Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 112: Dr. David Vago, This Is Your Brain on Meditation

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

There has been an explosion of research in recent years on what meditation does to the brain, but as neuroscientist Dave Vago points out, the science of putting meditation under neuro-imaging is still quite young. Vago, the research director for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, studies brain scans of meditators to analyze changes in brain activity, blood flow, size and function of certain areas in the brain, and he was part of a group of scientists who published paper aiming to define "mindfulness" and its neurological impacts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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I'm Dan Harris. As you've heard me mentioned before, I've got a new book coming out. It's called Meditation for Figuity Skeptics. And it's based on this road trip that I took across the country back in January with my good friend, Jeff Warren, who's an amazing meditation teacher from Canada. And I guess the backstory is after I wrote 10% happier, I kind of thought naively that everybody who read it would start meditating that if I made a good enough case based on the science and based on the fact that if I can do it anybody can, that

people would start meditating and I was really wrong about that. And it's become clear to me in the intervening years that habit formation is really difficult. And so the point of this next book is to sort of systematically tax onomize, you know, classify, list all of the obstacles to meditation such as I don't have time for this or it's going to make me lose my edge or I can't do it because my mind is too busy to make a clear list of these obstacles and then to tackle them one by one. So Jeff and I got in this big bus back in January of 2017 and went across the country and met people who want to meditate but aren't and we, you know, one by one help people figure

out how to get over these various really significant obstacles so they can actually do the thing. One of the people we met was this incredible neuroscienceist named Dave Vago, who is at Vanderbilt University, and formerly of Harvard, and he is on the cutting edge of the neuroscience that's been done around meditation. He's basically looking at what meditation does to the brain, both for people kind of to use an analogy that often gets used at the shallow end of the pool. In other words, sort of, just a few minutes, every few days, or like deep end of the pool,

people who have been doing it for years and spend years at a time, you know, or months at a time on silent retreat. And those findings are just utterly fascinating. Anyway, we met Dave on the road trip. Oddly enough, the stuff that we did with Dave didn't make it into the book in the end, but he ended up being our key scientific advisor on the writing of the book, making sure that when we talked about science,

we did so correctly. And we ended up turning all of the video we shot with him in his lab into a special course for the 10% happier app. And so that's up on the, if you are a subscriber to the app, you can get the course. Anyway, I've been doing a lot of talking, sorry, I'll try to shut up soon.

But this interview is fascinating. We talk about all sorts of stuff. So long introduction, but here is Dave Vago. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, my pleasure. A bit proof of the quality of your meditation practice. We deleted. This is the second time you're coming for a podcast

because the first time you came in, we lost the files. And you're like, super good nature to about it. I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, this is such a natural conversation we're having. We could have this conversation any day and I really just love talking with you. It's wonderful. Likewise, my friend. Likewise, so thank you for doing it and thanks for being a good support. Yeah, my pleasure. I have so many things I want to talk about this new paper that you wrote, which is really interesting and results in this very, let's just say interesting, because we'll get into, I have other adjectives headlines that resulted as a consequence, so you know what I'm talking about. And then I also want to talk about this new course you're doing with us on the app, but let me just start by just giving people a

framework on who you are. Can you just tell me how you started meditating in the first place? Yeah, I love this question. You know, I think about, I can't help myself, but Synchronicity is a powerful way to think about meaningful coincidences, right? So you can either look at the sort of calls and relations of how you, you know, certain things led up to, sort of an occurrence that was meaningful in some way, or you can look at it as a signpost. And I often see my trajectory into this world as a series of signposts and secretes.

And I almost feel like that story you gave with your friend at film school was almost like a little signpost towards being able to leave your attachments and not be attested things. All right, let me just jump in and tell people what that was, because I'm not sure people will know. Oh, OK. So be a test of things. All right, let me just jump in and tell people what that was, because I'm not sure people will love her. Okay. So just by way of background.

Okay, so, so, David, I've been talking about the fact that he's a good sport about the fact that we deleted his first podcast. And I was telling him a story before we started recording that my friend, if you're listening Harry Yoon, I'm still sorry. Harry Yoon is a guy, what, I did one semester at NYU film and in college. Just long enough, as I told Dave earlier, to realize that I sucked at making movies, which

was really useful for me, actually, really informed the decisions I made going forward. One of my favorite classmates is a guy named Harry Yoon. And he was also, there was a special semester they did for kids who were at liberal arts schools in Harry. I was coming in from a school in Maine called Colby and Harry was coming in from Williams in Massachusetts and we made student films and everybody played a different role in the film each time so sometimes you're a director sometimes you're a cinematographer blah blah blah. Harry's film the time when he was a director I was the cinematographer. We got back after he had planned this thing meticulously. We got back at the end of the day and I checked the film and I either hadn't pressed play or whatever you do

on a movie camera or I hadn't loaded the film or I loaded it backwards. Anyway, it was all gone. So you're basically saying that in hindsight, that's just a signpost of my first or a first brush with impermanence. Yeah, yeah, like a Dharma, a Dharma and a Karmic teaching

