The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the

Cultivation of Well-Being

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 DANIEL J. SIEGEL

THE MINDFUL BRAIN

Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York • London
 All illustrations are the property of the author, unless noted otherwise. To
contact the author, please visit mindsightinstitute.com. “The Mindful Brain”
is a trademark of Mind Your Brain, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 by Mind Your Brain, Inc.

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Siegel, Daniel J., 1957-

The mindful brain: reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-
being / Daniel J. Siegel.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06870-2
1. Psychophysiology. 2. Awareness. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Psychophysiology. 2. Brain—physiology. 3. Mind-Body
Relations (Metaphysics) 4. Mind-Body and Relaxation Techniques. WL 103
S5712m 2007]

QP360.S485 2007
612.8—dc22 2006030093

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells St., London W1T
3QT
TO CAROLINE
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface

PART I
MIND, BRAIN, AND AWARENESS
1. A Mindful Awareness
2. Brain Basics

PART II
IMMERSION IN DIRECT EXPERIENCE
3. A Week of Silence
4. Suffering and the Streams of Awareness

PART III
FACETS OF THE MINDFUL BRAIN
5. Subjectivity and Science
6. Harnessing the Hub: Attention and the Wheel of Awareness
7. Jettisoning Judgments: Dissolving Top-Down Constraints
8. Internal Attunement: Mirror Neurons, Resonance, and Attention to
Intention
9. Reflective Coherence: Neural Integration and Middle Prefrontal
Function
10. Flexibility of Feeling: Affective Style and an Approach Mindset
11. Reflective Thinking: Imagery and the Cognitive Style of Mindful
Learning
 PART IV
REFLECTIONS ON THE MINDFUL BRAIN
12. Educating the Mind: The Fourth “R” and the Wisdom of Reflection
13. Reflection in Clinical Practice: Being Present and Cultivating the
Hub
14. The Mindful Brain in Psychotherapy: Promoting Neural Integration

Afterword Reflections on Reflection

Appendix I Reflection and Mindfulness Resources
Appendix II Glossary and Terms
Appendix III Neural Notes

