The One You Feed - How to Work with the Craving Mind with Dr. Jud Brewer

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Key Concepts: The roles of rewards and punishments and the importance of understanding how the habit loop cycle works in adjusting behavior. Understanding cravings and addictions and strategies that can be used to work through our habitual behavior patterns. How bringing awareness and curiosity is a crucial component in training our mind to deal more effectively with cravings. To learn more about this episode and Dr. Jud Brewer. click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In case you're just recently joining us, or however long you've been a listener of the show, you may not realize we have years and years of incredible episodes in our archive. We've had so many wonderful guests that we've decided to handpick one of our favorites, and it may be new to you, but if not, it's definitely worth another listen. We hope you'll enjoy this episode with Judson Brewer. Chocolate only serves as a temporizing measure when we're lonely, as compared to like reaching out and calling a friend. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance

of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction.

How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Judson Brewer, MD and PhD. He's the Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness and Associate Professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Yale University and a research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book is The Craving Mind, From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.

Hi Judd, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you on. You have a book called The Craving Mind, From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, Why we get hooked, and how we can break bad habits, which is right up my alley. And the fact that you do a lot of research on meditation and mindfulness is also really interesting to me. So I'm looking forward to getting into your work.

But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, In life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It means so much because in a nutshell, it describes how we learn to do everything that we do from tying our shoes to smoking cigarettes.

In your book, you talk about, you call it a couple of different things. One, you call it reward-based learning, and you also refer to it as a habit loop. But can you walk listeners through what that means and how that functions? Because I think it's pretty key that we understand that really before we go much further into anything else that you've got. I'd be happy to. that really before we go much further into anything else that you've got? I'd be happy to. This process was set up probably so we'd remember where food is. So I'll use food as an example.

Let's say that in our ancestors' days, they were out foraging for food. And when they found a food source that they ate the food, and when they ate the food, and it was nutritious as compared to poisonous, the signal from their stomach would send a dopamine signal in their brain that would say, remember what you ate and where you found it. And so it basically sets up this habit loop that needs three components. It needs a trigger, a behavior, and a result or a reward. So the trigger in this case would be, you know, seeing berries or something that looks nutritious, the behavior would be eating it, and then that reward would be that dopamine signal that says, hey, you know, that was good, do it again. And that really is at the heart of our behavior. You say, simply put, the more that a behavior is repeated, the more we learn to see the world a certain way through a lens that is biased based on rewards and punishments from previous actions.

Yeah, I would say we it's like we start to wear glasses and we start to see the world, you know, so that example was food, you know, learning to eat food. But in modern day where food is plentiful, that habit loop is still at play. If we're angry and we give somebody the universal sign of displeasure and we feel smug, same habit loop. Or if we're lonely and we eat a cupcake or some chocolate and we feel a little bit better, that same habit loop is at play. And so it's like we start wearing glasses that say, if I'm lonely, I should eat chocolate. In modern day, we call that subjective bias. And one of the things that really runs as a theme through the whole book is that those loops and that bias are not necessarily very useful for us in certain cases. And we don often examine them so to your point let's use the

chocolate and lonely i'm lonely so i eat chocolate and the reward is that i'm less lonely maybe that is the behavior early on but but very often over time it doesn't really deliver the reward or the reward isn't really solving the real problem. Yeah, absolutely. You've really nailed it. So, you know, chocolate only serves as a temporizing measure when we're lonely, as compared to like reaching out and calling a friend. Yeah, I want to explore that further. But I want to talk a little bit about a couple of concepts that you talk about in regards to addiction. You say addiction is continued use despite adverse consequences. And you go on to say that talking about the way that addicts were trying to avoid something more often. Rarely did one of them say that it felt great to go on a

three-day cocaine binge, blow hundreds of dollars or more a day and sleep it off for the next few days. They described their reward-based learning as a way to avoid situations, to numb their pain, mask unpleasant emotions, and most often succumb to their cravings, scratching that damn itch. And one of the things that you'd follow that up with is talking about how every time we give into a craving, we reinforce that loop. Yeah. So this is that feeding bit that goes back to the story of the wolf. We feed the wolf, it keeps coming back for more. And the same is true when we drink, when we're trying to numb ourselves or when we eat. I had a patient who she formed a binge eating pattern where she

