Mind-wandering: what is it for?

Perhaps there is not a single person that hasn’t experienced mind wandering. Yet, not too often we ask what is mind-wandering and how does it happen? More importantly, what are benefits and harms of the mind-wandering?

What is mind-wandering?

A recent study (1) measuring dimensions of mindfulness describes mind-wandering as three-fold: it happens without our effort, the activity is not focused on any particular object and the person who is wandering is unaware of the activity (1). If you have ever read a book and then realized that you have no idea what you just read, then you can be sure you know what mind-wandering is.

Is mind-wandering bad or good?

Science hasn’t yet solved the bad and good dilemma of the mind-wandering. Science, however, accumulated more evidence on negative mind-wandering effects than positive.

Many religious and spiritual practices, as well as self-help advice on productivity, encourages to keep your mind focused, “to be present”. The following passage from Buddhist text also indicates the possible drawback of the wondering mind. “Monks, I know not of any other single thing so intractable as the untamed mind. The untamed mind is indeed a thing untractable. "Monks, I know not of any other thing so tractable as the tamed mind. The tamed mind is indeed a thing tractable. <…>” The Book of the Ones (2). 

The price we pay for mind-wandering

The biggest negative effect commonly cited is the loss of performance. A review study (3) concluded that wandering mind might be responsible for a failure in academic success, loss in performance during reading and cognitive ability. Mind-wandering seems to bring trouble in goal-oriented tasks in general (4).

“The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost” (5). The emotional costs we pay for mind-wandering are negative moods (3) and lower happiness (5). When our mind wanders researcher register an increased activity in a brain region called default mode network (4,6). The default mode network shows increased activity in depressed patients (7), so it is not surprising we have an emotional cost associated with mind- wandering. 

So what is the mind-wandering for?

By now we know, that mind-wandering makes us unhappy and it reduces our productivity. This doesn’t sound like a really great mechanism that we should have kept during our evolution? So why did we keep it? 

We don’t really have a say in what the evolution leaves us with. What the process "cares" is how to increase our fitness at any cost. Happiness is arbitrary, an illusion that we seek to keep us motivate to be in the wheel of an evolutionary process. 

Nobody can be certain why mind-wandering increases our fitness, but it could be that this mechanism evolved to helps us in building stronger social connections, better corporation plans and anticipate future. It also might be potentially useful in relieving boredom (3) and pain (8). Perhaps one of the most relevant benefits of mind-wandering in our society is creative thinking and learning. Mind-wandering might help to find novel solutions to some life problems (9) and provide meaningful insights (10) after the incubation period (3). 

Is there a way to tame our wandering mind?

It might look by now that we are slaves of evolution. We keep spinning on the wheel of evolution with no way out. But the great thing about evolution that it has left us with many mechanisms to increase our success. One of such mechanism is our brain flexibly. 

Brain flexibility allows us to recognize that we are all following the agenda of evolution, but we have a choice which parts we subscribe too. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Buddha has told us there is a way out of suffering. Research (4 ) is catching up with what Buddhist knew for centuries: we can tame wandering mind through meditation. Any type of mindfulness meditation can decrease activity in your default mode network (4) helping you to be more focused on the task and with higher awareness (1). 

References

1. Lutz A, Jha AP, Dunne JD, Saron CD. Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective. American Psychologist. 2015;70(7):632–658.
2. Taming the Mind: Discourses of the Buddha, edited by The Buddhist Publication Society. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/various/wheel051.html
3. Mooneyham BW, Schooler JW. The costs and benefits of mind-wandering: A review. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2013;67(1):11–8.
4. Brewer JA, Worhunsky PD, Gray JR, Tang Y-Y, Weber J, Kober H. Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(50):20254–20259.
5. Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010;330(6006):932.
6. Mason MF, Norton MI, Van Horn JD, Wegner DM, Grafton ST, Macrae CN. Wandering minds: The default network and stimulus-independent thought. Science. 2007;317(5834):1–7.
7. Sheline YI, Barch DM, Price JL, et al. The default mode network and self-referential processes in depression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2009;106(6):1942–1947.
8. Kucyi A, Salomons T V, Davis KD. Mind wandering away from pain dynamically engages antinociceptive and default mode brain networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2013;110(46):18692–18697.
9. Baars BJ. Spontaneous repetitive thoughts can be adaptive: Postscript on “mind wandering”.Psychological Bulletin. 2010;136(2):208-210.
10. Morewedge CK, Giblin CE, Norton MI. The (perceived) meaning of spontaneous thoughts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2014;143(4):1742–1754.

