It is this state of awareness that brought us to the evolutionary roots of this matter in this discussion, but the question is, what has this to do with our present world? What is the importance of this awareness? We’ve already cited increased competence, and that is certainly enough to merit our attention, but there’s a great deal more going on here.
LINKS TO STRESS
There was a remarkable gathering of minds in 2005, an interdisciplinary conference, and the conversation was recorded in a book edited by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Davidson called The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation. We recommend it as an interesting rundown of the confluence between neuroscience and mindfulness, summarizing what we know and speculating where we might go with this idea. It offers many remarkable insights—and not just into meditation but also into the more general and all-encompassing idea of mindfulness. For instance, at the conference, Helen Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, traced depression to detailed neural pathways, and she showed how those pathways changed through not meditation but cognitive behavior therapy—another way in which the mind reshapes the brain.
But the discussion was expanded significantly by the inclusion of Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford neurologist who has made a name for himself as the go-to guy on stress. The foundation of his work is tracking stress through the hormone cortisol, which has emerged as the accepted biomarker of stress. Sapolsky’s most famous subjects were baboons living in the wild in Africa. He captured them periodically to measure cortisol in blood samples and discovered that the life of a wild animal could indeed be loaded with stress, the very factor we associate with the noise and rigors of civilized, human life. Sapolsky concluded that baboons suffered this same problem for much the same reason we do, and it had little to do with scarcity or predation. It actually arose from hierarchy. Baboon society is dominated by aggressive males who enforce dominance with violence and more or less constant harassment of subordinates. (Both leaders and subordinates wind up suffering from chronic stress, but in different ways.) One need not get very far into Sapolsky’s research to realize that an alpha male baboon in a suit and tie could probably do a passable job of running a Wall Street firm or, in a black turtleneck, a Silicon Valley start-up. In fact, parallel research showed a parallel distribution of cortisol among British civil servants.
There are a couple of keys to this, and one is that stress is about control and the attempt of dominant players to exert control. But there is also a key point about chronic stress. In baboon society, aggressive behavior and punishment are an unrelenting way of life, or at least it was for these baboons. For a time. Sapolsky’s research in Africa tracked a disease outbreak among the baboons that happened to be selective in its lethality to dominant males. After a critical mass of them died off, the surviving baboons reorganized without the violence and resulting cascade of cortisol. Peace prevailed. That is not to say that stress was removed from their lives—just that it was no longer the dominant force of their lives, and this is the refining point that brings us to Sapolsky’s contribution at the 2005 conference.
Stress is one of those concepts that has been beaten to death in popular understanding, but the general discussion misses something important. The very mention of the word provokes something like the universal response to the mention of vampires in old horror movies: zero tolerance, and a sign of the cross to ward them off. The fact is, a complete absence of stress in your life is not an ideal state.
“For a short time, one or two hours, stress does wonderful things for the brain,” Sapolsky told the conference. “More oxygen and glucose are delivered to the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, works better when you are stressed for a little while. Your brain releases more dopamine, which plays a role in the experience of pleasure, early on during stress; it feels wonderful, and your brain works better.”
Dopamine is the big indicator here; it’s the neurotransmitter wound up in our primary reward system, the big player in making us feel better and keeping us focused. The presence of dopamine signals something quite remarkable about stress. Sapolsky cited a bit of monkey research, simple and straightforward: researchers tracked dopamine when a monkey was given a reward each time it pressed a lever, and they compared the results with those when a monkey randomly got a reward only about half the time it pressed the lever. The results showed that the monkey released more dopamine in the latter case. More pleasure for half the number of rewards, but also when rewards are irregular or unexpected.
Sapolsky: “I said that lack of control is very stressful. Here a lack of control feels wonderful and your dopamine goes way up. What’s the difference? As I mentioned earlier, the research shows that if your lack of control occurs in a setting that you perceive as malevolent and threatening, lack of control is a terrible stressor. If the lack of control occurs in a setting perceived as benign and safe, lack of control feels wonderful.”
All of this is to say that our pleasure circuits are attuned to awareness and unexpected rewards, and stress is in this mix—not chronic unremitting stress that characterizes day-to-day life for many of us, but the ups and downs that flow from normal life. The pleasurable life is not stress-free, and Sapolsky argues that this realization provides a precise analogue for meditation:
People think that you secrete stress hormones when there is stress, and when there is no stress, you don’t secrete them or secrete just a little bit. You are at baseline. It was a long-standing tradition in the field to consider the baseline to be extremely boring. What’s now clear instead is that the baseline is a very active, focused, metaphorically muscular process of preparation for stress. The jargon used in the field is that it has permissible effect, allowing the stress response to be as optimal as possible. That’s a wonderful endocrine analogue to the notion of meditation. A state of peace is not the absence of challenge. It is not the absence of alertness and energetic expenditure. If anything, it is a focusing of alertness in preparation. It absolutely matches the endocrine picture.