did eat entire large pizzas in one sitting, but she learned that pattern. She started feeding that pattern literally around the age of eight. And she'd been feeding it for about 20 years when I first saw her. I'm a recovering alcoholic heroin addict. so I've got plenty of miles on this particular subject. And, you know, one of the things for me that I often stay sober off of just never having to get sober again, I just, that's enough for me. Like, I think back to how awful that is and how awful cravings are. are. And I've used the analogy often that cravings are like stray cats. If you feed them, they kind of keep coming back. But if you just don't, sooner or later, they get the message and go elsewhere. And you talk about that a little bit in the book about how, yes, the craving will be there in the beginning, but it will, in essence, if you don't feed it, it will burn itself out. Yes. It sounds like you've seen that. I've certainly experienced that myself

in a number of different realms. And we've even done clinical studies where we've seen this bear out in the data. In one of our smoking studies, we found that at the end of treatment, we gave people mindfulness training. And at the end of treatment, we gave people mindfulness training. And at the end of treatment, a number of them had quit smoking. And their cravings were still at the same level as the people that hadn't quit smoking. Yet over time, as they stopped fueling that fire of craving, you know, they stopped adding cigarettes as fuel to the fire, their cravings went down over time. And it was about three months before we saw a statistically significant difference between those two groups. I got sober the first time at age 24 and stayed sober about eight years and then went out and then came back. And the first time that I got sober, the desire to use left me fairly quickly. in a situation similar to mine where they achieved a long period of abstinence from something.

And when they tried it the second time, it was harder in some way. And I'm curious if you have any idea why that might be, or there's any data, or is that just anecdotal? I guess it's not nonsense because it's my experience, but you know. Yeah, I don't think it's nonsense. A lot of my patients have, you know, when I'm seeing them, they're like on their fourth or fifth recovery attempt. So I'm trying to think if there's anybody specifically that had their second one, you know, like you and this other person that you described. The one thing I can say is that it kind of gets entrenched a little bit more. And it can also have to do with our brains developing certain habit patterns over time. So, you know, after about the age of 22 or so, you know, certain, there's a lot of pruning that happens in our prefrontal cortex in particular. And so, that's a nice critical period.

And then after that, things can get a little more locked in and the brain is still amazingly plastic so i'm wondering if you know you have these eight years and then after that you went back to using and then got sober again is that right yeah i used for maybe three years yeah so that can be you know i'm just speculating i'll give you some baseless speculation, some BS. So baseless speculation there says, you know, there's something with that second piece where it gets locked in a bit and then probably a combination of circumstances and your brain being a little bit more mature and different that it gets locked in a little bit more and it's harder, you know, harder to quit where it, and maybe it's, you know, I'm anthropomorphizing the brain, but it's kind of

like, oh, you know, he's, he's, he might be serious this time. We got to hold on. We got to kick his, kick his butt on this one. Yeah. Yep. So one of the things that you mention in the book is this idea of, we just mentioned, each time that you do the behavior, you reinforce the habit. And you taught people the idea of, you use the analogy of surfing. Cravings are like waves, and people could surf those cravings. So, talk to me about what that means and how that works. How does somebody do that? Yeah, it's a good question. So often cravings, and you tell me if this has been the case for you, these cravings feel so big that they feel like one, they're going to crush us and two, they're going to last forever. And so that's actually a cognitive distortion that our brain is making where it says, this is terrible, make it go away as quick as possible. And I'm going to tell you that this is really, really bad, and it's going to last forever to convince you to get it over with quickly. We can actually help people break it down and see that these are just cognitive distortions. And this is one thing that mindfulness training helps with.

