Tuesday, May 05, 2009

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” - William James


The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.
- John Milton

According to a very interesting article in the science section of today's New York Times, we can lead a miserable life by obsessing on our problems and drive ourselves crazy trying to multitask and instantly answer each and every e-mail message, or we can recognize our brain’s finite capacity for processing information, accentuate the positive, and achieve the satisfactions of a focused life. Not surprisingly, the latter can be achieved through the practice of meditation.

“Multitasking is a myth,” according to Winifred Gallagher, author of the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.”

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

According to the Times article, Robert Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T., has been tracking the brain waves of macaque monkeys and humans as they stare at video screens looking for certain flashing patterns. When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention. But that involuntary impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.”

He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else. These oscillations, called gamma waves, are created by neurons’ firing on and off at the same time — but these signals can have trouble getting through in a noisy environment. “It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”

Researchers have already observed higher levels of synchrony in the brains of people who regularly meditate. When giving newcomers' instruction at the Zen Center, I remind them that the practice of Zen meditation trains the mind to put its attention where we want it, when we want it, for as long as we want to.

Normally, our attention follows our "monkey mind," so called because it leaps from one thing to another, never settling on one thing for too long before it's bored or distracted and leaps to the next object of interest. We've never learned to train the monkey mind, and as a result it leads us literally to distraction.

By focusing on our breath and constantly returning our attention to the breath, we start to train the monkey mind. As soon as we see it start to wander off from our breath, we return our attention to the simple act of breathing, and keep doing this like we might train a puppy or kitten. Eventually, we can use our power of will in what Dr. Desimone calls biased competition to compel the attention to follow our direction, and not lead us from distraction to distraction. This is the start of Zen training, and once this skill is mastered we can maintain our attention in a focused state of single-pointed concentration, called samadhi.

I always like to see modern science confirm what the Buddha taught 2,500 years ago.

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