The Four Phases of Focus


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 us, this network is frequently on high alert. Just attempting to concentrate on your own breaths, something you don’t regularly do, becomes a challenge—especially when you’re crammed inside an fMRI as the subject of an experiment.

In the third phase, the test subject would attempt to decouple their salience network and wrestle back focus from distraction in order to renew their concentration.

Finally, in the last stage, the prefrontal cortex’s executive control center would reestablish its dominance and restore focus on the subject’s breath, moving that focused breathing back into awareness.

Regardless of whether we’re talking about an experiment on breath concentration or just living our daily lives, this four-stage process of focusing, mind wandering, decoupling and reestablishing focus is a ritual that we practice over and over all day long. The speed at which you can regain and hold focus has enormous implications for everything you do.

The good news is anyone can learn to meditate. Practicing daily breath-focused meditation, even for just five minutes a day, has been demonstrated to improve willpower, which is a prerequisite for flow and happiness.

Meditation also has an interesting side effect: many people who meditate experience up to an additional hour of sleep at night. This additional hour of rest has all kinds of health benefits, including lowering your general level of anxiety. Besides, who couldn’t use an extra hour of sleep?

________________________________

[1] Mind of the Meditator, by Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz and Richard J. Davidson, Nov 12014 Scientific American

Check out Robb’s new book and more 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo...
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a...
Read more

The Top One Quality of True Leaders

Image
“So, what's up with the pile of words?” you ask. This is part of an experiment we conducted earlier this year on how to be the perfect leader. Sooner or later, most of us wind up in a position of some power, whether it’s running a cub scout den or a girl scout troop, heading up a committee at church or your job, or residing over your flamenco dance group or your flamingo lawn ornament club. And when you nobly accepted the challenge of being in charge, your brain released a little shot of cortisol, the stress hormone. In your moment of panic, you made the executive decision to discover the secret to being a good leader. If you were like me, you went down to your local bookstore and perused the aisles looking for books on leadership. After all, you wanted to be the best president the flamingo lawn ornament club had ever known, recognizing a club needs to be more than really swanky pink shirts. In my case, the bookstore anticipated my arrival and had at the ready a slew of...
Read more