References
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Words cannot fully express the gratitude I feel toward the many people
along this journey to explore the mind and understand mindfulness. My
colleagues at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, including Sue
Smalley, Lidia Zylowska, Sigi Hale, Shea Cunningham, Deborah Ackerman,
David Creswell, Jonas Kaplan, Nancy Lynn Horton, Diana Winston, and
others, have been a great source of inspiration and learning. Peter Whybrow,
our director at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, has
been of great support in bringing mindfulness into that academic setting. At
the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR)/UCLA Center for Culture,
Brain, and Development, I am fortunate to be a part of a team of scholars
dedicated to crossing the usual boundaries separating disciplines and am
thankful to Robert Lemelson of the FPR and to my co-principal investigators
there, Patricia Greenfield, Mirella Dapretto, Alan Fiske, and John Schuman,
for our ongoing collaboration. Marco Iacoboni has also been a fabulous
colleague with whom I have been able to share clinical ideas about the
mirror neuron system and collaborate on educational programs for therapists
in this emerging area.
At the Mindsight Institute, Erica Ellis has been extremely helpful in
administering our educational program and working closely with me on
finalizing the references and copyedited text. Those fellow therapists who
study interpersonal neurobiology with me at the Institute are a continual
source of intellectual stimulation and challenge, and they have been an
important sounding board in helping to translate these intricate ideas about
the mindful brain into an accessible and hopefully useful form for others. I
am especially thankful for the collaboration of the members of GAINS, the
Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies.
I appreciate the ongoing professional collaboration with Allan Schore
and Lou Cozolino, and I thank Lou for his permission to use the wonderful
drawings of the brain from his excellent book, The Neuroscience of Human
Relationships (2006). MAWS & Company created the artwork for Figures
4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 6.1, and 14.1, and I am grateful for how clearly those drawings
are able to express my ideas about mindful awareness.
A vital source of inspiration are my patients, whose courage to face the
direct experience of memory and emotion, of trying to find a way beneath the
restrictive personal identities that have enslaved them for so long, continues
to give meaning to my professional life in these many years of practice.
As this exploration of mindfulness has unfolded, Rich Simon organized a
meeting at his annual Networker Symposium gathering in which he brought
together Diane Ackerman, Jon Kabat-Zinn, John O’Donohue, and me. It was
love at first insight, and the varied relationships among each of us has
continued to grow in marvelous ways. Our Mind and Moment meeting in
February, 2006 was a pinnacle of my educational journey, and I am
profoundly grateful to Diane, Jon, and “O’John” for our time together.
In learning about mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn encouraged me to dive
deeply into direct experience and guided me to the Mind and Life Institute’s
gathering of scientists to sense first-hand a week of silence. I’m grateful for
his suggestions and appreciative of Adam Engle, chair of the Mind and Life
Institute, and to Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and the other faculty
of the Insight Meditation Society who hosted that transformative event.
In the writing of the book itself, it has been extremely helpful to have the
insightful comments from a number of individuals who read earlier drafts and
gave important feedback on the voice of the book itself. These individuals
include Diane Ackerman, Erica Ellis, Bonnie Mark Goldstein, Daniel
Goleman, Susan Kaiser-Greenland, Jack Kornfield, Lynn Kutler, Rich Simon,
Marion Solomon, and Caroline Welch.
Rich Simon not only read this and other manuscripts of mine, but he has
served as a comrade-in-arms in facing the challenging task of writing a first-
person account for a professional audience while at the same time exploring
the science of the mind with rigor and clarity. He is both a social feng shui
master, as the experience of his now thirty years of running the Psychotherapy
Networker reveals, as well as a brilliant editor with vision for the larger
issues between and beyond the lines of the text. I thank him for his vital
support.
I was very fortunate to be able to rely on a number of individuals’
expertise on mindfulness and on the brain to check on various details of the
science and explorations in the book. Jack Kornfield and Dan Goleman made
helpful clarifications and I thank them for their thoughtful comments on the
text. Ellen Langer was a pleasure to engage with in examining ideas about
mindful learning and mindful awareness. I am grateful for her insights and her
willingness to take the time to go over a wide array of issues in our
discussions. Richard Davidson was also of great support in reviewing
certain aspects of brain research as they relate to his important contributions
in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience. His wisdom and
kindness are greatly appreciated.
I am also deeply appreciative of David Creswell, Susan Kaiser-
Greenland, Sara Lazar, and Lidia Zylowska for sharing their unpublished
research data with me to include in this text. Their genorosity has enabled
this theoretical synthesis and conceptual integration about the relational
nature of the mindful brain to offer cutting-edge knowledge in this exciting
field.
I’d also like to thank Andrea Costella and Deborah Malmud for
shepherding this unusual project with professional perseverance. This book
is not a typical text in that it synthesizes deep personal experience with
scientific analysis. I am grateful that they supported the project and helped it
come to life. Deborah Malmud has also been a pleasure to work with in my
capacity as the Series Editor for the Norton Series on Interpersonal
Neurobiology, and I am grateful for her clear thinking about how to bring this
emerging interdisciplinary view into the academic, professional, and public
worlds.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and children for their never-ending
support of my whacky ways and my passion for this work. I feel deeply
grateful to watch the reflective emergence of my two adolescents who
continually challenge me to be fully present in our lives. I have been
fortunate to be able to explore these evolving ideas regularly with my wife
who has taught me so much about mindfulness. Her insights have been
extremely helpful in trying to make the mindful brain come alive on these
pages.
 PREFACE

