wandering mind meditation

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How to Focus a Wandering Mind

We’ve all been there. You’re slouched in a meeting or a classroom, supposedly paying attention, but your mind has long since wandered off, churning out lists of all the things you need to do—or that you could be doing if only you weren’t stuck here…

Suddenly you realize everyone is looking your way expectantly, waiting for an answer. But you’re staring blankly, grasping at straws to make a semi-coherent response. The curse of the wandering mind!

But don’t worry—you’re not alone. In fact, a recent study by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert sampled over 2,000 adults during their day-to-day activities and found that 47 percent of the time, their minds were not focused on what they were currently doing. Even more striking, when people’s minds were wandering, they reported being less happy.

This suggests it might be good to find ways to reduce these mental distractions and improve our ability to focus. Ironically, mind-wandering itself can help strengthen our ability to focus, if leveraged properly. This can be achieved using an age-old skill: meditation. Indeed, a new wave of research reveals what happens in our brains when our minds wander—and sheds light on the host of cognitive and emotional benefits that come with increased focus.

What happens in the wandering mind?

For something that happens so often, what do we really know about this process of mind-wandering?

For thousands of years, contemplative practices such as meditation have provided a means to look inward and investigate our mental processes. It may seem surprising, but mind-wandering is actually a central element of focused attention (FA) meditation. In this foundational style of meditation, the practitioner is instructed to keep her attention on a single object, often the physical sensations of breathing. 

Sounds simple enough, but it’s much easier said than done. Try it for a few minutes and see what happens. 

If you’re like most people, before long your attention will wander away into rumination, fantasy, analyzing, planning. At some point, you might realize that your mind is no longer focused on the breath. With this awareness, you proceed to disengage from the thought that had drawn your mind away, and steer your attention back to your breath. A few moments later, the cycle will likely repeat.

At first it might seem like the tendency toward mind-wandering would be a problem for the practice of FA meditation, continually derailing your attention from the “goal” of keeping your mind on the breath. 

However, the practice is really meant to highlight this natural trajectory of the mind, and in doing so, it trains your attention systems to become more aware of the mental landscape at any given moment, and more adept at navigating it. With repeated practice, it doesn’t take so long to notice that you’ve slipped into some kind of rumination or daydream. It also becomes easier to drop your current train of thought and return your focus to the breath. Those who practice say that thoughts start to seem less “sticky”—they don’t have such a hold on you.

As a neuroscientist and meditator, I’d long been fascinated with what might be happening in my brain when I meditate. Being familiar with both subjective, first-person meditative practice and objective, third-person scientific research, I wondered what would happen if I put these two modes of investigation together. Could I get a more fine-grained picture of how this process works in the brain by leveraging the experience of these cognitive shifts during meditation?

I started by considering the default mode network, a set of brain areas that tend to increase in activity when we’re not actively engaged in anything else—in other words, when our minds tend to wander. Maybe it was this default mode network that kept barging in during my meditation, interfering with my ability to keep my attention focused. And maybe this network was what I was learning to “tune down” by practicing over and over. I wondered if I could test this scientifically.

Supported by funding from the Mind & Life Institute , and with the help of colleagues at Emory University, I started to test which brain areas were related to meditation. We asked meditators to focus on their breath while we scanned their brains: whenever they realized their minds had been wandering, they’d press a button. Then they would return their focus to the breath as usual, and the practice would continue. As they did so, we collected MRI data showing which brain regions were active before, during, or after the button press that corresponded to various mental states.

The study, published in the journal NeuroImage , found that, indeed, during periods of mind-wandering, regions of the brain’s default mode network were activated. Then when participants became aware of this mind-wandering, brain regions related to the detection of salient or relevant events came online. After that, areas of the executive brain network took over, re-directing and maintaining attention on the chosen object. And all of this occurred within 12 seconds around those button presses.

Looking at activity in these brain networks this way suggests that when you catch your mind wandering, you are going through a process of recognizing, and shifting out of, default mode processing by engaging numerous attention networks. Understanding the way the brain alternates between focused and distracted states has implications for a wide variety of everyday tasks. For example, when your mind wandered off in that meeting, it might help to know you’re slipping into default mode—and you can deliberately bring yourself back to the moment. That’s an ability that can improve with training.

The benefits of building focus

What are other practical implications of this knowledge? Recent behavioral research shows that practicing meditation trains various aspects of attention . Studies show that meditation training not only improves working memory and fluid intelligence , but even standardized test scores . 

It’s not surprising—this kind of repeated mental exercise is like going to the gym, only you’re building your brain instead of your muscles. And mind-wandering is like the weight you add to the barbell—you need some “resistance” to the capacity you’re trying to build. Without mind-wandering to derail your attempts to remain focused, how could you train the skills of watching your mind and controlling your attention?

In our study, we also wanted to look at the effects of lifetime meditation experience on brain activity. In agreement with a growing number of studies, we found that experience mattered—those who were more experienced meditators had different levels of brain activity in the relevant networks. This suggests that their brains may have changed due to repeated practice, a process called neuroplasticity. 

One brain area stood out in this analysis: the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the default mode network that is particularly related to self-focused thoughts , which make up a good portion of mind-wandering content. It turns out that experienced meditators deactivated this region more quickly after identifying mind-wandering than people who hadn’t meditated as much—suggesting they might be better at releasing distracting thoughts, like a re-hash of a personal To Do list or some slight they suffered at work yesterday.

In a follow-up study, we found that these same participants had greater coherence between activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and brain areas that allow you to disengage attention . This means that the brain regions for attentional disengagement have greater access to the brain regions underlying the distraction, possibly making it easier to disengage. Other findings support this idea—more experienced meditators have increased connectivity between default mode and attention brain regions, and less default mode activity while meditating.

This might explain how it feels easier to “drop” thoughts as you become more experienced in meditation—and thus better able to focus. Thoughts become less sticky because your brain gets re-wired to be better at recognizing and disengaging from mind-wandering. And if you’ve ever struggled with rumination—re-living a negative experience over and over, or stressing (unproductively) about an upcoming event—you can appreciate how being able to let go of your thoughts could be a huge benefit. 

Indeed, the Killingsworth and Gilbert study I mentioned earlier found that when people’s minds were wandering, they tended to be less happy , presumably because our thoughts often tend towards negative rumination or stress. That’s why mindfulness meditation has become an increasingly important treatment of mental health difficulties like depression , anxiety , post-traumatic stress disorder , and even sexual dysfunction .

More on Mindfulness & Mind-Wandering

Learn more about how mind-wandering can make you unhappy

How mindful are you? Take our quiz!

Watch Jon Kabat-Zinn talk about mindfulness .

Reading all this might make you think that we’d be better off if we could live our lives in a constant state of laser-like, present moment focus. But a wandering mind isn’t all bad. Not only can we leverage it to build focus using FA meditation, but the capacity to project our mental stream out of the present and imagine scenarios that aren’t actually happening is hugely evolutionarily valuable, which may explain why it’s so prominent in our mental lives. These processes allow for creativity, planning, imagination, memory—capacities that are central not only to our survival, but also to the very essence of being human.

The key, I believe, is learning to become aware of these mental tendencies and to use them purposefully, rather than letting them take over. Meditation can help with that.

So don’t beat yourself up the next time you find yourself far away from where your mind was supposed to be. It’s the nature of the mind to wander. Use it as an opportunity to become more aware of your own mental experience. But you may still want to return to the present moment—so you can come up with an answer to that question everyone is waiting for.

About the Author

Wendy hasenkamp.

Wendy Hasenkamp, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and Senior Scientific Officer at the Mind & Life Institute.

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Posted December 21, 2011

We spend a lot of time thinking about what is NOT happening, contemplating events that occurred in the past or that might happen in the future. Indeed, this sort of "mind-wandering" is thought to be the default operating mode of our brains.

Although being able to think about what isn't going on around us can help us learn from the past and productively reason about the future, it comes at an emotional cost. Simply put, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. People report being less happy when their minds are wandering compared to when they are not. But, a new study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that there is something we can do to decrease the mind-wandering: it's meditation.

As it happens, experienced meditators report less mind wandering while meditating than people without any meditation experience. And, even when meditators are simply asked to not think of anything in particular, their brains also do a better job of keeping them present-focused.

To explore the power of meditation in curbing mind-wandering, a group of experienced meditators and a group of meditation novices were asked to perform several different types of meditations while their brains were scanned using fMRI. The experienced meditators had over 10 years and 10,000 hours of mindfulness meditation experience under their belts. The meditation novices had none. Importantly, each non-meditator was selected to match a meditator in terms of their country of origin, primary language, sex , age, race, education , and employment status. The idea was to compare folks who were pretty similar in all aspects, except for their meditation experience.

Mindfulness plays a central role in many forms of meditation and includes two main components: (i) maintaining attention on your immediate experience and (ii) maintaining an attitude of acceptance toward this experience. Because of this present-centered focus, the researchers had a hunch that people who practiced mindfulness might be better at staying in the present - and not having their minds wander - during their meditative practice. While their brains were scanned, people performed three standardized meditation techniques commonly taught within the mindfulness tradition: Concentration, Loving-Kindness, and Choiceless Awareness. Here are the instructions used for each one:

Concentration: "Please pay attention to the physical sensation of the breath wherever you feel it most strongly in the body. Follow the natural and spontaneous movement of the breath, not trying to change it in any way. Just pay attention to it. If you find that your attention has wandered to something else, gently but firmly bring it back to the physical sensation of the breath."

Loving-Kindness: "Please think of a time when you genuinely wished someone well. Using this feeling as a focus, silently wish all beings well, by repeating a few short phrases of your choosing over and over. For example: May all beings be happy, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be safe from harm."

Choiceless Awareness: "Please pay attention to whatever comes into your awareness, whether it is a thought, emotion , or body sensation. Just follow it until something else comes into your awareness, not trying to hold onto it or change it in any way. When something else comes into your awareness, just pay attention to it until the next thing comes along"

While meditating, brain areas commonly active when our minds wander were relatively less active in experienced meditators compared to controls. But, most interesting, even when the meditators weren't instructed to do any sort of meditation at all their brains looked different. At rest, meditators showed stronger cross-talk among brain areas typically involved in mind wandering and brain areas involved in working memory and self control . As I have blogged about before , working memory helps keep what we want in mind and distracting information out. The meditators seemed to have developed the ability to automatically activate working memory when mind wandering threatened to take over, allowing them to control and dampen thoughts that might take them astray. Meditation practices appear to transform people's experience when they are not doing anything at all into one that resembles a meditative state - a more present-centered state of mind.

Of course, it is possible that the meditation experts didn't learn to curb their wandering mind through meditation, but rather were attracted to meditation in the first place because their minds tended not to wander. However, a host of recent work showing that meditation changes the brain points to its potentially powerful influence on mind wandering.

Mind wandering isn't just a common activity, it's thought to occur in roughly 50% of our awake life. Many philosophical, contemplative and religious practices teach us that happiness comes from living "in the moment." One way this can be accomplished may be through meditative practices that train our brains to rein in our wandering minds.

For more on the links between body and mind, check out my book Choke !

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Sian Beilock, Ph.D. , is a cognitive scientist and the President of Barnard College at Columbia University. She's an expert on why people choke under pressure and how to fix it.

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12 types of meditation: a breakdown of the major styles.

Meditation is the practice of focusing the mind and developing awareness to help achieve clarity and calm. It is widely recognized for its incredible benefits , including reducing stress and anxiety, improving sleep and concentration, and increasing overall happiness.

There are many styles of meditation that offer different ways to redirect your focus and attention. There's not one universally accepted "best" type; it's about finding what works for you. Here are 12 key types of meditation to start exploring:

Guided meditation

The essential guide to meditation.

Guided meditation exercises that you can use anytime, anywhere.

In guided meditation a teacher leads you through the practice, either in person or via an app or course . This type of meditation is perfect for beginners, as the teacher's expert guidance can help you get the most out of a new experience.

How to practice:

The main thing here is to find a teacher you like and connect with. You can also tailor your search based on a desired result and try guided meditations focused on sleep, stress relief , or acceptance .

Mantra meditation

In mantra meditation you focus your attention on a mantra: a word, phrase, or syllable. This is a good approach for those days when the thoughts and feelings seem completely overwhelming, as it gives your brain something else to focus on. It's also thought to increase the vibrations associated with the mantra, helping you enter a more positive and deep state of being.

Choose  a mantra that resonates with you . It may be a self-affirmation (such as "I am worthy"), or it may be a simple chant ( such as "om" ). Repeat that mantra over and over again for a few minutes. Each time you get distracted, don't worry about it. Just draw your focus back once more to the mantra.

Spiritual meditation

Spiritual meditation is the mindful practice of believing in and connecting to something that is greater, vaster, and deeper than the individual self. In this meditation you are trusting that there is something bigger out there and that everything happens for a reason.

Sit in silence with the awareness on the breath and repeat affirmations focused on surrender and trust, such as: "I am conscious and aware," "I let everything simply be as it is in this moment," or "I live in my Creator and my Creator lives in me."

Present-moment meditation

Present moment (or mindfulness) meditation trains us to move from thinking to sensing. Rather than dwelling on the past or dreading the future, this meditation encourages you to become aware of your immediate surroundings or experience, crucially without any judgment. It urges us not to get attached to our thoughts but rather just allow them to be.

Mindfulness meditation is something you can do almost anywhere. Bring your awareness to the physical sensations of the breath and the body: the rising and falling of the abdomen and chest or the feeling of the breath as it travels in and out the nostrils or mouth. You could also bring focus to any sounds or smells around you. Once you feel settled, bring your awareness to the thoughts and emotions, letting them come and then letting them go. Imagine each thought is like a cloud moving across a clear blue sky, always changing.

Transcendental meditation

Transcendental meditation involves sitting with your eyes closed for 20 minutes twice a day repeating a specific and personal mantra (or set of words) given to you by a Transcendental Meditation teacher. The ultimate goal is to transcend or rise above the person's current state of being.

Find a qualified Transcendental Meditation teacher to initiate you into the meditation technique with a mantra. This mantra is decided by a complex set of factors, including the year the practitioner was born, and the year the teacher was trained. Sit twice a day for 20 minutes repeating this mantra.

