Want to Be More Mindful? Check Your Phone.

From Fitbit to RescueTime to Weight Watchers—whatever your New Year’s resolution this year, there’s probably an app to help you along. John Tresch, an associate professor of history and sociology of science, recently wrote about another tech frontier: mindfulness apps to help you relax and meditate. One of these, Headspace, even calls itself “the first gym membership for the mind.”

Tresch notes that mindfulness is usually defined as the practice of sustained, nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts, emotions, and sensations. He describes it as a secularized form of Buddhist meditation, a practice of attention called sati. Over the last decade he has been conducting an ethnographic study of neuroscientists who are studying meditation and its effects on the brain. He’s fascinated by this intersection of east and west: high-tech science that is concerned with the brain, body, and mind from strongly rooted Western traditions, and ancient Eastern traditions of rigorous training in mind techniques and complex philosophical systems about what the self is.

“There’s a fundamental obsession with the self in Western philosophy as the 'person who knows,' and Western introspective traditions, whether in monasteries or on a psychoanalyst’s couch, are often about getting to know that self better, getting to know the soul,” says Tresch. “Whereas in Buddhist ascetic practices, the aim is loosening attachment to the self, with a very different metaphysics about what the world is and how we know it.”

The two viewpoints have often come together in Silicon Valley, which Tresch describes as partly rooted in ‘60s counterculture but shaped by Western capitalism and a fascination with technology and innovation. Now he sees mindfulness apps as part of a new wave of Western Buddhism, something he calls “post-Buddhism.”

“In some quarters of American Buddhism there’s a changing of the guard,” he says. “There’s a new generation that says, ‘We can get everything that’s good about the teachings of the Buddha—especially these mental techniques—and leave aside all of the cultural and mythological and social baggage that comes with religions.’ So Buddhism gets transformed into a technology rather than being a way of life, an ethos, an ethics.”

Neuroscience has a tendency to talk about the mind as if it’s just what the brain does, says Tresch. Now he sees younger teachers of Buddhism using language like “brain-hacking” to describe what meditation does: “The mind has become the brain, which has now become a computer you can hack.”

Humans have used the latest technologies as metaphors for the mind for centuries, from computers to movie cameras to the telegraph to weaving, all the way back to printing and handwriting. “Before the 1800s you see metaphors about the mind and thinking as writing and inscription—learning means imprinting, carving things into the mind, which is a blank slate you write on.”

Tresch is not making a judgment but endeavoring to lay out the pros and cons of what the mindfulness apps are trying to do: allow someone to take responsibility for his or her own mental development—to be your own guru, program your own mind, with the help of pre-recorded, guided meditations.

In the modern world, however, the idea of do-it-yourself technology for relaxing or letting go of unhealthy attachments may be problematic, Tresch says. “We live in this extremely business- and economically-oriented culture, where we feel like we always have to check in for the latest updates, where we have to have the newest products and innovations or we feel like we’re falling behind. That can lead to some really dangerous ways of relating to the world. So there might be something a little strange about looking for peace and detachment on your iPhone—which for a lot of people is the cause of so much distraction and agitation. Or maybe it makes perfect sense—since that might be where you need it most.”

Tresch’s article, “Buddhify Your Android,” will appear in the book Persona, étrangement Humain(Persona: Strangely Human), edited by Emmanuel Ģrimaud and Anne-Christine Taylor-Descola. The book accompanies an exhibit with the same name that will run at Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly through November 11. Persona looks at how different cultures understand and create individuals and how different technologies and conceptions of the natural world lead to different ideas of what the self is. To learn more about the exhibit, click here.