Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 98: Daniel Goleman, Dr. Richard Davidson, 'Altered Traits' (Bonus!)

Episode Date: September 8, 2017

Dan Goleman and Richie Davidson, both titans in their respective fields and best-selling authors, have co-written a new book out now entitled, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body." Goleman, a renowned psychologist and science journalist, and Davidson, a prominent neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, talk about their cutting-edge research in this new book, comparing brain activity of "Olympic level" meditators (such as monks) to meditation beginners and how mindfulness can be restorative for brain health. 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.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Not to brag what we've had lots of big shots on this podcast. Today though, in this bonus podcast,

we've got two big shots. Danny Goldman or Daniel Goldman, as he's known professionally, wrote a huge book called Emotional Intelligence. Many years ago, he's a renowned science journalist and has some experience as a scientist as well and as a long time meditator. He has a new book along with a co-author by the name of Richard Davidson. He goes by Richie Davidson. The two are old, old friends. Richie is one of, if not the premier neuroscientist who looks at what meditation does to the brain. And these two have been friends, as you'll hear, and they have a very interesting sort of joint story about how they both got interested in in

meditation and science and the intersection of two. And in this book, what they do is really take a kind of dry, I'd clear I'd look at the big body of research that's been generated in recent years as it pertains to meditation. And they kind of, they try to tell you what's quality science and what's not, and they even take a hard look at some of the science that Richie himself has done. And they also, what they really do that's fascinating

is they sort it, they tell you what can you expect as a beginner, a meditator, what kind of results can you expect? Same thing for intermediate, and where things get really interesting is what happens when you start looking at what they call Olympic level meditators. The book is called Altered Traits and the authors again, Richie Davidson and Danny Goldman and here they are. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. Good to see you both. Great to be here. Pleasure to be here, Dan. and happy your podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Go to see you both. Great to be here. Pleasure to be here, Dan. So, I want to walk through the book, but let's... And you guys have both been on the show before, so people, if they go, they should go back

and listen to those interviews to get more of a sense of your brilliance and backstory. But let's do a little backstory here, because I want to know how you met and how this whole thing got started So Danny I'll start with you. Okay, so I'm a graduate student at Harvard and you were a graduate school I was and this is back in 1968 ancient history It's Christmas. I'm writing a term paper on suicide. I'm feeling pretty depressed

woman knocks on my door, a very attractive woman turns out, and says, I've just come from Kathmandu. I met a friend of yours there, and he gave me a letter that he wanted me to deliver to you. So I say, oh, come in and have some tea. And I end up bringing her to New Hampshire, where is the next place he wants to go. And there is a guy all in white with these fantastic Hindu gods and goddesses papering a wall of the room he's sitting in. And he doesn't say anything when we walked in.

It was very creepy for me. Then after a while he speaks and it turns out he's Prondas. Prondas, I knew it was Richard Albert. He had been in the program I was then in at Harvard and had been fired because he and Larry were going around giving people advice to do psychedelics. Larry. Tim Larry.

Yes. Tim Larry and Richard out. Plugged in tune out with that guy. tune in. Turn on. What a actor. Drop out. Yeah.

Got you. So, Vrondas had been in India and had become the student of an old yogi who gave him the name Rondas and showed him that there are other ways to change your experience of the world and that maybe these last longer than a trip. And I got very interested in that and managed to get a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to go to India, where I met his teacher, named Corleba, who was quite amazing to me. He was very present, very loving, kind of an unconditional love you felt from him. And you also felt that for the people you're with, that was the real miracle, was that it

was contagious. And I met a few other people like that, rare, but still present in India, came back to Harvard and said, hey, guess what? There's an upside to the human potential, not just psychopathology. I was in clinical psych. It was like, you know, bring us somebody and we'll tell you what's wrong with them. And this was how right you could be. And they were really disinterested except for my friend Richie, who was a graduate student then. So, my very first day as a graduate student at Harvard, I attended my first class in psychophysiology.

And this was in, I started in 1972, this was before the days of the internet. And I knew that there was this guy named Dan Goldman at Harvard because he had published these really obscure papers in a journal which is not one of your premier journals, but one that nevertheless contained some wonderful information. And he'd written these papers on meditation. I knew that he was there. And I went into this class, and then this guy sits down next to me,

and I turned to him and I said, you're a dang old man. Now, it's not because I had some unusual psychic abilities, then had just come back from India, and he looked like he had just come back from India. I had one pair of pants. They were bright purple pajamas. They're the quarter-way pajamas. By the way, those pants figure into the story that Mark Epstein, Dr. Mark Epstein, told, I believe, on this podcast where he was one of your students. Dr. Mark Epstein, just for those

who don't know, you you should know is this amazing writer We talked about the overlap between Buddhism and psychotherapy and and happens in the way of karma I guess to have been a student in a class where you were the TA or something like that and he fell in love with your pants because They were unusual. Yeah, they were very baggy. They're pajamas. That's how they make them in India I owned one pair I warm every day like the bottom of a shallower commies kind of thing Like you know, you know how the a lot of folks in India and Pakistan were the was called a shallower commies with the long

draping shirt and and baggy pants. That's what you're like One size fits all got you So that that was my first encounter with Dan and then that night He offered to drive me back to my place which was just a few blocks away and Normally I'd walk but I said of course I'd love to go with you And so we went he took me into his vehicle which was a old UW old VW microbus with pictures plastered from floor to ceiling of holy people, yogis. And it just kind of blew my mind to see this.

And that was my first encounter with Dan. And we talked for several hours that night, and that was in September of 1972, and our lives have been linked in really quite extraordinary ways ever since then. And the writing of this book is, in many ways, a celebration of this amazing arc that we have, I think, both been so grateful to be part of. Let me say that the title, Alter Traits, was really harking back to conversations we had in those days where we were pondering the fact that there seemed to be lasting qualities that were the effect and maybe the goal of meditation practice and that people were pretty enamored of altered states in those days, but we thought

there was something more to look at. And that is how does this change you in a way that you have, you know, that characterizes you day to day, not just when you're sitting on your cushion? What spills over that lasts? Those are the answer traits. So we called the book, Alter Trace. And then in 1974 or two years after I started graduate school, I went to India and Sri Lanka for the first time.

