Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Dr. Richard Davidson: What We’re Getting Wrong with Meditation

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Dr. Richard Davidson (Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, Founder & Director of the Center for Healthy Minds) shows us what it truly means to be well in your emotional self by harnessing our trauma mechanisms into well-being! He breaks down the scientific data he’s gathered on long-term meditators (including monks!) to show the efficacy of meditation, the parts of the brain most affected by meditation, and what all of that means for how we self-regulate and cope with trauma. Dr. Davidson explains how meditation can help parenting, how our expectations and narratives influence our perception of the world, and what our "emotional fingerprints" are. He and Mayim discuss how his framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose lead us to understand the science of well-being, the notion that love and kindness are innate and hate is learned, and the importance of teaching forms of meditation to our kids. Check out the Center for Healthy Minds:  https://centerhealthyminds.org/give/overview For well-being tools, visit: https://hminnovations.org Download the free Healthy Minds meditation app:  https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

our beliefs about ourselves and our expectations of ourselves influence our perception of the world. And I would go even further to say they not only influence our perception of the world, they define the world in which we subjectively inhabit. One way for an average person to reflect about this, and this is a kind of simple meditation exercise that we do, is imagine a challenging situation. that has happened recently in your life. Bring it into your mind and simply envision what your response to that situation might be

if you had a completely different set of beliefs and expectations going into that situation. We are so fused with the beliefs and expectations that we have of ourselves. Many people don't even recognize that they have beliefs and expectations. Wait, can we just, can we slow this down just for a second?

Because, so I thought of a situation, I'm not going to go into too much detail. I thought of a situation where someone hurt my feelings, and they did something that I think is wrong, you know, unethical, like really wrong. So I'm trying to imagine, like, I have, I'm thinking of a friend of mine who happens to be a, I would consider a pretty enlightened person. she was raised in a Buddhist community and she's very chill. If this happened to her,

she would have had a totally different reaction. I mean, it's not to say that she wouldn't be hurt, but is that the kind of example we're talking about? Yeah, I think that's a very appropriate example. Huh. We all have a narrative about ourselves. Many people don't recognize that they have a narrative. And there are some people that recognize

that they have a narrative, but they regard it as a kind of fixed quality of themselves. They don't recognize that the narrative can shift. And really what's key to well-being is not so much changing the narrative at the beginning, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so that we can see the narrative for what it is, that it is a narrative.

And it could be different. And it's a constellation of thoughts. And thoughts are thoughts. They're ephemeral. They come and go. It's my and be allics break down. She's going to break it down for you. Because you know she knows a thing or two.

And now she's going to break down. Amazon Pharmacy presents painful thoughts. I read somewhere that the average Americans spends 13 hours a year waiting in pharmacies for prescriptions. Clearly, I am above average. I thought being above average would feel better. Maybe I'll read some greeting cards. Next time use Amazon Pharmacy, we deliver.

And here's to being anything but average. Amazon Pharmacy. Health care just got less painful. Hi, I'm Iambiolic and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. Today we're going to break down so many different aspects of not just meditation, but what it truly means to be well. in your emotional self.

Flying solo today, which is really sad because Jonathan would absolutely love to talk to Dr. Richard Davidson. He is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

But he is so dope in so many ways, he began his personal meditation journey with none other than Ram Dass when he was in grad school in the 70s. He's published over 573 articles. He's written a book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain, with Sharon Begley. He wrote with Daniel Goldman, Altered Traits, which came out in 2017. He founded a nonprofit Healthy Minds Innovations, which translates science into tools that cultivate and measure well-being.

I highly recommend you go to centerhealthymines.org. There's also an app, a Healthy Minds app that is free, which is unbelievable. And this man is all about us understanding the larger framework of our wellness, where awareness, connection, insight, and purpose contribute to our well-being. He's a fascinating, really, really, really well-researched man. And he has studied over 75 months in an MRI scanner. Do I need to say more? If you want to know about the science of meditation

and also the larger framework in which we as humans deserve to connect with meditation as one of our tools, I highly recommend you take a listen. It's such a pleasure to welcome Dr. Richie Davidson. He goes by Richie, to The Breakdown. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. You said I can call you Richie, so I'm going to go ahead and do that.

Please do. I tend to be pretty old-fashioned with neuroscientists, and I feel like I should call them doctor. But if you insist, I will call you Richie. I insist. Thank you so much for being here. I'm very, very excited to speak with you. You know, you're one of the real kind of pioneers, you know, in an aspect of neuroscience, which obviously is very close to my heart, but also our under-examines.