The problem with human nature: why can't we get satisfaction?

The first and the second noble truths delivered by the Buddha constitute the diagnosis of the human predicament. The first noble truth states that the suffering exists (dukka = suffering or no satisfaction). The second noble truth says that the cause of suffering is clinging and craving for things, which in other words means you keep trying to get satisfaction, but never can.

A rather old, but still very good study on monkeys and the dopamine levels in the brain (1) shows that pleasure is not everlasting. It also shows that the craving gives us pleasure than the actual thing we crave for. From our own experience, we know that if we want something very much and then we get it, we kind of see that the craving was something that gave us pleasure and not the thing itself. After we inquire the item, the pleasure soon starts wearing out. We start seeing flaws in our inquired item and start wanting something new very soon. We are not satisfied again.
Such craving is explainable from the point of view of natural selection. Craving allowed us to reproduce and survive. If the pleasure lasts forever, we wouldn’t be looking for food or for a mate. Such everlasting pleasure and satisfaction would eventually lead to our extinction.  
So are we ill-fated to keep craving forever? Buddhist third and fourth Nobel truths state that is not the case. There is a way out: a path to your own evolution without going extinct. 


References
1. Schultz, W, Apicell, P. and Ljungbergb, T. 1993. Responses of Monkey Dopamine Neurons to Reward and Conditioned Stimuli during Successive Steps of Learning a Delayed Response Task. The Journal of Neuroscience, 13(3), 900-913. 

Life is full of surprises

Life is full of surprises.
Photo Silvija Budaviciute

We often say and hear: the life is full of surprises, but we are not always convinced it is true. Thankfully some of those surprises help us to stop the train of thoughts and remind us to acknowledge the joys of now.

This morning my husband and I, we wanted to do something to enjoy the starting day. A park my friend recommended was closed today. We couldn’t go anywhere far as our car requires maintenance. Thus, we decide that perhaps we should take a bike ride and check the path I don’t yet know, but I was planning to take to visit my friend tomorrow. So we did.

We just started riding the bikes downhill as my husband, being slightly ahead of me, abruptly pressed the breaks. I followed with the same response and pressed my breaks…a bit too much. The rest you can imagine. In a slow motion: I am on concrete, the bike flying over me, the back wheel now touching my right arm and the whole bike finally lands on me. Unable to move and in pain, only very few things come to my mind: 1. I need to get that bike of me, 2. My knee and elbow hurt and 3. Why my husband is so serious?  After the pain passed, we started to laugh; that was a salto mortale, but I am alive and nothing is broken. Just yesterday I worried about so many things, but not a single time did I think I would crash my bike. Yet, that is what happened. Isn’t that a surprise?! All my worries I thought as important yesterday were just images produced by my mind and none of them might ever become true. Yet, I spent my time worrying about them, while life kept happening and presenting its own solutions for me.

I am grateful for life for such surprises. They return my wondering mind to present. I am not saying I like such experiences (would prefer not to have a tire markings on my arm). I prefer nice surprises, but only unpleasant ones can teach you something. Today's experience reminded of the following things:

1. I am grateful to be alive.
2. I don’t like bad things happening to me, but I have no control over them.
3. I don’t have control over good things either.
4. I can choose how I respond to bad things.
5. I can train my mind to respond to bad experiences with joy (Pīti in Pali).
6. Both bad and good things end (some earlier, some later).
7. There will always be surprises in life. I don’t use this one to depress myself that there is something lurking in a corner. Just to remind myself that we have no control over the most of the events in our lives. The only thing we can do (whatever happens) is to remember the points above (1 – 6) and choose our response.