And Dan was living that summer in Sri Lanka. Susan, who was not my wife then, but is now my wife, was with me. We went and lived with Dan and his family in Sri Lanka. When we were in Sri Lanka, writing about and practicing meditation, we wrote this article which had a sentence in it that we included in the publication and only many years later really did we appreciate its full significance. And the sentence is, the after is the before for the next during. Better unpack that, being after is the before for the next during. And so what that means is that the quality of being that you are displaying after a

period of practice represents your new baseline, which is the before and the during is during the actual practice. And so this is really the process by which a trait becomes established and enduring. When there are a repetitive sequence of practices where the baseline state becomes transformed. So if I, so let me just see if I can put that into every day terms. So if I'm practicing 15 minutes of meditation a day, I gradually get more and more self-aware, let's say, as a way.

But over time through this process you're describing, that self-awareness becomes more of an established trait as opposed to a passing state that I might be able to access some of the time. Exactly, exactly. And so what we're really interested in in these practices is not the buzz or experience that we have when we're sitting on the cushion or sitting in the chair, but it's the impact on everyday life. It's how the every nook and cranny of everyday life is impacted. And that is really what this notion of Walter Traits is about.

There was one piece of science that came along that helped us enormously. When we first had this idea back in Cambridge and those days, we didn't know how it could happen. Then slowly the idea of neuroplasticity was established, which means that the more you practice or exercise a neural circuitry the stronger it becomes, the more connected it becomes. This is for me, neuroplasticity is for me the heart of what got me interested in meditation and what fuels my ongoing, what I like to call evangelism, because basically what it's saying is that the brain and the mind can change, that we are not stuck with factory settings

when it comes to compassion, self-awareness, patience, focus, that actually these are skills that can be trained. That is what I always thought meditation was for people who drive a micro bus and have pictures of holy men, pasted on the inside and wear purple pants. I was not going to meditate at 1972 version of Danny Goldman would have confirmed all of my anti-meditation sentiment. But neuroplasticity does it for me because that is a game-changing life-changing proposition. Right, absolutely. And that was really the critical scientific foundation

and the insight about the enduring change really occurred before we had a mechanism that we can hang it on. And neuroscience was not a developed field at the time that we first started. It wasn't until the mid-1970s that the first neuroscience meeting for the society for neuroscience was actually held. And so it really took quite a bit of time for the facts of neuroplasticity to be established. And that really, I think, is the single most important scientific development that has enabled this work to go forward. There are others, but that clearly is the most important. So before that, the received doggy Moe was that after a certain age, saying you're

mid-20s, your brain is what it is and you can't change it. And it disintegrates slowly. You lose brain cells. Right. Yeah. And that's kind of happening anyway, isn't it? Well, that part was right. It turns out that they didn't know that you make 10,000 new neurons every day.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And those are important distinctions. We were basically taught as students that the brain is different from other organs in the body because the dogma was at that time that it does not generate new cells. And so, unlike your skin, for example, where if you injure it, it will heal and it heals because new cells are formed, we were instructed that the brain is different, but we now know that that's simply not true. And there's incontrovertible evidence that new brain cells are generated every day of

our lives, and they play an important role in higher mental functions. And we believe that meditation is one strategy for promoting neuroplasticity. But it's important to say also that neuroplasticity in and of itself is not necessarily good or bad. If you stimulate neuroplasticity and you are in a toxic environment, for example, or your mind is filled with unwholesome thoughts... What if you're binge watching a series on your computer? Well, it depends what the series is depicting, but that's a real issue.

And so, one of the interesting things about meditation practice is it may do two things. It may both stimulate neuroplasticity and also fill your mind with more wholesome thoughts that will enable more positive characters. So that's like a self-reinforcing cycle, even? Exactly. But I would say that the data that we review in alter traits demonstrates very clearly that meditation is a kind of mental fitness exercise that moves that neuroplasticity in the better direction.

Well, so you brought up the book. Just to spell out the conceit of the book. What were you trying to do in this book? Why write it? Why now? Well, initially, when we did our dissertations at Harvard, despite the resistance to it, there were like two peer-review articles that we could cite on meditation in the entire literature, one from India, one from Japan.

Now there are more than 6,000 peer-review articles. There are more than 1,000 a year. It's a huge explosion of interest scientifically. When we use the standards of an A-level journal top most rigorous review. You sift down to about 1% of those 6,000 are actually good. I have to say, which of our own dissertation research would not make the cut. But that's because methods have evolved. The brain imaging is much more precise.

There wasn't even brain imaging. Hadn't even thought of when we were doing it. So the state of the art has moved on. And it's, it was time to write the book because there's a critical mass of A interest, B hype. A lot of the bad studies are cited as reasons you should meditate, but actually they're bad studies. They're good studies, you could cite. We wanted to show that there is now evidence meditation, trains your attention, helps your stress handling stress.

It helps in a number of ways that have been shown by rigorous studies. I think it's an invitation for people to try it and also encouragement to keep going because the more you do, the better it gets. I really like the book and I just want to see if I can restate the point just and you'll correct me if I'm wrong. But it seems the point was of the book is to sort the wheat from the chaff, you know, just to show there's a lot of science that maybe isn't as strong as it should be when we're going to talk about why people should

meditate. But also, you systematically go through and look at what are the effects of meditation on beginners, people who've been sort of doing it for a while, but not necessarily are our monks, and then finally finally at the monk level, what you call the Olympic level, people who have done north of 10,000 hours of meditation. Am I restating the sort of point of the book? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

There's a carlery to this, which is also about what meditation is not. And so it's not about fixing things, it's not about clearing your mind, it's not about getting rid of thoughts. Those are popular misconceptions about what meditation is. And so a carlary of doing this is to help readers appreciate what meditation may be useful for, but also what it really is not designed to do. I want to get into these three areas that you look at, but let me ask you, Richie, as the hands-on scientists in the room, why has there been so much subpar science done on meditation? And what's the damage?

