Making Sense with Sam Harris - #380 — The Roots of Attention

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Amishi Jha about attention and the brain. They discuss how attention is studied, the failure of brain-training games, the relationship between attention and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of different types of meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction, the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and emotion, the difference between dualistic and nondualistic mindfulness, studying nondual awareness in the lab, the influence of smartphones, the value of mind wandering, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Amishi Jha. Amishi is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and she serves as the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and did postdoctoral training at the Brain

Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. Amishi's work has been featured at NATO and the World Economic Forum and the Pentagon. She's been covered in the New York Times, NPR, Time Magazine, Forbes, etc. And her TED Talk titled, How to Tame Your Wandering Mind, has been viewed over 5 million times, and she's the author of the book Peak Mind. We focus mostly on attention and the brain. We discuss how attention is studied, the failure of brain training games, the relationship between attention and awareness, mindfulness as an intrinsic mental capacity, the neurological implications of different types of training in meditation, the neural correlates of attention and distraction, the prospects of self-transcendence, the link between thought and

emotion, the difference between dualistic and non-dualistic mindfulness, how we might study non-dual awareness in the lab, the influence of smartphones, the value of mind-wandering, and other topics. And I bring you Amishi Jha. I am here with Amishi Jha. Amishi, thanks for joining me. Very happy to be here, Sam. So tell our audience what you have focused on scientifically and academically up to now. Sure. So I am a, like you, a neuroscientist. I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. And the work I do in my lab is focused on understanding how the brain's attention system functions, what makes it fail and makes it vulnerable, and as it relates to mental training and mindfulness, what we can do

to strengthen it. So a lot of our effort has been kind of shifting over the years from more the basic mechanisms of how attention operates to understanding the factors that we must consider in trying to strengthen it and protect it, especially for groups for whom attention can be a matter of life and death. I mean, in some sense, that's all of us, but particular professions like emergency services folks, military service members, medical and nursing professionals. Truly, their lapses could mean grave consequences for others. Yeah. Yeah. So what tools do you use to study attention at the level of the brain? Yeah. So we use functional MRI and EEG, as well as with most of our work sort of out in the field, so to speak, we're doing behavioral measures

with various cognitive tasks, as well as a whole battery of sort of subjective or self-report metrics. Let's bring in your interest in mindfulness and meditation. How did you come by that? And what has been your level of exploration there personally? And what teachers or traditions have been important to you? Right. So the answer is sort of in two parts, the personal journey and the professional or actually research-related journey. And of course, they intersect at multiple points. As I mentioned, most of my training as a cognitive neuroscientist was really in the basic mechanism. So just figure out, which is not a simple thing, but figure out how it works. And I started getting a little bit antsy around this because what we were finding repeatedly that my advisors had already known

was that this system of the brain is extremely powerful. So much so that I'll refer to it as the brain's boss, because we know that wherever it is that we devote our attention will modify almost the entirety of the computational functioning of the brain. It can bias it in very, very profound ways. So if it is this boss, I started getting excited in my early years as an assistant professor, that was at the University of Pennsylvania, on what we could do to perturb attention. And that meant doing all kinds of fun things in the lab, like bringing in undergrads and having them do intentionally demanding tasks, and then sort of messing with them in kind

and IRB approved ways. So either negative mood inductions or psychosocial threat, telling them that they're not doing as well as other folks, stressing them out in various ways. And repeatedly and reliably, we saw that their attention failed them. So we started getting a picture of all the ways in which you could perturb attention. And that, of course, led to devastating consequences for the normal ways in which attention could bias information processing. And that's what, from the laboratory perspective, got me extremely curious and I would say desperate to find some way in which we might train attention. So this was the early 2000s. And at that point, sort of two things were happening. In the cognitive neuroscience literature, there was a proliferation of studies on brain training approaches, right?

