Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Training Your Attention | Dr. Amishi Jha

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

How to stay focused, fight distraction, and function at your peak.Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami. She serves as the Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. Dr Jha is the author of the national bestseller, Peak Mind. In this episode we talk about:What peak mind isWhy meta awareness is important to practice and achieve peak mindThe suite of mindfulness-based attention training practicesWhy humans developed attention in the first placeUsing the flashlight and floodlight metaphors to help us understand different types of attentionThe mental pushup for attention: focus, notice, and redirectThe attention benefits for high stress populations who engage in contemplatives practicesMultitasking vs. monotaskingThe real life and death consequences of confirmation biasPart of the reason why we may be experiencing a crisis of attention Giving our mind the freedom to choose where it goes nextRelated Episodes:Why You Can’t Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again | Johann HariSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/amishi-jha-rerun-2023See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast, I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, distraction is one of the top complaints of meditators and pretty much every human being alive right now in an era that has been dubbed the info blitzkrieg. My guest today has spent years studying the impact of meditation on people who work in high-stress professions. She's collaborated with the military, first responders, and elite athletes, and she's written a whole book about how to, in her words, a focus without all the struggle. Take back your attention from the pull of distraction and function at your peak.

Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative and author of the book, Peak Mind. Find your focus, own your attention, invest 12 minutes a day.

In this conversation, we talk about what she means by peak mind. She gives us the neuroscience of attention 101. We talk about the benefits of contemplative practices for high-stress groups and what exactly it is about meditation that's helping these people. We talk about multitasking versus task switching, simulation mode versus mindful mode. And she finally gives an answer to the question I've gotten a million times, which is something to the effect of, what is the least amount of meditation you can do and still derive all of the advertised benefits?

Her answer does carry a few scientific caveats, but it's fascinating nonetheless. One quick note here, this episode is part of a two week series we're doing called Deep Cuts, where we dip into the vast TPH archive to find some of our best and most popular episodes to give you a measure of sanity during the holidays. But first, it's time for our regular segment around here

that we call BSP or blatant self promotion with the new year just around the corner. We've got a couple amazing things cooking on the podcast and over on the app. Our podcast series is going to feature some of the smartest people we know talking about their non-negotiables. The must have practices and principles

that help them stay sane. We're going to talk to the comedian and actor Bill Hader about creatively channeling anxiety. They're renowned psychotherapist, Esther Perrell, about one simple thing you can do right now to increase your happiness and on and on. The special series non-negotiables kicks off on January 3rd. Meanwhile, over on the 10% happier app, we are skipping the new year, new you energy and favor of something we're calling the imperfect meditation challenge. A kind of mindful

mute button on shame. You will discover how embracing imperfection can help you improve your relationship with meditation. The free challenge kicks off on January 8th. You can join in the app starting January 1st. Download the 10% happier app today wherever you get your apps. Hello listeners, this is Mike Corey of Against the Odds. You might know that I adventure around the world while recording this podcast. And over the years, I've learned that where I stay when I travel can make all the difference. Airbnb has been my go-to place for finding the perfect accommodations. Because with hotels,

you often don't have the luxury of extra space or privacy. Recently, I had a bunch of friends come down to visit in Mexico. We found this large house and the place had a pool, a barbecue, a kitchen, and a great big living room to play cards, watch movies, and just chill out. It honestly made all the difference in the trip. It felt like we were all roommates again. The next time you're planning a trip, whether it's with friends, family, or yourself, check out Airbnb to find something you won't forget. Hello listeners, this is Mike Corey of Against the Odds.

You might know that I adventure around the world while recording this podcast, and over the years, I've learned that where I stay when I travel can make all the difference. Airbnb has been my go-to place for finding the perfect accommodations. Because with hotels, you often don't have the luxury of extra space or privacy. Recently, I had a bunch of friends come down to visit in Mexico. We found this large house and the place had a pool, a barbecue, a kitchen, and a great big living room to play cards. Watch movies and just chill out. It honestly made all the difference in the trip. It felt like we were all roommates again.

The next time you're planning a trip, whether it's with friends, family or yourself, check out Airbnb. To find something you won't forget. Amishie Jiao, welcome back to the show. It's great to be here. Great to have you here. Alright, let me start with a very obvious question. What do you mean by peak mind? Yes. So a peak mind, it's not what you might think of as like

a successory poster of, you know, women on mountaintop all goals achieved. It's really about having full access to all of your capacities, your full attentional awareness, as well as this ability to stave off distractions and use your mind's resources to achieve what you want to achieve in life. Okay, so it's the ability to have access

to all of your mind's resources and you still in the book go to Great Lens, healthfully, I believe, to point out that distraction. There's nothing malfunctioning in you if you are distraction. That's right. And I would say, let me be specific. Really, attentional resources is the key phrase. So distractions occur. Let's even back up.

It's not even distractions. Spontaneous thought, mental content, internal chatter, it will occur, external distractions will occur. Sometimes those can actually be problematic and sometimes they're not. And in some sense, a peak mind has been being able to maneuver through the landscape of what it means to be a human being so that you can use these precious brain resources, in particular, the brain's attention system, to have success in the way you feel and what you perform and who you want to be. so that you can use these precious brain resources in particular the brain's attention system to have success in the way you feel and what you perform and who you want to be. So if you're at peak mind, it doesn't mean that you're not having spontaneous thoughts or that your child isn't screaming for your attention or a cat is meowing outside the door,

whatever. It just means that you can incorporate these quote unquote distractions in a healthy, supple way. That's part of it, but it's even going one step beyond that. It may mean that you are fatigued or irritable or distracted, but you have an awareness of this particular state and can negotiate what is best to do next

based on that awareness. And I think that is actually really important. And something I tried to give multiple examples of. It's not that everything's going to be rosy, rainbows, unicorns, sunshine. It's that when you cultivate the mind in this way, and really it's I'm talking about a whole suite of contemplative practices having to do with mindfulness meditation, you get to befriend your mind and in particular your attention system in a way that gives you useful information about what you might do with your mind in that moment and the next.

So it's just disabusing us of this notion that it's about being positive or it's about being, quote unquote, at the top of your game. Because sometimes knowing I am completely reactive right now, maybe I shouldn't press send on that email. It's so useful, more useful than probably just pretending that everything's great. I believe you scientists call that medic cognition? Metawarness. I would love to, you know, I love that it's been so fun, Dan, to see how the sophistication

level, not just obviously of you as you continue to grow in this whole enterprise, but just the level of the conversation in this podcast has been really, I've just been kind of an observer and a fan to see how much more nuance the conversation's been getting. And so I'm going to take this opportunity to just at least voice my distinctions between meta cognition and meta awareness. And yes, what I am talking about right now, what I just described is what I would call meta awareness. And the way that I describe or define meta-awareness is having an awareness

of the current contents and processes at play in your mind in a particular moment. Very different than metacognition, close cousin, but actually quite different because metacognition in some sense is thoughts or views you might have of your cognitive processing. The time window for metacognition is a bit longer. It's like, oh, I tend to make decisions in an exhaustive manner, or I tend to be a maximizer. Or, you know, I usually don't remember names. Those would be really useful metacognitive features that you might know about yourself.