Welcome to a journey into the heart of our lives. Being mindfully aware,
attending to the richness of our here-and-now experiences, creates
scientifically recognized enhancements in our physiology, our mental
functions, and our interpersonal relationships. Being fully present in our
awareness opens our lives to new possibilities of well-being.
Almost all cultures have practices that help people develop awareness of
the moment. Each of the major religions of the world utilizes some method to
enable individuals to focus their attention, from meditation to prayer, yoga to
tai’chi. Each of these traditions may have its own particular approach, but
they share a common desire to intentionally focus awareness in a way that
transforms people’s lives. Mindful awareness is a universal goal across
human cultures. Although mindfulness is often seen as a form of attentional
skill that focuses one’s mind on the present, this book takes a deep look at
this type of awareness through the perspective of mindfulness as a form of
healthy relationship with oneself.
In my own field of studying interpersonal relationships within families,
we use the concept of “attunement” to examine how one person, a parent, for
example, focuses attention on the internal world of another, such as a child.
This focus on the mind of another person harnesses neural circuitry that
enables two people to “feel felt” by each other. This state is crucial if people
in relationships are to feel vibrant and alive, understood, and at peace.
Research has shown that such attuned relationships promote resilience and
longevity. Our understanding of mindfulness can build on these studies of
interpersonal attunement and the self-regulatory functions of focused attention
in suggesting that mindful awareness is a form of intrapersonal attunement. In
other words, being mindful is a way of becoming your own best friend.
We will explore how attunement may lead the brain to grow in ways that
promote balanced self-regulation via the process of neural integration,
which enables flexibility and self-understanding. This way of feeling felt, of
feeling connected in the world, may help us understand how becoming
attuned to oneself may promote these physical and psychological dimensions
of well-being with mindful awareness.
Turning to the brain can help us see the commonality of mechanisms
between these two forms of intra-and interpersonal attunement. By examining
the neural dimension of functioning and its possible correlation with mindful
awareness, we may be able to expand our understanding of why and how
mindfulness creates the documented improvements in immune function, an
inner sense of well-being, and an increase in our capacity for rewarding
interpersonal relationships.
I am not a member of any particular mindful awareness tradition, nor
have I had formal training in mindfulness per se before taking on this project,
so this book will be a fresh look, without presenting only one specific form
of mindfulness. This will be an exploration of the overall concept of
mindfulness. Mindfulness can be cultivated through many means from
experiences within attuned relationships, to approaches in education that
emphasize reflection, to formal meditation.

THE NEED
We are in desperate need of a new way of being—in ourselves, in our
schools, and in our society. Our modern culture has evolved in recent times
to create a troubled world with individuals suffering from alienation, schools
failing to inspire and to connect with students, in short, society without a
moral compass to help clarify how we can move forward in our global
community.
I have seen my own children grow up in a world where human beings are
ever more distant from the human interactions that our brains have evolved to
require—yet are no longer part of our inherent educational and social
systems. The human connections that help shape our neural connections are
sorely missing in modern life. We are not only losing our opportunities to
attune to each other, but the hectic lives many of us live leave little time for
attuning to ourselves.
As a physician, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and educator, I have been
saddened and dismayed to find so absent from our work as clinicians a firm
grounding in the healthy mind itself. After asking over 65,000 mental health
professionals face-to-face in lecture halls around the world if they had ever
had a course on the mind, or on mental health, 95% replied “no.” What then
have we been practicing? Isn’t it time for us to become aware of the mind
itself, not just to highlight symptoms of illness?
Cultivating an experiential understanding of the mind is a direct focus of
mindful awareness: We come not only to know our own minds, but to
embrace our inner worlds and the minds of others with kindness and
compassion.
It is my deepest hope that by helping each other attune to our minds we
can move ourselves and our culture beyond the many automatic reflexes that
have led our human community down such destructive paths. The human
potential for compassion and empathy is huge. Realizing that potential may
be challenging in these troubled times, but perhaps it may be as direct as
attuning to ourselves, one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time.