So these simple behavioral tasks that people play as games and seeing if we can actually strengthen functioning. And even at that point, now it's sort of been very much clarified that this is a problematic approach because you get better at the game, but not much else. There's many, I think, very well-intentioned enterprises that have, and then many researchers that have tried to do this in their laboratories. But the problem was you'd get better and better at the game, but then we shifted even the most subtle aspects of the perceptual input or the task demands, you were kind of back to square one. So we weren't seeing that there's some core strengthening of attention as a general resource. And so we tried other things like light and sound or technology facilitated things. And now people have gotten

much more sophisticated with direct current stimulation, et cetera. Nothing was really working. I was not finding that anything was able to, in a sustained way, benefit attentional functioning. So that's sort of happening in my lab, in my pursuit of trying to understand how to strengthen attention in the face of these sort of potent kryptonite factors that disable it. In my personal life, as a young assistant professor who had just had her first kid, I was battling a lot of what can happen with a multitude of demands and trying to be the best I could be in all the roles that I played in my life. And I found that I just could not keep hold of my own attention.

And it was this very sort of ironic realization. It's like, this is all I study. This is what I do in the lab. Yet I am just all over the place. I'm not aware is what I do in the lab, yet I am just all over the place. I'm not aware of what's happening. And it got to the point, especially as it related to my family, that I felt like it was unacceptable. And there's one moment that I remember trying to read my then toddler a book. And at some point in the middle of... This is a book I read, and you have children,

right? I mean, just read the same book over and over and over again to the point where I could tell you the words on the next page. But at some point he is, so we've read this book multiple times as a bedtime story. And at some point in the middle of the story, one night he sort of stops me and he asks me something about what's on the page. And I had absolutely no idea. It's like I was completely going through the motions. age and I had absolutely no idea. It's like I was completely going through the motions. And that made me very, very, I don't know, I felt very tender about it. Like this is him as a toddler. I mean, if I'm starting to miss things now, what about when he really, really needs me? And it was a wake-up call in my life of like, I got to figure out how to pay better attention.

And so I went sort of on a personal hunt, trying to see if there's anything in the literature, in the scientific literature of like, okay, look, maybe there's something I missed, right? These brain training games we know aren't really working or technology solutions aren't working. There's not really a lot of evidence that there's anything. And through a series of sort of fortuitous events, one having to do with Richie Davidson visiting Penn at that same period of time in the spring of the semester, I was having all these things.

And he gave a talk sort of in his standard affective neuroscience talk, because this was so early on in the whole mindfulness, I don't know, explosion of literature. He didn't even talk about or mention anything about the meditation work he was doing. But at the end of his talk, he showed this kind of now very often seen image, but at that point it was pretty novel. A brain that had been induced to be in a negative state and showing this sort of functional MRI brain activation profile. And right next to it, one that was induced to be in a positive state. And he did this basically by having people remember autobiographical memories that were either positive or negative. And what was his point was essentially, look how distinct these are, that we can put the brain in these affective states and they're different from each other. But given what was going on in my life,

at the end of the talk, I raised my hand and I basically was like, how do you get that brain pointed to the negative one to look like that brain, the positive one? And he almost a little bit in a flippant way said meditation. And that was sort of the close of the session. And I was sort of like, what? I'd never ever heard anybody use that term in a context like that. And what's your background, Amishi? I was just going to tell you. So my background is as an Indian woman. Of course, I'd heard about meditation. It was like my earliest memories are my parents meditating. So this is something I knew very much as part of the cultural landscape of my personal life. But frankly, for a lot of reasons, which we can choose to go into if we want, I had completely rejected it.

To shorthand it, essentially, I was not interested in anything at that point that I thought was not serious, like a serious endeavor that could have some basis in science. But the second part was that the culture itself, I felt, had a lot of sexism and other things that I didn't feel were welcoming to me and who I was. And so I just kind of rejected the whole thing outright. So in some sense, I had already had a thing against meditation from my personal background. And then here is this affective neuroscientist who I admire and really respect. And he's saying this term, and I couldn't kind of square the two. So at some point later on in his visit, we had a chance to sit down and talk about what he'd been up to. And that opened me up a bit,

