Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

by Rick Hanson

What brain states underlie the mental states of happiness, love, and wisdom? How can you use your mind to stimulate and strengthen these positive brain states?

The brain is the primary mover and shaper of the mind. It’s so busy that, even though it’s only 2 percent of the body’s weight, it uses 20– 25 percent of its oxygen and glucose (Lammert 2008).

Richard and I both believe that something transcendental is involved with the mind, consciousness, and the path of awakening—call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, the Ground, or by no name at all. Whatever it is, by definition it’s beyond the physical universe. Since it cannot be proven one way or another, it is important—and consistent with the spirit of science—to respect it as a possibility.

It could be 350 years, and maybe longer, before we completely understand the relationship between the brain and the mind. But meanwhile, a reasonable working hypothesis is that the mind is what the brain does.

Most animals don’t have nervous systems complex enough to allow these strategies’ alarms to grow into significant distress. But our vastly more developed brain is fertile ground for a harvest of suffering. Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day.

he taught virtue, mindfulness (also called concentration), and wisdom. These are the three pillars of Buddhist practice, as well as the wellsprings of everyday well-being, psychological growth, and spiritual realization.

Virtue simply involves regulating your actions, words, and thoughts to create benefits rather than harms for yourself and others. In your brain, virtue draws on top-down direction from the prefrontal cortex

Mindfulness involves the skillful use of attention to both your inner and outer worlds. Since your brain learns mainly from what you attend to, mindfulness is the doorway to taking in good experiences and making them a part of yourself

Wisdom is applied common sense, which you acquire in two steps. First, you come to understand what hurts and what helps—in other words, the causes of suffering and the path to its end (the focus of chapters 2 and 3). Then, based on this understanding, you let go of those things that hurt and strengthen those that help

It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.

The brain evolved to help you survive, but its three primary survival strategies also make you suffer.

Virtue, mindfulness, and wisdom are the pillars of everyday well-being, personal growth, and spiritual practice; they draw on the three fundamental neural functions of regulation, learning, and selection.

The pangs of living range from subtle loneliness and dismay, to moderate stress, hurt, and anger, and then to intense trauma and anguish. This whole range is what we mean by the word, suffering. A lot of suffering is mild but chronic, such as a background sense of anxiety, irritability, or lack of fulfillment. It’s natural to want less of this. And in its place, more contentment, love, and peace.

Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, our ancestors developed three fundamental strategies for survival: Creating separations—in order to form boundaries between themselves and the world, and between one mental state and another Maintaining stability—in order to keep physical and mental systems in a healthy balance Approaching opportunities and avoiding threats—in order to gain things that promote offspring, and escape or resist things that don’t

For most people, the left lobe establishes that the body is distinct from the world, and the right lobe indicates where the body is compared to features in its environment. The result is an automatic, underlying assumption along the lines of I am separate and independent. Although this is true in some ways, in many important ways it is not.

For you to stay healthy, each system in your body and mind must balance two conflicting needs. On the one hand, it must remain open to inputs during ongoing transactions with its local environment (Thompson 2007); closed systems are dead systems. On the other hand, each system must also preserve a fundamental stability, staying centered around a good set-point and within certain ranges—not too hot, nor too cold. For example, inhibition from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and arousal from the limbic system must balance each other: too much inhibition and you feel numb inside, too much arousal and you feel overwhelmed.

This mobilization usually comes with feelings of craving; these range from quiet longings to a desperate sense of compulsion. It is interesting that the word for craving in Pali—the language of early Buddhism—is tanha, the root of which means thirst. The word “thirst” conveys the visceral power of threat signals, even when they have nothing to do with life or limb, such as the possibility of being rejected. Threat signals are effective precisely because they’re unpleasant—because they make you suffer, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. You want them to stop.

Everything changes. That’s the universal nature of outer reality and inner experience. Therefore, there’s no end to disturbed equilibria as long as you live. But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions. Consequently, your brain is forever chasing after the moment that has just passed, trying to understand and control it.

Today, humans approach and avoid mental states as well as physical objects; for example, we pursue self-worth and push away shame. Nonetheless, for all its sophistication, human approaching and avoiding draws on much the same neural circuitry used by a monkey to look for bananas or a lizard to hide under a rock.

Oxytocin—promotes nurturing behaviors toward children and bonding in couples; associated with blissful closeness and love; women have more oxytocin than men.

this pleasure system highlights whatever triggered it, prompts you to pursue those rewards again, and strengthens the behaviors that make you successful in getting them. It works hand in hand with the dopamine-based system.

Even if you do get what you want, it’s genuinely great, and it doesn’t cost much—the gold standard—every pleasant experience must inevitably change and end. Even the best ones of all. You are routinely separated from things you enjoy. And someday that separation will be permanent. Friends drift away, children leave home, careers end, and eventually your own final breath comes and goes. Everything that begins must also cease. Everything that comes together must also disperse. Experiences are thus incapable of being completely satisfying. They are an unreliable basis for true happiness.

To use an analogy from the Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah: if getting upset about something unpleasant is like being bitten by a snake, grasping for what’s pleasant is like grabbing the snake’s tail; sooner or later, it will still bite you.

When you’re awake and not doing anything in particular, the baseline resting state of your brain activates a “default network,” and one of its functions seems to be tracking your environment and body for possible threats (Raichle et al. 2001). This basic awareness is often accompanied by a background feeling of anxiety that keeps you vigilant.

