Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull

First, she talked about a study done at the University of Montreal in 2010, in which two groups—one made up of experienced Zen meditators, the other of non-meditators—were given the exact same type of pain experience: a thermal heat source strapped to one calf. They were hooked up to monitors that tracked which areas of the brain were stimulated. What researchers later discovered by looking at the brain imaging was that even though the experienced meditators weren’t actively meditating in the course of the experiment, their threshold for pain was much higher than the non-meditators’. The meditators’ brains were paying attention to the pain, McGonigal explained, but because they knew how to turn off the inner chatter—the running commentary our untrained brains, or monkey minds, so happily serve up—they were better able to tolerate pain than those who did not practice meditation. Next, McGonigal cited a similar study done at Wake Forest University that focused on a group of brand new meditators who’d undergone only four days of training. When they were brought into the laboratory and given the same pain test, some were able to tolerate greater levels of pain than others. Why? The temptation might be to surmise that these people were simply quick studies in the art of meditation, that they were better at it than others. Brain imagery showed, however, that in fact their minds were doing the opposite of what experienced meditators’ brains do. Instead of paying attention to the ...