But metawarens says, right now, I have no idea what this guy's name is. Very different. Versus I tend to be this way. I hope that that distinction is helpful at least. Let me see if I have grabbed it by repeating it back to you. Sure. Medicognition would be thinking about how you tend to think and Meta awareness would be the ability to drop out of the thinking process as it's happening right now and to know it non-judgmentally. Yes, another way to put it,

getting the raw data of what is transpiring in your phenomenology moment by moment. Do you imagine peak mind is an abiding trait or a temporary state? In some sense, we're interested in the moment by moment state. And like any kind of mental training, the notion would be if we cultivate these capacities, if we cultivate more presence of mind, non-judgmental awareness, focus when we want it, receptivity when we want it, moment by moment, the chances of us being able to call up that way of making the mind

more frequently and more sort of on-demand will increase. So our interest is in moving from more state-related presence to turning into a trait. But in some sense, when we use the term trait, it's almost like we're saying we check the box. Got it done and lightened, move on. And I don't feel that that's the way it is. I think that just like physical strength in the body, just because you might have been an Olympic level runner at some point, doesn't mean you'll always maintain that peak physique. You have to keep at it.

And the brain is no different. So in some sense, we want to conceptualize this as an active, effortful process that we must practice in order to benefit from. You mentioned that there's a suite of contemplative practices that we can employ to get to peak mind. And these are practices that you've been studying in your lab. Can you run through some of these? Sure. Sure. Maybe you would even be helpful if I started out by describing attention and the brain systems of attention to connect the dots between why we chose these practices in something we call mindfulness-based attention training. So, using that begot flora, do you want me to? Yeah, I think so. You used a phrase we were texting last night

and you used a phrase of the neuroscience of attention 101. So I actually found that to be fascinating. So if you want to start there, by all means. Yeah, I think that for most of us, who don't happen to have a research lab that studies the brain's attention systems, when we hear the term attention, something very specific comes to mind.

And usually it has to do with this notion of focus or concentration. But when we think about attention as researchers from this field of cognitive neuroscience, it's actually means something more than that. That's a part of it, but that's not the entirety of it. So when I say brain science of attention 101, what I really mean is let's get like a fuller sense of what the systems and subsystems are To then understand what it means to actually even train attention So when I first of all want to just say that you know attention itself Why do we have it? That's a that's a question. I asked myself just very early on like what a weird thing

that we have a brain that pays attention and It comes out of just a really big problem that the brain had through the course of evolution, which is at some point the organism got to the sophistication level where it could function in a manner where it needed access to more information from the environment but could not possibly process everything it would potentially encounter. And so attention was the solution devised to sub-sample interfacing with the real world and overcoming these computational limits of the brain. And so then you're like, okay, it's going to sub-sample reality.

Well, in what ways is it going to sub-sample it? And this gets into how we might even start understanding the subsystems of attention. One way would be by selecting certain contents, like the left side of this particular Vista's, probably where I'm going to find my food, or the right side is where I tend to have predators lurking and I should be careful.

So just the nature of what you should select in terms of space or a particular type of feature, et cetera. Another way we could select or sub sample reality, especially as we get more and more sophisticated brains, is sort of in time. So what's important right now versus something that I might think about in the future or a memory I have in the past.

And then a third way we might think about how we get a slice of reality, not the entire thing, is based on something that's goal-relevant. For what I want to do right now, what matters? So just that's the broad framing of how we can think about what attention might be doing. And then we can just,

let's get into some of the metaphors that I think are helpful to think about it. So going back to sort of the lay broad conceptualization of attention as focus, that's absolutely something it does. And typically I think about this as the metaphor I like to use is like a flashlight. So wherever it is that that flashlight's pointing if you're in a darkened room or a darkened walkway alley path in nature somewhere, wherever that flashlight's pointing, you're going to have preferential

access to information. It's going to be crisp and clear and useful. Everything else is going to remain sort of out of your conscious experience kind of blanked out. And this is called the brain's orienting system. And just like a flashlight, we can direct that resource wherever we want. It can be toward the extra environment, but we can also direct this resource internally. So right now, if I say, you know, what's the sensory experience you have of your feet

right now? You know, probably before I said that, you weren't thinking about what was going on on the bottoms of your feet. But as soon as I said that, you could direct that flashlight to internal bodily sensations, get the information. Now it's CRISPR and clearer and more available to you, which is a really, really cool thing. We can use it not only for sensory experience, but thoughts, concepts, emotions, everything.

So the cool thing about focus, meaning the flashlight, is this narrowing and really fine-grained, privileged processing of certain kinds of information. In addition to being able to direct it willfully, it also gets grabbed. And if you think about every time you hear the ding of your phone or somebody calls out your name, your flashlight went to that sound essentially. So it's capable of both being directed and being pulled. But you'll have privilege access. So that would be we might put

in the category of like, okay, we got a sub sample parts of what's going on around me in some defined way. Now let's move to how you're going to capture what's happening right now, privileging in time. That's what we call the alerting system. And the metaphor I like to use for that one is like a flood light. Essentially, it's broad and receptive. And what it cares about is what's going on right at this moment. That yokes very nicely with this notion of metawarness that we were just talking about.

It's like receptive, low signal to noise ratio if you want to geek out about the terms where nothing is privileged over anything else. The only thing that's really privileged is what's going on right now. So I'm not thinking about the past or the future, I'm here. So I think that the floodlight is sort of a nice way to think about it just in terms of broad and receptive and illuminating whatever's occurring. And then the third... Can I jump in on that? Yeah, yeah, please, please, anytime.

I hate doing this, but I just, I actually really don't like jumping in, but I just want to make sure I understand that. So the flashlight, if I was going to think about it in meditative terms, a flashlight in meditation might be, I'm really going to hone in on the feeling of my breath at my belly right now. Exactly.

Whereas the flood light would be open awareness. I'm just going to let my senses rip and note whatever's coming up in my mind as it happens without any prejudice. You got it. Exactly. So these are mapping on to already, you're doing exactly what you don't initially ask me what are practices that might relate to it? So you just essentially describe two different practices. I just totally stole your thumb.

No, it's great. No, it's great. No, it's great. That means that we're in sync. You're getting where I'm going and you're actually understanding why from the brain science point of view, especially as an attention researcher, it was so thrilling to come across this whole field of human endeavor called meditation practice that mapped on so beautifully to what we were studying

in our lab, in my lab. So let's just talk about the third system, because it actually kinda yokes together the two others that we've been talking about. The third system really is regarding our goals and how we wanna behave in any moment. And this is something called central executive system, or just executive functions.

And that term executive is the same one that we think of when we think of an executive of a company. The executive's job is not to do every single task that the organization must do. It's to ensure that there's an alignment, broadly speaking, between all the endeavors and the goals, moment by moment, to make sure everybody's on track. And I like to use the kind of metaphor of a juggler here. And really it's just because like all the balls got to be in the air,

make sure none of those balls drop. But you're not in charge of doing each individual task. So in some sense, if you think about the executive control system and the two types of practices, you just described, a really concentrated practice, like a focused breath awareness practice, where you're honing in with like exquisite precision on the target of where you want the flashlight to shine, the goal is stay on that target. Be aware moment to moment that your flashlight

is directed there. And so we're engaging both. We're engaging the flashlight to do the job that the juggler says the executive control system says do. And then when we're doing an open monitoring practice, the goal is quite different. It's don't specifically advantage some information over other information, allow whatever arises to be noted.

