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

by Rick Hanson

Stage one—you’re caught in a second-dart reaction and don’t even realize it:

Stage two—you realize you’ve been hijacked by greed or hatred (in the broadest sense), but cannot help yourself:

Stage three—some aspect of the reaction arises, but you don’t act it out:

Stage four—the reaction doesn’t even come up, and sometimes you forget you ever had the issue: you

In education, these are known succinctly as unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. They’re useful labels for knowing where you are with a given issue. The second stage is the hardest one, and often where we want to quit. So it’s important to keep aiming for the third and fourth stages—just

The best-odds prescription for a long, good life is a baseline of mainly PNS arousal with mild SNS activation for vitality, combined with occasional SNS spikes for major opportunities or threats.

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, these practices correspond, respectively, to mindfulness, virtue, and wisdom.

On the path of awakening, keep going! Lots of little moments of practice will gradually and truly increase your co...

most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind—what it feels like to be you—based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.

But here’s the problem: your brain preferentially scans for, registers, stores, recalls, and reacts to unpleasant experiences; as we’ve said, it’s like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. Consequently, even when positive experiences outnumber negative ones, the pile of negative implicit memories naturally grows faster. Then the background feeling of what it feels like to be you can become undeservedly glum and pessimistic.

Turn positive facts into positive experiences. Good things keep happening all around us, but much of the time we don’t notice them; even when we do, we often hardly feel them. Someone is nice to you, you see an admirable quality in yourself, a flower is blooming, you finish a difficult project—and it all just rolls by. Instead, actively look for good news, particularly the little stuff of daily life: the faces of children, the smell of an orange, a memory from a happy vacation, a minor success at work, and so on. Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it—dig in!

Savor the experience. It’s delicious! Make it last by staying with it for 5, 10, even 20 seconds; don’t let your attention skitter off to something else. The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory (Lewis 2005).

Imagine or feel that the experience is entering deeply into your mind and body, like the sun’s warmth into a T-shirt, water into a sponge, or a jewel placed in a treasure chest in your heart. Keep relaxing your body and absorbing the emotions, sensations, and thoughts of the experience.

Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.

When your brain retrieves a memory, it does not do it like a computer does, which calls up a complete record of what’s on its hard drive (e.g., document, picture, song). Your brain rebuilds implicit and explicit memories from their key features, drawing on its simulating capacities to fill in missing details. While this is more work, it’s also a more efficient use of neural real estate—this way complete records don’t need to be stored. And your brain is so fast that you don’t notice the regeneration of each memory. This rebuilding process gives you the opportunity, right down in the micro-circuitry of your brain, to gradually shift the emotional shadings of your interior landscape.

When a memory is activated, a large-scale assembly of neurons and synapses forms an emergent pattern. If other things are in your mind at the same time—and particularly if they’re strongly pleasant or unpleasant—your amygdala and hippocampus will automatically associate them with that neural pattern (Pare, Collins, and Pelletier 2002). Then, when the memory leaves awareness, it will be reconsolidated in storage along with those other associations.

The brain’s capacity to learn—and thus change itself—is called neuroplasticity. Usually, the results are tiny, incremental alternations in neural structure that add up as the years go by.

Because of all the ways your brain changes its structure, your experience matters beyond its momentary, subjective impact. It makes enduring changes in the physical tissues of your brain which affect your well-being, functioning, and relationships. Based on science, this is a fundamental reason for being kind to yourself, cultivating wholesome experiences, and taking them in.

To gradually replace negative implicit memories with positive ones, just make the positive aspects of your experience prominent and relatively intense in the foreground of your awareness while simultaneously placing the negative material in the background. Imagine that the positive contents of your awareness are sinking down into old wounds, soothing chafed and bruised places like a warm golden salve, filling up hollows, slowly replacing negative feelings and beliefs with positive ones.

infuse positive material into negative material in these two ways: When you have a positive experience today, help it sink in to old pains. When negative material arises, bring to mind the positive emotions and perspectives that will be its antidote.

Given the negativity bias of the brain, it takes an active effort to internalize positive experiences and heal negative ones. When you tilt toward what’s positive, you’re actually righting a neurological imbalance. And you’re giving yourself today the caring and encouragement you should have received as a child, but perhaps didn’t get in full measure.

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It’s about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

Implicit memories are residues of past experiences that largely remain below awareness but powerfully shape the inner landscape and atmosphere of your mind. Unfortunately, the bias of the brain tilts implicit memories in a negative direction, even when most of your experiences are actually positive.

Every time you take in the good, you build a little bit of neural structure. Doing this a few times a day—for months and even years—will gradually change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways.

autonomic nervous system (ANS).

Relaxing engages the circuitry of the PNS and thus strengthens it. Relaxing also quiets the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system, since relaxed muscles send feedback to the alarm centers in the brain that all is well. When you’re very relaxed, it’s hard to feel stressed or upset (Benson 2000).

You can reap the benefits of relaxation not only by initiating it in specific, stressful situations, but also by training your body “offline” to relax automatically;

Parasympathetic fibers are spread throughout your lips; thus, touching your lips stimulates the PNS. Touching your lips can also bring up soothing associations of eating or even of breastfeeding when you were a baby.

