<\/p>\n
By Jeff Warren<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was 1972 at Penn State University, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old
\nmaterials science PhD student, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! He had a
\ncontinuous and oppressive stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, and everything
\nelse.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While most human beings would consider this par for the course; par for
\nthe human condition (or ‘cogito ergo sum’, which can be translated as “I
\nthink therefore I am”), Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a
\nprocess guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be tweaked to work more
\nefficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going
\nover and over the same anxieties, and cravings, and storylines.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Most of these thoughts had no purpose,” he said.
\n“They were not going to cure cancer.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one of
\nthose little life coincidences that some people like to call ‘synchronicities,’ Weber picked up
\na slim volume of poetry on his way out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the
\nUniversity admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He read: \u201fAll beings are, from the very beginning,
\nBuddhas.\u02ee – Hakuin Ekaku
\n This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of
\nZazen – written in the 18th century by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew
\nnothing of Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber: “the
\nentire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For what must have been thirty or forty minutes,
\nI dropped into this magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts
\nwhatsoever.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Weber had had what in Zen is called a ‘kensho’ – an
\nawakening; a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon described in different ways by countless
\ntexts and countless teachers, in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many such
\nexperiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as insistent and clamorous as
\never. But now Weber knew another way was possible. He was determined.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A Spiritual Life in a Scientific World<\/strong><\/p>\n For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD; married and raised two <\/p>\n He read lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered <\/p>\n Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber <\/p>\n Of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would seem to <\/p>\n And at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. <\/p>\n “There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he <\/p>\n Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts “What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, <\/p>\n But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the <\/p>\n Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with <\/p>\n Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional <\/p>\n The Brain Exploration Begins<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar Jill Bolte Taylor experienced her “awakening” when she had But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the opposite pattern: <\/p>\n And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion between <\/p>\n Creative thoughts, planning thoughts – these are fine, and are, By contrast, further study has suggested to Brewer that the thoughts <\/p>\n Some of his subjects attained dramatic reductions in DMN activity, while <\/p>\n Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity in <\/p>\n Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the reduction <\/p>\n “Even in novices we saw a relative deactivation across the <\/p>\n This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what <\/p>\n As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies that show how <\/p>\n And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work <\/p>\n Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street, and <\/p>\n yogaesoteric<\/strong><\/p>\n January 9, 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jeff Warren It was 1972 at Penn State University, and Gary Weber, a 29-year old materials science PhD student, had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! He had a continuous and oppressive stream of neurotic concerns about his life, his studies, and everything else. While most human beings would consider this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[693],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articole-1603-ro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n <\/strong><\/p>\n
\nkids, and made his way through a string of industry jobs – eventually culminating in a senior
\nmanagement position, running the R&D operations of a big manufacturing business – he got
\nspiritual.<\/p>\n
\ncomplicated yoga postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as ‘self-inquiry’
\n– a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind. To make time for all this, Weber
\nwould get up at 4am and put in two hours of spiritual practice before work.<\/p>\n
\nkept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something happened. He got into a yoga pose – a
\npose he had done thousands of times before – and when he moved out of it, his thoughts stopped.
\nPermanently. “That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a
\nstate of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few
\nmore when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come
\nback.”<\/p>\n
\ncontradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom tells us that talk is the verbal expression of
\nthinking; separating the two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports.<\/p>\n
\nWhat he cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was supposed to run four research
\nlabs, manage a thousand employees, and a quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How was
\nthat going to work?<\/p>\n
\nadmits may say more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go into
\na meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d just sit there and wait to see what
\ncame up. And what came up when I opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter, and more elegant than
\nany I could have developed on my own.”<\/p>\n
\nhad disappeared, rather, a particular kind of self-referential thinking had cut out what he calls “the
\nblah blah network.” Scientists now refer to this as the “default mode network” (DMN), that
\nis, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the
\ndistracted daydreamer. This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged in a specific
\ntask.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n“is I can still reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing emotionally-
\ncharged, self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”<\/p>\n
\n“me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it, all mental and emotional
\nsuffering. He has a theory about this: “If you look at the self-referential narrative, it’s
\nall ‘I, me, mine.’ When that cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s
\nvery quiet and peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than they are,
\nand no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’”<\/p>\n
\nresearch showing that more DMN activation correlates with more unhappiness – ‘A Wandering
\nMind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.<\/p>\n
\nlife: “I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I feel
\nthe energy come up, but it doesn’t go anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway.
\nThe anger dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the typical
\nneural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire leading up to them, and, once
\nthe response passes, you don’t make up a story about what happened that you repeat again and again in
\nyour head. Those storylines are gone.”<\/p>\n
\ntransformations – the neuroscientist James Austin, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, to name two
\nexamples – Weber got interested in what was going on his brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at
\nYale University named Judson Brewer, who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation. He
\nfound, as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when meditating.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\na stroke.<\/p>\n
\nWeber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind
\nof deliberate effort – actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a
\nkind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few times previously, and other researchers
\nhad, until then, only reported anecdotally.<\/p>\n
\nWeber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a state of “no-thought” where the
\nmind is permanently stilled of any kind of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue.<\/p>\n
\naccording to Weber, served by completely different parts of the brain. The real suffering happens in the
\nendless and exhausting internal monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of thoughts
\nshould be the explicit goal of practice, something he says other contemplative traditions also
\nemphasize.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nthemselves – even a certain amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the
\nproblem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and get “caught up” in these
\nthoughts.<\/p>\n
\nstill thinking in a self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations. One subject
\ndescribed watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have long argued, you don’t need
\nto eliminate the self-thinking process, you just need to change your relationship to it.<\/p>\n
\nthe DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being discussed at all marks an important
\nadvance in the scientific study of meditation in particular, and spiritual practice in general. Many
\nresearchers have shown unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by meditation and
\nby mindfulness in life. But they have not yet shown why this is so.<\/p>\n
\nof suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a specific region, but a more general deactivation; a
\nneurological “letting go” that parallels the experiential one?<\/p>\n
\nbrain – like the brain was saying, ‘Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff; I
\ndon’t have to do all this high energy maintenance of myself’. One interpretation of that –
\nand there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to do. It’s a very efficient
\nmachine; we just have to stop getting in the way.”<\/p>\n
\nBrewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help teachers and
\npractitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for
\nBrewer, addressing suffering is the priority; a project science can help with. <\/p>\n
\nmeditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging)
\nand use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time.<\/p>\n
\nfor non-meditators more quickly, and hopefully one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if
\nneuro feedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they
\nwouldn’t notice otherwise.” he says.<\/p>\n
\nwithin one or two runs in the Yale fMRI, they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the
\nbrain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With
\nthis technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more
\nefficient.”<\/p>\n