But but but people are gonna hear all this stuff You're saying what signposts its in granicity and Dharma can Karmic and they're gonna say okay Wait, I thought this guy is a scientist. Why is he so weird? Yeah, well, you know, you have these you know personal feelings I think that you can't avoid even when you talk about things like consciousness or spirituality We all sort of have some general idea of what it is But when you try to put it under the microscope, it's much more difficult. So I can have a belief in a spiritual experience

and what a spiritual experience means to me, for example, but to better understand what it is from a neurobiological point of view is much more difficult. But I'm not afraid of those questions, and I actually think these types of life experiences are where inspiration comes from, to put difficult questions under the microscope and look at them, and I just happen to use a neurobiological lens. And I can talk a little bit about, I can't really say much about synchronicity and meaningful

coincidences, but I can certainly talk about purpose and meaning in life, and that's really some of the main metrics by which we measure well-being or happiness. So, I put it in that frame, and the secret is that I was referring to is really how we get to where we're going in the path that we choose. And what does give you purpose and meaning? And for me, it was this path of learning how to meditate and then ending up studying it. And I can't say that there were real hard choices that I had to make, but really the choices were presented to me. And I made them following the same signposts along the way that led to where I am today, which is now the research director of a Integrated Medicine Center at Vanderbilt University. But it started with my uncle, who was a psychiatrist.

He was also interested in meditation, and he was doing work with Stanislaw Grough and Hallotropic Breathing, which is a way of just manipulating your breath to sort of gain experience into your body. He recommended that I take a meditation course when I was showing interest. And this was when I was about 20 years old in college. I was taking a Buddhism class called the Asian Search for Self by Douglas Brooks, and he's an Indo-Tibetan scholar. And he was incredibly inspiring and charismatic. He still is. And in taking that class, I wrote a paper on Atman, which is the eternal self from the Sanskrit.

The Hindu tradition. The Hindu tradition. And that idea of there being, you know, this, well, from the Hindu tradition, they talk about this sort of permanent sense of everlasting self that is kind of dualistic with the traditional sort of physical body and everything else that you sort of think of in the conventional self, your hopes, your fears, your wants, your self-identity. A little bit different from the Buddhist conception of no self, which just all unpacked that too. So that idea is that essentially there is no permanent sense of self that you can really identify that

we're always changing. And so I really interested in this I decided, okay, I'll try this course. And I went to a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat, a koenka, S.N. Goenka style of practice. He's a teacher from India who was actually not a month, but he did teachings all over the world. Yeah, he's a businessman. Businessman from India. And he really brought, I think, one of the

main sort of carriers of the tradition from India to really, you know, between, you know, I think it was like the fourth or seventh century when Tibet was sort of the last group to start making create new sort of schools of Buddhism. And in the 1970s, there was not really a lot happening in India with the development of Buddhism and practice of Buddhism in terms of change. But he brought it to the West. And that's when it started to begin flourishing. People like Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein, and a lot of contemporary teachers started to learn from going up.

So they have these meditation retreats all over the world, and they're free, which is great. That's how all meditation retreat should be. And you just have to apply. And I did, I was just a young 20 year old, and I'm totally into it, which is great. That's how all meditation retreat should be. And you just have to apply, and I did, I was just a young 20 year old, and I'm totally into it, this sounds great. And it's gonna be over a Christmas break. And new over most people, most kids in my age

were going out to a New Year's parties, and I was gonna go sit in a little wooden plank bed with someone that I can't even speak to next to me, and meditate all day. And really, they take away everything from, well, back then there weren't really phones, but you couldn't write in an notebook. Men and women were separate. And you really can only speak in the evening times.

If you had questions, you can speak directly to the teachers. So that experienced for me for 10 days, really blew me away. I was... You didn't hate it, because it sounds, I think a lot of people were gonna say, that sounds awful. It does sound awful. And I think only particular people

would really get something out of it, some people would not. And I think as a scientist, we're realizing there are some people who won't benefit from that. And in fact, they may benefit from something more simple like, you know, a nap, like, you know, like the time. Yeah, I know, there's a lot of them actually these days.

But the point being is, you know, the jury's still out whether, particularly, you know, a mechanism or mode of delivery for teaching mindfulness like an app is better than, a 10-day silent meditation retreat. And so we don't know who it's good for, but for me it was great. I was, I didn't have really any sort of psychological instability or real problems I was trying to confront, but I was just intellectually curious about the mind. So as a cognitive neuroscientist in training, it was still an undergrad, but I was

in that field and interreligion and Buddhism. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Not only did it give me a profound sense of insight into my own mind, but this is really informative on how we understand emotion regulation and attentional control and all these different things that I've been thinking about in neuroscience and training. So I just took that and started practicing myself daily and I never thought it would be part of my science. I finished my undergrad at University of Rochester and then started working at Sleep Lab at Columbia.

I never really continued to practice but there was no one really studying meditation before 2000, you know, in the neurosciences. And I went to graduate school, started in 1999, and I continued to practice, and I wrote a paper on meditation as being the new introspectionism. And my teacher was like, oh, this is very interesting. But my advisor was very against it. He basically said, Dave, you need to stop thinking about all this

Zen stuff. It's not going to be helpful for your career. You're not going to be successful in academia. And he said that explicitly to me. But I just kept it in the back of my mind like this is something I really want to do if I can. And in 2004, there was this great event that happened at MIT with Dalai Lama hosted by the Mind and Life Institute. And there were a bunch of Buddhist scholars but also neuroscientists, you know, from Harvard, that were on this panel and talking about the mind. And I thought, wow, you know, there's people who are real scientists doing this work. And I heard about Richie Davidson, who you had on your show recently. And he's a, he was doing a lot of what we refer to as affective neuroscience. So people who study emotion and the neural substrate so emotion.