Since your PNS is primarily directed at maintaining the internal equilibrium of your body, bringing attention inward activates parasympathetic networks (as long as you’re not worried about your health). You may have already had some practice with mindfulness of the body (e.g., yoga, a stress-management class). Mindfulness just means being fully aware of something, in the moment with it, and not judging or resisting it. Be attentive to physical sensations; that’s all there is to it.

Like relaxation, you can use imagery on the spot to stimulate the PNS, or do longer visualizations when you’ve got the time to develop imagery that will be a powerful anchor for well-being. For example, if you’re feeling stressed while at work, you could bring to mind a peaceful mountain lake for a few seconds.

HRV is a good indicator of parasympathetic arousal and overall well-being, and you can change it directly.

Breathe in such a way that your inhalation and exhalation are the same duration; for example, count one, two, three, four in your mind while inhaling, and one, two, three, four while exhaling. At the same time, imagine or sense that you’re breathing in and out through the area of your heart. As you breathe evenly through your heart, call to mind a pleasant, heartfelt emotion such as gratitude, kindness, or love—perhaps by thinking about a happy time, being with your children, appreciation for the good things in your life, or a pet. You can also imagine this feeling moving through your heart as part of the breath.

Growing up, many of us felt let down by people who should have been better protectors. The deepest upsets are often not with those who harmed you but with the people who didn’t prevent it—they’re the ones you probably had the strongest attachment bonds to and thus felt most let down by. So it’s understandable if your inner protector is not as strong as it could be.

Draw on prefrontal capacities to evaluate: What is the chance that the feared event will happen? How bad would it be? How long would the damage last? What could I do to cope? Who could help me? Most fears are exaggerated.

The most powerful way to use the mind-body connection to improve your physical and mental health is through guiding your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Every time you calm the ANS through stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you tilt your body, brain, and mind increasingly toward inner peace and well-being.

Meditation increases gray matter in brain regions that handle attention, compassion, and empathy. It also helps a variety of medical conditions, strengthens the immune system, and improves psychological functioning.

Find refuge in whatever is a sanctuary and refueling station for you. Potential refuges include people, activities, places, and intangible things like reason, a sense of your innermost being, or truth.

The farther down the neuroaxis, the more immediate the reactions; higher up on the neuroaxis, time frames stretch. For example, cortical influences help you pass up a reward right now in order to gain a greater one in the future (McClure et al. 2004). Usually, the longer the view, the wiser the intentions.

In sum, the ACC is at the center of top-down, deliberate, centralized, reasoned motivation.

It is sometimes said that desire leads to suffering, but is that always true? The territory of desire is far-reaching, and it includes wishes, intentions, hopes, and cravings. Whether a desire leads to suffering depends on two factors: Is craving—the sense that you need something—involved? And what is the desire for? Regarding the first of these, desire per se is not the root of suffering; craving is. You can wish for or intend something without craving the results; for example, you can decide to get eggs from the refrigerator without craving them—and without getting upset if there are none left.

Regarding the second factor, intentions are a double-edged sword that can either hurt or help. For example, the Three Poisons—greed, hatred, and delusion—are a kind of intention: to grab pleasure and hold on tight, resist pain and anything else you don’t like, and ignore or distort things you’d rather not know about.

As you weave positive inclinations more deeply into the different levels of your brain, you increasingly push the Three Poisons to the margins. It’s important to nurture good intentions at all levels of the neuroaxis—and to cultivate the strength to carry them out.

Strength has two primary aspects: energy and determination. You can intensify these by quickening your breathing a little, or by tightening your shoulders slightly, as if you’re bracing to carry a load. Get familiar with the muscle movements—often subtle ones—associated with strength. Just as making the facial expression of an emotion will heighten that feeling (Niedenthal 2007), engaging the muscle movements of strength will increase your experience of

In general, the farther down the neuroaxis a response takes place, the faster, more intense, and more automatic it is. Higher on the neuroaxis, responses become more delayed, less intense, and more considered. In particular, the cortex—the most evolutionarily recent level—really enhances your capacity to take the future into account. Usually, the longer the view, the wiser the intentions.

The two networks—metaphorically the head and the heart—can support each other, be awkwardly out of sync, or struggle in outright conflict. Ideally, your intentions will be aligned with each other at all levels of the neuroaxis: that’s when they have the most power.

Intentions are a form of desire. Desire per se is not the root of suffering; craving is. The key is to have wholesome intentions without being attached to their results.

Inner strength comes in many forms, including quiet perseverance. Get familiar with what strength feels like in your body so you can call it up again. Deliberately stimulate feel...

Equanimity is a perfect, unshakable balance of mind. —Nyanaponika Thera

Imagine that your mind is like a house with a mud-room—the entry room in cold climates where people put their messy boots and dripping coats. With equanimity, your initial reactions to things—reach for this carrot, push away that stick—are left in a mental mud-room so that the interior of your mind remains clear and clean and peaceful.

The word equanimity comes from Latin roots meaning “even” and “mind.” With equanimity, what passes through your mind is held with spaciousness so you stay even-keeled and aren’t thrown off balance. The ancient circuitry of the brain is continually driving yo...