And then in its own time, let it pass away without holding on to it, manipulating it, elaborating on it, etc. So to me what was neat about understanding the nature of the variety of practices that mindfulness meditation offers is that in some sense able to engage all three of these systems and actually train all three of these systems by repeated reps, if you will, in terms of exercise. And so the main practice is your teaching to your study subjects. Right, so the main practices are a focused attention practice.

And I just, to make it easy, because this concept is, you know, using these metaphors I want to be helpful. So it's like like find your flashlight. And that is really about breath awareness, both to focus in on breath-related sensations, but also to actually engage that flood light or the alerting system, metawareness,

to note moment by moment, where is my flashlight? Because only then can you actually redirect it back. So even if you think of a simple breath awareness practice, let's just break it down. So the goal you have broadly speaking for the period of time you're gonna practice is focus on breath-related sensations, be as specific as you can,

and when the mind wanders, return it back, redirect it. So you get that flashlight, you're directing it, you've got a target object, but then you're still engaging this broader meta-awareness so that you're checking out what's going on moment by moment. And then you've got the executive control that comes in and says, up, you're off task, get back, and you just redirect back. And that's essentially what our dear friend, General Piot, who we spoke to when we spoke

together last time on this podcast, he was a little bit of a guess with me. He calls it the push up, you know, the mental push up. And I like that because it's three simple steps, focus, notice, redirect. And if we do this, not just during our mindfulness practice, but in our lives as we're trying to accomplish whatever goal it is, it's quite helpful. So the reason that we offer in my book,

as well as in the kind of training programs that we study in my lab, focused attention practices, and open monitoring practices, is to get the full companion of working out all three of these systems. And then we also bring in loving kindness practice, which we call connection, to kind of round out that you've got these tools, now apply them to be connected to another aspect of your humanity. I asked this question as a dedicated practitioner of loving kindness meditation, but how does it

go down for you when you're teaching loving kindness, which you've rebranded into connection, but I would imagine still when the rubber hits the road, the details of the practice can be a little gooey for some audiences. So how does it go down when you're teaching this practice to firefighters, football players, and members of the US military? It's surprisingly well. I was actually very concerned when we started introducing this

because I was like, eh, there's never gonna be a pushback. In fact, some of the trainers will say, I don't think this is gonna go well at all. But the reason that I think it does go well is because it does touch into something that we all experience. The need for, I would say, we all experience the need for this, which is that sense of care and extending concern and interest in ourselves, which I don't think most people in this service sectors that are really hard-nosed are doing as often as they know they probably would benefit from doing, and each other.

Right? There's no question. The kind of care and concern that a service member or firefighter has for his or her team members is so robust. The care that they have for the mission is strong. The care for the civilians that they don't want, they want to ensure are protected and, you know, that they're treated well

and in a manner in line with their mission is also strong. So there's so many aspects of this that actually meet the kind of ethical and professional mindset of many of these individuals. So I think it does resonate. And what's always interesting to me is we have a four-week program and I lay out something very similar in my book, which is the result of, you know, success stories of honing it down in a way that makes the most sense. But then after the four weeks, if we've got more time with these groups, we'll say, pick whatever you

want. Just practice on your own. Just pick something and practice it 12 to 15 minutes, five or so days a week, and often loving kindness is chosen, which also kind of surprises me. But then, again, based on all the things I just said to you, I think it actually makes a lot of sense that that would come into play. It's interesting. It does make sense. If you're on a football team, you care about your teammates. If you're a firefighter, you care about the people who's lives, you're protecting, saying for the military. But these are male dominated fields,

and in my experience being a male, we are not socialized to emphasize our caring capacity. You know, it's yes and no. If somebody said, do you wanna take care of your family? Are you a loving father and a spouse? You were to say, absolutely. And those are really important to me. You would not deny that.

You would say, yeah, as a leader, would do care for the employees that work under you or with you and your organization. Absolutely. So though it may feel like it rubs up against some kind of norms of a callousness or that kind of orientation. In some sense, it goes to the heart of a different kind of sort of maybe potentially stereotypically

male sensibility, which is, I'm here. You can lean on me. And that aspect, I think, also resonates with a lot of people when it comes to this particular practice. But it's kind of interesting for me because, you know, as I mentioned, I'm a detention researcher. So it wasn't an obvious choice. It was basically from part of it was just talking to a lot of teachers, including Sharon Salzberg, our mutual friend and teacher,

and even John Kabinzen regarding kind of how do you round out what you offer people in a way that would allow them to experience sort of the full suite of different aspects that contemplative practice offers in a way that would allow them to experience sort of the full suite of different aspects that contemplative practice offers in a way that is accessible to most. And that's why the switch from the term loving kindness to connection really gets to the heart of the matter and the way that we're describing it

and asking them to participate in practicing. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Amishi J. right after this. Much more of my conversation with Dr. Amishi J. right after this. Hey everybody, it's Dan on 10% happier. I like to teach listeners how to do life better. I want to try. Oh hello, Mr. Grinch. What would make you happier? Ah, let's see. And out of business sign at the North Pole. Or a nationwide ban on caroling and noise, noise, noise.

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Quick reminder, we've got a great new year's coming up on January 3rd, right here on the podcast, featuring the non-negotiables where we compile some of the smartest people we know and ask them about their must-have practices and principles featuring Esther Parall, John Kabat's in, Pema Children and more, and over on the 10% happier app we've got a New Year's meditation challenge for people who are imperfect, meaning everybody. That kicks off on January 8th. So you said you've honed your protocol down to a four week training for people in high

stress environments. Yes. You tell us more about what that looks like and what you've learned from iterating on this? Yeah. You know, the first thing for me was when we started this work, which was back in the early 2000s. What's known in the literature right now?

You know, we're not going to send people on a month-long retreat. We're not sending them on a 10-day retreat event. We're going to have to figure out a way to integrate practices and training within their day-to-day lives. And the most well-established program at that point was mindfulness-based stress reduction, right? This 24-hour program developed by John Kabatzen, which requires about two and a half hours a week for eight weeks, 45 minutes of

home practice, and as a beautiful suite of practices, all along the lines of really these things that we were talking about of different aspects of training attention, et cetera. So that was a great place to start. And there was already a literature that suggested these things are beneficial. 24 hours and 45 minutes a day was like a non starter for most of the organizations I wanted to work with. It was like, yes, sorry, no thanks.

And not in a subtle way. Like, yeah, no. We will give you an hour if you really want to come talk to us, but we don't think there's any time for this. So I knew kind of the strong distance between what the literature suggested would be, probably likely to have an impact. And then the second part, which was what they were likely to give me. And so the way that I wrote this first set of grants was really to take sort of a stepwise approach.