Vipassana meditation

This meditation technique, also called "Insight Meditation," involves sitting in silence, focusing on the breath and noting any and all physical or mental sensations that arise. The idea is to find "insight" into the true nature of reality (which vipassana teaches is suffering), by examining all aspects of your existence. Multiday vipassana retreats are a popular way to dive deeper into this practice.

Sit quietly and concentrate on the breath as it moves through the body. Let all emotions, sensations, thoughts, and sounds arise without getting attached to them. Label any distraction, for example, "a bird chirping" and return your focus to the breath.

Metta meditation

Also known as a "loving-kindness" meditation, in this practice you bring your awareness to the people in your life (both near and far, known and unknown, liked or disliked) and direct positive energy and thoughts toward them. It's a wonderful technique for decreasing anger and increasing understanding, positivity, and compassion.

Find a comfortable position, and with the eyes closed, bring your awareness to the chest, to the heart center. As you breathe in, imagine you are breathing in warmth, compassion, and unconditional love for yourself, and as you breathe out, imagine you are directing that warmth, compassion, and unconditional love to the people around you. Start with close friends or relatives, and move out to directing it to neutral acquaintances and then those you don't particularly like right now.

Chakra meditation

This meditation is used to keep the body's seven chakras, or energy centers, open, aligned, and fluid. It is based on the idea that blocked or unbalanced chakras can cause negative physical or mental ailments and that by meditating on them we can bring the self back into harmony.

Become familiar with the chakras and their corresponding properties and qualities. Spend time resting your awareness on the chakras that you feel you need to bring into balance. Concentrate on the bodily location of each chakra and picture energy flowing through that area that is the color of that chakra . Here are some more details on meditations tailored to the themes of each chakra .

Yoga meditation

Just as there are many different types of meditation, there are many styles of yoga . Some types, such as Kundalini, focus on using meditative techniques to strengthen and relax the nervous system. You can bring a meditative awareness to any yoga style or class simply by focusing on the breath and the present. 

While taking any yoga posture, keep your awareness on the breath and the physical sensations in the present moment. Each time you find the mind wandering to thoughts, gently draw it back once more. Corpse pose (savasana) taken at the end of all yoga classes, is one of the best pathways for meditation.

Candle-gazing meditation

Trataka, or candle gazing, is a type of meditation in which you keep your eyes open and focused on a point or object—frequently, the flame of a lit candle. Objects such as crystals could also be used. This practice helps bring energy to the third-eye chakra and can increase concentration.

Sit comfortably with your gaze focused on a single object, such as a candle, tree, or crystal. With relaxed eyes, try your level best not to blink. Maintain focus until your eyes begin to feel uncomfortable and then close the eyes. Keep the image of the object in your mind's eye, then open your eyes and start again.

Visualization meditation

In a visualization meditation, you picture something or someone in your mind, to the exclusion of everything else. It can feel challenging but is no different really than focusing on the breath or body. Frequent visualization can help you manifest the things you want in life , by staying focused and pouring energy into them.

Closing the eyes and sitting comfortably, bring to mind someone or something you either want or have negative feelings around that you want to let go of. Keep your focus here and keep returning each time the mind wanders. Observe, too, any physical sensations that may arise (such as bodily heat in response to anger). Do not get attached; continue only to observe.

Become the observer meditation

Similar to vipassana, in this meditation you bring your awareness completely but impartially to the self and observe your thoughts, feelings, patterns, and behaviors. Through this focus, you will begin to learn more about yourself and from that awareness be able to effect any change you may need or want to see in your life. 

You can do this meditation anytime, anywhere, simply by bringing the awareness inward. Observe your mind as if from the outside, becoming completely conscious of your thoughts and behaviors but remaining completely impartial and nonjudgmental. Be a witness to your experience.

Whichever meditation style you choose, doing it regularly will lead to the best results. Try a technique every day for 10 days and see how you feel at the end. And remember: You can't meditate wrong, so don't worry if the mind is busy. This is very normal. Meditation is not about forcing the mind into stillness but rather redirecting the focus and attention in order to give yourself a little break.

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The brain on silent: mind wandering, mindful awareness, and states of mental tranquility

David r. vago.

1 Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital and Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

Fadel Zeidan

2 Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Mind wandering and mindfulness are often described as divergent mental states with opposing effects on cognitive performance and mental health. Spontaneous mind wandering is typically associated with self-reflective states that contribute to negative processing of the past, worrying/fantasizing about the future, and disruption of primary task performance. On the other hand, mindful awareness is frequently described as a focus on present sensory input without cognitive elaboration or emotional reactivity, and is associated with improved task performance and decreased stress-related symptomology. Unfortunately, such distinctions fail to acknowledge similarities and interactions between the two states. Instead of an inverse relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, a more nuanced characterization of mindfulness may involve skillful toggling back and forth between conceptual and nonconceptual processes and networks supporting each state, to meet the contextually specified demands of the situation. In this article, we present a theoretical analysis and plausible neurocognitive framework of the restful mind, in which we attempt to clarify potentially adaptive contributions of both mind wandering and mindful awareness through the lens of the extant neurocognitive literature on intrinsic network activity, meditation, and emerging descriptions of stillness and nonduality. A neurophenomenological approach to probing modality-specific forms of concentration and nonconceptual awareness is presented that may improve our understanding of the resting state. Implications for future research are discussed.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. –T.S. Eliot a

Introduction

What are the phenomenological characteristics of a restful mind? With eyes closed, removed from external distraction, a state of wakeful relaxation may easily be cultivated. Yet, left to its musings, it is common for the mind to experience a relentless stream of evaluative thoughts, emotions, or feelings without much effort. “Monkey mind” is a metaphor for the mind's natural tendency to be restless— jumping from one thought or feeling to another, as a monkey swings from limb to limb. Given the heavy demand of modern life on cognitive load, managing the onslaught of ongoing sensory and mental events throughout daily life and improving efficiency of mental processing is of high concern. Tranquility and stillness of mind, as described in the Buddhist Nikāyas , b are believed to reflect a natural settling of thoughts and emotions, in which there is stability of attention, sensory clarity, and equanimity of affect and behavior. 1 This state is believed to develop through systematic mental training involving a combination of concentration, nonconceptual observation, and discernment. 2 – 4

Although the majority of research on brain function has focused on task-evoked activity, current research focusing on the task-unrelated resting mind–brain is beginning to reveal the critical importance of this largely ignored part of human life. Since the advent of neurophysiological recording, it has been determined that the brain is never truly resting. Hans Berger first observed that all states of wakefulness and sleep reveal a spectrum of mixed amplitudes and frequencies of electrical activity that does not cease. According to thought-sampling studies during mind wandering, 5 – 7 the content of the restless mind is often incredibly rich and self-relevant, characterized by spontaneous thoughts and emotions concerned with the past and hopes, fears, and fantasies about the future, often including interpersonal feelings, unfulfilled goals, unresolved challenges, and intrusive memories. With respect to cost and benefit, research on the “resting state” is demonstrating how task-unrelated or stimulus-independent thought (SIT) may adaptively organize brain function 8 and how the intrinsic neural activity supporting SIT affects brain metabolism and neuroplasticity. 8 – 11 Although there are certainly benefits to having access to the rich landscape of spontaneous thoughts for the purpose of creative incubation, 7 , 12 problem solving, 6 and goal setting, 13 an inability to focus attention in the face of irrelevant distraction by such thoughts can be problematic. Unfortunately, humans have been shown to experience this intrinsic undercurrent of spontaneous, self-generated thought during ongoing task demands as a form of interference, distraction, or rumination approximately 50% of each waking day. 5 , 14 SIT often interferes with the ability to remain externally vigilant, 15 , 16 remain focused or concentrate on the task at hand, 16 properly encode external information, 17 listen, 18 perform, 16 , 19 or even sleep. 20 In addition to the apparent inefficiency that SIT contributes to daily life, there is now a large literature linking a majority of self-generated thought to negatively valenced content and negative mood states, 21 , 22 future unhappiness, 5 and the maintenance of psychopathology, such as generalized anxiety disorder 23 – 25 or major depressive disorder. 26 , 27 Most recently, there has been interest in exploring how particular forms of mental training that include a state of mindful awareness allow individuals to change the relationship with the resting state and experience the stream of stimulus-independent mental content in an adaptive way. 28 – 30

Mindfulness and mind wandering are often described as two divergent mental states; 31 , 32 yet, both are frequently referenced in the context of mental rest. There is a subtle difference in both awareness and engagement with the flow of mental objects that may determine the adaptive or maladaptive nature by which the mental content influences one's current mood and future behavior ( Fig. 1 ). Currently, there is great interest in better understanding the neural mechanisms that support resting-state dynamics, states of mindful awareness, and their respective contributions to mood and cognition (see Refs. 31 and 32 ). In this article, we examine a more nuanced perspective on particular mental states that reflect “rest,” mental quiet, stimulus independence, and the neurobiological and physiological circuitry supporting the various flavors of what may constitute a “restful mind.” Occasionally, references are made to the historical Buddhist literature for the purpose of exploring an epistemology of mind as it relates to contemporary secular adaptations of the construct mindfulness.

Variations in awareness during meditation and mind-wandering rest. Visual (V), auditory (A), and somatic (S) modalities of experience are depicted. Awareness in the present moment is depicted by the blue band around mental objects arising and passing through time. Width of the band represents the temporal focus of awareness. The more temporally extended awareness is in time, the more mental stickiness and disengagement delays are apparent. Wider bands refer to difficulty disengaging from mental or sensory objects, greater projection into past or future experience, and a resulting smaller aperture. FA meditation focuses on only one mental/physical object in experience (somatic object is depicted here). All modalities of experience enter awareness in OM meditation and mind wandering (MW). Variations in qualities of object orientation (engagement/disengagement), clarity, and aperture in experience are depicted. These three qualities are represented, respectively, by the width of the circles for each mental object, brightness of the fill color, and diameter of the ring of awareness that sits in the present moment of time. Adept meditators are believed to experience higher clarity (phenomenal intensity) in both forms of meditation, whereas MW is believed to represent low clarity or dullness. Low object orientation or engagement represents less mental stickiness and rapid disengagement, leaving available more cognitive resources. Aperture (scope of awareness) is believed to be intentionally narrow for a concentration practice and high for OM practice. In MW, the spotlight of attention is typically narrow and unintentional because of increased engagement with each mental object; resources are subsequently depleted. Adapted, with permission, from Farb et al. 27 and Lutz et al. 124 See Lutz et al. 124 for more extensive descriptions of clarity and aperture, as well as for other potential experiential descriptors relevant to mindfulness.

The (not-so) resting state: mind wandering, evaluation, and self-referential processing

The resting state is commonly referred to as the baseline state of mind in quietly awake individuals and in the context of no particular task. Given its task-negative orientation, the resting state has been used as a functional contrast for most active task-positive conditions in functional neuroimaging studies. 33 , 34 In fact, this state has been used as a control or baseline condition against conditions of interest in an overwhelming number of neuroimaging studies, since such methods were introduced in the early 1980s. 33 The instructions for this passive baseline state are frequently given in some variation of, “let your mind freely wander without thinking of anything in particular,” “relax,” or “stay still and do nothing,” and involve either eyes opened or closed; however, to avoid the occurrence of sleep, many protocols have encouraged the use of open eyes, with (and without) a fixation cross as a visual stimulus on which to rest one's eyes.

Interest in the resting state has mostly reflected the interest in the methodological function by which to probe spontaneous low-frequency (<0.1 Hz) blood oxygen level–dependent (BOLD) fluctuations (LFBF) that demonstrate consistent spatially and temporally coherent connectivity among large-scale functional brain networks. 35 – 38 Across each of the variations in the above-mentioned instructions, there is robust consistency in detection of these networks, suggesting that low-level physiological noise, task load (fixation), eye movement, or the presence of visual input cannot influence the results. 39 Furthermore, these large-scale intrinsic resting-state networks (RSNs) appear to reflect a fundamental aspect of the brain's organization and are consistently apparent across waking states, including task performance, sleep, 40 and even general anesthesia. 41 At least 10 organized RSNs have been identified during rest, including the default mode network (DMN; Fig. 2 ), with each one reflecting specific functions that cohere to the intrinsic connectivity patterns (i.e., language, attention, executive functioning, salience, sensorimotor activity, or mind wandering). 42 – 45

RSN partition and global fc variability of other networks with the frontoparietal network (FPN). (A) Shown is the network partition of 264 putative functional regions in 10 major RSNs identified at rest through independent component analysis. (B) The connectivity between the FPN and all other RSNs and associated mean variable connectivity are shown. The FPN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs. Adapted, with permission, from Cole et al. 45

A critical consideration in the interpretation of spontaneous LFBF is the extent to which it is due to specific functional behavior or mentation. There is evidence that varied mental content during the resting time period can modulate functional activity across RSNs, suggesting content has an effect on functional variations in LFBF. 46 , 47 This would seem plausible given that people are engaged in unconstrained mind wandering while laying quietly awake in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, with a variety of mental content to account for low-level task activation. 47 Yet, there are a number of arguments 38 supporting the idea that mentation during mind wandering is unlikely to be the dominant source of LFBF. 38 Nevertheless, task relevance is often difficult to determine with SIT, unless it is in direct contrast to some attentionally demanding task. Mental content during mind wandering may indeed be of critical importance to task-related processing (e.g., memory consolidation, prospection) or to other ongoing processes that are fundamental to self-specificity. 14 , 48 , 49 Spontaneous fluctuations found in RSNs are believed to be regulated differently than task- or stimulus-driven brain activity. One popular theory holds that the intrinsic activity from LFBF may be more closely related to long-range coordination of higher frequency electrical activity that facilitates coordination and organization of information processing across several spatiotemporal ranges. 50 , 51 Metabolic demands at rest also do not suggest a strong correlation with cellular activity; 8 , 10 , 51 yet, the resting state does not reflect a zero-activity physiological baseline from which attention manifests.

The resting state has historically been referred to as the default mode, because it has been thought to reflect the dominant mode by which coordinated intrinsic activity ongoing at rest is defaulted to, and to which it returns when attentional demands cease. 8 Despite its regular occurrence, not all minds wander to the same degree; there are stable differences among individuals in the propensity to experience SIT and engage the DMN. 14 , 52 Nevertheless, the reciprocal relationship between the passive task-negative state of rest and the active task-positive states is thought to support two fundamentally different modes of information processing—one serving internally oriented attention and another serving externally oriented attentional demands. The DMN shows the most robust anticorrelation with attentional networks, apparent during externally oriented tasks, suggesting that it is fueling task-negative internally directed functional activity.

