MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving
your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can
enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence
tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of
“mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the
engineer Chade-Meng
Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and
tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be
used to augment individual performance, leadership and
productivity.
This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it,
there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable)
pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was
originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and
increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to
Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said,
“I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of
suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the
goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of
the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its
practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way,
allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them,
self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.
But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended
effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?
To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by
the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle
Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an
experiment whose publication
is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We
recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take
part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken
any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to
take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to
practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were
told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future
course.
After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the
participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine
their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you
might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who
had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of
suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the
participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment
had begun.
WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or
she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied.
Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth
person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot,
entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned
uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room —
who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored
the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary.
Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or
selfishly ignore her plight?
The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the
nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening
fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had
meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it
occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it
did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit
considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in
distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces
the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the
meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.
Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one
of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s
documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn
increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being
lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though,
derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to
foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist
Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation
between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands
together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each
other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators,
then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the
artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and
the like — that divide us.
Supporting this view,
recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard
Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training
in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain
areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress —
areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree
of felt associations with others.
So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not
just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors,
community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the
odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to
lessen it as well.
David DeSteno is a
professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he
directs the Social Emotions Group. He is
the author of the forthcoming book “The Truth About Trust: How It
Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?smid=fb-share&_r=1&