Your Brain Is Hardwired for Love—Meditation Helps You Fully Express It | Daniel Goleman | Big Think

Your Brain Is Hardwired for Love—Meditation Helps You Fully Express It

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If you've ever watched someone meditating it looks like they're just sitting there with their eyes closed. But what's going on in their head is extremely interesting: metta meditation (or 'loving-kindness' meditation if that's your thing) has been proven to actually make long-term practitioners certifiably better people. You might have to do it for 1,000 hours to see discernible effects in your brainwaves, but it's still fascinating news for those in the mediation field and indeed anyone interested in brain science. Daniel Goleman's new book is Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence.

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DANIEL GOLEMAN:

Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, lecturer, and science journalist who has reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half.

Goleman is also the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better.

His latest book is Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, which he has co-authored with Richard Davidson reveals the science of what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Daniel Goleman: Perhaps the most startling finding for meditation beginners comes with what’s called compassion or loving kindness meditation. This is a practice that often accompanies mindfulness the breath, for example. People will do at the end of the session, they bring to mind people that have been kind to them; they think of themselves; they think of people they love, people they know, everyone everywhere and wish them well may they be safe, happy, healthy, free from suffering. And it turns out that the repetition of those phrases is psychoactive it actually changes the brain and how you feel right from the get go. We find, for example, that people who do this meditation who’ve just started doing it actually are kinder, they’re more likely to help someone in need, they’re more generous and they’re happier. It turns out that the brain areas that help us or that make us want to help someone that we care about also connect with the circuitry for feeling good. So it feels good to be kind and all of that shows up very early in just a few hours really of total practice of loving kindness or compassion meditation.

So we feel that the brain is somehow biologically prepared to learn to love better. The brain area that become stronger in its activity is the same as a parent’s love for a child. It’s the mammalian caretaking circuitry. We share it with all other mammals. And in humans it’s extremely important for the third of three kinds of empathy. There’s empathy that allows you to understand better how someone thinks to take their perspective, lets you be a good communicator. There’s the empathy where you connect emotionally; you feel what the other person feels immediately; you sense in your own body what’s going on in the other person. This allows rapport and chemistry, it’s also very important. But the third kind of empathy is what’s called empathic concern; it’s the feeling of caring about another person wanting to help them. It’s the basis of compassion. You can have the first two and not to be particularly concerned or caring, but if you have all three then you’ve got the whole package of empathy and we find that love and kindness meditation strengthens that third, both in terms of how you behave, how you feel and what’s happening in the brain.

One of the paradoxes we found when we started looking very closely at all of the research that’s done on meditation was a kind of a disconnect between what the classic traditions from which these methods come are saying is important and what scientists are studying.

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