The DMN, also described as the hippocampal– cortical memory system, 53 , 54 has most consistently been shown to include the ventral posteromedial cortex (vPMC; including posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and retrosplenial cortex), ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior inferior parietal lobe (pIPL), hippocampus, and lateral temporal lobe. 36 , 39 , 55 , 56 The DMN has occasionally been reported to also include the dorsomedial/rostromedial PFC (including BA 8, 9, and 10), rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC, or anterior medial PFC), insular cortices, and temporal pole. 52 , 57 , 58 Interestingly, these additional regions have been implicated in task-positive networks and goal-directed activity, suggesting possible overlap of networks with potential functional relevance, and apparent nonstationarity or change over time seen in typical functional connectivity (fc) analyses. 58 Such observations of nonstationarity also suggest a problem with implicating one network supporting a rapidly changing mental state at rest. 47 In fact, some recent work has suggested that the DMN may be broken into multiple subsystems that subserve different dimensions of stimulus-independent or stimulus-oriented mentalizing during the resting state. 52 , 59 , 60

Notably, core DMN regions have been reported to support active states associated with self-reflective, evaluative processes in addition to supporting passive mental states of rest, further suggesting that the resting state involves internally oriented evaluative processing. 36 , 52 , 61 – 63 Self-referential processing involves taking one's self as the object of attention and making judgments or evaluations of one's own thoughts, emotions, or character. 34 , 57 These functional roles have provided the basis for the characterization of the DMN as an evaluative network and has implicated the network in both spontaneous and volitionally mediated mind wandering. 49 The primary nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) are particularly noteworthy because of their anatomical connections and corresponding functional roles. For example, the vmPFC has direct anatomical connections to the hypothalamus, amygdala, striatum, and brainstem, providing input necessary to process emotion, motivational states, and arousal. 64 Its functional role in coordinating and evaluating basic drives associated with mood, reward, and goal-directed behavior is also strongly supported by the abovementioned anatomy and by its activity in functional brain imaging studies, animal experiments, and behavioral observations in patients with vmPFC lesions. 65 , 66 The PCC is considered to be a network hub with dense anatomical connections across the brain and in particular with the medial temporal lobe, making it and neighboring regions of the vPMC well suited for mediating autobiographical memory retrieval and self-referential processing. 43 , 67 Recent studies have suggested that vPMC activity may be functionally reduced to being “attached to” and “getting caught up in” one's experience, whether it be self- or other-focused, or negatively or positively valenced. 68 In this context, self-reflective processing consumes one's cognitive resources and interferes with ongoing task demands and/or embodied behavior.

A large body of research on the resting state now supports the involvement of the DMN in a diverse array of cognitive processes that are associated with negative or maladaptive mood states, such as rumination, craving, or distraction. 14 , 34 , 68 There is evidence that, in most forms of psychopathology, the DMN is hyperactivated and hyperconnected, showing abnormally high activation during goal-directed tasks. 34 These data suggest that task-dependent downregulation is not as apparent and that patients suffering from psychiatric disorders may be more easily distracted by internal ruminations. 69 Furthermore, greater suppression of the DMN during task performance has been shown to improve accuracy, memory encoding, retrieval, andconsolidation. 70 – 72 Greater DMN activation just prior to a stimulus predicts attentional lapses and decreased accuracy, further providing evidence for its potential role in distraction. 72 However, despite the predominant interpretation that DMN activity is indicative of maladaptive functional processes, this interpretation may be overly simplistic. SIT and associated DMN activity have been characterized by content that is adaptive and constructive. 6 , 57 For example, in healthy individuals, SIT has been shown to facilitate insight, creative problem solving, cognitive control, and prospection for simulating future possible outcomes. 12 , 22 , 73 , 74 The critical point here is that the costs and benefits of DMN activation are context dependent. 14 , 75 Indeed, Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna 14 proposed the context-regulation hypothesis, which states that self-generated thought under conditions that demand continuous attention is unproductive because it can be a source of error, but under nondemanding conditions, it has the potential for benefit.

Although some may argue that there is no apparent functional relationship associated with spontaneous, intrinsic activation of the DMN, an argument can clearly be made claiming the benefit of spontaneous or intentional DMN activation as it reflects our sense of self-identity. DMN activation supports conceptual, linguistic, and symbolic forms of self-representation involving a form of “mental time travel,” which explicitly provides a sense of coherence and continuity with our sense of self in the present moment by allowing one to project representations of self into the future and retrospectively to the past. 14 , 76 Tulving 76 described this mnemonic process involving episodic forms of autobiographical memory as “autonoetic consciousness,” suggesting a conceptual knowing and awareness of self in real time. Tulving and others 77 – 80 argued that this uniquely human ability c provides the necessary cognitive structure for advancing intelligence, building on existing knowledge, discriminating ethical and adaptive behavioral responses to the environment, and “day dreaming” for advanced forms of cognition. One could then imagine that, without opportunities to cultivate autonoetic consciousness, mistakes would be repeated, decisions would be poorly informed, and a sense of identity would be lacking. Mind wandering and the associated DMN activity may, therefore, reflect intrinsic capacities that are necessary to navigate the complex social environment in which humans exist. 14 , 81 Indeed, maintaining a sense of continuity of the self, with reliance on mnemonic processes and DMN activation, contributes to the highest functional and metabolic demands of the brain during waking states.

Mindful awareness: stillness in concentration

From the classical Buddhist Abhidharma perspective, stability and stillness of mind provide freedom from destructive types of emotion and cognition (e.g., anger, craving, greed, lethargy, hyperexcitability) that are rooted in excessive self-absorption or perseveration. 4 , 82 The following metaphor is commonly used to describe how the foundation of mindfulness may contribute to the benefits of a still mind, focusing on cultivating attentional stability and reduced unintentional mind wandering. If a stone is tossed into a still lake, the ripples are clearly visible. Yet, when that lake is unsettled, a single stone's effect is barely noticeable. The same is true of the mind, 83 in that a restless mind that is fraught with many thoughts and emotions is easily distracted, inefficient, and unable to adequately encode information for later retrieval. Furthermore, if one leaves a glass of muddy water still, without moving it, the dirt will settle to the bottom, and the clarity of the water will shine through. Similarly, in mindfulness-based meditation, in which attention is trained to continually return to a single point of concentration, thoughts and emotions settle into what is described as the mind's natural state of stillness, ease, equanimity, and sensory clarity. 3 , 84

In the text Stages of Meditation , an 8th century Indian Buddhist contemplative, Kamalasila describes 10 sequential stages of attention training, referred to as “taming the mind” or “calm abiding” (Pāli: samatha ) that begins with an effortful form of focused attention (FA) and progressively advances toward a state of effortless and objectless awareness. 82 Stability of attention refers to sustained concentration and vigilance that remain unperturbed by distraction or interference from discursive mind wandering, while clarity refers to the phenomenal intensity with which sensory or mental content is experienced. 82 , 85 Insight practice (Pāli: vipassana ), a form of open monitoring (OM) meditation, typically follows calm abiding training with the goal of facilitating meta-awareness of one's own mental habits, increasing the aperture of awareness to all sensory and mental objects that naturally arise and pass. Mindfulness meditation is often taught as an interplay between calm abiding and insight meditation. Therefore, according to the classical Buddhist Abhidharma, one depiction of a restful mind is one that requires concentration, but is calm, alert, and holding an object or stream of objects in effortless awareness.

Although the breath is the most commonly described object of focus in historical Buddhist contexts (e.g., Satipatthāna sutta ), concentration may be on any internal or external sensory object across modalities, the temporal flow of objects arising and passing through space/time, or the restful state where no objects are present ( Table 1 ). One particular contemporary mindfulness system, the Basic Mindfulness system, 86 was developed by Shinzen Young with multiple Buddhist traditions in mind and uses an algorithmic approach that teaches individuals to note and label any experience in three modalities (visual, auditory, or somatic). Sensory objects can be noted and labeled as they arise and pass in OM meditation, or there can be a concentrated focus on one particular modality and experience (i.e., subjective, objective, rest, or flow). A focus on rest is one particular concentration method for cultivating a quiet mind with specificity in each modality, such that absence of the sensory object becomes the object of focus and any impulse to engage with external or internal sensory objects is regulated. Young 86 describes “see rest” as a focus on the “gray-scale blank” with eyes closed or “into image space but not at an image” with eyes open; “hear rest” is described as “mental quiet” or “physical silence” around the practitioner; “feel rest” is referred to as a focus on the “physical relaxation and absence of emotion in one's body.” The different levels of absorption, modalities of concentration, and associated objective neurophysiology have yet to be fully characterized.

Note: The subjective labels “see in,” “hear in,” or “feel in” allow for noting internal sensory experience; “see out,” “hear out,” or “feel out” allow for noting objective sensory experience; “see rest,” “hear rest,” or “feel rest” allow for noting sensory rest; and “see flow,” “hear flow,” or “feel flow” allow for noting the flow of sensory objects across time. 86

Meditative concentration is sometimes referred to as “one-pointedness” (Sanskrit: samādhi) or “absorption” (Pāli: jhāna ). In Tibetan, samādhi is translated as ting nge dzin, where the syllable dzin means “to hold” and the syllable nge is an adverb meaning “to hold something unwaveringly.” The Nikāyas mention variations of samādhi and give descriptions of deepening levels of absorption on the object of attention. Four stages of absorption on form (Sanskrit: rupa jhānas ), four on formless ( arupha jhānas ), and total cessation of perception and feeling ( nirodha-samapatti ) are described in progressive stages of concentration and stillness. At the fourth stage of the rupa jhanas, the mind is focused on a “material” object with equanimity and a narrow aperture of awareness ( Fig. 1 ), such that no other sensory stimuli can enter awareness. By the first formless stage, the meditator achieves insight that there is no longer an object, but rather infinite empty space. The formless states and nondual awareness appear to have similar characteristics, none of which have yet been clearly distinguished in cognitive neuroscience. Stages of jhāna practice have been observed in one functional MRI (fMRI)/electroencephalography (EEG) case study of a long-term Sri Lankan Khema practitioner who was able to progressively move through each of the eight stages of form and formless absorption practice. 87 This study found decreased BOLD activity relative to the resting state and a basic state of concentration (access concentration) across visual, auditory, language, and premotor regions of interest; slight increases in the rACC and ventral striatum; and a shift to lower frequency α and θ bands in EEG. 87 Interestingly, the study suggested that ventral striatal activity corresponds to the subjective experience of joy during early stages. In the historical Hindu context of the yoga suttas, samādhi is believed to represent nondual or transcendent states of conscious awareness and absorption where the sensory or mental object is known directly, beyond name and form, and a feeling of unity or oneness is experienced with the object of meditation. 88 – 91 These descriptions of concentration practice suggest that, through practice and depth of concentration, mental quiet shifts from stable perception of an object to a state of nondual awareness where there is a dissolution of self–object distinctions.

In contemporary contexts, comparisons have been drawn between states of mindfulness in concentration and experiences of “flow,” “the zone,” peak states of performance, and the opposite domain—“zoning out.” Although there are clear similarities of samādhi with states of flow, distinctions can be made. Critically, samādhi is described to involve intentional blocking of sensory information and yet allowing motivationally relevant information to enter conscious awareness. 4 Without volitional control, absorption in an object with focal awareness may also be maladaptive, such that inhibitory processes prevent pertinent sensory information from arising to conscious awareness, potentially leading to an overwhelming sensation and maintenance of emotional reactivity related to the object of focus. 93 Furthermore, the experience of zoning out, as is commonly experienced during a temporally extended, exogenous attentional process that involves low arousal or does not require analytical or critical discernment (e.g., watching television), has also been described as an “intense immersion in the moment;” yet, the individual “typically loses touch with the socially, culturally, and historically constructed world in which he or she lives.” 94 This has been described as “meditation sickness” in Zen traditions that heavily emphasize methods that focus on achieving “inner stillness” over those that engage with the scriptures or discriminate right from wrong in an analytical or critical way 94

Mindful awareness: stillness in nonduality

Later stages of both jhāna and samatha practice place less emphasis on engagement and disengagement with objects of attention and more with nonduality, which refers to the eventual dissolution of subject–object distinctions, nonconceptual awareness, and a phenomenology described as the true nature of mind—an ultimate form of stillness. 82 , 85 Nonduality is most commonly equated with the concept of reflexive awareness (Sanskrit: svasamvitti ) 95 or “bare attention,” coined by the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera in his book, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation . 3 This nonconceptual emphasis on living in the here and now is believed to have contributed to the foundations of contemporary mindfulness and of the therapeutic recipe for well-being. 94 , 96 In traditional nondual practices of mindfulness (e.g., Chan, Zen, Mahamudra, Dzogchen), 97 there is emphasis on the subject–object distinction as the root of suffering. The Sanskrit author Santideva describes this state of stillness as “remaining like a piece of wood,” such that any impulse toward a particular thought, emotion, or behavior can be heedfully detected but denied full engagement before the mental event requires cognitive resources. 97 , 98 The general instructions for Mahamudra practice are, “Do not chase the past; do not invite the future; rest the awareness occurring now in a clear and nonconceptual state.” 97 There is clear instruction to avoid self-reflective processing and maintain focus in the present; yet, the idea in this practice is not to cultivate a state of samādhi, but rather to release any effort, let go, and not engage with any object. In contrast to the stillness derived from focused concentration, the nondual emphasis is believed to cultivate stillness through an objectless focus. The nondual state has been referred to in Tibetan styles of Dzogchen as “open presence” (Tibetan: rigpa chogzhag ) and also as “awakening” (Pāli: bodhi ) or “nibbana.” Many Buddhist traditions see this as a goal state, where there is a cessation of all “unwholesome” states and all phenomena, including space and time. 99 Understandably, this state of awakening is highly contextualized in the schools of Buddhism from which they are originally described, and there has yet to be objective evidence for the reproducibility of this state. However, the state of open presence has been most closely associated with a nonreferential form of compassion that has been shown to dramatically increase -γ -band activity in advanced meditators across frontal and temporoparietal regions. 100 This activity was also found to correlate very closely with subjective reports of clarity during the practice and remain high in amplitude even after the meditation was complete. 100 γ-Band synchrony is believed to reflect control and temporal binding of local neural activity by distributed neural networks. 101 Theories of attention specify that continuous activation of task-relevant brain areas is driven by high-frequency γ-band activity, and greater magnitude of activity reflects stronger links between attention and sensory inputs. 101 Other neuroimaging experiments on nondual states have demonstrated unique, weak anticorrelations between the attentional networks and the DMN in comparison to stronger anticorrelations during FA practice, suggesting less inhibitory tone over other incoming sensory or mental input. 102 Although both concentration and nondual approaches appear to cultivate stillness in unique ways, the qualitative phenomenology may indeed be similar.