And I heard that he was doing it and Steve Kosslin and Nancy Kamishar and all these great neuroscientists. I'm like, this is great. I'm gonna try to do this. And I applied to a summer research institute in 2005, which was the second year that they did it, got in, and it was doing meditation, and just meditation at the time,

guided by Sharon Salzburg and Joan Halifax. These are great teachers, one from the Zen tradition, that's Joan Halifax, and Sharon Salzburg and the Insight tradition. And everyone's barefoot, and we're talking science, too. So it was a mixture of retreat and a science conference. And I was like, wow, this is this, this is my people. This is great.

And Richie really was inspiring for me. He was there and became sort of a mentor for me ever since. So I then ended up becoming the, because I was just finishing my PhD in 2005. They needed someone to help manage the research coordination that was happening through the Mind and Life Institute. And so I just finished my PhD and I was like, well, I guess I can do that. I'm a neuroscientist by training now. And they needed someone to pick up the bandwidth with or Richie just didn't have it. And so I applied and got this position as their senior research coordinator and senior scientist and stayed with them for about three and

a half years part time because I didn't want to quite give up academia to be with them full time. But so I did that. And in the meantime, I got a, well, before I actually, before I joined them, I got a grant from them to study meditation in women with diagnosed with fibromyalgia. These are people who have chronic pain and fatigue. And I thought it would be a good population to study how they regulate emotion and attention. So we did this study and we saw that they got better in many ways and I can talk about the details. But that really just solidified my whole trajectory

into doing this kind of work. And as I joined the Mind and Life Institute, it just exposed me to all these amazing people, Richie, Dan Gomes, and John Capitzin,zin, all these great scholars, including the Dalai Lama, which was incredibly inspiring given that I was so into meditation. So I just kept going. And I moved to New York in 2007 to join a functional nerve imaging lab at Cornell on the Upper East Side and then

We moved to Harvard actually in 2009 and that's when I gave up my official role in mind and life and Became full-time faculty at Harvard Jeff Warren who is my co-author on the new Meditation for fidgety skept book, you knew him from before we rolled through Nashville and went to your lab, which we'll talk about later. You knew Jeff because he spent some time following some of your research when you were at Harvard, and there was this moment that I read about in this great article that Jeff wrote for, I think, a weird website

called Psychology Tomorrow. I think that's the name of the website. Well, I'll try to put a link somewhere so the people can find it. It's a great article, Jeff, is a fantastic writer. And somebody basically had some sort of enlightenment experience in the scanner while you were scanning their brain. I may have said that incorrectly,

just give this the story. Okay. So, being at Harvard, the Crimson Shield brings a lot of interest and people want to work with you just because you have that shield behind you. And I started to, and because of my work with Mind and Life, I knew a lot of these contemporary mindfulness teachers and Shinsen Young was one of them. Former guest on this podcast. Yeah, a really wonderful individual.

And one of the difficulties in studying meditation is that when you meditate, your mind can go to a lot of different places. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with letting your mind go to different places. And the idea is just try to keep your attention on where your mind goes, and at least some styles of practice. But what Shinson brought to us was a very algorithmic approach to meditation, which was a noting and labeling technique. So from a Burmese style, Mahasi Saida was a

teacher from Burma that taught Western teachers how to more, I easily identify mental habits. And he did that by constructing the students to just note whenever something comes to mind. Note it as a breathing or image or sound or taste, or whatever, just some sort of label. Note it with attention and then label it. And so you're really just focusing your attention

on whatever object arises and then label it with some sort of label. Actually, I do a lot of this kind of practice. It provides some sort of distance. Yes. You start to see it non-judgmentally because you're framing it in your mind. You're like, oh yeah.

So you might be having a bunch of thoughts about how you suck at meditation. But then you know it is doubt. And you're like, oh, this is just a mental, this is a mind state. Right. It's not personal. I'm not doubting. I'm having a thought that I'm doubting. Yes.

Right. That's a huge part of the practice. And in a sense, you're separating this psychological distance that you're creating between you and your thoughts is a form of emotion regulation. In fact, when you look in the brain of anybody who does this, you'll see that when you label your emotion and actually down regulates your emotion, well, your amygdala reactivity to that emotional stimulus. So say you saw a bunch of words that were like fear or pain or scared. And you might actually have some little reactivity by your brain that generates emotion, or you see a picture that's like a snake or somebody getting shot.

