Meditation is the logical response to neuroplasticity

If our minds reshape themselves based on our experiences, maybe we should curate our experiences to give ourselves better minds

Brains are muscles too, you know!

¹A few axioms/definitions to ponder before we bring them all together. Hopefully you’ll see where this is going, in which case (or in any case, I’m not your boss) feel free to skip to the next header:

• Biopsychology: All thoughts, feelings, mindsets, and concepts are represented in your brain - physically, biologically - by neurons and the connections between them

• Neuroplasticity: Neural pathways that are used often (and in high-salience) are “strengthened”, making them fire more easily in the future

• Meditation: Humans can intentionally put themselves in certain mindsets, make themselves feel certain feelings or think certain thoughts, or go over certain facts and concepts

The phrase “it’s all in your head,” when meant to diminish the meaning of mental sensations, is bullshit. All thoughts, feelings, attitudes, concepts, and relationships between them are represented physiologically by connections between the neurons in your brain. An embarrassing past memory is represented by a circuit of neurons, which is connected to other circuits representing the feeling of embarrassment itself, as well as all the other physical and mental sensations you experienced at the time and related concepts. The sensation of seeing your old high school building will light up that circuit in your brain, and depending on the strength of its connection to other circuits, it will evoke different memories and emotions². The memory of a traumatic event, the feeling of trauma, and associations with a trigger are just as physiological and real as the glucose burning in your quadriceps when you walk, as the bacteria in your colon digesting your food, and as the white blood cells eating the daily pathogens you intake.

One of the most important things to know about neural physiology, and about psychology, and about life, is that connections within and between neural circuits strengthen as they are used and atrophy when they aren’t, like muscles. This is scary, because it can create vicious cycles. Getting angry a lot makes it easier to keep getting angry, and you get angry at smaller and smaller things; a one-time association between a stiff drink and momentary mental relief can make alcohol top of mind whenever relief is needed. If you spend a lot of time looking at outrage-inducing political headlines on social media, you’re going to become more prone to outrage in the future. It’s also encouraging, because to some small extent, we can try to control what we think and what we feel, which allows us to build the attitudes and emotional triggers we want. 

An attempt to consciously control one’s mental state is the best definition I’ve found for meditation. You’ve probably heard specifically of mindfulness meditation; mindfulness is a mental state that is cultivated through meditation. Loving-kindness meditation is another. The idea is that by putting oneself in a certain state of mind, you strengthen the neural circuit that represents that state of mind, making it easier to fall into in the future. You can also strengthen connections between circuits: the focus on the breath that’s usually used in mindfulness meditation creates a strong association between a conscious, deep breath and the mental state of mindfulness, which means a practitioner can take such a breath to try to evoke mindfulness.

Maybe don’t think about your parents’ murder so much

I find this definition helpful because it explains why meditation can be powerful - if our minds are shaped each day by what we’re thinking about, maybe we should try to control what we’re thinking about so we end up with the minds we want, instead of being shaped by our (sometimes hostile) environment - while also bringing some of the hype back down to earth. While there might be some funky stuff that science can’t explain in the back corners of our minds that can be accessed through years of practice, for the most part, meditation is mostly people deciding they’re too high strung and practicing being less so. By exposing meditation as a generic powerful tool rather than some magic no one understands, it also explains why there has been some backlash against it, as it can and has caused real harms.

As mentioned earlier, continuously being exposed to outrage, anger, or harmful associations will strengthen them, and one could even purposely do so by meditation. Think of a training montage of an [anti-]hero immersing themselves in thoughts of how a villain has wronged them to motivate themself to train harder. Anger might be a good training motivator, but it’s got to have some bad consequences for the psyche to wallow in it that much! More likely than a purposeful focus on objects of rage, you could face one of two accidental harms: 

1. Practicing an imperfect/narrow version of a mindset too intensely could lock in that version

2. Practicing a mindset that you’re already good at could send you too far in that direction

The story linked above was about a woman who was already pretty mindful practicing “mindfulness” in a way that involved sending her full awareness and attention towards any external stimulus. Focusing too much on external stimuli, sending her full attention there will her whole force of will, had the effect of making her startle very easily. In that, she got caught in the first harm, over-practicing a too-specific aspect of the full mindset. It turns out there is a good reason why the human brain has a lot of functions to subliminally determine what is worth devoting attention to. Those functions usually aren’t perfect - they were tuned for a hunter-gatherer society quite unlike our own - but messing with them won’t necessarily produce a better result if you aren’t careful. 

There’s also the danger that further strengthening a mindset that you already have a tendency towards will leave you too far along in that direction. Mindfulness is great when you can call it up at will, but if you can’t get out of the mindset when you actually need to concentrate on the task at hand, it will start to be maladaptive. We live in a society where most people are highly strung and could benefit from at least some forms of expanding their awareness, learning to enjoy the small pleasures of life that we so often tune out. That’s why mindfulness mediation in particular has caught on so strongly. But if you’re already a very laid back person who is quite aware of their surroundings, mindfulness might not be the mindset you most need to practice through meditation; if done wrong, it might even make you too passive. All advice is good advice for those who need it, and terrible advice for those who don’t, whether it’s “Never give up”, “Take it easy on yourself”, or “You should try Headspace.” The best place to start with meditating is probably to reflect on the type of person you’d like to become, decide what mindsets you need to act like that person, and find a way to practice that.