Mindful awareness and discernment versus mind wandering and evaluation

Recently, a number of studies have suggested a therapeutic role of mindfulness-based therapies in neuropsychiatric settings, in which symptoms are reduced explicitly through the reduction of persistent DMN activity and associated narrative self-processing interfering with goal-directed tasks. 103 – 108 This is particularly emphasized in contemporary mindfulness settings where nonconceptual awareness or nonjudgment is emphasized. Indeed, the practice of various styles of mindfulness-based meditation purportedly involve a decrease in self-reflective processing and evaluation. 28 , 30 It is therefore not surprising that, across styles of practice, meditation is found to inhibit activity of nodes within the DMN, similarly to any goal-directed task. 104 , 109 – 114 Furthermore, reports of improved quality of the meditation state 115 or greater meditative experience 116 have been associated with greater decreases in magnitude of activation in primary nodes of the DMN. The PCC, a major node in the DMN, has specifically been targeted for real-time neurofeedback, with the goal of improving one's stability of attention across styles of meditation. 115 , 117 Such results support the idea that meditation practice is undeniably an active cognitive process, and with greater expertise, the magnitude of the inverse correlation with DMN activity becomes greater, 109 suggesting that greater levels of effortless concentration may more robustly reduce activation in the DMN. Generally, one would expect such deactivation of the DMN during any goal-directed task, especially in contrast to a nonmeditative state following instructions to the mind wander 38 or in contrast to a task that specifically recruits self-reflective processing. 118 However, without any explicit instruction to process internal information in a discursive, narrative self-focus, a nonmeditative rest condition may no longer reflect the same mental content, process, or valence for an advanced meditator as in a novice practitioner. In fact, recent data have suggested that meditative expertise may transform the resting state into one that is more similar to a meditative state. 109 , 119 Furthermore, recent studies have demonstrated that spontaneous mind wandering that engages the DMN may still be apparent, but less frequent, during meditation or during nonmeditative states. 105 , 120 Yet, the contrast between a traditional nonmeditative resting state and particular styles of meditation provides considerable insight into the restful mind and how it engages with mental objects with and without awareness.

Although these results appear to suggest that mindfulness is involved in suppressing the DMN and associated self-reflective processing, this interpretation may be an oversimplification for the explanation of meditative expertise. Mindfulness is not merely the opposite of mind wandering, nor is it necessarily always present focused (see Refs. 94 and 96 ). Upon closer inspection of the meaning of mindfulness from the Sanskrit, Pāli, or Tibetan translations, there is a controversial emphasis on cognitive processes “to recollect,” “to bear in mind,” and “to remember.” 2 , 94 , 96 This is in contrast to the typical instruction to stay in the present moment of awareness without judgment. 121 Across schools of Buddhism, two aspects of mindfulness are often described, one in which there exists a nonconceptual state of awareness (Pāli: sati ) and another that involves discernment (Pali: sampajaňňa ), d requiring active reflection, judgment, and action in relation to the sensory or mental objects observed. 2 , 4 In fact, the compound sati-sampajaňňa is often found in the classical Abhidharma or Nikayas to describe a state of mindfulness. 84 Discernment is a cognitive process that reflects continuous access to, and appraisal of, the objects of attention as they arise, so that no thought can be developed into action unchallenged. 2 It facilitates recollection of Dharmic teachings and primes prosocial motivations. It is a process described to help eradicate mental afflictions and motives that potentially affect self-development on a moment-to-moment basis. 122 Without such discernment, the Abhidharma continues to explain that the mind begins to wander toward afflictive thoughts and emotions. Mindfulness and discernment are also described to develop a self- or meta-monitoring faculty that can detect when the goal state of concentration on a particular object has shifted and support a reorientation of attention to the goal-relevant object. This form of meta-awareness implies a nonconceptual, second-order, embodied reflection on experience as a form of experience itself and that is not entangled in the contents of awareness. 123

Given such descriptions, we hypothesize that a state of mindful awareness critically involves rapid flexibility between brain networks that are contextually driven by specific mind states of the practitioner. Building on previous models of mindfulness-based meditation processes, 28 , 30 , 124 we propose that a frontoparietal control network (FPCN) is appropriately situated to couple with, and integrate information across, other contextually relevant networks. The FPCN has the potential to support a volitional focus of stable attention and nonconceptual meta-awareness across bodily systems with a high level of sensory clarity and facilitate rapid discernment and evaluation of each object without strong engagement as mental objects arise and pass in the practitioner's phenomenological space ( Figs. 1 and ​ and3). 3 ). As described by Cole et al. , 45 the FPCN is believed to act as a hub to enhance connectivity between all other RSNs.

Comparison between mind wandering and OM meditation. Evaluative processes and associated DMN activity process visual, auditory, and somatic modalities and inhibit FPCN, VAN, and DAN attentional networks from gaining meta-awareness. The VAN (vlPFC and TPJ) is critical for reorienting, while the DAN (FEF and IPS) is critical for sustaining attention. Mind wandering and OM meditation process the same inputs (visual, auditory, somatic). OM has increased activation of attentional networks and flexible switching between networks. Mind wandering has less connectivity across networks and therefore lacks the meta-awareness to detect unintentional self-reflective or evaluative processing. The FPCN not only acts as a hub for detecting irrelevant mind wandering, but also for facilitating rapid discernment and evaluation when contextually appropriate. Thickness of lines represents proposed strength of connectivity between networks. SMA/PMA, supplementary and premotor areas; IPS, inferior parietal sulcus; pIPL/aIPL, posterior/anterior inferior parietal lobe; PI, posterior insula; AI, anterior insula; dmPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; vmPFC, ventromedial prefrontal cortex; r/dACC, rostral/ dACC cortex; S1, primary sensory cortex; PCC, posterior cingulate cortex; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; FPCN, frontoparietal control network; VAN, ventral attention network; DAN, dorsal attention network; FEF, frontal eye field; FPC, frontopolar cortex; dlPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; vlPFC, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex; MT+, middle temporal visual area; TPJ, temporoparietal junction; RSP, retrosplenial cortex; sc, superior colliculus; sgACC, subgenual anterior cingulate cortex; HF, hippocampal formation.

The dorsal attention network(DAN)is associated with externally directed cognition, including covert and overt shifts of attention, eye movements, and hand–eye coordination. 125 It increases in activation at onset of search, maintains activity while awaiting a target, and further increases when targets are detected. 73 , 125 , 126 It is bilaterally represented and includes frontal eye fields (FEFs), ventral premotor cortex, superior parietal lobe, intraparietal sulcus (IPS), and motion-sensitive middle temporal area (MT+). 54 The DAN facilitates orientation in the sense that it is engaged by cues that prime the system for forthcoming stimuli. 126 In contrast, the ventral attention network (VAN) is not engaged by predictive cues and, in fact, is kept under inhibitory control, likely by top-down regions, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), for the purpose of reducing distraction or allowing unintended information from flooding conscious awareness. 125 The VAN is strongly right-hemisphere dominant and includes the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and ventrolateral PFC (vlPFC) as major nodes. The VAN continues to direct attention to salient and behaviorally relevant sensory stimuli outside the focus of processing maintained by the DAN. 126 The FPCN has been shown to have extensive connectivity with both the DMN and attentional networks (DAN, VAN), supporting the potential to flexibly couple with either network, depending on task demands. 73 The FPCN includes the VAN, nodes of salience (dorsal anterior cin-gulate (dACC) and AIC)) and executive control networks (dlPFC), as well as the anterior inferior parietal lobe (aIPL), frontopolar cortex (FPC), and dmPFC. 54 , 73 Together, this circuit is believed to link sensory representations to motor maps and facilitate the critical meta-awareness function that then engages a circuit breaker for sustained attention and reorientation of attention as new objects arise and pass. 126 Although frontal areas are responsible for voluntary executive control, parietal regions in concert with frontostriatal circuitry are more involved in stimulus–response associations and would likely become more critical as effort decreases. 126 The DAN and VAN may communicate through the FPCN when there is an intention to actively manipulate the information for some purpose. For example, the VAN is critical for semantic retrieval in the context of inhibitory control. 127 Through a relatively short temporal window, it has been proposed that the FPCN may help link active attentional processes associated with sustained vigilance and alerting with the semantic retrieval and reorientation of attention to task-relevant, but currently unattended, stimuli facilitated through the VAN. 126 The FPC takes up a uniquely large volume of space in the human brain, 128 is a critical node of the FPCN, and is thought to be differentially sensitive to changes in demands for stimulus-oriented or stimulus-independent attention along a lateromedial dimension. 74 This may be why this region is sometimes included in the DMN and at other times included with the frontoparietal or executive control network. 52 , 60 , 63 One study observed the recruitment of both rostromedial and lateral FPC during mind wandering with a lack of awareness; whereas, mind wandering with awareness was found to recruit nodes of attentional networks (lateral PFC and dACC) in addition to the PCC/precuneus, TPJ, insula, and temporal pole, suggesting a processing overlap that could account for poor task performance. 63 Yet, future research will have to clarify whether this type of retrospective experience-sampling method represents a form of nonconceptual meta-awareness that is likely in meditative practice or meta-cognition to involve some level of “mental stickiness” and contributes to distraction and future planning.

Although some methodological challenges remain in interpreting some of the existing initial findings for network interactions (see Ref. 31 ), recent cross-sectional fc studies of meditators have generally demonstrated increased connectivity between the two main nodes of the DMN (PCC and vmPFC) and between nodes of the DMN and salience and executive networks during a nonmeditative resting state. 109 , 111 , 114 , 129 – 132 These studies reflect changes that are sustained in nonmeditative states. In a small number of studies, increased fc has been found between DMN nodes and task-positive regions (e.g., dACC, dlPFC) during and across styles of meditation practice ( Fig. 3 ). Although some of the methodological discrepancies are difficult to interpret, these preliminary studies support the hypothetical flexible switching between networks and the potential functional relevance between nonconceptual awareness and discernment.

There is now evidence to suggest that the FPCN may be actively recruited through both OM and FA meditative practice. 133 – 135 Recent meta-analyses of both morphometric and functional neuroimaging studies of FA and OM have demonstrated increased size and activity in regions of the brain associated with the FPCN (FPC, dACC, dmPFC, dlPFC), areas also associated with the salience and executive networks. 133 , 135 Parts of the DMN (PCC, pIPL) have been shown to decrease in activity during OM and FA mindfulness–based practices. 134 , 135 These data suggest mindful awareness may not only contribute to a quiet mind embedded in concentration, but may also be critical for allowing individuals to flexibly switch between externally and internally driven processes in a volitional manner, drawing from inner reflection and focusing externally with more control than a control population. 30

Thus, a more nuanced reflection on the state of mindfulness, especially in the context of OM meditation, demonstrates significant similarities, and an interaction, with a state of mind wandering. Both mind wandering and OM meditation involve attentional orientation to mental objects arising and passing with each moment ( Fig. 1 ). Yet, subtle differences in attentional engagement, task relevance, emotional reactivity, and perceptual clarity determine the extent to which each state, and the content associated with each state, contributes adaptively (or not) to current mood or future behavior. In the context of OM meditation, 30 , 124 , 136 thoughts or emotions may arise, but the practitioner is typically instructed to refrain from engaging purposely with the content and to rather remain a witness as a nonattached observer to the content as it arises and passes without any form of appraisal. Such attentional processing will reduce cognitive elaboration and, thus, increase the speed at which one may disengage from objects of attention or reduce mental stickiness—a concept often described in contemporary mindfulness 137 , 138 as a disengagement deficit, more often found in SIT, and as a natural tendency to dedicate resources to an object of attention, such that few resources remain to capture any other pertinent environmental information until one is able to disengage and reorient. Over time, this form of mental stickiness on particular emotional stimuli can become habitual, contextually dependent, and highly automatized into the sensory–affective– motor scripts and schemas that dictate tendencies toward behavior. 139 – 141

There is some evidence suggesting that intensive training in meditation techniques reduces mental stickiness by enhancing monitoring of attention, 142 increasing a distributed attentional focus, 143 – 145 enhancing speed of attention allocation, engagement, and subsequent disengagement from serially presented objects of attention. 146 One of the best examples of this decrease in stickiness, or faster disengagement, in the extant meditation literature is shown by data from an attentional blink task 147 by practitioners who completed 3 months of intensive meditation training. 146 A smaller attentional blink and reduced brain-resource allocation to an object of attention (the first target) were found, as reflected by a smaller target 1 (T1)-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation peaking around 300–450 ms ( Fig. 4 ). 146 Those individuals with the largest decrease in brain-resource allocation to T1 generally showed the greatest reduction in attentional-blink size, and improved detection of T2. These observations provide strong support for the view that the ability to accurately identify T2 depends on the efficient deployment of resources to T1. Such data are also suggestive of reduced elaborative processing in the context of goal-directed activity. It should be clear that this process of discernment and evaluation may be operating below conscious awareness, at the level of nonconscious perceptual processing—an aspect of attentional filtering that has previously been described as a potential source for affective and attentional bias. 29 , 148 , 149

Brain potentials from electrode Pz, time-locked to T1 onset on short-interval trials (220–440 ms) as a function of session, T2 accuracy, and group. Selective reduction in T1-elicited P3b amplitude in no-blink trials is evident in meditation practitioners. Adapted, with permission, from Slagter et al. 146

In this article, we illustrated how the phenomenology of a restful mind can take adaptive or maladaptive forms that are context and content dependent. A sense of peace and quiet in the mind is proposed to arise through mental training in concentration, nonconceptuality, and discernment, in contrast to the untrained frenetic restlessness of mental time travel that is characteristic of daily activity in the postmodern setting. The frenetic resting state and associated brain network dynamics are believed to help scaffold attention and emotion throughout everyday waking life, but with the potential to interfere with cognitive performance, mood, and affect when mind wandering occurs in the context of cognitive demand. Mindfulness-based meditation is often viewed as the antidote for mind wandering, positing an overly simplistic polarization of mind wandering as bad and mindfulness as good. However, building on existing efforts to introduce a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between mindfulness and mind wandering, 32 we describe a potential neurocognitive framework in which mental training associated with mindfulness allows the practitioner to more skillfully gain volitional control, flexibility, and awareness over mind wandering, evaluation, and associated DMN activity without necessarily suppressing or avoiding the flow of mental content. Considering the functional role and dynamics between RSNs is complex, and, thus, the exact role played by the DMN and other attentional networks is likely to be context specific and modulated by the specific practices in which an individual engages. As a function of the situational demands, the FPCN is specifically proposed to rapidly and flexibly couple with the DMN and other attentional networks for contextually appropriate engagement and disengagement with relevant objects in the ongoing stream of mental and sensory content. Thus, a sense of tranquility or stillness of mind involves the elimination of distortions and distractions in an effortless and sustained form of awareness and can have lasting effects on one's mental habits, biases, and worldview in relation to the surrounding world. It is likely that a highly developed meta-awareness in the context of mindfulness-based practice may offer a key mechanism for rapid discernment of what is relevant at early stages of attentional processing while also providing sensory clarity and emotional stability through each moment of experience.