These cravings, they come and they crest and eventually they go away. So one thing that I've asked a lot of my patients is, well, have you had a craving that's lasted forever? And at first they're like, no, wait, because it would still be here. It lasted forever. So that's a great way to kind of step back and say, okay, because it would still be here. It lasted forever. So that's a great way to kind of step back and say, okay, these cravings do come and go. It's easier to look at it after the wave is gone. But when you're in the middle of it, I like the analogy of a wave because this big wave comes up. And if we don't have something to keep us afloat like a surfboard, we're going to get crushed by it. So we can

actually use awareness to help us stay afloat. And so the way that we help people surf these cravings is give them kind of a surfboard or a buoyancy of awareness, which helps them actually turn toward the direct experience of what cravings actually feel like. So the way to do that is simply by turning, instead of running away, you know, and trying to distance ourselves from the craving, it's actually paradoxically turning toward them and asking, okay, what's this feel like in my body right now? And then when we start to break it down into, okay, it's tightness, it's tension, it's burning, it's clenching, it's this and that, that actually helps us stay on top of the wave as it gets big, as it crests, and as it goes away, as compared to getting crushed by it. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Oh, no, really. Yeah, really. No, really.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You did a study where you tried mindfulness based habit change um but you brought people in and you said all right we're going to have this mindfulness training group and then we're going to try what

was at the time i don't know if it still is but at the time it was this freedom from smoking course that the american lung association kind of considered the state-of-the-art way of getting people to stop smoking. And the course that you developed and that you worked with people on was twice as effective as the other course. And that's using the technique largely that we just talked about, this idea of surfing the craving, which is really, to your point, is paying attention to it instead of trying to avoid it, instead of trying to make it go away, is to simply just go, okay, what is this? What's it like? And you then try to deconstruct that and say, what was it about the mindfulness therapy that was so effective? So let me break this down and try. And so you did another study where you found that an acronym for RAIN, and I'll let you talk about what RAIN is in a second, but that that method was at the heart of what really led to the effectiveness of what you were doing.

Yeah, and I'll talk about it. And we've actually even extended this beyond smoking to even eating, helping people work with binge eating and emotional eating. But the acronym is called RAIN because it starts with R, where you have to recognize the craving. If we're an autopilot, we don't recognize it, forget about it. It's going to crush us. So that's the R is for recognize. The A is for accept or allow it to be there, or even acknowledge. So instead of running away from it saying, okay, here's this craving and even, you know, come on, let's do this. And the I stands for investigate. And this is the most critical piece. I think of investigation as bringing curiosity to what the craving feels like. And this is where we're turning toward that experience, like I just mentioned. So we're

investigating what does this feel like in my body? Is it tightness? Is it tension? Is it burning? Is it heat? Is it clenching? Is it whatever? And then the N stands for note. And we simply note those physical sensations from moment to moment. And that RAIN acronym helps us start to see, oh, these are physical sensations. And from moment to moment, those sensations might be here, they might change a little bit, but they come and go. And it helps kind of remind us that cravings are made up of these little sensations. They come and go, they're not permanent. And this is where we got actually at our follow-up, when we did our follow-up data point, we actually had five times the quit rates of this gold standard treatment for smoking. And with this, we tested this even with an app-based mindfulness training for eating called Eat Right Now. We actually got

a 40% reduction in craving-related eating after just a couple of months. So, you know, we're starting to see this converge in a number of different behaviors that share this common habit loop. Yeah, I want to go back for a second to the habit loop where you talk about trigger, behavior, reward. Actually, first, I want to say those results are amazing. And I'm not terribly surprised by them, but it is a remarkable improvement over the other types of approaches. But you talk about this idea of the trigger behavior and reward. And what's so interesting to me is that a lot of what you're talking about is recognizing that the craving is happening and that that behavior is designed to bring about a reward.