Beware of a surprise behind the corner.
Photo: Sergey Gerasimenko

Talking about surprise behind the corner, as we continued our ride (now with some of my limbs slightly bleeding) we found this little fellow lurking in the shadows of a construction site.

Perhaps life is like this little creature, suddenly appears surprising and presenting itself in the most peculiar ways when you least expect it.

Can meditation experience be harmful or bad?

An interesting discussion "Meditation as medication" between Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero) and Miguel Farias (Coventry University, The Buddha Pill) on the possible negative and positive effects of meditation. I think calling meditation effects positive or negative (or similar comparative adjectives) is something we shouldn't do. I think the whole point of meditation is to explore what the meditation experience is like for you. It is not bad or good, it is just an experience.

What we should remember about meditation is that as the famous quote says: “with great knowledge comes great responsibility” to everyone around us and to ourselves. Meditation doesn’t guarantee you will experience only good or bad things. Bad or good do not exist in Buddhism to begin with. There is no universal formula to attain liberation from suffering. There are only suggestions how to attain it.  Buddha says you are the final authority to judge if it works for you.

I have been practicing with Zen for some years as well as Vipassana more recently. Zen emphasizes you should not share your experiences with anyone but your teacher. I couldn’t understand that for a long time, but now I see the benefits of it. Now, after four years of Zen practice, I started to share my experience with other and it helps my practice.  However, with more practice I start seeing why Zen approach might be much more useful at least at the beginning of your practice. Zen tradition recognizes that your individual experiences are key and listening to other people experience might contaminate to your practice.

Not every practice is going to work for everyone and there is a not universal formula. However despite which tradition you choose to follow, what they all have in common the emphasis on the fact that you have a choice how you relate to our experiences. You have to discover for yourself what works for you. That is why there are so many traditions to begging with. Mindfulness is just one of the tools; for some it works and for some it doesn’t. I have no idea why in Western culture mindfulness is so popular in comparison with Zen or Tibetan tradition. Perhaps mindfulness has the less religious aspect to it and this attracts Westerners, but it is not a universal solution to every Westerner as it is sometimes presented.  However, independent of tradition, a good teacher (in any tradition) will be pointing out that individual experiences and your response to them are what matters and all advice you get is only a guideline. You are the one who makes the final decision.

It always puzzled me why do we expect that meditation will bring only good experiences? As Robert Wright says in the video some people come to meditation with a very troubled mind to begin with.  If you are troubled from the beginning why would you expect only good things will come out? Even if your mind is not troubled, you still will experience difficult feelings during the meditation (some bigger or smaller, but bad things happen to everyone).  In meditation, you will be put face to face with those experiences and you have no place to run. But here you need to ask yourself, why are you meditating? I agree with James Baraz that your meditation intention is extremely important. If your intention is to feel calm, I bet that when you experience for example an intense fear during meditation, it is very likely you will (to put it very bluntly) freak out. If your intention is to become wiser, then you might explore this fear and stay with it to understand it.

I agree that a good teacher is very important. As Robert says a good teacher for you might be a complete disaster for me. You need to find someone who resonates with you. A teacher there is to guide your practice. A teacher will tell you that meditation doesn’t guarantee you only good or bad experiences; the teacher will guide you to see all these emotions (or anything that arise during your meditation) for what they are. In meditation, you will learn to incline your mind towards being with that emotion and choosing your reaction to it. If someone has terrible experience during the meditation and ends up with for example a depression, maybe that means that person for the first time became aware of it and hopefully will be able to seek necessary help, if meditation doesn’t do the job. We can't however, claim that meditation per se causes depression, but of course, this is a possibility. Experimental studies should help to answer this question. A good teacher and remembering why you meditate could also help in such situations.

I am not knowledgeable enough to argue why people might commit suicide after the retreat. It is really sad to hear such things happen.  However, I think before we draw definite conclusions in such cases we again need to examine them by taking into account many different co-founding factors.  It is also important to keep in mind that in certain cases intensive retreat is not necessary the best thing to start your meditation practice with. At least in Zen tradition, you might not be advised to go to a retreat for a long time. Sometimes some people might benefit more from a regular sitting at home. 

