IN THE West, meditation is hailed as a panacea for many ills. It is taught as a cure for emotional distress and as a recipe for happiness. It is even prescribed for pain relief and as a treatment for recurring depression when the drugs fail. In central and south Asia, where the practice originated, it represents something quite different: a spiritual exploration of the mind, a profound recasting of how we understand ourselves.

The two are not incompatible, though. The Dalai Lama, who practises in the Eastern tradition, is one of several meditation masters to encourage a de-spiritualised version, a path accessible to all.

For many years, science writer Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard Davidson have collaborated with the Dalai Lama in this mission, answering his call for scientists to test the effects of meditation in the lab and apply the results wherever they might be useful. Goleman and Davidson have now written a book, The Science of Meditation, in which they try to cut through the tangle of claims and promises. Their aim is to make clear what works and what doesn’t, and to explain why focusing our attention minute by minute on a single facet of consciousness (a mantra, our breath, stray thoughts) might have such a dramatic impact on our well-being and state of mind.

It is much needed. Of the hundreds of behavioural and neuroimaging studies carried out on meditators over two decades, many are inconclusive. Even so, Goleman and Davidson find plenty to be optimistic about. For example, there is good evidence that regular sessions of mindful attention have a calming effect on the amygdala, the brain’s emotion processor, and reduce impulsive reactions to stressful or negative thoughts and experiences.

Mindfulness can help mute our emotional response to physical pain, and lessen anxiety and mind-wandering (not the kind that feeds creativity but its unfocused opposite). The benefits are apparent, even for beginners, and they increase with practice.

Compassion meditation, which aims to boost empathy, has an even more immediate effect: just 7 hours over the course of two weeks has been shown to boost altruistic behaviour. It is probably no coincidence that this makes us happier, too.

“The fundamental aim of meditation is to deconstruct the self, not shore it up”

This is the kind of affirmation that Goleman and Davidson most enjoy. They are interested less in meditation’s potential for improving health or sharpening business performance and more in its capacity to cultivate enduring qualities such as selflessness, equanimity, compassion and the ability to free the mind of negative emotions – what they call “highly positive altered traits”.

Much of the evidence for these traits comes from Davidson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has scanned the brains of dozens of highly experienced Tibetan monks. These yogis, who have meditated for thousands – in some cases, tens of thousands – of hours, describe themselves as living in a heightened state of present-moment awareness, “as if their senses were wide open to the full, rich panorama of experience”.

Davidson claims he has found a neural correlate to this mind-warp: a massive increase in the intensity of gamma waves in the brain, a signal associated with conscious perception. Are these monks living on a different plane of consciousness from the rest of us?

While Goleman and Davidson are long-time meditation enthusiasts, they are not evangelists. They are sceptical of many claims about the benefits of mindfulness, and Davidson makes a point of publishing “non-findings” from his lab. For this, he would no doubt be applauded by Thomas Joiner, a psychologist and specialist in suicidal behaviour, who argues in his own book Mindlessness that interest in this form of meditation has gone too far. “Authentic mindfulness has been perverted into solipsism,” he declares.

Yet he never properly draws the line between the authentic and solipsistic versions, and appears to use mindfulness as a stand-in for his real bugbear: the modern culture of self-importance and narcissism, manifest in such things as selfies, self-marriage ceremonies, self-compassion, and even trendy coffee shops.

“To ask that people gaze inward… is inviting them to let natural inclinations run amok, to the point of unseemly excess,” says Joiner. Self-examination at this level ends in “the sound of a cell phone click as one takes a selfie, and… the self glorified while the culture falls around it”.

Self-lightening

Really? It’s easy to be cynical about popular culture, but pinning its excesses on mindfulness seems a stretch. The fundamental aim of meditation is to deconstruct the self, not shore it up, to “lighten the system that builds our feelings of I, me, and mine”, as Goleman and Davidson put it.

One of their most interesting passages describes what this self-lightening looks like on a neural level, how meditation practice quietens the brain’s default mode network, the constant background chatter that accompanies mind-wandering and self-absorption.

If a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, as various psychological surveys argue, then a focused mind must be worth struggling for. For Goleman and Davidson, the struggle is not so much about individual relief as global salvation, about reducing “greed, selfishness, us/them thinking and impending eco-calamities, and promoting more kindness, clarity, and calm”.

Joiner may raise a sceptical eyebrow, but the Dalai Lama would probably approve.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Into the moment…”

Why gut instinct will decide the most irrational referendum yet

How opinion polls will shape the narrative of the EU referendum

“Knowledge about the EU is low. It will be a domestic protest vote guided by entrenched views“

How your Facebook feed will affect your Brexit vote

Find out more about the science of Brexit

There is no such thing as a rational voter. Several decades of surveys and opinion polls show that elections and referendums are decided as much by ideology and emotion as a sober analysis of policies and manifestos.

The referendum on the UK’s future in the European Union could be the most irrational yet. Uncertainty over consequences, and contradictory economic and political information, mean that voters will be swung even more than usual by feelings and biases that have nothing to do with the issues at stake.

“Polls show that knowledge about the EU in Britain is low,” says John McCormick, who studies EU politics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “To a large extent it’s going to be a domestic protest vote”.

He predicts that instead of EU considerations, many voters will be guided by their entrenched views on immigration, the Conservative government and political figures such as David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.

In this, the EU referendum is similar to the UK’s , in which voters were asked if they wanted to replace the first past the post voting system with the “alternative vote”. The result was no: 68 per cent to 32 per cent.

Surveys conducted in the weeks before showed that many people didn’t understand what the alternative system was or what would change were it adopted. Yet many voted anyway, led by – whether they thought them competent or likeable, for example.

Shortcuts for our brain

This is the kind of cognitive shortcut that psychologists have found we all use in the face of overwhelming or uncertain information. Being well informed doesn’t inure us. Studies have shown that : the more you know, the more you realise how complex the issues are so you console yourself that you are better off making an intuitive judgement.

The problem is that such shortcuts aren’t necessarily accurate and may be completely irrelevant.

One of the most common is “status quo bias”. This is the tendency of people who aren’t politically engaged or who are confused about the possible consequences to vote against change. It has played a role in many referendums including the 1975 vote on the UK’s continued membership of the European Community and the alternative vote, says Paul Whiteley at the University of Essex, UK, and is likely to be even more important in this one.

Brexit is more important for the future of the UK than a switch to the alternative vote, he says, so more people will feel they have a duty to vote even if they really don’t know what to do.

One of the greatest unknowns is how the current widespread mistrust of political elites will play out. This has contributed to the success of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, as well as the rise of Donald Trump and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the UK’s Labour party. Anger at political elites – including those in Brussels – may be more influential than traditional concerns such as how the EU affects British values, says Stephen Reicher at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

“What so many politicians fail to understand is that, in this anti-political age, politics as usual doesn’t work and that doing things that might conventionally doom you now doesn’t,” he says. “It might even help you, something Trump has mastered to perfection.”

Find out more about the science of Brexit