In 2009, Susan Morgan left her business, 
her patients, and her house
to spend four years in silence.
No talking, except for twice-weekly
meetings with her teachers.
No internet, no phones, no connection
to the outside world.
- I was a worrier...
For the whole first year, I would wake up 
in the morning in a state of alarm.
Like get out of bed, like, "I'm late for an 
appointment!" or "What am I supposed to do?"
When you're in silence and you're
just sitting and walking all day,
you kind of start to notice those things.
She and her husband Bill lived at the Forest 
Refuge Center in rural Massachusetts,
where they stayed in separate rooms and 
spent each day studying mindfulness.
When the couple returned home from 
their silent retreat, daily life felt...
different.
- You start to see slow shifts, subtle 
shifts, like I'm not as reactive,
and I'm more patient, and I feel more
a sense of gratitude and appreciation.
Over the past few decades, mindfulness has 
emerged as a billion-dollar industry
and a cultural darling for its ability 
to improve physical and mental health.
But it can be hard to get past the hype.
To understand the full potential of mindfulness,
scientists are studying experienced
meditators, like the Morgans.
What they're discovering is that mindfulness 
isn't just an effective stress reducer.
It can actually change our brains,
improving things like memory,
creativity, and decision making.
So long as we actually 
know what we're doing.
I'm meeting people whose minds stretch 
the limits of human potential,
and the researchers who are studying them,
to understand how we can all be
healthier and more productive.
This week: mindfulness.
I'm Michael Tabb. 
This is Exceptional Humans.
- What do you think are some of the biggest 
misconceptions about meditation?
- The idea that you're to empty your mind.
That's a futile practice, 
to try to make it quiet.
But more, how can you be a friend 
to a very busy, upset mind?
Susan Morgan has been meditating for 27 years.
Her husband, Bill, for almost 50.
- Sitting practice is kind of the little 
laboratory that you create for yourself.
Most of the time, daily practice doesn't feel good.
But there's an awareness now of
actually meeting myself where I am,
recognizing that there's a need to
attend to this crumpled up body.
There are many types of mindfulness,
but the basic principle is to attend to 
the present moment without judgment.
The point isn't to stop caring about things,
but to get some space between yourself
and the thoughts or feelings that
might normally consume you.
Morgan says this means shifting your perspective 
to see how we're all interconnected.
And research shows it comes 
with lots of health benefits.
- Back when I started this research,
I understood that the science 
would help people understand
that meditation was more than 
just sitting there, right?
And that it was perhaps not so kooky
as some people thought at the time.
Sarah Lazar is a neuroscientist at
Massachusetts General Hospital,
and assistant professor at 
Harvard Medical School.
More than a decade ago, she started
studying long-term meditators,
including Suzanne and Bill,
to better understand the effect that
meditation has on the brain.
- So as we get older, our 
brain starts to shrink.
So one of the most surprising things we found 
in our first study with long-term meditators
was that there were certain brain
regions that were just as big
in the older meditators as in 
the younger meditators.
Those preserved regions are parts of
the brain associated with focus,
executive decision making,
and awareness of your body.
Long-term meditation also seems 
to preserve intelligence.
- As we get older, our IQ drops with age.
And what we see here is the yoga practitioners 
and the meditation practitioners,
although there's some decline with age,
it's nowhere near as pronounced 
as it is with the controls.
Lazar wanted to be sure these changes
were caused by meditation itself,
as opposed to being natural differences that 
somehow lead people to start meditating.
To account for that, she did another study.
Her team found dozens of people 
who had never meditated
and had them take an eight-week course called 
"Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction."
MBSR was developed in the 1970s 
as a secular form of meditation
to treat chronic pain, anxiety, and illness.
After they completed the program, Lazar's team 
put participants in an MRI machine
and discovered something fascinating.
Like long-term meditators, their
brains were different, too.
In addition to being less stressed, people who 
practiced mindfulness for eight weeks
had more gray matter in parts of the 
brain involved in memory consolidation,
self-awareness, compassion, and creativity.
Meditating for a few months doesn't give you 
all the benefits of meditating for decades.
But Lazar is now trying to determine
if meditating for eight weeks
is enough to make you smarter.
- We're in the process now 
of doing some studies
where we're giving people the IQ test before 
and after the eight-week program.
And so when the study is finished, we'll be able 
to say whether or not it actually increases IQ.
Of course, meditation isn't exactly new.
It's hard to say exactly where
meditation came from,
but written records show people have been doing 
it since at least 1500 BC in ancient India.
Westward immigration in the 
19th and 20th centuries
brought several types of meditation
to Europe and America:
mindfulness, mantra, and spiritual.
Mindfulness started to take hold in
the West in the 1960s and 70s.
But the biggest explosion in popularity 
has come in the past decade.
Mindfulness apps have become 
a billion-dollar industry.
- We have over 45 million 
people on our platform.
So it seems to be resonating.
Dr. Megan Jones-Bell is the chief
science officer at Headspace,
a startup that offers guided
meditation through its app.
In the growing field of mindfulness products,
they're trying to set themselves apart 
by investing heavily in research.
- We know that, actually, 10 days of Headspace
is associated with about 
a 14% reduction in stress,
about the same improvement in focus,
and that when you use Headspace over
the span of six to eight weeks,
that's when you start to see effects of 
reductions in anxiety and depression.
At its most recent funding round in 2017, 
Headspace was valued at $320 million.
In early 2019, its main competitor, an app 
called Calm, hit the billion-dollar mark.
The commercialization of mindfulness
has come with some criticism,
that companies are selling access to something 
that's freely-accessible anyway,
promising health and productivity benefits 
you can get without a subscription service,
or a coloring book, or a vacation.
But lots of people find these apps to be an 
incredibly helpful introduction to mindfulness.
These apps help you slow down and reap lots 
of the benefits meditation has to offer.
Maybe you end up spending four years
on silent retreat or maybe not.
But either way, it's important to
recognize that mindfulness
is about more than solving your
problems or increasing productivity.
- If we see it as a way to connect more
with the parts of ourselves 
that we haven't opened to,
to actually open up to more 
of our of our humanity,
then I think it can be a real
resource in our culture.
Because there is a lot of loneliness and 
alienation that needs to be addressed.
But like with so many things, 
it can be abused, or misused,
or not quite taken full advantage of as well.
- Techniques only go so far.
We're talking about learning how to
shift a perspective over time.
And that kind of fundamental shift requires 
something more than just technique.
Thanks for watching this 
Quartz member exclusive.
This video is part of our series,
Exceptional Humans.
Keep watching for more stories on people whose 
minds stretch the limits of human potential,
in everything from sleep, to memory, to meditation.
