đ How Meditation Cleans Your Brain
New research uncovers how focused attention changes the movement of cerebrospinal fluid
Mindfulness meditation typically guides you to sit quietly and focus your mind on the present moment. Specific anchors for attentionâmost commonly your breathâcan be helpful for nudging your awareness into that present moment, but contrary to common understanding, the point of meditation isnât to prevent thoughts or meet some ultimate goal of calmness.
Instead, itâs about keeping your mind here and now, whatever that entails. It could be thoughts that come and go, it could be the physical sensations of particular emotions, and it could even be feelings of boredom or restlessness. As long as youâre truly aware of those experiences as they happen instead of getting mentally lost in them, you are in fact meditating. In contrast, when youâre lost in your thoughts, you are mind-wandering rather than meditating.
People often describe their meditation practice as mentally cleansing and restorative. According to new research, there may be some surprisingly literal truth to that when it comes to the brainâs physiology.
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a clear fluid that washes through the brain providing protective support as a shock absorber and also helping to remove waste products. When the circulation of CSF is disrupted, brain health can suffer. Sleep is known to positively impact circulation and promote better waste clearance, but what if meditation can produce similar benefits while you are awake?
𧪠What did the researchers do?
In a study published in PNAS this month, researchers recruited a sample of 23 adept meditators and compared them to 27 control participants with limited meditation experience. All participants completed two 25-minute tasks while getting their brains scanned with MRI:
Meditators: completed a 25-minute block of mind-wandering followed by a 25-minute block of focused attention meditation.
Control group 1 (repeated control): completed two 25-minute blocks of mind-wandering.
Control group 2 (breath control): completed a 25-minute block of mind-wandering followed by a 25-minute block of slow breathing exercises.
By analyzing the MRI data, the researchers could investigate how CSF moved through different areas of the brain and how this movement changed depending on what participants were doing inside the scanner.
đ What did the research find?
When experienced meditators shifted from mind-wandering to focused attention, it produced lower levels of CSF regurgitant flow in a midbrain area called the cerebral aqueduct (a narrow channel that connects the brainâs ventricles). Regurgitant flow involves backward fluid motion and it tends to increase with age and neurodegenerative damage.
These reductions in regurgitant flow did not appear in either control group, even when non-meditators slowed their breathing to match the meditatorsâ natural shift in respiration. Meditation itself seemed to be the active ingredient rather than a general change in relaxation or breathing.
During focused attention, meditators also showed stronger low-frequency CSF fluctuations near the base of the skullâprecisely the kind of low-frequency pulsations normally seen during sleep. These waves are linked with better CSF circulation and more effective waste clearance in the brain.
In other words, meditation creates fluid dynamics in the brain that resemble healthy sleep and oppose the patterns seen in aging or neurodegenerative disease. This adds a physiological reason for many of psychological benefits that meditators describe following their practice, though future research will have to tease apart how tight that connection really is.
Although sleep and meditation are very different psychological states, they both seem to promote a clearer mind, less stress, and better focus. And based on the research findings above, itâs possible that a similar physiological mechanism underlies many of those mutual benefits.
âď¸ Takeaway tips
#1. Try brief focused attention sessions on the breath
Anchoring your attention to sensations of breathing is a classic mindfulness technique that has been around for a long time, and itâs easy to practice whenever you have a moment between tasks during your day. The study above suggests that even relatively short sessions of practice can positively balance the flow of CSF in the brain. Itâs still early days in the research, but these physiological changes may contribute to feelings of restfulness and psychological stability that meditators often report.
#2. Donât be too strict or demanding about your meditation
Many of us have ended a meditation session with conclusions like âit was terrible, I couldnât stop thinkingâ or âI just felt restless the whole timeâ or âI found it frustrating that I couldnât stay focused on my breathingâ. However, our problem here doesnât lie with the meditation itself but rather the goals and expectations weâre setting. Going into a meditation with goals like feeling calmer and having no thoughts is bound to be counterproductive, since every moment will feel like a battle toward trying to achieve something. Instead, go into a meditation session with no goals whatsoever and simply know that you will sit for a few minutes and notice what happens in your mind. The thing I love most about meditating is that I never really know what will happen, what Iâll think, or how Iâll feel, but Iâm ready to pay attention.
#3. Less judgment, more curiosity
Following from #2 above, mindfulness generally encourages you to be less judgmental about what youâre thinking or sensing in life and more curious about simply observing it. There is a huge psychological difference between these two mindsets: when a passing acquaintance in the street doesnât say hello, judgment will make you wonder for hours why they now hate you, while observation will be content with having seen them. The same events in life can produce very different meanings and emotional consequences simply by bumping up against either judgment or present-moment awareness.
âMindfulness, though so highly praised and capable of such great achievements, is not at all a âmysticalâ state, beyond the ken and reach of the average person. It is, on the contrary, something quite simple and common, and very familiar to us.â
~ Nyanaponika
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