Okay, let's start with a 24 hour program, but let's kind of see how low we can go. Can we go down to 16 hours? Can we go to eight hours? Can we go to four hours? And what about the number of weeks? Can we go from eight weeks to four weeks to two weeks? So we tried out all those different combinations. I mean, saying that in a couple of sentences

sounds like, well, that's good that you did all that. That's basically eight years of my life, right? Just trying it out with various cohorts, various military cohorts, trying to get people to do these studies in the middle of their pre-deployment training, non-trivial, because we wanted to interact with individuals when the demands were high, when

the chances of their attention getting degraded and depleted were high, and in a preparatory period, before it actually mattered. Attention becomes life or death when you're in a combat environment. So there were many challenges to wanting to do this, but it gave us some very clear answers, which also made me very gratified. We went on this quest and we got clear answers on what was too short or didn't work. Essentially, four hours of training with a trainer or delivering something over two weeks, even if it was longer than four hours, not helpful, not successful, and reliably producing

beneficial changes, tractable changes, and objective metrics of attention, as well as things like mood and stress levels. We know when we were shooting too low, and that was so helpful to figure that out, because now when somebody said, can you come in and do an hour-long program, I'm happy to do it, but it's going to be just talking about it, not really providing the training, because we know going too short is not going to really produce any kind of tractable enduring benefits. And then what we're trying to figure out is, okay, probably the best place to land this thing is gonna be about four weeks,

eight hours of instruction, two hours a week per week. And then the amount of time that people should practice, daily was another big puzzle. Cause we started out giving them, we're like, okay, 45 minutes, maybe too much. How about 30 minutes? So we asked people initially to do 30 minutes, but we said, look, this is a research study.

Please be honest, tell us what you actually did. So privately, separate from the eyes of the trainer, they would write down in those days, on little cards what they actually practice daily. Now we just have an app that would allow us to track with some precision, how much they're practicing. Nobody was doing 30 minutes. Like, nobody was doing 30 minutes.

And then what we ended up having to do is say, okay, got all these participants, let's figure out for what level of practice, approximately, per day, do we start seeing beneficial effects. And it ended up that those that were practicing about 12 minutes or more a day were showing beneficial effects. Those that were practicing less were actually not. And so 12 was like an interesting number for us. And we kind of pursued that for a while of only asking people to practice 12 minutes a day. Got a lot more traction that way. People were actually engaging. Then we were trying to say, okay, is it every day they have to do it? No, they weren't doing it every day. So about five days, it's like a four to five days, a good number of days to ask for it. But now we're in the reasonable range of people

were willing to do it. And they were not too burdened by it. And we could fit it in the schedule that made sense to us. So that's a long way to say it took a lot of effort. But we really were trying to figure out what would be feasible, accessible with these kind of people so that we weren't just randomly choosing it. We actually pursued it with a scientific approach. It was beautiful. It was not too long at all. It was fascinating. And, you know, I get asked all the time, what is the least amount of meditation I can do and derive all of the advertised benefits? And I've never really had an answer, but it sounds like you've arrived on an answer, which is 12 minutes, four to five days a week.

That seems to be about right. And it would be very clear on that for high stress groups and looking specifically at things like attention, mood, and stress. So, you know, if you're in the middle of a kidney transplant and you're like, how much mindfulness is gonna help me so that my immune system responds most robustly, I have no idea. This is what research can tell us

based on the kinds of groups that we've worked with. The other thing that's, I think, so important, because you get asked that, I get asked that, well, what if I do less than 12 minutes? And what if I do more than 12 minutes? And my answer is like, do whatever you can do. But around 12 is when we start saying these really tractable effects. And here's the other kind of even better news. If you do more, you benefit more.

That we've seen across study after study, whether it's special forces or students or long-term practitioners. If you practice more, just like physical activity, you benefit more. And I think that that's also kind of a cool thing. And I know that at some point, you were describing practicing at least two hours a day, a couple times a day, maybe even. I don't know if you're still on that routine. There's a different kind of an impact that a larger window of time during the day can have on you. Sometimes I find myself, usually when I'm running training programs, I'll try to, kind

of, in solidarity with our participants, do what they do. If they're on a week where they're doing a lot of focused attention, I'll do that. Then on the weekends, I'm thinking of it as a little bit of a treat, which most people would say, what? Like, I'm going to double up today. I'm going to, I'm going to do 30 minutes, or I'm going to do 24 minutes or whatever it is. And I like it. So that always seems to hold true. That, that, you know, there's a different experience and a different level of benefit with more engagement. In my experience, the meditation becoming a treat thing takes a while. I mean, I haven't done any studies here.

This is all anecdotal and observational. But when I hear people talking about enjoying meditation, that usually tells me that they're in the mature or more mature phase. Let me put it this way. It may not feel like a treat when you're doing it, but I feel like the quality of my mind is in a better place and not happier by the way. More present, more pliable, more, all these things that we talked about

is peak mind. It's like if I'm feeling sad, I can face the sadness. If there's frustration, I can hold it and actually watch the decisions that I'm gonna choose to make. I just feel more, I mean, I just the word kind of, I'm a better friend to myself and in the way that I guide myself to maneuver through my life.

That's the treat part. It's not like I'm just blissed out or something like that. At least with the kind of practices I'm doing, that's not what I'm attempting to achieve. Yeah, I mean, yes to all of that, my own personal experience too, that the percentage of sits that are pleasant, even if they're unpleasant on some level, but are just pleasant on the less, you know, because I can be with the unpleasant in a way that I'm not so entangled with it. That has gone way up for me over time. I once saw somebody, and this was completely not scientific, it was just that with having a conversation with somebody who kind of sketched out with his finger in the air,

a curve of what it's like to be a meditator in the top of the beginning years, you know, you're really going uphill, uphill, uphill, and then you reach a sort of summit and then it goes downhill after that. I think probably it's more true to say that it goes up and down and up and down to gradually vectors toward a higher place.

But for me, I do feel that there are times where my meditation practice has a kind of momentum of its own, it doesn't feel like I'm having to force myself into the chair. And once I'm here, I'm kind of pleased to be here. Yeah, definitely. But I would say just to go back to the beginner and what the mind can feel like, you know, I offer a course at the University of Miami for undergrads

and they're learning the practices along with all the science. And it's so interesting because within maybe a round week three or four, they're saying things like, my mind is a mess. Like, I am wondering so much, is it because of the time we are in the semester? Is it, you know, just that there's more things going on right now? And then I ask them, well, what do you think it is? And then the best moment is when they have their own aha insight, like, oh, maybe I'm just noticing it more. And I just, I love that. That doesn't get old for me at all. And I think that it's just this interesting paradoxical aspect of getting to know your own mind in this way,

that in some sense, that kind of real pain or discomfort of contending with a mind that feels like, you know, as you put it like the slippery fish or whatever, you've got a nice metaphor for that. That's actually a win. And it may not feel that way. It's always that freshness of mind of like, you read about it, we can even see it in our graphs that yes, look, positive mood is actually going up or actually, you know, there's

a little bit of a U-shaped function where there's a little bit of more negativity, but then it goes down again if you really track people at a granular level. But to actually understand that from your own phenomenological experience is something else. Why were you so drawn to high stress groups? Well, it's kind of my entry point into practicing in the first place and even how it entered my lab. I would say growing up,

you know, I'm an Indian woman. So my earliest memories are walking into my parents bedroom, like in the morning kind of blirry-eyed and seeing my, you know, the bed made, my dad's sitting on it, like freshly showered with a prayer beads meditating. And like I grew up with that. And same with my mom, you know, she meditates every single day using the momma, these beads. And I was just like, that's great, great for you. But not doing that, not interested. And there was like a little bit of sort of cultural, I would say anger I had toward the entire enterprise learning that there was such a sexist orientation toward who gets to have access

