How the Insights of Neuroscience Can Aid Our Practice
By Paul Tingen
Around twenty-five years ago, neuroscience went through a dramatic
change in perspective that had profound implications for mindfulness
practitioners, and that can greatly deepen our understanding of our
practice and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh. To be able to describe
neuroscience’s big discovery, first some basic facts: the brain is
astoundingly complex, typically containing some 100 billion nerve cells
called neurons. Each neuron is capable of making thousands, sometimes
hundreds of thousands, of connections with other neurons using
chemicals called neurotransmitters that transmit electrical signals along
complex cellular pathways. “Thoughts, memories, emotions—all emerge
from the electrochemical interactions of neurons,” writes Nicholas Carr in
his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.1
Until the 1980s, conventional wisdom in neuroscience held that the brain
developed during childhood until it reached a fixed form that remained
the same during adulthood. This belief in the brain’s static cellular
circuitry gave rise to a very limited view of human consciousness, a
“neurological nihilism,” in which consciousness was seen as no more than
the byproduct of these fixed pathways. With the emergence of the
computer, the analogy was made that the hardware of the brain
determined and limited the software (our feelings and our thoughts).
However, due to pioneering research in the 1980s, most famously by
Professor Michael Merzenich,2 this orthodoxy was turned on its head.
Since then it has become widely accepted that the brain constantly
rewires itself in response to changes in our feelings, thoughts,
experiences, and the way we use our body. This phenomenon is referred
to as the plasticity of the brain. In computer language, the software and
the hardware inter-are: the software can shape the hardware, just as
much as the other way around. Neuroscience today is governed by what is
known as Hebb’s rule: “Cells that fire together wire together.” The brain
gets less plastic as we grow older, but the capacity for rewiring remains.
The idea of neuroplasticity has given new hope to people with physical,
emotional, and mental impairments that had hitherto been regarded as
unchangeable. Conversely, just as it is possible for the software to change
the hardware for the better, it can also change the hardware for the
worse. Moreover, in Carr’s words, “plastic does not mean elastic.” Neural
pathways become entrenched, and the more entrenched they become,
the more they resist the process of rewiring. The older, entrenched
pathways are paths of least resistance amongst which neurons like to
communicate with each other, propelling us to keep repeating similar
feelings, thoughts, and actions. Every time we use a particular pathway, it
increases the likelihood that we will do it again.
Says Carr, “The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper
those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the
mind essentially trains itself to be sick.” In short, whenever we’re stuck in
habitual suffering, we’re not just wasting our life energy and time, we’re
actively entrenching this suffering in our neurological pathways, making it
more likely that we’ll suffer in the same way again. Suffering is not a free
ride.
Rewiring for Well-being
There are many parallels between these theories of neuroscience and
Thay’s teachings. The essence of our Buddhist practice is to use
mindfulness to develop singularity of thought (concentration/samadhi),
which can help us to get out of habitual thinking and feeling and help us
to stop triggering our habitual neural pathways of suffering. Mindfulness,
in effect, allows us to consciously rewire our brain for improved well-
being.
Mindfulness is intentional and based on our free will. Free will can be
applied in many ways. An athlete or musician will construct neural
pathways in his or her brain through endless deliberate practice.
However, the practice of an athlete or musician will rarely be self-aware,
and while it may push pathways of suffering out of sight, it won’t
transform them. Mindfulness may be the only state of mind that is wholly
deliberate and wholly self-aware, and that is able to embrace other states
of mind, transform them, and foster well-being, thereby allowing us to
consciously rewire our brain.
The way we use the mantra, “This is a happy moment,” is a good example.
We train the brain to create and deepen a neural pathway of well-being
that might not otherwise be there. Conversely, if we focus on the
negative, we keep firing and strengthening the neural pathways
associated with our suffering. We know that certain ways of expressing
our suffering can make us feel lighter and freer, while others appear to
deepen it. One main reason for the difference between “rehearsing”
suffering and transforming it lies in whether we embrace our suffering
with mindfulness or not. Another factor is whether we look at our
suffering with Right View; wrong views trigger the very thoughts that
cause and entrench our suffering. If we don’t embrace suffering with
mindfulness and with Right View, we will almost inevitably be caught in
habitual suffering. But if we embrace our suffering with Right View and
mindfulness, and stop the thoughts that trigger it, we can transform the
energy of our suffering so that it becomes available for our well-being.
The light of mindfulness cooks the raw potatoes, so they become a joy to
eat.
Thay has always disagreed with a widespread view in Western society that
we can get rid of unpleasant feelings, particularly anger, simply through
expressing them. He often warns against the danger of rehearsing these
feelings. Neuroplasticity shows us that repeatedly firing off our
neurological pathways indeed risks strengthening those very pathways.
And so, again contrary to a lot of Western thinking, Thay has long
recommended that people who come to Plum Village don’t immediately
start digging into their suffering, but instead begin with watering their
seeds of well-being. Once we are stable and our sense of well-being is
strong enough, we can look at our suffering again and have a chance to
transform it, rather than risk being overwhelmed by it.