I think that there are, that there's really a couple of reasons. One is that there is a positive funding in this area. And there are lots of people who I think would be doing much better work if they're more funding available. It's really costly to do very well-designed studies with large sample sizes and the appropriate number of control groups. It's not for the faint-hearted and it's not cheap. So I think that's one reason. The second reason is that in any field, at the very beginning, it's very early on. It's really at a kind of immature stage and there are reasons to try things even if we know that those studies

are subpar. One of the things we talk about in the book is a study that we did in my lab that actually is according to the statistics out there on publications. It's my most cited scientific paper of any paper I've done. I've published over 300 papers This is the most cited and honestly it's a I would give it maybe a B minus in terms of the quality of the science And it wasn't published. I mean it was published in a in a kind of B-level journal and There are many deficiencies, and it just happened to be extremely well-sighted because it was the very first randomized control trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction that was published.

Let's just explain what both of those terms mean. Mindfulness-based stress reduction invented by this goes back to the how intertwining and how sort of weird this situation is, but is invented by a friend of yours, John Kabatzen, who also dates back to Boston in the 60s. He went to MIT, where his molecular biologist and went on to design this thing called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which is derived from Buddhism, but takes away a lot of the metaphysical claims

and religious lingo and teaches meditation in a very secular environment. He doesn't like the word secular, but I'm using it anyway. And so it created this eight-week protocol that allowed for nice clean replication of the teaching of meditation, which had then allowed people like you to the study, what happens when people take this eight-week course. Now, you said randomized control trial? Yes. Tell me what that means.

So what we mean by that is that we took a large group of people and we told them that they, by signing up, would be participating in a research project where they would be randomly assigned where one group would get mindfulness-based stress reduction immediately and another group would have to wait six months before they would get it. And so that's what we call a wait list design. And we truly randomize people in this way. And so they knew that they can get it immediately, or they would have to wait six months. And part of the signing up was that if they were assigned to the wait list control group, they really couldn't

do any meditation for this first six month period, but we then really did give them the MBS or course when they were finished with that six month period. But that's not good enough by the standards you imposed in this book. Well, then Richie went another step and a later study. I think with Johnny's cooperation, he designed, he should use a term. You should tell a story. Oh, you tell a story. Well, it didn't go far enough and it didn't go far enough because one of the things that

is so clear when you just even think about it, you don't have to be a scientist to appreciate this, is that when you take a course in mindfulness-based stress reduction, which, as you said, Dan is an eight-week program where you come for one class a week for eight weeks, you're together with a group of people, with an instructor who really believes in the value of what she or he is teaching. And there's a lot of group cohesion and sharing and positive incentives to participate. And that in and of itself is very beneficial

without any practice. And so what we did is we spent a lot of time and a lot of money creating this Kaka Mami program that we call the Health Enhancement Program. And it turns out not to be so Kaka Mami, but it has every element of MBSR except mindfulness. It has the same group process. It's focused on activities which genuinely we believe are health promoting and well-being promoting. It includes some light physical activity, nutritional information, relaxation, but it has no mindfulness component whatsoever. The other thing we match, though, is the enthusiasm of the instructors.

So that the folks who are teaching the health and hands-in-programmed believed Genuinely believed that it was going to be as effective in promoting well-being as the MBSR instructors believe that MBSR would be. So then you can make a real comparison. You're looking at the brains of the people who took these two courses and the differences there tell you so. Well that's right and also one of the things we found is that on every self-report measure on anxiety, on depression, on well-being that we that have typically been used in studies of mindfulness-based stress reduction, the folks who took our health enhancement program, which had zero mindfulness, did exactly as well, no statistical difference whatsoever, and they both showed significant improvements. It raises lots of questions about all these other studies we've been citing that don't

do what you did in terms of... Exactly, exactly, but we did find some differences between them, but they were much more specific and refined than what you would be led to believe from looking at the early studies, including our study, which used an inadequate control group. So what is the, Danny, what is the, because there's the suboptimal science out there, why is that a problem? It's a problem because people are hyping meditation based on suboptimal science. They're saying, look, there's this fabulous study done by Richard Davidson at the University

of Wisconsin. It's his most cited study. By the way, I wrote a book called Destructive Emotions. It was one of the first to praise the study and publicize it. And you ignore the fact that there's no, you know, that it's not really a randomized control, because there's no active control group like HEPP, the Health Enhancement Program. And I think that this sets up mindfulness or meditation for a counter movement which says, hey, this is all hype. Look at the research. Let's take a hard

look at it. It's not that good. So one of the reasons to look at the rock solid research is to contrast it. So for example, when take home from the study Richie did comparing the active control health enhancement with MBSR, is that if you want to look for the real differences, don't ask for self-reports, look at physiological measures, look at the brain measures, look at the measure of how much cortisol is in the saliva and the... Things people can't control. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. ...can't lie to you about, or they can't lie to themselves about, whatever it is. You're the trying to look good, you know? So speaking now as an evangelist, if we believe, and I think everybody in this room does believe that mental exercise, mindfulness, meditation can and should be one of the next big public health revolutions, the science needs to be rock solid. We go out and make the case for this.

We need to be able to point to science that is bulletproof You got it. And so what this book does is say here's the stuff you can point to a confidence Absolutely, and I do think that it's appropriate to think about it in that kind of public health need these are Practices which we think can contribute to the collective public health and it's a kind of urgent public health need

at this point in time. And the previous surgeon general, who was relieved of his duties on April 17th of this year, Vivek Murty, the surgeon general of the United States, talked about well-being as an urgent public health need and talked about the fact that meditation may be very helpful in this regard. But we need to be honest about what it can do and what it can't do. And one of the important points is that meditation was not originally developed to cure illnesses.

