Healthy Brain, Happy Life (37 page)

I was so pleased with the results, I gave myself a few days off as a reward, and before I knew it, I never started again.

Well, there went the idea that thirty days can set up a habit. I guess you really need thirty days
and
more motivation than I had at that time to create a daily meditation practice.

The good news was that even if I didn’t continue with the daily meditations, they gave me a taste of what it was like to have a meditation practice, and more important, I noticed the benefits, including more focused attention and calm in my life. I knew I couldn’t give up.

HOW DO YOU SUCCESSFULLY CREATE NEW HABITS
?

I am a poster child for how to unsuccessfully start a new meditation practice. I failed so many times that it’s a miracle that I ever managed to build the consistent routine that I have today. Why is it so difficult to start a new routine? Probably for the same reason that it’s hard to start running regularly or reading every night before bed or eating more leafy greens. All of these are activities that take a certain amount of time, motivation, and even struggle. Learning something new is always a challenge. When I finally began to exercise in a regular way, it took a lot of mental, emotional, and physical energy to make that change. Yes, I was catapulted by the powerful epiphany about my own lack of fitness on my adventure trip in Peru and by my ever-widening presence in pictures from the time. But, ultimately, my motivation to really stick with it came from a combination of desires and positive outcomes: I wanted to feel strong, I wanted to lose weight, I wanted to be more social, and I began to see results. This positive reinforcement got me over the hump.

Other people develop motivation to change by completely immersing themselves in the new behavior. That’s why many people go to boot camp for exercise or on meditation retreats. Immersion forces focus and regularity. It would probably have helped if I had gone to a nice long meditation retreat for which I paid someone to make me meditate every single day for many hours. That’s also the premise of
The Biggest Loser
show or my personal guilty TV pleasure,
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition
. In
Extreme Makeover,
the producers remove the weight loss candidate from their home environment for at least three months to completely change their habits, while also transforming their home environment and filling it full of workout equipment to really make the new habits stick once the person gets back home. I didn’t have either a major epiphany or the luxury of an immersive experience with meditation.

So what are you supposed to do if you don’t have outside help? One useful strategy is to start much, much smaller than I did. For starters, a twenty-minutes-a-day commitment was just too long and resulted in immediate abandonment of the habit as soon as I finished my thirty days.

Instead, I would recommend starting with just thirty seconds a day, repeating one of your positive goals. BJ Fogg, a social psychologist at Stanford University and creator of a program called Tiny Habits, would add that you could pair your very short or “tiny” new habit with something that you already do every day. For example, pair your recitation of your intention with brushing your teeth in the morning. Just standing right there in the bathroom, close your eyes and recite the intention when you’ve finished brushing. Once you tackle this, you can build up to saying a mantra or doing a breathing meditation.

This idea was actually the inspiration for the four-minute Brain Hacks found throughout this book. You can easily turn your favorite Brain Hacks into a long-lasting habit by pairing them with your own personal daily anchor.

BRAIN HACKS: MEDITATION

Meditation is simple. It does not take long, it can be done anywhere, and it has a powerful effect on your brain–body connection. Try these quick tips.

•  At the beginning of your day, take four minutes to recite one goal or intention for your life.

•  Go to a quiet place outside and just sit silently for four minutes while focusing on the natural world around you and nothing else.

•  Use a mantra like
Om
or
Ah
in a four-minute meditation.

•  Before you go to bed, sit quietly for four minutes focusing on your breath.

•  Find a meditation buddy and make a pact to do a partnered four-minute session together at least three times a week.

•  Following the instructions given later in this chapter, do a four-minute loving kindness meditation just to start to get the hang of it. Rotate between breath meditations and loving kindness meditations to see which one you like best.

THE DALAI LAMA, AMBASSADOR OF MEDITATION AND NEUROSCIENCE

You might not know this but His Holiness the Dalai Lama is not only a global ambassador for meditation but also a powerful advocate for the neuroscientific study of the effects of meditation on the brain. I had the privilege of hearing the Dalai Lama speak on this topic in November 2005 at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. I was one of more than thirty thousand attendees at this meeting, and so I made sure to be at the session early enough to get a good seat. Miraculously, I was able to sit in the actual room where the Dalai Lama was speaking (many others were in satellite rooms with a video beamed in). The most striking thing about the Dalai Lama to me was his boyish charm. Maybe it was because he started his remarks by confessing, with a little giggle, that he had experienced stress in preparing his remarks for us neuroscientists. I just wanted to go up and pinch his cheeks. The Dalai Lama has an undeniable mix of joyful charm and profound presence, and both were on display that day in Washington, D.C.

