the end of the course, the participants
who logged the most meditation hours
had increased their working memory
capacity, whereas those who practiced
less often — as well as a control group of
other soon-to-be-deployed Marines —
showed decreased capacity.
Likewise, in a 2011 study conducted
by researchers at Massachusetts
General Hospital, a group of healthy
adults took an eight-week MBSR course,
during which time they meditated an
average of 27 minutes a day outside
of class. Before-and-after magnetic-resonance scans showed that, compared to a control group, the meditators
had increased gray-matter density in
several regions of the brain, including
the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped
structures in each of our temporal lobes
that are associated with learning and
the encoding and retrieval of long-term
memory. In addition, those participants who reported that they were less
stressed at the end of the eight-week
program showed decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala — the
two almond-shaped clusters of nuclei
rooted deep within each temporal lobe
that control our fight-or-flight response
and play host to negative emotions like
fear and anxiety.
ZENTERPRISE
For his 2015 book Mindful Work: How
Meditation Is Changing Business From
the Inside Out, New York Times business reporter and longtime meditation
practitioner David Gelles traveled
across the United States for more than
a year interviewing business leaders.
Among the people he talked to were
Janice Marturano, who founded the
Institute for Mindful Leadership in
2011 after serving for 15 years as vice
president of public responsibility and
deputy general counsel at General Mills,
where she created a unique mindfulness program to benefit employees; and
Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford
Motor Company, whose mindfulness
David Gelles
‘[Mindfulness] takes
time, effort, and
isn’t always easy or
even enjoyable. It’s
like going to the
gym, but for your
mind.’
Julie Liegl
‘Don’t be afraid of
doing something
different. Mindfulness can be beneficial for anyone
interested and
open to positively
investing in their
wellbeing.’
I T’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Secular mindfulness programs like
mindfulness-based stress reduction
(MBSR), which was pioneered at the
University of Massachusetts Medi-
cal School in the early 1980s by Jon
Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., now an emeritus
professor of medicine at UMass, have
become the building blocks for mind-
fulness training in North America.
Kabat-Zinn has described mindful-
ness as “paying attention in a particu-
lar way: on purpose, in the present
moment, and nonjudgmentally.” He’s
echoed by a 2011 article in the jour-
nal Psychotherapy, published by the
American Psychological Association
(APA), that defines mindfulness as “a
moment-to-moment awareness of
one’s experience without judgment.”
In 2010, Emotion, another APA jour-
nal, published the results of an intrigu-
ing experiment that looked at how
mindfulness can improve the working
memory capacity of highly stressed
individuals — in this case, U.S. Marines
who were about to be deployed over-
seas. Subjects were tested on a number
of tasks related to short-term memory
both before and after participating in
an eight-week mindfulness course cre-
ated by Elizabeth A. Stanley, Ph.D., a
former U.S. Army intelligence officer
and founder and president of the Alex-
andria, Virginia–based Mind Fitness
Training Institute. The 29 participants
tracked the amount of time they spent
outside of class practicing the tech-
niques they had learned. When tested at