like, okay, given what he's starting to find with the adept monastics regarding some of the structural and functional changes they were seeing, I opened up my curiosity and took a walk down to the Penn bookstore and started kind of browsing through the section on meditation. And I got very, very fortunate that the book I ended up picking was Jack Kornfield's Meditation for Beginners. And committed to kind of checking it out and reading it and started doing some of the practices that came at that point with the CD, which my children don't even know what that is. But it really started making a difference. And it was a real aha moment where I realized that, oh my goodness, the thing that I've been

doing in these practices quietly by myself every day, which is essentially a foundational, one of the things was essentially a mindfulness of the breath practice of focus your attention on breath-related sensations, notice when the mind wanders, and when you do, return it back, that this activity was very much tied to what I was desperately looking for within my lab, an approach that may help to protect and strengthen attention. So after maybe six months, I said, that's it. I'm going to try to figure out what's going on here and bring these tools that I'm personally practicing, put them to a strong test, and wrote my first NIH grant on exploring the effect of mindfulness meditation on attention. And then I've sort of haven't stopped since. So that sort of

brings together the journey of the personal and the professional. Nice, nice. And so when did you first start publishing on mindfulness and attention? 2007. So your interest in all of this, it's perhaps surprising to realize that all of this precedes what the smartphone has done to everybody's life, right? I mean, it's amazing. When we think about a crisis of attention now and a war being fought for our attention. I think the first thing people think of now, I mean, really the front lines of this battle is the computer they're carrying around in their pockets. But obviously this has been a problem for thousands of years and

everything the Buddha recommended was appropriate to a scattered human mind 2,500 years ago. But let's define a few terms. How do you define attention? How would you differentiate it from mindfulness? And how do you think about these, both of those things in relation to consciousness or awareness, which I use as synonyms? All three. Yeah. So you go for attention, mindfulness, and just the basic faculty of consciousness slash awareness slash sentience. Yeah.

Well, I definitely want to dig in on how that relates to what I'll tell you in my view of attention. So the main thing about attention is that it really, if we think about its sort of evolutionary purpose, right, or how it became something that we all possess in our own minds to solve a big computational problem that the brain suffered from, that there was just far more information in the environment than could be fully processed in any one moment. So the notion of selecting a subset of what is experiencing for full interrogation, using the full computational power of the brain, whether it's in much less sophisticated organisms than the human brain, makes sense to me. And from the kind of standard cognitive neuroscience perspective,

attention and its selection ability isn't one thing, but at least three things. And we could probably laundry list even more, but the three ways in which we pay attention really guide and connect to your second part of your question regarding mindfulness. So the first system of attention is really regarding sort of selective focus or selection, content-based privileging of some information at the exclusion of other information. And that prioritizing and privileging in the brain we know shows up as biased information processing in favor of what we pay attention to. So this would be something like the brain we know shows up as biased information processing in favor of what we pay attention to. So this would be something like the brain's orienting system, as well as

aspects of what executive functioning does. But the core thing here is some things matter and are advantaged and other things are not. So I refer to this in this kind of metaphor of a flashlight. So if you're in a darkened room, this aspect of attention would be like having a flashlight privilege wherever it is that you're directing it toward. And the holding of the flashlight is its sort of endogenous or control capability that you can move around and guide what you need to do on a sort of piece-by-piece basis to put together, you know, making your way out of the room if you're in a darkened room. So the features of this kind of attention are really narrow, constrained, high signal-to-noise ratio. But if we move So the features of this kind of attention are really narrow, constrained,

high signal to noise ratio. But if we move away from that system and kind of talk about the next aspect of attention, it's almost the exact opposite. And it might even tie into what you were describing as awareness, which is formally the brain's alerting system. So this we could think of as privileging, not the content, like the flashlight, but the moment. Because really, when you think about being alert, it's about what is happening, the full spectrum of what is happening right now. You can't save up being alert for later. Low signal to noise ratio, broad, receptive. And sometimes I'll refer to this as sort of a floodlight. Just everything that is happening without a selectivity is illuminated in this moment for your full

conscious access. So narrow, directed, broad, and receptive. And then the third aspect of attention, which of course, all of these interact with each other in some way and are supported by distinct brain systems. The third aspect is really regarding goal-related selection. So it's not based on the particular content or the moment, like the first two, but what are my goals in this moment? What do I want to be doing? like the first two, but what are my goals in this moment? What do I want to be doing? And then ensuring that our actions align with our goals. So something called executive functioning and this system's job, or you might call it attentional control, this system's job is to ensure that goals and actions are aligned and to course correct when they're not.