He made the argument that there are many commonalities between Buddhism and the study of neuroscience. He said that the Buddhist tradition of exploring nature and testing ideas explicitly rather than relying solely on scriptures or unproven beliefs is consistent with scientific effort. Another interesting parallel between Buddhism and neuroscience is that the Buddhist tradition believes strongly in the potential for transforming the human mind. In fact, one of the major reasons meditative practices were developed as part of Buddhism was to help people change mentally, developing both deeper compassion and more profound wisdom. I was hooked.

In addition to being a worldwide ambassador for meditation, the Dalai Lama walks his talk; he meditates for four hours each morning. I can only assume that his rigorous practice came about through immersion because he was identified as a young child as the Dalai Lama and, therefore, started practicing meditation regularly and intensely at an early age. But I don’t think you can explain his entire spiritual practice by the way he was raised. I believe there is something special about him. You can feel him as soon as you enter a room in which he is present—even one as big as a football field like the one I was in with him. He is a deeply spiritual and powerful presence.

The most surprising (and my favorite) part of the talk in Washington was when the Dalai Lama admitted that he finds meditation difficult. If the Dalai Lama can confess this, the rest of us should feel just a little bit better, right? He then challenged us neuroscientists: If we found a method for achieving the brain benefits of meditation without requiring four hours of practice each morning, he would happily use it.

BRAIN WAVES, THE BINDING PROBLEM, AND WHAT HAPPENS IN YOUR BRAIN WHEN YOU MEDITATE

Inspired in part by the Dalai Lama, in part by their own innate scientific curiosity, and in part by the growing interest in meditation’s beneficial effects on a wide range of neurological states like depression and other affective disorders, neuroscientists have started to examine exactly what happens to our brains when we meditate. Is there a brain “signature” of meditation? And if neural activity actually changes in response to meditation, what does that suggest about our ability to control our minds?

One area of intense interest examines the patterns of rhythmic and synchronous brain activity, often called brain waves (the technical term is neural oscillations) that occur during meditation. These brain waves originate from the electrical signals of widespread networks of brain cells firing synchronously. The patterns of these waves of electrical activity can happen at different speeds from very slow, one to three times per second, for example, to very fast. Relative to meditation, some neuroscientists have been particularly interested in one of the fastest rhythms studied in the brain—the gamma wave, or gamma oscillation, which happens very fast, at about forty times each second. You can imagine the gamma oscillations like ocean waves of synchronous electrical activity that sweep over large swaths of the brain forty times per second and coordinate activity across these large brain areas. Neuroscientists have been particularly interested in gamma oscillations because previous studies have reported increases in gamma activity in different brain areas during a range of tasks of higher cognitive functions, like visual attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception.

One well-known problem that gamma waves have been applied to is called the binding problem. The binding problem addresses the question of how the brain comes up with a coherent representation of individual items when so many different and widespread parts of the brain are involved in processing information from vision to emotion to smell to memory. But, as we all know, we don’t see and feel the world in distinct snapshots, with vision separate from emotion separate from memory. Instead, our perceptions, thoughts, and actions are seamlessly integrated. To achieve this kind of seamless integration, neuroscientists have proposed that we need a master orchestrator to coordinate the perceptions, actions, emotions, and memories we process and that gamma waves could be just this kind of orchestrator. Scientists are currently testing the idea that gamma waves might help
bind
the activity of all the different brain areas responding to a particular stimulus (visual, olfactory, emotional), allowing our brain to create a coherent and integrated representation.

Because meditation was thought to change widespread brain states and improve attentional focus (remember attention had already been shown to be associated with increased gamma activity), it made sense to examine gamma wave activation during meditation. That’s exactly what one group did. Their strategy was to examine the brain activity of expert meditators and see what might be different between their brains and the brains of control subjects who had undergone just a week of basic meditation training. The expert meditators were eight Tibetan Buddhist monks who had accumulated between ten thousand and fifty thousand hours of meditation training over the course of fifteen to forty years. So they were truly experts when it came to meditating. The main experiment compared the pattern of brain waves, including gamma oscillations, as the monks and the novices performed an advanced form of meditation called the loving kindness meditation.