This research on neuroplasticity has been out there for years. But it hasn’t quite trickled out into the general consciousness. We still think of our brains as “hardwired”; we still believe that how we respond to situations—whether cognitively or emotionally—is an immutable fact, a facet of our personality or identity, something we have to deal with or work around but can’t actually change. That it even occurred to me during my “attentional” crisis that I could change my brain instead of my entire life is a consequence of my particular choice of career. When you’re faced with a crisis like the one I was in, the natural approach might be to figure out how to change your life so you can cope better—switch jobs, drop responsibilities, and so on. Yet to me, nothing was particularly negotiable. I was already on the right path, doing what I loved. There wasn’t anything I was wanting to change—except for the way I was feeling in the midst of it all. And as a neuroscientist, I already had an intimate knowledge of the brain’s incredible neuroplasticity. Brain injuries like those suffered by Gordon, the paraplegic I met all those years ago as a hospital volunteer, gave me my first inkling of what might be possible when it comes to neuroplasticity. After damage, the brain could dramatically recover some of the functions that it had seemingly lost. It would take time, practice, and persistence, but it was possible. This told me that the brain could change. So the next step, after going from injury to recovery, was to take people who are already healthy and provide them with opportunities for repeated practice. The hope was that with repetition they could optimize some of their functions. Could we use the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity to make the mind healthier, more tailored to the challenges of our times?

I could change my brain—that much I was certain of. What I didn’t know, exactly, was how.

That same spring when my teeth went numb, the eminent neuroscientist Richard (Richie) Davidson happened to come to campus to give a lecture in my department. Today, Richie heads up a thriving center focused on meditation research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Center for Healthy Minds, but when he came to Penn in the early 2000s he hadn’t started speaking at length about his recent research into meditation. Toward the end of his lecture, he put up two separate fMRI brain images on the screen side by side: one of a person induced to be in a positive mood, and one of a person induced to be in a negative mood. To get these images, researchers triggered emotional responses in participants by having them vividly recall happy or sad memories, playing upbeat or mournful music, or having them watch movie clips of contrasting mood. Meanwhile, the giant MRI magnet, buzzing and beeping with its radio frequency pulses, captured the brain activation data.

During the Q&A, I raised my hand. “How do you get the negative brain to look like the positive one?”

He answered without hesitation. “Meditation.”

I couldn’t believe he’d used that word. This was a brain science lecture—how could he bring up meditation? It seemed as outlandish as mentioning astrology to an audience of astrophysicists. Meditation was not a topic worthy of scientific pursuit! Nobody would take you seriously. Plus, I had my own personal reasons for being skeptical.

Growing up, my dad was committed to meditation practice. I remember stumbling into my parents’ bedroom early in the morning, bleary-eyed, to see my dad showered and dressed—mala (prayer beads) in hand, eyes closed, still as a statue. Although I didn’t often travel back to the Indian city where I’d been born, when I was about ten, we traveled to India for the summer. One of the big events for my family that year was a Hindu rite-of-passage ceremony for a cousin, a boy who was the same age as me. During the ceremony, the priest whispered something in his ear. I later discovered that what he’d whispered was a special mantra, a short passage in the ancient language of Sanskrit. He was to use prayer beads with 108 beads and silently, deliberately repeat the mantra 108 times as a daily practice.

I was intrigued—it seemed like being invited into a secret club, very important and adult. I asked my mom what the mantra was, and when I might receive mine. That’s when she broke the news to me: I wouldn’t receive the mantra given to all boys . . . because I was a girl. In the Hindu tradition, only boys got to have this ceremony, and only boys received the mantra. This gave my mom no pleasure, since she always wanted her daughters to be treated equally, but this was the cultural reality.

That was it for me. I was done with meditation. If meditation wouldn’t accept me, I wouldn’t accept it. I lumped it all together and packed it away, boxing it up in my mind in the same container as the other outdated attitudes about gender roles, as well as all the other old traditions I chafed against. I was not going to learn to cook Indian food to be the perfect Indian wife, and I was certainly not going to meditate. So, when Richie Davidson said the word meditation in that seminar, every part of me—the scientist, the professor, the outraged young girl getting shut out of a family tradition—pushed back in opposition. I brushed his comment away, but it nagged at me.

