The power of cognitive behaviour therapies in [depression] is considerable, certainly equal to the power of the standard drug treatments for depression. If these psychological treatments had been drug treatments they would have been certified as effective and safe remedies. The treatments would be an essential part of the pharmacopoeia of every doctor. As they were not developed by profit-making companies, and thus are not marketed or promoted, their use often languishes.

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Gavin Andrews, Professor of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, writing in the British Medical Journal, 1996, cited in: Begley, S. (2007). Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves (1st ed.). Ballantine Books.  Ch. 6, p. 143.

Prof. Andrews was reporting on several studies, since 1989, comparing the effect of several treatments on patients with major depression. Th etreatments included: interpersonal psychotherapy, cognitive-behaviour therapy, imipramine (an antidepressant), and an inert pill….

Of special note, the treatments cause their results in almost completely opposite ways in terms of their influence on brain activity! (Mayberg et al, 2002; Goldapple, Seegal et al, 2004)

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The goals of shamatha practice [Sanskrit: meditative quiescence] are to quiet the noise that bedevils the untrained mind, in which one’s focus darts from one sight or sound or thought to another like a dragonfly, and replace it with attentional stability and clarity. Those two qualities of attention … allow the practitioner to gain insight into the nature of mind and human experience.

To do this, yogis cultivate a sense of mental and physical relaxation from which attentional stability follows. That enables the mind to focus either on an object in the outside world or on a thought or feeling generated within the mind, something that in a person less practiced in attentional training tends to vanish like surf on the sand.

A mind trained in shamantha is better able to resist distraction and feels a sense of peace and calm. Attentional clarity, which follows from attentional stability, is the ability to focus on a chosen object with vividness and in sharp detail, no longer dulled by the boredom or mental fidgets typical of the untrained mind.

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Begley, S. (2007). Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves (1st ed.). Ballantine Books.  Ch. 9, p. 214

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Because neuroplasticity and the power of … mental training effect changes in the very structure and function of our brain, free will and moral responsibility become meaningful in a way that they have not been for some time in the scientific West…. Neuroplasticity and the ability of the brain to change as a result of mental training step between genes and behaviour like a hero in front of a streaming locomotive.

If the brain can change, then genes “for” this or that behaviour are much less deterministic. The ability of thought and attention to physically alter the brain echoes one of Buddhism’s more remarkable hypotheses: that will is a real, physical force that can change the brain. Perhaps one of the most provocative implications of neuroplasticity and the power of mental training to alter the circuits of the brain is that it undermines neurogenetic determinism.

Neurogenetic determinism … is the belief … propelled by … modern genetics that ascribes inescapable causal power to the genes one inherits from one’s parents… Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behaviour, and that geneticists made between a gene and a behaviour, dealt another blow to the notion of an efficacious will. The discoveries paint an image of individuals as automatons, slaves to their genes or their neurotransmitters, and with no more free-will than a child’s radio-controlled car.