Hidden Brain - Seeking Serenity: Part 1

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

In graduate school, neuroscientist Richard Davidson learned to use scientific tools as a way to examine the brain. At the same time, he also started studying under master meditators — who deeply contemplated their internal and external lives. This week, two ways of understanding the mind.Make sure to listen to our Success 2.0 episodes: Taking the Leap, Getting What You Want, and Getting to the Top and Staying There. And if you like Hidden Brain and want more of it, please join our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain+! 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. One morning in March each year, I raised the window shades in my home and see that the cherry tree outside has exploded into blue. The tree has bear branches one day, a riot of delicate white flowers the next. The last time this happened, the change was so spectacular that I reached for my phone to capture the moment. But the photo failed to show what my eyes had seen. For one thing, the camera included lots of details my brain ignored, stray branches,

the edge of my windowsill. The light in the picture was not as brilliant as it had appeared to me just moments earlier. More importantly, the image didn't capture the meaning my brain perceived when I saw the tree in bloom. The message that winter was nearly over, that spring was around the corner. Let me now ask you a question. Which version of the cherry tree represents reality better? The one in the photo? Or the one inside my head? Today we launch a two-part series

that explores what happens when two ways of understanding come into conflict with each other. One is objective, the other is subjective, one aims for precision, the other is attentive to meaning. Each can be bewildered, even suspicious of the other. Two ways of seeing this week on Hidden Brain. Richard Davidson grew up in Brooklyn during the 1960s. When he was in high school, he came across an article in the magazine Science News about a study. I had read about a sleep laboratory that was based in a hospital in Brooklyn, my monody's

hospital, actually the hospital that I was born in a hospital in Brooklyn, my monody's hospital, actually the hospital that I was born in. Richie called the hospital to ask if he might be able to volunteer in the lab. You know, I talked to some receptionist who kind of dismissed me and it took more persistence. I actually wrote a letter, a handwritten letter, and then followed it up with another phone call. And although they had never had a high school volunteer before, we were able to work out

an arrangement. In the afternoons after school, while other kids were playing sports or doing homework, Richie would take the subway to the hospital. He got to help around the lab, doing basic work, likeie would take the subway to the hospital. He got to help around the lab doing basic work like cleaning electrodes. But one time he got permission from his parents to stay up all night and watch the scientists in action. The research subject was sleeping in another room that was adjacent to the room that I was in. It had a bed and they were wired up so they were recorded for brain electrical activity measurement. Also electrodes were on

their eyes to record eye movements. And so I saw the electrodes being put on and I saw this person going to sleep. The scientists would let the person drift into dreams, the REM cycle. And then a person was awakened and asked, was there anything going through your mind? Just before we awakened you? And you know, one of the interesting things is that although most people don't remember their dreams when you wake a person up immediately after a Rem period like this, typically you do get recall in the vast majority of cases. What was amazing to Richie was that scientists could learn about the dream in two completely different ways.

They could objectively measure the dreamer's eye movements and capture patterns of brain activity. But they could also match this objective data with the dreamer's subjective account of the dream. You know, I was just more taken with the whole process that here is a strategy for looking at the physiological correlates of mental experience. And this was a way to study this. It was a whole kind of paradigm that was unfolding before me that I had never thought about before, and it was super exciting to me. It was exciting for Ritchie at age 14, and it was revolutionary for the time. For centuries, the main way to understand someone's thoughts was to simply ask them.

The person would describe what was happening inside their head. But we humans are prone to bias and blind spots, forgetfulness and vanity. Everyone from scientists to marketers to political consultants know, if you really want to learn people's preferences, you should observe how they behave rather than listen to what they say. Where the brain measurement technologies Richie saw at the lab came a new way to study the mind objectively from the outside in. Here was a situation where there was simultaneously a distinct change in the brain that was accompanied by a report of a conscious experience, a mental

experience. And that, to me, was just mind blowing and captured my imagination. And really, at age 14, as corny it is to say, I knew that my life was somehow going to be dedicated to the study of the mind. I did not know what specific path I would take, but I knew that the mind was really essential to everything that we do, and that that was really the most important thing that I can dedicate myself to. In time, Richie was to become a student of two techniques to understand the mind. One technique tried to understand the mind from the inside out.