THE APPROACH
Mindfulness is a very important, empowering, and personal internal
experience, so this book will of necessity blend personal ways of knowing
along with external visions from science about the nature of the mind. This is
both the challenge and the thrill of the writing, and I have set out to integrate
the subjective essence of mindful awareness while providing objective
analyses of direct sensory experience and research findings along with
practical ways that these experiences, ideas, and research findings can be
applied.
Being clear about these different ways of knowing is extremely important
as we go forward: subjective experience, science, and professional
applications are three separate entities in the body of knowledge that we will
need to maintain as distinct dimensions of reality for this integrative effort to
be valid and useful. Premature blending of these three elements can lead to
erroneous conclusions about subjectivity, misinterpretations of science, and
misapplications of these ideas to clinical practice and education. By
presenting these ideas, experiences, and research findings first, we will then
be ready to “cleanly” apply their synthesis to the important work of helping
others learn, grow, and alleviate suffering. If we mix them too soon for the
sake of getting to “the practical,” we run the risk of confusing the ways we
have come to build our vision of the mind and moment.
 To achieve this goal of clarity in ways of knowing, the book is divided
into four parts. An introductory section offers an overview of mindful
awareness and examines why turning to the brain is helpful in illuminating
the nature of the mind itself. In the second section we will explore direct
experiences and see the immediacy of the moment that retrospective analysis
from others can only hint at from a distance. The purpose of these
experiential chapters is to explore the essence of mindfulness and what may
get in its way, and keep us from being present in our own lives. We will
explore how this form of being aware can be achieved through intentional
training that disentangles the mind from automatic intrusions.
In the third section we explore various facets of the mindful brain that
emerge from these experiential immersions and from the insights of the
scientific and professional literature. We will integrate the lessons learned
from direct experience with a review of existing research on the brain and
the nature of the mind. This synthesis will attempt to weave the subjective
and objective dimensions of understanding our lives.
In the fourth section we will reflect further on the implications and
applications of these mindful brain perspectives on education, clinical work,
and the discipline of psychotherapy itself. These applications will build on
what came before as we link subjectivity and science with practical
applications in daily life. This section will offer some initial ideas about
how to integrate these concepts about internal attunement into practical,
everyday usage of mindful awareness in our professional and personal
endeavors.

INTERPERSONAL NEUROBIOLOGY
Understanding the deep nature of how our relationships help shape our
lives and our brains has been a passion driving my professional life. Since
the early 1990s, I have been involved in trying to create an interdisciplinary
view of the mind and mental health (Siegel, 1999). The perspective of
interpersonal neurobiology embraces a wide array of ways of knowing, from
the broad spectrum of scientific disciplines to the expressive arts and
contemplative practice. We will be applying the basic principles of this
approach to our exploration of mindful awareness.
Interpersonal neurobiology relies on a process of integrating knowledge
from a variety of disciplines to find the common features that are shared by
these independent fields of knowledge. Much like the fable of the blind men
and the elephant, each discipline examines a necessarily focused and limited
area of the elephant, of reality, in order to know that dimension deeply and in
detail. But to see the whole picture, to get a feeling for the whole elephant, it
is vital that we try to bring different fields together. While each blind man
may not agree with the perspective of the other, each has important
contributions to make in creating a sense of the whole.
And so we will be using this integrative approach to bring together
various ways of knowing in order to understand mindfulness in perhaps a
broader way than any single perspective might permit. At the foundation we
will be trying to combine first person knowing with scientific points of view.
Beyond this important subjective/objective marriage, we will combine
insights from neuroscience with those of attachment research. This approach
will enable us to consider how the fundamental process of attunement might
be at work in the brain in states of interpersonal resonance and the proposed
form of intrapersonal attunement of mindfulness.
Turning to the brain and attachment studies is not meant to favor these
two fields over any others, but rather to use them as a starting point. A
variety of fields will come into play as we examine the research on memory,
narrative, wisdom, emotion, perception, attention, and learning along with
explorations that go deeply into internal subjective experience.
I love science and am thrilled to learn from empirical explorations into
the deep nature of ourselves and our world. But I am also a clinician, steeped
in the world of subjective experience. Our internal world is real, though it
may not be quantifiable in ways that science often requires for careful
analysis. In the end, our subjective lives are not reducible to our neural
functioning. This internal world, this subjective stuff of the mind, is at the
heart of what enables us to sense each other’s pain, to embrace each other at
times of distress, to revel in each other’s joy, to create meaning in the stories
of our lives, to find connection in each other’s eyes.
My own personal and professional interest in mindfulness emerged
recently in an unexpected way. After writing a text exploring how the brain
and relationships interact to shape our development, I was invited to offer
lectures at my daughter’s preschool about parenting and the brain. After
creating some workshops for parents, the preschool director, Mary Hartzell,
and I wrote a book in which we placed “mindfulness” as our first grounding
principle. As educators we knew that being considerate and aware, being
mindful, was the essential state of mind of a parent (or teacher or clinician)
to promote well-being in children.
After our book was published, numerous people asked how we came to
teach parents to meditate. This was a great question since neither Mary nor I
is trained to meditate nor did we think that we were “teaching meditation” to
parents. Mindfulness, in our view, was just the idea of being aware, of being
conscientious, with kindness and care. What we actually taught them was
how to be reflective and aware of their children, and themselves, with
curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love.
I am continually learning from my patients and from my students, whether
they are parents or high school students, therapists or scientists. These
questions about mindfulness and parenting inspired me to examine the
existing research in the growing field of mindfulness-based clinical
interventions. What struck me in learning about this area was that the
outcome measures for its clinical applications appeared to overlap with the
outcome measures of my own field of research in attachment: the study of the
relationship between parents and children.
This overlap of the ways in which well-being and resilience were
promoted by secure attachment and by mindful awareness practice was
fascinating. This similarity also dovetailed with the functions of a certain
integrative region of the brain, the middle aspects of the prefrontal cortex. I
became intrigued by this convergence and was eager to learn more about the
fascinating field of mindfulness. The outcome of this journey to explore these
ideas, experientially and conceptually, is this book on the mindful brain.
This book is for people interested in knowing more about the mind and
how to develop it more fully, in themselves and in others. These ideas may
be especially useful for those who help others get along and grow, from
teachers and clinicians to mediators and community leaders. Each of the
people in the broad spectrum of these life roles is crucial in helping foster
well-being in our human society.
With this exciting view of integrating ideas among the worlds of
relationships, brain, and mind, I dove into direct experience within the
depths of the mind. I invite you to come along with me as we explore the
nature of mindful awareness that unfolded, moment by moment, in this mind-
opening journey of discovery.
THE MINDFUL BRAIN
 PART I

