Mental Architecture

Does meditation work? What the slides didn’t have room for: how the numbers were counted, where the practice came from, and what each trial measured.

The app study counted far more than 47%. Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert collected about 250,000 reports from roughly 5,000 people, and analyzed 2,250 adults. In nearly every activity they listed, minds wandered at least 30% of the time. When a mind wandered, the thought was pleasant 42.5% of the time, neutral 31%, unpleasant 26.5%. Even the pleasant ones left people no happier than staying where they were.

The Buddha’s breathing text does not stop at one breath. It runs through sixteen steps, in four groups of four: the body, feelings, the mind, and the qualities of mind. Every group starts from the same plain act of noticing the breath, long or short.

Kabat-Zinn’s first hospital course was ten weeks long and was called the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program. He took a few practices out of their Buddhist setting and taught them as plain exercises, for patients with chronic pain that other treatments had not helped. By 1992 it was eight weeks, and it was called mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR. His definition of the idea: paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.

The scanner study: fourteen experienced practitioners, twenty minutes of breath focus, a button to press at the moment of noticing. The scientists described four phases, mind wandering, awareness, shifting and sustained attention, and each phase was tied to a different brain network.

In the Santa Barbara study, the mindfulness group also practiced ten minutes a day on top of the class. The gain in reading scores came with a gain in working memory, how much a person can hold in mind at once. Neither appeared in the nutrition group.

In the anxiety trial, the adults were 18 to 75, treated at three medical centers in the United States. The diagnoses included generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder and agoraphobia. On the 1 to 7 severity scale, ratings fell 1.35 points with the course and 1.43 with the medication. The course was a two-and-a-half-hour class every week, one retreat day, and forty-five minutes of practice at home each day.

The depression analysis used each patient’s own records from nine of the ten eligible trials, 1,329 people with 1,258 analyzed, not only the published averages. In statistical terms, the relapse risk came out at 0.69 against usual care and 0.79 against other active treatments, which is where the 31% and the 21% come from.

In the 136-trial review, about three quarters of the adults were women, and the programs ran in community settings.

In the smoking study, both programs met eight times over four weeks, so the 17-week check measured who stayed quit long after the classes ended.

Where to read the originals: the Anapanasati Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 118) for the breathing instruction. Epictetus, Discourses, book 4, chapter 12, for the warning about attention, and his Handbook, section 4, for the bath. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, his private notebook.

When did your mind last leave a page you were reading, and where did it go?

Sources: Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010 (Science); Hasenkamp et al., 2012 (NeuroImage); Brewer et al., 2011 (PNAS); Mrazek et al., 2013 (Psychological Science); Hoge et al., 2022 (JAMA Psychiatry); Polusny et al., 2015 (JAMA); individual-patient analysis of nine trials, 2016 (JAMA Psychiatry); Galante et al., 2021 (PLOS Medicine); Brewer et al., 2011 (Drug and Alcohol Dependence).

Mental Architecture

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