Unfortunately, there is a particular rhetoric surrounding the emphasis of nonconceptuality, nonjudgment, and present-moment focus that continues to lead to ethical, social, and developmental passivity in the contemporary mindfulness movement. Given the secular emphasis of mindfulness on the present moment, there is regrettably less emphasis on the benefits from an efficient ability to draw consciously from past experiences and the capacity to reflect inwardly. On closer inspection of the state of mindfulness, we discuss here the benefits of judgment, evaluation, conceptuality, and DMN activity to provide a more nuanced description of brain network interactions and the benefits delivered by these meditation techniques that are continuing to emerge in contemporary society. More broadly, these skills are not emphasized for personal gain, but rather to ultimately nurture the human connection and sense of meaning and purpose that provides the foundation for the benefits of realizing stillness.

Although the current theoretical analysis remains speculative, continued consideration of the resting state in comparison to meditation practice is likely to reveal specialized insights into brain function, energy metabolism, conscious awareness, and therapeutic relevance for psychiatric conditions. Future research investigating differences between FA and OM practices may help clarify critical differences between focal and ambient awareness, and the ability for individuals to volitionally modulate types of information that enter awareness through engagement and disengagement processes. Other considerations for future research should include tracking phenomenology using qualitative empathetic interviewing skills 150 with explicit second-person methods built into the neuroimaging studies, in addition to correlating first-person reports with third-person measures of brain activity. This method could involve independent, unbiased interviewers who may help participants explicate their experiences in order to direct them toward phenomenological aspects of their experience and away from theorizing about it. Examining the stability of RSNs across meditation states, axiological frameworks, and across a phenomenology of clarity and mind wandering, may better reflect consistent therapeutic targets that are context specific. More consistency across fc analyses will have to involve choosing consistent seeds for analyses and tracking functional changes across states and rest in both clinical samples and meditation-naive subjects who do not have a self-selection bias. As research progresses in this field, it is likely that differences between novice and advanced meditators will become apparent and may account for discrepancies in the ability to sustain/maintain nonconceptual forms of awareness during meditation and the speed with which practitioners can make discerning judgments. Indeed, even the greatest meditators report fluctuations in level of clarity with which meditative quality is experienced over time. Thus, future research would benefit from having closer measurements of neurophysiological changes as they directly relate to first-person reports on phenomenology of experiences, such as clarity in the context of meditation and throughout daily life.

Acknowledgments

The authors express gratitude to A.P. for the constructive feedback. F.Z. and D.R.V. wrote the paper.

a Eliot, T.S. 1943. Burnt Norton. Four Quartets. Orlando: Harcourt.

b Early schools of Theravada Buddhism describe a collection of scriptures and suttas in the Pāli Canon.

c Although Tulving argues that mental time travel is uniquely human, there is good evidence to suggest that scrub jays can cache food in a manner that reflects both planning for the future and some form of mental time travel to retrieve detailed information on when and where the food was cached. 79

d Sampajaňňa is also described in nondual traditions as a form of “monitoring,” rather than “clear comprehension” in Theravadan texts. Thus, this aspect of mindfulness may reflect a state of meta-awareness, decentering, or dereification that reflects an interaction between task-set retention and background awareness. 97

Conflicts of interest : The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

• Mindfulness meditation and your wandering mind

“Concentrate all your thoughts on the task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” ~ Alexander Graham Bell

If you’ve tried mindfulness meditation, either following along with the short guided mindfulness meditation on The Changeability Podcast ( episode 44 ), or you’re a regular meditator – you can’t help but be aware of the mind’s tendency to wander around during your meditation session.

You’re just settling into a few minutes of focusing on the here and now, you’re noticing your breath going in and out and suddenly you’re aware of thoughts crowding in about all sorts of things.

Maybe it’s something you should have done, or an upcoming meeting or event you’re organising.  It might be you’re hungry and can’t stop thinking about your next meal.

Whatever the thoughts are, this is normal – if a little irritating sometimes!

Some people feel that if they can’t clear their mind and not think of anything then meditation is not for them, or they can’t do it.

But everyone can do it – it’s just how you define ‘doing it’.

It’s not about getting it right or wrong.  It’s about practicing a way of thinking, of focusing your attention on something specific – like in our case we’ve been paying attention to our breath.

It’s about the practice – which is why ‘practice’ is such a great word in relation to meditation. Because it’s about the experience of doing it rather than getting to an end point or destination.

It’s about gently being aware or turning your focus onto your breathing, and re-turning your attention back to your breath and the here and now as other thoughts start coming into your mind.

The thoughts keep coming and gradually you get snatches of moments where they don’t – they may be incredibly fleeting on some days and other days, with practice the space between them gets longer.

But it takes practice and to be honest, some perseverance and commitment.

So don’t be surprised or hard on yourself if you find it challenging or think you’re failing in some way, this is part of the process.  There is always the opportunity to re-commit and get back to it.

So to get back to mindfulness meditation and your wandering mind – there a few little techniques you can try out to help you turn your attention away from the thoughts and back to your breath. You can hear us chat more about these in episode 45 of The Changeability Podcast, but in the meantime here are a couple of ways of dealing with your wandering mind.

Notice you’re thinking these thoughts – you might even think ‘I’m having a thought’.  Then find a way of letting it go.

One way of doing this is to visualize the thought as something. You might see it in a bubble that bursts, leaving the thought to evaporate and disappear.

Another technique some people like to use is to count your breaths, either in and out or just out.  This helps you to bring the focus back to the breathing.

None of these stop the thoughts coming but can help you deal with them so they don’t become too distracting and take you away from the purpose of your mindfulness meditation – being in the here and now in a non-judgemental way.

On Episode 45 the Changeability Podcast you’ll find out:

• Some interesting things about Alexander Graham Bell
• Why mindfulness meditation is not about getting it right or wrong.
• What’s going on in Julian’s head as we delve into his mind!
• What’s been irritating Kathryn this week in her meditation time.
• It’s not about stopping the thoughts.
• 7 ways to help deal with distracting thoughts and wandering mind syndrome.

Links and resources mentioned in episode 45

• What is mindfulness and why do we need it  – Episode 43
• Manage your Mind with Mindfulness Meditation  – Episode 44
• The Library in your Mind  – Episode 3
• What is Mind Management  –  Episode 6
• ‘ Mindfulness – A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world ‘ by Mark Williams and Danny Penman
• A Beginner’s Guide to Mindfulness Meditation  – A short course
• With Breath in Mind – a Guided Meditation  – a Brilliant Living® MP3
• Join the  FB Changeability Group 

What to do next

If you’d like help in getting going with mindfulness meditation – and a shortcut to help you stay on track, we have a couple of Brilliant Living ® resources for you.

A short course where in 1 and a half hours from now you will be up and running and have a guided meditation to keep with Julian’s ‘ A Beginner’s Guide to Mindfulness Meditation ‘ short course.

Or if you just want a super quick way to get going, download our guided meditation mp3 ‘ With Breath in Mind ’. Six 10-minute tracks to choose from.

If you have any ideas, comments or questions we’d love to hear from you at [email protected]

On mind wandering, attention, brain networks, and meditation

Affiliation.

• 1 Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA. [email protected]
• PMID: 23643368
• DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2013.02.005

Human attention selectively focuses on aspects of experience that are threatening, pleasant, or novel. The physical threats of the ancient times have largely been replaced by chronic psychological worries and hurts. The mind gets drawn to these worries and hurts, mostly in the domain of the past and future, leading to mind wandering. In the brain, a network of neurons called the default mode network has been associated with mind wandering. Abnormal activity in the default mode network may predispose to depression, anxiety, attention deficit, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Several studies show that meditation can reverse some of these abnormalities, producing salutary functional and structural changes in the brain. This narrative review presents a mechanistic understanding of meditation in the context of recent advances in neurosciences about mind wandering, attention, and the brain networks.

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Research at Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education shows that formal compassion training increases both mental focus and caring behavior.

The practice of compassion meditation may be a powerful antidote to a drifting mind, new Stanford research shows.

Compassion meditation focuses on benevolent thoughts toward oneself and others, as the researchers noted. It is different in this aspect than most forms of meditation in the sense that participants are “guided” toward compassionate thoughts.

The research article , “A Wandering Mind is a Less Caring Mind,” was recently published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.

“This is the first report that demonstrates that formal compassion training decreases the tendency for the mind to wander, while increasing caring behavior not only towards others but towards oneself,” said James Doty, a co-author on the study, Stanford neurosurgeon and the founder and director of Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.

“Mind-wandering” is the experience of having your thoughts not remain on a single topic for long. Prior research suggests that people spend as much as 50 percent of their waking hours in mind-wandering, often without realizing it.

Doty said that mindfulness is extremely useful in today’s world with its myriad of distractions, as humans are often overwhelmed and can find it difficult to attend to necessary tasks.

“By closing one’s eyes and engaging in attention training through a mindfulness practice, not only does it diminish the negative physiologic effects of distraction, which can result in anxiety and fear, but it can increase one’s ability to attend to important tasks and not have an emotional response to the often negative dialogue which is frequent in many individuals,” he said.

Enhancing mindfulness

One way to thwart mind-wandering is through practices that enhance “mindfulness,” or the state of paying attention in a non-judgmental way to the present moment, the researchers said.

Distinct from other forms of meditation, compassion meditation training involves the recognition of, and wish to relieve, suffering in others and oneself. As such, there is an emphasis on the focus of one’s attention on a particular person, object, or situation, rather than engaging in meditation where there is no specific object of meditation.

“This difference in technique may in turn lead to changes in mind-wandering that are different from what is observed with mindfulness training,” the researchers wrote.

As the researchers noted, compassion is defined by an awareness of suffering, sympathetic concern and a wish to see the relief of that suffering, and a responsiveness or readiness to help relieve that suffering.

The study examined 51 adults during a compassion meditation program, measuring their various states of mind-wandering (neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant topics) and caring behaviors for themselves and others. Participants took a secular compassion meditation training program developed at Stanford University that consists of nine two-hour classes with a certified instructor.

They were encouraged to meditate at least 15 minutes daily and, if possible, 30 minutes. At various intervals, participants were asked questions such as “Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” and ‘Have you done anything kind or caring today for” yourself and then again for another?

The researchers also gave the participants examples of “kind or caring behaviors” – such as visiting with people at a retirement home, helping a child with homework or in learning something new, and telling a friend, family member or co-worker what they appreciate about that person, for example.

The results indicated that compassion meditation decreased mind-wandering to neutral topics and increased caring behaviors toward oneself.

Moreover, the more that the participants engaged in their compassion meditation practice, the greater their reductions in mind-wandering to unpleasant topics and increases in mind-wandering to pleasant topics, both of which were related to increases in caring behaviors for oneself and others, according to the study.

Mind drift not always problematic

The researchers say the study is the first to provide initial support that formal compassion training can reduce mind-wandering and elicit caring behaviors for oneself and others.

Doty noted that mind-wandering by itself may not necessarily be bad. Unlike mind-wandering that drifted to negative or neutral topics, the researchers did not find a decrease in caring behaviors for self or other when the mind wandered to positive topics.

People allow their minds to wander, by choice or accident, because it sometimes produces concrete rewards – such as an intellectual insight or even physical survival.

For example, rereading a line of text three times because our attention has drifted away matters very little if that attention shift has yielded a key insight or a pleasant topic. This contrasts with mind-wandering that unleashes a flood of anxiety and fear, for example.

Doty noted that one of the evolutionary traits in the human species is the ability to monitor potential threats and immediately focus one’s attention on that threat.

“If there are too many such threats or, in the case of living in modern society with so many events that one feels they must attend, our internal system to analyze such threats can cause us to feel overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted,” he said.

Doty added that mind-wandering can be reflective of this reality as one’s attention keeps getting diverted.

Co-authors on the study include Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal; psychologists Inho Lee and James Gross from Stanford; Thupten Jinpa, the English translator to the Dalai Lama; Hooria Jazaieri,a UC Berkeley psychologist; and Philippe Goldin, a UC Davis psychologist.

Media Contacts

James Doty, Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education: (650) 962-4545, [email protected] Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, [email protected]

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What Happens to Your Brain When You Meditate Every Day?

Improved memory, attention, and learning? Yes, please!

Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

Verywell Mind / Getty Images

What Meditating Every Day Does to Your Brain

Benefits of meditation, how to meditate every day, sample meditations to try.

People who meditate regularly swear by it, but others are often skeptical of it, thinking it’s a little, you know, woo-woo.

But what if we told you that meditation is actually a powerful way to train your brain to be calmer and sharper? That scientific studies have shown that meditating regularly can alter brain shape, size, and function?

“Meditation can actually create structural changes in the brain. It has been shown to increase gray matter in the brain, particularly in areas related to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and perspective,” says Mirela Loftus, MD, PhD , medical director at Newport Healthcare.

Meditation can actually create structural changes in the brain. It has been shown to increase gray matter in the brain, particularly in areas related to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and perspective.

Based on the amount of scientific evidence supporting meditation, every doctor would be prescribing it if it were a pill, says Gary Soffer, MD , an integrative medicine specialist at Yale Medicine.