It paid attention to the variety and complexity of mental experiences by turning the spotlight of attention inward. This approach would say that my subjective appraisal of the cherry tree represented reality more accurately. The other technique said the mind could best be understood by studying it from the outside using scientific tools and the scientific method. The goal was to eliminate subjective appraisal as much as possible, because, especially when it came to looking inward, self-perception was flawed and flaky. When we think about our own minds, it's like standing in a hall of mirrors. We cannot tell where reality ends and reflection begins. Ritchie found himself irresistibly drawn to both techniques. He felt each had much to teach the other.

He was soon to learn the many ways that practitioners of each technique would be deeply wary of the other. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. When I was a teenager, I remember discussing a famous thought experiment with friends. A philosopher in China went to sleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. He flooded from flower to flower, thinking butterfly thoughts and taking butterfly-sized sips of nectar. Then he woke up and realized he wasn't a butterfly, but a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly. The next moment a disturbing thought occurred to him. He had really felt he was a butterfly in the dream. He was convinced he was a butterfly.

Now, having woken up, he was absolutely convinced he was not a butterfly, but a man. If a man could dream that he was a butterfly, was it not possible that he was now a butterfly dreaming that he was a man? The thought experiment reveals a deep truth. What we perceive as reality cannot be extricated from the workings of our own mind. The world that we experience is actually constructed by our minds and our brains. And so, yeah, there are things out there, but the way we perceive those things that are out there is entirely a function of how we constructed in our own individual minds and brains.

And so if we can construct it differently, we can literally live in a different world. As Ritchie Davidson came of age, he became very interested in how his mind constructed reality. The counterculture movement of the 1960s was in full swing. Musicians like Jim Morrison were exploring how you could pierce the veil of the 60s and the culture was very much an important influence on my life. It was sort of in the air. I was quite taken with the Beatles and other musical groups who were experimenting with their minds

and considering the possibility that the kind of standard way that many of us were raised and taught to approach the world to paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven that are dreamt of in your philosophy. Bands like the Beatles invited listeners to test the limits of their own minds. When they sang Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, this was widely perceived to be a reference to the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. I did hear the Beatles live. Lucy in the sky with diamonds was certainly an

important song for me growing up. The Harvard Psychologist Timothy Leary was experimenting with magic mushrooms and encouraging volunteers and studies to explore psychedelic drugs. In 1967 he spoke to a group of 30,000 hippies at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He urged them to turn on, tune in, and drop out. Drop out. In 1968, the Beatles went to India

to learn from a meditation master named Maharishi Maheshiyogi. Gitaras George Harrison in particular developed a deep interest in what was known at the time as transcendental meditation. Richi was fascinated by these ideas, but increasingly he found himself drawn to a related concept. What happens inside our minds doesn't stay inside our minds. The thoughts we think, the feelings we have, can shape and influence the world in which we live. There was a link between our minds and the broken state of the world.

Some of John Lennon's songs specifically, Imagine was really an important song in that whole album. The idea that there is a different way of being that is accessible to all humans. And I would say a way of being that is imbued with greater peace and compassion and kindness and love. You know, in many ways those are still the relevant themes today. and was the impulse here a curiosity about the mind? Or was it an impulse that was shaped more by wanting to see a different kind of world? In other words, when I think about Lucy and the sky with diamonds and I think about Imagine, I actually have a very different

impression of those two songs. One is very much about the things that you can do with your mind and, you know, exploring your minds and the way in which your mind can do amazing things. And the other one is very much about you know how it changed my can actually influence and speak and act in the world. So which was it for you? That's a beautiful insight and I would say it was really both. I was very involved in the peace movement, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and very committed social activists. And at the same time, recognizing that our minds have such an important relation to the world in which we live. And so I think we really need both. The year after Imagine came out, Richie started graduate school in psychology at Harvard.

It was 1972. And this was just a little bit after a very controversial psychologist by the name of Richard Albert was fired from Harvard for giving psychedelic drugs to Harvard undergraduates. And of course, he then went off to India and became known as Ramdas. And when I started my graduate work at Harvard, one of the people that I knew was a fellow graduate student. I did not know him at the time. I read a few papers that he published as a graduate student, I did not know him at the time.

I read a few papers that he published as a graduate student. His name was Daniel Goldman. I had never seen a picture of Dan, but I knew he had published these crazy papers on meditation. And in my very first class as a Harvard graduate student, I sit down and this guy sits next to me and I turn to him and I say, you must be Dan Goldman.