to some of these practices. And in Hinduism, as an adolescent, I've learned that really some of these practices only the boys get access to. And I was like, no way, sorry, see you're not doing that. Not interested at all. So it was something I never thought in my life I would be interested in or practice. And then learning about it, in fact, by one of my dear colleagues at that point, early 2000, Richie Davidson, and having to kind of contend with somebody I've respected studying this, things that's actually relevant to the kinds of things that I'm interested in. And I was personally struggling at that moment with a lot of my own high stress and high demand

as a young mom, etc. That I opened up to this possibility and realized that there's a lot of value in it. And there's a lot of things that are beneficial to me in ways that my highly skeptical mind that had really blown it off, you know, to the point where it was him saying the word meditation and the neuroscience lecture was like astrology to astrophysicists. Like, why are you saying this? It was just so ridiculous. But then coming around to that, it really made me have a lot of interest in approaching other people that might also have

that same kind of skeptical orientation. But I know their lives are very demanding. The stress that they experience is real. And they wanna be at the top of their game in a way that is not only helpful for themselves, but for those that they wanna interact with and benefit. So that's part of the reason. I was just very curious about helping other people that might in some ways have an interest

like mine to optimize in some way that is helpful. You talked about this a little bit, but can you summarize or expand upon the previously delivered summary of what the benefits you've observed are for high stress groups who engage in these contemplative practices. Yes. So, you know, we've talked about these various systems of attention, and there are objective tasks that we can offer that track things like focus and broadening, and a kind of a cousin to attention, the working memory system, which is this ability to maintain and manipulate information over very short intervals, really like the sort of scratch space of the mind, you know, where we deliberate thoughts and hold them temporarily. And what we learned, the first thing that we learned, which was alarming, was that these tasks, which are studied for many years, they've been around for at least, let's say, over 50 years in the field of

attention research. Robustly stable tasks. But now, if even over the course of the task itself, we just insert things like a negative image or a threatening sound or put them under some kind of stress, attention starts falling apart, even in the context of just a laboratory metric. So, tension starts falling apart, even in the context of just a laboratory in metrics. So all right, attention is stable and very powerful, but you can perturb it pretty easily by things like stress, threats, negative mood. And so then I became just tied to what we were talking about a moment ago of working with high stress populations. Their lives are filled with these moments, all of our lives are.

But for certain windows, we're asking people within certain professions to perform at their best when the circumstances, any objective observer would say, yeah, these are very threatening and negative circumstances, you know, think of a firefighter during hurricane season or trying to help in the middle of a tornado or something like that or, you know, service member, et cetera. So now it was like, okay, in the lab, we can get the attention to start falling apart when we just induce relatively innocuous images, news images of negative stuff. So now let's track them over a high stress interval.

Like they've got to perform well, football players over a preseason training, kind of readiness training for soldiers where they're simulating combat situations. So we've given the set of tasks at the beginning of some interval, then four to five weeks later come back and give it again. And what they're doing during that period of time is demanding over some protracted periods of demand.

Everybody was tanking in their attention. So these same things of attention and working memory reliably degraded over four weeks. And now get on a, you're being deployed. So, to me, that was very troubling. And that's one of the reasons we actually started having that interest to offer the training during high stress intervals. Well, if we could before, but usually during this one, we would get access to them. So, here's what we were finding. We're finding that if we give these kind of programs to people, we're they're practicing

like we described, you know, about 15 minutes a day in this four-week interval, after participating in a group-based training where they get introduced to the practices, we can protect against that decline. So the groups, you know, in a kind of standard-controlled design, we recruit a bunch of people, half of them would get the training, half of them would be wait-listed to get it later, or they'd get some other kind of training. And only those that were getting the mindfulness training actually were not declining in their attention. They were staying stable,

and those that were practicing more than others, more than this sort of minimum dose, were actually, in some cases, increasing in their attention even over this high stress interval. And we saw, again, this dose response effect. So those that practice very little benefited, little those that practice more benefited more. So in general, that's the sort of broad beneficial effects that we see is a protection or enhancement

of attention. If these folks in high stress groups are doing these contemplative practices and you're seeing a benefit to their attention, attentional resources, attentional capacity, what is the mechanism? What is it about meditation that is helping them? Great question. And fundamentally, is it basic attention research or somebody interested in the brain mechanisms of attention?

That's what we've been trying to figure out, right? So I gave you this sort of theoretical understanding of this. If what's happening during a focused attention practice, for example, is you're cultivating a better ability to keep that flashlight focused. We should be able to see sensitivity and tasks that require task focus. Laser-like focus. Select these stimuli, not these other ones. If what we're doing during a mindfulness practice, a focused attention practice is noticing our mind wandering. When we have people

do tasks that actually promote mind wandering and we give them opportunities to report on how often they're mind wandering, they should be mind wandering less. And that's what we find. And if it's the case that what you're doing during a focused attention practice, or even an open monitoring practice, and frankly, even during a loving kindness practice, is holding the goal in mind at whatever granular level, so that you're implementing moment by moment, you should see improvements in things like working memory, worse all about the goal or the intention

of holding the information active, and we see that as well. So all these hypotheses that we have regarding what we think practice is doing to these subsystems of attention, we have tasks that tap into those, and those are the ones that are showing beneficial effects. So broadly speaking, that's what it is. Now we can also look at the brain directly, right? Having people come in, come inside, MRI scanner, look at the brain while they're practicing a

mindfulness exercise, and then sort of do a pre-post across a multi-week training to see what kind of brain changes, functional changes there are, the story seems to be consistent. We see a dialing down of a brain network, which I know you've talked about, the default mode network that I asked you with, in some of its responsibilities are what we might call mind-wandering. That's dialed down overall, and then the fluidity and what we call dynamic functional connectivity between networks that have to do with focusing and holding a goal in mind is much better. So the brain itself, as well as performance, as well as self-report, suggests that these specific improvements in finding the flashlight and holding it, being broad and receptive, understanding when the mind wanders and redirecting it back, we're seeing positive evidence in support of those mechanisms.

Just since you brought up the term flashlight again, I think that now it's just a pretty good time to point out that you recorded a meditation for the 10% happier app called Find Your Flashlux. That's right. So people could actually check out how to do it and how we describe it. Let me ask a few other questions about attention. What about multitasking versus the newer... Monotasking.

Yeah, which I like a lot, monotasking, yeah. Yeah, so this is the other thing entering into this landscape of, you know, service members, sports people, business leaders, like this very go get them kind of culture. I was learning a lot about the norms and multitasking. You'd see over and over again, it's sort of kind of like a badge of honor. Like I multitask all the time. I think many of us, many people I know would say that they do this. And the first thing to say is, no, you're not doing that.

If you think you're multitasking because you're doing multiple, potentially demanding tasks simultaneously, you're wrong. You aren't. Notice we didn't say flashlights of attention. We said flashlights, singular, focus is singular. So what you're actually doing when you think you're multitasking is task switching. So you're toggling back and forth

between these two high demand tasks. Now, if the task is not high demand, like you know how to walk and you're walking, no problem. It's only in these high demand situations that you're gonna toggle back and forth. And this becomes, like the way that I like to describe it because a lot of people are like, yeah, okay fine, I'm task switching, but even that's not, what's the big deal? So I task switch. Well, think about what's happening at the level of the brain. You know, as we, as we were

talking about a little while ago, attention, it's job is to buy us information processing in favor of the privileged information. So whatever it is, the task that you're doing, the goal that you have, the focus that you're on, it recalibrates the entirety of the way the brain operates. And I like to use this kind of visual for people. Like, let's think of the brain as like a studio apartment. So now, you've got this agenda. I'm going to make, I'm going to do some meal prep.

