Q&A - The Neuroscience of Meditation
While the practice of meditation dates back thousands of years, only in the past 15 years has neuroscience provided insights into the neural mechanisms through which mindfulness builds stress resilience.
The following conversation between neuroscientist Bechara Saab and mindfulness trainer Brandon Mehrgut explores how the modern practice of mindfulness rewires the human brain.
Dr. Bechara Saab is the CEO and Chief Scientist of Mobio Interactive, a digital therapeutics and performance enhancement company pioneering the application of psychotherapy in healthcare through its mobile platform, Am Mindfulness.
Brandon Mehrgut is the founder of Shanghai Mindfulness, China’s largest English speaking Mindfulness community, and a certified trainer with Potential Project, where he works with a wide range of clients including Volkswagen, Ford and Disney.
Recorded in Shanghai, September 2019.
- Bechara
So Brandon, a while ago you introduced me to this very interesting concept in meditation — which stems back to Zen meditation — that you call the circle of thought. Can you describe this in your own words?
- Brandon
You bet. The circle of thoughts is the train of awareness of thought when you’re practicing mindfulness meditation. If your point of awareness is the breath, at some point you will become totally lost in thought. And then you start to become aware that you’re lost in thought. And upon this awareness, you then gently and strategically bring your focus back to the breath. And it’s that cycle that is an extraordinarily beneficial process to go through. That awareness is where the power lies in mindfulness meditation and just mindfulness in general — that meta-cognition. And one of the things that we’re going to discuss today is about the habit of meditation — and a huge part of the habit is falling in love with this circle. You know what I mean?
- Bechara
Yes. It’s something which really resonated with me. You become aware that you’ve lost focus and then you gently and strategically come back to the breath — those are the words you used. I’m particularly drawn to this word “gently”. Because whenever you do something that you specifically have tried not to do, which is to lose focus, the natural reaction is to be upset with yourself. It’s to have a negative feeling because you’ve failed.
- Brandon
Yes.
- Bechara
And the real trick is to not be upset with yourself. And when you do that, you actually build up the ability to have resilience in all aspects of your life. Not just when you lose your focus but when, like, somebody bumps into you on the sidewalk or when any stressful thing happens. Because your brain doesn’t know if the information comes from inside your head or outside. Once it’s in your brain, it’s just electrical signals. And so that was really, really powerful to me. It made a lot of sense to me as a neuroscientist when we first spoke about that years ago. And I think just knowing that this is therapeutic neural activity — this is the brain strengthening for resilience — is really important for people to know so they can make the most out of this habit that they form when they practice meditation
- Brandon
I one hundred percent agree. And you know this is really what separates us from every other species on this planet. Just like Aristotle said, it’s an active and intelligent mind that can entertain a thought without accepting it … And it’s important to know when you’re looking at mindfulness meditation this is in-and-of-itself, the method — the method is this cycle of focusing. Or an even better word I’d like to use is becoming aware, because focus implies effort, and this is really an effortless process — resting the awareness at the breath and then, when you start to think about whatever It may be, you become aware that you’re totally lost and then you come back. When you go through this cycle, a lot of people think that this is a negative thing, that you got lost in thought, but it’s actually not a negative thing. You know, after almost 15 years of practicing meditation I still love the cycle. Let’s say I sit for 20 minutes just in breath awareness, and for 19 of those minutes I’m lost in thought. But I keep going through the cycle over and over and over again, I’ll say to myself: “Oh wow I really needed to meditate today. I’m getting a lot of benefit”. Becoming lost in thought and then coming back is like a bicep curl for the mind.
- Bechara
Mmmm.
- Brandon
Meditation is filled with a lot of paradox. If you try to supress all thought, or you try to calm the mind very fast, the exact opposite will happen. So you just go through the process and you enjoy it. And if you think a lot … Great!
- Bechara
You know, as a neuroscientist, I always tend to think about the brain in terms of its neural circuits and the types of molecules that are involved. And there’s a very clear mechanism through which this circle of thoughts can be maintained. And the way that I hypothesise that it works — and there is some pretty good evidence that suggests that this hypothesis has some validity — is that as you’re maintaining your focus, primarily you’re exercising your prefrontal cortex to do this. Often that disengages when you really start to get involved in a body meditation. But certainly during the initial acts of paying attention to something, you recruit the prefrontal cortex. But as you get lost in thoughts, you might get brain activity elsewhere. But the moment when you realize you’ve lost your focus, you have that immediate reaction that comes from the subcortical nuclei — the emotional circuits — that say, “Damn, I lost my thought!” But what you learn to do, is you learn to actually send what I think is probably glutamatergic signals down to subcortical nuclei that then activates the local inhibitory networks.
