Mindframe

What happens to the brain during meditation? When researcher Wendy Hasenkamp was at Emory University, she and her team ran experiments on focused meditation aided by the fMRI[1]. In the end, the researchers came to recognize a distinct pattern among their subjects, a four-phase process involving four distinct brain areas. When subjects entered the fMRI scanner, they were told to focus on the sensation of their own breathing. The subject’s insula (related to a person's focus, or lack thereof) would default towards mind wandering. When that happened and the subject became aware of the fact that they were no longer concentrating on their breathing, they were instructed to press a button. When the subjects tried to refocus on their breathing, their salience network would take over. This is the part of the brain that registers sudden attention shifts, alerting you to nearby distractions. Your salience network might be more aptly named your distraction network, and for many of u...

In 1501, the Church of Florence commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt a marble statue of David the Biblical shepherd boy. Because the statue was to be placed on a hill and viewed from below, it needed to be about thirteen and a half feet tall—roughly twice life-size. Proportionally, this created some challenges, but to make it an even greater test of ingenuity, the marble Michelangelo had to work with was not pristine. It was a leftover from an unfinished 1464 sculpture by another artist. Clearly, Michelangelo had his work cut out for him. At this point, the artist was only in his twenties, but he had already made a name for himself with his Pieta in Rome. More to the point, he had spent so much time and concentration honing his skills that even working with another sculptor’s scraps, he was able to free the David from his marble prison. At first read, this might sound like a nice metaphor about art emerging from nature, but it’s at the critical mass of something noted scholar ...

Across a wide variety of domains, people who have achieved expertise share a common trait. In fact, this one factor might lie at the very epicenter of behavioral control. It’s called ‘the rage to master”—the relentless pursuit of knowledge or skill, in the face of all other distraction. You can see the results in everything from Steve Curry’s three-point shooting to Meryl Streep’s acting to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s command over the blues guitar. In the latter case, Vaughan’s quest for mastery included supergluing his fingertips so that he could keep playing after he’d bloodied his fingers from practicing the same riff over and over again. The flip side of the coin is another, less polite word: obsession. In clinical psychology, obsessions are something that people seek help to overcome. There’s even an official diagnosis for people who struggle with their fixations: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. If you have OCD, you might feel an uncontrollable urge to wash your ha...

In the last twenty years we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how expertise is created. Scientists like K Anders Ericsson from Florida State University have been leading the charge. His new book, Peak, Secrets from the new Science of Expertise chronicles years of experiments examing how expertise is attained across a wide spectrum of domains. Ericcson’s findings shatter three commonly held myths about experts. The first myth— Talent is bestowed upon you by winning the genetic lottery .   Many people believe that their IQ, for example, is fixed and nonmalleable, as is their abilities in sports, mathematics, the arts and so on. In other words, you’re either born with talent or you're not. Repeated research has shown that IQ, like early talent in a given domain, has very little causal relationship to the level of expertise you can eventually attain.   Acquiring expertise, instead, shows a one to one correlation with the kind and quality of your training p...

What is a leader? The simplest and perhaps most literal definition is “someone with followers.” But the presence of followers alone doesn’t signify that you’re any good at the act of leadership. History is littered with men and women who blithely led others straight into disaster. Great leaders do three things that set them apart. First of all, they start with a growth mindset, a term coined by psychologist Carol Dweck. This is far more than a simple positive attitude. Positive thinking alone can lend situations an undeserved—even dangerous—rosy cast, verging into denial. Growth mindset, which holds that improvement is made possible through honest self-assessment and hard work, encourages people to acknowledge and learn from their mistakes. Dave Guy, who plays trumpet alongside The Roots, Jimmy Fallon’s house band on the Tonight Show, is one of the foremost trumpeters alive. Early in his career, he made it his goal to learn how to play in as many different genres as he could—b...