Anxiety is a neutral state

The brain typically detects negative information faster than positive information.

When an event is flagged as negative, the hippocampus makes sure it’s stored carefully for future reference. Once burned, twice shy. Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones—even though most of your experiences are probably neutral or positive.

Negative events generally have more impact than positive ones. For example, it’s easy to acquire feelings of learned helplessness from a few failures, but hard to undo those feelings, even with many successes (Seligman 2006). People will do more to avoid a loss than to acquire a comparable gain (Baumeister et al. 2001).

in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one (Gottman 1995).

Negative experiences create vicious cycles by making you pessimistic, overreactive, and inclined to go negative yourself.

As you can see, your brain has a built-in “negativity bias” (Vaish, Grossman, and Woodward 2008) that primes you for avoidance. This bias makes you suffer in a variety of ways. For starters, it generates an unpleasant background of anxiety, which for some people can be quite intense; anxiety also makes it harder to bring attention inward for self-awareness or contemplative practice, since the brain keeps scanning to make sure there is no problem.

In Buddhism, it’s said that suffering is the result of craving expressed through the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These are strong, traditional terms that cover a broad range of thoughts, words, and deeds, including the most fleeting and subtle. Greed is a grasping after carrots, while hatred is an aversion to sticks; both involve craving more pleasure and less pain. Delusion is a holding onto ignorance about the way things really are—for example, not seeing how they’re connected and changing.

In sum, the simulator takes you out of the present moment and sets you chasing after carrots that aren’t really so great while ignoring more important rewards (such as contentment and inner peace). Its mini-movies are full of limiting beliefs. Besides reinforcing painful emotions, they have you ducking sticks that never actually come your way or aren’t really all that bad. And the simulator does this hour after hour, day after day, even in your dreams—steadily building neural structure, much of which adds to your suffering.

The effort to maintain separations is at odds with the myriad ways you’re actually connected with the world and dependent upon it. As a result, you may feel subtly isolated, alienated, overwhelmed, or as if you’re in a struggle with the world.

When the systems within your body, mind, and relationships become unstable, your brain produces uncomfortable signals of threat. Since everything keeps changing, these signals keep coming.

we evolved to pay great attention to unpleasant experiences. This negativity bias overlooks good news, highlights bad news, and creates anxiety and pessimism.

The brain has a wonderful capacity to simulate experiences, but there’s a price: the simulator pulls you out of the moment, plus it sets you chasing pleasures that aren’t that great and resisting pains that are exaggerated or not even real.

Compassion for yourself helps reduce y...

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Some physical discomfort is unavoidable; it’s a crucial signal to take action to protect life and limb, like the pain that makes you pull your hand back from a hot stove. Some mental discomfort is inevitable, too.

To borrow an expression from the Buddha, inescapable physical or mental discomfort is the “first dart” of existence. As long as you live and love, some of those darts will come your way.

First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts”—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.

Suffering is not abstract or conceptual. It’s embodied: you feel it in your body, and it proceeds through bodily mechanisms. Understanding the physical machinery of suffering will help you see it increasingly as an impersonal condition—unpleasant to be sure, but not worth getting upset about, which would just bring more second darts.

Social and emotional conditions can pack a wallop like physical ones since psychological pain draws on many of the same neural networks as physical pain (Eisenberger and Lieberman 2004); this is why getting rejected can feel as bad as a root canal.

Your emotions intensify, organizing and mobilizing the whole brain for action. SNS/HPAA arousal stimulates the amygdala, which is hardwired to focus on negative information and react intensely to it. Consequently, feeling stressed sets you up for fear and anger.

Getting fired up for good reason—such as becoming passionate and enthusiastic, handling emergencies, or being forceful for a good cause—definitely has its place in life. But second darts are a bad reason to light up the SNS/HPAA system, and if they become routine, they can push the needle on your personal stress meter into the red zone. Further, apart from your individual situation, we live in a pedal-to-the-metal society that relies on nonstop SNS/HPAA activation; unfortunately, this is completely unnatural in terms of our evolutionary template.

For all of these reasons, most of us experience ongoing SNS/HPAA arousal. Even if your pot isn’t boiling over, just simmering along with second-dart activation is quite unhealthy. It continually shunts resources away from long-term projects—such as building a strong immune system or preserving a good mood—in favor of short-term crises.

the one-two punch of a revved-up amygdala and a weakened hippocampus can lead to feeling a little upset a lot of the time without exactly knowing why.

Stress reduces serotonin, probably the most important neurotransmitter for maintaining a good mood. When serotonin drops, so does norepinephrine, which has already been diminished by glucocorticoids. In short, less serotonin means more vulnerability to a blue mood and less alert interest in the world.

Happiness, love, and wisdom aren’t furthered by shutting down the SNS, but rather by keeping the autonomic nervous system as a whole in an optimal state of balance: Mainly parasympathetic arousal for a baseline of ease and peacefulness Mild SNS activation for enthusiasm, vitality, and wholesome passions Occasional SNS spikes to deal with demanding situations, from a great opportunity at work to a late-night call from a teenager who needs a ride home from a party gone bad This is your best-odds prescription for a long, productive, happy life.

These three processes—being with whatever arises, working with the tendencies of mind to transform them, and taking refuge in the ground of being—are the essential practices of the path of awakening. In many ways they correspond, respectively, to mindfulness, virtue, and wisdom—and to the three fundamental neural functions of learning, regulating, and selecting.