Those will generate these negative emotional responses, and a normal person will be able to regulate those emotional responses through prefrontal activity, activity in the funnier brain. And the sympathetic nervous system, your stress response, comes out of direction from this area of the brain that's been talked about on the show before called the amygdala and whenever it becomes whenever you have an emotional reactive response to a stimulus the amygdala turns on really bright in the brain and basically helps modulate the activity through your

hypothalamus and pituitary and adrenal sort of access. This is the access for a stress response. And so, in any case, whenever you label your emotions, you're gonna down regulate that emotional response very effectively. So it's just a really powerful way to do it. And so what Shins and Brought was a particular way to note and label experience in three modalities, visual auditory and somatic. And that was it. He's so instead of labeling and noting everything with random

different labels, he said, let's focus on three different modalities. Specifically, we can then focus in these modalities alone or we can note all of them. for our purposes in a lab it was like this is wonderful because we have this nice way to delineate experience. In visual auditory and somatic modalities we can look in the brain and how these different modalities are can be separated and distinguished and he has a way of noting and labeling an experience called rest which is a way to just stay focused in a particular modality, let's say, here, the auditory, where you're just paying attention to any sort of external or internal mental chatter,

or external sound, and you're just focused, but on the absence of any stimulus being present, it can be just restful. And this restful state. So we focused a lot on these states because we really were interested in how it contrasts with mind wandering, which is a typical state that we often go to when we're not meditating and just having our mind relaxed. And so we had these advanced practitioners in the scanner as well. We then, with very levels of experience, and that was important for us and I'll tell you why in a sec. So they had, they varied between about a thousand hours and over 10,000 hours of lifetime meditation hours, formal practice and we use a particular

algorithm to determine how long they've been formally practicing on a cushion and that's just a good metric for people's meditation experience. And what we found was there were two practitioners in particular who were having very deep states of open awareness, well, during what we would call an open awareness practice, which is just allowing your mind to freely wander but with awareness and attention to where it goes. And in those states, they started to have what they refer to as cessation experiences. And cessation really refers to, well,

it refers to the direct translation of Nirodha SamPati, which in the Sanskrit it just refers to as cessation or extinction of all time and space is what it refers to. Is this the same as Nirvana? Yes, so it has a correlate to Nirvana. Nirvana also is translated as, in some translations, as extinction. The idea is extinction or extinguishing extinguishing extinguishing. So and that's just one of a candle. Yes, right.

It's just one way to translate the sort of temporary or fleeting experience of of all experience going away all duality disappearing. Many experiencing something instead of it's just that's right experience. That's correct. All that's left is the world, as my friend Sam would say. That's right.

All that's left is the world and you are part of it. And this non-dual experience is typically one of these most advanced states that meditators typically can either generate spontaneously through meditation practice or that they can cultivate it intentionally. But more often it happens spontaneously, which in this case it happens spontaneously. And Shin Zenim refers to this as gone with a big G. In contrast to gone with a little G, which so if you, so right now I'm holding up a bottle in front of Dan, he sees it, and then it goes away.

It's gone. So that's gone with a little G, meaning an object that rises into your visual field and then it goes away. So that's gone with a little G, arising and passing of objects in your mental space. Gone with a big G is a cessation experience when all time and space drops away and there's no duality between things as this non-dual experience.

And we had them indicate with a button press when they achieved peak states of clarity. And the way we describe clarity is this sort of phenomenal intensity by which they experience an obvious. Well, how can you press a button if you're not there anymore? That's a good point. People ask that question all the time. In fact, what happens is, well, most of these advanced practitioners can do the button presses without it distracting them very much. But what's good about the button presses is it says that they just reached it.

And so we can look around the button on the front side of it or afterwards. And see there's a plateau in the way your brain blood basically blood flow and dynamics of how blood responds in the brain is how we measure changes in the brain. And it's a very slow response. It takes 12 seconds for the blood changes to occur from every particular state. This is how... So this guy who, who in question, who I believe I've actually met him, Jeff had introduced him between once.

He's a mailman from Canada, if I would call him crazy. But there were two people. Oh, there were two people. Well, the one I know about was a afore a mailman from Canada, if I would call it crazy. But there were two people. Oh, there were two people. Well, the one I know about was a four-mentioned mailman. And so basically, he said, he pressed the button, indicating, yeah, the lights went out. I just had a cessation experience, which is, you know, like talked about

an ancient mystical literature, it's like a really big deal. In your brain scanner. And what do you believe him? Do you look at the data? Is the data support that, what this guy said? Well, we don't, there's no data from, from previous, no, I'm kidding, but it's a,

to know what it was, but what we did see was something unique in those two individuals. And the, so we typically look at the magnitude of, of these bold, this is blood oxygenated level dependent responses. These are just changes in blood flow that indicate, it's an indirect measure of brain activity. And that's what we measure in an FMRI. And what we saw was that there was a change in blood flow

in a particular part of the brain called the frontal polar cortex. And there's a lot of really interesting things about this brain region. And I'll a lot of really interesting things about this brain region. And I'll just say what we observed was that these two individuals more than anyone else showed a dramatic increase in the magnitude of activity in that in that brain region throughout this particular run that they were experiencing in that state.

And so, and overall, that was a brain region that showed activity, while more activity in that brain region, the more formal experience that these meditators had, we saw more activity in that region. So there was already reason to believe that this region was important for maintaining sustained attention and what we refer to as meta-awareness, which is- Aware that you're aware. Awareness of awareness. Yeah, Minja Rinpoche was also here and he talks about this all the time and sometimes he even says awareness of awareness of awareness.

Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time, pure on earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions,

like what is the meaning of life? I can't really help you. But I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs, and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers. We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow Life is short

wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondering app. So, but it strikes me that as I listen to you talk about what an FMRI is. It's like an echo of the thing. Maybe an echo like an echo of the thing, maybe an echo of the echo of the thing, because it's what's happening in the mind and then what's happening in the brain, and then you're looking at blood flow, which is a reflection of the two previous things. So do you think in hindsight we're going to look back at the tools we have today as really

weak in terms of the quest that many that you, I think, and some of your fellow contemplative neuroscientists are on, which is to understand, you know, what is at the deep end of the pool in terms of contemplative practice is enlightenment real, and can we measure that in the brain? Do you think we just don't have the tools to fully do that yet? I think the methods are improving every day. Neuroimaging is only like 40, 50 years old, and only in the last 17 years has meditation been under the lens of neuroimaging. And in fact, there's only 21 neuroimaging studies that have looked at structure changes

and about 80 that looked at functional changes. And of those 80, only about 25 are actually quite good. And of those 25 that are quite good and the 21 that were good in terms of the structural changes, what you find is generally, when you look at across all styles of practice, and you look at a cross section of all meditators, what you find is, I'll give you four brain regions

that change in size and function as a result of meditation. Number one, the frontal polar cortex, this part of the brain right behind your forehead, it's part of the brain that two or three million years ago, our earliest hominid ancestors started to grow that area of our brain in dramatic comparison to in comparison to serenobos or other related hominids. Australopithecus for example was an early hominid that started to use tools and language. This is an area of the brain that grew dramatically in size. There's all this really interesting, the paleo neurologist will look at this part of the brain and they show that there's horizontal spacing distance between look at this part of the brain and they show that there's horizontal

spacing distance between neurons in this part of the brain that's twice, relatively twice the size or space than any other part of our brain and no other hominid ancestor has that kind of dramatic difference. What's so interesting about that is that that means that there's more space for connectivity for the other kind of dramatic difference. And what's so interesting about that is that, that means that there's more space for connectivity for the other parts of the brain. So it means it's highly involved in connecting with other circuits in the brain.

And it's also really important functionally for flexibly switching between internal states of mental activity and processing the external sensory world. So it makes a lot of sense why that part of the brain is not only getting bigger in size as a result of meditation, but it's most active in advanced meditators. And that's across all the studies. There's also part of a larger circuit called the frontal peridal control network, and all the areas of the brain that are part of that circuit, say the insula, which is another part of the brain that changes in size

and function as a result of practice, and the dorsal anterior singlet cortex, and the parts of the inferior parietal lobe, they work together to create this circuit, and you see the changes in size and activity in those areas more than any other regions. Also, you see some activity that decrease in the default mode. And I know you've talked about this a lot and this is a really important finding related to mind wandering or distraction because most of the time when we're distracted, we start moving into this narrative about ourself, in the past,

or reflecting on something negative, typically, or worrying or fantasizing about the future. And the network that's really responsible for generating that activity is called the default mode network. It's called default because it's the most frequently active network when we're not doing anything. It's just default to it, yeah. Yeah, it's default to it, network when we're not doing anything. It's just default to it, yeah. Yeah, it's default to it, exactly. So you see decreases in that network during meditation practice. So those are the general findings across all the studies that are out there.

And the fungal polar cortex just seems to be a very special one that's also preserved in terms of the atrophy that we normally have across our lifespan. Unfortunately, at age 21, we're already losing about a neuron a day, so we're losing a lot of brain space. If you practice meditation, there is a strong correlation now between the practice of meditation and the decreased atrophy. So your brain doesn't shrink as much, especially in these regions, the frontal polar cortex, the insula, and the dorsal anterior singlet cortex.

So you, sorry, were you going to say anything? I was going to say, well, mostly the frontal polar cortex and the insula, specifically, I've been shown. So you just talked, you teed me up nicely for the thing. I've already signaled I wanted to talk to you about, which is you just talked about what studies show and do not show. You wrote a big paper recently that generated a lot of headlines, some of them in my view, infuriating because they seemed

to have no relationship to the paper itself. Anyway, the paper takes a hard, it was written by a bunch of scientists and it takes a hard look at the science around meditation. And I'm gonna sum it up and you'll tell me where I screw up the summary. But essentially there's been an explosion of research into meditation in the last 10, 15 years. 6,000 studies.

Yeah, so a ton. And it's generated a lot of excitement and and some cases hype about what meditation can do for your brain and your body and like fix every problem in your life and help you you know conjugate verbs in Esperanto or whatever it's like whatever. It gets a little crazy. You try to do you guys try to do what I view as an admirable thing, which is a reality check. Here's actually the good science, and here's the bad science, and here's the problems with the science, here's some issues going forward. You just describe what you were trying to say and why then some news outlets ran with

headlines like the science around meditation is bunk and you shouldn't do it. There was one headline in Newsweek, do you remember what it said? Okay. Yes, it said. I didn't want to bring attention to it, but yeah, it did say, after they interviewed me, I tried to give my, you know,

my points that I was very clear on, and you know, that you should read the article and get more detail on, but essentially, their headline was that mindfulness is a meaningless word and the science is shoddy. I wrote back to the writer and was like, I never said anything about that. There's nothing I didn't say that the science was shoddy. The science is still very good, but it's young and we should be cautious in how we interpret

it. And I didn't say that mindfulness was a meaningless word. I said, there's a lot of confusion about how we understand, how we operationalize the word. It's used in many different ways and we often don't contextualize it appropriately. And that we need to be careful how we do that. Sometimes we say, I practice mindfulness meditation. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean you practice focused attention meditation where you just

focus on your breath? Does it mean that you do open awareness practice, which is a little different? Do you do both? And often, you know, we just have to be clear on how we use the word. And so the paper was written by 15 co-authors, all invested in this field. It must have been like hurting cats. Yeah, it was at least a three-year-long process. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