Meanwhile, in the lab, we were looking for new routes for improving attention, mood, and performance. We tried many things—devices, brain-training games, and other strategies like mood inductions. In one study, we investigated a new device that many students called their “secret to academic success” because it made them feel more attentive. It was a small, handheld gadget that connected to earbuds and goggles. Users turned it on to experience blinking lights and soothing sounds. You didn’t have to do anything—you passively listened to the sounds and watched the lights. It was wildly popular—in one tech-happy Asian country, people were buying it for their children, and college students said it was single-handedly responsible for helping them pass the national exams. The manufacturer claimed that it would increase focus, improve memory, and reduce stress. So, did it, really?

People who tried it said it did. But we didn’t have to take their word for it—my team and I could test it in the lab and find out definitively.

We ran one basic attention study, then another just to be sure. In both, we gave participants computer tests that evaluated their attention, then sent them home with these devices and instructions to use them for thirty minutes per day for two weeks. When we brought the participants back in to retest, here’s how much of an impact the device had had on their attentional performance: zero. There was no change, not even a hint of a directional trend.

We tried a lot of the new stuff. Maybe it was time to try something . . . old.

A short time after Richie Davidson’s talk, I bought a book called Meditation for Beginners, by Jack Kornfield, a longtime teacher and author of mindfulness books, which came with a CD of guided meditation practices. The first time I played it, I didn’t expect much—I’d never done any kind of guided program before and didn’t think it would really be my thing. But it wasn’t at all what I thought meditation would be. I liked Kornfield’s voice and style, as well as his running commentary directing me to pay attention to my breath and notice my mind-wandering. There were no special mantras, no chanting, no instructions to contort my body or visualize energy, as I’d feared and expected. And the striking thing was that he seemed to know my mind! He predicted that it would wander, resist, push away, criticize, and get bored. He advised that, when you notice the mind “doing what minds do, simply return your attention back to the breath.” It wasn’t overly earnest or spiritual; quite the opposite. It was ordinary, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact.

“Meditation” is a broad category of human activity. It’s a general term, like “sports.” If someone asked whether you have any hobbies, you wouldn’t simply say, “I play sports.” You’d tell them you play tennis, or basketball, or ultimate frisbee. Sure, they all require general physical fitness, but there are sport-specific physical skills and aptitude you’d also need to develop for the particular sport you play. And the training drills differ for gymnastics as opposed to, say, hockey. Meditation is similar. It involves engaging in a particular set of practices to cultivate specific mental qualities. There are many forms of meditation that have been offered up across human history from the world’s wisdom traditions: philosophical, religious, and spiritual. The suite of practices—the mind’s “workout”—differs based on the particular type of meditation you do—be it transcendental, compassion, mindfulness meditation, or something else. With transcendental meditation, for example, you aim to achieve a “transcendent” state, connecting with something larger than yourself, while compassion meditation is about cultivating concern for the suffering of others and acting on behalf of reducing this suffering. The Kornfield book I read focused on mindfulness meditation—anchoring your attention in the present moment and experiencing it without “editorializing”: making up a story about what’s happening or will happen.

Over the next month, I practiced daily, adding a couple of minutes each week, eventually working up to a twenty-minute practice every day. And I began to feel the slow return of sensation to my mouth. My jaw stopped aching all the time. I could feel my teeth again. I could talk with ease! It gave me enormous relief. And then I noticed that I could see my husband’s face again. I mean really see it—notice his expressions, key in fast to what he was feeling or trying to communicate. It happened with my son, too. I felt so much more connected to both of them, almost effortlessly. And at work, I was feeling more present, more effective. I had a sense of being highly aware and anchored in my body, in my life. Where had I been?

Nothing else in my life had changed—I still had the same demanding job, the same grants to write and classes to teach, students to mentor, lab to run and colleagues to debate, the same nightly bedtime story to read to my son about the wumps (more like a cross between a camel and a donkey than a guinea pig, now that I was paying attention). But something had changed—I felt completely different. I had managed to close that gap, to move back into my body, into my mind, into my surroundings. I felt capable and in control, confident that I could face challenges and work to overcome them. I felt powerfully alive.