I'm going to make a bunch of meals. I'm going to use my whole apartment essentially. My tiny apartment is like a kitchen. And I'm going to have, I'm going to do some meal prep. I'm going to make a bunch of meals. I'm going to use my whole apartment essentially. My tiny apartment is like a kitchen and I'm going to have like my vegetables here. I'm going to do all my meal prep. You're scattered stuff around. And then you're like, it's bedtime. I got to get ready. You got to put everything away, make it into an actual bedroom so I can fall asleep, right?

Think of those as like two tasks. Getting ready for bed versus actually making food. In some sense, that's what you're doing when you're task switching. You recalibrate the entirety of the brain, the studio apartment for one task, then you got to rearrange the furniture, clean up, put everything away, and now you're going to get ready for bed. It's exhausting to go back and forth, and that's essentially that recalibration process, that toggling will do the work that is required to get you able to reconfigure the brain freeze task, and it will deplete this broader resource of attention in the process.

So you're not multitasking, you're task switching between two tasks, and a much better way to approach the whole thing is as best as you can, try to not put yourself in a task switching context if you can. And you know, a lot of leaders that I talked to about this will say, well, I can't. Like, I got to be responsive. If somebody calls me or, you know, I'm asked to do something in the middle of something else, I got to be responsive and I completely understand that. You know, that in some sense, that is a very real aspect of what leading any enterprise, you know, whether it's even your own family could mean.

Like, you got to be responsive. Then I would say be aware of the costs of task switching. You're going to be slow when you switch tasks. It's going to take you some time. So if you're in the middle of writing a report and somebody comes into your room and starts telling you stuff, maybe let them know. It'll take me a second to orient to you and really hear your words and understand them. Give me that time. So know that there's going to be a time cost and also you're much more likely to make errors when you have

to do all this switching back and forth. So know the landscape of what you're allowing yourself to do. You're going to be more error prone. You're going to slow down and you're going to exhaust yourself. So everybody should be aware that that's the case and make their best plans to try to help themselves under those circumstances. What do you personally do to help yourself, to protect yourself against the siren call of multitasking? Yeah, I mean, I try, I mean, in the same way, like if I know I have to pick up my kid at

school, I'm not gonna turn off my phone, but I've turned off all the notifications on all my social media. That's been helpful. So at least now when I have my quote unquote downtime, I'm not doing a bunch of tasks, like checking everything in every comment, and then when I'm working, I will really,

I mean, it's like you're in some sense, it is tied to a practice orientation. You know, in the same way that I want to focus on the breath and when my mind wanders, return it. The paper I'm working on is my focus. And it's like a dance where you're like, look, this is the focus. But if I know there's a paper out there

that I need to go online and search for to get the current reference, doesn't mean I'm not gonna do that. But I'm gonna be aware, I have a goal right now, which is just to get this paper and come back. Don't start shopping for a new pair of sunglasses in the middle of that. So just try to keep that protected container as best as you can and roam within that as you need to.

And some sense people talk about self-care. This is self-care. It's like you're caring for yourself as you're working in the most fundamental way. And it shouldn't be a badge of honor to do something else like multitask and force yourself to be slow and make errors and be exhausted all the time. Doesn't help anyone. Let me ask you about something I know you're right about in the book, which is confirmation bias.

What is confirmation bias and what have you found in this realm? So confirmation bias is essentially this tendency of mine, a kind of built in brain bias or default tendency, if you will, that whatever you hold to be the case, whatever you hold to be true or the story you've got regarding a particular situation, for example, you're going to highlight to yourself the aspects consistent with that story. And that tends to happen very often. And it can be quite consequential when it's tied to what you think is occurring in a complex situation, like for example, a potential scenario of military combat, which is one of the

examples I provide in the book. Well, I know you referenced this name earlier, General Wall Piot how he was in a situation where he was thinking about bombing an encampment in Afghanistan that they believed was probably Taliban. It turned out it wasn't, and he and his team were able to get over the confirmation bias they saved or they didn't kill a lot of people. That's right. That's what I mean by it's can have very real life or death consequences when it's noted

and actually not followed. I mean, the problem with all kinds of biases is that they're default tendencies. They're not reality. They're not actually even picking up on reality. So what this brought up for us, and this was a story that he had conveyed quite a while ago that related to a lot of what we were trying to do with our mindfulness training program is actually give soldiers, as well as many other kind of first responders, this understanding that there are going to be these default

tendencies of your mind. And what do you actually want to be able to be successful with your performance, with your job? And every one of them would say, I want to know what's actually happening. Of course, I don't want to be in my deluded view, or whatever somebody else's determined is the case. I want to know the reality. And so that kind of brings up a lot of really interesting discussions of how do you make a mind that is more capable of getting the broad data of an experience so that the story is not clouding your ability to see what is. That's where it goes back to something we talked about a while ago, this notion of meta-awareness.

And some of the challenges to meta-awareness are that we're not implementing it because we are too fused with the story we've got, so that just like, you know, essentially what happens when we have a story, and this happened with the scenario you just described, all the intel that they were getting was being fed into the story that they already had, that the people that they were approaching were combatants. There are people that they should be fighting, the Taliban in that case. So they kept interpreting all the data in that way.

And what actually saved them was one soldier who had this scout mindset, who was actually observing what is. And he said, you know, he got to the kind of front to where he'd actually make visual contact. And he said, there are not many weapons. There are no weapons here, which is a very odd thing. So what he was doing is picking up the data that was a mismatch between the story that they had,

and then the reality that he saw. So he was able to break himself out of the story, which gave him more raw data than he realized, oh my gosh, this is just a better one tribe. And in fact, that's what General Pied describe later. It's like having this very angry woman come out when they tackle the people in front of these buildings, kind of saying, what are you doing to my family members here?

We're just trying to make our way through these pastures. So it was consequential that they broke out of their story. The danger was that if they didn't have somebody that saw the raw data of what was occurring, they might not have. And so the way in which you might introduce practices that promote the way in which you might introduce practices that promote seeing what is or dropping the story are very much those that are tied to open monitoring or a technical term we might use de-centering, which is essentially practicing defusing yourself from the story that you have, taking a bird's eye view, if you will. So an open monitoring practice, we often talk about, you know, either being a mountain or the observer of your experience to let sensory content, mental content come and go.

But if we're so in the story, it's like if we're looking at a movie, if we're watching a movie and we are in the movie instead of noticing, oh, it's a screen and I'm watching this and it's one of many things that could be on the screen. We won't know the limitations of that fused reality. And so de-centering can actually really, really help break out of that fog. So much more of my conversation with Dr. Amishi Jot right after this.