And so there's been a lot of hype about its role in curing this illness and that illness. And it may be very important as an adjunct in helping us change our relationship to symptoms and it could be very useful in that way. But it's to think of it as a primary therapeutic agent to cure illness is probably misguided. On the other hand, if you have a chronic disease like arthritis, it's very painful every

day. Your meds don't help anymore. Medicine doesn't know what to do. Turns out MBSR, which helps you change your relationship to the experience of the pain, helps you live a better quality of day. So there's a there there. You just need to know where exactly. Exactly. Well, so let's go through these three kind of levels that you examine in the

book. You start with regular folks and what we can get out of meditation. So can you just, I'll start with you and then read you away. And what are the headlines? Well, so for beginners that say you've never done it before, you're going to try it. One of the things that surprised us is that if you do what's called a kindness meditation, sometimes compassion, loving kindness, those terms are used, where you simply wish yourself well, people you love well, people you don't know, ever expanding circle, you know, that they'd be happy, healthy, whatever, it turns out that that immediately benefits you, people seem to be happier, but also makes you more likely to notice and help people who need your help, makes you

more altruistic, makes you more generous. So that's one of the findings right at the beginning and surprisingly quickly. If I can just add one element, another really important finding with that kind of meditation is that it reduces implicit bias. An implicit bias is a kind of non-conscious bias. So we can say on a questionnaire, for example, that we're not biased against a certain out group, but certain aspects of our behavior may really undermine that report that we might give. Huge issue.

And we've talked about, on this podcast, we've talked about the impact, potential impact of meditation on bias and prejudice in the society. And we will continue to do so because that's just a huge issue. It's such a hopeful avenue for this practice and at a time in this society where it's too much bias. And there's really good evidence to suggest that it doesn't take much, just a couple of months of meditation using this kind of loving kindness

and compassion practice to shift hardcore objective measures of implicit bias. However, this brings up another point, which is the kind of meditation you do determines what benefits you get. So for example, mindfulness, which doesn't necessarily include this loving kind as practice, where you just watch your breath, for example,

or you notice what's happening in the passing emotions and thoughts in your mind. It turns out that one of the things you do as part of that is notice when you're mind wanders and bring it back. The mind wanders on average 50% of the time. One of the things people say at the get-go of meditation often is, oh my God, I can't do this because my mind wanders all the time.

We're wrong. You're just noticing how often it does that. So every time you bring it back, you are creating the ability or strengthening the ability to concentrate and focus. And that's another variety of benefits at the beginning is intentional. So one study that you see Santa Barbara where they do very good research on this show. For example, that mind-wandering lesson that people became better focused, they also found it helped a lot with what's called working memory. Working memory is a technical term for what you're hearing or experiencing right now.

Are you going to remember it later so you can draw on it? For students, this is called learning. And actually, these were college students. They did it with their scores on the graduate school. Endurance exam was 16% higher than a group that didn't do this, which means, hey, they learned and had a practical payoff. So the kindness, the attention, another big benefit is how you handle stress.

People who just beginners in meditation become a little more relaxed with stressful situations and aren't triggered so easily, which just makes you, I think, have a much more pleasant life. Also improves the lives of the people who happen to come into your world. Not to mention. Anyone who knows you.

Yeah, another element of stress reactivity is this quality of recovery from adversity. And we think about that in terms of resilience, and we can define resilience as the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. And there is some evidence to suggest that simple mindfulness practices can help you recover more quickly. And we can actually measure that, track that in the brain and in the body. And the ability to recover quickly is so important

to paraphrase the bumper sticker, stuff happens. And we can't buffer ourselves from it, but what we can do is change our relationship to it so that we experience it, but then we can recover more quickly. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newer series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles.

After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how RuPaul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. What's the mechanism for the boosting of resilience? Is it that in meditation you close your eyes, you sit and watch your breath, and then when you get lost, you start again. In that moment that you notice you've gotten lost and you let it go, you let that storyline

go and you don't hopefully don't beat yourself up too much and you go back to your breath and you do this, add in finitum. Is that the process by which one boosts resilience? It's I think it's a key contributor and you know we are all born with this mass of real estate in the front of our brains that we call the prefrontal cortex. And the prefrontal cortex is the most advanced evolutionarily of our cerebral cortex, the highest part of our brain. And it confers all kinds of amazing abilities.

And most particularly particularly it allows us to reflect on the future and also to contemplate the past. And we could do mental time travel because of the prefrontal cortex, which clearly confers all kinds of benefit, but what it also does, it can, is it can ensnare us. It takes us out of the present moment. And so we can be ruminating about something that happened in the past and we can be worrying about something that may happen in the future, all of which is taking us out of the present moment and contributing, if you will, a second arrow of pain or suffering, which will add to whatever the actual adversity might be, and double it or triple it as a consequence of anticipating and then ruminating.

There's a very well-known biologist that Stanford Robert Sapolsky wrote a wonderful book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And the reason why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers is because they have a puny prefrontal cortex. They can't do the mental time travel that we could do. They do get eaten by lions a lot though. They do. Right, so they're downsides. That's a little upsetting, yes. But what he means by time travel is thinking about what happened in the past. Oh, that thing they said to me, that email I got that was so upsetting. But it's two in the morning and that was two weeks ago and you're still thinking about

it. Or thinking in the future about, oh my God, how am I going to handle that or what's going to happen. Now the upside of course is we can plan, we can envision what possibilities. That's the positive thing. On the other hand, it's the amygdala, that's the trigger point for the fight or flight. Are free tools? Talk about the amygdala, where is that as a part of brain?