- Brandon
Hmmm
- Bechara
That’s a lot of terminology there. But essentially you’re using the executive function of your brain to get out in front of the emotional centre to just quell it, and quiet it, so that you do have more of that space between action and reaction.
- Brandon
Yeah!
- Bechara
And that’s something to think about when we actually practice meditation. You’re actually strengthening neural circuits. You are actually physically moving molecules through your brain with these thoughts. And that’s why there’s such a powerful long-term impact from practicing the way we practice.
- Brandon
Yes.
- Bechara
And it’s outstanding that people were able to do this stuff thousands of years ago. And it’s incredible that we have the technology now to actually peer inside the brain and watch it happen in real time.
- Brandon
The whole thing is just amazing. And I just want to pick your brain for a moment because a lot of beginners in meditation, and even intermediate practitioners, often neglect the fact that long term changes are happening in the brain. That is to say, I’ve been practicing meditation for 15 years and if I just stop practicing, for say a month, I’ll still reap a tremendous amount of benefits from that. And I was wondering what you knowledge is on that — the long term benefits of mediation — let’s say someone who has practiced for ten weeks as opposed to someone who has practiced for ten years.
- Bechara
One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s not just enough, for example, to listen to didactic or Dharma content like this. You have to actively engage, and you have to do the practices.
- Brandon
Right.
- Bechara
So you know you could come across people that have been meditating — or trying to meditate — for 15 or 25 years and see no change in their brain because they essentially haven’t been really doing it right. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re trying to quantify the effect in real time with Am in order to be able to provide people with exactly what is best for them. So whether it’s 10 months or 10 years is less important than how good you’ve actually been doing it.
- Brandon
Yeah.
- Bechara
But once you’ve started to rewire or to strengthen certain neural circuits, those changes can last essentially forever.
- Brandon
For sure.
- Bechara
And that’s one of the reasons why psychotherapy, when it’s successful for the treatment of affect disorders like anxiety and major depression, tends to be much longer lasting than using drugs. Like, after you’ve gone off your medication, you’re just as likely to go back and have the same affect disorder as you had before, whereas with psychotherapy you have a much longer lasting thing because in psychotherapy you’re actually developing new therapeutic activity in your brain — you are developing your brain circuits or you’re strengthening pre-existing brain circuits, more likely. Whereas medication is a kind of band-aid that is not really stopping the wound at all.
- Brandon
Hmm.
- Bechara
But definitely. Long-lasting changes for sure. This is well understood. The neuroscience community is not in debate about this anymore. It’s very clear that when you practice meditation properly for a certain amount of time — probably even three weeks — you’re going to have changes that could last your whole life.
- Brandon
I always say this in our talks that pretty much, as a species, we’ve gotten together and said ‘OK guys, we’ve figured out that if you stop once a day, and you watch the mind, it’s really, really good for you … And it’s a hell of a time to be alive. That we have this neuroscience that started to come out around 15 years ago.
- Bechara
The first more serious brain scans on people doing meditation, like the work of Sara Lazar. That’s about 15 years old. Certainly for ten years, most neuroscientists have accepted that meditation has some clear effect. And now more recently, some have realised that you don’t need to be a monk in order to see effects. Regular people can do meditation — even for a few weeks — and we can observe effects on the brain. And that’s pretty good news!
- Brandon
How much do you meditate per day?
- Bechara
Recently it’s been picking up. I very much use meditation as a performance enhancement tool.
- Brandon
Really?
- Bechara
I’m not trying to reduce the stress in my life. I’m trying to take on more shit and have the same amount of stress as I did before.
- Brandon
That’s a really interesting frame. Because that might affect the output as well, don’t you think? That you’re using this as performance enhancement. Because for me, I’m somewhat of a philosopher.
- Bechara
I’m not. I’m very practical.
