Chapter
Seven
Attention
You may be irritated by such stories. You may think that the way the brain directs
its resources has nothing to do with wisdom. Yet there have been many studies of
the effects of Zen and other meditative training on brain function, and it seems
that the development of attention may be critical.
The very earliest studies began back in the 1950s when intrepid researchers car-
ried cumbersome EEG equipment up to the monasteries and mountain caves of
Indian yogis, and recorded brain waves while banging cymbals, flashing lights,
and plunging the yogis’ feet in cold water (Bagchi and Wenger, 1957). The yogis
were not distracted by these violent intrusions, and for a while this seemed to
confirm the difference between their concentrative meditation and the open
meditation of a group of Japanese adepts who appeared to remain alert to sounds
and lights with no sign of habituation (Kasamatsu and Hirai, 1966). Sadly, this
simple picture was not confirmed by the conflicting results and hypotheses that
followed (Fenwick, 1987; West, 1987), and it was many years before research into
the neuroscience of meditation began to make progress again, with discoveries
concerning changes in functional connectivity, shifts in attention, and changes in
the default mode network.
James Austin is an American neurologist who undertook extensive Zen training
in Japan and has since explored the relationships between Zen and the brain.
Reviewing numerous studies, he concluded that the two main types of medita-
tion, concentrative and receptive, differentially train one or other of the two main
attentional systems in the brain: the dorsal system that mediates purposeful, vol-
untary, or high-level attention, and the ventral attention system that controls vig-
ilance, alerting, and involuntary attention (Austin, 1998, 2009). Furthermore, he
argues that the top-down skills of the dorsal system are relatively easy to acquire
and can be seen in short-term studies with novice meditators, while ‘advanced
meditators may slowly be developing more “opening-up” meditative styles and
engaging in a range of subtle, global, more bottom-up receptive practices’ (Aus-
tin, 2009, p. 43).
Similar conclusions are drawn by Antoine Lutz from his neurophenomenological
research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His group found that focused
meditation involves training the neural systems associated with monitoring con-
flict (e.g. the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex),
paying selective attention (e.g. the temporal-parietal junction, ventro-lateral pre-
frontal cortex, frontal eye fields, and intraparietal sulcus), and sustaining attention
(e.g. right frontal and parietal areas and the thalamus). By contrast, open medi-
tation does not involve an explicit attentional focus, and so should rely on brain
regions implicated in monitoring, vigilance, and disengaging attention from
distracting stimuli (Lutz et al., 2008).
Later experiments compared mindful self-awareness (with emotion- and sensa-
tion-based prompts, like ‘feel into yourself ’) against self-referential thinking (with
cues to thinking: ‘reflect who you are’) in novice and experienced meditators. For
the self-awareness group, they found deactivation of prefrontal and precuneus
areas associated with mind-wandering and the default mode network, especially
in long-term meditators, and in both groups there was greater activation of areas
associated with somatosensory attention (J. Lutz, 2016, pp. 21–34). Many subse-
quent findings support this distinction, confirming the proposal that focused and