My Brain on Meditation

Part I: Pain on the Brain

So there I was, strapped down to a long, narrow board and stuffed into a space so small I could hardly even wiggle. All around me, machines chirped, beeped, clicked, and made all sorts of other weird sounds. The scientists who were there to study my brain were in the next room, watching through a large window and telling me what I supposed to do with my mind, when I was supposed to do it, and for how long. I’ve meditated in some strange situations, but this was certainly one of the strangest.

In a way, you’d be hard pressed to find conditions less conducive to resting the mind in a state of alert, open presence, which is what the scientists were trying to study. There was, however, one factor working in my favor: the functional MRI (fMRI) that I was trapped in has to be the most spiritually charged brain imaging device on the planet. Housed in the Waisman Lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, this is the very machine that Drs. Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz have used to study the brains of Mingyur Rinpoche, Matthieu Ricard, and some of the world’s other most advanced meditators. Their studies have yielded incredible findings about the brain’s ability to adapt and change, helping to launch an entirely new field of scientific inquiry: contemplative neuroscience.

Though I am certainly no “Olympian meditator” (as the scientists call people like Mingyur Rinpoche), I have been practicing since I was a college student in the early 1990s. Since I’ve logged enough hours on the cushion to warrant the expectation (stress the word “expectation”) that my mind has changed over the past few decades, I was asked to participate in a study that looked at how meditation affects the way the brain responds to pain. I can’t say that I was thrilled to have this as my entrée into the world of contemplative neuroscience, but as it turned out I learned a great deal about how meditation changes the way we relate to difficult situations.

Let’s get back to the lab. Before they popped me into the fMRI, they a strapped small metal box to my wrist. This little gadget had no other purpose than to inflict pain at regular intervals. Every few minutes, I’d hear a sound and then feel a warm sensation as water flowed into the box. At first, it was pleasant. Then it would get hotter and hotter until it was barely tolerable. I was told later that the temperature was set to inflict just enough pain so there would maximum discomfort, but no lasting damage to the skin. Whatever the plan was, it worked. I was in pain.
The test went on for an hour and a half. As I lay inside the fMRI, the scientists would tell me to meditate, sometimes by focusing on a visual object and sometimes by simply resting in open presence. While I meditated my wrist was repeatedly exposed to the water, which was warm at times and scalding hot at others. After each short interval, I was asked to rate the intensity of the pain and how unpleasant it was. I wasn’t the only one who did this. There were twelve meditators in all, plus a control group of novice practitioners who had no prior experience with meditation.

As I lay there, trying to meditate while a group of scientists tortured me, my experience was actually quite simple. I knew when the hot water would be coming, but in the lead up to the painful feeling I was able (for the most part) to remain present and alert. Thoughts and reactions came and went, but I didn’t pay any particular attention to them. I let them come and go, yet didn’t get distracted by them.

It turns out that meditating and non-meditating brains respond to pain differently. Over the course of the ninety minute study, you slowly learn to anticipate the painful stimulus. In other words, when you hear the beep, you know you’re going to get burned. Some parts of the brain, particularly those associated with registering painful sensations, light up when the hot water arrives. That’s not too shocking. But what was interesting was the activity in a part of the brain known as the anterior insula. When the hot water arrives for the first time, this region of the brain lights up in both the meditators and non-meditators. Over time, as the non-meditator learns when to expect the hot water, the brain activity begins to shift. The anterior insula starts becoming active before the water even arrives, and it stays active after the pain ends. This doesn’t happen in the meditating brain. When they measured the brain activity of the meditators, they found that activity in the anterior insula looks pretty similar at beginning and at the end of the session.

For me, this seems like a great example of the difference between what Mingyur Rinpoche calls natural and self-created suffering. When we don’t know how to work with our minds, or know how our minds work, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the storyline that the mind weaves in response to experience. This is especially true when it comes to painful situations. The storyline becomes so compelling, and we get so caught up in the endless flow of thought and memories, that we end up reliving the difficulties we’ve faced over and over.

The event that triggered the reaction may have been unavoidable (this is what Rinpoche calls “natural suffering”), but the enduring aftermath is purely a creation of the mind. It’s something we add to the experience. In this sense, “self-created suffering” is optional.

Meditation helps us reframe the way we experience natural suffering and to let go of the patterns that perpetuate self-created suffering. It’s what helps us reorient the mind to see that all the reactions, memories, and expectations that move through awareness are nothing more than ephemeral blips on the radar of experience. They are no more real than all the scenarios we conjure up in our dreams.

Based on this research, it seems reasonable to infer that the untrained mind learns to experience suffering before pain even arrives. At least for that one part of the brain – the anterior insula – there is no difference between the presence and absence of pain in that moment. In fact, if you were only looking at that part of the brain, you wouldn’t even be able to tell if the person was experiencing pain or not. But regardless of what the brain is doing, one thing is clear: When we haven’t learned to manage our inner worlds, our anticipation can create as much suffering as painful events, and sometimes even more.

The good news is that modern science is now proving what contemplative traditions have been saying all along. With patient practice, we can recondition our minds, and even rewire our brains, to respond differently to painful situations. I’m not sure that I needed to be burned with scalding water to realize this, but if a hack meditator like me can taste a bit of equanimity in the face of a challenging situation, then there must be hope for the rest of humanity.