And I like the metaphor here of a juggler. So you're kind of keeping all the balls in the air. You're not trying to do every single individual task, but you're overseeing and coordinating. So all three of these in my mind very much relate to mindfulness and mindfulness practice, which I'm happy to talk about differently, but to give it an experiential sense for people. So people are obviously listening to us now and trying to pay attention to the thread of this conversation, but they might be doing other things simultaneously. They might be taking a walk or driving and paying attention to other things. And so there, this kind of spotlight function of awareness that can select a subset of experience, however momentarily, is constantly doing that, right? So they get distracted from the flow of this conversation by something in the environment they might suddenly notice that might,

quote, demand their attention. And all of that competition is happening in the context of this wider field of awareness that you just described as a kind of floodlight. It's the wider space of experience from which things can get promoted to focus, where the background can suddenly become foreground. So you can take this in one sensory channel, right? So if you're looking in your visual field, you can focus on a single object, you know, and you can attempt to focus on that thing to the exclusion of everything else. And yet you still notice that you see more than that object. There's stuff in your peripheral field that might suddenly capture your attention. You know, if someone suddenly just steps into the room, you're going to notice and turn your head

and engage that person, right? So there's this... Yeah, by the way, this... I'm sorry, finish your thought. Yeah, so there's this kind of foreground-background dynamic we can see in what we notice in awareness, and it can be ever-changing. And so that really grabs two of the concepts I mentioned at the outset, which is attention, this narrow focus, and

awareness or consciousness, which admits of a much wider field of contents. And now we're bringing in mindfulness to the picture, which is this export from Buddhism explicitly, although it has analogs and other traditions, which is a way of training the mind to pay attention in a very specific way. Yeah, so now, Mishi, just to go back to what you said a second ago, right, the broader field of the unfolding of what occurs in our experience, some of you're highlighting some part of space and not other part of space, or it can be spotlighting in quotes of this moment relative to other things that are happening in your past or something about the future, which would be more like alerting. Or the spotlighting can be relative to the goals I'm holding right now. And that can be both in terms of how we relate to the external environment, like we were talking about the flashlight being pointed toward a part of space, as well as the internal environment. And part of the reason I really like that flashlight approach is it's like, and I will get to mindfulness in a second, I just did want to kind of mention this because it relates

to the full scope of what mindfulness I think will help with. The flashlight metaphor is useful because we can hold a flashlight. We have that agency and control. But if we are walking down a darkened path and we're pointing the flashlight toward where we want to walk it, it's goal-directed attention, right? So sort of executive control and this kind of capacity to select are working together. If you hear a rustling, what's going to happen? You're going to get captured by it.

The flashlight, even without much preparation, is going to be pointing to something else, probably where you thought you heard the noise come from. So not only is it endogenous or controlled, but it can be exogenous and captured by things that are happening in our environment. And this flashlight can be pointed to internal mental content and can also be captured by internal mental content. So if I ask you to remember what you had for dinner last night, in some sense, what you're doing is recalling the episode of last night's events, pointing the flashlight to the granular time period of dinner, maybe even visualizing what you had and pulling that out so you have more access to that information. Or it could be captured by a thought like, oh shoot, did I leave my

faucet running or whatever it might be. So I think that the internal extra domain, as well as this multiplicity of how we spotlight information is important to think about. Now, the excitement for me regarding mindfulness is that it seemed to cover a lot of this terrain. And the way that I would describe mindfulness sort of most broadly is that it's a mental mode, a way of making the mind. It's an intrinsic capacity. You don't get mindful only by practicing mindfulness meditation. You hold this in what you possess in your mind. And that mental mode is characterized by this sort of purposeful attention to our present moment experience with these qualities of non-elaboration and non-reactivity. So we're doing our best when we are in a mindful mode of getting the raw data, not an editorialized version,

