Three Ways to Become a Deeper Thinker

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What is the sound of one hand clapping?

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

You don’t have to be training to become a Buddhist monk to realize the value of hard questions without clear answers. Wrestling with a koan of your own—such as Why am I alive? or For what would I give my life?—can be a way to improve your emotional health and grow as a person. You might resist doing so because life’s fundamental riddles are uncomfortable to contemplate, and the world gives you every opportunity to avoid them. But when you enter the mysterious world of unanswerable questions, you will surely grow as a person and change for the better.

[Read: Why so many Americans are turning to Buddhism]

The questions that matter most to us are typically those least likely to have clear answers. If you ask me, “Why do you love your wife?” I will struggle to answer convincingly. I know I do, but the reasons seem impossible to articulate. Anything I say (“Because she is good to me”) will utterly miss the point and trivialize the relationship. Indeed, the fact that fairly trivial questions are easy to answer with clarity is no coincidence. (“How do I get to the supermarket?” Two right turns, then a left.) The celebrated psychotherapist Carl Jung considered this ease-of-answering test a way of understanding what matters most. “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble,” he wrote in 1931.

We might call life’s unanswerable riddles “right-brain questions.” Neuroscientists interested in the hemispheric lateralization of the brain—how each side undertakes different functions—have shown that when people use deep understanding and intuition, as opposed to analytical method, to gain insight into problems, a burst of high-frequency, or gamma-band, activity appears in the right temporal lobe, corresponding with a change of blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis of the British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, who has argued that people primarily use the right side of the brain when they ponder questions about life’s meaning.

We generally resist the work involved with this kind of right-brain insight because confronting big problems that are difficult to resolve is uncomfortable. As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.

You might conclude that, for the sake of your well-being, you should steer clear of such contemplation. But you’d be mistaken, in much the same way as you’d be mistaken in avoiding exercise because working out involves bodily discomfort. To begin with, sitting with issues of life, death, and love requires us to admit the limits of our understanding—to say “I don’t know.” Researchers have demonstrated in experiments that people are highly averse to giving this response, but doing so is a sign of cognitive health. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that learning to make this admission more easily could be a good way to improve your cognitive health.

Even an “I don’t know” response can lead to a deeper, if unstated, understanding—with important benefits. In 2012, for example, two psychologists asked a sample of young adults how often they considered questions such as “Do you ever reflect on your purpose in life?” and “Do you ever think about the human spirit or what happens to life after death?” They found that the people who spent more time on these questions tended to score higher than their peers on a variety of measures defined as spiritual intelligence, critical existential thinking, sense of life’s meaning, curiosity, and well-being. That certainly sounds like cognitive health to me.

[From the June 1963 issue: “The Riddle,” by Albert Camus]

Taking the evidence all together, I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions. As much research has documented, anxiety and depression have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. I believe that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. As I’ve discussed previously, we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle. Like the benefits of hard exercise, the short-term discomfort of big questions is necessary to avoid the long-term ill-health that comes from avoiding these questions.

To address this problem, I’d like to see a revolution in existential thinking, a craze for pondering life’s mysteries. Social entrepreneurs could establish reading rooms and debating clubs in every city. Philosophers could become as popular as the hottest fitness influencers. That’s my fantasy, anyway. But short of its becoming a reality, I can suggest a routine you can follow.

1. Schedule your mental workout.
If you go to the gym, you probably do so at a planned time, involving particular exercises. And there are certain things you don’t do while working out—eating pizza, taking a nap. You can use similar principles for your mental fitness. Choose a period of time each day—say, 30 minutes—that you can dedicate to weighing tough questions of real importance. First, ban all devices and allow no distractions; then figure out in advance what existential or spiritual challenges you plan to consider. You can use a paragraph or two of philosophy or scripture to focus your mind on a specific question, break it down, and improve your understanding.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this method is called analytical meditation, and similar practices exist in other traditions. As you may find in your initial weeks at the gym, the exercise is hard at first and tempting to abandon. But with discipline, the habit becomes easier, then pleasant, then indispensable. For many years, I have actually combined the two practices: Right after my morning hour in the gym, I’ll spend the next half-hour (usually 6:30–7 a.m.) in meditation. At this point, I can’t imagine starting my day any other way.

2. Go for a long walk.
For some people, a good alternative is a long walk alone, without devices, as a way to give room to your right-brain questions. Philosophers have long advocated this technique—Immanuel Kant was reputedly such a regular walker, to aid his deep thinking, that neighbors set their watches by his passing. Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted. I like to prescribe this practice—again, ideally in the early morning—to my students, especially if they have been feeling a sense of meaninglessness.

3. Invite boredom.
One effect of our screen-centered culture is that we’re never truly bored. This might sound great, like a quality-of-life enhancement. But it isn’t. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it helps stimulate the brain’s default-mode network, the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention. Neuroscientists have shown that such activity is vital for accessing high-level meaning. For this reason, building periods of boredom into our life really matters, because they no longer occur spontaneously. A good way to do this is to run errands and make short trips without taking your phone. At first, you will still feel the reflex to reach for it every few seconds. But fairly quickly, you will start to experience your default-mode network sparking up again, perhaps for the first time in a long time. In a deep cognitive sense, boredom is productive.

[Arthur C. Brooks: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

A decade ago, after a lengthy trip to India, I took a series of long walks to ponder unanswerable questions. Among other ones, I considered the question posed by the koan that opened this essay: What is the sound of one hand clapping? I aimed not to find an answer, but to gain a greater understanding of the question—which I hoped might help explain other mysteries of my life.

Over a few weeks, I came to comprehend that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. The hand’s movement mimics clapping, but the only way to make the illusion a reality is to add a second hand. The sound of one hand clapping can be imagined, but the clap doesn’t exist until another hand is present. With that realization, I recognized the koan’s question as a way to understand the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (śūnyavāda in Sanskrit), which says that no individual thing or person has any intrinsic existence, but exists only relationally, dependent on everything else. The concept of an individual nature is, like one hand clapping, an illusion.

On further reflection, this illuminated for me another ineffable mystery, one that I mentioned earlier: why I love my wife. By myself, I am the one hand clapping, an illusion of a human. I come fully into personhood only when I am completed by the presence of my mate. She is for me the other hand, creating the sound that is our life.