It's in the midbrain, kind of between the ears, would you say? The temporal lobes are on each side of the head, and they fold in, and the medial portion in the anterior, close to the anterior. Like the medial anterior. That's a sweet language. So the temporal lobes are on the side of the... They can do it in my job for me.

He helps me a lot. He's a question. So this is a part of the brain that then folds into the middle and in the middle portion inside, you cannot see it from the surface of the brain. It's in the interior. And there's a little structure from the surface of the brain. It's in the interior. And there's a little structure on each side of the brain, which each of us has two amygdala, and it's about the size of a thumbnail in a human brain. It confers, it confers threat. It's part of the threat response, but it also plays a more general role

in what we can think of as labeling things that are important, that are emotionally important. It's a salience detector. And it also is the part of the brain which will hijack us when emotional stuff happens, the amygdala gets triggered. And when the amygdala gets triggered, it can also recruit many other parts of the brain because of its connectivity.

And that can wreak havoc on our ongoing, whatever our ongoing activity might be. For example, it paralyzes the prefrontal cortex when it gets really high-gend. And it takes over and drives us memory hierarchies shift. So what's salient or easiest to remember is what is relevant to the situation at hand. It gets a very small portion of the incoming sensory signal, so it can make mistakes. It has a hair trigger decision rule. I'd rather be safe than sorry.

There's a rustle in the bushes. We better run, even if it's not a lion. This is a holdover from our ancient past. But it works today. The problem is it's reacting to a complex symbolic reality. So it can make a lot of mistakes. You can get hijacked for all kinds of reasons that you regret. And then you'll do something that you regret later.

So it's probably never happened to you or your listeners. It's not that uncommon. So anyway, the amygdala is what recovers, would you say? The prefrontal cortex has circuitry, as I understand it, that can calm down the amygdala or help a calm down, or at least say no, I'm not going to do what you want me to do. And it's this connection between specific regions of the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala which actually gets strengthened with certain kinds of meditation practice, which kind?

Simple mindfulness will strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. So the first group you looked at was beginners. What was the next group they looked at? Sort of mid-range people, people of day jobs, but still meditate a lot. So this would be me. So I'm like eight years in, I do a couple hours a day, I do a retreat once in a while. Yeah, you probably have somewhere

between five and 10,000 hours of practice already. No. Hand it up, you'd be surprised. Okay. At least 5,000. Maybe, I don't know. I've never, I've never had it up, but yes, definitely not nothing.

Yeah, so that's our second group. Okay. So I'm particularly interested in this one. And there are some really interesting findings with this group. This is where you begin to see real trade effects. That is a trade effect. Trade effects. And what we mean by a trade effect is where we can test a certain quality when you're not meditating.

And we can compare a group of people like yourself who've done, say, 5,000 hours of practice to a group who are matched on all kinds of sociodemographic characteristics, but have not done any meditation. And there we begin to see differences in the so-called baseline state when you're not actually meditating and this implies that these are qualities which are beginning to infiltrate into everyday life. What are those qualities? So let me give you one example. One has to do with attention and specifically a phenomenon that we know of as the attentional blink, which

is really all about noticing very small changes in the environment, particularly when you're looking at things that are changing very rapidly. So if you are, for the listener, it would be helpful to know, what's a typical everyday situation like that? A typical everyday situation is two people sitting down and having a conversation, particularly if they are spouses in a relationship, if you look at a videotape of a married couple, for example, interacting

where they're talking about activities that happen during a typical day, there's a lot, typically a lot of interaction, there's a lot of stuff going on. And the ability to notice those really small changes turns out to be important for healthy, successful, interpersonal communication. And the attentional blink is when you notice something initially, you then go into a refractory period where the mind and the brain is insensitive for a certain period of time. Because you're thinking, hmm,

she made that facial expression. What does that mean? In other words, you're preoccupied. Right. Exactly. Right. Exactly. And when you look at the average person who's not meditated, most people show evidence

of this phenomenon that we call an intentional blink. And it's so prevalent that scientists have talked about this as an obligatory refractory period of the nervous system. Refractory meaning you're offline. Offline. And that this is just something that is an intrinsic part of the brain. It's the way the brain operates. It turns out that it's not the way the brain necessarily operates. It's trainable. And you can actually do simple practices of the sort that we're talking about and modify the attentional blink. So the magnitude of that blink really changes in a way that we think makes a difference for everyday life.

You do it less. I will say that in my own experience, because since we're talking about a cohort into which I slot, my attentional blink has improved. Now I started from pretty low baseline, very distractable, very self-centered, but I do a lot of listening to people talk as part of my job. I find that I'm better at staying engaged. Not, and it's not so much like forcing myself to stay engaged. I'm actually kind of just, it's almost pleasurable, I guess, would be the right way to describe it. Well, so now that we're in this, again, we're on this kind of second bucket of people here, Danny, what are the other things that you

see from the science about these people who are not, what we call an intermediate level? Sure. So all of the benefits we talked about, the beginner level, the attentional, the stress recovery, the kindness amplify. They're stronger. Consistently, there's a dose response relationship, the more you do it, the better it gets. And this is, you know, neuroplasticity makes sense of that.

Why would that be? It's because you've practiced more hours, the same thing. There's another finding, which was quite a surprise. Richie's lab did it, and other scientists, this is a genomic finding. People in genetic science says impossible. And that is that if you do one day of a mindfulness practice or insight practice, as it's called at the higher level or more advanced level, if

you will, something surprising happens to your genes for inflammation. Those genes, you know, are at cause or part of the development of a wide range of diseases, from diabetes and heart disease and cancer, you name it. And what happens, Richie? Well, what we see is that there is an epigenetic change, and what epigenetics means is the science of how genes are regulated. And so while we are all born with a fixed complement

of base pairs, that is our DNA, and for the most part, that's not going to change. What does change is the extent to which a gene is turned on or turned off. And we can think of genes having little volume controls, and they range from low to high. And it turns out that there is a lot of dynamic change of the volume of the genes. And we were specifically looking at a group of genes that, as Dan said, have been implicated in inflammation, that drive inflammation.

