Siddhartha’s brain

James kingsland

10% of children have diagnosable mental disorders that affect their ability to become happy adults. Kingsland argues that emotional health is a better predictor of happiness than the typical causers (i.e., academic achievement, sociability, family background). He says that so many people demonstrably suffer from mental health issues suggests not that they’re discrete conditions like diabetes or asthma, but an extreme manifestation of the human condition. Even with identified physiological and neurological symptoms, Kingsland says these can be corrected through meditation (a buzzword rife with misunderstanding). People have come to think meditation excises people into zombies without desires, ambitions, and personalities, which they perceive to go against the grain of the western cultivation of self-advancement. It’s a misunderstanding because work does not mean suffering and peace does not mean inactivity, and the two aren’t antithetical (you can be completely at peace hard at work on something).

The need for meditation breeds another question, too. What went wrong in evolution that caused us to need meditation to fix us?

Kingsland wrote this book to recount the life of the founder of Buddhism, a Hindu prince named Siddhartha Gautama, the changes his brain and behavior underwent on his journey to happiness, and how he did more good than any other human in bringing the benefits of meditation to bear on our long-suffering species. It’s a book about the scientific basis of enlightenment as well as an exploration of how and why the mind developed the cognitive quirks that made practices like meditation popular and necessary for psychological well-being.

The core practice of Buddhism is known as “mindfulness,” which involves making a conscious effort to live nonjudgmentally in the present moment, acknowledging thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they arise and accepting them just as they are. This practice is understood to help one deal with psychological challenges more objectively, rather than with automatic responses based purely on emotions, fears, and preconceptions. Over the past few years there has been a surge of popular interest in the secular form of this ancient mental discipline, with training courses springing up all over the world and becoming available online and via apps. Scientific journals have published studies by psychologists and therapists suggesting that this deceptively simple technique can not only help treat pain, anxiety, depression and drug addiction, but also improve everyday concentration and performance.

Why can meditation positively affect anxiety and depression the way it does is only half the thesis of this book. The other half is how. How did meditation become a thing? It certainly wasn’t started by the pampered Siddhartha, who arguably sought enlightenment in a life absent any material need. A coddling parent is the best way to encourage your child to seek hardship, to intentionally bootstrap yourself into wisdom through intentional adversity. Instead, it was formalized by the brahmins, the Vedic Hindu priest caste, who, while hallucinating, channeled the universal law that governed the lives of gods and men into the Vedas via Vedic Sanskrit. They’d do the weird things religions do, like babbling and making blood sacrifices as attempts to keep the world from breaking, but around 500 BCE, this one-sided relationship with the brahmins as the source of spiritual truth and the rest of the people began to fracture. Technology had been changing the pace of farming. Suddenly people had tools that could clear enough crop to create a surplus, and with more surplus came trade. As people traded more, more people were afforded the option of leaving the land to congregate in cities. All this activity produced a new class of people, made of merchants and bankers and businessmen. The wealth and urban lifestyle they created around them brought more time for thinking, talking, speculating about the meaning of life, and even questioning the authority of the brahmins on spiritual matters. These merchant-established trade routes also facilitated these questioning ideas being spread to other areas. Learning of some of these new ideas, Siddhartha abandoned his station as prince to seek a teacher of these new ideas, landing with Ālāra Kālāma, a Yogi who taught that nature was ephemeral and that to end suffering one must rise above it to discover Atman, the eternal, unchanging Self that was indistinguishable from the essence of the universe. This core of the person was untouched by the body, with its fickle emotions and primal urges. This is where contemporary yoga has missed the mark, because in its original form it had little to do with health and relaxation: it was about mastering the senses and subduing the egotistical, mundane self and its constant distractions. Only by stripping away our crude nature could we experience the bliss that was the undying Self. Thousands of years before Sigmund Freud would write about the subconscious, Yogis in ancient India had identified the untamed mind as a principal source of suffering.

When Benson first started studying meditation, a group of monks enthused by the idea of having their monk minds monitored volunteered to be measured. They sat in a chair wired up to devices measuring blood pressure, breathing rate, rectal temperature, the amount of oxygen and other chemicals in their blood, and an electrode cap to measure brain activity. As soon as the subjects started to meditate, their breathing rate and oxygen consumption plummeted and their heart rate slowed, indicating an abrupt drop in metabolic rate. Their muscles relaxed, measured as a decrease in the amount of lactate circulating in their blood. At the same time, slow electrical oscillations in their brains known as alpha waves increased in intensity. Benson dubbed this response the opposite of the fight-or-flight response, aka the relaxation response, and that this response reduced oxidative stress at the cellular level, taming the inflammation associated with so many illnesses known to be exacerbated by chronic stress (and the heavy release of cortisol into the blood), including hypertension, anxiety, insomnia, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. He argued the relaxation response combated cell aging by promoting the repair and maintenance of the stretches of expendable DNA at the ends of chromosomes known as telomeres, which act like the stiff plastic sheaths that prevent the ends of shoelaces from fraying. In order to divide, a cell must duplicate all its chromosomes, but every time this happens, some of the DNA in its telomeres is lost. Eventually, in cells that have to divide many times in the course of a lifetime, the telomeres wear down to such an extent that the integrity of the genes carried by the chromosomes is threatened. To protect the body as a whole, these cells stop dividing and become senescent, and may eventually undergo apoptosis—cell suicide. So, in most cells, the telomeres seem to act like lit fuses, steadily burning down until—bang!—it’s all over.