of meditation and of mindfulness. And one of my sort of favorite things about you is you're very careful in sort of not equating all ways that meditation and mindfulness have made their way into our culture. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit because, you know, we obviously talk about it a lot here on the podcast. I've talked about how my meditation practice has grown and is still growing. Can you sort of talk about, and I don't mean to start this off by asking you to be critical, but can you talk a little bit about what certain aspects of our culture,

what we're getting wrong or not exactly right when we talk about, let's just say, meditation? Sure. Well, first, thank you for having me and thank you for the good question. I think a good place for us to begin is to acknowledge first that there are hundreds of different kinds of meditation. I often use the analogy of sports. There are just a plethora of different kinds of sports. And to say sports would really be so underspecified in terms of describing what a person might be doing. And in the same way, really, in terms of the contemplative traditions from which they come, there are literally hundreds of different kinds of meditation practices. Here in the West, we have privileged just a very tiny fraction, and there's even a further restriction of range

in terms of what's been studied scientifically. And often meditation is equated with mindfulness. And mindfulness is one of hundreds of kinds of meditation. And so, and it's also the case, and this is a separate issue, that these practices in their original form have been embedded in a larger framework, a part of which is an ethical framework. And when, these practices are taught in the West and also when they're being studied, for the most part, when they're being studied scientifically in the West, they are stripped of this ethical framework, this ethical context in which they are embedded in their original form. And I think that this does some disservice to the practices themselves.

I believe that a proper contextualizing of these practices within their context, may actually even change the effects that they have, both behaviorally and biologically. And so I think that these are all elements that are complex elements, but ones that really are important. in understanding how these practices affect the mind-brain in the body. Can you, it's a beautiful point. And we had Sharon Salzberg on here, and we've had a lot of really interesting people who were part of some of those early waves, you know, of bringing, as it were, bringing meditation

and, you know, Eastern practices that have been in use for thousands of years. You're right, in a completely different context. You know, bringing those to the West. Can you even be a little bit more specific? Because I think when people hear, you know, like ethical construct, like, can you be more specific? Like, is it just that white people in the West shouldn't meditate? No. So can you be more specific about kind of what that means? I mean, what I hear is, like, when I say that I practice yoga, right? People picture me like sweating in a room with lots of skinny pretty girls because I live in Los Angeles and, you know, like you feel good and you get real strong.

And, you know, when I think about yoga, I think about all the branches of it. And I think about mantras. And I think about positioning. And I think about breathwork. And I think about mindfulness. Because that's sort of how I've been taught to think about it. Is it similar for meditation? Yeah, it's similar in some ways.

I think one of the important pieces is that in their original context, you know, when we put our butts on the cushion, it's primarily not about us. It's about others. We are putting our butts on the cushion in order for us to be more compassionate, in order for us to be more helpful to others, in order to increase our warm-heartedness toward others. It's really about that altruistic frame. That is the kind of mindset, if you will,

in using a more modern term that these practices are really part of. And so in the West, they've become much more self-focused. You know, it's really focused on self-improvement, peak performance. I was going to say there's a competitive notion. You call it this sort of like mind training, you know, like who can get their quickest? Who can be Zen the quickest?

Yeah. And so I think that it's, again, we haven't, we meaning the scientific community has not yet adequately studied this, but my conviction from everything I know as a scientist and as a practitioner that when we meditate, even with simple forms of mindfulness practice, and we meditate, and we meditate with this altruistic. mindset, the impact of the practice is going to be different than when it is removed, stripped from that context. And you specifically, you know, have kind of dedicated your career to sort of providing both parts of an understanding of what it means to sort of apply meditation, meaning there's the, you know, the neurological substrates kind of part of your universe and your work. And then there's also, you know, sort of an elucidation of what it really means to sort of have emotional health and what well-being means. So you kind of have these two things,

which, you know, for anyone to work on one of those things would be such an amazing contribution, but you really have kind of a hand in both of these. So, you know, as Sharon Salzberg said, you know, she didn't need to know the neural substrates, to know that this stuff works. But for many people, and I think also in general for Western culture, we really want that information. And we want those scans and we want the data

and we want, you know, we want the asterisks indicating statistical significance. So if you don't mind kind of giving us a layperson's sort of, you know, if I were to say to you, I'd like you to convince people, you know, in four minutes or less, that meditation, mindfulness, that this kind of attention to breathwork, to silence, to calm, to peace, that it impacts your brain positively. What would you say? Yeah. Well, first, let me say that I, first of all, Sharon is a very dear old friend, and I would agree with her that, you know, and for me, you know, I didn't originally start meditating because I was convinced by the scientific research.

When I started meditating, there was no scientific research. So it was so long ago, there wasn't even science. Am I right? I'm kidding. Well, there wasn't science on meditation. There were there were three papers in the world's literature on neuroscientific changes with meditation. That was it. Yeah, my first retreat was in 1974. So it really was before any of this work was started. But to answer your question, there are a few things that I would say, we have learned that meditation, and here I'm intentionally using it generically because different forms of meditation do different things to the mind and the brain. They're not all the same. But if we make a general point about a variety of different kinds

of meditation, we know that they improve our brain health. And they can't. And they can't improve our bodily health. And this is one of the ways in which they are, they support well-being. And so there is research that shows that circuits in the brain change in response to a variety of different kinds of meditation. And these circuits are important for several different aspects of well-being. and one of the things that I liken it to is, which doesn't directly answer your question, but is indirectly related, and that is that I think of the cultivation of well-being as a public health issue. We know that meditation improves well-being. We know that well-being is linked to our health.

people who have higher levels of well-being are physically healthier. That's not true of everyone. But if you look at large populations, epidemiological research, it's definitely true. And so when human beings first... My Ambialx breakdown is supported by superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine. Drink more water.