And what we see is that a day of intensive practice down-regulates these genes. So we actually see, over the course of just eight hours that there is a measurable change in the extent to which these genes are expressed. What is inflammation? by specific molecules, which deal with typically foreign agents to control them. And so when you, if you get a cut and it becomes swollen, the swelling is inflammation and the inflammation is typically a lot of white blood cells which are generated to basically get rid of

foreign substances. Why would I care that my inflammation was affected in any way? Because this gets out of whack and the body starts producing inflammatory sudden molecules and so when there's nothing to heal Well, and so so we need inflammation to live and to deal with Challenges of the right kind of the right kind But where it gets us into trouble is when those inflammatory processes last longer than

they need to and are chronic over time. And that's when they can really wreak havoc. And so, and it turns out there's some really new, very new interesting things going on that have looked at not just inflammation in the body, but also inflammation in the brain. And so the same kinds of inflammatory mechanisms are occurring in the brain. So for example, a disease like Alzheimer's disease, we know something about what its primary cause is with plaques and tangles, specific lesions, damage, and specific parts of the brain. But then what happens is there is an inflammatory response.

So there's inflammation which develops around this primary problem. And when that inflammation persists for a long period of time, that can actually produce many of the symptoms that we associate with these diseases and adds to the problem. So in other words, a history of meditation prior to the onset of Alzheimer's might make the symptoms less noctious. Right, that's exactly what we believe. It's not going to cure Alzheimer's.

It's not going to, in all likelihood, affect the primary cause of Alzheimer's. But there is reason to believe it will impact the inflammatory response around Alzheimer's, which will very much impact the symptom picture. So both my wife and I have both Alzheimer's and dementia in the family. So you would argue there's a pretty strong case to be made to a reasonable dose of meditative. Absolutely. Now I should just make clear that we now, for the very first time, have methods to directly measure inflammation in the brain in living human beings non-invasively. And it's only been developed in the last couple of years with using positron emission

tomography. That has never been used yet with meditation. So there's no study published in the scientific literature that has looked at neuroinflammation and its potential change with meditation. We're beginning those studies now for the first time. That caveat is appreciated, but informed conjecture is allowed on this book. Yes, so the informed conjecture is absolutely. Why not try and by the way, the data shows that Why not try and by the way the data shows that meditating on retreat seems to have even better Benefits than doing it daily and Bailey is more like a maintenance and retreat is more like advance Well, you know you're producing a certain amount of inflammation in my end because Our another mutual friend of ours Joseph Goldstein who had old friend of yours also dates back to the 60s and 70s and going

to India and all this stuff, who is my meditation teacher, is on my rear end all the time about going up to do retreat and it's been a couple of years and I've got one scheduled in a couple of weeks, but I'm actually not sure I'm going to be able to make it. Check your calendar, maybe it's important. I believe it's important. It's hard with young kids, which I very much appreciate. In my own life, when my kids were young, that was a period of time in my life when I stopped doing retreat.

But in later years, after they've gone off and did their thing, it's time to return. It's another version of work-life balance. It's not work-life. Exactly. But the retreat data are really amazing. So we published a paper very recently looking at a simple measure of respiration rate, breathing rate. And it turns out that this is an important index which relates to all kinds of things, health-wise, and in terms of emotional balance

and equanimity, and long-term meditation. Might I say slower the better. slower the better. And we studied people in the intermediate category, folks like yourself. And it turns out that on average, you guys have a slower breathing rate than age and gender match controls. However, what we also see is that the duration of time on retreat practice is the single most

significant predictor of respiration rate. We have very careful measures of daily practice and it turns out that the retreat practice trumps daily practice quite significantly in predicting the magnitude of decline in respiration. Interesting. I want to get on to the Olympic level, guys, but I was having a conversation with my wife recently, who generally is genuinely pleased that I meditate because I was a real pain in the butt for a long time. I continue to be on many levels, but unless so, she was saying that one of the downsides of the meditation

is that she, I'm so even, she says, as you can't tell really whether I might be mad or heart nursing, some sort of resentment, it's actually she has to look really closely. And that actually at times is a bit unsettling for her. Have you guys heard of it? Well, you know, this is a common phenomenon, marital therapy where one person changes and then the other person has to adjust to the change. Yeah, yes. But that's not bad.

No, I mean, she's not complaining about it too vociferously again, because the upsides are much, much the outweigh this particular downside and by a long shot, but it's an interesting thing nonetheless. I do, I mean, I know what's going on in my own head. In fact, there's one of the meditation cliches I love is hurt more, suffer less. In other words, when

I get angry, I actually feel it more acutely, but I'm less likely to act on it and actually goes away faster. But I can see how from the outside, it may all seem a little bit flatter. Yeah, although I think that one of the interesting things is that it may appear flatter, but it really is primarily due to recovering more quickly. Because as you said, their aspects of the experience were you experienced even more strongly? You do. Yes, absolutely.