Let’s dive in and take a look at what meditating regularly does to your brain.

At a Glance

Meditating regularly changes the brain in several ways. It alters brain waves, increases gray matter, and improves connectivity within the brain. The cherry on top? It also boosts feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin.

Together, these changes make us happier, calmer, and sharper. As a result, we're better equipped to handle stress, stay focused on tasks, and experience a greater sense of well-being in our daily lives.

While meditation is an ancient practice, science is still unlocking the full spectrum of its benefits. A surge in research over the past few decades has investigated meditation's effects on both the brain and body. 

Electroencephalography (EEG) and structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have been used to map the brain and study the effects of meditation on the brain.  

Meditation has been shown to change many aspects of the brain’s structure and function.

Increases Gray Matter

Meditation increases gray matter in the brain, particularly in areas related to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and perspective, says Dr. Loftus. In fact, imaging studies show that meditation increases the size and volume of the brain, due to increased gray matter concentration.

Strengthens the Prefrontal Cortex

Regular meditation is linked to increased thickness of the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with higher-order brain functions such as awareness, concentration, memory , and decision-making, Dr. Loftus explains. 

MRI scans have found that in addition to increasing the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, meditation also improves the neural connectivity and cognitive function in this area.

Improves Neuroplasticity

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change and rewire itself based on new information and experiences. Meditation increases neuroplasticity by improving neural connectivity patterns across different regions of the brain.

By enhancing connectivity between different brain regions, meditation can improve cognitive functions, information processing, and emotional regulation, says Dr. Loftus.

Boosts Dopamine and Serotonin

Dopamine and serotonin are neurotransmitters, or chemical messengers in the brain. Meditation is linked to a larger quantity of positive neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine in the brain, says Dr. Soffer.

Apart from regulating functions like sleep, growth, and metabolism, these chemicals play an important role in maintaining our emotional equilibrium, by making us feel positive and happy.

Alters Brain Waves

Meditation not only calms our blood pressure, respiratory rate, and heart rate, it also alters our brain waves. This helps us relax, concentrate, and process information better.

Those who practice meditation regularly often exhibit higher levels of gamma brain waves, which are associated with heightened perception, problem-solving, and consciousness, says Dr. Loftus.

Decreases the Size of the Amygdala

The amygdala , which is responsible for the fight-or-flight response , tends to shrink in people who meditate regularly, says Dr. Loftus. Research shows that this significantly reduces our stress levels.

As a result of these changes in the brain, meditation offers us several mental, emotional, and cognitive benefits. In fact, in addition to improving certain mental health conditions, it also benefits our nervous system and immune system, says Dr. Soffer. 

Research shows us that meditation can improve:

• Emotional regulation
• Self-awareness
• Concentration 
• Spatial abilities
• Execution function (thinking, planning, decision-making)
• Conflict resolution
• Mindfulness
• Self-compassion
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Mindful Moment

Need a breather? Take this free  3-minute meditation to calm down quickly —or choose from our  guided meditation library  to find another one that will help you feel your best.

The best way to reap the benefits of meditation is to incorporate it into your daily routine and practice it every day. The benefits can be vast if you stick to the practice, says Dr. Soffer.

Here’s how you can make daily meditation a habit:

• Start small: You can start with just a few minutes every day. Even five minutes of meditation can be helpful. As you get more comfortable with it, you can work your way up to longer sessions.
• Find a time that works for you: Choose a specific time of day that works best for you, whether it’s first thing in the morning, during your lunch break, or before bed. Consistency helps in forming a habit.
• Pick a quiet spot: Choose a place where you can sit comfortably and won’t be interrupted. It could be a swing on your porch, a cozy chair in your room, or even a quiet corner in your office.
• Set the ambience: If you like, you can set the ambience for your meditation session by dimming the lights, playing gentle soothing music, and lighting a scented candle.
• Set an intention: Before you start meditating, set a clear intention or goal for your practice. It could be to reduce stress, increase focus, or simply take a break from your busy day.
• Use a guided meditation program: If you’re new to meditating and not sure how to go about it, it can be easier to start with a guided meditation program that takes you through the steps. There are several free programs available online—you can choose the one that best fits your needs and your schedule.
• Focus on your breath: Use your breath to anchor you to the present. If your mind wanders to other things, gently bring your focus back to your breath.
• Reflect on the practice: After you finish, take a moment to reflect on your session. What did you feel and learn? If you like, you can write down your thoughts in a journal.
• Be patient with yourself: Building a new habit takes time. Be patient with yourself on this journey. Don’t get frustrated if your mind wanders or if you miss a day. Some days will be easier and others will be harder.

If you want to get started with meditation, these are a few types you can try.

Breath Awareness Meditation

Breath awareness meditation simply involves focusing your attention on your breath. Here’s how to do it: 

• Sit comfortably and close your eyes.
• Taking deep breaths, bring your attention to your breath. Pay attention to the way the air comes in through your nose, fills up your stomach, and goes out again.
• If your attention wanders, gently bring it back to your breath.
• Do this for as long as you like. When you’re done, open your eyes slowly.

Body Scan Meditation

Body scan meditation involves bringing your attention to each part of your body and consciously relaxing it, one at a time. Here’s how to do it: 

• Lie down on your back and close your eyes.
• Bring your attention to your toes, breathing into them and relaxing them. Notice any sensations you feel without trying to change anything.
• Slowly move your focus to your feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, and so on, up to the top of your head.
• After you finish scanning your entire body, take a few deep breaths and open your eyes.

Loving-Kindness Meditation

Loving-kindness meditation involves sending kind thoughts to yourself, your loved ones, and the world around you. Here’s how to do it: 

• Get comfortable, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths.
• Send kindness to yourself. You can repeat silently, “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be safe.”
• Extend kindness to your loved ones. Think of someone you love and repeat, “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe.”
• Expand kindness to others. Gradually extend these wishes to a neutral person, someone you have difficulty with, and finally to all living beings.

Walking Meditation

If you find sitting still difficult and prefer movement, walking meditation may be for you. Here’s how to do it: 

• Find a quiet space to walk comfortably back and forth.
• Walk slowly, paying attention to the sensations in your feet as they make contact with the ground.
• Coordinate your breath with your steps, inhaling and exhaling with each step.
• Notice any thoughts that come to you, letting them go and returning your focus to walking.
• Turn around and continue walking mindfully when you reach the end of your space.
• When you’re done, stand still, take a few deep breaths, and reflect on the experience.

Key Takeaways

While meditation may seem simple on the surface, its impact on the brain is quite profound. Incorporating it into your daily routine can improve your attention, memory, mood, and stress levels. You can start slowly with just a few minutes a day, working your way up to longer sessions over time. Just do your best to be regular with it! 

Pernet CR, Belov N, Delorme A, Zammit A. Mindfulness related changes in grey matter: a systematic review and meta-analysis . Brain Imaging Behav . 2021 Oct;15(5):2720-2730. doi:10.1007/s11682-021-00453-4

Lardone A, Liparoti M, Sorrentino P, Rucco R, Jacini F, Polverino A, Minino R, Pesoli M, Baselice F, Sorriso A, Ferraioli G, Sorrentino G, Mandolesi L. Mindfulness meditation is related to long-lasting changes in hippocampal functional topology during resting state: a magnetoencephalography study . Neural Plast . 2018 Dec 18;2018:5340717. doi:10.1155/2018/5340717

Rathore M, Verma M, Nirwan M, Trivedi S, Pai V. Functional connectivity of prefrontal cortex in various meditation techniques: a mini-review . Int J Yoga . 2022 Sep-Dec;15(3):187-194. doi:10.4103/ijoy.ijoy_88_22

Washington University. Brain plasticity: what is it?

Guidotti R, Del Gratta C, Perrucci MG, Romani GL, Raffone A. Neuroplasticity within and between functional brain networks in mental training based on long-term meditation . Brain Sci . 2021 Aug 18;11(8):1086. doi:10.3390/brainsci11081086

Nationwide Children's Hospital. Dopamine and serotonin: our own happy chemicals .

Katyal S, Goldin P. Alpha and theta oscillations are inversely related to progressive levels of meditation depth . Neurosci Conscious . 2021 Nov 29;2021(1):niab042. doi:10.1093/nc/niab042

Gotink RA, Vernooij MW, Ikram MA, Niessen WJ, Krestin GP, Hofman A, Tiemeier H, Hunink MGM. Meditation and yoga practice are associated with smaller right amygdala volume: the Rotterdam study . Brain Imaging Behav . 2018 Dec;12(6):1631-1639. doi:10.1007/s11682-018-9826-z

Tang R, Friston KJ, Tang YY. Brief mindfulness meditation induces gray matter changes in a brain hub . Neural Plast . 2020 Nov 16;2020:8830005. doi:10.1155/2020/8830005

Toussaint L, Nguyen QA, Roettger C, Dixon K, Offenbächer M, Kohls N, Hirsch J, Sirois F. Effectiveness of progressive muscle relaxation, deep breathing, and guided imagery in promoting psychological and physiological states of relaxation . Evid Based Complement Alternat Med . 2021 Jul 2;2021:5924040. doi:10.1155/2021/5924040

Rusch HL, Rosario M, Levison LM, Olivera A, Livingston WS, Wu T, Gill JM. The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials . Ann N Y Acad Sci . 2019 Jun;1445(1):5-16. doi:10.1111/nyas.13996

By Sanjana Gupta Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

Guided Meditation for Beginners: A Step-by-Step Guide with 10 Tips

Posted: June 3, 2024 | Last updated: June 3, 2024

Use Meditation Apps

Wear Comfortable Clothing

End with Gratitude

Start with Short Sessions

Be Patient and Gentle with Yourself

Use a Guided Meditation

Focus on Your Breath

Close Your Eyes and Relax

Choose a Comfortable Position

Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation for Beginners: Find a Quiet Space

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Your Mind Is Being Fracked

The historian of science d. graham burnett on what’s at stake in the rise of an extractive attention economy and how we can reclaim our attention..

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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I think a lot about the way we talk about attention. Because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you’re in school? Pay attention, as if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet, and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra, rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams.

I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can’t, to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try. My attention, it just doesn’t feel to me like something I get to spend.

It feels — I don’t know. It feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I’m in control, and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder, and they try to run away.

Sometimes a dog side-eyes them from across the street, and they turn from mild-mannered terriers into killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone. And even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there.

My attention feels like that to me. And this is what I don’t like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out, what kinds of things are around us, it really matters. And it’s supposed to. Attention is supposed to be open to the world around us.

But that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone. It’s like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones. There’s lightning cracking overhead. There are always dogs barking.

And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody’s kids. I don’t think we’re creating an intentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, and I keep feeling like we’re getting near it, but not quite there. Because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn’t feel rigorous enough to me. It doesn’t feel like it is getting at the experience of it well.

And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in “The New Yorker” by Nathan Heller, and I came across D. Graham Burnett, who’s doing all three.

He’s a historian of science at Princeton University. He’s working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he’s a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots, artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention. And yeah, that got my attention. As always, my email, [email protected].

D. Graham Burnett, welcome to the show.

Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that?

Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it’s a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were these big, juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth, waiting to geyser up if you tapped them. Drill a hole — whew, gusher.

We’ve tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry, mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent, and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out, and you get your monetizable crude.

This is a precise analogy to what’s happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, $500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

How do you define what attention is?

I would love for us to use this whole conversation to roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go at it one way. I’m in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. In laboratories, using experiments, scientists have, since the late 19th century, sliced and diced a human capacity that they’ve called attention.

And it is that work that they did that has made it possible, I would argue, to price the thing called attention that we’re invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It’s entangled with the idea of stimulus and response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash.

That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called attention. When they started doing early eye tracking experiments to follow where people’s gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that — largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry — there was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes.

When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. And it’s very similar to the thing that, right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate and auction continuously.

In your research, what’s been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you’ve come across?

Oh, I love that question. Well, let’s do unholy. And maybe you’ll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like forerunners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen. This is manual, like a clockwork cursor that’s traveling back and forth in front of you.

And you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate kind of with a joystick, to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you’re gradually deprived of oxygen.

That’s a big twist. [LAUGHS] I didn’t see that one coming.

Yeah, we might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body. There are a whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then, as you gradually lose consciousness, you’re asked to continue for as long as you can, manipulating this envelope around the cursor.

This was understood to be an attentional test. It’s cybernetic, as you can see. It’s a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others.

And let me assure you, if you’re going to put somebody in the cockpit of one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who’s really good at that. So I would call that one kind of an unholy — I mean, let’s be clear. I’m —

Yeah, fixating fighter pilots to see what happens to their attention. Yeah, I’ll categorize that in the unholy.

Yeah, I don’t want to sound paranoiac either. I’m in favor of fighter pilots who are able to pay attention —

Yes, I understand why they were doing it.

OK, yeah. Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now, we’ve been, if you like, cybernetically integrated into our devices. And you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I’m describing.

I’ll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation particularly to German U-Boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention to it, you’re totally screwed.

A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War to assess a very new problem — how long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention, what comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop-off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon.

And that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep, technoscientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting.

And we see the legacy of that kind of work, to this day, in the way we think about attention. That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what’s now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves.

I’m so interested by that form of attention. And it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention and some of the conversations I’ve had on the show about attention, which is, it’s so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over.

I think that implicitly, in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day. And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right? I come in and I open my computer, and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and Slacks and a million things.

And then, at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I’d like to go, but not the only place I’d like to go, right? I don’t imagine the good life as being a life where I have the attentional capacity of the perfect worker. Right? A lot of what I’m interested in theory with attention is, a sort of more open form of awareness, an ability to see other people more deeply.

And I’m a meditator. And so one thing I notice a lot, over time, is that what I think I should be paying attention to, and then what appears to come up with great value to me are not the same thing. Right? Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world, too.

You put your finger on, really, the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now, both so difficult and so important, is that secreted within that term are, in fact, two very different projects bumping up against each other.

In a laboratory, you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it. You can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what’s in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is.

But that other thing that you’re kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object, that comes from a different place. It’s also in the language of attention, and it has its own separate history.

If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both, interestingly, true. Two biz school theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called “The Attention Economy.” I think it’s 2001. They don’t actually coin the phrase, but they’re responsible for it sort of exploding into the collective conversation.

