A Bridge Between the Neuroscience and Experience of Meditation

I came to Iain McGilchrist’s Ways of Attending as someone interested in both meditation and neuroscience. This very short book distills one of the central arguments of his much larger work, The Master and His Emissary. Rather than presenting a comprehensive account of hemispheric differences and their consequences for Western culture, it offers an accessible introduction focused on attention. For me, it provides a compelling bridge between meditation and neuroscience.

McGilchrist’s central insight is that attention is not merely a cognitive function that selects parts of an already existing world. The manner in which we attend helps shape the world we experience.

McGilchrist distinguishes between the characteristic forms of attention associated with the brain’s two hemispheres. He rejects the popular idea that the left hemisphere is logical and the right creative. Both hemispheres participate in nearly everything we do. What distinguishes them is not so much what they do as how they attend.

The left hemisphere employs narrow, focused attention. It isolates objects, analyzes details, forms categories and makes the world available for practical action. The right hemisphere sustains a broader and more receptive awareness. It remains open to context, relationship, novelty, ambiguity and the living whole. We require both. The problem arises when the narrow, analytical representation produced by the left hemisphere is mistaken for the whole of reality.

This distinction immediately suggests a connection with meditation. Meditation often begins by selecting an object such as the breath and learning to sustain attention upon it. This focused attention develops stability, precision and the capacity to recognize distraction. Yet meditation does not end with tighter control over a narrowly defined object. As practice matures, attention can become more open and receptive. The breath is experienced within a wider field of bodily sensation, sound, feeling and awareness.

McGilchrist’s account helps explain this movement from concentration toward presence. Focused attention establishes stability, but receptive awareness allows experience to appear without immediately being divided, categorized or judged. The meditator learns not only where to place attention, but how to be with what is attended to.

It would be too simple to identify focused meditation with the left hemisphere and open awareness with the right. Meditation involves both hemispheres and distributed networks throughout the brain. McGilchrist’s more useful point concerns their relationship. Narrow attention should serve a broader awareness: we encounter the whole, examine something within it, and then return that understanding to its living context.

This is particularly relevant to my practice of counting distractions during meditation. Counting provides an objective measure and trains the ability to recognize distraction and return to the breath. But measurement is not the destination. It is a tool through which focused attention can become stable enough to support a less effortful and more unified awareness. In McGilchrist’s terms, measurement should serve presence rather than replace it.

Much neuroscientific research describes meditation through attention control, executive functioning, emotional regulation and changes in brain networks. Traditional meditation describes it from within, using concepts such as non-grasping, equanimity, absorption and insight. McGilchrist helps connect these perspectives. He begins with the organization of the brain but follows it into questions about experience: What does a particular manner of attending allow us to perceive? What kind of relationship with the world does it create?

Seen in this light, meditation is more than attention training intended to improve cognitive performance. It is a practice of changing the manner in which we encounter experience. We retain the capacity for precise, purposeful focus while becoming less governed by grasping, categorizing and control. Focus becomes the servant of awareness.

Ways of Attending therefore provides more than a neurological explanation of meditation. It offers a concise point of entry into McGilchrist’s broader thought and a vocabulary for understanding how brain, attention and lived experience belong together. Meditation trains not only the ability to remain attentive, but the capacity to meet the world with a broader, more patient and more receptive awareness.

A Personal Inquiry into Pain, Discomfort, Difficulty, and Growth

Suffering Imposed Upon Us

Suffering is one of those words that seems straightforward until we try to say exactly what we mean by it. Pain, discomfort, difficulty, stress, grief, and suffering overlap, but they are not the same thing. We may voluntarily endure considerable discomfort and not consider ourselves to be suffering at all. At other times, we may be suffering without fully recognizing it.

There is an easy place to begin. Externally imposed oppression or victimization causes genuine and undesirable suffering. War, abuse, exploitation, cruelty, and deprivation can overwhelm a person’s ability to simply choose a different attitude toward what is happening. There is little reason to romanticize such suffering, and certainly no reason to impose it on someone because we imagine it will make them stronger.