When she says something that drives me nuts, I think the old me probably either would have reacted on a hair trigger or would have gotten upset about it but it would have been like a game of whack-a-mole and I would have responded a half hour later because I was nursing the grudge unconsciously. Whereas now, and she says something that drives me crazy, I actually feel it pretty quickly and strong and it actually kind of almost hurts physically,

but I'm less likely to say the thing that's gonna make the next 48 hours horrible. Congratulations. That's not, this is not foolproof. I'm talking in general as well. But you know, I've also, in being around the Dalai Lama a lot, I've seen him a few times actually get angry. It doesn't happen often, but I've witnessed it a few times. And what you, what I witness is that it comes right out. And then the moment

later, he starts laughing, he may notice something funny and it's completely gone. There's absolutely nothing that lingers. It like metabolizes. Yeah. And that's talking about the yogis. That's a kind of real characteristic where there's just spontaneity. We call it a lack of stickiness. So there's expression of whatever is occurring in the moment, but there's absolutely no stickiness. Okay, so you're talking about the yogis now. This is the Olympic level meditations. Well, let's let's talk about them What are the primary findings and you've done much of the of the seminal research on these guys. And then they are mostly guys

ugly enough. No, they're actually in our in the samples that we've most recently published approximately half of them have been women to correct to correct a misconception. So good. Good. So on these men and women, what are we finding? What can we say with certainty about the impact of tens of thousands of hours of meditation? Well, let me give you one example, which is really a very telling example. One of the things that we studied in them

is their reaction to physical pain. The reason to use physical pain is it's really a compelling stimulus, and all of us know what it is. And what we do in the laboratory is we use something really quite realistic and we use heat. And the way we can generate this is we have this crazy device that we call a thermode, which is basically a very thin metal plate that gets taped to the wrist. And through it we can circulate very rapidly water whose temperature is very precisely controlled. And so we can very, very carefully control the temperature of that metal plate

and we can change the temperature very rapidly because the water is circulating extremely quickly through it. And so it allows us to very safely, in a very controlled way, to produce a real burning sensation. And when you have this thing on and it's on for 10 seconds and it's at 49 degrees centigrade, you really feel like your skin is burning. And it's very real. And it is real. But we can just adjust it so that it's just below the threshold of producing tissue damage. And so we did this with the expert meditators,

these really long-term meditators, some of whom have given us permission to identify who they are. One of them is Mingyue Rinpoche, who is... Who's the previous guest on this podcast. Thanks to you, by the way. And someone who has average lifetime practice based on our estimates of somewhere around,

at this point, it would be somewhere around 75,000 hours. So when... We should make, this guy's a monk. And then the people you're studying are are largely monks and nuns. They're professional meditations. Yeah, professional meditations. So the, the, right, these are people whose day job

it is to meditate. Right. Wow. And so another... Did he react to the pain? So the, here's the thing, what we did in this experiment. What we did is we gave initially every participant a zap of the pain so they knew exactly what it was that we were going to be presenting.

And then in the actual experiment, we give them a cue that occurs 10 seconds before they get the pain. And the cue says they're going to either get a warm sensation or they're going to get the burning sensation. So it tells them what they're about to get. And then they get whatever they're told. And the stimulus occurs, the heat occurs for 10 seconds. And then there's a recovery period. So there are three periods here.

There's an anticipation period where they're told they're about to get the pain, then there's the actual pain, painful stimulus, and then there's a recovery period. So when you do this with a typical person off the street who's never meditated, you give them an initial zap so they know what they're getting, you then present a tone which tells them that they're about to get the pain, their brains react as if they're getting the actual heat stimulus.

Even before they get it. Even before they're getting it. And we know a lot about the circuits in the brain that are associated with pain. It's called the pain matrix. It's very well studied. And most of the circuitry gets triggered immediately with just the tone. And this is like an audio tone. They're here. Just the tone. So there's absolutely nothing you know about pain that's occurring. It's just the tone signaling that they're in 10 seconds about to get sapped. And then the actual pain occurs and they show a bigger response to the pain. But then in

the controls in the 10 second recovery period, it's as if the pain is still continuing. This is among the nonmeditators. They're non-yogiators. They're still continuing to reverberate with that ruminate about it. And so in some sense they're getting a triple dose. And in the yogis, in the expert meditators, what happens is during the anticipation period, essentially nothing. Their auditory cortex activates when they get the instruction, you know, the tone. But there's almost no elements of the pain matrix that get activated during this time. It's like a flat line. Then when they get the heat itself, they actually show a huge response. And in certain areas of the brain to our surprise, they actually showed a huge response, and in certain areas of the brain to our surprise,

they actually showed a greater response, significantly greater than in the controls, particularly in the sensory regions, which really are processing the fine sensory details, the tingling, the sometimes you notice some vibration in the skin. All of these sensory qualities are processed in the somatosensory cortex, and that area of the brain actually shows a stronger response. And then in the recovery period, they come right back down to baseline.

So in thinking about this, it's like a sharp inverted V that the expert practitioner show. And this is in contrast to the controls who are showing strong activation across each of these three periods. And so this is one difference that's just dramatic. And we think is really important, not just for pain, but in terms of how they respond to all kinds of things in the environment.

Dan, can you run through some of the other headlines when it comes to the Olympic? Well, one thing that I found really impressive has to do with what's called a gamma wave. It's a very unusual part of the brain wave, not seen very often. We all get it for maybe a half second or less when we have a bright idea, creative insight, solve that problem. It's good feeling. And then it goes. Or when we imagine biting into an apple, and all of a sudden the taste and the sound and

the smell and all of that come together, get a gamma. It shows up now and then. The advanced meditators, these Olympic level men and women, have lots of gamma in their brainwave all the time to treat. So they just walk it around as, I mean, I love the feeling of having a good idea. It doesn't happen all that often, but I love that feeling. In fact, I've what's read a quote from a great writer. I think it was Franz and Jonathan Franz, who said that who was asked, you know, what's better? I can't remember what the question was or was quote exactly. So I'm going to probably mangle this. And hopefully I'm talking about the right guy. But he was asked what feels better having

a hit book or what's it feel like to have a hit book? And he said, I would much rather have the feeling of solving a problem during a book, a writing problem, and the feeling of having a hit book. So yeah, what a great feeling to be with these gamma waves, if that was your trait, that would be awesome. Yeah, so it is a trait. There's no question that they show a prevalence of these gamma oscillations when they're not meditating, when they're not doing any formal meditation, and this is one of the key indications of a trade effect, where you see a biological difference that is present in the so-called baseline state when they're not doing any formal meditation.

