The Monkey in the Brain

Meditating Graphically

A regular meditation practice, for around 20 minutes per day, has been shown to have a lot of benefits. Unfortunately, for many people, the concentration and focus required is simply too difficult to maintain for more than a few seconds at a time.

If you are one of those people, perhaps some graphics will help you visualize your way to more focused meditation.

This is your brain.

If you look really, really closely, you will see a small monkey.

Scientifically speaking, this is called the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is the part of your brain that is active when you are not. The DMN lives mostly in the past and the future, and, like a monkey, it is constantly jumping from thought to thought, so that your brain actually ends up looking like this — cluttered and full.

It is said that the average person has 70,000 thoughts a day — though I am not sure who did the counting. Whatever it is, it is a lot of thinking. We can now simplify the diagram, and map this clutter of thoughts along two axes, because some thoughts are negative, while others are positive; and each thought has a different level of emotional intensity.

For example, worrying about someone giving you a bad look is somewhat negative, and has a low intensity, but worrying about how you will make the next mortgage payment is highly negative, and comes with a high intensity.

So now, a person having a bad day has a brain like this…

…while a person having a generally good day has a brain like this.

What happens when you meditate? For a period of say twenty minutes, if you have been able to focus correctly, your brain looks like this.

Negative and positive thoughts are both minimized, while the focus remains, as far as possible, in the neutral, middle zone.

It doesn’t matter how you achieve this focus — you could be focusing on a sound, listening to music, or, most commonly, just focusing on your breathing. If you can reduce the RPM of your brain down for these few minutes, every day, so that the focus and intensity remain in neutral mode, lots of good things will start happening in your brain.