but the raw data of our present moment experience that has both to do with what's happening sort of externally and internally. Yeah. So again, just to take another pass over that same ground with slightly different words, what mindfulness is, is as you say, it's not some artifice that you're adding to your experience. You're invoking a capacity of the mind that you already have. It is, in fact, attention. It is noticing what you notice in each moment, but it is doing it in a non-discursive and, one could argue, ultimately non-conceptual way, one could argue, ultimately non-conceptual way, which is that you're, you know, insofar as it's possible to make contact with the raw data of experience in all your sensory channels and in

your mind, it is attempting to do that, and it's also attempting to do it in a way that is not reactive to what is pleasant and unpleasant, because our habitual mode is to notice that much of our experience is valenced and sometimes quite strongly valenced positively or negatively. So things taste really good or they taste really bad, they feel really good or they feel really bad. We like the way certain ideas and thoughts feel, their implications, and we have strong emotional reactions to them. And all of that reactivity is what mindfulness as a practice is designed to bypass and ultimately quiet, right? I mean, the goal of mindfulness is not merely to be mindful from the point of view of Buddhist practice. It's to achieve a kind of equanimity in the mind where

the mind is no longer reacting to the pleasant and unpleasant in the usual ways, and where a kind of native tranquility and well-being can be found in the present moment, really, you know, orthogonal to anything that's happening, right? So your happiness, if the practice succeeds, your sense of well-being and fulfillment and happiness is no longer contingent upon the changing winds of experience, right? Your happiness is no longer predicated on, can I secure this next thing that I just thought to desire? Rather, you're noticing something about the native capacity of the mind to be open and relaxed. And we can talk about this, but even positively valenced in a way that is not reaching forward into experience in a grasping,

anticipatory, greedy way, but is actually just positively valenced based on the fact that it's no longer contracting, it's no longer reacting, it's no longer at war with experience inside or outside, but it's just open. And so mindfulness as a practice is a way of invoking that kind of attention and training it to the point where it becomes a kind of default. You know, that takes some practice, but that's the goal of the practice. Absolutely. And I love the way you put it regarding the sort of naturally emerging equanimity and positive leaning mind, right? So you're not contriving anything. Because again, when you're contriving, you're elaborating or you're conceptually constraining in some rigid way. And the thing that becomes interesting from the brain training perspective is, well,

what do you do to get there? So if we all have this mode, why do we need to bother practicing mindfulness and mindfulness exercises or mindfulness practices? And what are the factors that deter us from holding that mental mode more often? And this gets into what I would sometimes refer to as sort of the dark matter of cognition, or also known as distractibility or mind-wandering, having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. And so one of the ways that I like to describe mindfulness is using this sort of metaphor of an MP3 player and thinking about our capacity, our intrinsic capacity for mental time travel. There's a lot of chatter happening and we're filled with that chatter. And oftentimes that chatter takes us to the past so that we can reflect on it or it takes us to the future so we can plan for it.

or it takes us to the future so we can plan for it. But oftentimes, especially for the kinds of populations that my lab works with, under high stress circumstances, especially when those periods are protracted, you're rewinding and fast forwarding in very unproductive ways. So that now when you're rewinding, the chatter may be a lot of rumination and you're kind of, that flashlight is yanked to the past and almost stuck there, or you are forecasting a doom-filled, catastrophic scenario in the future, which you just made up in your mind. And in some sense, this is what we're kind of jockeying between, rumination and catastrophizing. And so when we think about what mindfulness is, it's keeping the button on play so that you are actually experiencing the moment-to-moment unfolding of what is