There's no real data, there's no game plan. This has happened to me many, many times, especially on the perimenopause journey. That's why we're fascinated by what superpower is doing. They send a licensed professional to your home, or you can visit a nearby lab, one simple blood draw with over 100 biomarkers. That's way more than you usually get.

It unlocks a true understanding of your body. Their app has detailed information on heart, liver, thyroid hormones, metabolism, vitamin and mineral levels, even environmental toxins. From disease prevention to treating that annoying brain fog or simply optimizing your gym game, superpower is the most comprehensive and advanced system out there. I've been super tired of constantly guessing or just trying to read articles online about what to do for health.

Superpower gives you an actionable health plan based on personal results. It's a real game changer. Plus, they have an on-demand clinician team to answer questions. Supplement or prescription suggestions can be directly bought through superpower so you don't have to go anywhere else. They also have nutritional guidance, tips for lifestyle and behavioral adjustments, you even get your true biological age that you can track over time. Superpower used to cost $499.99. Right now, it's $199 for the full experience, which is much more affordable than anything else out there. Make this the year you stop guessing about your health with superpower. Superpower. Not only did Superpower reduce their price to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break.

Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, they'll ask how you, you heard about them, make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. Evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And I'll bet every person listening to this podcast brushes their teeth and spends a few minutes a day doing that. This is not part of our genome. This is something that we figure out how to do because it's important for our personal physical hygiene. What we're talking about is important for our personal mental hygiene. And it turns out that science shows that our mental hygiene is also linked to our physical hygiene. Amazon Pharmacy presents painful thoughts.

I read somewhere that the average Americans spends 13 hours a year waiting in pharmacies for prescriptions. Clearly, I am above average. I thought being above average would feel better. Maybe I'll read some greeting cards. Next time, use Amazon Pharmacy. We deliver. And here's to being anything but average.

Amazon Pharmacy. Healthcare just got less painful. You study brains of people and you do these kind of, you know, large, you know, meditation studies. And, you know, there's many different methods that you can use to do this. How do you control for the other things that people do? Meaning people who meditate are also more likely to, you know, not eat processed foods,

you know, have jobs that tend to be less stressful, meaning like there are so many other things that you have to control for. You know, how do you know that that's what you're looking at? Because I know a lot of people who meditate and they are not kind to their spouses. They're not kind to themselves. Or I know people who go to yoga and then

leave and start cursing at people because, you know, they're not driving fast enough on the freeway. Or, you know, on an even more kind of, you know, basic level, like many people like still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, but also like meditate and do yoga. So how do you control for that? How do we know what we're looking at when you tell me, you know, this study shows? Yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, it's a wonderful question. You also, introduce some other elements to it, which are also really important about people who meditate that do all these other things that may seem inconsistent with their meditation practice. So let me address each of them.

They're both important. The first question about how do we know that it's really meditation as opposed to their diet, their lifestyle choice of occupation, just a gazillion thing. So, you know, when we started this work, we compared long-term meditators to age and gender-match controls. And all of the problems that you're describing are exactly the problems that leave that work to fundamentally be unsatisfying. We needed to start there because if there was no difference between long-term meditators and age and gender match controls,

we might as well put away the hardware and go home because if we can't see a difference between them, with all the confounds that you're talking about, then we're not going to see effects in more novice meditators. So we started there, and we found some huge differences. There are many questions that are important. and that can account for these differences. And we can't say with any certainty that these are due to the meditation practice. It could be living at high altitudes. You know, it could be the simplicity of their lives, so many factors.

So we then embarked upon entirely different research strategies where we took people who've never meditated before. And we randomly assigned them to meditate. These are people who obviously are expressing some interests. And the way we set these experiments up is we tell them, we're going to teach you an intervention to cultivate well-being. But there'll be different interventions. And you'll be randomly assigned to one or another of these interventions. In one case, a person might get meditation.

Another case, a person may get cognitive therapy, which is an empirically well-validated strategy for reducing anxiety and depression and improving well-being. And people are randomly assigned. so they don't choose which they're going to. And so all of these factors that you're talking about now are completely rigorously removed from explanation in that case. And there we can much more definitively say that the changes we're seeing are due to meditation per se. That's a really helpful set of distinctions.

What's the most interesting part of the brain, in your opinion, that you find positively impacted by consistent meditation. I know, it's like asking you to pick your favorite child, you know. Yeah, well, you know, all neuroscientists have favorite parts of the brain that they're. So, you know, I would say probably, well, one is, I should, I should first qualify it in the following way. We don't these days talk about specific, individual parts of the brain so much because that's not the way the brain works. The brain is a massively interconnected set of machinery, and the brain works in circuits.

