![Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman](/cover_340306.jpg "Search Inside Yourself: Increase Productivity, Creativity and Happiness [ePub edition] - Daniel Goleman")
Attentional Blink Task
Here is the interesting part: if the two numbers are presented within half a second of each other, the second one is often not detected. This phenomenon is known as attentional blink. Somehow, after the first salient target is detected, mental attention “blinks,” and it takes a while before the brain can detect the next one.
This attentional blink has previously been assumed to be a feature of our brain’s wiring, and therefore, immutable. Slagter’s study shows that after just three months of intensive and rigorous training in mindfulness meditation, participants can significantly reduce their attentional blink. The theory is that with mindfulness meditation training, one’s brain can learn to process stimuli more efficiently, hence after processing the first salient target, it still has the mental resources to process the second.
This study is a fascinating glimpse into the possibility of upgrading the operating efficiency of our brains with mindfulness meditation. So if your job depends on your ability to pay attention to information for a prolonged period of time, maybe this meditation thing can help you get a raise.
There are many more interesting scientific studies of meditation. We’ll just point out a few more salient ones.
Antoine Lutz showed that adept Buddhist meditators are able to generate high-amplitude gamma brain waves, which are often associated with high effectiveness in memory, learning, and perception.6 Better still, these adepts exhibit higher gamma-band activity even at baseline, when they are not meditating, suggesting that meditation training can change your brain at rest. If you pump iron a lot, you will have bulging muscles even when you are not working out in the gym. Similarly, when you do a lot of meditation training, you will have strong mental “muscles” of calmness, clarity, and joy even when you are just hanging out.
One early study in this field by Jon Kabat-Zinn revealed that mindfulness can greatly accelerate the healing of a skin condition known as psoriasis.7 The methodology was simple. All participants were given the usual treatments, but for half of them, tapes of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s meditation instructions were played to the participants during the treatment, and just playing the tapes significantly accelerated the healing process. While I find the results fascinating, what is compelling about this study is that psoriasis is something tangible and visible—a skin disease characterized by red spots that grow larger as they get worse. So when you talk about how meditation can help you heal in this context, it’s not just woo-woo talk by some New Age person; it is something so tangible, you can see it and actually measure it with a ruler.
Finally, there is a study that suggests meditation can thicken your neocortex. This study, conducted by Sara Lazar, took MRI snapshots of mindfulness meditators and non-meditators, and showed that meditators have a thicker cortex in brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing.8 Of course, these measurements show correlation, not causation, which means it is entirely possible that people with a thicker cortex in those brain regions just happen to be meditators. However, the study also showed that the longer the meditation subjects have been practicing meditation, the thicker those parts of their brains are, which suggests that meditation practice is causing those observed changes in the brain.
The above was just a snapshot of some of the research in the last twenty-five years. It is remarkable that mindfulness helps improve everything from attention and brain function to immunity and skin disease. Mindfulness feels almost like MacGyver’s Swiss Army knife—it is useful in every situation.
Remember, if Meng can sit, so can you.
Mindfulness Without Butt on Cushion
Extending the Benefits of Mindfulness beyond Sitting
Mindfulness, I declare, is useful everywhere.
—Buddha
Mindfulness may be one of the most important things you can ever learn in your life. But don’t take it from me. Here’s what William James, the father of modern psychology, had to say:
And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.1 (emphasis by original author)
There you have it. Mindfulness is the skill that gives you the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again, and as William James said, it is “the education par excellence,” the best thing you can learn. I hope that makes you feel better about spending money on this book.
In the previous chapter, we learned that mindfulness meditation is a key tool in developing emotional intelligence. In this chapter we will learn ways to extend mindfulness into every aspect of our daily lives. The mind of calmness and clarity you experience while sitting in mindfulness meditation is very nice, but it only becomes life changing when you can bring up that mind on demand, in day-to-day life. This chapter shows you how.
In General, Generalize Mindfulness
One of the most important things a mindfulness meditator needs to do is extend the benefits of mindfulness beyond sitting into every part of life. During sitting meditation, you may experience some degree of calmness, clarity, and happiness, and the challenge is to generalize that mind into life situations outside formal sitting meditation.
The good news is the benefits of mindfulness training are already naturally generalizable or, put another way, easily incorporated into all areas of our lives. For example, your attention naturally gravitates toward things that are either very pleasant or very unpleasant, so if you can train yourself to keep your attention on something as neutral as your breath, then you can keep your attention on anything else. Your breath is like New York City for your attention—if your attention can make it here, it can make it anywhere. Hence, if you become very good at settling attention on breathing, you may find yourself able to pay much better attention in class or at meetings. Renowned meditation teacher Shaila Catherine told me that after she learned to meditate intensely during college, she never received any grade below an A.
That is the good news. The better news is there are things you can do to make your mindfulness training even more applicable to other areas of life.
There are two areas in which you can naturally and immediately start to integrate mindfulness. The first is to extend from mindfulness at rest to mindfulness during activity. The second is to extend from self-directed mindfulness to other-directed mindfulness. If you like, you can think of it as extending, or generalizing, mindfulness along two dimensions: one from rest to activity and the other from self to others. In the following few sections, I will suggest exercises for each.
Mindfulness in Activity
The best place to practice mindfulness is in daily life. Once you are able to bring mindfulness into every moment of daily life, your quality of life may change dramatically. Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates this beautifully with his description of the simple experience of walking:
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds,