transpiring of your life, frankly. And so this also, I think, makes it very kind of accessible, like, okay, I get that. I get that there's a need for me to do something because I can imagine the tendency of my mind, and we know what the data says, about 50% of our waking moments, we're not here. We're in the past or the future, you know, and kind of rapidly going back and forth between those. So it will take some kind of exercise if I want more moments where I spontaneously end up able to be in the mindful mode in the present moment with that button on play. Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing I like about that metaphor is that it cuts through this association, which can even get ramified by adopting the practice of mindfulness, that mindfulness is this thing you're adding to

your experience strategically so as to change it, right? So before you learn how to practice mindfulness, you hear about it as a practice, and then you get some instruction. And in the beginning, that might be to focus on the breath. And gradually, you begin to include everything in your experience. But you're still focusing strategically on experience. And it can seem like you're doing something. Whereas in reality, when the practice is actually working, what you're doing is less of something. You are less distracted, right? So you're on play more and more. And the truth is, there really is only play, right?

I mean, your life is always on play. And what you're calling rewind and fast forward are really just the intrusions of thoughts about the past and the future. And you're not noticing thoughts as thoughts because you're distracted by them and identified with them. Absolutely. the future, present percepts and sensations. And there's simply this condition of appearance, and you can either recognize it clearly, or you can be confused. You can be in a kind of waking dream where you are unaware of your actual condition, right? I mean, there is something, perhaps we can bring in this other feature here, which we have begun to talk about but not named, which is this, what is the nature of our distraction? I mean, there's in some way identical to our thoughts. We feel that the arising of this next thought seems to be our true condition as subjects in the middle of our experience. It seems to create a middle of experience, right? We don't

feel identical to the totality of our experience. We feel like we are having an experience and we're appropriating it from one side or from some, you know, some position in the head as a subject. And this feeling of subjectivity, this feeling of self, the feeling that there's this I in the middle of things, is what it feels like to be identified with thought. It's what it feels like to be thinking without clearly knowing the status of each arising thought as an appearance in consciousness. Absolutely. And that's where we can talk about it as cognitive fusion. And there's many words to describe what that is and sort of what the antidote to that might be in terms of defusion or de-centering. But if I could just take a moment to talk about even the most basic,

or let's say foundational practice of mindfulness, because I see where you're going. And there's this sort of three-dimensional model that my colleagues, Antoine Lutz and John Dunn and Cliff Saron and I developed that tries to capture all three of these regarding this object orientation, like we've been talking about, there is something I'm focusing on. I've met each of those guys, but I haven't seen them quite some time. So nice to hear their names. I mean, we can talk about sort of the multidimensionality. We call it the matrix of mindfulness. But if we just go back to sort of the foundational practice that everybody listening to us can anchor around. So if it's something like mindfulness of the breath, and the instruction,

again, is focused on breath-related sensations where you're saying as sensory as possible with regard to those. So in some sense, the flashlight is focused on an anchoring object, which is the unfolding of the breath without manipulating it in any way. And the second part of the instruction being notice when your mind has wandered away. So in some sense, the floodlight is on. What is happening in my unfolding experience right now? And then the third, which is redirect back, which is essentially, am I on my goal-related task? And for the formal period of time I'm doing this mindfulness of breath practice, my attention should be on breath-related sensations. So even if you shorthand this, and a lot of our military colleagues will call this our

mental push-up. So focus, notice, redirect, and repeat as what might be going on in an unfolding of a couple 20-minute, 10-minute, 12-minute mindfulness practice. The qualities that you're talking about become engaged and exercised pretty quickly. And the idea is that the repeated engagement in those aspects are what gets strengthened and allow us to then carry them around, like you said, by default. So being able to have a target for where you should be placing your mind in the backdrop allows you to see when you're off that target. And part of that requires kind of tuning in to what is the unfolding of my present moment experience. I'm watching it.