It doesn't work in isolated structures. Having said all that... Having said all that, things light up, and you can tell a part of the brain it is. Yeah, that's in part true. And so one part of the brain, which is importantly influenced by meditation, is the prefrontal cortex, this chunk of real estate that we have in the front of our brain that really, many scientists believe it is responsible for things that are characteristically human. in particular our capacity for self-control, for regulating emotions, regulating attention,

all of which in part depend upon the prefrontal cortex. And so there are literally hundreds of scientific studies now that show some effect on the prefrontal cortex from different kinds of meditation. Also can't help but wondering about prefrontal cortex and trauma. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention to this particular part of the brain in terms of the processing of trauma in terms of knowing what's now, what's then, and really a deep sense of self. Meditation also is something that can be very helpful in trauma therapy as well, correct?

Yeah. So one of the things I often say is that the very mechanisms in the brain and in the body that and code trauma are the same mechanisms that can be used for awakening, for well-being. They're mechanisms of neuroplasticity and epigenetics, both of which we know are impacted by trauma, and both of which also we know now are engaged and altered with different kinds of meditation. So there is no question, I think, that these practices can be helpful in that regard. But yeah, I want to also go back to a point that you made earlier that we didn't, I didn't talk about yet, which is the examples you gave of the person who comes out of a meditation

class or yoga class and gets on the LA freeway and is behaving like a jerk to others who might be driving. And, you know, certainly, all of us have seen those kinds of examples. And to me, I mean, it's not that surprising. We're going to see stuff like that because it takes a lot to change habit. And if a person has been habitually behaving in a certain way, I think it's unrealistic to expect a magical solution and for change to happen so quickly. And so this is really where we see the influence of practice and practice in a variety of scientific studies now shows systematic relationships with outcome. Not all the time, but in many studies, the more practice we do, the more beneficial is the outcome.

Well, I'm going to go ahead and poke at that a little bit because I think, you know, as someone who took up, you know, meditation really at a time in my life when my behavior towards my children was an indicator that something was amiss in me, right? And I have pretty easygoing children. And what became clear to me was that my instinct to run. rush to anger or to rage or to extreme impatience was a complete reflection of me and really not them. You know, I do believe children do exactly what they need to get their needs met. And if you don't meet it the first time, if you don't listen, if you're on your phone, if you're doing other things, they will tug harder. And then they will start doing other things to get attention. and it was a friend of mine, Carla Nalmberg,

who turned me on to meditation. But I want to be really consistent with the message that I know that you are so good at sort of delivering as part of your life's work. It's not simply that you need to put in the hours because many of us sit and we put in hours. There is a notion that there's an integration, required to really incorporate not just, you know, the tricks, the top five, you know, ways to meditate, but really a deeper understanding of the substrates of the need to, you know, fill in

the word, center, be mindful, quiet down, have more compassion, you know, live an ethical kind of existence. And, you know, for me, as I as I was, you know, learning more and more about you, you know, this notion that awareness, connection, insight, and purpose are actually the framework for kind of who we are. To me, that makes a lot more sense. And I know that that's, you know, obviously part of what you're indicating. There's, there's a larger kind of path And I wonder if it's okay that I brought those four concepts in because to me that's sort of, you know, that piece that for me was missing. You know, when I just started like sitting and like, okay, I'm sitting like I don't get it.

You know, it wasn't until, you know, and I came to these, not necessarily from your work, but, you know, I came to the notion of starting to chip away at awareness, connection, an insight purpose. I call them A-KIP, but I don't know if you call them A-SIP, or if it has an accurate. Okay, A-SIP, great. Can you talk a little bit about sort of those components and perhaps how that sort of, you know, then dovetails into when we think about kind of growing, not just a practice of meditation, but sort of an identity of integrity. Yeah, well, that's beautifully put. thank you for putting it that way. The ASIP components that you're referring to,

awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, we view as a framework, a template for understanding well-being. These are the four key pillars, if you will. In each of these pillars, we believe exhibits plasticity. They can be changed by experience, and they can also be influenced by training. And this framework is really important and guides pretty much everything we do these days. And we think it's particularly important because, as we discussed earlier,

most of the work in science, in the science of meditation in the West, is focused on the first two pillars. Most of it is focused on the first pillar, awareness, which is where mindfulness would be, there's a little bit on connection with loving kindness and compassion practices. There's virtually nothing on insight. And while there is scientific research on purpose, there's almost no research on the training of purpose in the way that we're talking about.

That is the plasticity of purpose. And so this is really an important framework. And, you know, when a person is just doing mindfulness, with all due respect, it would be like going to the gym and just working out on your upper body. You know, it's going to be good for your upper body, but after a while, it's actually going to lead to some imbalance. And so in order for a human being to flourish, she needs all these components. It's not possible to flourish with just one or two. We need all of them. And so we have developed a more systematic well-being training program.