And this is not a reflection of any kind of psychic power that I may have. It's simply because he looked like he just came back from India. Anybody would have been able to spot him from a mile away. He was wearing these Indian pants and an Indian shirt and he had beads and his hair was you know wild. He looked different than any of the other students in this class. So indeed he was Dan Goldman and that began our friendship and that night he asked me if I wanted to come over to his house. We had just started talking and it was clear we had so much to share. So I of course accepted his kind invitation and he had a VW micro bus that was plastered

from Florida ceiling with pictures of these yogis. And he drove me to his house and I get there and this guy opens the door and it was Ramdas. What was that first evening like when you and Dan went home and visited with Ramdas, what did you talk about? Did you practice meditation that evening? What did you do? Yeah, we did some practice and you know, it was a kind of deep sharing and I had never met anybody like that before, yet I yearned for it.

And it just completely blew my mind. I had seen pictures of Rondas because Rondas, by then, was famous and his pictures were in the media, and he sort of became my informal teacher and provided an alternative education to my formal Harvard graduate education. He ran this group that met once a week in this house that Dan was living in. And so these were some of the really early influences that were so important in shaping my career.

In his classes at Harvard, Richie's professors were teaching him about the science of psychology, about techniques being developed to objectively measure what happens inside the human mind. Much of this work was informed by a deep desire to help people suffering from mental disorders, to find cures for human anguish. Outside his classwork, Richie was learning

an entirely different education in his weekly meditation sessions. Another member of this group was John Kabatzin, who would go on to become one of the foremost practitioners of mindfulness training in medicine. Richie soon began his own daily meditation practice. Even at this early stage, he was starting to see the same connection that the Beatles had preached between changing your mind and changing the world. So here was Dan, who is a graduate student in Harvard, John, who had just finished his PhD at MIT. These are really high-powered academic institutions,

and they were kind, warm-hearted people. They exemplified the qualities that I was really looking for. And they were the kind of people that were infectious to be around. I really wanted to spend more time with them and learn what their secret sauce was. You know, that's when I discovered why, with Dan, I knew that he had a practice of meditation. And this was why I was drawn to it, because I had the intuition that their practice of meditation was somehow connected with them being such wonderful people. So warm-hearted. And I knew that that was important, not just for me, but for the world.

Once Richie tasted meditation, he wanted more. So two years later, in 1974, he decided to go on a meditation retreat in India. His girlfriend Susan joined him. I was 22 years old at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And it was really, you know, a hard-nosed kind of meditation boot camp. It was in a Himalayan hill station called Daohaazi,

which is not far from where the Dalai Lama lives in Darmsala. The men were all staying in one area, the women in another area. We were staying intense. We had no running water. We had to get a pale of water each morning. We brought it to this fire pit and he did it up

for our hot water for the day. And it was, we were meditating about 16 hours a day. We typically meditated till midnight and you know, around midnight and then the bell would ring to get us up at 4 or 30 in the morning. Then we'd go back. Yeah. The first day, Richie was walking up at 4 or 30

in the morning by the bell. He joined the other meditators and sat cross-legged in a half-loaded position. Richie attempted to focus on his breath. After some time, he felt a twinge of pain in his right knee. Then, the pain spread to his lower back. He tried to recast his attention to his breathing, but the pain was too much. By the end of the day, he thought, I can't believe I have nine more days of this.

That was really tough and gave me my first taste of intensive meditation. There was a lot of physical pain involved and it was very intense. And was there a part of you that sort of said, you know, four hours into it on the first day, this is not for me, I need to bail? Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. The teacher, by the way, was a very, very famous Buddhist meditation teacher by the name of Goenka. And each night he gives a talk.

And on the third day, he said, many of you probably are wanting to leave because the pain is unbearable, your mind is going crazy and you think that this is just not the right thing for you. And I was so invested by that point in meditation that I was going to just power through this no matter what. But Richie's girlfriend, Susan, had reached a different conclusion. She was in the middle of writing me a letter on the third day where she was just telling me in the letter some practical details that she's leaving. She's gonna stay in town. She'll meet me after the retreat is over,

but this is not for her. And she was gonna give me the letter later that night and was gonna leave the next morning. And Goenka said at this talk, he said, for those of you thinking of leaving, I ask one thing, please stay another 24 hours. And if at that time you want to leave, you have my blessings, please leave. But I want you to make a commitment to stay one more day.