We think “alertness in preparation” is an exact summary of the hunter-gatherer state of mind, and now it appears that evolution has wired us to be rewarded by achieving it. Of course it has. The ideal state is not noise or absence of noise, stressed or relaxed, feast or famine, awake or asleep. This is more the case of defining one more edge between two states and then noting how our bodies are attuned to walking that line.
Cortisol can track this matter with stress, but there is a more interesting way that’s emerging to gauge our undoing, our literal unraveling. Remember that confounding the issue of diseases of civilization was the unavoidable fact of nature that we all must die of something. Obviously, though, most of us would rather there be nothing more precise than “old age” written on the certificate under “cause of death.” The process we’d all like to see in play (given the alternatives) is senescence, the unwinding of the biological clock spring.
The study of our DNA, though, has turned up an interesting measure of this process, structures called telomeres that serve as protective caps on the ends of strands of DNA. Telomeres seem to have some clear role in preserving the integrity of DNA through the countless divisions and recombinations that occur with cellular growth and reconstruction. They keep the code intact—but as we age, they seem to wear out, which is part of the reason the process of cellular growth becomes less reliable. And then we sag, sink, and wrinkle. Senescence.
Yet the decay of telomeres is not simply a chronological process, a measure of time, of old age. Besides time alone, conditions of our life can damage telomeres. And those conditions happen to be the ones we have been talking about throughout this book: bad nutrition, lack of sleep, flawed relationships, obesity, sedentary lives. All of this causes us to wear out before our time. Stress itself is now being tracked by telomere decay, just as it is with cortisol. So is lack of sleep, which brings real meaning to Worthman’s contention that we pay for a lack of sleep in the
currency of stress, as reported earlier.
This currency is denominated in telomerase, which is an enzyme the body secretes to protect telomeres. Dopamine may signal our sense of pleasure and well-being, but the presence of telomerase signals that we are not rushing our body’s clock toward senescence. In 2010, one group of researchers published results that showed a significant increase in telomerase among participants in a meditation retreat.
BUILDING YOUR BRAIN
On this topic of meditation there is an interesting gap that pulls us back to the discussion of human evolution. But first, consider what is not going on in most forms of meditation. It is not about thinking; it’s not what you think.
As you might imagine, years of tradition funneled through diverse cultures and personalities have created variations in the practice of meditation. The details differ, and in some traditions, practice actually does involve a sort of religious fixation on a specific object or person, like the Buddha. But more often than not, especially as the practice has been interpreted in Western tradition, in the austere forms of Zen Buddhism and in research labs, the actual focus of the mind during meditation involves pretty much nothing at all. One common approach is to simply sit and not try to control thoughts or sounds or the flow of events, but to observe and note the various streams that enter one’s mind.
Another form of practice is more focused on a single set of sensations—more often than not the breath, or simply intense concentration on an imaginary point inside one’s head, directly behind the eyes. Yet notice what is not happening in all of these practices. The practice itself is directed toward no particular goal or personality trait. Practitioners are not exercising the mind in mental acrobatics like memory drills, conundrums, or puzzle solving. They are certainly not instructing the center of self to become more moral, pious, or upright. One simply tries to quiet the background substrate in which thoughts flow.
In light of this, it seems somewhat odd that what we have reported does occur, that memory or performance or cognition or even physical health get better as a direct result of training the mind to do nothing. A demonstrated improvement in immune response from simply quieting the mind? Yes indeed. Or, more profound still, recent results from one research project show a link between meditation and increased brain mass, including increased gray matter in regions of the brain associated with learning, memory, and emotional regulation—the last linked to specific physical changes in the hippocampus and posterior cingulate regions of the brain.
What this is saying is that the brain responds to meditation as a muscle does to exercise, and of course it does. That was the implication from neuroscience’s realization about neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Yet it is wrong to say that meditation alone accomplishes a reshaping of the brain. The fact is, everything effects a reshaping of the brain, especially our relationships with one another. The tangible, weighable, measurable, energy-sucking organ is being built from the ground up, beginning even before we are born, and the whole stream of information we call life is doing the building work. The degree to which those relationships are healthy, especially when we are children, is the degree to which our brains are healthy.
What is different about meditation and a number of other practices like talk therapy or exercise or sound nutrition is that we are deliberately shaping our brains, intervening in the building process. Someone once argued that there is no choice about whether to train your dog. You either train your dog or your dog trains you. Something similar happens with our brains.
