The Riveting—and Murky—Quest to Hack the Meditating Brain

New research is poised to give us a new shortcut into the state of mindful meditation. But is this really a good thing?

Richard Powers’ Bewilderment was the most moving and prescient novel I read last year. In the book, an astrobiologist grapples with compounding losses: the death of his wife and the unraveling of his son, Robin; and the environmental degradation and mass extinction that envelops the planet. Before his demise, Robin begins an innovative treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback in which he enters an fMRI machine and learns how to mirror a brain state of his deceased mother—recorded when she was a research subject for the therapy. Through channeling her brain waves, Robin arrives at a place of radical acceptance and even appreciation in the face of crisis. At one point he’s described by the lead researcher of the Decoded Neurofeedback program as a “junior Buddha.”

This new treatment is a plot device in the novel, but it’s not entirely a product of the imagination. Our understanding of brain patterns has increased exponentially in the last decade. Researchers have been able to accurately decode the content of dreams by teaching machines to predict visual imagery based on brain function. Another study found that fMRI machines could confirm whether students had understood concepts based on neural alignment with their teacher. And by examining the brain patterns of patients with major depression, researchers were able to design a computer-based tool to reduce negative negative attention bias, which resulted in a 40 percent decrease in depression symptoms versus a placebo. This window into the brain is one that scientists are already reaching through and tinkering with.

And now, neuroscience has found a way to give definition to the brain of meditators and illustrate how meditation changes the brain over time. We can see how neural patterns shift as the brain rewires during meditation and certain neural circuits come online with more regularity. The Buddhist brain has been hacked. And though this may open up the practice of meditation and its benefits to more people, there are also some serious questions about whether something vital is lost in reducing meditation to a series of brain patterns.

Much of what scientists have found so far isn’t so surprising, but it does confirm long-held associations about what parts of the brain fire up during meditation. One meta-analysis of 110 studies showed the imprint mindfulness can have on the brain, such as increased activation in areas associated with focused problem-solving, self-regulation, self-control. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been able to teach machines how to recognize meditative states in humans through measurements of brain patterns. We are not far from a reality in which researchers could teach people how to mirror a mindful brain state through a process similar to Powers’ Decoded Neurofeedback.

It’s not hard to see why this would be a valuable practice. Through meditative decoding, practitioners could be steered towards more fruitful brain states in the same way that depressed patients are now being steered away from negative ones. Just as observing game-tape can help athletes analyze the moves they make in physical space and tailor their training accordingly, watching mental states during meditation can help therapists, researchers, and teachers analyze the moves practitioners make in mental space, and tailor their clients’ training accordingly.

But this begs the question: By reducing mindfulness to a brain state defined by brain patterns, are we missing the larger point of the practice of meditation?

Some traditionalists have decried the secular divorce of mindfulness from its spiritual underpinnings in Buddhism and other eastern practices. Secular meditation has been called the “thin version” of mindfulness—a packaging that may make it more palatable, yet less impactful. After all, Buddhist training does not occur in the relative vacuum of a laboratory setting, but in the relative richness of lived experience, and is in turn meant to translate into what happens in our day-to-day lives. In Bewilderment, when Robin can no longer receive the Decoded Neurofeedback treatment, he regresses right back to his unraveling.

Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar was one of the first researchers to document structural changes in the brain due to meditation. Since Phinneas Gage first met the business end of a tamping iron, it has been understood that one’s mind is directly impacted by the physical make-up of the brain. Yet Lazar’s research revealed the reverse: One’s brain can be directly impacted by the mind and the way one chooses to direct one’s attention. For the first time, researchers could correlate the self-reported reduced stress and anxiety of meditators with a shrunken amygdala, underscoring the fact that shifting our mental state can have a physical impact on our brain state.

But when asked about the possibility of using neurofeedback to mimic meditative states, Lazar told The Daily Beast she was cautious about the idea of a mindfulness hack.

“People want a quick fix—for the gadgets or the drugs to do all the work for us,” Lazar said. “In some circumstances they can help a person get a feel for what an advanced state is like, though neither the machines nor the drugs accurately mimic the real thing.” Her point is that mindfulness is an enduring practice, whereas a machine- or drug-induced brain state is reliant upon that intervention.

To think about this another way, it would be pretty cool if there were a Steph Curry-brand “Three Point Feedback Machine” that one could wear to rain down shots from beyond the arc. It would probably help one get a sense for what that feels like. But after removing the machine, one would return to a mere mortal shooting range. To arrive at an advanced state requires learning how to scale all the intermediary states step by step. There is no shortcut to mastery, whether for scoring threes or entering a new state of mind.

“Ultimately, for mindfulness to do its thing, we have to apply it to everyday life, to see with our own eyes when we think, say, or do something unskillful and then endeavor to learn from that and change our behavior going forward,” said Lazar. “There is no machine or drug that can help us do that, we need to do that ourselves.”

Andrew Olendzki, a Buddhist scholar and the director of mindfulness studies at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., told The Daily Beast that from the Buddhist perspective, the question of reduction isn’t an issue. Science and mindfulness are not mutually exclusive but mutually informative.

“The Buddhist view is that mind and brain are interdependent and co-arising,” said Olendzki. “Neither is the primary cause of the other, but they arise together.” Mapping out this co-arising can help us further understand the human condition, so long as we don’t place a primacy on the physical realm.

“I would like to see the scientific tradition embrace the subjective dimension of human experience without feeling the need to diminish it by ‘reducing’ it,” Olendzki explained. “I would like to see the brain systems of mindfulness identified more precisely, if only to help people learn to access and develop the capacity to be mindful.”

Science, Buddhism, and secular mindfulness can certainly be allies in this pursuit, so long as we recognize that in the age-old quest for contentment a quick fix is never the answer. Buddhists have been hacking the mind for a couple millennia now, and any dedicated practitioner will tell you it is an ongoing process. Science can help us understand this process, but to make progress on the path one must walk the walk, and a glimpse of the peak is no substitute for the satisfaction that comes from the strenuous effort, sore legs, and unbeatable view.

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