So Susan heard this and she honored that request and by the fourth day, everything changed. The next day, the teacher Goenka instructed the meditators to scan their body from head to toe and back again, from their toes up to their head, all the while paying close attention to what they felt. For Ritchie and Susan, it was a breakthrough. One of the important insights from this kind of practice is you begin to not avoid the pain, but you really look directly at the pain. And you begin to see that what the pain is comprised of is not homogeneous, but actually is quite differentiated. And so, you know, I remember very distinctly having the experience this first time of having the pain be completely transformed where I

was experiencing it as tingling, as heat, as different kinds of sensations. And when you really penetrate it, you can see all of these varied qualities. And it's not just one thing. You know, we label it as pain, but that's a label. And that the actual experience is far more granular and differentiated. You know, the pain was completely transformed.

The positive qualities of this kind of practice became robust and apparent. And we just don't appreciate, we don't look, we're not aware of those kind of granular details typically, but we can be with the right kind of training and mindset. So, what were the positive things that you experienced, Richie? I mean, so you've described sort of how you're able to look at the pain and realize the pain is not one thing but many things. But when you sort of say you had this feeling that the benefits were apparent on the fourth day to you and to Susan, what were those benefits that you were seeing in your own mind?

I would describe it as a kind of calm clarity, where the mind really settles and is very, very clear and very awake. Just taking everything in and really being calm and having this sense of peacefulness and also a kind of contentment where there was almost a sense that anything can come down the pike now and it's going to be okay. You write in your book, Alter Trades, we did not have to be controlled by the mind with the random associations, sudden fears and angersars and all the rest, we could take back the helm. And so there was some element of this that was very much about saying, you could actually be the master of the ship in some ways, the captain of the ship, and actually not just be essentially a passenger that your mind was taking where it wanted to go.

The invitation in this work is that we can become the master of our own mind and we can intentionally direct our mind. And when we do the capabilities that are unleashed are really quite extraordinary, and every human being has this capacity. capacity. Tell me, you returned from India with this feeling of having, sort of almost on a high. What was it like to come back to Harvard, come back to graduate school? What was that like, the juxtaposition of what you were seeing, feeling and experiencing in your meditation practice and what you were learning about hearing about and being taught in your classes.

It was tough in many ways. One is that, you know, when you go on one of the kind of meditation retreat that I went on where you're doing this intensive practice, you're in complete silence, in completely sequestered. It's a little jarring to go back into the world. You know, the first few days, the sense of calm is mostly preserved. But then after a few days,

it honestly quickly wore off. It was a very difficult lesson in how fragile this is and what it takes for these qualities to really endure and that 10 days of sitting for 16 hours a day although to some people it may sound like a lot really to change the course of our mind you need a lot more. So that was the first thing. The second thing is that as a graduate student, I was learning a lot about psychopathology, psychiatric illness, and we were being taught to look at people and try to figure out what's

wrong with them. And the path of meditation and the contemplative traditions in which I was beginning to learn a little bit about really had a very different orientation to look at people and to try to figure out what's right about them. And so there was this really difficult juxtaposition between the orientation that I was beginning to glean from these contemplative traditions and modern psychology, which for the most part was really focused on the negative qualities of our experience and our behavior. To Ritchie, it seemed like his teachers at Harvard were missing out on something important. During meditation, he could feel his own mind becoming clear.

He paid better attention to his surroundings. He felt less anxious, more compassion. Psychologists and neuroscientists were studying the mind in order to alleviate the suffering of people with emotional disorders. So why were the ignoring techniques developed in contemplative traditions that also promised an antidote to misery? I came back with this incredible conviction that meditation was relevant to Western psychology and Western science. And we really needed to bring this into

our science. And I still remember the visceral feeling I had when I encountered for the first time this passage in William James Great 2 volume tomb that was written in 1890. The principles of psychology has a whole chapter on attention. And he said in that chapter, the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. And that to me was just incredible and was an invitation because what I was learning through meditation was at least in part how we can educate our attention. How did your professors, your colleagues, the other people in the department, how did they process what you were doing? I mean, some people must have thought you'd just gone off the deep end here.

what you were doing. I mean, some people must have thought you'd just gone off the deep end here. They did. Some people did and I won't name names, but there was one professor in particular at Harvard. I will never forget this in a class on psychopathology where, you know, I had just come back from India and was adopting the same dress that Dan Goldman had when I met him the first time. And he was staring at me and he said, you know, one of the easy indications of psychopathology is the way people dress. And first of all, it was a ridiculous statement. It was clear that I was very much being singled out. I turned red, you know,

