Richard Powers’ Bewilderment was the most moving and prescient novel I read last year. In the book, an astrobiologist grapples with compounding losses: the death of his wife and the unraveling of his son, Robin; and the environmental degradation and mass extinction that envelops the planet. Before his demise, Robin begins an innovative treatment called Decoded Neurofeedback in which he enters an fMRI machine and learns how to mirror a brain state of his deceased mother—recorded when she was a research subject for the therapy. Through channeling her brain waves, Robin arrives at a place of radical acceptance and even appreciation in the face of crisis. At one point he’s described by the lead researcher of the Decoded Neurofeedback program as a “junior Buddha.”
This new treatment is a plot device in the novel, but it’s not entirely a product of the imagination. Our understanding of brain patterns has increased exponentially in the last decade. Researchers have been able to accurately decode the content of dreams by teaching machines to predict visual imagery based on brain function. Another study found that fMRI machines could confirm whether students had understood concepts based on neural alignment with their teacher. And by examining the brain patterns of patients with major depression, researchers were able to design a computer-based tool to reduce negative negative attention bias, which resulted in a 40 percent decrease in depression symptoms versus a placebo. This window into the brain is one that scientists are already reaching through and tinkering with.
And now, neuroscience has found a way to give definition to the brain of meditators and illustrate how meditation changes the brain over time. We can see how neural patterns shift as the brain rewires during meditation and certain neural circuits come online with more regularity. The Buddhist brain has been hacked. And though this may open up the practice of meditation and its benefits to more people, there are also some serious questions about whether something vital is lost in reducing meditation to a series of brain patterns.
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