syllogisms, without getting antsy. He went from being a kid who used to get thrown out of class in high school to being a kid who won awards in college.
What happened? In a word, he learned to focus. Hour after hour on retreat, he brought his attention back to his breath. Again and again. Until he could place his attention on something and it would mostly just stay there. I’m not saying Craig is some perfect human. I live with him, so I know that just this week he left his keys in the ignition of our car at the mall, forgot his phone on an airplane, and got overwhelmed with deadlines for this very book. But I can say he’s mostly pretty focused a lot of the time. And that makes him a really decent life partner, a good friend, and somebody who, generally speaking, gets stuff done.
So it’s not just in the research. Focus can change your days. Because you need focus to make things happen. You need focus to listen to the people you love, earn money, and keep yourself on track in the midst of the deafening storm of information you wade through every hour.
Mindfulness, the simple act of training attention, leads to just that kind of focus. The question then becomes, What will you do with that focus?
Meditation Might Make You a Better Human
A few years ago a super-cool scientist named Helen Weng did a study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was then a graduate student. It was published in one of the best psych journals around, and the results blew everybody away.10
Helen wanted to study compassion. In particular, she wanted to know if meditation training could, perhaps, increase compassionate action.
To find out, she took some undergrads and divided them into two groups. The groups were just about identical in age and gender, and at the beginning of the study they tested fairly evenly on baseline compassion rates. She then sent the two groups through two different trainings. The first group went through a two-week meditation training focused on compassion. The second group went through a two-week cognitive reappraisal training that was designed to increase positive thoughts.
To measure progress, Helen gave everybody an fMRI scan before and after the trainings. At the end, she also had everybody play a game that was designed to test altruism. For the game, she gave everybody twenty bucks. Then, during the game, participants in the study watched a “dictator” steal money from a “victim.” Of course, the dictator and victim weren’t real players, but the study subjects didn’t know that. They just knew that they had this twenty bucks that they’d been given. And they knew they could give some of that money to the victim. And if they gave some of their money to the victim, the rules of the game would force the dictator to reimburse the victim. In other words, they could give some of their very own money, money they’d earned from being in this arduous study, to right the wrong.
Curious what Helen found?
First off, she found that those who underwent the meditation training showed greater activation in the brain circuits usually associated with empathy, emotion regulation, and positive affect. So that’s already interesting.
But here’s the real kicker: the folks who did two weeks of compassion meditation gave nearly twice as much money as the other group.
So meditation training not only impacted the way people felt about the victim (that’s the brain part), it also changed the way they acted toward the victim. They were literally more willing to make a sacrifice to improve another person’s situation. Pretty cool, right?
So maybe meditation can make us better humans—more compassionate, more ready to respond to others. And in fact, there’s other research on this now, too. One study I like a lot, which came out of Yale a few years ago, showed that teaching white people kindness meditation reduces their bias toward racial minorities.11 Other studies have shown that meditation increases social connectedness,12 that it boosts compassionate responses to suffering,13 that it can reduce prejudice toward homeless people,14 that it combats ageism,15 and on and on. This compassion effect is a big deal. Our culture is multicultural, multi-everything, has always been, and is getting more so every day. It’s pretty obvious that we’re going to have to find a way to all live together. The evidence suggests that meditation can help with that.
AND ANOTHER THING…
Mindfulness Can Dismantle White Supremacy
As I’ve already stated, I’m