What’s the best way to gear up for a new habit? There are two common approaches. One is to imagine the positive outcome of solving a given problem. The other is to ponder what about your current situation makes you unhappy and what the solution to your problem might look like. Gabriele Oettingen of New York University decided to test these ideas against each other. She ran an experiment in which she divided her subjects into three groups and gave them the same problem. The first group was told to start by indulging themselves, fantasizing about having solved it. The second group was told to dwell on the negative consequences of not solving the problem.  The last group, however, was told to do both: to envision the satisfaction of resolving the problem, then to focus on the harm done by not resolving it. Finally, they were to contrast their imagined positive outcome with the current negative reality. It turned out that when expectations of success were high, the thir...

Where do great ideas come from? Often, the answer is “other great ideas, sort of mashed together.” The term “remix culture” was coined after the invention of technologies that made hiphop possible: literally sampling pre-existing recordings. Sugarhill Gang’s landmark “Rapper’s Delight” samples the bass riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a riff which has since been sampled dozens of times, by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Will Smith to Daft Punk. Of course, the concept of using someone else’s work to make something new has been around since nearly the dawn of music. In his classic Folk Songs of America , historian Alan Lomax takes a moment to defend “cowboy music” from “book-learned folklorists” who at the time alleged that it didn’t count as a true folk movement, since so many of the songs were reworkings of older ballads. “To my mind these critics have merely pointed to the fact that the West was a cultural melting pot,” Lomax wrote in 1960. “…That this evocative and self-...

D o you experience difficulty in filtering interruptions out of everyday life? Do outside forces—sirens, a co-worker chewing loudly in the next cubicle over, the smell of cologne in a packed elevator, the roar of the crowd, or the buzz of an incoming email—make you feel as if you are constantly under assault? No, this is not an ad for some new concentration wonder drug. Many of us suffer from the inability to stay focused. There’s even a name for it: reduced latent inhibition. It's a phrase that sounds pretty serious. As you read this, maybe you’re starting to feel guilty, worrying that your life may be negatively affected by these rapidly pingponging thoughts. What if it interferes with your ability to get things done, to think complex thoughts and make contributions to the world? It’s true that diminished focus might be a negative net result of heightened sensory awareness, but don’t despair. Harvard psychologist Shelly Carson and her team discovered something unusual...

Here’s one way in which all that talk about big-city glamor may be backed up by fact. Statistically, large cities yield a far higher number of patents and inventions than towns or suburbs. At first glance, there may seem to be an obvious reason: a higher headcount means a higher total output. Surely, the two would increase proportionally. However, according to theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, the truth is more complicated—and more interesting. According to Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From , West’s research showed “the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.” In other words, it wasn’t just an overall rise in creativity, but a rise among individuals as well. So, what’s going on? Researchers from MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab think they know the answer. Their work indicates that greater population density leads to higher rates...

Last time you pulled up to a gas pump, you had to make a choice. That choice consisted of 87% with ethanol, Regular, or Premium. It’s a choice you’ve made thousands of times. In fact, far beyond the gas pump, you’re asked to make that very same kind of “good, better, best” decision over and over again, whether you’re picking airplane seats or breakfast cereal. It seems to make sense: in a fast-changing world where the options seem to multiply every day, there is something comforting about “good, better, best” as an easy navigation tool. Your brain adapted so well to this strategy, it’s likely you don’t even think about it. It’s just another heuristic, just another way the brain conserves energy by employing a rule of thumb that spares you from thinking too hard. Why not bring it into the cereal aisle? Marketers hit upon this tactic years ago. It seems like a hugely successful move for anyone who wants to take advantage of the brain’s natural tendency towards fuel conservation, o...

What is the most practical method for generating creativity? Despite our growing understanding of those neural processes, that question haunts every scientist, writer, artist, filmmaker, athlete, inventor, and any other person hoping to make something great. Much has been written about the connection between creativity and what’s called the default network: the mental mechanisms associated with mind wandering and daydreaming. The default network is the soup de jour. This might be because there is something inherently alluring about the idea of epiphany, that bolt-out-of-the-blue inspiration seen as the mind fruit of spontaneous genius. What doesn’t get as much airtime is the role of domain knowledge—that is, the breadth and depth of your familiarity with a given field, including the contents of your associative memory and the sum total of your practice regime. One of the best-known epiphany stories occurred around 1666 when Sir Isaac Newton was allegedly conked on the h...