It’s important to stress here that we are not arguing against exposure to light that mimics the sun, which would be like arguing against the sun. The problem here is timing, not exposure. Thus, the goal is to control the timing of our exposure to light to mimic the natural cycle of day and night and of seasons. This prescription, then, links with ideas we will raise later about the benefits of exposure to nature. Spending time outdoors in sunlight is as important as turning off lights at night to harmonize your body’s circadian rhythms with the earth. This helps not just with sleep but with the full range of your body’s finely tuned systems.
But go back for a moment to the idea of the second sleep for yet another link to other matters. Interestingly enough, some experiments in removing subjects from the influences of all artificial light have been done, just to see what would happen. In a matter of days, a pattern emerged in many subjects. They could sleep when they wished, and many adopted a habit of going to sleep early, say at eight o’clock, then would awake around midnight or so for a few hours, and then would go back to sleep—a bifurcated pattern of sleep. But what was intriguing about this was a parallel pattern that appears in writings from preindustrial Europe, a pattern of this “second sleep.” Historically, people would use that interim period as quiet, thoughtful time, or for having sex, or even for going to visit neighbors. It was social time and it appeared naturally on body clocks set by the absence of artificial light. Researchers have also found similar patterns in various cultures.
There are a couple of key lessons in this intriguing fact. First, it tells us that our bodies are strongly hardwired for a specific and important behavior, and if we remove the artificial meddling of industrialism like electric lights, our systems will self-correct. We think this principle applies to a lot more than just sleep.
But there is a second clue here. That interim period between first and second sleep has a biochemical signature: elevated levels of the hormone prolactin. Prolactin shares a common etymological root with lactation and lactose because it was first identified, along with oxytocin, as a dominant hormone of breastfeeding, of lactation in mammals. Oxytocin especially has since gotten a reputation as the social hormone, as we shall see in a later chapter.
But prolactin shows up prominently in another context, among people who practice meditation—the topic we engage next.
6
Aware
What Is Revealed in the Wild Mind
A couple of decades ago, the anthropologist Richard Nelson told us an anecdote that seemed to say a lot then—and even more now, knowing, as we do, so much more about the mind. Nelson is one of those maverick researchers who became an anthropologist not because he was attracted to academia but because he’d rather live in remote places among wild people. His particular chosen station early on was living among Koyukon people, caribou hunters of the frigid interior of Alaska. Later, though, he chose to live in the very different environment along the coast, the warmer maritime archipelago of islands that Alaskans call “Southeast.” This is a place of rain, cedars, seals, and salmon, the interior a place of Arctic winters, fur, wolves, and ice.
Several of the Koyukon became Nelson’s friends, and after he had lived some time in Southeast, he decided to invite a few of them to visit him at his new home. He expected a reunion—swapping stories, laughs, and endless rounds of warm conversation. But when they arrived on the island where he lived—a place wholly unfamiliar to them—they gave him only silence. They were struck near dumb by the overwhelming detail in the strangeness all around them, and they wandered the island absorbing every sodden green inch of the place. After days of this, they could at last speak, and they proceeded to describe to Nelson his own island home in far more detail and with far more insight than he could after years of living there.
This is the hunter-gatherer state of mind, a hyperawareness, a presence, a capacity for observation we can only begin to imagine. The authors have some inkling of what it means and where it comes from as a result of deep personal experience. Richard Manning is a lifelong hunter, with almost fifty years’ experience stalking game in the woods. Most of his household meat supply is hunted game. Even after a year at a desk, tethered to a computer and a cell phone, Richard finds that the hunting experience can summon forth a state of mind like no other. We had one watershed conversation about this, and oddly, although John has never hunted, the concept snapped into focus much of John’s thinking about noise—mental noise—and mindfulness. Yet we think this modern experience of hunting is the merest approximation of the heightened powers of observation and awareness that were a fact of everyday life for the Koyukon and for all wild people. Generally, this mindful state is regarded as an ephemeral phenomenon that will not yield to hard-science, data-based analysis. Yet we think that mindfulness plays a large role in forming this common and wistful assessment by field researchers who have spent time among wild people: there is an otherworldliness and peacefulness to their lives we can but begin to imagine.
Through time, we have come to think there is a rough draft parallel to the hunter-gatherer mind-set that can be found in a modern-day practice—a practice that is in fact readily available to us and has been studied in detail, especially in recent years with the emerging tools of neuroscience. We are going to have a look at the formal practice of meditation as it emerged from Buddhist tradition. The thing is, the Koyukon hunters in our anecdote were not practicing meditators, as far as we know, and in this chapter, we are far more interested in the Koyukon state of mind than in meditation. We are, however, going to talk some here about formal meditation and the research behind it because we believe it illuminates the more general mind-set of hunter-gatherers. Later, we will link back to this general state of mind in ways applicable to modern people, meditators or not.