And it was actually started mind and life in Stuart helped bring us together. Where was it published and what was it called? It was published in the perspectives on psychological science journal. And if you go to the Newsweek article, I hope you go directly to the actual article. The article itself is reasonable. I think so. Yeah. And it's supposed to be really a corrective to the hype that you see in the media more

than anywhere else. Because of the 6,000 articles that are out there, there's a lot of claims that are made when they do small sample sizes. Meaning that they didn't study enough people in order to make the claim they're making. Yeah, or there's not a very good control. If you do anything, let's go pick some flowers today and then study what, if you're well-being pre-imposed or how you feel afterwards, you feel better, and you probably will feel better. So, it's a, you describe what you mean by control. So, control is really important when you do

any sort of scientific investigation. So, if you say you wanna study a particular intervention, which is eight weeks, which is typically the amount of time that people spend in a mindfulness- particular intervention, which is eight weeks, which is typically the amount of time that people spend in a mindfulness-based intervention, which now has a sort of standard model that was based on John Kabat-Sins, eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. That's sort of the standard in the field, but it's changing now. But in any case, if you want to study that in eight weeks, what happens over those eight weeks, you want to control it with another eight-week intervention that does, that matches for the

time spent in a group, the charisma and enthusiasm of the teacher, and all those sort of what we call non-specific effects that you get in a mindfulness-based intervention. But if you really want to know what the actual meditation piece is doing then you have to control for everything else And if you don't do that then of course there's gonna be benefits. Can't separate signal from noise if you don't do that That's right. That's right. So there haven't been a lot of studies that do this really well in fact of the 18,000 studies that look at clinical Outcomes there's only 47 that came out to be the most rigorous. Yeah. And of those 47, this was done in a 2014 paper, Madhav Goyal wrote another very landmark paper that was a meta analysis of all those articles out there. They're good and that

use an active control, which means that they control for those non-specific effects. So it doesn't mean the science is shoddy, it means it's young. It's young. So people are just trying to figure this stuff out. And it's actually quite good. I said there was a moderate effect size that shows that mindfulness-based intervention

in comparison to the most rigorous standards can show moderately significant increases in comparison to, say, any sort of active control. So it could be just a social support group, or even in comparison to some other, like, pharmacological interventions, actually improves symptoms of depression and anxiety. Right.

Let me pick up on that, because you mentioned the meta-analysis that we've done a few years ago that looked at the 47 good studies. And people often cite that meta-analysis to say, well, meditation doesn't help because one of the conclusions was actually meditation is roughly as good as antidepressants. But that's huge. That's actually great. Yeah. So you can probably do both.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. That, so you can probably do both. Yeah, right. Exactly. That's a huge effect. That is. Depression, as somebody I speak from experience, is tough. And I don't expect one thing to just fix it. So exercise, meditation, drugs if your doctor recommends it, having good relationships, getting enough sleep, eating well,

you got to attack it from, you gotta surround the football. So this just seems to argue, I wrote a book called 10% Happier, so clearly I'm not in the panacea business. But you can swallow the cool age, like a lot of people who are sort of immersed in this field have, which is really great how you're still skeptical, which is good, it's healthy.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm a parents are scientists. My wife's scientists. None of the people in my life would let me get away with this anyway. I mean, by the way, we're talking about crazy medical journals. I mean, I used to grow up. My parents used to get a, in the mail, I remember they used to get a journal called JAMA, J-A-M-A, which is the big journal, and I always used to take a crayon and write PA before pajama. So I'm used to medical journals around the house. I like, I like, I like, I'm not particularly good at math, so I never became a scientist, but I, I, I, I, constitutionally, I believe in rigor and skepticism. But I, I think that the studies that we've seen thus far about meditation if you look at the good ones seemed to indicate

This is a good tool to have in your good arrow to have in your quiver. It's not gonna fix everything Right, it's good arrow. It's good tool and I think you know a lot of times it gets in mindfulness-based interventions Start is attempted to use that to you know to really confront really difficult Disease states even like multiple sclerosis or epilepsy. And it's not gonna cure those types of diseases, but what it does do is you're starting to see a lot of changes in the body and the mind to help improve recovery or to improve coping.

And we know that these types of emotional responses to disease can be profoundly impacting the progression of disease. So for example, there's a lot of data showing it changes on how inflammatory genes are expressed. I think Richie and Dan talked about this as well. That's huge news because inflammation is a big part of disease progression. And if you can actually, through just mental training, affect how inflammation decreases across the body, then what you're saying is that the mind itself has the capacity to slow down the progression of disease through a very specific mechanism

that relates to how the body attacks any sort of disease state. Incredible. Yeah, that is incredible. And also intuitive. And intuitive. So when people say it's a mindful and skip for sleep, for example, the jury's mix or the data's mixed because there's different types of sleep problems. And I'll just say really quickly that for insomnia, there's different aspects of insomnia. So sleep onset insomnia, which is having difficulty fall asleep, fall sleep, and sleep maintenance insomnia is the difficulty in which you stay asleep. And meditation or

mindfulness-based interventions show a pretty decent effect size for helping promote the sleep onset or improve sleep onset insomnia. So people who are in their heads and ruminating when they're lying in their bed, it's good for them. But when it starts to, when you sleep maintenance insomnia, it may not be helpful at all. In fact, the more you meditate, the less efficient your brain gets at staying asleep. I can tell you why that is. The Buddha, if you translate the word Buddha, just means awake.