How do they define attention in that book? They say attention is what triggers, catalyzes, awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition that couldn’t be more different — the recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called “Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations,” centers that book on attention.

What does he say attention is? He says, attention, playing with the “attendre” in French, is waiting, the exact opposite of catalytic triggering. It’s waiting. It’s, in fact, for him, infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it. He says you’re waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you?

So let’s imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio, and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting. It might be, let’s say, a religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors. We would think about other images like it we might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be or the symbolic things that are in it.

And as we experience that kind of web of things that are in the image, we’d really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that’s in ourselves. And so, for Stiegler, attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infinite waiting. Attention, triggering. Sharp contrast.

And let me try to bring in a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two. In the early 20th century novel “Wings of the Dove,” the American novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with the doctor she desperately needs. She believes this doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish.

The doctor’s very busy, and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment. And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them a clear, clean crystal cup, empty of attention, an empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention as a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of imminence, that kind of negative capability.

Anything’s possible here, the gesture of generosity. It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of a solicitation. Something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring, waiting image. And so, when I have to talk about what I think attention is, I’ll often use that image. Like, what’s attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world and see what happens.

You’ve talked about how attention is — or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construct. Can you talk a bit about that?

Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that’s ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Crary. Jonathan Crary is an art historian at Columbia University. In a book called “Suspensions of Perception,” published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why, in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying it in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way.

Crary argues that you don’t see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It’s not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on.

Those guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura, right? Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them, like a forerunner of the camera. And the mind is like that box. There’s a world out there. There’s a world in here. There’s a nice mapping function between those two worlds. And therefore I, as a propertied white male subject, am good in the world because the world is out there and in me, in a relatively unproblematic way.

Crary argues, I think correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity, implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it end? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn’t have the same picture inside themselves as what’s out there in the world, that we’re these oozy things made of meat, you know? And that actually, our eyes have blind spots. And suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mincemeat of the classical model.

So then where are you in this kind of blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity now that you’re like an opaque, thick meat creature, instead of this nice camera obscura creature? Well, Crary argues that attention is born in that moment as a way of saying, again, that I hold together as one being, as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is.

Your will maybe, that’s that idea that somehow will has something to do with it. That for William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right? That free will itself, if it existed, its locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject.

Let me offer two responses that come to mind, and starting here. So obviously, he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will. But the first thing that I know where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention, going far, far, far back before the 19th century, is within religion.

So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions in Judaism around that. I’m sure there’s much more in other religions that I know less well. Prayer is an attentional question. Meditation is a technology of attention as it gets talked about now. But you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps, attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions?

It’s a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will, if one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn’t sort of the language we would use.

Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks.

But if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in attention actually comes out of my own meditational life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources, as we begin to think about what to do now.

And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone Weil comes to mind.

So Simone Weil, who skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways, but never crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately, a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer.

So for her, if you like apophatic attention, attention that won’t have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right? Two theological traditions. One where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God is so beyond us. We’re not going to get to God. We’re finite creatures. God is infinite.

Our best chance to get anything like the God space is to enumerate everything that’s not God to get at God via the via negativa, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing, rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we’re having a conversation with God.

I would argue that Simon Weil’s account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of one’s self, an openness to immanence, is apophatic. It’s an attention that isn’t triggerable. It won’t target. You can’t bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not.

So that’s the other question that comes up for me. There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we’ve been having since the early 19th century, that people were complaining about how we were losing our attention then. Trains were too fast, life was too fast. Everybody’s reading newspapers.

And it’s the same arguments, and yet, it’s all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up. And then we just kind of move on to the next thing, and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age, to the extent they imagine it, they don’t mean the 15 century. They mean right before whatever the thing they’re worried about now is, right?

Blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers were great, but digital news is too far. How do you think about that concern that you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic?

I’m sympathetic to that critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right, again and again, that things were changing. And things have changed in ways that were catastrophic, in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments.

So, was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. And everyone was like, this is horrible. I don’t want to read soap ads like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space. Also, horrible.

New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you’d have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions, against which people had to gather together and mount resistance.

I would argue that we are in a moment now in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves the instrument of our being, this is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this. And we need to mount new forms of resistance.

We don’t know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn’t yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don’t yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is what we need, is like all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening in lots of different places already. And we need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.

Maybe this is a digression, maybe it’s not, because you’re a historian who has dealt with this question, I think, a bunch. I’m fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics. Call them moral panics, right? The very term assumes just a hysteria that then went away. Often, when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it’s true on one level that, obviously, the world did not come to an end. We’re sitting here talking. And it is also often true that they were right.

You go back and read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and the thing he is predicting roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment. And so even things that should not be entertainment will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. And it is just like a direct line to Donald Trump. And you could say, oh, we had a previous moral panic about television, or you could say, all these people were right. The world didn’t end, but a lot of bad things actually did happen.

I think about this with advertising. Mid-century, there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising. You can read “The Affluent Society” by John Kenneth Galbraith, and he’s very interested in this question. And my sense is, among economists and others, that’s looked back on as a little bit embarrassing, right? Like, look, there’s advertising, and it’s fine.

And I don’t know. I’m actually amazed. I moved to New York about a year ago. I’m amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway. Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time, it had a grayscale image advertising “The Exorcist” reboot — horrifying image, like two girls, black [INAUDIBLE] dripping from their mouth. I mean, just grotesque. Every morning, I would see it.

And it seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space. Why am I being — why every morning, when I bring my five-year-old onto the subways, he’s seeing an ad for a horror movie? But we’ve just gotten used to it.

I’m curious how you think about this discourse, this sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. And as such, worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong, too. Because eventually, we’ll simply make our peace with it, and the world will move on. And if it does that, then, clearly, it was fine.

Yeah. Where even to begin? Oh, my heavens. I mean, those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear-eyed about our condition again and again. The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value, big picture, that’s one of the enormous secular trends one can discern over the last 150, 200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are, in effect, explicable out of that dynamic.

Now, I don’t want to sound reactionary when I say that, and I also don’t wish to kind of invoke some fantasy utopia of the past, but we are more severed from each other now than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ersatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways.

We’ve seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations, for instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it’s totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we’re seeing.

One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is, I think, because we don’t have a good definition of it itself, we don’t, I think, think about it very clearly. We know what we often don’t want. A lot of us don’t want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online. We don’t like learning and noticing in ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped.

A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So we know what we don’t want — this. I don’t think we have a very good, positive vision. How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention, given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants?

Yeah, it’s a very hard question. In a sense, you’re asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. Are we going to prescribe for people this versus that, and who will prescribe? I think of the extraordinary definition of education that Gayatri Spivak offers, which is the non-coercive rearranging of desire. What’s education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

And that rings for you?

I have to say it does.

That’s not how my education felt to me.

Well, I don’t think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that’s a richly humanistic and, at the same time, critical account of education. It’s not especially an account of education that conduces to making optimized workers in the labor force.

But let’s just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire in some basic sense. You say, we just tell people that they shouldn’t want, enjoy, receive that little dopamine hit, feel good when they’re scrolling through TikTok. Well, OK. Our desires can go lots of different places. It’s also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing.

The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want that is what we really want, or what, in wanting, most dignifies and extends our experience of being, as opposed to, again, severing and impoverishing us. That’s the hard work of education. And people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also, they have to work that stuff out with other people.

That’s, in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition, stuff, the kind of best that’s been thought and said — texts, objects. Here, here, look at this. It’s not, “look at this, I’m going to force you.” It’s, “I want you non-coercively to discover that in being with this in these ways, something good will happen.”

Yeah, let me hold on to this idea of non-coercion. So first, for me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend eight hours a day sitting in these small classrooms being lectured at. Just didn’t. I had to — which I don’t think is a bad thing. I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don’t think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I’m not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either — but nevertheless.

And something that has been on my mind has been how bad, I think, parents, at least of certain classes right now, have gotten at coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young. So it’s kind of easy right now, but I know it’s going to get harder. And I see all these parents who know that they don’t think their kids should have a smartphone when they’re 11. And they fall because, eh, the other kids do.

And I see in this debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids, what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So Jon Haidt writes his book, “The Anxious Generation.” Part of the book’s thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis in our children. Then there’s a huge back and forth on these exact studies.

And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books, no matter if you can measure that on somebody’s income statement or not.

And so I wonder not just about the non-coercive rearranging of desire, but I also wonder about — I mean, I don’t love calling it the coercive rearranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of, and then particularly for younger kids, for whom their attentional resources are being formed, actually insist upon that.

So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is, just, where do you anchor your intuition that it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours?

If I’m being honest as a parent, right — and I’m not saying I would legislate this — I anchor it in my own experience of attention. I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right? Another human being’s story or thoughts or mind, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering. And I will say — and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on the show. We’ll talk about the School of Attention that you’re part of in a bit. I will say that my biggest concern and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects than how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they’re able to bring to the things they will want to know. But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that.

I’m enormously moved by what you’re saying. The dynamics that you’re describing are not unfolding in empty space. They’re unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can’t leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing.

And there may be no other way to organize large, modern, complex societies. But we would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides. And the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about, is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.

I think I’m getting at something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism, and I don’t love the term, one, because I think it annoys people and shuts them down. But the other is because it’s imprecise. But the thing I mean, when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age, is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic.

Absolutely.

And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good of virtues of — and a lot of it is very religiously inflected, to be fair. I mean, religion was an alternative structure of logic of meaning that was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think as religion has weakened not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world, capitalism market logic has taken over a lot of that space. And the market does not have our interests at heart.

You invoke religion as one of the traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke to other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There’s the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention.

And partially, that’s like why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It’s part of the reason it’s getting increasingly exterminated from universities because you can’t monetize it. And but I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention.

And there’s a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, show me the most expensive thing, and I’ll take it. And the people in the know and the space of the arts would snicker and say, how callow that he walked out with that. That’s not the good stuff.

So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching, and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.

Is attention the category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want? So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health. If I told you health is important, you’d nod your head. You’re nodding your head, in fact, right now. If I said, I’m really trying to work on my health, on the one hand, you would get what I meant by that. On some level, I don’t want to die soon and young for a preventable reason. But I also wouldn’t really tell you anything. There’s so many subcategories to health, right? You go to doctors for different parts of the body. And there’s mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health, the entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world.

And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, right? Cardiovascular fitness, not health, right? And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you?

I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use. And I would argue that what’s important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you’ve done on this and the wide range of authors, like Jenny Odell and James Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks who’ve written on this.

We need more of all of that because — and here’s where your language of health is exactly right — what we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I’m old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fixx, right? He wrote the book on running in — what was it — ‘77. Before that, regular people didn’t go jogging. They didn’t go running. People who ran were people who were sort of athletes or people in school because they were doing collective sports.

Also, there weren’t gyms that regular people went to. Right? There were places like Gold’s Gym, where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I’m talking 1974 or ‘75. The whole idea that ordinary people would concern themselves with their fitness is something that’s emerged over the last 40 years. It’s staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No, people have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that’s a relatively new thing, and it’s really changed in our lifetimes. And I’m proposing to you that that’s going to happen again. Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health and our attention, is going to be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what’s going to happen. It’s going to reshape education, which, as you’ve signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That’s what it needs to teach. And it’s going to transform our other ways of being together.

So you’re trying to do some of this. You have, along with others, this School of Attention. What are you trying to teach?

Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as a little bit Black Mountain College, creative, artistic collaboration; a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place; and then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and ‘20s, like the schools created by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which were more like activist projects to promote a certain kind of politics.

So that’s kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we’re interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward. We had a senior Zen student do a course on Zen meditation as an intentional form. A class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. A class on perfume where smell as a sensory modality is centered as a sort of attentional form.

We run workshops — and this is separate from the classes. We do free workshops. And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some intentional stuff together, exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four-minute piece of music under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention.

And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies, in which between 5 and 10 people will get together, usually a bar or a cafe, and they’ll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it seminar style, having a drink. That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there’s a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situationist style activity.

So an example would be like a great Audre Lorde passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening, and then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lorde passage in our heads together.

And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it’s a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity.

I’m interested in that idea of practicing attention together. With my kids, when I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is when I ask, what do I mean by I want them taught attention? Some part of it is just I want them to have familiarity, a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like.

I’m not sure I had that for a very long time. I’d, of course, experienced many kinds of attention, but it’s only later in life I become more mindful of what they feel like. And that’s helped me diminish the role of some in my life. The reason I’m not on Twitter or X anymore is that I don’t like the feeling of the attention it furnishes. I don’t like how I feel when I leave it. The reason I’ve sort of moved back to paper books is I do like the feeling of the attention. I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating contexts in which you experience different kinds of attention, so you have that internal map you can work with.

Absolutely. It’s a do by doing kind of thing. You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one’s attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it intentionally.

So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier. So how do you lead people through this?

OK, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist genius, Pauline Oliveros, would use in her practice.

It’s not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveros, and we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about, Annea Lockwood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand that you’ve got a sort of sound piece queued up.

We’ve got it.

OK we’re going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready. You’re going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say?

I think we’ve cut it to 30 seconds or so.

OK, so it’s 30 seconds. We normally do this for a little longer, but all right. So wherever you are, get ready. You’re going to hear this 30-second sound piece four times. And I’m going to give you the mood under which you’ll attend to it. First, just listen. OK? First, listen.

Second listen, recall. What have you heard before?

Third listen, discover. What do you hear for the first time?

And four, finally, don’t listen. What do you find when you don’t listen?

So let’s talk back and forth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase for you, Ezra?

The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body’s response kept changing. So initially, it’s like you got these birds. It seems like it’s going to be a kind of nice ambient piece of music.

And then just like the intense, escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread, the noise goes up. The number of sounds happening simultaneously, it feels like it goes up. The volume goes up. So by the end, you’ve begun — or for me, I began as, oh, a nice — like, Jesus Christ, why did my producers choose this piece of music? So, yeah, it was a little bit — the first time, I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.

For me, in the first attempt through, I was acutely attuned to 1,000 questions sort of pulling me in all directions. Because I’m accustomed to doing these kinds of things over a long time, so longer, more immersive, more people, so a lot of anxiety as to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through, trying, but trying, but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second listen where we were trying to hear something that we’d heard before, recall.

