Saturday, June 23, 2012

A State of Military Mind

After over two years of (weekend) partice, today was the first time I got the courage to step into half a day meditation quasi-retreat. Once again, discovered that novice was still thriving but I am so glad I went. If this piece Meditation in the army cannot convince someone to purse this, I am not sure what else would.

Major Jeffrey Davis’s elite Marine unit was trained in meditation before its 2008 Iraq deployment, in one of the first scientific studies of meditation within the military. Davis became a quick believer. “We look at all of these weapons systems around us as necessary for war,” he says. “But it’s the human mind that operates all these things. If I can find a better way to train a Marine—if I can teach him to react quicker, to think quicker, to learn quicker, to act wiser in an ambiguous situation—the better off we are.”

But it wasn’t an easy sell. “There was a lot of resistance from the Marines at first,” Davis says. “When we first started, the guys felt a little weird about it.” I can imagine. This probably would have brought snickers and groans among the guys I served with, many of whom joined the infantry for the extreme physical challenge. At first glance, meditation and brain-training exercises don’t seem part of a martial culture. Though participation can be made mandatory, these techniques require significant buy-in, focus, and dedication over an extended period. “This type of training has been considered soft, not hardening,” says Amishi Jha, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Miami who has studied the effects of meditation on service members. “That somehow it’s going to weaken instead of toughen, that it’s going to make people less precise and more passive. But it’s not going to the spa and getting a massage. It’s the exact opposite for your mind. It’s being in the most alert and present state that you can imagine.”

In the second study, Johnson scanned the brains of eight platoons of Marines using fMRI. Stanley then taught four platoons an eight-week mindfulness course, similar to that used with Davis and his men. All eight platoons went through combat scenarios at the Infantry Immersion Trainer, after which Johnson gathered more blood and saliva samples, submitted them to behavioral and cognitive tests, and again scanned their brains.
 The Marines trained in mindfulness techniques, Johnson says, showed a better recovery from stressful training, and their brain scans showed similarities with the neural patterns of the elite performers—the SEALs and Olympians—in the Paulus and Johnson study. “These results,” Johnson says, “suggest that mindfulness training can produce changes at the level of brain, biology and behavior, which is quite provocative.”

John Way, an Army Special Forces soldier, started Warrior Mind Training classes in 2006 at a weekly meeting taught by Ernst near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after returning from his first Iraq deployment. Now, for ten minutes in the morning and for up to half an hour at night, Way uses music—Miles Davis, Joe Satriani, Mozart—as a meditation tool. On his second Iraq tour, he could man a machine gun on guard for hours, refocusing his attention when his mind strayed. During ambushes and firefights, he found a clarity that had been absent before. “You see an explosion, and you don’t let the overwhelming experience of the explosion get to you,” he says. “You’ve got other stuff going on. Okay, those are explosions, but who’s shooting and where’s he at? You see the problem and you see the solution. You’re able to break it down and focus, instead of everything just coming at you at once.” He compares it to his current work as a medic, identifying and treating the severest injuries without being distracted by lesser wounds.



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