I almost didn't read the article because of the title. As a avid practitioner of mindfulness meditation, I was turned off, "That's horseshit, being in the moment is what makes me happy and keeps me safe!" But after reading the article this just reinforces why meditation is so good at resolving anxiety and depression. Our brains AREN'T good at living in the moment, they are good at making predictions. Mediation is the process by which we LET GO and try to only OBSERVE the wild prediction process going on in our heads. Understanding this makes the article only reinforce the notion that meditation is so healthy for us as it teaches us to step away from our predictions before they spiral into depression or general anxiety disorder.
Once about half a month into a retreat, I was staring at blank space in a hut in the middle of the forrest, constantly distracted by fantasies of "a better blank space" - perhaps a nice cave with a walk in, or how I could make a little hut at home and go there every morning. It seems like once I had let go of everything, the mind even had a tendency to want to imagine better blank spaces. lol. The cases of people fantasising about better houses or cars are easy to see, but the fact that I saw it's possible the human mind can do this with blank space means it can do it with anything. :) It's just human nature. Denying things like this can create shadows and so on :)
Saying this though, it's watching the mind. We aren't built to live in the moment, but never the less, something can see this! Something watches all this going on in the mind! What is that? Mostly we make a 'home' in attention and identify as our attention. But whatever was seeing 'me' fantasising about nice little architectural meditation huts in the middle of the forrest, that was indistinguishable from objective reality.
That's a higher level of awareness. Often when someone says we need a paradigm shift in conscience this is what they are talking about. They've achieved this state, a higher level observational level of the world. The neocortex is hierarchical, the output of one level being fed as the input to the next higher level. Learning to consistantly station our awareness at the highest level in our brains is a result of meditation practices.
I hypothesize one of the most efficient paths to solving most of societies hardest problems would be to focus our education around mindfulness concepts about conscience. I feel the pairing of meditation and evidence based science used as a new institutional rock(our "mandatory" educational system needs replacing) will lead humanity into the next golden era.