Our Sun of Mindfulness
To describe these processes more clearly, I would like to build on Thay’s
analogy of our practice as that of a gardener. A gardener transforms
compost (the mud) into flowers (the lotus). A skillful gardener knows how
to create a pleasant garden with lots of flowers and just enough compost
to feed them. Being a skillful gardener of our own inner garden is our
spiritual work of self-love. To offer another analogy: neural pathways can
be described as a collection of gullies, brooks, canals, and canyons; our
feelings and thoughts can be considered the water in them. Mindfulness
has often been described as a light, and in this case we could extend the
analogy by describing mindfulness as the sun.
And so, it rains and a rivulet forms: the first arrow has hit and we suffer.
The Buddha’s teachings tell us this is unavoidable; life will fire us arrows.
Suffering is inevitable. But if we don’t handle this arrow correctly, if we
add other arrows to it with wrong thinking, the rivulet turns into a
stream, a river, and eventually a flood of suffering. The one neural
connection has turned into a pathway and is likely to join with other
similar pathways, and all of them may be deepened. As these neural
pathways are strengthened, so are the corresponding mental formations,
and they will be more difficult to transform. And once this gully or canal
or canyon has formed, new rain will be drawn to it, deepening these
pathways still further.
There is a belief in Western culture that we have to go through our
suffering (the dark night of the soul), but from the perspective of
neuroplasticity and our practice, we cannot transform our suffering from
inside our suffering. We cannot affect the course of a canal while being
caught in the stream. We cannot dissolve neural pathways while firing
them simultaneously. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.
We have to step out of the stream and shine our sun of mindfulness on it.
Only with the healthy parts of ourselves can we heal our afflictions.
When we’re suffering, streams (or storms) of thoughts and feelings run
through us; and when we manage to breathe and become mindful, these
streams calm down to a gentle trickle. As the water slows down, as the
storm abates to a gentle breeze, the neurons stop firing together, and we
no longer strengthen our neural pathway of suffering. The suffering, the
neural pathway, may still be there, but it is no longer a danger to us. It is
like the mother embracing her angry child: she holds him firmly, so he
can do no damage, and also lovingly, so he can come back to his true
self. At that point, the water can mingle with the earth and turn into mud,
or it can evaporate in the light of the sun of our mindfulness and fall
down as rain (our tears) somewhere else in our garden. In both cases, the
water will help grow flowers rather than deepen the pathway of suffering.
When we consider this analogy, it’s easy to see why Thay so often stresses
that we should not judge or suppress our suffering. In seeing our
suffering as water flowing through a canal, we realize that we need that
water to tend our garden. If handled unskillfully, the water can deepen
the groove of our suffering; if we know how to practice, we can use it to
grow flowers in our garden. The analogy can be extended yet further.
Sometimes our suffering has become frozen, hidden, inaccessible: we
may have become bitter or repressed our feelings. One can’t grow flowers
with ice, so we have to first melt our frozen feelings.
Mindfulness practice in general, and sitting meditation in particular, are
ways of strengthening the power of the sun of our mindfulness, or the
power of our concentration (samadhi). But sometimes, if our sun of
mindfulness isn’t strong enough to transform our suffering, we need the
compassionate and mindful presence of another person. As the water
starts to flow, we cry, and we begin to disarm and transform our suffering
with our collective mindfulness. This is one of several reasons why
practicing in a Sangha is so important. Neuroscience offers an additional
reason, emanating from its research of a particular class of neurons called
mirror neurons, which are triggered when we observe the actions and/or
feelings of others, and which then fire in corresponding ways.
Neuroscientists have argued that mirror neurons make empathy possible;
and even simply being in the company of other practitioners will trigger
mirror neurons that strengthen our own practice.
What Thay calls our store consciousness can be seen as the network of
neural pathways in our brain, much of it inherited from our ancestors,
with each seed corresponding to a neural pathway. Intense feelings,
addictions, and many of the noxious things we consume in our society
can strengthen our neural pathways of suffering (hence the importance of
the Fifth Mindfulness Training). By contrast, the calming nature of our
entire practice makes it easier to rewire our brain. There are no magic
formulas or strategies; the crucial point is that we need to be very
mindful, at all times, of whether we’re transforming our suffering or
merely rehearsing it.
Living lightly offers more freedom and clarity to practitioners and also
makes it possible to turn neutral feelings into pleasant ones—in other
words, to turn neutral and often forgotten neural pathways into pathways
that trigger well-being. It is, so to speak, far easier to cultivate flowers in
the gently rolling hills of Plum Village than in the steep crags of the Grand
Canyon.
The thesis of Carr’s book is that extensive use of the Internet rewires our
brains to make it more difficult for us to handle deep thoughts and
extended narratives. Some of Carr’s sources on neuroplasticity are:
* Pascual-Leone, A. Amedi, F. Fregni, and L.B. Merabet, “The Plastic
Human Brain Cortex,” Annual Review of Neuroscience, 28 (2005).
* Michael Greenberg, “Just Remember This,” New York Review of Books,
December 4, 2008.
* Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal
Triumph from the Frontiers of Science (New York: Penguin, 2007).
* Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain:
Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (Harper-Perrenial, 2002).
2) Carr, pages 24-26.
Paul “Ramon” Tingen, True Harmony of Loving Kindness, is an anglicised
Dutchman who now lives in France, near Plum Village. Paul writes for
music technology magazines and is the author of a book about the
electric music of Miles Davis entitled Miles Beyond. Paul has recorded one
CD, May the Road Rise to Meet You, and is currently recording a second
album titled Metamorphosis. He ordained as an OI member in 1997. His
website is www.tingen.org.
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