MIND, BRAIN, AND AWARENESS

Chapter One

A MINDFUL AWARENESS

B eing aware of the fullness of our experience awakens us to the inner world
of our mind and immerses us completely in our lives. This is a book about
how the way we pay attention in the present moment can directly improve the
functioning of body and brain, subjective mental life with its feelings and
thoughts, and interpersonal relationships.
The essential proposal is that this ancient and useful form of awareness
harnesses the social circuitry of the brain to enable us to develop an attuned
relationship within our own minds. To explore this idea, we will be turning
to the research on our social lives, examining the particular regions of the
brain, including the mirror neuron system and related circuits, that participate
in attunement and may be active when we resonate with our own intentional
states.
The term mindful brain is used in this approach to embrace the notion
that our awareness, our mindful “paying attention or taking care,” is
intimately related to the dance between our mind and our brain. Being
“mindful” has a range of definitions, from the common everyday notion of
“bearing in mind or inclined to be aware” to the specific educational,
clinical, and scientific definitions of the term we will explore. It is with this
broad general common-usage definition that I will present a review of the
new developments in science that have emerged regarding the more specific
forms of mindfulness and one’s own subjective experience of the moment at
the heart of one’s life.

FINDING THE MIND IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES

Since the mid-1980s there has been growing attention to “mindfulness” in the
Western world. This focus has been on a number of dimensions of daily life,
from our personal lives to the experience of children in schools and patients
in therapy. The busy lives people lead in the technologically driven culture
that consumes our attention often produce a multitasking frenzy of activity that
leaves people constantly doing, with no space to breathe and just be. The
adaptations to such a way of life often leaves youth accustomed to high levels
of stimulus-bound attention, flitting from one activity to another, with little
time for self-reflection or interpersonal connection of the direct, face-to-face
sort that the brain needs for proper development. Little today in our hectic
lives provides for opportunities to attune with one another.
In our personal lives, many of us have found this societal whirlwind
deeply dissatisfying. We can adjust, responding to the drive to do, but often
we cannot thrive in such a frenetic world. On this personal level people in
modern cultures are often eager to learn about a new way of being that can
help them flourish. Mindfulness in its most general conception offers a way
of being aware that can serve as a gateway toward a more vital mode of
being in the world: We become attuned to ourselves.
In a review, Paul Grossman (in press) has stated that the “colloquial use
of mindfulness often connotes being heedful or taking care within a clearly
evaluative context: A parent tells a child, mind your manners, or ‘mind your
language,’ implying to take care to behave in a culturally prescribed manner.
‘Mindful of the poor road conditions, he drove slowly,’ ‘What is man, that
thou art mindful of him?’ (Psalms, viii. 4), ‘I promise to be mindful of your
admonitions,’ or ‘always mindful of family responsibilities.’ All these
formulations reflect an emphasis on carefully paying attention so as to not
reap the consequences of heedless behaviors.”