THE SCIENCE DEVELOPS
Richard Davidson began meditation quietly in the 1970s, when people training in serious disciplines like psychology at serious universities like Harvard didn’t go in for this sort of idea. To complicate matters, serious psychologists also did not talk about emotion back then, and that’s what happened to capture Davidson’s interest.
“Overall, though, there just wasn’t much room for emotions in the cold, hard calculus of cognitive psychology, which considered them downright suspect,” Davidson wrote in his book The Emotional Life of Your Brain. “The attitude was basically one of haughty disdain that this riffraff occupied the same brain that gave rise to cognition.”
Davidson latched onto an emerging tool then absent in psychology departments: the electroencephalogram, or EEG, which measures activity in various parts of the brain. He wanted to track the physical manifestations of emotion in the brain, but also other measures like heart rate and respiration. The concept was to link human behavior to a real, physical set of responses in the body. This was the line of thought that would lead to mapping the neural pathways of emotion.
During this period, Davidson was mostly mum about meditation in his professional life but was nonetheless pursuing the idea in some interesting social circles, arguably in the very house in Boston that served as a focal point for science’s distrust of practices like meditation. Davidson’s original contact at Harvard was the psychology professor David McClelland, who a decade earlier had run the research center that supported two faculty members, Richard Alpert and his coinvestigator, Timothy Leary, of LSD fame. When Davidson joined this circle in 1972, Alpert was by then known as Ram Dass and was living in the carriage house behind McClelland’s house and teaching meditation. Davidson began a meditation practice then and followed that thread to India for formal training while he was still in graduate school.
Still, he kept that practice out of his work and instead chose to study emotions like fear, anxiety, and depression. He gained some new ground there, publishing some of the original work that tied those emotions to specific, identifiable parts of the brain, using tools like the EEG. But Davidson says that part of the reason he did not pursue research in meditation was
because the tools of neuroscience were then not up to the task. And part of his reluctance was undoubtedly encapsulated in the phrase he uses for finally reversing that decision and beginning specific lab work on meditation. In his book, he labels this reversal “coming out of the closet.”
It was indeed a dramatic exit from that closet, involving trunk loads of computer gear, electrodes, generators, and battery packs that had to be lugged by literal Sherpa guides on foot for days on end on treacherous, cliff-edge mountain passes; he was seeking out swamis, mystics, and gurus. No, really. Davidson launched an expedition near Dharamsala, India, attempting to find and wire the brains of some of the most experienced meditators on earth, those associated with Tibetan Buddhism. These were, Davidson allows, truly odd people, like Olympic athletes of the mind, in his analogy. They were far removed from the common experience, which is precisely why he sought them out. They are outliers, and it is interesting to consider how their extreme example might inform the rest of us.
Davidson, however, failed in this mission—but it led to nothing less than a challenge in 1992 from the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso himself, who had become engaged in the process. Tenzin Gyatso challenged Davidson to bring to bear on meditation the same rigorous elucidation his EEGs had brought to his study of emotions.
Davidson was by then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he remains, as a professor of psychiatry and psychology and the director of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. He used the challenge and the network of Tibetans he had come to know to eventually entice a handful of meditators, all of them experienced in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, to his lab to have their brains wired. And they were indeed Olympic athletes of the practice. Each had logged at least ten thousand hours of meditation. Each had lived at least one three-year period in retreat, which means doing nothing but meditation every day, eight hours a day, for three years, never leaving the retreat site. One monk had spent more than fifty thousand hours in meditation. If meditation does indeed change the brain, then it ought to be obvious in these people. And it was.
By then, the more advanced brain imaging tools available through functional magnetic resonance imaging had come into play, so Davidson’s lab could be a lot more specific about brain activation than he could have been with EEGs, which measure only surface activity of the brain. The researchers loaded the monks in fMRI tubes and had them meditate, not meditate, and meditate in various ways. They also played distressing sounds (like a woman screaming) for the monks at various unannounced intervals to record reactions. Researchers used similar routines for control subjects.
What they found was that the monks reacted much more to the screams than the control subjects did, and in a particular area of the brain—at the temporal parietal junction, which is strongly associated with empathy and the ability to take the perspective of another. This result occurred when monks were both meditating and not meditating. Davidson says the differences between the monks and the controls were not subtle, and the researchers had not expected such emphatic results, having long experienced the delicacy of brain waves and the difficulty of reading them. Normally, differences—even significant differences—are barely readable, or readable only with computer enhancement and amplification.
“We were absolutely stunned because the changes were so robust and so dramatic that we were able to observe them with the naked eye, which is almost never the case in this kind of research,” Davidson said in one interview about the work. “We can literally see the signal in front of us.”