Telomere length is the scientific equivalent of having the heartline on your palm read. The longer it is, the longer you’re supposed to live. Unsurprisingly, stressful environments shorten telomeres and accelerate aging. If, on the other hand, people are able to continually engage in something that promotes the activity of the gene responsible for making telomerase (the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres) then meditation can effectively combat cellular aging.

While the same thinking that created the brahmin class rift is what’s allowed us to trade forest for farm for federal governance, it’s also what’s allowed us to be more stressed. Thinking about the future made us capable of thinking about the dangers that could threaten that future. Animals and our ancestors could get on with foraging and feeding after a threat had passed, whereas us thinkers had the unfortunate imaginations of constantly thinking about danger, constantly being stressed about what could happen, constantly invoking the fight or flight response that shortens telomeres and numbers our days.

Kingsland talks about the origins of meditation, mainly to highlight that no one invented it, except maybe fire. Since people have been people, they’ve probably been sinking into the relaxation response unconsciously. Meditation is nothing more than focusing exclusively on a repetitive stimulus long enough to break the stream of ordinary thought. That’s why fire is considered the founder of meditation. Anyone sitting around a fire ends up staring into the flames, very quietly, very awake, very focused. Transcendental meditation, where we focus on the repetition of a mantra like ‘Om,’ started 2300 years ago with the Yoga sutra Patanjali. Benson arguably did the same thing by trying to generalize his ‘One’ mantra with the American public. His research had revealed that sitting in a quiet place with your eyes closed - silently repeating a word of one syllable for about twenty minutes - broke the train of regular thought and in the process lowered blood pressure, slowed heart rate and breathing, and elicited a profound sense of calm. Any mantra, even and especially the ones the religious engage in, are strong enough to evoke the physiological flip side of the fight-or-flight response. I say especially religious because how does repeating hail Mary fifty times any different than Om? One has religious meaning and the other is meaningless by itself, sure, but after a dozen hail Mary’s not one prayer sayer is thinking about the virgin Mary. Repetition in any form clears a space in the mind by warding off stray thoughts. Couple a catholic mantra with the roman catholic’s rosary beading and you’re reaching nirvana backwards, thinking your sense of peace is god instead of realizing you’re just giving yourself a psychological shower.

Why Buddhism owns this cognitive key is because it demonstrates that you can remove the supernatural from religion and focus solely on investigating the mind for the purpose of improving well-being. It sounds very religious through the lens of taking a contaminated mind and repurifying it. Anxiety, fear, jealousy and depression poison us with craving, aversion and delusion. Only through calming ourselves can we resist these defilements and see more clearly. Only through insight can we divine the nature of the mind.

It all sounds great, and casting the supernatural aside, where Buddhism seems to lose large swaths of potential converts is when the conversation of consciousness comes up. One of the great delusions of our species is that inside each of our heads sits a pilot. It’s a persistent and convincing solution only until you realize what you consider your Self, the experience of your selfhood, changes not even over a lifespan but from moment to moment. “You” change according to whether you have drunk your morning coffee, how well you slept, how full your stomach is, whether you are feeling distracted, irritated, bored, worried, or elated. Which is the real you? Research has found those most embedded in the illusion of the self present with an extreme strength and the strength between two parts of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. These two areas and the relationship between them is where “we” sit. More research has found this connection temporarily dissolves, as does the activity within each brain area, when subjects ingest psilocybin. It’s why users of magic mushrooms universally recount the profound spiritual experience of being at one with the universe. It must be magic because it short circuits the part of our brain that draws a line between “us” and “everything else.” Why do you think so many religious rituals involve the use of natural psychedelics?