DEFINING THE MIND

I have found a useful definition of the mind, supported by scientists from
various disciplines, to be “a process that regulates the flow of energy and
information.”
Our human mind is both embodied—it involves a flow of energy and
information that occurs within the body, including the brain—and relational,
the dimension of the mind that involves the flow of energy and information
occurring between people—from the writer to the reader, for example. Right
now this flow from me as I type these words to you as you read them is
shaping our minds—yours and mine. Even as I am imagining who you might
be and your possible response, I am changing the flow of energy and
information in my brain and body as a whole. As you absorb these words
your mind is embodying this flow of energy and information as well.

BEING MINDFUL
Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life on
automatic, and being sensitive to novelty in our everyday experiences. With
mindful awareness the flow of energy and information that is our mind enters
our conscious attention and we can both appreciate its contents and also
come to regulate its flow in a new way. Mindful awareness, as we will see,
actually involves more than just simply being aware: It involves being aware
of aspects of the mind itself. Instead of being on automatic and mindless,
mindfulness helps us awaken, and by reflecting on the mind we are enabled
to make choices and thus change becomes possible.
How we focus attention helps directly shape the mind. When we develop
a certain form of attention to our here-and-now experiences and to the nature
of our mind itself, we create the special form of awareness, mindfulness,
which is the subject of this book.

SOME BENEFITS
Studies have shown that specific applications of mindful awareness
improve the capacity to regulate emotion, to combat emotional dysfunction,
to improve patterns of thinking, and to reduce negative mindsets.
Research on some dimensions of mindful awareness practices reveals
that they greatly enhance the body’s functioning: Healing, immune response,
stress reactivity, and a general sense of physical well-being are improved
with mindfulness (Davidson, Kabat-Zinn, Schumacher, Rosenkranz, Muller et
al., 2003). Our relationships with others are also improved perhaps because
the ability to perceive the nonverbal emotional signals from others may be
enhanced and our ability to sense the internal worlds of others may be
augmented (see Appendix III, Relationships and Mindfulness). In these ways
we come to compassionately experience others’ feelings and empathize with
them as we understand another person’s point of view.
We can see the power of mindful awareness to achieve these many and
diverse beneficial changes in our lives when we consider that this form of
awareness may directly shape the activity and growth of the parts of the brain
responsible for our relationships, our emotional life, and our physiological
response to stress.

MINDFULNESS IN LEARNING AND EDUCATION

In addition to such personal and health advantages of mindfulness, the
concept of “mindful learning” has been proposed by Ellen Langer (1989,
1997, 2000), an approach which has been shown to make learning more
effective, enjoyable, and stimulating. The essence of this approach is to offer
learning material in a conditional format rather than as a series of absolute
truths. The learner in this way is required to keep an “open mind” about the
contexts in which this new information may be useful. Involving the learner
in the active process of education also is created by having students consider
that their own attitude will shape the direction of the learning. In these ways,
this form of mindfulness can be seen to involve the learner’s active
participation in the learning process itself. Langer suggests that the point of
conditional learning is to leave us in a healthy state of uncertainty, which will
result in our actively noticing new things.
Educator Robert J. Sternberg considered this educational mindfulness as
something akin to a cognitive style (2000). Research on mindful learning
(Langer, 1989) suggests that it consists of openness to novelty; alertness to
distinction; sensitivity to different contexts; implicit, if not explicit,
awareness of multiple perspectives; and orientation to the present. Taking
these dimensions of mindfulness into account within the educational setting
may permit students to deepen and broaden the nature of learning throughout
their lifelong careers as learners. Teachers can use terms such as “may,”
“might be,” or “sometimes” instead of “is” to promote conditional
uncertainty. (See Chapter 12 for more on the role of mindfulness in
education.)
Langer herself (1989) has suggested that we be careful about seeing her
concept of mindfulness as having the same meaning as the historical and
modern use of that term in contemplative practices. For the time being, we
will use the qualifier, “mindful learning” to refer to Langer’s important
conceptualizations regarding how the mind seems to disentangle itself from
premature conclusions, categorizations and routinized ways of perceiving
and thinking. When we are certain, Langer says, “we don’t feel the need to
pay attention. Given that the world around us is always in flux, our certainty
is an illusion” (Langer, August 2006, personal communication). Ultimately,
this form of mindfulness is a flexible state of mind in which we actively
notice new things, are sensitive to context, and engage in the present.
I could find no formal studies published that compare mindful learning
with its goal-directed educational component to the more ancient
contemplative form of what we will call “reflective mindfulness.” This
reflective form of mindfulness, what we will also refer to as “mindful
awareness” or just “mindfulness” in this text, has now begun to be
intensively studied, with new findings that will be discussed in the chapters
ahead.
Finding similarities and differences between these two uses of the term
mindfulness may help us elucidate the deeper nature of each version.
Interestingly, research in both forms has revealed that, though achieved
through differing means, they are independently associated with positive
outcomes in people’s lives, such as an enhanced sense of pleasure, internal
awareness, and physiological health. In this book we will be exploring the
possible neural mechanisms shared in common by these two important and on
the surface distinct dimensions of how we shape our minds in the moment.