Another very interesting nugget you shared via text that I think might be worth exploring, these are your words, simulating mode versus mindful mode. What do you have in mind there when you're talking about that? Yeah, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts too. So what we just talked about with the confirmation bias is in some sense connected to what we might call simulation mode. So it ends up, you know, we were talking about the default mode network. The default mode is this network of brain regions in the middle line of our brain, that happens to be more active when we are going internal,

when we're reflecting on self-related thoughts, when we're actually reflecting on memories that have occurred, planning, thinking about the past. So it's a very complex set of things that's happening. The thing that kind of yokes it all together is that we are not only time traveling, we are in some cases mind traveling. And all of this means it's not tied to the data that's occurring moment to moment.

It is a simulated reality. The brain is playing out stuff from things that are internally held to plan for the future or reflect on the past or perspective taken, put myself in, you know, in your shoes of like, what is Dan thinking right now? So time traveling and mind traveling are really simulations of the mind. And the more I started learning about this brain network, this default mode network,

because in many ways, oftentimes the mindfulness literature, it's almost like it's the evil network, we're trying to bash down, right? It's like, you gotta turn down the volume on that terrible default mode, because you're mind-wondering, well, mind-wondering is not a problem. Spontaneous thought is not a problem. Simulating is not a problem, unless it's interfering with what you're trying to do.

And in the case of what we were just talking about, essentially, all the data that these soldiers were being fed on the mountaintop was feeding into a simulation. And so it was coloring their view of the reality that was in front of them. That's when it can become problematic. We rely on our simulation capabilities. It's what makes us uniquely human. So there's nothing intrinsically problematic about it. But what I started to realize is like, oh my goodness, like everything that we talk about

with regard to simulations, their immersive nature, their transporter nature, their enticing nature, and often their self-related nature, is what we are attempting to cultivate against in some ways with mindfulness practices. And that's why I was curious about your own thoughts regarding this kind of internal orchestra or movie that can play and how it relates to what you've experienced in your journey with mindfulness as well. Well, I love what you just said that we make mind wandering or simulation the enemy in meditation. It's not about squashing all of that because that's just impossible, especially for beginners. You know, maybe people who are really good at concentration practices can

squash it for periods of time, but really the goal is not to end mind-wondering. It's to create a different relationship to it. And that, I think, is so important for people to understand, especially beginning meditators who are tempted to tell themselves a story after they see how distractable they are, that they are uniquely unable to meditate. That's the worst when I hear that. It's like, my mind is so busy. What's the first of all, I was like, no, you're human, that's the nature of your mind.

It was built for that kind of distractibility. But just to kind of flesh out terminology, if you don't mind geeking out with me a bit. So essentially what we're talking about, what I just described as simulation mode, is this spontaneous thought that arises in the mind. And yes, that is absolutely a default of the brain. It happens constantly.

And there's all kinds of reasons we think it might be happening. Some that are actually tied to normal healthy functions and memory generation processes. It's needed. We need that simulation to be happening because we can't take our experiences and turn them into memories if we don't kind of replay what has occurred over and over again. So oftentimes, you'll notice in a practice or just in your life that like if you just, let's say, you know, this happened

to me the other day where I was looking for a rug or something and I just, a rug after a rug after a rug and then like, trying to go to bed at night, I was just like seeing his rugs in my head. And like, what the heck is going on? But then I have a little heartfulness. It's like, well, of course, you just spent the last whatever, 30 minutes browsing through rugs. That's the mental content that your brain is still

sort of sifting through. And the replay function is what allows certain drugs to be remembered, and may even affect my choices of which one I'll choose to buy. Very normal thing that the brain does. I mean, forget about purchasing drugs, but any experience you have, it'll help. So what we call mind-wandering is in some sense just spontaneous thought that is very natural that occurs. The term mind-wand wandering is actually the technical

description is having off-task thoughts during an ongoing task. So it's already qualifying, that it's in the context of something else is going on, and it's pulling you away. So it's not just that things are happening in your mind when you're trying to get stuff done, it's that it is literally hijacking attention away. That is when it becomes problematic. And it really does become problematic. The simulation itself is not necessarily a problem. And in fact, this I think is very important. And actually, I think my mindfulness practice

has helped me with this as well. Simulating on purpose, letting your mind go wherever the heck it will is so valuable. I mean, not just kind of reflecting on it from my own practice experience, but we know that positive mood is lifted. We know that visioning is helped, you know, problem solving in some sense, deliberating, action planning. All these things are helped by allowing your mind to freely flow wherever it will. And I think one of our part of the reason we're

having a crisis of attention right now, actually, is because we are not allowing those moments to occur. You know, we can't be just standing in line and standing in line letting our mind just wander. We got our phone in our hands or just sitting on the couch and kind of one staring out out of your window. We just don't do that. And so these micro moments that we used to kind of naturally have built into our daily life, the white space, if you will, is gone. It's being consumed by our attention now needing to work. It's actually focused on a task, and that task is the content being made available to you through your technology. Right. So instead of standing online at the grocery store waiting for an elevator or just taking a walk with no device, we're scrolling or doom scrolling or just catching up on email,

optimizing every single moment. But that has a tax on the mind is what you're saying. Yeah, I would even say we're not optimizing. We're expending all of our capacity by doing this. And it's a cultural, it's like there's many reasons that drive us doing this, but it's not innocuous. And it actually is playing into why I think we feel overwhelmed. So often we don't allow this precious brain system to rest. And rest in some sense means there's no controlled processing. It is, I mean, I really do think about it

like my little puppy dog, like taking him to a walk in the, you know, on a leash is one thing and that's what we do most days, but some days just take him to the dog park, let him run around, like we don't do that for our minds. We just let it off leash and we don't think that has any value. It's like that's a waste of time, but it's not.

It's actually really generative and beneficial. So just changing that cultural understanding, I think, is very important. And this is different from meditation. Well, the reason I'm saying it's tied to meditation is because what my meditation practice allowed me to do is check in with my attention more often and get the insight that, oh, wow, I'm always using it. You know, I'm always

task focused, even if I'm having challenges with it and need to, when wander away and come back. And what if I just didn't have a goal? Like, what would that even feel like to just not have a goal? Now early on, when I would play around with that, what would happen is, roomative loops would come up, worry would come up, catastrophizing would come up, and I would be stuck. So what I consider to be the free flow of my conscious experience wasn't. Now I was getting stuck in certain mental landscapes that were driving my mood down. And what my meditation practice allowed me to do is when I would check in with being stuck

when I thought I was just letting the mind wander and I could kind of unhook myself so that I could say, oh, look at that, that thoughts come up a lot. Or I'm just stuck in this space. How about just letting go a little bit? Like it almost let me reset as I was mind wandering because I had the tools of being able to have an open monitoring orientation. And then I could actually get back to having the mind flow where it will

without feeling so bound by certain neighborhoods of the mind where I was spending a lot of time and driving myself kind of crazy. Just so I'm clear here, there are periods of time where you're dedicated to the task of meditation. But then there are periods of your life where you're saying, I'm not going to dedicate myself to a task at all. I'm going to take a walk or I'm going to lie in the couch or I'm going to lie on the grass or whatever it is and let my mind wander. And what your meditation practice did was allow you to not get so stuck in mood depressing cul-de-sac.