We don't call it a mindfulness program because that's not what it is. It incorporates all of these components. And not only do we believe, but we've shown that they're all trainable. and they influence overall well-being. You know, I'll be honest, I was surprised when, and, you know, I read the P-NAS paper, and I was really surprised when you talked about how for awareness, for connection, for insight, and for purpose,

that these things are able to be cultivated. They're able to be grown. the place you were born, the class you were born into, the family you were born into, that's not what determines your ability to develop these. And I found that I was surprised that I was surprised to hear that, but it did make me feel very hopeful. And I think the one that obviously, as you mentioned, doesn't really get a lot of attention. The one that I wonder if you can elaborate a little bit about, because I think it is the most abstract for most lay people, The notion of insight, so insight, this is a quote from the paper, insight in our framework refers

to self-knowledge concerning the manner in which emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and other factors are shaping one's subjective experience, especially one sense of self. I think eight out of 10 well-adjusted adults would be like, what's that? Can you explain what? Explain what insight is, I would argue this is one of the things most missing from our current culture in every aspect. Yeah. And first, let me just say, I love that you ask this question. And it is also, if you look at other existing frameworks for understanding well-being, to the best of our knowledge, there's not a single other framework that has insight as part of it. It's really unique, although in the contemplative traditions, if you look in Buddhist psychology, it's all about insight.

And if you talk to the Dalai Lama, that's the core of the meditation practice he does. It's really fundamentally about insight. So what we mean by this is really pretty simple. And it is the idea that our beliefs and our expectations, particularly our beliefs about ourselves and our expectations of ourselves influence our perception of the world. And I would go even further to say they not only influence our perception of the world, they define the world in which we subjectively inhabit. You know, William James eloquently spoke about this in his writing.

And one way for an average person to reflect about this, and this is a kind of simple meditation exercise that we do, is imagine a challenging situation that has happened recently in your life, bring it into your mind, and simply envision what your response to that situation might be if you had a completely different set of, beliefs and expectations going into that situation. Can you imagine how you might respond differently

if you had a different set of beliefs and expectations? And that's simply a way to get, to make this a little looser, if you will. We are so fused with the beliefs and expectations that we have of ourselves. Many people don't even recognize that they have beliefs and expectations. Wait, can we just, can we just, can we? slow this down just for a second? Because, so I thought of a situation, I'm not going to go into too much detail. I thought of a situation where someone hurt my feelings and they did something that I think is wrong, you know, unethical, like really wrong. So I'm trying to imagine, like,

I have, I'm thinking of a friend of mine who happens to be a, I would consider a pretty enlightened person. She was raised in a Buddhist community and she's very chill. If this happened to her, she would have had a totally different reaction. I mean, it's not to say that she wouldn't be hurt, but is that the kind of example we're talking about? Yeah, that's a, I think that's a very appropriate example. Huh. Not because she's Buddhist. I happened to conjure a friend of mine who's like very, she's very, like, roll with the punches.

And I've known her since I'm 11. and I've always been like the high strong one. And she's always been like, that's just life. Like everything's fine. Yeah. And also, let me just say to make it explicit for listeners that I don't think that this quality belongs in a privileged way to any specific religion. Sure.

I think it's accessible. It is part of human nature. Yeah. So, but yeah, that's the kind of thing that I think is the case. and this idea of this narrative that we all have a narrative about ourselves. Many people don't recognize that they have a narrative. And there are some people that recognize that they have a narrative, but they regarded as a kind of fixed quality of themselves.

They don't recognize that the narrative can shift. And really what's key to well-being, let me just say one thing here, is not so much changing the narrative. at the beginning, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so that we can see the narrative for what it is, that it is a narrative. And it could be different. And it's a constellation of thoughts. And thoughts are thoughts. They're ephemeral. They come and go. And having that deep understanding is really helpful in loosening the grip, loosening the extent to which this narrative really hijacks our perception.

Okay. So this is where my, yes, and this is where my brain went. This is literally what I thought, as you were saying that. I was like, but he doesn't know my family. And I'm not saying that just to be funny, but I literally, you know, I wasn't planning on going kind of back to that trauma place, you know, but I think of, you know, I think of a lot of us who have intergenerational trauma. I think of a lot of the ways that, that many of us are raised and, you know, hurt people, hurt, and many of us come from parents who were processing what their parents were processing, et cetera, et cetera. You can tell, by the way, I talk, that I'm from a particular part of the universe where there's a lot of this.

And, you know, what the hope is, you know, is that, you know, it's not the 1940s. It's not even the 1970s. Like, we are in a different, we're in a different age, right? I'm doing different as best as I can. I'm sure my children will have what to say. But, you know, another aspect of the work that you've done is to create a curriculum and also, Also, you know, there's an app that is free, which is like unbelievable, where people can begin to access these things in ways that they can make it their own. Because just the notion that's, I think, so many people walk around, even in this day and age.

And I live in Los Angeles, you know, a place where people love to talk about this over smoothies, right? But the notion of truly understanding what you came from, where you're going, you know, how your psychological being. is impacting every relationship that you have, right? The notion that this is something that can be taught to young people. Like, that's what we need to do, correct? And I mean, some schools are starting to already implement this, even in elementary school. You know, mostly when I try and have my kids participate in meditation, like they laugh, they get bored, they don't know why we're doing it.