MINDFUL AWARENESS
Direct experience in the present moment has been described as a
fundamental part of Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and Taoist
teaching (Armstrong, 1993; Goleman, 1988). In these religious traditions,
from mystical Christianity with centering prayer (Fitzpatrick-Hopler, 2006;
Keating, 2005) to Buddhist mindfulness meditation (Kornfield, 1993; Nhat
Hahn, 1991; Wallace, 2006), one sees the use of the idea of being aware of
the present moment in a different light from the cognitive aspect of
mindfulness.
Many forms of prayer in different traditions require that the individual
pause and participate in an intentional process of connecting with a state of
mind or entity outside the day-to-day way of being. Prayer and religious
affiliation in general have been demonstrated to be associated with increased
longevity and well-being (Pargament, 1997). The common overlap of group
belonging and prayer makes it hard to tease apart the internal from the
interpersonal process, but in fact we may find that this is just the point:
pausing to become mindful may indeed involve an internal sense of
belonging.
The clinical application of the practice of mindfulness meditation
derived from the Buddhist tradition has served as a focus of intensive study
on the possible neural correlates of mindful awareness. Here we see the use
of the term mindfulness in a way that numerous investigators have been
trying to clearly define (Baer, Smith, Hopkins, Krietemeyer,& Toney, 2006;
Bishop, Lau, Shapiro, Carlson, Anderson, Carmody et al., 2004). These
studies, across a range of clinical situations, from medical illness with
chronic pain to psychiatric populations with disturbances of mood or anxiety,
have shown that effective application of secular mindfulness meditation
skills can be taught outside of any particular religious practice or group
membership.
In many ways, scholars see the nearly 2500-year-old practice of
Buddhism as a form of study of the nature of mind (Germer, Siegel, & Fulton,
2005; Lutz, Dunne, & Davidson, in press; Epstein, 1995; Waldon, 2006)
rather than a theistic tradition. “Reading early Buddhist texts will convince
the clinician that the Buddha was essentially a psychologist” (Germer, 2005,
p. 13). It is possible to practice Buddhist-derived meditation, and ascribe to
aspects of the psychological view of the mind from this perspective, for
example, and maintain one’s beliefs and membership in other religious
traditions. In contemplative mindful practice one focuses the mind in specific
ways to develop a more rigorous form of present-moment awareness that can
directly alleviate suffering in one’s life.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has devoted his professional life to bringing mindfulness
into the mainstream of modern medicine. In Kabat-Zinn’s view, “An
operational working definition of mindfulness is: the awareness that emerges
through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and
nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat-
Zinn, 2003, pp. 145–146). This nonjudgmental view in many ways can be
interpreted to mean something like “not grasping onto judgments,” as the
mind seems to continually come up with reactions that assess and react.
Being able to note those judgments and disengage from them may be what
nonjudgmental behavior feels like in practice. “On purpose” implies that this
state is created with the intention of focusing on the present moment. The
InnerKids program, designed to teach young children to learn basic