I, you know, those were days when I was more volatile. And so I didn't say anything in class, but after class, you know, I didn't mince words in saying what I thought of this professor. of this professor, it was hard. And fortunately, most of the my classmates were also rooting for me and appreciated what I was trying to do. In fact, I was celebrating the opportunity to bring rigor to the study of these qualities. And so my fellow classmates appreciated that. When the professor said this, I mean this professor doesn't sound like a particularly

nice person and certainly wasn't a very kind comment, but where do you think this was coming from? So there's clearly the tension between the fact that what you were learning in graduate school was fundamentally focused on psychopathology, what you had learned in your meditation practice was about potential, the ways in which our minds could be better than they are. So it wasn't so much about fixing something that was wrong. It was about reaching a higher mountain, if you will. But besides that distinction, can you talk a moment about the suspicion or the hesitation that justified or unjustified

was present at Harvard about the work that you were doing itself, the whole enterprise of basically studying the mind from the inside out rather than from the outside in? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that there are a few things that we're driving this. One is a suspicion that this might lead to bad science. You know, everyone knew that I went to India, that I went on a meditation retreat, that I was doing this personally. And there was this sense that somehow this was tainting my objectivity, and I was going to become a religious zealot as a consequence. So I think that there was some concern about that.

There are a few papers at the time on meditation research that were frankly pretty bad. And so, I think that there was a sense that this was kind of boondoggle area that just was replete with bad science and not something that a Harvard graduate student should be involved with. Yeah, going back to that sleep study you did when you were a kid, there's the experience that we all have when we are dreaming. It feels rich, it feels subjective.

I remember at least how it felt like when I was dreaming last night. And then someone comes in and says, I can put EEGs on your skull and on your eyelids. And I can measure something that is in some ways an artifact of what it is that you're experiencing. And they're both ways of perceiving something that's happening inside our brains,

but they are very, very different approaches. They're approaching the question from entirely different perspectives. And so it's perhaps not entirely surprising, Richie, that people from each of these paths will look at the people on the other path with some suspicion. Yeah, I think that's very true.

And there is this great neurobiologist who prematurely passed away from liver disease in 2001. His name is Francisco Verella. One of the hallmarks of his career was to talk about the importance of bringing first person and third person methods together. First person are the reports of our own experience. Third person is measurements that a like a scientist can do where we record brain activity or eye movements on another person and being able to bring these two very different modes of knowing together and look for points of convergence is really exciting because of that promise because it was bringing these two together. When we come back, Richie tries to bring the two paths together. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. When he was a graduate student, Ritchie Davidson was fascinated by two different languages that tried to describe the mind. One reported from inside the mind. The other peered into the mind from the outside. As Richie became an academic, older faculty members warned him, stay away from explorations into meditation and mindfulness. They were bound to be unscientific, unsound. I had this fervent aspiration to do research on meditation and I was told in no uncertain terms Richie if you want a successful career in science this is a terrible way for you to begin. Richie followed the advice he dove into the field of affective

neuroscience how the brain processes emotions. He spoke almost exclusively in the language of mainstream science and wrote papers that examined the mind from the outside in. He used tools like EEG tests to measure the electrical activity of the brain. Richie's career flourished. He published his work in prestigious journals, received awards, and got a tenured position at the University of Wisconsin. All the while, he maintained his daily meditation practice and attended more retreats. In 1992, an opportunity arose to do what he had been trying to do since he was a graduate student.

Build a bridge between these two languages that describe the mind. Become a translator between the outside and approach and the inside out approach. Besides, this opportunity came with a very special invitation to meet the ultimate meditation teacher, the Dalai Lama. He was interested in encouraging serious neuroscientific research on meditation, particularly the practices from his tradition. Through some common acquaintances, he heard about me. He knew that I was a serious neuroscientist and had interest in meditation. And he invited me along with two other scientists to meet with him at his residence in Darmsala with the

explicit purpose of beginning to investigate practitioners who have spent years meditating, who are living in the mountains around Armçala. And so the way this visit was constructed is we were going to meet with him first and then we We slept about 5,000 pounds of equipment with us. We looked like this strange melding of a bunch of geeks and like a traveling rock band because we had these huge cases. We brought all this equipment and there we were. And so I was the leader of this group. And this was the first time I was meeting the Dalai Lama. So we were meeting him at his residence.

