How the Body Knows Its Mind_The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel

by Sian Beilock

  B. Alan Wallace, a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar, led the volunteers through their meditative practices. People learned to focus their attention on one stable aspect of their body, such as their breathing, and to recognize when their attention had wandered off and to rein it back in. At three points during the retreat—once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once toward the end—each person took part in a series of tests designed to measure concentration and vigilance. This amounted to watching a procession of lines move across the screen and signaling, by pressing a mouse, whenever they saw a line that was slightly shorter than the rest. This task demands intense and sustained concentration and is quite tedious.

  As the UC Davis group mentions in the report of their findings, historical accounts from the Buddhist contemplative tradition describe meditation practices that are designed to improve sustained attention. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that people got better at doing the attention tasks over their intense three-month meditation experience. This sort of improvement, importantly, wasn’t seen in those volunteers who were simply waiting their turn to go to the retreat. As a group, the meditators exhibited superior attention skills.

  Meditation also had an impact on the body. An analysis of samples of the meditators’ blood showed a significant increase in telomerase, an enzyme that has been linked to being healthy and disease-free. Some cells in the human body constantly divide throughout life—skin cells and cells in our digestive tract, to name a few types. Others divide less often. The enzyme telomerase plays an important role in successful cell division, as it allows for the replacement of telomeres (short pieces of DNA located at the end of the chromosomes) during the dividing process. When cells divide, the end of the chromosome is often lost, along with the information it contains. Telomeres help protect these ends during division. As a result, healthy cells are maintained after division, not fusing with other cells or rearranging in such a way as to lead to abnormalities and cancer. Meditation may lead to emotional changes that help regulate this anti-aging enzyme.6

  The findings about mediation’s lasting impact are really striking. Five months after the retreat, laptops were sent to the participants’ homes with instructions for administering the attention tasks to themselves. The scientists found that there was still a positive impact from the retreat. Those who had taken part in the retreat hadn’t seemed to lose much ground from the last testing session in Colorado. The people who maintained the biggest boost were those who were still practicing meditation at home, even if they were doing it for only several minutes a day.7 Booster shots of meditation seem to be enough to sustain the concentration benefits of intense meditation sessions.

  Meditation training could benefit many professionals—air traffic controllers, pilots, even referees in professional sports—who need vigilance to successfully perform their jobs. A lapse of concentration, not minding the present, could mean missing a problem in a jet’s path, missing the runway altogether, or missing an error or foul. Consider the pilots of Northwest Flight 188, who were in a heated discussion about airline policies and overflew their destination by more than a hundred miles.8 Perhaps meditation training would have ensured that the pilots stayed on task.

  * * *

  Back at the Casa Grande Mountain Retreat in Puerto Rico, as I was finishing my meditation lesson, Jack said, for what may have been the tenth time in our two hours together, “Focus on your body posture, on how you are sitting, on your shoulders and back. Your mind will follow.” Jack teaches a combination of meditative traditions, but his focus on the body reminds me of a relatively new meditative practice (at least new to the West) called integrative body-mind training (IBMT) that scientists have recently been showing has a powerful impact on the mind. Adopted from traditional Chinese medicine, IBMT incorporates body relaxation, mental imagery, and mindfulness training, guided by a coach and assistive CD. It puts a special emphasis on cooperation between the body and mind and stresses a state of “restful alertness.”9 The idea is that a successful meditative state is achieved through an optimization of connections between mind and body, particularly, that the body has the power to change the mind. In IBMT, people learn to form a high degree of awareness between body and mind. IBMT does not stress efforts to control thoughts; you adjust your focus gradually through awareness of posture and body relaxation so that unwanted thoughts are less likely to co-opt your attention and distract you.

  You don’t have to be an experienced meditator to enjoy the benefits of IBMT. A recent study showed that it can change our brain for the better with eleven hours of practice, even if we have no previous meditation experience. Neuroscientists observed improvements in the nerve fiber tracts connecting frontal areas of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex to other brain structures after eleven hours of IBMT conducted over a one-month period. The ACC is part of a brain network important in the development of self-control and emotion regulation.10 In another study, just five hours of IBMT over a two-week period led to a 60 percent reduction in smoking among a group of smokers.11

  As someone who is always pressed for time, I was definitely interested in these sorts of results. But I did wonder how such short bouts of IBMT could be so effective, so I did some research and came to the conclusion that IBMT seems to be a lot like riding a bike. When you are a child and first get on a bike, you tend to pay attention to every aspect of your performance—how you are balancing, holding the handlebars, what you are doing with your feet, arms, and hands. This constant vigilance requires a heavy dose of input from the prefrontal cortex (where our focus of attention is largely housed). But as you get better and better, you reach a point at which all of a sudden you don’t have to pay attention to everything you’re doing. Indeed studies of activities like bike riding or hitting a golf ball reveal that, as people improve, these activities are performed largely outside conscious awareness. Something similar is thought to happen in meditation practices such as IBMT. There are noticeable changes in brain states that go hand in hand with meditative experience, one being less involvement from brain regions involved in consciously directing our attention.12 Short bouts of IBMT might do the trick because people begin to automatically deal with a wandering mind, even when they aren’t meditating.