The new and urgent message, not just from meditation research but from neuroscience in general, is that we know now that directed forms of mental exercise begin shaping our brains in ways we want them to go. Davidson said in an online interview that what he has produced in his lab at Madison is really “the invitation to take more responsibility for our own brains. When we intentionally direct our minds in certain ways, that is literally sculpting the brain.”
Yet this process is not completely independent from human design, which is to say what natural selection delivered us. Remember, meditation has no goal, but it is a sort of tune-up of the components. And yet from the process, a common thread emerges—a common end that is wholly in tune with our evolutionary history and hallmarks as a species.
Psychologists have devised a simple way of measuring this, a game that begins with giving volunteers real money, fifty bucks or so, and then placing them in a three-way relationship in which they dole out that money according to what other players do. And then, without the subjects knowing it, the testers rig the game so it appears as if one of the other players is stingy and is in fact punishing the third player by not doling out a fair share. The choice for the volunteer is whether to part with some of her own money to effect a more equitable distribution of the cash, and the test is real enough in that the volunteer, usually a broke undergrad, gets to keep whatever cash she has left after the game ends.
Davidson’s lab has run this game on randomly selected subjects who undergo a short training in meditation, and after they do so, they give away more money. Researchers regard this as a measure of empathy. The meditative practice does not tell the subjects they should be more empathetic or equitable or compassionate or just. It does not offer skills for doing so. It simply quiets and tunes the mind. Once cleared of clutter, the mind reverts to its default mode set by evolution, which is empathy.
MINDFULNESS FOR EVERYONE
In psychological circles, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is known for bringing the term “mindfulness” into play. The term, of course, is much older in the English language, but Langer has secularized it, employed it as we have above in the more general hunter-gatherer state of mind. She is in fact known for a couple of experiments that bring this whole idea into common, general, no-nonsense experience. The first is the chambermaid experiment. She selected a sample of hotel chambermaids and asked them all whether they exercised. Most said they did not, although their work routines kept them active enough to meet the surgeon general’s guidelines for healthy physical activity. Nonetheless, Langer recorded their body fat, waist-to-hip ratios, blood pressure, weight, and body mass index and then split the subjects into two groups. She followed around the members of one group through their daily routines and pointed out to them how the specific motions of their work looked like gym exercises. A month later, she interviewed everybody to make sure they had not changed behavior (like diet or exercise) and then redid the measurements. The group that had been told that their work resembled gym exercises in fact physically looked as though they had been exercising: they decreased their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio, and they showed a 10 percent drop in blood pressure. The control group stayed the same. It appears that the mind literally can shape the body.
In a second famous experiment called “Counterclockwise,” Langer rounded up a group of old men and housed them in quarters decorated and furnished as if it were twenty years earlier. The men began to look and act as if they were twenty years younger.
Langer has also recruited professional musicians and divided them into two groups, telling one to perform a piece to match their best-ever performance of that same piece. She told the other group to play a familiar piece in a new way, with subtle variations that only they would know. Then she had audiences evaluate the performances. The latter group of performers got higher marks from the audience. She then told salesmen to vary their pitch every time they gave it, instead of giving a rote presentation. They logged more sales as a result.
This last experiment steers us toward Langer’s definition of mindfulness, and it is every bit as simple as “awareness.” She doesn’t teach subjects in her experiments how to meditate, but she does teach them how to “notice new things.” That’s all: notice new things. This is the same instruction that evolution issued to hunter-gatherers to ensure their survival.
Our favorite experiment in this vein was conducted not by Langer but by Daniel Simons of the Univers
ity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris, at Harvard at the time of the research. In it they showed subjects an impromptu game of two teams passing a basketball back and forth. Subjects were asked to note how many times the basketball changed hands, meaning they were asked to pay attention to a single detail and account. Then, during the game, a guy in a gorilla suit walked onto the field of play and weaved among the players.
Remarkably, the participants in the experiment did not see the gorilla. Not at all. They were too engaged in the counting, in the narrow task at hand.
Maybe Langer’s instructions to be prepared for something new, for an anomaly, would have helped them see the gorilla in the room—but we think that any hunter-gatherer would have seen it, no problem.
7
Biophilia
Finding Our Better Nature in Nature
Now we need the great biologist E. O. Wilson and the idea of biophilia. (The term is widely attributed to Wilson but in fact traces to the German socialist philosopher and social psychologist Erich Fromm. He uses it much as Wilson does in the 1964 book The Heart of Man.) Wilson lays out the idea in deceptively simple terms: “Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.”
The real power of this idea is rooted in the implications of “innate.” It means that it is encoded in us by evolution—and if it is programmed, then heeding that innate attraction has the power to ensure our well-being. There is something about the deep attachment to nature as opposed to attachment to the artificial world that confers fitness, or at least did confer fitness during most of the course of human evolution.
Go Wild Page 15