And that if we can recognize that that is the case, it can make such a big difference. Because my girlfriend said this really, really well, is she started to realize that eating had an emotional component. She went, when I thought that what I really wanted was a cupcake, there was only one answer in the world for that, and that was a cupcake. When I realized that what it was, was that I was lonely or I was sad, there's lots of answers for loneliness or sadness. And I just thought that was such a wise way of realizing what's happening underneath. And the habit loop is so important because we've got a trigger, loneliness, sadness, whatever it is. behavior that we think leads to this reward, but you can insert a different behavior in the middle there. I think it was Charles Duhigg in his book, The Power of Habit, talks about this, that one of the easiest ways to change a habit is you still have the trigger, you still have the reward, you change the behavior in the middle. Yes, that is one way to change it. And this is where it

gets really interesting because with addiction treatment, often there's a substitute behavior. Like with smoking, if you eat candy instead of smoking, it fits right within Dewey's paradigm. You just put in a different behavior. It gets even more interesting when we bring in behaviors that are simply awareness. So mindfulness, if you think of awareness as a substitute behavior, it provides two different things. One is it's intrinsically available, so we don't need to go outside of ourselves to get something like to eat candy or a cupcake, for example. But also the reward is different. So there's this excitement that comes when we're anticipating eating candy or chocolate or a cupcake. But the curiosity itself has a different feel to it that's more of an open, expanded feeling than that of the contracted excitement

of I'm about to eat chocolate or candy. And that reward in itself, this is something we can all explore. If you look at the feeling of contraction that comes from excitement versus the expansion that comes from joy, the joy actually feels better. And so our brains start to learn, you know, they're always comparing what's a better reward. Well, that joy is actually more rewarding than the excitement that comes with anticipating eating candy or something like that. And so that in itself can become more intrinsically rewarding and feed on itself in a way that doesn't depend on things outside of us, which can be very helpful. I agree. And I do think if you look at what I referenced with Charles Duhigg's model, that is the one thing about it that I have found to be potentially challenging is that

if you're after the same reward, it doesn't always work that way. You can't just go, if the reward I'm after is excitement, right? And you're used to getting that from, you know, any number of illicit behaviors, you don't get that same excitement by substituting playing Scrabble in the middle or something, right? It doesn't work the same way. And so that's what I really like about what you're talking about. And kind of leads to right where I wanted to go next, which is this concept of excitement versus curiosity or aliveness. And you quote a Burmese meditation teacher who says, in their quest for happiness, people mistake excitement of the mind for real happiness. And you go on to kind of talk about

your own experience with that, about how you sort of discovered that yourself over time on meditation retreats and different things. Yeah, it took me a while. Yeah, me too. Work in progress. So that was Sayadaw Upanditu, who's this Burmese master. And I just really love that quote. I think it's from his book called In This Very Life. And it highlights something that I had really not noticed before, which was I thought that the highest level of happiness was like, you know, that kiss or the roller coaster or the mountain bike ride or this or that, you know, that excitement. And it wasn't until I actually discovered the really blissful joy, the peace that comes from simply being, and actually curiosity taps into that same thing, that I was blown away by how

much more rewarding that was. Yeah, you talk about how, and this gets back to what I was saying before about examining the reward and seeing if it's really working. If what we're after by doing these various behaviors is a change of consciousness in a positive way, right, which is, you know, what it's all sort of about is to really in addition to interrogating the craving and and the mindfulness of that but interrogating is this behavior working for what i think it is you have questions like what does this reward actually feel like how long does the feeling last does it fix whatever caused our disease in the first place you say indeed we may be mindlessly pressing our dopamine levers, thinking this is as good as it gets.

Our stress compass may be miscalibrated, or we may not know how to read it. We may be mistakenly pointing ourselves towards these dopamine-driven rewards instead of away from them. We may be looking for love in all the wrong places. And man, that is such a great description of addictive behavior is that my experience with it is that they all work in the beginning. There's a reason that we become addicted to things. They do something very positive. They provide what we're looking for. They provide that change of consciousness in a positive way. The problem with

them all is they just all become maladaptive over time. It doesn't work anymore. And yet that habit loop, as you talk about, is so ingrained that we are unable to just even see that. Our minds become habituated, our receptors downregulate, and then we start chasing that high as compared to being high. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman

reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk for a second about that idea of excitement, because you say excitement brings