And I got curious about why this was happening. Through this meditation practice, I found myself feeling dramatically different after just a month or two. It seemed a little bit like I’d just miraculously landed into feeling better. Yet I knew it wasn’t a miracle. Something had happened to my attention system, and I needed to figure out what. I knew a lot about the brain science of attention, but I had not come across anything in the scientific literature on its link with mindfulness practice. I thought, I need to take this to the lab.

Road Testing Mindfulness

I knew that designing an actual scientific study would be quite a bit different from the small-yet-impactful experiment I had conducted on myself—committing to a daily mindfulness practice to “test” whether I could feel better, clearer, sharper. This study would have nothing to do with my personal feelings and everything to do with being rigorous in my methods to determine whether objective performance could improve in people I didn’t even know. When we do a scientific study of attention, we set out to test specific questions, which are bound by detailed parameters and controls. The first thing we would need to know before asking specific research questions was how much time a person would need to engage in mindfulness exercises in order for us to be able to track the impact with objective metrics. Hours? Days? Weeks?

The best way to start, I decided, was to go big.

The Shambhala Mountain Center, outside of Denver, Colorado, is surrounded by the silver and green of aspen and birch, the ice blue of the Western sky, and the sharp purple ridges of the Rocky Mountains. The place is a retreat in the true sense of the word—removed from the rest of the world, from the usual business of life, even from cell phone service. Most important, for our purposes, the center conducts a monthlong intensive meditation retreat in which participants engage in a variety of activities mindfully for twelve hours per day, with most of those hours spent in formal meditation. If we were going to see an impact on our laboratory metrics of attention from mindfulness practice, we’d see it here—or it probably didn’t exist.

Members of my research team flew to Denver with a suitcase full of laptops, each one loaded with the same kind of attention tests we used in the lab. At the retreat center, they set up a table at the check-in spot and, as people arrived, handed out flyers asking for volunteers. “Participate in a study on attention and mindfulness meditation!” the flyers said, and many people, most of whom had been meditators for years, perked up, intrigued. The next morning, before the retreat began, volunteers arrived in groups of five, sat down at the laptop stations, and were guided through a series of tasks designed to gather data and give us a baseline: What was their starting point? In terms of attentional functionality, what was their “normal”?

One of these tests was called the Sustained Attention to Response Task, or SART. This test was developed in the late 1990s, and, as the name suggests, it tests a person’s ability to sustain attention. Here’s how it works: participants sit in front of a computer screen where a number appears for half a second, then vanishes; a half second later, another number appears, then vanishes; and so on for twenty minutes. Their job: Press the space bar every time a number appears—unless the number is 3. Then, don’t press. By design, the number 3 appears only 5 percent of the time—not a lot.

This test engages all three of your attentional subsystems. You orient attention, focusing on each number as it flickers; stay alert to the appearance of the number 3; and use executive attention to make sure you’re following the instructions, pressing only when you should. Simple.

Simple, perhaps. But not easy. Most people are pretty terrible at this task. Why? Perhaps the numbers flicker by too quickly, making it difficult for them to actually see clearly? Nope. Half a second is plenty of time for the brain to process visual information. Maybe they look away from the screen? We checked. Tracking their eye movements by securing electrodes around their eyes, we learned that our participants were great at keeping their eyes on the screen. Here’s what else we learned: although their eyes were on the screen, their attention was not. They were on autopilot, pressing the space bar no matter what number appeared. Their attentional flashlight was directed elsewhere, the floodlight was offline, the juggler dropped the ball.

I chose the SART for this exact reason. Before asking fine-grained questions about which subsystems of attention are strengthened, I wanted to know if mindfulness training could minimize a fundamental vulnerability suffered by all subsystems—attentional hijacking. Could a monthlong retreat boost attention to help keep it on the task-at-hand? To find out, I needed a test that would engage attention broadly, and also challenge it with distraction, boredom, and mind-wandering. The SART was perfect.