The more difficult questions begin with the suffering of ordinary life. How much of it can be avoided? How much do we create ourselves? Can difficulty contribute to growth without becoming suffering? And when suffering cannot be avoided, can changing the way we attend to it change the experience itself?

Suffering We Don’t Acknowledge

Sometimes a person is genuinely suffering but does not acknowledge it. I have done this myself. We push through, minimize what is happening, distract ourselves, or simply refuse to call it suffering. This may be a useful coping mechanism for a time, but as a long-term strategy it is a distortion. Not acknowledging suffering is not the same as being free of it.

There have been times when I mistook my ability to keep going for evidence that I was not suffering. Looking back, the suffering was quite real. Recognizing it was not giving in to it; it was necessary before I could respond appropriately. Sometimes the wiser response is not greater endurance but acknowledging what is happening and taking care of ourselves.

Discomfort and Growth

Growth often involves discomfort, but it may be a mistake to call that suffering when the difficulty is voluntarily undertaken. Athletic training provides an obvious example. We deliberately stress ourselves because we want to increase our capabilities. Fatigue, exertion, and even pain can be unpleasant without necessarily being experienced as suffering.

Much the same applies in ordinary life. Learning something difficult, creating something, caring for others, or working toward a meaningful goal can involve considerable effort and frustration. But when the effort is freely chosen and has purpose, we may experience it as challenge rather than suffering.

Attitude matters here. There is an old saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. Few of us love what we do every day, but the saying contains an insight: the meaning we give to difficulty changes our experience of it.

Looking Directly at Suffering

Buddhism takes the investigation further. A common Buddhist formulation is that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. We cannot avoid unpleasant sensations, illness, aging, loss, and death. But Buddhism asks whether the suffering we add to these experiences arises partly from our resistance to them—our craving for things to be different from the way they are.

“Optional” does not mean that a suffering person can simply decide not to suffer. It points instead to something that can be discovered and developed through practice: our experience may change as our relationship to pain, loss, and adversity changes.

Some meditation practices make this question experiential. There are meditation teachers who teach an Hour of Stillness, in which you try not to move. Eventually something hurts. We quickly label a sensation pain and react: I don’t like this; I want it to stop.

But give the sensation your complete attention and something interesting can happen. What seemed like a single solid thing called pain becomes pressure, heat, tension, pulsing—sensations arising and passing. Sometimes what we had labelled pain diminishes or disappears. More importantly, the suffering surrounding the sensation can diminish even when the sensation remains.

This isn’t a trick for ignoring suffering. It is almost the opposite: looking so closely that we begin to distinguish the sensation itself from our reaction to it. Buddhism takes this insight deeper still. Much of our resistance is organized around a sense of self: I am hurting; I don’t want this; this shouldn’t be happening to me. Buddhist practice ultimately asks us to examine that “I” as closely as we examine the pain. If our sense of a fixed and separate self begins to loosen, so too may some of the suffering organized around protecting it.

The point is not that pain is imaginary. Pain can be present without necessarily becoming suffering.

Avoiding Unnecessary Suffering

There is also something to be said for not creating unnecessary suffering in the first place. At first glance, exercising without pushing yourself very hard can sound lazy. But slow running and low-intensity exercise are established approaches to building fitness.

Endurance athletes commonly do much of their training at an easy, sustainable intensity. The idea is not to prove your fitness on every outing but to build it gradually. Easy training allows longer and more frequent sessions, develops aerobic capacity, and reduces the fatigue associated with repeatedly exercising at high intensity. Approaches such as easy running, conversational-pace running, Zone 2 training, and polarized endurance training differ in their details, but they share an important principle: harder is not always better.

The same principle applies beyond running. Strength training does not require taking every set to failure. A cyclist does not need to finish every ride exhausted. A swimmer can accumulate distance at a comfortable pace and discover, months later, that what once required considerable effort has become easy. Capacity can be built by repeatedly working within one’s limits and allowing those limits to expand.

There is an important distinction here between stress and strain. The aim is not to avoid effort, but to apply enough stress to stimulate adaptation without unnecessarily turning the experience into suffering. By going slowly, we can gradually develop the capacity that eventually allows us to go faster.