  IBMT is all about progressing from a highly self-conscious practice to an effortless one. Strengthening the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain allows our mind to run on autopilot.13 While they are in a deep meditative state, practitioners totally forget the self and the body. The prefrontal cortex takes a break.

  Whether you want to hit a five-foot putt to win the tournament, nail a stress-filled pitch to a client, or ace an important test, meditation may help regulate your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors when you need to perform at your best under stress. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, two politicians who are constantly performing under pressure, have attested to the power of meditation in helping to reprogram their mind. They use meditation practices as a way to rein in their wandering mind and combat the stress of living in the public eye. And it doesn’t take years of practice. Even short practices with techniques such as IBMT can improve your thinking and alleviate stress.

  When people are under stress, cortisol (a hormone produced by the adrenal gland) increases and is associated with stress-related changes in the body, such as higher blood pressure and a quick burst of energy. Measuring the concentration of cortisol in blood or saliva can provide reliable information about how stressed a person is at a particular moment. When psychologists want to study how reactive to stress people are, they use a test in which they ask subjects to do some mental math out loud (say, continually subtract 47, beginning at 1,934, as quickly and accurately as possible). In most people, this test produces a sharp increase in cortisol concentrations in their blood or saliva. This spike in cortisol can be reduced by just a few weeks of integrative mind-body training.14

  IBMT also induces changes in self-control when people aren’t trying to focu
s on anything in particular. Indeed when researchers looked at the brains of smokers when they were simply resting after their meditation training, they found increased activity in brain areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex, brain areas related to self-control. Meditation training may make self-control easier and more automatic—a real coup for smokers who are trying to quit and have to rein in their impulses to act on those urges to light up.

  There seems to be real power in meditation like IBMT that combines both physical and mental training. If half a dozen to a dozen hours of meditation can change the brain and help enhance performance on the playing field, in the classroom, or in the boardroom, then it may be time to rethink our weekend activities. After all, that’s less time than it would take to watch four football games or repaint the bedroom.

  Musical Bodies and Minds

  Every Tuesday for the past six months I have taken a violin lesson in the River North area of Chicago. It’s actually a pretty funny scene. I go in for my 3:30 lesson just as a five-year-old kid and her mother come out. When I leave my lesson, another five-year-old enters, parent in tow. It seems as if the mothers and fathers of these musical kids are always wondering where my child is; it’s not until they see me holding the violin case that they realize I am the one taking the lesson. I played the violin from age eight until I was eighteen. I stopped when I went off to college and got immersed in other life pursuits. Now, as a thirty-something adult, I have come back to music, struggling to learn finger positions, bowing, and stance, activities that as a kid I never thought much about; they came so fluently to me then.

  The first few months playing the violin again were the most frustrating. I came to each lesson eager to make progress in terms of the pieces I was playing; I wanted to go from simple scales to Bach minuets. But I made little progress. It wasn’t rare to spend an entire lesson on my stance or the placement of my fingers around the bow. I was growing impatient. It was then that my teacher, Jenny, explained that she was coaching my body first, before she taught me the music. This body-centered focus makes a lot of sense when considered in the context of meditation techniques like IBMT. By training my body, I would develop the control and balance needed to play concertos. We rarely think about how great performances occur, how our body gets us there. Jenny’s idea was that putting my body in the right position would actually make it easier for me to understand the music.

  Teaching the body also frees up the prefrontal cortex and the working memory housed there to play sonatas and concertos at the highest possible level. Just as in learning to ride a bike, first you must devote a lot of working memory and conscious control to how you are holding your body. With time, however, these movements become more automatic and habitual in such a way that your brainpower is available to devote to musical theory and interpretation.

  Molding the body as a first step in teaching the violin may be especially effective for young kids, given that cognitive horsepower develops with age. Because children have less working memory than adults, getting the motor parts of playing down pat allows them to use all their conscious control for musical interpretation. And because the prefrontal cortex isn’t thought to reach full maturity until well into early adulthood, other brain areas like the sensory and motor cortex have a lot of input in what is learned early in life.15 Thus teaching the motor aspects of music first, especially when we are young, may be beneficial, as the areas of the brain that primarily control movement are poised to take in information and help us commit it to memory.