We sometimes feel the need to meditate, but haven't yet fully understood why we want to do it. I think at least in Western culture we want to get the benefits of meditation immediately (today's "marketing" of meditation benefits makes people crave those immediate benefits), without fully understanding that a part of meditation is facing your very deep fears and very negative emotions. Some of these emotions we are not even aware of before we start exploring them. Meditation is a very hard work and a very long process before you start seeing any benefits at all. There are a lot of warnings in older Buddhist text what meditation can do to you if your mind is not ready. Before you start your meditation practice, ask yourself what your motivation to do the meditation is? Meditation can and will bring bad experiences as well as good ones.

Perhaps there was a very good reason why meditation was kept for monks only for a long time (and still is in some countries). Now, when it becomes available to everyone, it is more than ever important to ask yourself are you ready to discover what might be hiding in the deepest realms of your minds?  If your aim is just to be more relaxed, perhaps going to intensive retreat to explore the darkest corners of your mind is not necessary the most beneficial thing to do, at least not at the beginning of your practice. The mind is a big mystery and trying to explore it can be a very difficult journey. I agree that meditation can have good and bad sides, but it is like everything else. Most of us coffee keep awake, but there are people who don’t experience such effect and feel sleepy after a cup of coffee.  Thus, we can’t claim that drinking coffee will prevent everyone from sleeping. It is the same with meditation.  After all, it is all your own experience, it is not good or bad, it is a personal one and with practice, you learn to know what it is for you.  Saying that meditation will help or harm someone is the same as denying a need to meditate. The motivation to do or not to do should come from within. The only thing we can do as practitioners is to share our personal experience and let other people decide to if they want to follow the Buddha path.

Your response is your choice

A truly inspiring mediation at Nirondha on a warm evening of 21st July. Everyone is preparing for the meditation session with James Baraz on "Transforming Suffering into Happiness". Everyone suffers, so of course who doesn't want to be transformed! 

I was quite frustrate about certain things when I came for the meditation, so when James invited to observe our anger in our meditation I decided to give a try. Now, I thought, I will see anger for what it is. I will see how it really feels to be angry without judging this experience.

I was determined to give an end to that mystery of anger, but of course it wasn't that easy as I thought. My mind was wondering back and forth about different things, but finally for a second I got myself to look into my anger. To my surprise as soon as I truly looked at it, it was puff and gone. Of course, then I got angry and all judging: why can't I see my anger! And we are back to getting our mind to a present moment...everything is so brief.

After the meditation, James gave a lovely talk on "Non-Greed, Non-Hatred, Non-Delusion". I was trying to be mindful about the talk and it was touching my heart, but one thought was coming back: " What is he talking about? What hater, what judgement?! I was trying to observe it and  I found none!" And there it hit me. I haven't found it, but I thought I was angry!

After the truly inspiring talk, I asked James: "I am puzzled. I tried to stay with my anger, but I couldn't find where is it. It all seems to only exist in my thoughts. If don't thnink about it, there is nothing to observe. When I don't find the anger, I get all judgy about not having that anger". He interrupts me and with half smile says: " Don't you think you hit something proofed there"? 

Buddha says: nothing is permanent (1). It only now resonates with me what a Buddhist nun Yifa was saying at the Buddhism and Modern psychology course (2). She says when you get angry or experience other strong emotions you grasp to that feeling as it would be something real. In meditation, however, these feelings are revealed as not real. She gives this beautiful analogy of a strong emotion as a movie. If you start seeing this movie frame by frame, you observe that there is no movie. It is true for every emotion or feeling that arises in us.  It is beautiful said by Steven R. Covey: "between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response" (3). 

References
1. The Three Basic Facts of Existence.I. Impermanence (Anicca) with a preface by Nyanaponika Thera, 2006.

2. Buddhist nun Yifa. Robert Wright, Buddhism and modern psychology. Lecture on Feeling and illusion. Coursera course, 2014.
3.  Covey, S. R. 1989. The 7 habits of highly effective people. Powerful lessons in personal change. Free Press, New York.