But this aspect of insight, what does that look like to teach it to kids? And I don't just mean kids in wealthy private schools. What does this look like for every human being as their right to understand their inner world? What does that look like? How do you teach that? Yeah. Yeah, well, first, there are a lot of wonderful issues that you raised. And so we,

I'm not sure where to start. With young people, we've developed a kindness curriculum, which teaches some aspects of this. It's starting in preschool with kids four and five years old. The kindness curriculum, by the way, is freely available on our website in both English and Spanish. Anyone can download it. There's been essentially really nice.

no work on the development of insight. We don't know at what age it really would be appropriate to start teaching this. My own conjecture is probably around adolescence would be the appropriate time to begin to teach this. And I think the way in which this might be taught to adolescents might look really different than the way we think about meditation. Meditation doesn't require that you sit. It doesn't require that you sit in any specific posture.

Meditation can be done anytime, anywhere. And so it may look completely different in an adolescent being taught these kinds of insight practices. And so it may be in the form of a dialogue that they have with a peer, where they're asked to take the perspective of another as a way to cultivate this appreciation for how our beliefs and expectations affect our perception of others. So there's another point that you made, though, which I feel obligated to comment on. And just about your own history, you know, the history of any family is going to be fraught with, you know,

lot of complexity and there's trauma in so many different places. And you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a huge amount of really good neuroscientific evidence on this now that there is a reality of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. There's also a reality of the intergenerational transmission of resilience, of the intergenerational transmission of awakening. because the very same mechanisms that are responsible for trauma, as we said before, are also responsible for well-being and for flourishing. And so we can harness those mechanisms. And people will start off at different baselines because of their trauma history.

But every human being has innately the capacity for these qualities. And in fact, you know, I talk about the fact that we are born to become, And to some people, that may sound nuts in the kind of world in which we live. But the data are very clear. If you look in young infants and you look at their propensity for warm-hearted pro-social interactions compared to interactions that are selfish and aggressive, the data are very clear. And it's not like 55% of infants prefer the pro-social and 45% prefer the other. it's like 95.

You know, depending on the study, it's between 90 and 100%. This is something that we come into the world with. And so when we sit down or more actively meditate and cultivate these qualities, we're not cultivating them from scratch. We're not trying to create something de novo, but rather we're familiarizing ourselves with the basic nature of our own minds. That's really beautiful. And, you know, when I think about, I mean, it really, it touched my heart.

And Valerie also, I think we both welled up a little bit. You know, that notion that our default state is one of openness, right? Kindness, love, connection. I mean, we're mammals, right? That's nurturing an attachment. Like, that's what we do. And I thought of two groups of people who seek to tap into this, people who have a deep connection

with a power greater than themselves. And I'm not saying that religious people have it all figured out. But for me, as a person of faith, especially when I connect musically in a faithful, mindful way, that notion that I am connected to something that has as its core

an element of goodness, and this is a human word, you know, God doesn't have good, bad, you know, it just is. And, you know, certain aspirin, of monotheistic religions, Christianity, have really honed in on that notion of salvation and goodness. So I'm even leaving that aside, but just being in touch with something that feels like, oh, that's my purpose, is goodness, is kindness, is openness. The other group of people I think about are people who have had transcendental experiences, either through intense meditative practice,

often with fasting and sometimes chanting, and also people who have experienced, you know, often with completely safe physician supervised psilocybin or ketamine. There are people who report that in transcendental states, they are experiencing a source of love and wholeness and goodness. And I have to believe that these things are not, you know, they're not disparate. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think that this is something that every human being has access to and it's really part of who we are.

And love is a more fundamental part of our nature than is hate. I think we need to learn to hate, but love is innate. You had the opportunity to meet the Dalai Lama in 1992, I believe, and this led to a really fascinating aspect of research of scanning, correct? scanning monks. I need to know about this. I have so many dumb questions. Like, where did you scan them? Did they come here? Were they living here? What did they wear? Like, did you have to provide certain food? What was that sort of research protocol like? Yeah, great questions. I mean, over the years, we've probably scanned at least 75 monks. And, and, and, you know, and,

And most of them live in Asia, in India and Nepal, primarily. And so when we were doing those studies, we would fly the monks over from Asia to Madison, Wisconsin. And they would spend about a week with us, typically. And, you know, they wore monks' ropes. So that's – and, you know, they came. into our laboratory, they used the scanner that we have in the lab, and that's what we did. And we fed them food that they enjoyed eating. Did they get like a coupon to Starbucks?

Like when you participate in a scanning study, you get like a... Some of them like lattes, you know, these are, I mean, all the monks that we had the opportunity to scan, for the most part, are monks that are familiar with the West. They've been to the West before they, many of them are teachers. Some of them are famous teachers who, you know, have, are quite well known, have published books in English that are well-known books. And so some of these are, you know, some of the most famous living meditation teachers. And can you talk a little bit about sort of what you looked at in this particular, you know, population?

Were you asking them to actively meditate? Were you asking them to think about other things? What were you kind of looking at? Was this well-being can be measured? That's a quote of yours. Yeah. So we were looking at many different aspects of their brain and their body in these studies. we would record brain electrical activity.

We would also have them in the MRI scanner looking at both the structure and the function of the brain. We did have them actively meditate. A good portion of the studies was focused on discovering what changes in the brain occurred during meditation per se, during formal meditation. But we also were looking at how their brains were different at baseline compared to age and gender match control. But that, you know, those findings are findings that have all these possible alternative explanations that we talked about earlier. Sure. Because of the many ways in which these people are different. But, you know, you ask sort of, you know, how we did that and what some of the practical details are.

Let me just share one story because it captures this. So we, most of the time, we have them stay in a hotel that's just adjacent to the campus. and walking distance from the lab. I have to ask, did you bring them in winter? Because I have seen Wisconsin in the winter. Roves are not enough for that winter. We had them here in the winter. And, you know, they wrapped themselves in scarves.

So, yeah, in at least one case, I went out and bought someone a pair of gloves because he didn't have any gloves. And I felt it was not appropriate for him not to be wearing gloves. many of them stayed at this hotel that was just on the edge of campus and they walked to the lab from there. And so we had one of these monks in for a week and he left. And the day after he left, I got a call from the manager of the hotel. And the call was initially taken by an assistant of mine.

And she said that the manager is calling me. And I thought that, you know, there's probably some administrative screw up. The bills got, you know, didn't get paid or something to that effect. Oh, I assume somebody threw a television through a wall. You made them un-munk with your research. So what happened was they were calling me to thank me for the wonderful guests that were having staying in this hotel. And he said to me that this guy was so friendly.

and he got comments from the housekeeping staff, the front desk staff, and the restaurant staff, all of whom were just talking about what an incredible person this was. That is one of the best unobtrusive measures of kindness that we have. You co-authored the emotional life of your brain,

which came out in 2012, and it talks about emotional style. And we had Susan David on, and a lot of her work kind of resonated with when I was learning about this work of yours. And the notion that we all have like an emotional fingerprint, meaning there are different kind of unique components of many different aspects that sort of make up how we function and operate emotionally. you discuss resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context, and attention.

And I guess where we fall on all of these continuum sort of determines our emotional fingerprint. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the structure of this concept, you know, of emotional style? And also, can these things change too? Yeah. So great question. So the emotional life of your brain book and the framework for six emotional styles was an inductive process, if you will, that I came to after 30 years of research looking at these different ways in which people respond to emotional challenges. And so this really was the question that I began my career with and in many ways still is vibrant in our work. And the

question can be simply phrased as, why is it that some people respond to emotional challenges with resilience and others respond to these challenges with vulnerability, if you will? And what accounts for these variations in how people respond. And so any two people will respond differently to a challenge. And this is really the stuff of emotional styles and how we think about it. And so after doing this research, we came up with these six styles that really capture the space of how people respond differently. And some of them are, you know, pretty intuitive and seem, you know, pretty clear and reasonable. Others, I think, are surprising to most people because they're a little bit unorthodox and out of the box.

So, for example, one of them is sensitivity to context. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. And so we were led to that by thinking about some of the fundamental differences in people, who have post-traumatic stress disorder. And so when you think about people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, one way to think about them is that they are displaying emotions,

which would be appropriate for certain contexts, but they're displaying those emotions in contexts that are safe and inappropriate. So in response to a traumatic event, the emotions that they experience may be actually adaptive for that immediate traumatic event. But then when those emotions continue and they are displayed in safe context, that's where the problems arise. So to give a kind of concrete example, someone might be a veteran who comes back from a war zone, may be walking in his neighborhood, and here's an ambulance. Here's an ambulance.

Here's an ambulance siren, and that triggers off a panic attack because of all the associations. And what we would say is that the fundamental difference there is that that individual is not taking into account the context. The context here is it's a safe neighborhood. And, you know, it's an ambulance going by. And the failure to encode that context is leading. to a response which may be adaptive in the original traumatic context, but is no longer adaptive. And that is an example of a type of emotional style, and it's rooted in a specific brain system.

In that case, it really is primarily the hippocampus. And we know that the hippocampus is, it's an area that's really important for memory and particularly for emotional memory, at least in certain parts of the hippocampus. And we know that that's a area of the brain that is specifically exhibit certain kinds of abnormalities in people with PTSD. It's interesting that you kind of pulled out sensitivity to context. You know, I actually, you know, instantly was wondering about, you know, people who may not even be operating from a place of trauma or PTSD.

but, you know, I was thinking about when people date, right, or when you meet people that you're going to spend extended periods of time with, there are people who are exceedingly sensitive to things that other people are not. So I'll take Jonathan for an example because he's not here. You know, he once reported to me that his feet felt very hot. And like he couldn't, like we were playing pickleball or something. We were playing basketball. And I was like, your feet are hot. What does that even mean? And he's, he's just. said, well, what do you mean? What do I mean? Like, my feet are hot. Don't your feet get hot sometimes? And I said, I don't know if my feet have ever been hot, like in my life. And I gave him such a hard time about it.

And then I was at another time, not long after that, I was playing basketball with my younger son, who is exceptional in many ways. And we were playing for a few minutes. And he said, Mama, he must have been 13 at the time. He said, I can't play. My feet are so hot. And I remembered saying, I shouldn't have given Jonathan since a hard time because my younger son is a really good reporter of somatic things. And often they're not always connected to emotional states. But I thought, oh my gosh, like, I don't know if I'm not sensitive enough, right? If he's too sensitive. And I was just thinking, like with your child, obviously. I was like, okay, we'll stop playing basketball. But I was thinking about how many times, you know, especially in dating context or in friend contexts, where it feels

like there's a mismatch in this particular arena. But I wonder, and this might be outside of the scope of sort of emotional styles, are there ways to predict, do you think, who would be a good match based on these continuay? I don't know what the plural is of continuum. Continuums? Continuia. Continue off. Tush. Yeah, it's a great question. And the honest answer is we don't know. Yeah.

You know, it would be super cool to look at that. And I can picture successful relationships going both ways. That is where there's assortative mating, so to speak, two people who are similar coming together. But I also can picture complimentary mating where people who, who really are different come together and the sum is greater than the whole of its... Well, or... The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Or one person can hold for the other one whose feet are so hot. Yes. Can I ask you one final question? Sure. What is your personal meditation practice? Well, my personal meditation practice has evolved over the years. You know, I've been meditating pretty much daily since... on 1974.

Wow. And in the early days of my practice, I was practicing in the Theravaden tradition, doing a lot of Vipassana kind of practice. And then in the last 15 years, I've been practicing in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. And one of the monks that we studied is Minger Impeche. and I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's written the book called Joy of Living, which I think is probably the best book on meditation

that's ever been written. And he is my meditation teacher. Wow. Okay, wait, now I have a couple small follow-up questions. Hold on. Could you meditate in an MRI scanner if hard pressed? Sure. Like, not even a question.

You could like, that's easy. Yeah, I've done it. many times. What? I mean, I can barely stay, I can barely stay unsedated in a scanner. And I was trained, I was trained as an undergrad. I trained in FMRI. That was my, my undergraduate research. Yeah. But it's funny because I was, I was in Shavasana at the end of a yoga class the other day. And my favorite, favorite yoga teacher who also does Kirtan and he does a lot of chanting. And another class got out and there was a lot of talking in the hallway. And, you know, I instantly was like pulled out of whatever I was trying to not be pulled out of. And he, in a very, very calm voice,

his name's Zach, shout out. I don't know if he listens to this podcast or knows who I am. But he said, try and imagine that you cannot even understand language. And I was like, that's all I needed to hear. And I can't say that I was able to kind of bring myself back completely, but just that notion of like it, it just, you need to just let it wash over you, which is really what we need to do with all the negative thoughts and judgments that come when we meditate. Is that what it's like trying to meditate in a very loud MRI scanner? Yeah, I think that's a great, and I think his, that little tip is great. I, you know, think it's very insightful and yes, I think that that is, I mean, Minger-in-Pachate talks about this a lot.

You can do sound meditation. So rather than sort of feeling, wow, this is a big distraction and it's, quote, pulling me out, make friends with it. And making friends with it is simply to, anything could be used to support our awareness. Even pain, even noise, even trauma, even destruction. Exactly. And actually, I'm writing a book now with Mingyere and Bichet and another scientist called Turning Poison into Medicine. That's a tentative title.

That's incredible. That's the story of my life, Richie. Okay, wait, I did have one more question. What happened in 1974 that you got turned on to this kind of universe? Were you already in med school? I'm trying to do the math. I wasn't in med school. I was in graduate school.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, you have the other degree. Got it. Yeah. Just as you do. So, yeah. So, yeah, I was in, I just finished my second year of graduate school at Harvard in psychology.

And I was very fortunate to meet some people who were like just super amazing people. They were warm-hearted. They just had this secret sauce that I wanted to learn more about and wanted some of. And I learned that these were all people who had a practice of meditation. And they were people that I met. outside the academy. And although they had some connection to the academy, one of those people, by the way, was Ram Dass.

I don't know if you know who he is. Of course. Please, Richie. Okay. So Ram Dass was one of my first teachers. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. And he was hanging around in Cambridge, Massachusetts in those days. He had just come back from his first extended stay in India. Amazing. And I literally met him the very first day of graduate school. Wow. And so that was like a mind-blowing experience. No, that's absolutely.

So he told me I should go to Asia and get a taste of this more deeply. So it took a couple of years, but I went after my second year of graduate school. And where were you raised? New York City. Oh, Manhattan. proper. Got it. Brooklyn. Oh, Brooklyn. Got it. My parents are from the Bronx. It's really been a pleasure talking to you. And I just, again, I have such great respect for so much of your work and really how you've been able to tackle so many different aspects of, you know, true wellness in a way that's just

really so entertaining to talk to you about. And it really just is such a pleasure. So thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you so much, and I really appreciate your great questions and all that you're doing to bring this work out into the world. So thank you. It's my and Bialyx breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two.

One fiction. And now she's going to break down.