In follow-up tests, we’d ask more specific questions and isolate various subsystems of attention—to see if, for example, training improved the floodlight more so than the flashlight, which a later study confirmed.

Our study participants in the mountains of Colorado finished their initial tests and went off to spend the next four weeks immersed in mindfulness: living mindfully, and formally practicing mindfulness exercises for the majority of their waking hours each day. (I did a much shorter version of this type of retreat many months later, and the best way to describe it is “a bootcamp for the brain”—it was intense!) From the moment they woke early in the morning until they went to bed, they would practice—in silence—in thirty- to fifty-five-minute sessions. Even their meals were eaten in silence, and retreatants were given instruction on how to continue their practice while eating. At the end of that month, we’d be back to administer the SART again, and see what (if anything) had changed. It was a little bit like tagging fish and releasing them back into the ocean—off they swam with the rest of the group into the meditative waters of a retreat environment.

We also offered the same test to medical and nursing students on campus. We found that after they took an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course, like those offered at over 750 medical centers worldwide, they improved in orienting. They had a better grip on their flashlight.

In my own experience, in the very early days when I began mindfulness training, one of the first things I’d noticed was that I felt worse. I noticed the drop in my stomach—which, like the accompanying anxiety and sadness, would linger for hours—when I had to leave my son at day care and walk away; I noticed the dull ache in my clenched jaw, often synchronized with feeling overwhelmed by the parade of demands throughout my workday. My thoughts continued to whirl without stopping long after I got home from the lab. This stuff had always been there, of course, but now it seemed magnified because I was paying attention to it.

But then, because I was more aware of physical sensations and concurrent negative thoughts, I slowly began to catch the thought earlier. I could notice it, acknowledge it, and let it pass away on its own. This way of interacting with my mind gave me a stronger sense of control. Instead of feeling constantly hijacked and held hostage by distressing thoughts and emotions, I was aware of my body tightening and my attention drifting. Soon, I felt more capable of redirecting my mind if I chose to. I could step out of a loop of negative thinking, instead of getting caught in it, like in the churn at the bottom of a waterfall.

And now, the data from these initial studies seemed to corroborate my experience, suggesting that mindfulness meditation, unlike anything else we’d studied so far, could actually change the way our attention, our “brain’s boss,” behaved. But we needed to make sure.

Is Mindfulness Really the Secret Sauce?

We didn’t have a no-training control group, as we typically would with a scientific study—everybody participated. The football players were in preseason training, a high-stress interval with high stakes: at the end of it, they’d all head to training camp, where their performance would determine the trajectory of their entire playing season, and maybe even their career. The head coach, cognizant that anyone who didn’t get training of some kind could be at a disadvantage, insisted that everybody get something. This made for a stronger test anyway, because it asked an urgent question: If mindfulness training is helpful, is it more helpful than doing something else, like relaxation training?

We knew that those experienced meditators on retreat in Colorado as well as the medical and nursing students we’d trained back on campus had improved measurably. What we needed to figure out now was whether mindfulness, in particular, was the key piece of the equation that was helping, or whether relaxation exercises would have the same effect.

Here’s what we found: Both types of training helped in some areas, like emotional well-being. But then, for attention, the two groups diverged—and they diverged the most for those who engaged in the daily exercises five or more days per week.

In the mindfulness group, attention skills held steady instead of degrading—mindfulness training had indeed worked to “protect” their attention, even through this high-demand period.

But in the relaxation group, attention got worse.

I’m absolutely not saying “don’t relax.” What I’m saying—and what the science is showing—is that trying to use relaxation as an antidote to attentional degradation will not work, because it doesn’t actually address the reasons that attention is degrading.

We knew that mindfulness practice was the key to training attention. The next question was: How effective was it? Could it help us outside of a controlled university environment or a serene retreat locale? Could it help under extreme stress, under time pressure, under high demand? We’d tested mindfulness under ideal conditions—what about the opposite? In other words: real life?

Mindfulness Under Pressure

In the lab, when we started to consider how kryptonite conditions like stress impact attention, it seemed that there were many different ways. But one common factor was this: stress hijacks your attention away from the present moment.

