How to change your mind
Can meditation really make you a more relaxed person? Can it help to dissolve unhealthy habits of mind? Traditional wisdom suggests so, and increasingly, neuroscientists are coming to the party, revealing through their research, that the brain is surprisingly maleable.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, one of a popular new wave of Buddhists Monks with an interest in neuroscience explores this fresh territory in his recent book The Joy of Living, explaining just how meditation can work to change your brain.
Here's a key passage from Chapter 2: The Inner Symphony
Unfortunately, one of the main obstacles we face when we try to examine the mind is a deep-seated and often unconscious conviction that "we're born the way we are and nothing we can do can change that." I experienced this same sense of pessimistic futility during my own childhood, and I've seen it reflected again and again in my work with people around the world. Without even consciously thinking about it, the idea that we can't alter our minds blocks our every attempt to try.
People I've spoken with who try to make a change using affirmations, prayers or visualisations admit that they often give up after a few days or weeks because they don't see any immediate results. When their prayers and affirmations don't work, they dismiss they whole idea or working with the mind as a marketing gimmick designed to sell books.
One of the nice things about teaching around the world in the robes of a Buddhist monk and with an impressive title is that people who wouldn't usually give an ordinary person the time of day are very happy to talk to me as if I were somebody important enough to take seriously. And during my conversations with scientists around the world, I've been amazed to see that there is a nearly universal consensus in the scientific community that the brain is structured in a way that actually does make it possible to effect real changes in everyday experience.
Over the past ten years or so, I've heard a lot of very interesting ideas from the neuroscientists, biologists, and psychologists with whom I've spoken. Some of what they've said has challenged ideas I was brought up with; other things have confirmed what I'd been taught, thought from a different perspective. Whether we've agreed or not, the most valuable thing I've learned from these conversations is that taking the time to gain even a partial understanding of the structure and function of the brain provides a more grounded basis for an understanding from a scientific perspective how and why the techniques I learned as a Buddhist actually work.
One of the most interesting metaphors about the brain I've come across was a statement made by Robert B. Livingston, M.D., founding chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. During the first Mind and Life Institute conference, in 1987, Dr. Livingston compared the brain to "a symphony, well tuned and well disciplined." Like a symphony orchestra, he explained, the brain is made up of groups of players that work together to produce particular results, such as movements, thoughts, feelings, memories, and physical sensations. Although these results may appear fairly simple when you watch someone yawn, blink, sneeze, or raise an arm, the sheer number of players involved in such simple actions, and the range of interactions among them, form an amazingly complex picture.
To better understand what Dr. Livingston was saying, I had to ask people to help me understand the information in the mountain of books, magazines and other materials I'd received during my first few tours of the West. A lot of the material was extremely technical, and as I tried to understand it all, I found myself feeling a huge amount of compassion for aspiring scientists and medical students.
Fortunately, I've been able to talk at length with people more knowledgeable than I am in such areas, who translated all the scientific jargon into simple terms that I could understand and thus gained an understanding of how the brain works in a way that made very simple "people sense." And as my grasp of the essential details improved, it became clearer to me that for someone who was not raised in the Buddhist tradition, a basic appreciation of the nature and the role of the "players" that Dr. Livingston spoke about is essential to understanding how and why the Buddhist techniques of meditation actually work a purely physiological level.
I was also fascinated to learn from a scientific point of view what had happened inside my own brain that enabled me to go from being a panic-stricken child to someone who can travel around the world and sit without any trace of fear in front of hundreds of people who've come to hear me teach. I can't really explain why I'm so curious about understanding the physical reasons behind the changes that occur after years of practice, while so many of my teachers and contemporaries are satisfied with the shift in consciousness itself. Maybe in a former life I was a mechanic.
But, getting back to the brain: In very basic "people terms," most brain activity seems due to a very special class of cells called neurons. Neurons are very social cells: They love to gossip. In some ways they're like naughty school children constantly passing notes and whispering to one another — except that the secret conversations between neurons are mainly about sensations, movement, solving problems, creating memories, and producing thoughts and emotions.
These gossipy cells look a lot like trees, made up of a trunk, known as an axon, and branches reaching out to send and receive messages to and from other branches and other nerve cells running through the muscle and skin tissues, vital organs, and sense organs. They pass their messages to one another across tiny gaps between the closest branches. These gaps are called synapses. The actual messages that flow across these gaps are carried in the form of chemical molecules called neurotransmitters, which create electrical signals that can be measured by an EEG. Some of these neurotransmitters are pretty well known to people nowadays: for example, serotonin, which is influential in depression; dopamine, a chemical associated with feelings of pleasure; and epinephrine, more commonly known as adrenaline, a chemical often produced in response to stress, anxiety and fear, but also critical for attention and vigilance. The scientific term for the transmission of an electrochemical signal from one neuron to another is action potential — a term that sounded as strange to me as the word emptiness might sound to people who have never been trained as Buddhists.
Recognising the activity of neurons wouldn't be very important in terms of suffering or happiness, except for a couple of important details. When neurons connect, they form a bond very much like old friendships. They get into the habit of passing the same sorts of messages back and forth, the way old friends tend to reinforce each other's judgments about people, events and experiences. This bonding is the biological basis for many of what we call mental habits, the kind of "knee-jerk" reactions we have to certain types of people, places, and things.
To use a very simple example, if I'd been frightened by a dog at a very young age, a set of neuronal connections would have been formed in my brain that correspond to the physical sensations of fear, on one hand, and the concept dogs are scary, on the other. The next time I saw a dog, the same set of neurons would start chattering at one another again to remind me that dogs are scary. And every time that chatter would occur, it would grow louder and more convincing, until it became such an established routine that all I'd have to do was think about dogs and my heart would start pounding and I'd begin to sweat.
But suppose someday I visited a friend who had a dog. Initially, I might feel scared hearing it bark when I knocked on the door and when the animal rushed out to sniff me. But after a while the dog would get used to me and come around to sit by my feet or on my lap, and maybe even start to lick me — so happily and lovingly that I'd practically have to push it away.
What's happened in the dog's brain is that a set of neuronal connections associated with my scent and all the sensations that tell it that its owner likes me creates a pattern that is the equivalent of "Hey, this person is cool!" In my own brain, meanwhile, a new set of neuronal connections associated with pleasant physical sensations start chattering with one another, and I'd begin to think, Hey, maybe dogs are nice! Every time I visited my friend, this new pattern would be reinforced and the old one would be weakened — until finally I wouldn't be scared of dogs anymore.
In neuroscientific terms, this capacity to replace old neuronal connections with new ones is referred to as neuronal plasticity. The Tibetan term for this capacity is le-su-rung-wa, which may be roughly translated into English as "pliability." You can use either term and sound very smart. What it boils down to is that on a strictly cellular level, repeated experience can change the way the brain works. This is the why behind the how of the Buddhist teaching that deal with eliminating mental habits conducive to unhappiness.