And that watching requires a distancing between my immersion in the experience, essentially making me the object of my experience instead of the subject of my experience, which is where we can start talking about de-centering, where I'm taking a more distanced perspective. And that distancing also allows me to now maybe even see more clearly what's going on, that these thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, all this stuff arising, they're simply mental phenomenon that are coming into kind of full systems of attention is getting engaged over and over again. And through their engagement, we're cultivating an even sort of more exciting capacity, which is to watch the mind at some distance to get clearer data on what is going on. I want to talk about the brain basis of attention and mindfulness and distraction insofar as we know it at this point. But do you think it matters which bases and experience one uses to train mindfulness? I mean, do you think that

there's any difference between being mindful of the breath, say, or being mindful of sounds or sights, right? Because it's very, in the beginning, people pick these arbitrary objects and preferentially train attention on them. So for a very long time, you can be doing what's called mindfulness of the body, because the Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness. And it's often taught, or seemingly taught, it's implied at least, that any foundation is as good as any other foundation for achieving the results you want. And I've always wondered, in the limit, perhaps that's true, but I've always wondered if, you know, along the way there are significant differences in spending that much time focused in precisely that way on a subset

of experience. So if you're spending all your time focusing on the rising and falling of the abdomen, which is one way that people focus on the breath, as opposed to all your time listening to sounds in your environment. And in each of these techniques, you're doing it dispassionately, you're letting go of thoughts, you're just connected with the raw data of experience, and you're not clinging to the pleasant or pushing the unpleasant away. But it does seem to me that neurologically, you're still doing something fairly distinct between those two types of training. And if you're spending 10,000 hours doing one versus the other, you might achieve a different result in some ways.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the answer is yes and no. So in some sense, if you think about the way that attention is what we'd call domain general capacity exists, it's very nature is supposed to be that you can use it for a variety of different content domains. And those could be different sensory domains like vision or auditory functioning or body sensations or even concepts. But what it's doing is going to be the same on it, which is amplifying certain aspects and essentially improving the efficiency which with that amplification can happen. So if you spend 10,000 hours focusing on a particular visual image, it's very likely with the qualities that you described of sort of kind of core mindfulness quality of this presence-centered, non-judgmental, non-reactive

orientation or mode, then the visuals, if we do this with a visual image, it's very likely that not only will frontal lobe function improve, meaning the brain network involved in kind of control processes of attention, but its connection to visual cortex would be strengthened. Versus I'm going to do some kind of sound practice, probably it'd be to temporal or auditory cortex. Or if I'm doing some kind of repetition of a phrase, I'm going to have different language areas that could be the efficiency of that relationship would improve, but the core attentional functioning probably would be the same. And what it tends to look like is that that is the case, that when you compare different traditions and different functions, if the

recipient of that mindful orientation differs, the system with which frontal lobe attention systems will connect will be different. But the frontal lobe, I don't want to call it frontal lobe, but the control circuitry will be the same. At least that's the picture that's emerging. And in some sense, if you want to maximize the flexibility and generalizability of the strengthening of attention, it might even be a good idea to vary what the recipient is, whether it is a sound or a body sensation or something else, because the target or anchor

may not really be the thing that you care about most, but really cultivating the control of your relationship to it that you're looking at. Yeah. And I've often worried that a narrow focus, let's say that you use entero-reception as your foundation, which is effectively what one is doing if one is focusing on the rising and falling of the abdomen, that gets pretty quickly to just a sense of the internal body states as one's primary focus. primary focus, how much one wants to be, you know, growing one's connections to insular cortex, you know, given all that that does. I mean, the insula is doing many essential things, but it's also the basis for feelings of disgust and sensitivity to a wide variety of internal states, which if you turn up the volume on all of that, I can imagine, and having done a fair amount of practice of that sort, I felt I wasn't thinking about it in

neuroanatomical terms at the time, but I can imagine that it can make you sensitive to things that where increasing sensitivity in that channel isn't actually making you more functional, sensitivity in that channel isn't actually making you more functional, much less wise, right? Like to be acutely conscious of your, you know, the state of your gut does not equip you to function happily in most experiences most of the time, right? And it can actually become synonymous with just something like, you know, irritable bowel syndrome, right? Like it's just, it's not, it's not what you want to be, have captured your attention all the time. And, you know, so insofar as the practice is not, the goal of the practice is not to become more inward and neurotic and distracted by one's, you know, every, you know, digestive misadventure. It's worth taking a moment to think about the consequences of paying attention to