with it a restlessness and a contracted urge for more. Joy that results from curiosity is smoother and open rather than contracted. And I think the word contraction is so interesting. We had Michael Pollan on not too long ago, and you feature prominently in his book. I had actually read your book, because you and I planned to do this like six months ago. And, you know, I had read your book before, but he and I talked a lot about that idea of contraction, about how a lot of what our consciousness does is just contract down upon itself. It reduces what comes in. And for me, that was what addiction was all about, was I felt so sort of disconnected from everything that those things open that consciousness up. But that's another effect that meditation and mindfulness can often have, is to take us to a state that is not contracted. And you share in the book that for you, you realized after a certain point that whether it was good feelings that you were after, you were chasing, whether they were bad feelings, that all these things had

in common that contraction, that sort of shutting down a little bit of our consciousness to a smaller focal point. Yeah, I was chasing a lot of different things. And it's amazing, you know, I probably could have written many more chapters in that book, but many of those chapters were based on my own experience, like addicted to distraction, addicted to thinking, addicted to love, all this stuff. And it just seemed like that was the best stuff on earth until I realized that it wasn't. Right. So let's talk a little bit about curiosity, because I find curiosity to be a very useful trait in a lot of ways. But let's talk about curiosity would be the opposite of curiosity when we kind of think we know, right? And so we're not curious at all. And so, you know, if I ask you a question and you say, oh, I know the answer. And I say, oh, that's not the right answer. Do you feel contracted or do you feel expanded? Well, probably contracted. Yeah. Because it's like, well, no, I know,

you know, it's like, so that we can kind of use that to kind of calibrate this, this conversation even. And so we're not, we're not out there exploring. We're really just probably locking ourselves into our position, ready to defend it. I don't know. The image that comes up is like, you know, we build a castle or a fort around whatever our ideas are, or whatever our feelings or our sensations are, and then we try to protect those. And actually, you know, this reminds me of some work that Carol Dweck did probably 20 or 30 years ago around fixed versus growth mindset. You're probably familiar with that where you know we kind of think this is who i am you know whether it's um i'm a i'm a cupcake addict or i'm a whatever this is who i am so

we're kind of locked into that and then anything that we don't explore any other possibilities but that that growth mindset is where we're open oh yeah and this is where curiosity comes in it's like oh do i really need this cupcake right now and then or is it am i lonely like you talked about your girlfriend pointing out and when we're curious we're actually open to literally explore other possibilities and so you know if we're lonely we can actually see it's not just a cupcake, it's a cupcake, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this. And the curiosity is what helps us step back and say, well, it's actually needed right now. And it actually feels great to be curious. Yeah, it makes me think of that old Suzuki quote, in the beginner's mind, there are

many possibilities and the experts, there are many possibilities and the experts, there are few. But this also applies a lot to meditation and mindfulness, right? Because for me, the experiences of meditation and mindfulness go the best when what I'm doing is trying to sort of just what's happening, Pay attention to what's happening. Once I get into this is what I expect to happen, or this is what meditation is supposed to be like, or my mind is supposed to be quiet, it's not enjoyable and it's not productive. But if I can get out of that into the curious, what is my experience like? It changes everything. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's what beginner's mind is all about.

This makes me think of something else that you wrote. You say, it doesn't take any work. Since awareness is always available, we can simply rest in being aware. Excitement, on the other hand, requires something to happen to us or requires us to procure something that we want. We have to do something to get what we want. I just love the way you wrote that. But I also now want to take that to the idea of the default mode network. And the idea that that seems to have something to do with also whether we are doing or not doing something. So the default mode network, just for a little bit of background, it's this network of brain regions that's involved in self-referential processing, which is just a fancy word, which

means thinking about ourselves. So basically, you know, whenever we're worried about what somebody's thinking about us, or we're ruminating, or we're planning in the future, or we're worrying about things we did in the past, we're most likely to be activating this network of brain regions. And in one sense, the default mode network is active when we're doing something as in, we're doing our lives, right? You know, which is this constant thing that we're, you know, it's always running in the back of our head, not being focused on a particular task. That's not what we're talking about. Because that tends to shut down the default mode network, right? Absolutely. You're talking about doing in the sense of trying to make something happen as it relates to our self, or our conception of ourself. Yeah, it's kind of like