The second one I was struck by — so I remembered the birds, right? I noticed they go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second, I was a little braced because I remembered the feeling I had on the first. I was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then made me surprised by what was there in the moment.

Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase. [LAUGHS]

It’s not remembering.

That’s not. So it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one and two. Wait a second, I’m not supposed to discover new things until phase three.

So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself, but then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that inexorable march time that comes in and the harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, OK, OK, I’m remembering that. I’m remembering that. Third listen, were you able to discover anything new?

Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds, so I was sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear. The whole piece, then, on the third, the thing I noticed was it feels like you’re clear cutting a forest, right? That felt to me like what that piece of music was, right? You were going through the forest. It’s initially fairly untouched. And then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent, that tick, tick, tick, tick. When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of an ecosystem.

Yeah, and I love — discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I’m almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever’s back there making this, and were they at a machine? What kind of machine? What kinds of clips or samples were they drawing on?

So my kind of discovery, in a sense, was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase, four, you tried not to listen, Ezra. What happened?

It was more comfortable.

That body response to that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety, just was muted. So it was more like the way I listen to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music, and the music is providing a mood and an energy. Right? The music is a kind of stimulant.

What did you —

I’m not deeply immersed in it.

What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because, of course, our ears are funny. You can’t close your ears. So the stuff’s going to keep coming in. It’s not like our eyes. We’re —

Well, I moved to the eyes.

More of my attention was on what I was seeing.

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as you were listening? You did?

Kept them open on all.

That’s interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes on the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field, and brighten it such that it would displace my acoustic experience.

So I kind of had hyper vision for a second in an effort to blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that was a little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being. I must say I enjoyed that.

So what’s the point of all that for you? If that is a successful lesson when you do it, what are you hoping people will have experienced? What is the meta lesson of that lesson, right? It’s not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do?

Yeah. I want to just admit that I’m not super sure, and that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour or 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good.

It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do and with other people in relation to what’s in the world this way. And I think that at this moment, we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments.

Let me end on this. If you’re somebody who’s not near the Brooklyn Strother School of Radical Attention, but are somebody who kind of senses something is wrong with your attention, wrong the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you, you want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health, where do you start?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And for my answer, I’m going to read one of the “12 Theses on Attention” written by The Friends. Thesis 9 of the 12 theses reads, “Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they’re endangered. And many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. And this seeking is also attention’s effort to heal itself.”

So my answer is, find a sanctuary. It’s there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening. It might be that they actually can weld. And when they’ve got their visor down and they’re in the puddle of the hot metal, that’s when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting, and they may be doing a Zumba class.

I don’t know what it is they’re doing that’s near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people. And out of finding your people and with a measure of intentionality, insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing.

So then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Oh, there are so many great books. And all we need to do is protect the ability to read them, and we’ll be good. Well, let’s start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it’s by my esteemed colleague Natasha Dow Schüll down at N.Y.U. It’s called “Addiction by Design.”

Natasha Dow Schüll is a science and technology studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It’s a kind of a pre-smartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit.

And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated, dark pattern technologies that can be achieved, even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern, full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets. But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it’s amazing. Natasha Dow Schüll, “Addiction by Design.”

A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and that I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn’t have a history. Objectivity is just being objective. That’s like transhistorical.

And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of objectivity itself is, how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston.

And then I guess my wild card book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination, belief, dreams, and about America. It’s by Herman Melville, of course, the author of “Moby Dick,” a book I also love.

But I’m going to invoke his much stranger book, “The Confidence-Man,” which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. It’s very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in, and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.”

D. Graham Burnett, thank you very much.

Total pleasure. Thanks.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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• May 17, 2024   •   59:20 The Disastrous Relationship Among Israel, Palestinians and the U.N.
• May 10, 2024   •   1:02:30 This Is a Very Weird Moment in the History of Drug Laws
• May 7, 2024   •   1:04:33 Watching the Protests From Israel
• April 30, 2024   •   1:03:00 Cows Are Just an Environmental Disaster
• April 26, 2024 Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is
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• April 5, 2024   •   1:25:33 Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.”

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Burnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He’s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention , which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention.

In this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today’s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett’s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

28 books to read this summer

From absorbing histories to funny fiction and everything in between

According to experts, this is going to be the busiest summer for travel in almost 20 years. You’ll need books for all those trains, planes and automobiles (only in the passenger seats, please). Here are 28 books we’ve enjoyed this year that would make good company, from absorbing histories to funny fiction and everything in between.

‘The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq’

By Steve Coll

Nonfiction | The latest from Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post writer and editor Coll is a bracing moment of clarity for anyone in the U.S. foreign policy establishment willing to listen. It revisits Saddam Hussein as a nuanced figure, not a caricature, reexamining the mutually reinforcing delusions of the Iraqi dictator and four U.S. administrations. (Penguin Press)

‘The Cemetery of Untold Stories’

By Julia Alvarez

Fiction | Alvarez’s new novel — like her pathbreaking “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” from 1991 — explores sisterhood, family secrets, and immigration and return. But it also charts new, at times surreal, territory for her, with its story of a celebrated Dominican American author who resolves to build a little house on some inherited land, where she literally buries her unfinished work. (Algonquin)

‘Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space’

By Adam Higginbotham

Nonfiction | Calamities and near misses have molded NASA as much as the giant leaps the agency has taken, and no tragedy is more indelible than the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. Higginbotham’s book is a compelling, exhaustively researched and freshly told chronicle of the tragedy that traces its full arc. (Avid Reader)

‘City in Ruins’

By Don Winslow

Fiction | The final volume of Winslow’s City trilogy — and, apparently, his fiction-writing career — is a spectacular farewell. Over the course of the series (inspired by Virgil’s “Aeneid”), its hero, Danny Ryan, has gotten mixed up with the mob in his home state of Rhode Island and resurrected himself in Hollywood. In “City in Ruins,” Ryan has landed in Las Vegas, where past vendettas resurface in delightfully terrible ways. (William Morrow)

‘Come and Get It’

By Kiley Reid

Fiction | Reid’s novel examines the lives of young women at the University of Arkansas. There’s sex in it, but the real complications and most intimate details involve financial figures and the ways that unequal economic positions create clashing sets of values. Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone slips tantalizingly between sympathy and satire. (Putnam)

‘Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson’

By James Marcus

Nonfiction | Much has been written about the brilliant essayist and transcendentalist pioneer, but Marcus’s work stands out for his passion for his subject and his understanding of what makes a successful biography. This book is delightful for any reader, however much (or little) they already know about Emerson. (Princeton)

‘Great Expectations’

By Vinson Cunningham

Fiction | A roman à clef about the first Obama presidential campaign, based on Cunningham’s own experiences, “Great Expectations” elegantly explores the mind of its young Black narrator as he struggles to divine his place in the nation. With an eye to questions of faith, Cunningham crafts a coming-of-age story that captures not only the soul of America but also the unquenchable thirst for meaning. (Hogarth)

‘Grief Is for People’

By Sloane Crosley

Nonfiction | Crosley, an essayist and novelist known for her humor, holds on to it here while telling the story of her best friend and his suicide in 2019. Her book is not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is. (MCD)

‘The Hunter’

By Tana French

Fiction | French’s sequel to “The Searcher” brings readers back to rural Ireland, where retired Chicago police detective Cal Hooper is drawn into a long con involving the father of a young teen he has taken under his wing. This tense and moody novel burns slowly and beautifully, its plot unfolding mostly through conversations that hint at lurking trouble. (Viking)

‘The Husbands’

By Holly Gramazio

Fiction | In a world of endless choices — dating apps, shopping, games — why not romantic partners? Gramazio’s 31-year-old protagonist is thrown into a revolving door of possible husbands and possible lives, a fantastical way for her — and readers — to ponder the age-old question: “What if?” (Doubleday)

‘I Heard Her Call My Name’

By Lucy Sante

Nonfiction | In this memoir , Sante, an essayist on art and culture and the author of “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” bounces between her experience of gender transition in 2021 and the eventful and well-told details of her entire life. It’s about the cost of trying to live two different lives: as a man or a woman, but also as a human being and a writer. (Penguin Press)

By Percival Everett

Fiction | Everett is a preeminent American author, and “James” is his sly response to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The title immediately suggests what he is up to with this subversive revision. In these pages, the enslaved man known as Jim can finally declare: “I will not let this condition define me. … My name became my own.” While Everett flashes his own brand of humor, the novel gathers speed and terror like a swelling storm. Its conclusion is equally shocking and exhilarating. (Doubleday)

‘Listen for the Lie’

By Amy Tintera

Fiction | Did Lucy kill her best friend years ago? She doesn’t remember, or so she says, and her attempt to put this all behind her is upended when a podcaster unearths the cold case. Tintera draws on our love of true crime, and podcasts about true crime, to create an entertaining and thoroughly modern mystery novel . (Celadon)

‘Long Island’

By Colm Tóibín

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‘The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony’

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‘The Ministry of Time’

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‘The Spoiled Heart’

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‘This Strange Eventful History’

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‘The Women’

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The Benefits of Meditation and Mindful Movement, According to Researchers

Health & wellness.

Learn about the advantages of mindfulness and meditation, along with easy ways to get started.

Whether you carve out a few minutes each day to quietly sit in meditation or you do a mindful movement practice such as yoga or Tai Chi, cultivating a deeper awareness of your physical and mental state can offer a breadth of benefits for your body and mind. And that is backed up by science. Here's a look at what research has found, along with some expert tips to help you get started.

Reduced Stress Levels—And All That Comes With It

There's increasing evidence that meditation or a mindful movement practice can lead to improvements in physiological markers associated with stress, such as reducing blood pressure and resting heart rate, said Ciarán Friel , EdD, assistant investigator at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, whose work involves exercise physiology and behavioural science.

"One notable finding is that meditation has been linked to better regulation of cortisol, the hormone most associated with your fight-or-flight stress response", he said.

That's a big deal. Cortisol affects almost every organ and tissue in your body, according to the Cleveland Clinic . When it's properly regulated, the hormone optimises metabolic function, reduces inflammation and steadies blood sugar levels.

When your cortisol is off balance and stays elevated throughout the day—rather than just in the morning, its natural surge time—this can lead to increased belly fat, insomnia, muscle weakness and immune system dysfunction. Mindfulness meditation can bring those levels back to where they should be. For example, a 2013 study on medical students found that just four days of meditation significantly lowered cortisol levels.

In addition, a 2021 study looking at people with high stress levels, reported that not only did meditation bring down cortisol levels, but that the effects didn't seem to fade over time.

Better Athletic Performance

Having the right mindset for sports and fitness is essential, and mindfulness could be a way to build that, according to Amishi Jha , PhD, and professor of contemplative neuroscience at the University of Miami.

To determine its efficacy, she and fellow researchers recruited 100 American football players from colleges and had them do four weeks of either relaxation training or mindfulness training. The results, which were published in a 2017 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Enhancement , showed that both methods help reduce anxiety, but that meditation offered better outcomes in terms of focus, engagement and sustained attention during training.

"These results are in line with other research showing benefits that can transfer to athletic performance", Jha said. "That includes emotional well-being and better cognitive function, such as reducing the prevalence of distracting thoughts".

It may help endurance as well, according to a 2020 study that looked at university-level athletes. In that research, a five-week mindfulness training programme resulted in less fatigue during endurance events, as well as improved breathing and posture.

Sharper Mental Function

Better concentration while exercising is a boon to athletic performance, but it also helps with the other tasks of daily life. Meditation has been shown to provide cognitive benefits, and for many people, mindful movement can have the same effect as sitting down to meditate.

For example, a research review in a 2015 issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience noted that "skilful movement" like what's seen with mindful training, such as yoga and Tai Chi, can boost attention, focus, learning and organisation.

Those researchers suggest that the way meditation focuses on sensation in the body—such as feeling your chest and stomach rise and fall with your breath—can sharpen the mind-body connection in a way that reduces wandering thoughts and distraction.

How to Start A Mindfulness Practice

Developing a meditative mind takes time, and in some ways, it's like learning a new language. You'll need awareness, the ability to accept feeling awkward and uncomfortable, and some structure to become fluent. Here are some tips on kicking off the endeavour:

1. It may not feel relaxing at first.

A research review looking at 83 studies on meditation found that about 65 percent of them reported at least some "meditation-adverse events" such as anxiety and gastrointestinal upset. That's because sitting with your thoughts can bring up some difficult emotions, said Melinda Nasti , holistic therapist and director of spiritual wellness at Northwell Health in New York.

Knowing what might happen is helpful, along with techniques such as gently pivoting towards more objectivity—observing your thoughts instead of sinking into them—and counting your breaths. Coming back to awareness about your physical sensations may help break that overthinking cycle.

2. Try using meditation apps.

There are several apps that offer guided meditation, breathing exercises, mindful movement sequences and evening wind-down visualisations, Friel said. An app such as Headspace , for example, has all of these as well as new selections daily and "soundscapes" you can use as background for your meditation.

"What's great about these apps is that they're geared towards helping you get started, and you can adapt them to your needs", Friel said. "Just like any other form of exercise, some days will be easier than others, and although your meditation skills will improve over time, having a resource like an app can give you a useful framework for your practice".

3. Think moments, not sessions.

With practice, you can extend meditation and mindful movement sessions, but if you're just getting started, it's better to incorporate mindful moments into your everyday activity, Nasti suggested.

"What colour is the sky today?" she suggested asking. "Do the trees have buds? Just being intentionally present and noticing your surroundings 'counts' as mindfulness, and if you're walking, that can be a form of mindful movement".

4. Most of all, be patient.

Most likely, you'll begin to see the benefits of meditation sooner than you might think, but bear in mind that they may be subtle at first, Nasti said.

For example, you may be a bit less reactive to stressful situations, or you may fall asleep a few minutes sooner than you would otherwise, or you may find yourself having more "living in the present" moments during the day. As you continue to practise mindful movement meditation or regular meditation sessions, these benefits may become more pronounced.

"Have patience with yourself, because this is a practice that will grow over time", Nasti said. "Put small changes and mindful moments into every day, and over time, it will be much easier to sit and meditate for longer sessions. Once you've done that, you'll see the positive effects on your body, mind and spirit".

Words by Elizabeth Millard

Explore NTC

Free guidance from trainers and experts to strengthen your body and mind.

Originally published: 10 August 2022

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