The mindfulness myth: a “neurocentric” view of meditation

Original article “What's wrong with“ the mindful brain ”? Moving past a neurocentric view of meditation was published in 2019 by Evan Thompson, an associate member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Lifshitz, a researcher at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, in the journal Prolivaya light on the dark side of the brain "(Casting Light on the Dark Side of Brain Imaging).


Meditation is now in trend. Our culture is interested in meditation as a powerful tool for training the brain and the formation of the internal mental state - to make us happier, more productive and calmer inside. But meditation is not just training our brain. It is a deeply social and fundamentally embodied collection of cultural practices. If we reduce meditative practices only to a set of brain patterns, we lose sight of how these practices work, and ignore much of what they need to teach us about our own subjective experience.

The growing buzz around mindfulness revolves around a particular view of mindfulness meditation as a form of brain training. At the heart of this trend is a simple attractive idea: the practice of meditation, as we are told, literally “rewrites” (rewires) your brain. This is a catchy idea: train your mind, change your brain. But this idea has its own problems, both empirical (regarding the strength of the available data) and conceptual (regarding whether it even makes sense to think about meditation
in these conditions).

If we reduce meditative practices to a set of brain patterns, we lose sight of how these practices work, and ignore much of what they teach us about human experience.
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In the modern world, mindfulness is understood as a state or a trained ability to be concentrated in a certain way. Being attentive means being aware and accepting a constant stream of experiences of the present moment with curiosity. In accordance with this common understanding, mindfulness consists in noticing what happens to your thoughts, your body and your emotions — to analyze the subtle nuances of life experience that we tend to hide in our busy life. By educating certain networks in our brain, we can learn to be attentive in such a conscious way. It is not difficult to understand why this idea appeals to our “modern” feelings. We live in an electronic world that continually storms us with its complexity. Mindfulness seems to offer private access to a simpler mode of consciousness. This can give us a sense of control over our inner life.

The popular, albeit erroneous idea that mindfulness is in the brain suggests that the key to our happiness, peace and productivity lies within and that, controlling our brain, we control our own subjective well-being.

If there is something that our modern culture values ​​more than individual self-determination, then these are tangible results. We believe in what we can measure. The concept of conscious brain suggests that the practice of mindfulness meditation really does something — something physical, concrete. The evidence seems to be “brain pudding” (brain pudding). Studies show that Buddhist monks (“Olympic athletes” of meditation) have “thickened” the brain in all the right places (meaning the thickness of the cerebral cortex - approx. Transl. ) , And that even employed Westerners can “thicken” their brains through several weeks of daily meditation. The point is clear: if we are ready to meditate just a few minutes a day, we can also rebuild our brain in order to gain more awareness and control over our own mind - to become happier, more productive and calmer inside.

It's nice to think that we can determine a specific brain signature of a state of awareness. Then we could optimize meditation in order to reach this state faster and easier. We could skip everything that accompanies meditation (religious cosmology, moral teachings, bells and clothing), and focus on what some people consider the real essence: strengthening the brain networks responsible for attention to gain awareness of their own experience. Allegedly, this optimized approach to neural attentiveness will give us the results we want and quickly. Since the advent of the mindful brain, finding the inner world has never been so easy.

Nowadays, you don’t even need to look for a meditation teacher or a community — you can simply download the app for awareness or put on a brain bandage that is sensitive to brain activity to increase your brain waves.

For a small cost and just a few minutes of your time, you will also gain your own “mindful brain”.

So what is wrong here?

The discovery that meditation changes your brain is often perceived as evidence of the effectiveness of meditation. It seems that the tacit understanding is that documenting the effects of meditation on the physical tissue of the brain makes these effects more substantial and reliable, more reliable - more real.

But all mental activity is presumably reflected in the level of brain functions, so it is not surprising that a change in mental behavior corresponds to a change in the brain. Any repetitive activity you do may leave traces in your brain. Learning to play a musical instrument, mastering a second language, playing video games or even reading lines on the screen - all these actions, as has been shown, form the brain. Meditation is far from unique in this respect, so it makes no sense to appeal to the idea that the practice of mindfulness changes your brain as a way to prove that it really has effects. If the practice changes the subjective experience, it almost certainly changes the brain.

However, it remains less obvious whether modern brain imaging techniques can accurately identify and understand changes in the brain caused by practices such as mindfulness meditation. Scientific evidence that meditative practices produce a long-lasting positive effect in the brain remains experimental. First, most of the data available is based on correlation, not causality. In most studies on neuroplasticity caused by meditation, people who meditate for a long time are compared to beginners. Only from these studies we can not establish whether the observed differences in the brain are related to the practice of meditation or simply reflect the previously existing differences between groups. Perhaps people with a thicker brain (thicker brains) in certain regions are simply more likely to engage in the practice of meditation and stick to it.

It is important to note that most studies of meditation on neuroimaging have a very small sample size.

Even if we assume that the changes in the brain that are reported in neurovisual meditation studies are sustainable, there remains a deeper conceptual problem with the idea that we can compare types of complex behaviors or mental processes with changes in certain areas of the brain, There is something in awareness more than just accepting a brain condition or training it.

Mindfulness is not an internal cognitive process that is neatly displayed on brain activity; it is a complex combination of cognitive skills embodied in a specific social context

Consider parenting as an analogy. Parenting skills certainly depend on the brain - and their use changes the brain - but they are not private mental processes and do not exist inside the brain. Specific patterns of brain activity may correlate to being a good parent in this context, but these brain patterns alone hardly explain what it means to be a good parent. Good education is not inside the brain; it is the way in which the whole person (including the brain) is involved in the world. Moreover, what is considered a good upbringing differs depending on the culture.

Therefore, turning to the brain simply will not tell us what it means to be a good parent. To understand this, we need a broader perspective, taking into account the context of the whole person, as well as the social and cultural environment. The same goes for mindfulness.

One of the main points in meditative practice is the idea that our minds are inextricably linked with our bodies and with the wider social and environmental contexts in which we are involved. We hope for a science of mindfulness that would make us more, not less, remember how our brain fits into this big picture.