thinking about me, how is this affecting me? If somebody says, oh, you know, you look tired, and then I start worrying, oh, do I look tired? It's not exactly a task, but it certainly is my brain doing something. So that network of brain regions gets activated when we're worrying, when we're planning, and even when we're craving. There've been a number of studies ranging from chocolate to cigarettes to gambling to cocaine that activate regions of this default mode network when people are just shown pictures of those activities. Because they trigger rumination and they trigger craving. They trigger anticipation of getting. And they trigger craving. They trigger anticipation of getting.

That's a kind of preparing even for action, if you want to think of it that way. Our brain starts thinking, oh, and anticipating, yeah, let's do this. So the cupcake becomes the only solution, as you put it beautifully earlier. And that's actually kind of a fixed mindset, if you think about it. We're fixating, we're zooming in, we're honing in, and we're going for it. The contrast to that is curiosity, being open. And we've done some studies with fMRIs where you can measure brain activity. We've even done some with EEG where we can compare the doing of or getting caught up. Maybe it's more accurate to say getting caught up in our experience

because we get caught up in self-referential thinking. We get caught up in rumination. We get caught up in craving. That caught-upness actually has a contracted feel to it as well, right? Right. Whereas curiosity, which has that expanded feeling to it, is what deactivates the default mode network, or at least the one region that we've been studying called the posterior cingulate cortex. And so curiosity, different types of meditation, but I would say that anything that leads to an expansion

is probably deactivating this default mode network. And so you can think of it as this binary, you know, we're contracting when we're caught up, we're expanding when we're letting go. And that correlates with toggling of this brain activity. It increases when we're contracted, it decreases when we're letting go. There's a spiritual teacher, Adi Ashanti, that we've had on the show a few times. And he has a saying that I mentioned to Michael Pollan in our conversation. And I just think it applies to this, which is he describes the ego simply as that's all it is. It is just

a contraction. It's less a thing than it is a thought process, a way of the brain working, which is an interesting way to think about it. And of course, all your studies where you put people, hook people up to these devices and then measure what happens as they meditate and do different things is totally fascinating. I try to do a little of that with the consumer EEG devices, which just doesn't work. But the technology just isn't there. But I find that so fascinating that you can do that. And one of the studies you talk about in the book that's so interesting is working with people meditating and noticing that when they drop deeper into meditation, we see this decrease in the default mode network. But that as part of what you have them do is they can then check how they're doing.

And the minute they pull out of the meditation to check, how am I doing? Boom, you see the default mode network, you know, jump right back up. Yeah, because it's about how am I doing? Exactly, exactly. And they get caught up in, wow, look, look oh i'm doing uh i was doing a great job right right exactly well i like that that you mentioned that adi ashanti mentions this contraction is the ego because that's really how you know i think of um right now my working hypothesis is that the experiential self.

So I think there are different aspects of self. So there's this conceptual self, you know, like, oh, I'm Judd, right? But that concept doesn't necessarily lead to a contraction. If somebody says, you know, if a cop comes to my front door and says, where's Judd? I might have a little bit of a contraction around that concept. Oh, crap. What did I do? So there's this concept of me that's very different than the experience of me. But I think what, I don't want to put words in Agassiz's mouth, but I would say my own words there would be that that contraction tells us this is me, right? And so if he's talking about the ego being that contraction, I totally agree.

And we even have a neural correlate for that now with the posterior cingulate cortex. So there may be a conceptual self and there may be an experiential self that are linked. And it makes sense that they would be linked. But that contraction is where all the trouble starts. And is that the conceptual self? No, no, no. I think it's no problem to have a concept of I'm Judd. Got it.