You know, the point is not to sleep. The point is to be awake. And you see this in retreat settings that people will not say. You never sleep. Right, right. There's a lot of sleep inefficiency. You wake up a lot.

Well, but is it inefficiency or is it just you need to let your suffering less and you need less sleep? And that's Judbrough or another assigned to his friend of yours. That's his theory. You're suffering less. You don't need as much sleep. That's right.

We just, we refer to as this metric of measurement in sleep as efficiency. It's just how, how well you stay in these stages and progress through stage one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And if you have wakenings, we call that sleep inefficiency. But that's just a metric by which we measure how much you're sleeping at night. Doesn't mean that it's that you're not rested or that it's, it's, you're decreasing the benefits of sleep. We don't know that.

I can see that you want to take a drink of water. And your timing is good because I have a lot to say in order to set up this next question So you were very generously and graciously a part of this Gonzo cross country meditation tour that Jeff Warren and the aforementioned Jeff Warren and I did Almost a year ago and it was in January of 2017 and We got this big orange bus and drove across the country

and met people who are meditators or want to be meditators and talk to them about the practice and the hurdles to getting over the practice and that is all resulted in this new book. It has also resulted in a new course on the 10% happier app because we went and shot with you at Vanderbilt and went into your lab and when we put a very nice woman in a brain scanner and had her meditate with her brain and an MRI, I couldn't get in because I was too claustrophobic. I guess that video is going to be on the app too. So just tell us about this course. Well, the course is very exciting. I really had a great time doing it and what's so unique about it is that it embeds

some of the science into the guided practice. And I think that's a very unique way to experience meditation because sometimes, some people say, well, why do we need the science anyway? Why not just do the practice and feel like if you benefit from it, then do it. If you don't feel like you don't benefit, then I feel like you don't benefit, don't do it. Science has been shown now to really help provide motivation for people. Absolutely, for me.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a front of our culture. You can say science supports. Yes, it's a good evidence to supporting this practice. You know, it's helpful for many, especially Westerners, to do something. And so I try to embed what we know and what we don't know about meditation and the effects of it on brain and body and mind and into guided practices. So we spent some time highlighting some of the video footage that we captured while Dan and crew were at Vanderbilt. For example, when we put our director Linda Manning into the scanner, she's an advanced practitioner, in fact.

And we were able to just look in real time at what her brain was doing when we asked her to meditate for three minute blocks and then move into a discursive mind-wondering state and then meditate again. And what you saw dramatically was exactly what we predicted and what we saw in our advanced meditators, but she's then was the same sort of frontal polar cortex and this frontal parietal control network, this higher order, attentional network active during meditation and the default mode network kind of regions were more active during the mind-wattering state. And one unique finding was that there was just through awareness

is what we also saw with our advanced meditators the decrease in activation in the limbic regions, which is very unique. That's actually that's data that hasn't been published yet, but it was exciting because we were jumping up and down because it's like, oh look, we can see decreases in activity in sort of baseline limbic activity. Why is the limbic area, the limbic system important? So this is an area that you typically see responsivity, as I mentioned earlier, during an emotional stimulus. And then if you see activation there

and you actively try to regulate your emotions through some sort of strategy, like suppression or avoidance even, but some sort of strategy, some cognitive strategy. It usually decreases activity in the amygdala and hippocampus and the associated regions. These are all in parts of the medial temporal lobe, and those structures are just typically important for generating memories and emotions. And so to see that those areas just decrease their baseline just from paying attention, that was very unique. And so what we're basically seeing is a new

way of regulating emotion without doing anything, just by being aware, and by being aware you're actually dropping the threshold of activity in these limbic areas. That's very unique. Just to talk about how this would work in one's mind. I'll see if I can say it and you just tell me where I scroll as we're establishing as a habit here, as a pattern here. But essentially if anger arises, anger's a big one for me.

I get a lot of anger. Instead of fighting it or acting on it, just investigate it and let it pass. You see, actually, it will pass. It may come back a nanosecond later, but each burst will come and go. And if you just allow it to come and go, then the brain is not activating the same way. Yeah, and what we see is that at the baseline, if you're baseline for activity in those motion generative areas are actually decreasing, then it's going to be harder for it to go higher and actually lead to any sort of stress response.

Because you're not feeding it with the compulsive neurotic. That's right. Yes. But it has further to go. And in fact, what you see even in these advanced meditators is they respond even more in more magnitude or greater power to an emotional stimulus like people crying or baby screaming or something negative.

And the unique part is that they recover faster than meditators do. And so they have a very steep curve and how they respond to emotion. And this is what we refer to as equanimity. And part of the mechanisms by which we think meditation work is through this way of regulating emotion. So there's, it's a very unique way. And most people who study emotion regulation don't talk about awareness and awareness alone without

judgment as a form of regulation. But that's exactly what we're seeing. You're just observing. And eventually, through observing, the anger will come up and then it will reside. It will just come back down. This isn't passivity. No. It's not in difference either.