K, so why are your legs like that?

If meditation is just practicing mindsets, why does it all seem to be about sitting in the lotus position or not talking for a week or building mental toughness?

As far as mental toughness: any sort of meditation starts with building some executive function. You won’t make progress with any mindset unless you can introspect enough to tell when you’re in it and concentrate enough to hold yourself there, both of which require mental discipline (one thing Buddhist monks are so famous for, especially the martial arts kind). This command of your mind - the ability to be in touch with and direct what you’re thinking and feeling - is separate from any specific mindset but applicable to all of them and to much of life itself, both work and social interaction. That’s one of the other reasons people find meditation to be a superpower, contributing to the mindfulness hype: it isn’t even mindfulness per se, but the inner sense and executive function that comes from any type of meditation.

As far as gongs and the lotus position, the goal is just to make it easier to put yourself in the mindset you want to practice. It’s easier to expand awareness if there are fewer stimuli to bring into awareness; it’s easier to pay attention to the tastes and textures of a nice meal than a bland one; it’s easier to foster a feeling of compassion if you start by thinking about someone you already care about. Body positions that are good for maintaining the balance of relaxed/alert, like sitting cross-legged have been passed down for generations and can help if you have the flexibility and core strength for them, but that doesn’t mean they’re at all necessary or even the best choice for you and the type of meditation you want.

By broadening our definition of meditation to just “mindset practice,” we can open up the ways we meditate to be more conducive to what we’re trying to practice. I’ve been trying to get a running form with a high heel recovery to take load off my Achilles - arguably not a mindset, but definitely in part based on strengthening neural pathways - and focusing on that is much better done running than sitting on the floor. Curiosity is an incredibly powerful mindset that I think is undervalued (and beaten out of us by our schooling system), and it’s hard to foster without access to new information: you could  have a curiosity meditation session just using Wikipedia’s “random page” link, trying to get yourself interested in what you find and immersing yourself in that feeling, clicking on whatever other links catch your fancy. You’ll still need the mental discipline to check in with yourself and make sure you’re fostering the right mindset instead of just letting your mind wander, the universal skill across meditation types, but as long as you stay in that mindset, you can get there however you want. You could also foster curiosity more traditionally by going on a walk through the woods and actively wondering about the plants and animals you see, but if the gist of meditation is about setting yourself up to most easily hold the mindset, Wikipedia may be easier as long as you keep other tabs closed.

There’s one more special case of meditation covered under my definition that breaks out of traditional mindfulness in the lotus position and is without a doubt more popular than it: prayer. Other than mindfulness and Zen, the most popular mindset to meditate on in traditional meditation is compassion or loving-kindness, called Metta. Evoking feelings of compassion will strengthen the ability to feel compassionate in general, and directing it toward a person or group in particular will strengthen the neural connection between your concepts of them and of compassion. Well, wishing someone well or sending them “good vibes” is just praying for them, lending some scientific credence to the idea I heard growing  up in liberal Catholic circles that “prayer works by changing the pray-er”. One of the best ways to find truths about human nature is to look for things that have been invented many times independently across civilization, and prayer, which I consider a form of meditation in my broad definition, is a part of every religion I’ve encountered. Of course, as with other forms of meditation, prayer can potentially do harm if done “wrong”: spending a lot of time asking God to smite your enemies or make you rich could heighten your spitefulness and greed as you spend time in those mindsets. Encapsulating (some types of) prayer and uniting Western and Eastern spiritual traditions is one of the other reasons I like my definition of meditation.

Thanks, now my brain is jacked

Zooming out, mindsets being practice-able make sense because biology is built on feedback loops. Comparing brains to muscles and meditation to working out is a helpful analogy, but the overarching mechanism of being adaptable to our environments unites the threads beyond  the metaphorical level. Even eating things that change your gut microbiome³ or building calluses fit the same mold. I’m harping on this because it contains a helpful lesson: things actually get easier over time as you practice them! The stronger you build the neural circuits of any given mindset, the more easily you’ll fall into it both in daily life and when meditating. The beginning is easily the hardest part, so don’t get discouraged!

1. The schtick of using weird sections headers that kind of get brought up later as a gimmick to make the reader keep reading is copied shamelessly from one of my favorite bloggers, Adam Mastroianni.

2. I should say at this point that I’m not a doctor or a scientist or even a very practiced meditator. “Neural circuit” is not standard terminology, and the dichotomy between a “neural circuit” representing a concept/feeling and its connections to other “circuits” is arbitrary: it’s all just axons connecting neurons. But this dichotomy of concepts and connections between them helps me understand my own mind, and I am 90% sure that the high level concepts I’m talking about are true enough to be helpful.

3. This might be worth a separate blog post on its own: the first days of a new diet will naturally be the hardest because your gut microbiome is used to the old stuff and won’t be adapted to the new, sending you a signal of still being hungry until you feed it what it’s used to.