specific things. And I agree that it does make sense to just cast the net of attention as widely as possible and remain aware that the goal is upstream of any one of the downstream channels that we might notice, right? It's at the seat of, are you actually able to remain awake and aware and equanimous given all the things you notice moment to moment? Absolutely. So I would say, for sure, we want to think through the downstream systems that we're going to be interacting with, so to speak. And for sure, we do adjust when there are particular populations where it's a particularly bad idea, right? Somebody that has high anxiety or hypervigilance, you don't want them to spend a lot of time in sensations that are already going to be baseline heightened. And so you might do

something like, don't close the eyes and focus on sort of the interoceptive landscape. Instead, let's keep your eyes open and maybe do something that has to do with an active practice, like the sensations of the feel of the ground as you're walking. So I think things have to be adjusted in a way that we can do to ourselves, obviously, but also as we're thinking about what to offer people from a variety of different backgrounds and predispositions and even illnesses, we want to be sensitive to that. So that's true on the one hand, and I agree with you. I think I agree with myself because I said it initially, but that we want to probably

mix it up and be sensitive to where it is that we're putting our focus in terms of the anchor. The other side of it is, though, that in doing this in a multiple kind of way, by not rejecting any particular channel as the anchoring content domain on which we're going to place this particular mindful orientation, does give us a chance to develop more familiarity with a particular set of phenomena. So though it may be correct or true that focusing on the gut isn't going to do all that much for you in this sort of broad sense, it may actually familiarize you as you start understanding that, oh, that particular sensation in the body is tied to this type of emotion that

arises. And those kind of couplings can allow us to have more familiarity with what is going on moment by moment and is part of the insight I think that we can develop an advantage for ourselves because now when we have that little ache in the side of our left side, oh, I might be really feeling tense. I notice in my practice that tends to happen or whatever the particular things are. But so I'd say, again, kind of yes and, that I think that we should be broad, yet we should think about benefiting intimacy or familiarity with various aspects of our experience. So what are the neural correlates of the seat of attention as you've been describing it? And what does mindfulness characteristically do to brain function? And I think inevitably something about the default mode network will find its way in here. What do we know about the antithesis of mindfulness at the level of the brain? I guess there are other types of reactivity to experience that we might talk about. But

what does the goal look like and what are our failure modes? Right, right. And this is a very nicely emerging literature. I mean, this is so heartwarming to me as somebody who started her career in mindfulness pretty lonely. I mean, I could talk to Richie, but that was about it at that point. And most of my colleagues thought I was absolutely nuts to decide to study mindfulness in those days. So it is really nice to see how much we have learned and not just with regard to mindfulness, but in general, in terms of brain function over the last 20 years. So when I was going to grad school, of course, we thought of the brain as modular and we talked about regions, like I was starting to kind of default to like the frontal lobe does this and the parietal lobe does this. And of course, now we don't see brain function in that modular way.

We see it in a network way so that there is an entire series of nodes that coordinate and collaborate to produce certain kinds of mental processes. And that network view has really helped, I think, strengthen our understanding. And there's sort of two ways to think about it. One is from the point of view of what happens when you're actually practicing. So you're doing a mindfulness practice. What networks are active at what points in time? And then kind of extrapolating that, if you do a practice for a long, if you practice for a long time, what might become intrinsically sustained changes in the operating of these brain networks.

And then, of course, you can go even one step beyond that and say, how might that network functioning result in sustainable structural changes in the brain? And that's sort of, I think, the journey of brain training and neuroplasticity. So in terms of describing what happens and what brain networks are involved, I think it might help to start talking about what happens during a practice itself and how we can name these networks. And of course, this is an extremely simplified view, right? We know that the complexity of the brain is enormous and these dynamics are really, it's a delicate dance. But in general, what we could say is that when we have the instruction to focus our attention on a specific object,

there's kind of two prominent things that might happen. The first is that we have... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website.

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