  Most great violinists play beautiful music that resonates from their instrument, but their body is often involved too. Even masters such as Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio at age four and plays sitting down, moves his body in fluid and balanced ways during his performances. The role the body plays in musical expression is one reason why teaching that helps people learn to control their body is so popular in music schools. Take the Alexander technique, which music teachers think of as “an owner’s or operation manual which helps students to re-educate and restore beneficial postures and movements.”16 Founder of the mind-body method that took his name, Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in Tasmania in 1869. In his thirties he emigrated to England, where he lived and worked as an actor for most of his life. His acting career was almost cut short when he began developing unexplained symptoms of laryngitis, losing his voice with the stress of an upcoming performance. He visited several doctors to find a cure for his problem, but they were of little help. It wasn’t until Alexander examined his body posture in a mirror one day that he noticed something unusual: whenever he was about to speak his lines, he would tighten his neck muscles, pull his head back, and suck in air through his mouth. This sort of posture couldn’t have been good for delivering his lines, and he had a hunch it might be responsible for his voice loss too. Through careful observation of his own body movements, Alexander eventually taught himself how to loosen the tightness in his neck and head. Lo and behold, his attacks of laryngitis also went away. Amazed at the power of reeducating his body, Alexander started teaching his newly discovered kinesthetic sense to others and called it the Alexander technique.

  Alexander noted, “You translate everything, whether physical or mental or spiritual, into muscular tension.”17 Retraining people to incorporate breathing and a body-centered focus into their daily lives could change how they think.

  The Alexander technique is a mandatory part of training in many leading music, theater, and dance schools around the world, which believe that it not only improves musical and technical skills but also lowers stress and anxiety in performers.18 Learning how to control the body, to quiet tension and stress, can have a profound impact on the mind. Michael Langham, director of the Juilliard School in New York, has commented, “Alexander students rid themselves of bad postural habits and are helped to reach, with their bodies and minds, an enviable degree of freedom of expression.”19

  The power of the Alexander technique extends beyond the musical world. We often think that our poor posture or back problems or how we carry ourselves when we walk is a part of who we are, something we inherited. But we actually develop many bad movement habits through the types of repeated activities we do every day. Sitting at the computer, we hunch over the keyboard, shoulders at our ears, motionless. Though people once moved around the office constantly, to make a copy, send a fax, or get a drink of water, most of these activities have now been replaced by the click of a button, an email or a text, or a large water bottle. This sedentary lifestyle can have a negative impact on our body, but it also takes a toll on our mind.

  Many workplaces recognize that you can reduce strains—tight neck and shoulders, sore wrists, and lower back pain—that accompany sitting for long hours with a good chair and the appropriate desk. But no matter how high-tech your workplace is, if you sit slumped at your desk all day, your body will show signs of tension and stress. The Alexander technique teaches that the only way around these strains is to have a better idea of what your body is doing. Don’t ignore those aches and pains in order to get the job done, but consider them to be alarm signals that you need to take action. Just as Alexander changed his posture and regained his voice, you can develop body awareness that helps you feel better physically and mentally. Through touch and gentle body guidance, Alexander teachers help you become aware of how you perform everyday actions and take the tension out of them. Sit upright, tap the keyboard lightly, and release neck tension—these simple adjustments can go a long way to help you be more in control of your entire body and mind. Teachers of the Alexander technique argue that simple adjustments like these will not only lead to more comfort physically but that you will be better able to operate mentally as well.20

  I think of the Alexander technique as an extreme form of integrative mind-body training. You gain a high degree of awareness of your body, which helps you focus on what’s important and feel better; it can even help lift you out of a depressed mood. Knowing your body is key to getting control of your mind an
d your performance.

  The Alexander technique can help reduce back pain.21 It has also been shown to help people with Parkinson’s combat both their movement disorders and mental disorders such as depression, which affects approximately half of those who develop Parkinson’s disease. Depression is not just a reaction to having this disease. Parkinson’s is often related to changes in the production of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. When dopamine levels circulating in the brain are drastically reduced, movements become shaky and feelings of anxiety and depression can occur.22

  A few years ago, a group of researchers in London asked patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease to take part in a three-month study of the Alexander technique.23 A teacher used hands-on techniques to help patients learn how they can control their movements and balance in everyday activities. There were two control groups, one of which didn’t get any treatment, and another that got massages instead of Alexander lessons. Patients were randomly assigned to one of these three groups, a crucial part of any valid study, but a protocol that wasn’t always followed in previous studies on the Alexander technique.

  Both before and after the study, the London researchers took a battery of measures designed to establish the patients’ basic motor skills and mood. People were asked to rate how easy or difficult it was to perform actions such as walking, getting dressed and undressed, and turning over in bed—both when they felt at their best and also when they felt at their worst. They also filled out several common measures of depression. At the end of the study, patients who had taken part in the Alexander technique training reported that it was easier to perform daily activities. Most striking was that people who got the training were also comparatively less depressed than patients in the control groups.

  Other researchers have noticed a link between movement disorders such as dystonia, characterized by involuntary jerks and tremors, and depression. An inability to control the body propagates up to the mind, making it hard for folks to control their negative thoughts and feelings. But learning strategies to take back their body (or at least be more aware of what they’re doing with their body) helps to change this.