How meditation deconstructs your mind

We’re laying out the latest science of what meditation does to your mind. The better we understand the common mechanisms across how different meditation practices affect the mind, the more meditation science can contribute to broader understandings of human psychology.

More relevant for us non-scientists, we’ll get better at developing and fine-tuning styles of practice that can help us get the most out of whatever we’re looking for in taking up meditation. (It’s possible, after all, that there are improvements to be made on the instructions we received a few thousand years ago.)

There’s a lot to get into here, but if you walk away from this with anything, it should be that in the past few years, a breakthrough has begun sweeping across meditation research, delivering science’s first “general theory of meditation.” That means very exciting days — and more to the point, scientifically refined meditation frameworks and practices — are not too far ahead.

Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.

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