It's experiencing emotion fully, really, but allowing yourself to recover rapidly through what we would consider equanimity. And with clarity, you're approaching the emotion rather than avoiding it, which most people do with negative emotions. So you go into all of this in the course. Yeah, we do talk about this, yeah.

And so the way the course works, and I don't know if listeners have taken courses on the app before, but you get a one, two, three-minute video clip that, you know, will see me and Jeff and Dave horseing around in the lab. And it's all pretty cool stuff. And then that will stop and you'll get, it will slide directly into a guided audio meditation from you, Dave. And that's in every day you take a class where you can just binge it all at once. That's the way it works. Is that how it works in this course?

Because I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, we're in the weird position of having done a course on an app that bears my brand, but I haven't seen it and you have. Yeah, actually, I didn't see the video, I saw the video clip separately, but when we recorded them, there's seven different meditations, and they all have some element of science in them as it relates to the video clips. So I talk about that one that I just talked that I referred to.

We talk about, so one of the mechanisms, we wrote a paper a while ago in our Frontiers and Human Neuroscience Journal about the mechanisms by which mind from this works. And we listed six different mechanisms, attention regulation, so learning stability and control. And motion regulation is the second one, learning equanimity and inhibitory control. And I should just unpack that a little bit. Those are two mechanisms. So attention regulation, stability, stability and control. So how you sustain attention and how well you can basically stay on an object and gauge on that object and then be able to disengage from that object. Objects, meaning the thing you're paying attention to.

Exactly. So if it's the breath, how quickly can you disengage from that object and pay attention to something new, maybe something else that's relevant to you, anything. And that's really what you see a problem in attention regulation is when people get stuck on paying attention to something, a word comes up and then they get stuck on it and they actually miss the other things that are coming up around them that's maybe relevant to them. This is what we call the attentional blink when you just miss something because you're so focused on whatever you're paying attention to. And you see, meditators are better at able to engage and disengage very quickly.

So this has a lot to do with intention regulation. Emotion regulation, we talked a little bit about now, being able to generate equanimity, to come back and recover from an emotion quickly, and to inhibit distraction from arising, or from moving, or letting distraction take you away from that object of focus. Then the third one, I actually, the first one was intention and motivation.

So I did that of order, but intention and motivation is another mechanism by which you move from an effort full to an effortless type of practice, meaning that as you continue practice, it becomes more automatic. And you're really just retraining your brain to be more adaptive in how you experience the world. And that actually involves another mechanism, the fourth mechanism, which would be extinction and reconsolidation. So you're actually extinguishing, here's the extinguishing of the Irvana word,

but in this case, it's used as extinguishing a bad habit, a bad mental habit, and changing that with a more adaptive mental habit. And that becomes more automatic. So extinction and reconsolidation is that fourth mechanism. The fifth one refers to prosociality. So it also relates to your intention and motivation. When you first start practicing, you may be like, I just want to decrease my stress in my life, or I want to be able to pay attention better and be less distracted. So that's very self-focused,

but what happens over time is that we find that your motivation shifts to be other focused. Yeah, I've noticed it's very frustrating Right, I just wanted to decrease stress and now I care about other people Yeah, I know it's annoying right and then you actually what you do you find yourself in other people's heads almost The empathic skill develops the theory of mine. How do you what are other people thinking? For some people that actually almost too sensitive and they should turn that empathic radar down because they start thinking about what other people are thinking, and then you realize that you're just sensitive to other people.

But that is a skill that is changing over time. And so you're more altruistic in your motives, so you want to help people more and that actually benefits you. And the last one is sensory clarity. So those are the six mechanisms by which we think meditation functions. And that sensory clarity really first to a body more embodied type of approach to experiencing the world.

And that just means, rather than always anticipating or expecting how things should be in the world, you're focusing more on sensation. And what we refer to as a bottom up way of experiencing the world. you're focusing more on sensation. And what we refer to as a bottom-up way of experiencing the world. You're not stuck in your head. You're not stuck in your head. Exactly. You're more about just what is what your body telling you?

Yeah. And that's a huge part of learning how to experience the world in a more authentic way. That's a good place to leave it. Because just listing those six highly desirable attributes is a really inspirational note. Yeah, for sure. I agree. It's. So for people who want to learn more about you, obviously they can check out the new course on the app. And even if you're not a member of our app community, you can, if you download the app, you can see we usually, I'm sure we'll do that in this case, teaser clips.

So there's ways to get access to it, if not the whole thing. But beyond that, how, if people want to learn more about you, what can they do? You can go to contemplativeneuralsciences.com. That's a good place to find me and our lab. And there's a lot of resources there for all the other centers around the country, at least, that do this kind of work. You can go to the Mind and Life Institute. They also have great resources.

But yeah, contemplative neuroscience.com is a good place. Thank you for doing this. Really appreciate it. I promise we won't delete the recording of this. Oh, good, yeah. Well, there's so much more we can talk about. I mean, there's so much data out there that's fascinating, but we'll continue with these dialogues.

Absolutely. When this podcast is not going anywhere. Thank you, buddy. Thank you so much, Dan. Okay, so that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. Please take a minute to leave us a rating and a review. And if you want to suggest topics or guests for the show,

just hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Special thanks to Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan and the rest of the team here at ABC who helped make this thing possible and remember we're now on Tune-in. You can hear our new episodes there five days early on Fridays from the end of this year. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week. Hey, hey, prime members. You'll talk to you next week. podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.