Mental time travel takes us out of the current moment in time and, while doing so, monopolizes all our attention. The prevalence of attentional hijacking suggested to me that training the mind to stay in the present could be an important missing piece in attention training—a catalytic ingredient that the gadgets, brain-training apps, and other approaches we had tried were missing. To find out if I was on to something, we set our sights on one of the most high-stress, high-demand populations: the military.

I gripped my armrests as the plane circled above West Palm Beach, waiting to land. I was nervous, but it wasn’t fear of flying: I was there to meet the leadership of a Marine Reserve unit. My colleague and I were pitching a pilot study on mindfulness training specifically for the military and I had no idea if they would accept it. Our liaisons, two captains in the Marine Reserves who’d tentatively agreed to let us on base, had gone out on a limb in allowing us to come out to run a mindfulness meditation program with their Marines. These were warriors. Mindfulness meditation was not exactly their thing.

The study at the retreat center in Colorado had yielded promising results. Those participants had improved, indicating that mindfulness could boost attention under ideal circumstances. But what about less-than-ideal circumstances? What about less than a full month of intensive, continuous meditation in a placid, remote place? Sounds great to be in an idyllic mountain retreat—but most of us need help with our attention while we’re in the midst of our day-to-day lives, under pressure, juggling a million things. And further, meditating twelve hours a day is hardly realistic for the vast majority of people. Could mindfulness help the rest of us?

We’d been mulling over these questions at the lab when I got a phone call from a security studies professor from another university. A veteran who had turned to mindfulness after experiencing firsthand the difficulties associated with deployment, she was interested in offering it to other military service members. Since she didn’t have a background in neuroscience or experimental research, she was looking for a research collaborator. Richie Davidson, who I had stayed in touch with since his lecture at Penn, suggested she try me.

I was intrigued and got to work poring over existing research on attention and military deployment. I was immediately engrossed and, frankly, quite concerned. The military represented a population that had to deal with extremely high-demand situations all the time, and it clearly took a toll. During predeployment, service members trained intensively, simulating scenarios in which lives were at stake all day, every day. Then they deployed into scenarios where lives were actually at stake. Those potent forces we’ve been discussing that degrade attention are a constant way of life for military service members. Add to that other factors that degrade attention, like sleep disturbances, uncertainty, extreme temperatures, and mortality salience (thinking about your own death). And to punch things up even further, this was in the post-9/11 era of the military surge in Iraq. The year was 2007 and, as a nation, the United States had been at war abroad for six years. Units were going out on back-to-back deployments. Rates of suicide and PTSD among service members were climbing. Not only was high stress causing warriors to spiral into psychological disorders, but many were suffering from moral injury, struggling with regret, remorse, and guilt when their own reactivity led to behavior that violated their ethical code.

Did I have any hesitations about working with the military? Sure. I thought long and hard about it. A lot of the problems that these warriors were suffering from stem from having to go to war. Wouldn’t it be better not to have war?

Well, of course—wouldn’t that be great? But that question is fundamentally similar to the questions of what the rest of us should do about stressors in our own lives: Should we change our lives, or our minds? I can’t personally change the world and end war. But maybe I could help those serving in the military function better through incredible stress, protect their attention from degrading, regulate their emotions more effectively, and hold their own ethical code at the forefront of their minds even through the fog of war.

And finally, there was much to learn from this demographic. Could mindfulness help the attention of those under the most high-stress, high-pressure, and time-pressure situations imaginable? Could it give a boost to those who are compromised because of the job they have been asked to do, at the request of a nation? If so, it could probably help the rest of us, too. It was time to see if we could bring mindfulness down from the mountain and into the trenches.

This Is Never Going to Work

That’s what then captain Jason Spitaletta said to me as we walked onto the Marine Corps Reserve Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. He sounded good-natured about it. He smiled when he shook my hand and cheerfully told me our study was probably doomed. Marines, he said, were just not going to go for it. Mindfulness wasn’t something they’d invest in—it was too “soft” sounding. (This was 2007—it was very new to everybody back then.)