The problem was, the results really didn’t answer the fundamental question: does meditation indeed change the brain? There’s a perfectly good alternative explanation, which is that these people were somewhat freakish to begin with, given their long history of behavior that most of us would not even consider. Further, even if meditation can make a brain better and more empathetic, who has ten thousand hours to spend in a cliffside cave?
The monks’ results only suggested a direction for research; the more interesting results have come in the twenty years since, as Davidson’s lab has recruited and randomized samples of volunteers, taught them meditation in short courses, and loaded them in the fMRI tubes as well. Among the findings were clear and readable patterns in brain activation and reduction in anxiety and depression, but also some results you might not expect. During one experiment, researchers gave both meditators and control groups a flu vaccine and found a better immune response among the meditators, even the novices. Davidson’s lab has subsequently shown a marked improvement among meditators who are undergoing a standard treatment for psoriasis, further establishing the brain-body connection. Specifically, meditators healed at about four times the rate that controls did.
“We did the study twice because we didn’t believe the results,” Davidson says.
Yet in all of this, there are some intriguing results that point toward the idea that brings us to this topic: meditation in some way mirrors the state of mind among hunter-gatherers. The common perception is that meditation is a state of retreat or withdrawal, much like the common perception about sleep that Carol Worthman’s work contradicts. With meditation, the misinformed assumption is that the practice is aimed at relaxation and bliss. It is not. It is about attention and awareness of the here and now, which is precisely what wild people need in order to survive in a state of nature.
And, in fact, Davidson has done experiments that begin to illuminate this point. For instance, there is the matter of what is called the attentional blink. Each of us, no matter how we live, is perpetually immersed in a fast-moving stream of information, and it is up to us to pick out what is relevant from the stream to function, to recognize a threat or an opportunity or a clue that a game animal lies ahead or a child might fall or a potential client just walked in the door. Psychologists have a standard test for this: they read off a stream of letters and numbers in random order and ask people to respond whenever they hear a number but not a letter. It turns out that people are good at this simple task most of the time, but not when a number follows another number closely. The assumption is that the mental energy reserve they expend identifying the one target needs time to recharge, like a camera flash with rapid-fire photos. Those with weaker “batteries” miss the number that follows closely, causing an attentional blink.
In Davidson’s experiments, meditators performed better, with less attentional blink, showing that this is not a matter of bliss or relaxation but of awareness and competence.
The improved perception is a benchmark of meditation; the benchmark is known from some of the earliest experiments, and the results are robust enough to become recognized as a neurological signature of meditation. The meditative state is characterized by synchronized gamma waves throughout the brain. “Gamma” simply means that they are of high frequency compared with other brain waves, but it is their synchrony that is more interesting. As you can imagine, the brain is driven by a cacophonous mix of waves and signals blasting away at all frequencies and in all directions, the exact picture presented by an EEG of an active mind. It looks like a sound wave pattern of street noise, and a chaotic street at that. But there is understandably a profound effect when those waves settle into a common, synchronous pattern, analogous to an orchestra’s transition from the chaos of tuning to playing a root, third, and fifth of a chord in unison.
The term “neural pathways” makes us think of our brain as a sort of circuit board, where miniature wires connect one cell to another to make that path. An even more apt analogy for this profound effect is to imagine each neuron or cell as a radio that can be tuned to receive certain frequencies, to respond to a certain wavelength generated somewhere else in the brain. Synchronous waves recruit bigger neural networks because more cells are tuned to that “station.” Davidson calls it “phase-locking.”
When a brain is wandering in noise, unsynchronized, “the response to an external stimulus is as difficult to pick ou
t against this background cacophony as the ripples from a rock splashing into a turbulent sea. There are so many other waves and disturbances that any ripples from the thrown rock are almost imperceptible. But if the rock lands in a perfectly still lake, the ripples stand out like a walrus in a desert. A calm brain is like a still lake,” he writes in The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
This is not a matter for meditation alone but a concept rooted in much thinking about mental well-being and mental illness. Think of it as noise, as we long have—not literal noise but analogous: meaningless rumble, chatter, and static in the backdrop of the brain like the conversation-killing roar of a busy restaurant. It is implicated in problems including schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, autism, mental retardation, and brain damage. People afflicted with these problems are often unable to control the rush of stimuli, to still the lake. What they suffer from is just the opposite. The noise arrives in a sort of mental echo chamber that ratchets up the racket to an unbearable level and provokes behaviors we call pathological. These behaviors are an attempt to cope with the noise. Some of John’s early work on this idea found that calming the body in various ways served to calm this storm, a connection of physical to mental. But meditation also stands as a more direct attempt to calm the background of the mind—not to retreat, but as a way to allow the mind to more directly attend.
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