I was the spokesperson. And so we were sitting there waiting. And I had what was the closest I've ever come to having a full blown panic attack. to having a full blown panic attack. I was so anxious and my heart was palpitating and I could not envision what my first words would be and I was beginning to be flooded with self-doubt. Who am I to waste the time of the Dalai Lama?

Why am I here? All of those thoughts. And then all of a sudden, someone comes in the room and said, please come with me, took us into the next room, and literally two seconds after that, the Dalai Lama walks in. And within maybe 10, 15 seconds, all of my anxiety was completely and totally dissipated. I mean, just radically eliminated. I'm convinced he saw my anxiety. He saw my anxiety. He saw my suffering and he behaved in a way

that completely eliminated it. I don't exactly know what he did. He held me, he held my hand. He brought my head to his head. He touched me. I mean, he uses touch a lot. It is an expression of genuine compassion and love. It is enormously helpful. And I felt more comfortable

than I think I've ever felt in my life. And was just felt deeply secure and that this is where I needed to be. And you had the sense this was again not just somebody who happened to be a nice person, you had a sense that it was his practice, his meditation practice, his yours of practice that were bringing something out in him that touched you. Absolutely. I am absolutely convinced of that. He practices on average four to five hours every day. One of the things that he does is recites some texts from Shanti David, the great Indian saint, and I actually have this right on my desk here. I read it every day from Shanti Deva, the great Indian saint. And I actually have this right on my desk here. I read it every day, Shanti Deva says,

for as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world. So you visit Tadalai Lama, you're moved by this visit, you also have 5,000 pounds of equipment that you've caught it from the United States to India. What happens do you start to study people on the strip? So each day we literally hiked up into the mountains. We took a car as far as we can take a car and then the road stops and then the rest of the way you need to go on foot. And we had a bunch of shurpers with us and they were carrying equipment on backpacks.

And we literally hiked up in certain cases quite a long time, two hours, three hours, to these huts and caves, where these long-term retreations are living in retreat for the remainder of their lives. Of course, we would never be able to find these people if we went on our own. We went with someone who was a representative

of the Dalai Lama and who obviously knew where these people resided. And over the course of this three weeks, we saw maybe about 12 of these very long term practitioners, some of whom have been in retreat for more than a decade. The response that we got from every one of them was this. That if we wanted to learn about meditation, they'd be happy to teach us. They'll be happy to spend the next couple of years teaching us if we wanted. And remember what year this was. This was in 1992. Most of these people with the exception of maybe two had actually never seen a laptop computer before. They were completely untudered in Western technology. And so what these people basically said to us is that they're happy to talk to us about meditation.

They're happy to teach us about meditation, but they don't want to participate in the research. They had this view that somehow if we put electrodes on their head, it's going to put something into their into their head. And we explain to them that the electrodes don't transmit electricity, they simply pick up electricity. Nevertheless, they were skeptical and they didn't want to participate. And so over the course of three weeks, literally zero of the practitioners agreed to allow us to put electrodes on their head.

It was very frustrating and challenging as total and complete bust. I mean, it's interesting that I just want to note the irony here for a second, which is it wasn't just the professors at Harvard, who was skeptical and suspicious of, you know, the ideas coming from the meditators. It was also the master meditators who are skeptical and suspicious of the Western scientists coming to study them. Exactly. Exactly.

So I was really screwed from both ends. But the way you put it is absolutely right, and it's totally true. Richie had given himself a dauntingly ambitious goal, to become a translator between two ways of understanding the mind. That endeavor had failed and failed spectacularly. In part two of the story in our next episode, Richie discovers something very strange about the minds of master meditators. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Christian Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick.

Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our own song heroes today are Heather Harris, Max Co., and Jenny Wynn. They walk with Richie and help to organize this interview. Between my hectic schedule and Richie's busy calendar, believe me, it took some doing. Thank you, Heather, Max, and Jenny. If you find Hidden Brain to be useful to you in your daily life, please consider joining our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Hidden Brain Plus is where you'll find even more of the ideas and insights that you love. To subscribe, find Hidden Brain Plus in the Apple Podcasts app or go to apple.co slash hidden brain. That site again is apple.co slash I'm Shankar Vedantum. See you soon. you