Thinking of Nothing is a Productive Thing to Do

There's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity.

The lead article in this week's MormonTimes has the headline “Noise reduction” with subhead: “Making time to reflect allows spirit to connect.” It derives strictly from LDS sources and quotes multiple prophets including President Hinkley. The bottom line is that we need to allocate time for pondering and meditation, and this time should be free of noise and other sensory stimulation, and that is difficult in today's world.

Of course I enjoy some of the non-LDS confirmation sources as well.

The Larry Fleinhardt character of NUMB3RS is an introspective genius who tends to perceive the human condition in terms of cosmic metaphors. He seems to believe in meditation and he practices it but characterizes it as “trying to think of nothing.” The writers skillfully leave it to the viewer to decide whether this is valid and, if so, whether it's productive.

I believe that it is both valid and productive. There are a number of documented evidences for this. I will reference two:

1. A recent NOVA episode and a recent 60 Minutes report both featured the same study that shows that deep sleep facilitates learning and memory. Subjects are instructed to type an unfamiliar and awkward sequence of numbers with the non-dominant hand. It requires many minutes of practice to do it easily and accurately. Twelve hours later they are found to have lost quite a bit of facility and accuracy, as expected, unless they have had a significant amount of sleep during that time. In the latter case, it is found that both the speed and accuracy have significantly improved! In other words, while the person sleeps, the brain is constructing new connections to facilitate the activity and this is found to occur during the deepest part of the sleep – the delta-wave sleep, the time when the person is most nearly comatose.

“Let me sleep on it and get back to you,” is a reflection of the historic recognition given to this phenomenon. Many people have observed that they go to bed with confusing, insolvable problems in their heads and wake up the next morning with confusion dissipated and the solutions clear.

This is found to benefit both learning and memory. A person of my age spends much less time in this deep sleep phase and this is seen to be a possible factor in an older persons degradation of memory and of ability to learn new things.

2 In skilled meditators – e.g. the Dahli Lahma and his associates – where they are able to closely approach Dr. Fleinhardt's “thinking of nothing” state, brain scans show that the brain actually increases in its energy consumption, and a larger than normal quantity of the brain is involved in this energy-consuming activity. What is the brain doing when one would think that it is not doing much of anything? That brings up the advantages of meditation which are touted as ability to reprogram the subconscious, alter one's basic personality and intuitive/reflexive responses, and solve problems as mentioned in number 1 above, among other things.

In other words, there's more to the mind than thinking, more to learning than reasoning, more to memory than observing, and more to productivity than frothy white activity. If we rely on thinking, reasoning, observing, and activity alone without the quiet interludes to allow the subconscious sorting, cataloguing, referencing, and correlating activities that turn data into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom, we are impeding, even laming our effectiveness.

If we can't find time to sit down and meditate without grabbing a book, a TV remote, a game control, or counter-cross-stitch, we are denying ourselves a great deal.

And, of course, the temple is an ideal place for the kind of meditative reflection mentioned. We should not have to immediately grab the scriptures when we sit down in the assembly chapel or even in the Celestial Room. The Lord wants to reveal amazing mysteries of the kingdom to us. We should give him the chance. Prayer is supposed to be a two-way conversation.