Exploring happiness. Reflection on the Awakening Joy workshop with James and Jane Baraz

Am I happy and am I grateful for all the things I have in my life? Do I make my happiness a number one priority in my life and if not, why not? These were the questions I asked myself after I left the Awakening Joy workshop with James and Jane Bazar in Helsinki today. Have I answered these questions after the workshop? Of course no, but I feel I am one step closer answering them. In every event, retreat or workshop I learn something new that help to deepen my practice. The rest I just let go. 

James Bazar opened the workshop by quoting Dalai Lama: ” The purpose of life is to be happy” and continued by saying that everything we do, we do because we want to be happy. We are even grumpy, because we want to be happy. We walk with a fake smile and try to please everyone around us, because we want people to like us and we want to be happy. However, this is the happiness outside ourselves and unfortunately it is usually not long lasting. But can we turn to ourselves and look for happiness inside us? Bazars’ say it is exactly where we need to look for it and be open for it when we find it.

If the only thing we do to be happy - just to look inside ourselves - why are so many of us still unhappy? We often look for and remember only bad things happening to us. As Jane Bazar says: “our mind is designed to grasp and keep bad experiences in our memory, because the ones that were only thinking everything will be good didn’t make to these days”. I agree with Jane, evolution likes jokes like these. We are watching out all the time, but we can also train our minds to notice good things. I really liked James’ idea we can incline our minds towards anything we want by just thinking that way. So you want to be grumpy and see bad things around you – think that way. If we always look for something bad to happen, we train our mind to notice more and more bad things around us. But if I try to look for good things then of course we will tend to observe more good in our life. Jane very accurately pointed out: “it takes practice for our mind to notice good things and positive experiences”. I couldn’t agree more.

We all have happiness inside us; we were born with it. James brings this point home nicely by showing everyone a photo of a happy baby. “That is why we like babies so much,” - says James. “They remind us of us”. To be happy you need to want to be happy. You need to find gratitude for good things and practice it. Practice happiness, don’t these two words resonate? Practice happiness. Practice happiness. Intention is what takes us to be happy. It really struck me how simple and yet difficult is to be happy: all you need is want to be happy.  Funny things is that we not always know what we really want.

I asked James:“ have you met people who can really say they know what happiness is? He asked me back: “what do you think” ? I don’t think many people know what it means to be happy. I certainly cannot always understand what it really means to be happy myself. “The highest happiness is peace” – says James. At the workshop, we were asked to imagine what happiness is for us and think about that as my happiness. People gave really many explanations what they think happiness is. All of the descriptions were unique and I must say rather abstract. Nobody said: having enough gold is my happiness (though I must say James tried to provoke us with the photo of the pretty women covered in gold). But then again, in different setting and context the answers might have been different. For me, happiness is hard to describe in one word. But if I try to describe what happiness is for me it is a feeling of stillness, calmness. It is like you are standing on the top of the mountain and overlooking a wonderful landscape of fall colors sinking into the calm rich clouds. It is like boundary between you and the experience was dissolved; you are one. 

Many interesting topics were discussed at the workshop. With some of them I fully agree and with others I am somehow more skeptical, but nonetheless I enjoyed the workshop. I hopeful I will be inspired to explore these topics in more detail in future. For now, the message I took home was that things will fall apart, you will get sick and bad things will happen to you, but if you are genuinely happy you will be alright. Suffering exists and you are not suffering because you are not good enough. Everyone suffers, but those who process the suffering they are not afraid of it. These people can see goodness in themselves and in others. If you practice kindness towards yourself and the world, you will find gratitude in everything and you will be happy. 

The joy of walking

"Your Steps Are Most Important" - Thich Nhat Hanh.

We so rarely appreciate the act of walking. We take it for granted (as many other things that are such wonderful gifts). We rush from one place to another, without noticing how we got there and what steps we have made. Walking meditation can help you to find a connection with the walking experience and remind you about the enjoy of just walking.

Thich Nhat Hanh. A Guide to Walking Meditation to get you started with the walking meditation.

And this one to take the concrete steps: