Transcendental Meditation: A Meditation That Turns the Imagination Network Up, Not Off
New brain research suggests not every form of meditation quiets the default mode network. Some of it activates the network.
A thoughtful reader sent me this research and I was so excited about it I wanted to write a brief post about it.
Here is the backdrop: If you read my recent piece on why mindfulness researchers have the wrong brain villain, you know my quarrel with the popular story that the default mode network (what I prefer to call the Imagination Network) is the enemy of a good life, the thing meditation exists to switch off. The usual evidence is that experienced meditators show reduced default-mode activity. Quiet the network, quiet the suffering. Case closed.
Except the case was built almost entirely on one type of meditation. The neuroscientist Fred Travis and the philosopher Jonathan Shear have argued that meditations actually fall into three different categories: focused attention (hold the mind on one object), open monitoring (watch whatever arises), and automatic self-transcending (let the practice settle the mind on its own). Most of the "meditation quiets the DMN" research studied the first two. (Open monitoring turns out to have its own intriguing relationship to creativity, but that's a post for another day.) The third one behaves very differently.
Enter Transcendental Meditation, the textbook example of “automatic self-transcending.” The findings keep converging from different directions:
• In a 2010 EEG study (general-audience summary here), default-mode activity during TM was actually higher than during ordinary eyes-closed rest. That’s the opposite of suppression of the default mode network!
• In a 2017 follow-up, Fred Travis and Niyazi Parim found the default-mode hubs (the posterior cingulate and precuneus) stayed active during TM, and concluded that it does not belong in the focused-attention category at all.
• In a 2018 fMRI study, blood flow rose in attention and executive areas while dropping in arousal areas, the brain signature of attention deployed with almost no effort.
(A longtime TM practitioner has also gathered several of these findings in one place, if you want a lay tour of the literature.)
Put these findings together and you get a striking picture: During this practice, the imaginative, self-referential network is not switched off. It is engaged, alongside the attention system, in a low-effort, restful-alert state. The dreaming and the steering, online together, with the strain turned way down.
Why does this thrill me? Because it’s consistent with where I keep arguing the field needs to go: meditation is not one thing. Different practices do genuinely different things to the brain, and lumping them together confounds the science, a point Travis makes directly. If one kind of meditation turns the Imagination Network down and another turns it up, then “meditation quiets the default mode network” is not a fact about meditation. It was a fact about a subset of meditation.
It also fits the larger story I keep telling. The Imagination Network is not a villain to be silenced. It is the seat of your daydreams, your autobiographical memories, your sense of self, your ability to imagine a future, and your ability to take the perspective of another person. A practice that deepens your contact with that inner ground, instead of evicting you from it, is doing something worth understanding rather than something to suppress.
And this isn't only a neuroscience story. The contemplative traditions that mindfulness was distilled from is not meant to delete the mind's inner life either. The Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace — who spent fourteen years as a monk before earning his PhD — describes a classical practice he calls settling the mind in its natural state, in which "whenever any type of mental event is observed — be it a thought, an image, a feeling, a desire, and so on — one simply takes note of it… without trying to suppress or sustain it." You turn toward the stream of thoughts and images and watch them "arise and pass of their own accord," rather than evicting yourself from them. The aim is not an empty mind. It’s a steady one — steady enough to make use of the inner life instead of being tossed around by it.
One honest caveat, because I care about getting this right: this body of work comes largely from a single research program, the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi International University, which is institutionally tied to the TM movement. The convergence across EEG and fMRI is encouraging and the methods are sound, but findings this clean deserve replication by independent labs with no horse in the race. So I am holding their findings as genuinely exciting and provisional at the same time.
Still, the core lesson is one I will keep banging my imaginary drum about. The most useful question is not whether meditation is good for the brain, full stop. It is which meditation, doing what, to which network, for whom. The inner life is not noise to be filtered out. Sometimes the entire point is to turn toward it.
Thank you to the reader who sent this my way. This is exactly the kind of note that makes my writing here worth it.
As a meditator and fan of brain stuff, I am enjoying your investigations and would like to add something here from my own experience. Most of the meditation and mindfulness teaching that I have received is indeed not asking us to stop thinking. Gosh, why would we do that to our beautiful minds, they have so much power - I guess we agree on that. There is something else though, meditation for me, and mindfulness in daily life, is a practice of learning to experience our world through more than the thinking mind. I have heard and enjoy the phrase that meditation is a "neck down" practice. Scientifically, it's not completely that, but what that is pointing to is to experience our body from within our body (interoception). How does the hand feel, from the hand vs thinking about the hand. What I think is happening when we do this is that we using parts of the brain that are more experiential than conceptual. Not saying that the latter is a bad thing, just that the type of awareness we can bring to our embodied experience is so enriching! For me, it allow me to access more awe, openness to experience etc. I am just noticing the world, experiencing how it moves me "in the body" (feelings, sensations etc) and responding from there. So - I guess I am in full agreement that meditation is not about stopping thinking, although it can help us to observe the unhelpful patterns of thought that might plague us. Rather, it can also widen the view and enable more doors of perception to open.
I came across this newsletter at the perfect time. I had been reading a piece on mindfulness meditation and the author described it as a way to psychoanalyze our thoughts, emotions, and habitual patterns. It went against everything I've learned over 45 years of meditating—and still I began to doubt myself! So thank you.
It always puzzles me when people talk about any form of meditation as a way to quiet the mind, erase it, or stop it from thinking when in fact it's the mind's job to think! Not always with discernment and it rarely stays on topic. But you can befriend the mind and when you notice it's run amok, you can encourage it gently to return to now, return to practice. And...oh TM, not a fan of what it's become! TM was my introduction to meditation; it was so many years ago that it only cost $10 if we made a artistic contribution to the TM Center in LA! It's gotten crazy expensive, which is so silly because it's just mantra meditation. Anyone can create a mantra for themselves--for free. I'm fascinated by this study and like Trilety Wade, really look forward to others replicating it. Thanks again for all you do.