This whole time reading this, even as I’m writing it, we might be thinking the same thing: Being alone with yourself enough to realize all this is torture, isn’t that why being isolated is frowned upon in prison? The lack of external stimuli is a strange thing, because if you have demons, the quiet night is when they’ll come out. The distractions of daylight, with their promise of mundane tasks and social interaction, usually send these demons of our imagination scurrying back to their caves. That’s about all distraction is good for. Most people can’t even muster the ability to be without their thoughts even if they wanted, because they’re victims of time travel. Kingsland calls this neural phenomenon our ‘Default Network,’ where we’re pretty consistently consumed by thoughts of the past or thoughts of the future. He grants it being essential in order to intuit others’ desires, beliefs and intentions, but draws the line there. In order to focus on a mentally-demanding task, we must suppress the activity in our default network.

Some criticism comes from Buddhism because its central tenant is to relinquish desire. This criticism comes from those who understand Buddhism poorly and those who practice Buddhism poorly, because even to a monk, there are still desires universally considered wholesome. Without desire, there would be no, well, desire to achieve any worthy objective. No desire means no enthusiasm, no action, no progress; things arguably antithetical to Buddhism. Some Hindu monks believed there was no middle ground here. Siddhartha practiced with these monks, but it was his revolt toward desire that one day allowed himself a bowl of rice milk to stave off starvation in pursuit of spiritual objectives. He changed the way we, and many monks, thought about desire, that thing that originates up in a nerve cluster called the nucleus acumens under the cerebral cortex, that thing we call the pleasure center. This pleasure center is what pumps dopamine into our blood to cause us to experience desire, but so many of our brains are susceptible to the hack of addiction. Substances like cocaine flood the brain with a sense of well-being, keeping its switch on so strongly that its intensity subsides while cravings strengthen.

Hindus were not misguided in trying to cure themselves of this sapien malady, this losing of oneself in a forest of craving. They thought the answer was abstinence. It never is. Meditation strengthens control over the posterior cingulate cortex and correlates strongly with reductions in interleukin-6 (a blood chemical that causes tissue inflammation). This is relevant to craving as the posterior cingulate cortex has many times been implicated in craving. The PCC is like an intense friend always insisting on bringing out his family photo album at every opportunity. It’s most active when our mind wanders, and most quiet when we’re flowing, when we’re cognitively absorbed in a demanding mental task.

Meditation, or at least its positive outcomes, seem to have a lot of overlap with what psychologists call emotional regulation. We attempt to deploy strategies to influence which emotions arise and when, how long they last, and how they’re experienced and expressed. Meditation lets us observe this process dispassionately and allows us to move the needle on processes that aren’t doing us any favors. The four principal emotion regulation strategies recognized by psychologists are avoidance, distraction, suppression, and reappraisal. Avoidance involves steering clear of situations that provoke strong sensations such as fear or craving. “You think the sound is annoying you, but actually it is you that is annoying the sound. The sound is just what it is, just the air vibrating.” People have looked at the brains of those who meditate and have observed boosted activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the area associated with emotional regulation. The DLPFC has strong neural ties to the default network, that constellation of brain regions that lights up as we reflect about social comparison and mental time travel to our past and future. It’s our brain’s simulator, because it not only creates our sense of self but

also builds a representation of other people’s minds, allowing us to see things from their perspective and intuit their beliefs, thoughts, and intentions. The DLPFC is also linked to the amygdalae, those smoke detectors in each hemisphere of the brain that trigger our limbic system when they think we’re being threatened. This is physiologically consequential because when the DLPFC is turned up in meditation, it mutes the default network and amygdalae. Our amygdalae have become really bad at identifying what’s a threat, and so our smoke detectors are almost always going off. Muting that function prevents the disorders high amygdalae activity causes, like depression, PTSD, social phobia, OCD, and anxiety. This muting of amygdalae also shields the hippocampus from stress-shrinkage, which is important as the hippocampus is vital in memory storage and emotion regulation. Because all this is known and impactful as a replacement for medical treatment, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) has been designed to prevent people with severe depression from relapsing.

Mental illness is something we want to prevent, but only at a certain point. Creativity often gets lumped with mental illness and is talked about in the context of its manifestation in schizophrenia. Mental illness can be explained in part by environmental factors like pollution and diet choice that affect the expression of certain genes, but why is hereditary mental illness so persistent? Who doesn’t want to be with a writer, a performer, or an artist? Aristotle said no great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness. Because creativity and mental illness are linked, the genes for mental illness get passed on. Large studies in Britain have measured schizotypy – the four personality dimensions characteristic of those likely to have mental illness:

1. Unusual perceptual/cognitive experiences like hallucinations and magical thinking.

2. Difficulties with attention and concentration.

3. Lack of enjoyment and social withdrawal.

4. Nonconformity (unstable moods/behavior, disregard of rules, and violence/recklessness).

People high on these four characteristics have increased mating success. Kingsland’s question is why our species has bred brooders and warriors. He gets anthropological looking at the ancestors of our ancestors, the Australopithecines, and how walking upright helped us survive.