- Brandon
That’s also a really cool point about meditation and mindfulness because there are two frames to it. There’s that performance enhancement. And when we do corporate mindfulness training we typically use that frame. And then just resting the awareness on the breath. You can have very deep insight just from that alone. It’s actually incredible, especially when you practice with your eyes open.
- Bechara
Hmm.
- Brandon
This is something that I’m actually quite new to and I told my students that I recommend for them to practice with their eyes open.
- Bechara
New for you is like three years ago.
- Brandon
[laughter] It is. And I started practicing with my eyes open about three years ago. One of my teachers suggested it, and I asked him, “Do you close your eyes?” And he looked at me and said, “Brandon, we don’t live our lives with our eyes closed.”
- Bechara
I don’t do it every day. I do it maybe 4 days of 5 days a week on average.
I typically like to do meditations that are longer than 10 minutes, and I’m still pushing towards an unguided 45 minute to 90 minute sort of range, fully unguided, just me and my mind and body. But I’ve a long way to go before I can really do that.
- Brandon
Yeah. Yeah absolutely. I typically practice for about six hours a day.
- Bechara
Whoa.
- Brandon
Just joking! I tell people that all of the time and they are Whaaa? If I’m not busy, then I meditate ten to twenty minutes a day. If I’m really busy and I have a lot of stimuli, I would say 40 minutes plus. Just to add a little corporate mindfulness context, we always say that “our attention affects our choices, our choices affect our actions, and our actions affect our results”. Therefore, there’s a direct correlation with high attention span and high results. So that’s why we up the ante for mindfulness training when we’re super busy.
- Bechara
Interesting. I’d love to now take a little time to do a circle.
- Brandon
Sure.
- Bechara
Let’s go in and start doing some focus. And make note of when you lose focus, and gently, strategically come back. You can do eyes open, and I’ll close my eyes.
- Brandon
Is it OK if I just stare at you the whole time? Just joking.
- Bechara
All right, let’s get into it. Three, two, one.
- Brandon
[Brandon starts a guided meditation with Bechara] So go ahead and take one deep breath. In through your nose fully, and just letting go, out of the mouth … And just starting to allow your body to relax naturally … and just in this moment become aware that you have a body, right here right, right now, and just feel your body. No need to judge it, just become aware that you have a body in this moment … We can relax the eyes by simply becoming aware of the eyes and letting all of that tension melt away. … And really allowing the stomach to relax. And just bringing your awareness to the simple fact that you are breathing … feel the breath at the stomach. Feel the physical sensations of the stomach rising and falling. No need to change the breath. Just being aware that you are breathing, right here, right now … And at this point in time you may have noticed that you are thinking. And this is very normal. In fact this is good to be aware that you are thinking. And when you become aware that you are thinking, simply, gently bring your awareness back to the breath at the stomach … And this cycle may happen many times. Aware that If you’re lost in thought, just to come back to the breath. This is a very healthy process to go through … And just feel your breath at the stomach … And take one deep breath into your nose fully in, and letting go … And just slowly opening your eyes. And as you open your eyes, maintain awareness on the breath, and just notice how you feel in this moment and check in with yourself in this way. And continue with this practice for as long as you like …
Thank you. [Brandon closes the meditation]
So how do you feel?
- Bechara
Oh, I love that man. You know it’s interesting how you bring the eyes in, and just relaxing the eyes and just being aware of the eyes.
But I found myself drifting away, particularly at the beginning, in and out, very rapid cycles of thought — very rapid. And then there were definitely some long periods where I was just fully consumed by the awareness of my body, my breath, and then still got distracted, and then came back, and then by the end, more or less just fully engrossed by the body — and only really brought back or distracted at mention of being distracted or mention of breathing. And that’s pretty typical for me in terms of meditation. You’re so talented at this. It’s great. Yeah.
- Brandon
Thank you, brother.
- Bechara
How about you. How did it feel for you because you are engaged while you’re speaking, right?
- Brandon
Yeah, I feel very relaxed. One of the things when you’re guiding, it’s important to still practice meditation at the same time. And you know, some of the best advice that I received is from one of these masters of the mountains in Taiwan who said, “When you’re teaching meditation, it must be as if you’re meditating.” So, it’s always a very, very deep experience. Always a very calming experience.
- Bechara
Ok let’s wrap this up. Thank you, Brandon.
- Brandon
Thank you, brother.
