Happiness, Meditation and the Brain

Disclaimer: In this blog post I cover some very complicated issues presented at a retreat. I hope that I come close to the target as I try to explain them. I am not a neural scientist and do not fully understand the concepts I relay, but I have done my best is formulating my understanding of them.

When I went shopping for a faith a couple years back, the NPR Science Friday episode that covered the Dalai Lama and scientists studying happiness caught my attention. The show documented a connection between Buddhist practice and happiness. I couldn't have been more intrigued, so I started looking into Buddhism and eventually decided to dive in and start my practice.

Part of my practice is attending our sangha's day-long retreats. The recent Rick Hanson retreat covered meditation and the brain. Part of that talk included a discussion on happiness.

Hanson talked about synaptic patterns and how they form. He explained that "those that fire together wire together," meaning that when a person has repeated thought patterns, synapses fire; those firings form a connection, thereby forming a neural pattern. For example, a person who is ruminating about an argument she had with her partner is solidifying that negative pattern through her rumination. Then she sees her partner, and those negative synapses are triggered, and a negative attitude toward her partner is stimulated.

One of the more intriguing elements of this is that negative thought processes "wire together" much more quickly than do positive thought processes. Hanson pointed out to us that this serves a biological, evolutionary purpose. A primate living in the wild must pay more attention to those things that could kill her than those things that bring her pleasure. It's a matter of survival.

Hanson's point in discussing this is that we need to consciously focus more on the positive thoughts to encourage our brains to think positively. Because negative patterns formulate more quickly and more easily than do positive, we must work harder at developing the positive. Meditation, specifically metta meditation, does this. When a meditator sits and focuses on loving, kind feelings associated with others, even toward a person with whom she has difficulties, she is solidifying that positive synaptic association. The result is a happier and kinder person.

As part of our practice that day, Hanson lead us through a guided meditation using the following steps:

1. Setting intention
2. Relaxing the body
3. Focusing on feelings of safety
4. Evoking positive emotions
5. Absorbing the benefits

Step four had a profound effect on me - during this step I felt euphoric. The process is to focus on all the things in your life that make you happy. Doing so after having done steps one through three - for me - resulted in intense happiness and a very quiet mind. While going through my list of things that make me happy (my children, my marriage, my job, my sangha, my dogs, my friends, etc.), I started listing things that I would normally consider a negative. I was moved by this connection - that I could learn to deeply love the problems and the people that bring me strife.

One of the things I so dearly love is science, particularly medical science. I love to read about new discoveries in science. At this retreat Hanson illustrated just how far the field of neural science has come when he said that in the last twenty years we have doubled our understanding of the brain and that scientists expect that to double again in the next twenty years.

The biggest discovery has been our understanding of the relationship between the brain and the mind: no longer do scientists believe that the brain only affects the mind, but they now also believe that the mind affects the brain, as illustrated in the "those that fire together wire together" concept I mentioned above.

That is huge. Everyone should know this.

Yes, hormonal imbalances can affect mood, but we also now know that thought patterns can affect biological functions that happen in the brain, thereby either encouraging or discouraging happiness.

This is good news: We have some control over happiness.