But it's a real problem when I start taking myself personally or when I start becoming, you know, all ego inflated around, you know, I'm Judd. Right, right. In the book, you say our brain data filled in a critical piece of the puzzle, how our thoughts, feelings and behaviors relate to us. A thought is simply a word or an image in our mind until we think it is so great and exciting that we can't get it out of our heads. A craving is just a craving unless we get sucked into it. How we relate to our thoughts and feelings makes all the difference. Yeah. And that contraction is that relationship, which is like holding on. Oh, this is me, or I got to have that. Yeah. One of the things in Michael Pollan's book

that I found, I found the whole thing to be fascinating. But at one point, he relates going to your lab and getting hooked up to all this equipment and meditating and you're measuring him and it's all fine. And then he says, hang on a second, I want to try something. And he goes and he recounts in his own mind, one of his psychedelic experiences. And in that moment, you see the same thing happen that happens with experienced meditators, which is that default mode network kind of drops offline. And I just thought that that was fascinating that just recalling that state of mind of openness, of lack of contraction, just recalling that state of mind had a similar effect to what we would assume is happening while he's on the psychedelic. Yeah, this is really interesting. You know,

is happening while he's on the psychedelic. Yeah, this is really interesting. You know, the ancient term for mindfulness, the word is sati, which literally means to remember. Yeah. And so it's interesting, I think, with psychedelics, and Michael and I have had some great conversations about this. I think psychedelics can kind of show us this place that we always have access to, yet we don't know that.

And we don't necessarily have to be tripping on a psychedelic to access these places. We can actually just go back and have that memory, and then we're there, right? It's like, you know, if you go back to some really powerful memory that you've had, it really feels like you're there. Well, why can't we do that with a psychedelic experience and then be back in that space? Now, the interesting piece there is when we're back in that space, we can learn to do that without tripping on the mushrooms. Right. Yeah. And I think that's the really interesting part of that work. And what I found so fascinating about his book was, you know, I love the subtitle of it was, what this teaches is about the way our brain works. I'm not getting it exactly, but, you know, it's much wordier than that. But that was the essence of it. And, you know, all these things are pointing at, whether it be psychedelics, whether it be meditation, mindfulness, you know, a variety of different techniques are all about that expansion. They're all back to that idea of expansion. And, and there being lots of different ways to do that. Here's another interesting tidbit. Psychedelics are not addictive.

But many, many other drugs are because they affect different systems, right? And so these, you know, whether it's cocaine, alcohol, heroin, or even Facebook, which has been shown to do the same thing, activate the dopamine system, which is associated with restless contraction. Whereas psychedelics induce this expansion to the point where we lose a sense of self, we lose that experiential sense of self. And meditation can do the same thing, where we expand to the point where we lose this boundary between ourself and the rest of the world, and we merge. And this is where the folks talk about non-dual experiences.

I don't assume this has been done, but maybe it has. Has there been any studies that have captured people who have a mystical experience or a non-dual experience and show that essentially that that part of the brain shuts off? The best I can say, there was a guy, Robin Carhart-Harris, who was featured also in Michael Pollan's book. He's at the University College of London, UCL, where they actually injected psilocybin, the active ingredient in mushrooms, in people's veins as they were in the fMRI scanner. It has a very rapid onset and short half-life that way, so they can capture those moments very accurately.

And they found, it was interesting because we published our first big paper on experienced meditators back in 2011. And several months later, after we'd published that, his paper came out in the same journal. And I saw that and I immediately called him and I said, this cannot be a coincidence because it was the same network of brand regions that was totally turned off. He said, yeah, I don't think it's a coincidence. That's what got me interested in actually and became friends with Roland Griffiths, who has done all this work at Johns Hopkins with psychedelics. The story is absolutely fascinating. because we could talk forever, but you and I are going to continue talking afterwards in the post-show conversation that listeners, if you're interested in getting the post-show conversations, you can get them by being a supporter of the show, oneufeed.net support. You can get access to those and you can even listen to them in your podcast player,

just like everything else. And a couple of things I want to talk about are some more of those studies, but I also want to talk about your thoughts on the types of meditation and the approaches to meditation that are most useful in bringing about this sort of more expanded mindset. So Judd, thank you so much. I loved reading the book and this has been a really fun conversation. Yeah, it's been my pleasure. Thank you. Yes. Okay. Bye. was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really Podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.