What about their levels of generosity, compassion, are these good people? Well, you know, that's an important and difficult question to answer. So, on certain measures that we and other scientists use to measure pro-social behavior, they certainly... Pro-social behavior, just to find... Generosity, altruism. They certainly score high on those kinds of measures. But the honest truth is the science in that area is not very well developed at this point in time.

Let me say, but the subjective experience of these people is they are very nourishing. Some people you run into are toxic. When you're or after you're with them, you feel down. These people invariably, in my experience, leave you feeling up. Yeah, I mean, one of the best sort of anecdotal findings is something that happens to us with one of our long-term practitioners. So when they come to our lab, we put them up at a hotel that's right on the border of campus so that they can walk to the lab from where they're staying. And the day after this practitioner left town, I get a call from the general manager of this hotel and I thought,

oh, you know, must have screwed up something with the bill because the bill gets directly sent to us. So I get on the phone with him and he said uh... pardon me for interrupting your day but i just wanted to thank you for the kind of people you have state the so tell uh... there are three specific staff members that commented on uh... this persons generosity and kindness uh... during the last day

and he just wanted to thank me and encourage me to keep sending these people to his hotel. Wow. That doesn't happen all the time. No, I suspect it doesn't. Why does it matter what's going on in the brains and bodies of these Olympic level meditators? I mean, none of us are, I'm not getting 70,000 hours of what remains in my life. So why do I care?

Yeah. So there's a couple of reasons. One is it shows all of us, particularly psychology and science and neuroscience, what the potential upside is. It shows that there are particular brain systems that can be buffed up, that can be amplified, that can be improved. That itself is big. It also shows us that what we can derive from this process,

that we can use generally. For example, we talked about how beginners are able to focus and have less mind-wandering. I went to a class of seven-year-old second graders in Spanish Harlem, and every day they do this practice, they call breathing buddies. They take a little stuffed animal and they lie down on a rug

and they put the animal on their belly and they watch it rise on the in-breath and fall on the out-breath and they count one, two, three on the rule. This is a mindfulness for seven-year-olds. And it is amplifying or strengthening a capacity called cognitive control. Cognitive control is the ability to focus on one thing

and ignore distractions. Lord knows there are more distractions than ever in the whole history of humanity. You look at what our tech devices are doing. It's enormous. So I think this is a skill kids need more and more. There was a study done in New Zealand where they measured cognitive control in 4 to 8 year olds and track them down in their 30s. And they found that this capacity, the ability to keep focused, was a better predictor of the income level and health of people in their

30s than their IQ or the wealth of the family that grew up in. It's a completely independent factor and it's something we could give every kid. And this is the kind of thing we can extract from this area of science to see how could this generalize? What could we learn from this that we could spread around? We could take the scale. We could show our children. But can you scale the stuff you're finding among the yogis? Given that in order to be a yogi as you describe it,

you have to really live a very specific lifestyle. Well, you know, we've asked the same question for the intermediate practitioners, folks like yourself. And it turns out that we see the presence of gamma oscillations to a much greater degree than in people who have not practiced. And so there does seem to be a relationship between the amount of practice and the presence of these gamma oscillations. We also showed that in the intermediate level, practitioners, these gamma oscillations. We also showed that in the intermediate level practitioners, these

gamma oscillations begin to show up during sleep, which is the first time anyone has shown this. And that's very unusual and may play an important role in some of the restorative mechanisms that occurred particularly during deep sleep when there's a lot of bodily restoration that occurs. We know that these gamma oscillations play an important role generally in neuroplasticity. And the kind of thing we were talking about earlier, training the brain to help reduce or buffer the severity of a genetic risk for a disease like Alzheimer's. It may be, and certainly we don't have any firm evidence for this yet, but it may be that these processes

are influential in that, and these gamma oscillations may be an important indicator of the presence of these kind of restorative effects. So this is all, I think, really important. And I also think for people particularly in the kind of culture we live in today, having this kind of scientific evidence can be a real motivator. And even, you know, the Dalai Lama himself has told me that there are times in the morning when he'll be practicing and he'll actually think about the fact that based on everything

that we've told him, he knows that he's changing his brain and that that's actually motivating and that he thinks about that. And so I think that it could be very, very helpful. So the book is great and I really enjoyed reading. I also think actually it's an important contribution. And it's a nice mix of your personal stories and a good read when it comes to just sort of going through the science and what it says and what it doesn't say. Before we close, I just need any closing thoughts from either or both of you. Danny, let me start with you.

Well, I think that the reason we wrote alter traits is that someone like you would say something like that. We feel that at base, the science is rich, he said, is very encouraging, not just for the Dalai Lama, for anyone. For people who are just starting out or thinking of starting. Here is some hard science that tells you what are the good things that could happen. And I would add by saying that most middle-class people in Western countries these days believe that physical exercise is good for their health and many of us have incorporated some physical

exercise in our weekly routine. It's our aspiration that this book can help promote the kind of mental exercise that we are talking about as meditation and that mental exercise will become as commonly practiced in the future as physical exercises today. And I think if we took our minds and brains seriously in the way that the evidence suggests we should, we would all be doing these practices. It would be like brushing our teeth. There'd be absolutely no second thought about it. This is something that I think we need as a culture and as a civilization, and they're very, very little downside to doing this.

I've been saying what you just said for years, and I stole it from you. Where can people go if they want to learn more about either of you? Well, you could go to the Alter Traits website. Okay book. You could go to Daniel Goldman.info for me and for Richie You can go to Center for HealthyMinds.org our organization at the University of Wisconsin And also you can go back and listen to the podcasts we've done with both of you in the past for much more on Danny and Richie individually and And also, folks mentioned in this podcast, including Mingur Reng Poshay and John Kabin. And I still can't believe Joseph Goldstein has not come on this podcast. It's actually my fault, but it's ridiculous.

Thank you both. Appreciate it. What a pleasure. Thanks, thank you. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris.

Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

at 1dory.com slash survey.