Yes, or even problem-solving in a way that wasn't necessary in the moment. Like right now, do I need to figure out exactly how I'm going to get from LAX to where I need to go? Like, is that really the thing I need to do now? So it's like certain things just pop up and you can ask yourself, necessary right now or not, and that sense of control, and not even, I wouldn't even call it control because I wasn't controlling anything,

but it's like I could look at it without feeling compelled. I could make choices more freely because I could look at things very directly because I was aware of what was arising even as I was letting it flow. And sometimes yes, this was the right time to make my evening travel plans. And other times it was like, no, just don't worry about that right now. Just let it go wherever

it's going to go. You know, just sort of like, let it be. And it's so funny because I actually, I was writing that to you about simulation mode and, and we got into this conversation just now about sort of letting spontaneous thought happen. But it actually has been bringing up for me the notion of enlightenment. And I'll tell you, it is not something I, and I've been practicing meditation for quite some time now, but enlightenment has never been sort of a goal for me and at all. In fact, that sort of whole framing has just not been

on my mind, but what I loved about kind of what I was noticing in my own attempts at, you know, playing around with this like allowing for this kind of mental white space loved about what I was noticing in my own attempts at playing around with this, like, allowing for this kind of mental white space, is feeling that freedom to choose where my mind went next. And I often hear of people talking about liberation as sort of this state of what potentially enlightenment is, et cetera. And so I was curious about your thoughts of what you think that might mean, if you think it has value and how it might relate to this moment to moment freedom,

we can potentially experience. Well, as a verifiably unenlightened person, I can't speak from a position of expertise here, but the funny thing about enlightenment is, as soon as you start talking about enlightenment, you're in an argument because they're all the different traditions disagree about what enlightenment actually is. The classical Buddhist, old school Buddhist understanding of what enlightenment is, is the uprooting of greed, hatred, and delusion,

the uprooting of all afflictive emotions. How does that classical definition track with what you're describing? If you look at the nature of what minds tend to do, and now I'm getting into a totally different terrain, but if you're willing to go here, it's kind of a fun conversation to have. And when it takes back to the lab for a moment, so one of the things that we've been doing in the lab is very interested in this notion of mind wandering. And one of my post-docs has been innovating this line of work, Tony Zonesco. He's innovating this line of work that has to do with brain micro-states. So now we're not just looking at people's responses of whether they're mind wandering

or not. But we're looking at brain dynamics at the level of, let's say, 20 distinct states that you can see through the voltage topography of the brain within one second. So you've got like profiles of the brain that look distinct and let's just say 20 different ways within a second. And then you see these patterns repeat over and over again. And we can look to see how those brain states show up when people are on task or off task and you can actually look at the fluctuations between those states.

And what we know about them is whatever this prior state was, is likely to lead to what the next state is. So there's a temporal contingency in brain dynamics. And that's sort of the nature of this interconnected, contingent reality that we're talking about. And so now we're really connecting the dots. But if you think about what afflictive states are, they have that quality of lingering and stickiness.

And in some sense, it relates to what I'm saying about letting your mind wander in a liberative sense, because you're actively aware of that sticky quality, and you can do something to unstick yourself moment by moment. So my decision to not stay in a hell loop of my own making, whether it's depression or anxiety or fantasy, I can actually unhook myself. And the prediction would be, and we haven't tested this out yet, but it's something that Tony and I have certainly talked about. If that's really the case, this contingent nature of brain states may actually categorically shift as a function of practice so that we're seeing that people are less contingent, potentially,

when they don't need to be contingent, and maybe even more contingent when they choose to be in a particular state. So that's how it relates to me. And I really did take us on quite a journey there, but that's how it relates to me. And I really did take us on quite a journey there, but that's how I connect the dots on what I was seeing is like the freedom aspect of the mind and how it relates to some of these views on what enlightenment is. Yeah, I mean, there is freedom for sure in noticing that you're stuck, you're caught and changing the channel. And that changing of the channel doesn't mean you're pushing it away per se, but you're seeing a caught up in a useless group of rumination. I don't need to be here anymore. I can take my flashlight and shine it elsewhere.

You can, but I don't think that's what it's happening in the context of, I mean, if I had to guess, I don't think it's a changing the channel situation for really adept practitioners. I think it's a desolution of the state, like really allowing it to percolate away without having to actively do anything about it. You don't, the changing the channel is probably what I'm doing right now,

because I'm saying, I don't have to do that. I can do something else. So I am flipping the flashlight around, very productive, but different categorically than whatever brain processes are probably allowing for dissolving of whatever that was, that particular state was. Well, I wonder whether it's possible we're saying the same thing. And I honestly don't know, but I have heard Joseph Goldstein, my meditation teacher, talk about changing the channel. And I don't know exactly what he means by that, but I think it's possible he may mean

letting anger, depression, planning arise and pass on its own. Instead of a wrenching, it could be both. I mean, he might mean with by changing the channel, yeah, look, I've just see that I'm on the 18th time of running through all the horrible ramifications of a misflight, and yeah, I'm gonna focus on something else, and that's our wrenching of your flashlight in one direction. The other way in which the channel could be changed

is just the mind that doesn't cling as much allows these things to come and go. Yeah. And I've been playing around with that just in my own practice whenever I do a body scan. It's not a practice we talked about during this conversation, but even with a body scan, right? Where you're essentially, I think of the body scan and the way that I guide that practice

is like you're taking the flashlight and now you're kind of scanning the body in a systematic manner versus the big toe that it may be the top part of the foot, et cetera, right? So when you're going from one body part to the next, what is preceding versus what is prior or something like that? Like what should I be thinking about the next body part? And that's what's gonna be the focus of my attention? Is it really like a flashlight or is it that I'm letting the thing fade away

and now I'm moving forward? So I mean, I think it's just, you know, I happen to, I happen to really like this topic of attention and how it works. And, and with learning about mindfulness, I've really started exploring sort of the phenomenology. And surprisingly, it often does relate to the questions that we can ask in the lab. But these are, these are really, I think, part of the spectrum of, of what comes up when you think about advanced practitioners and what they're doing, too.

I certainly would say I'm nowhere near that terrain, but at least we can start using vocabulary that may make sense to think about what phenomenologically is going on. This is where Dr. Jaws research goes from the work-a-day world to the deep end. I love it. Before I let you go, can you just plug your book and any other resources that you've put out into the world that people might want to access if they want to learn more? Yeah, absolutely. So my book, Peak Mind, I really wrote it as sort of a gift to take everything we've learned in the lab with all these high-stress, high-demand populations and just make it available for everybody to benefit from what we've learned.

And you can check out our research and more about the book at my website, amishi.com, if you remember my first name, amisci.com. And if you want to check out a cool meditation practice, tied to the book, 10% happier app. We'll have it on it. Amishi, thank you very much.

Appreciate it. Thank you. It's a lot of fun. Thanks again to Amishi Ja. Great to talk to her always. 10% happier is produced by Justin Davy Gabriel Zuckerman, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson, DJ Cashmere's our senior producer.

Marissa Schneidermann is our senior editor, Kevin O'Connell, is our director of audio and post-production, and Kimi Regler is our executive producer, Alicia Mackie, leads our Marketing and Tony Magyar, is our Director of Podcasts, finally Nick Thorburn of Islands, wrote our theme. If you want more on the topic of attention, go to the show notes, where we've added a link to a previous episode with Johann Hari, who talks a lot about how to stay focused. and add free on Amazon music. Before you go, tell us about yourself

by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.