1. Standing on two legs gave us a better view.

2. We could travel great distances more efficiently.

3. We prevented overheating by exposing less of our body’s surface area to the midday sun.

4. We freed the hands to carry provisions, tools, and weapons, and could throw said weapons.

5. We freed our hands for communication.

Kingsland makes a case that our language evolved from sign language. The mirror neurons first discovered in the brains of macaques were found to fire not only when a monkey made a movement but when it saw another monkey or human making the same movement. These neurons lit up in the frontal lobe in the exact location involved in both speech and controlling complex hand movements, the Broca’s area. The idea is that at some point, language was incorporated into a neural system already evolved for communication using manual gestures.

This is where the stories of mental illness and language converge, because mirror neurons are now considered part of the extensive mirror system overlapping the default network, the brain regions that light up when we’re not engaged in an external task. Previously mentioned, the default network is our mirror version of other people’s worlds. Our simulator. Strongly active default networks are tied to mental illness because it’s the part most active when we think of our place in the social world, our past experiences and our future plans.

Mental time travel is indispensable for complex language, since what language does is allow us to pass on information about things that have happened or things that might happen. That theory of mind allows us a mutual understanding of what another person knows and what they don’t. Metaphor, irony and sarcasm would be lost without theory of mind. What this means is that language developed together with the default network over time, because it was the stuff of thought. We now run an internal dialogue (bicameral mind – people attributing the voices in their head as an other – god – rather than themselves), which with high activation of the default network causes us to suffer. We now so easily slip into rumination and negative self-referential thought that it interferes with our lives.

When we talk about meditation, part of what we’re really talking about is metacognition – our ability to think about thoughts objectively as they arise in the mind (e.g., observing an emotion as “there is frustration,” rather than, “I am so frustrated right now”). It aids in understanding how the contents of the mind ebb and flow. One region largely tethered to the ability to metacognate is Brodmann Area 10. It’s the farthest outpost of the orbitofrontal cortex, which handles our theory of mind powers. The size of this cortex is directly related to the maximum size of one’s social group, an area that has rapidly expanded with civilization and technology. Another important area of the brain in terms of metacognition is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which plays a vital role in working memory, planning, and decision-making. By now we already know the insula has a big poker in the fire of metacognition, and interoception (monitoring the internal state of the body) even more so. This is because inside the insula sits conscious awareness. We feel like we’re alive to the extent that this area is active. The point is that these areas are what force us to time travel, pulling us out of the present moment. Thich Nhat Hanh said without mindfulness your whole life will be like a dream.

All this mindfulness woo woo talk is great, but what is our return from investing our time in departing from thought? With those who’ve clocked a master’s worth of hours meditating, they show greater activity in the brain regions involved in sustained attention. This seems trivial, but as multimedia causes more and more individuals to suffer from Multitasking Addiction Disorder (MAD), it’s a crucial skill to hone. We’re conditioned to expect a stream of rapidly changing stimuli and so we get bored in their absence. Before people could be at home in their own mind, but now feeling at peace requires us to simultaneously game and jam and email. More importantly, these things we always say keep our mind sharp – puzzles, math, reading, studying, or simple meditation – do so because they draw us out of ourselves into a single moment. They give the default network a break and, preventing the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s from building up, maintaining the thickness of the cortex to prevent loss of nerve cell bodies and fibers. What makes the meditation revolution an uphill battle is that people refuse to make it a secular thing. They’re fixated on the -ism associated with it being a buddhist practice, but we forget Buddha wasn’t a buddhist. It was about a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. He discovered something about wakefulness and the nature of suffering and the nature of reality when you start to cultivate the mind in a certain way. That’s not secular. That’s universal.

Buddha wanted to teach people that the self was an illusion, nothing more than a special effect staged by the mind. We crave sensory pleasures that are impermanent and therefore ultimately unsatisfying, but rather than realize our mistake, we keep coming back for more of the same. We are caught fast in a trap, being metaphorically born and dying over and over again in an endless cycle of suffering.

He discouraged people from speculating on the imponderables such as the origin of the cosmos, using the analogy of a man who is struck by a poison arrow but refuses to have it removed until he knows the station of the man who shot it, the man’s height, his complexion and hometown, what was used to make the arrow, etc. The man would die, knowing all of these unimportant things. What was important was that he had been poisoned, and he sought antidote. Throughout our species’ history, we’ve gotten better at reconstructing the past to plan for the future. As grammatical language formed from simple gestures, we were able to share our mental time travels and experiences with others. We accumulated great collective knowledge, but at costs. Our new abilities to simulate past and future meant we could wander farther from the realities of the present. We became masters of deception and suspicious of others’ intentions. The formulation of the Self asserted ownership over others, objects, and experiences.