Tania: In the early research, you didn't find it. And then another thing, there was a tendency to equate mindfulness to meditation, and to just treat it as one thing. And I always said it is a bit like you would ask a specialist of sport, like a professor for sport medicine, and you would say, what does sport do to your brain or body? You would say, hmm, yeah.

Menka: Such a broad question, right?

Tania: Right? But then you would always ask, of course, in sport, it would be evident, right? Which sport do you mean? You mean horse riding, or you mean, and that was similar.

Journalists would tell me, Tania, tell me what does meditation do to your brain and body and whatever. And I said, look, it is too gross, right? Because meditation, the definition of meditation is just meaning. Cultivating your mind, is training your mind, is cultivating, is making you familiar with your mind, right?

That's the Pali translation of the word meditation. So, it's very, very broad, it's an umbrella term, and the same is somehow for mindfulness. So we said, okay, which practice does what? So, we tried to design one module around attention-based mindfulness, what in Tibetan Buddhism is also called Shamata practice.

But there are different names for it. It's attention-based mindfulness practice. You do it alone, you concentrate on breathing, on hearing, on seeing, on senses.

Menka: Bringing your mind back to that.

Tania: And always keeping back, so you're also focusing your mind to become present. This is why the module was called Presence, because it's becoming present with your attention to something. The object could be— We think the option.

Menka: Could.

Tania: Sound doesn't matter, right? An object of attention. And then the second module, which is red in all our color coding, it's the heart module, so it is about compassion and gratitude and loving-kindness. Care, right?

We were actively using a lot of practices which would activate this evolutionary care system. And then the third module was called Perspective, because here we were training a sociocognitive ability, not affective, not emotional. It was sociocognitive. Ability to take a meta perspective, right?

A meta-awareness on your thoughts, a meta-awareness on your inner personality aspect, a meta-awareness On the other, right? Theory of mind, perspective taking on the other's beliefs. And so this module was all about practices which would allow To do this perspective taking, this cognitive perspective taking on self and others. And so we could compare the effect of the three-month modules with each other.

And so this module was all about practices which would allow Tania: And as you said, we have, I think, more than 60 papers out just for the resource project.

Tania: On all these different measures, whether it was brain, or immune system, or hormones, or behavior, or subjective well-being, we could find differential effect. What I mean with differential effect means it really mattered which module you were doing, right? If the people practiced 3 months of mindfulness attention-based practice, they had structural changes in their brain. The hardware of the brain got bigger, thicker.

Gray matter got thicker. In other regions than if you did 3 months of compassion-based practice. Then you were much more in these areas we had already identified to be relevant for empathy, compassion. And it's limbic, paralimbic, it's feeling areas in the brain.

And again, when the same people went through 3 months of this perspective-taking practice, they had more parietal prefrontal areas getting thicker, which are known to be relevant for this perspective-taking, mentalizing, and theory of mind. So, what we could see, whether this was on the level…

Menka: Intuitive. Yeah. That's what you train for. Exactly.

Tania: Not all the same. Yeah. And so I hope that when people speak about meditation practice or mindfulness, that they would just start realizing that, right? It really matters what you practice every day. And you will have very, very different networks or also skills developing. They are all very beneficial, it's not that one is better than the other, but they are very different.