We often associate growth with pushing ourselves—no pain, no gain. But another path is consistency, patience, and gradual adaptation. Growth requires challenge, but it does not necessarily require suffering.

What Do We Do With Suffering?

Perhaps the mistake is trying to reach a single verdict on suffering. Suffering is good for you is too crude, but so is suffering should always be avoided. The distinctions matter.

Some suffering should be prevented. Some needs to be acknowledged rather than denied. Some apparent suffering may actually be voluntary discomfort in the service of something we value. And there is wisdom in developing our capabilities gradually rather than making unnecessary hardship into a virtue.

Then there is suffering we cannot prevent: illness, loss, aging, disappointment, and eventually death. Here the question changes. If we cannot remove the experience, what relationship will we have with it?

Sometimes the appropriate response is to change the circumstances. Sometimes it is to rest or ask for help. Sometimes it is to build our capacity patiently. And sometimes it is to look directly at what we are experiencing and see what happens when we stop resisting it.

Perhaps wisdom lies not in learning how to suffer, or even in learning how to avoid suffering, but in learning to recognize what kind of experience we are having and responding to it appropriately.

Pointers to the Oasis

People often say that meditation is boring. In a sense, they are right—but only because they mistake one stage of practice for the whole journey.

When people try meditation for the first time, or only occasionally, they often enjoy it. They leave feeling calmer, more relaxed, perhaps a little refreshed. This is good meditation, but it is only the beginning. It is primarily relaxational meditation. There is real value in it, but it is also relatively easy.

The challenge comes when meditation becomes a regular practice. Sitting every day or every week for twenty minutes or more requires discipline. You are learning a skill. You are training attention. The novelty wears off. Progress seems slow. The practice becomes routine, and many people conclude that meditation is boring.

For many meditators, this is the desert. Some turn back. Others keep walking.

But meditation asks a question in return. What do you mean by boring?

Is boredom always something to avoid? Must every moment be stimulating? Our modern world trains us to expect constant novelty, yet our minds are not necessarily healthier for it. There is value in occasionally doing one simple thing, repeatedly and without hurry. If not meditation, then gardening. Is it really so difficult to spend twenty minutes pulling weeds? Many people discover that weeding the garden becomes, quite naturally, meditative. Repetitive, single-minded activity gives the restless mind an opportunity to settle.

There is another way through boredom: curiosity.

You can gamify meditation, and there is nothing wrong with that. Treat each meditation as an exploration. How long can you follow the sensations of the inhale before they disappear? How long can you remain with the exhale? What subtle variations in temperature, pressure, sound, or movement can you detect? Does the breath have a taste at all? Every sitting becomes an opportunity to notice something you have never noticed before.

The breath is not nearly as simple as it first appears. A curious mind discovers that ordinary experience contains extraordinary detail. What once seemed monotonous becomes endlessly interesting.

With continued practice, something else begins to emerge. You experience the quiet joy of competence.

At first, this joy comes simply from discovering that you can direct your attention more steadily than before. You notice it during meditation. Then you notice it outside meditation as well. Conversations become easier to follow. Reading becomes deeper. You catch distractions sooner. Your attention becomes something you can trust. The practice is paying off, and it feels good. There is nothing wrong with enjoying this reward. It encourages you to continue.

As the hours accumulate—tens of hours, then hundreds—meditation begins to change. The effortful stage gradually gives way to something softer. What was once a dry exercise in concentration becomes infused with quiet joy. Your habits of attention gradually change. Instead of repeatedly reinforcing distraction, muddledness, craving, and suffering, you spend increasing amounts of time cultivating mindfulness, presence, and contentment.

The practice is no longer sustained by discipline alone. Attention itself becomes rewarding. The breath that once seemed ordinary reveals endless subtlety. Stillness no longer feels empty but alive. You find yourself looking forward to sitting down, not because you should, but because you want to.

You realize that what you once called boredom was simply unfamiliarity. You had not yet stayed with the practice long enough to discover what lay beyond it.

The ancient meditation traditions describe increasingly joyful states of practice, but you do not need to know their names to experience them. They are not reached through belief or mysticism, but through patience, curiosity, and sustained practice.

You thought you were crossing a desert. Instead, you had reached an oasis.