Psychology Today: We generally think of mindfulness as an idea that has been around for thousands of years, originally emerging out of Buddhist traditions. Many Buddhist researchers are doing great studies showing that mindfulness has an impact on many aspects of human experience.
I have a bit of a problem with that. When you understand the underlying physiology of mindfulness, you begin to see that any discussion about human change, learning, education, even politics and social issues, ends up being about mindfulness. That’s because mindfulness, in some ways, is simply the opposite of mindlessness. And mindlessness is the cause of a tremendous amount of human suffering.
I have a problem with something as important as deeper thinking being linked to any religion. Not because I have anything Buddhism or against any religion at all. (Of all the organized religions, Buddhism appears to be one that generates a minimum of human conflict.) The reason I have a problem is it’s hard enough getting across the idea that being mindful is useful, without activating a threat response from the billions of non-buddhists who could benefit from it.
The value of a secular approach
One of the reasons mindfulness can be difficult to talk about, in particular when discussing mindfulness with the busy people who run our companies and institutions, is that these people tend to spend little time thinking about themselves and other people, but a lot of time thinking about strategy, data, and systems. As a result, the circuits involved in thinking about oneself and other people, the medial prefrontal cortex, tend to be not too well developed. I write more about this in a paper called ‘Managing with the brain in mind’ recently.