How much does attention influence the physical world?

Does our mind influence the world, separate from our actions? Usually the way we influence the world is with our physical movements: whether it’s the movement of our hands in manipulating objects, or verbal utterances that influence the movements of others. But does simply paying attention in a particular way change something about the physical world, without you or anyone else actually moving in order to make that change? The answer to this question has to be yes, for reasons that I will explain. What is less clear is the implication of this: just how powerful are our thoughts? Just how much can we change the world merely with our attention?

It should be obvious that our thoughts and feelings do change the world, independent of immediate actions we take on them, because our thoughts and feelings change our brain. It’s easy to get confused about the causality here, so let’s just take a simple case. A guy downloads a meditation app and starts meditating every day. He just sits in silence and pays attention to his breath. He notices certain aspects of his life begin to change: he seems more relaxed, more confident, less reactive to difficulties. What actually happened here? How did this change come about?

One explanation would be that by paying attention in a particular way, the guy made alterations to his brain chemistry which subsequently caused changes in the ways he reacts to situations in the future. There are other ways you could interpret this,¹ but the simple takeaway here is that mere changes in attention and thought resulted in changes in the world, without the individual directly acting on those thoughts.

We could list a number of other examples of this phenomenon of thoughts/feelings influencing the world. You go to therapy, you have some conversations and feel certain emotions, and you notice that you’ve begun to behave differently. You encounter a setback in life, you start thinking more and more negative thoughts about yourself, and months later a doctor is doing a brain scan and noticing that the volume of grey matter in your hippocampus has diminished, which is a hallmark of clinical depression. Your thoughts and feelings influence your body; the mental influences the physical.

Here is the question we don’t have the answer to yet: how far can this influence go? How profoundly can mental activity alter the physical world? We know, for example, that mystical voodoo magic doesn’t work, at least in its current form. You can wish really strongly to have a billion dollars in your bank account tomorrow, and unless you do something about it, it’s not gonna happen. You can wish ill upon someone while watching them achieve ever greater heights of success, wealth, and fame. You can wish really really badly that you’d stop aging, but you will continue to age nonetheless. You can pay really careful attention to your feeling of hunger, but if you don’t eat for long enough you will eventually die.

And yet, our minds can influence our bodies in astonishing ways. The most salient example of this is the experience of cessation. Advanced meditators who sit for long enough can enter a stage of “nirodha samapatti”, which is sort of an endstate in meditation where your consciousness shuts off entirely. I’ve heard one teacher describe it as “experiencing the world without any perspective.” Subjectively, it feels like nothing – as in, consciousness apparently shuts off completely. You experience it as “snapping out” and immediately “snapping back in”, although in reality many hours might have passed, and you feel like you’ve just had the best nap of your life. ² The most remarkable aspect of this experience, though, is the physical changes: your entire body goes into a kind of hibernation. Your metabolism slows down to such an extent that you can stay in this “turned off” state without moving for 72 hours straight. There is a mystery here, about just how profoundly the mental can have a causal influence on the physical.

Our culture is awash in materialistic thinking, which basically means that we consider mental causes to be puny compared to physical ones. In many ways, this makes perfect sense: there is no amount of meditation you can do that will protect you from being stabbed. But at the same time, this causes us to neglect the plentiful ways that our minds can change the world.³

What is actually happening when you make progress in meditation? The question I always have is: is there some form of progress you can make in meditation that can’t be undone by a brain tumor or an injury to the head? Shinzen Young has a story about being taken off thyroid supplements for a medical treatment, which resulted in his IQ dropping steadily to dementia levels, but throughout the whole time he claims to have maintained some amount of clarity and equanimity. This would demonstrate that the mental practice he did with his mind caused some changes that went very deep into the physical structure of his brain. And the ability of advanced meditators to literally invoke a hibernation state by paying attention in a particular way suggests that you can go quite far.

This is what I was wondering on my walk the other day, after having practiced more intense concentration meditation in the past week. If I keep going further down this route how deeply does my brain change? It gives me comfort (and excitement) to consider that the changes might go pretty deep, might cut into the essence of who I am, rather than being merely cosmetic alterations to a fundamentally physical underlying process, a process that I’d be most apt to change by more physical means, like all the ordinary things people do to alter their minds: drugs, surgeries, and various kinds of electrical and magnetic stimulation. If the mental is primary, it could be that mere attention is ultimately more powerful than all of these things.