The One You Feed - Michael Taft: Meditation and Mindfulness for Geeks

Episode Date: October 13, 2015

This week we talk to Michael Taft about better mediation Michael W. Taft is an author, editor, meditation teacher, and neuroscience junkie. He is currently a meditation coach specializing in secular, science-based meditation training in corporate settings and one-on-one sessions. Michael is the author of several books, including  The Mindful Geek, and Nondualism: A Brief History of a Timeless Concept, Ego (which he co-authored), as well as the editor of such books as Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson and the upcoming The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young. He has taught at Google and worked on curriculum development for SIYLI. Michael is also an official advisor to the Therapeutic Neuroscience Lab. He was previously editor-in-chief of Being Human, a site for exploring what evolution, neuroscience, biology, psychology, archeology, and technology can tell us about the human condition, and was editorial director of Sounds True.   Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.  In This Interview Michael and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable How it takes awareness to know what wolf we are feeding Learning to meditate on emotional states Defining meditation The difference between meditation and mindfulness Making the unconscious conscious The misconceptions of meditation How meditation does not mean having no thoughts The Teletubbies That meditation is not always supposed to be blissful How there are more ways to meditate than just following the breath His teacher Shinzen Young The pillars of concentration, acceptance and sensory clarity Meditation and the Flow state For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The goal of meditation is not to turn you into a Teletubby. If it was, I would do it a lot more. 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. 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 reallyknowreally.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 Michael W. Taft, author, editor, meditation teacher, and neuroscience junkie. He is currently a meditation coach specializing in secular, science-based meditation training in corporate settings and one-on-one sessions.

Michael is the author of several books, including Non-Dualism, A Brief History of a Timeless Concept, and his new book, The Mindful Geek. Hey, everybody. Just a couple quick notes before we get started. history of a timeless concept, and his new book, The Mindful Geek. slash t-shirt. And I have one spot open for the fall coaching program. So if you are interested in that, send me a note to eric at oneufeed.net. Thanks. And here's the interview with Michael Taft. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show. Hey, Eric. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited and pleased to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you for a variety of reasons. I really enjoyed your book, The Mindful Geek, Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics. I'm glad to hear it. Thanks. Yeah, I really, I think it explores mindfulness and meditation in a couple of really interesting ways. So I think we can have a great conversation about it. Before we do that,

though, let's start as we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, 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 grandson stops for a second and he thinks about it and he looks up at his grandfather and he 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. Well, I think it's such an interesting and moving parable. Like most parables, it's so simple and yet cuts right to the core of, you know, essential issues about human life. What I particularly like about this parable is the fact that there are things that we cannot control in life, all the stuff that's going to happen to us that, you know, manifest from the outside, stuff that other people do, stuff that the world does, catastrophes or blessings or whatever. And we really can't do very much to control that or change that. But what we can do is control our own, you know, reaction to it, the way that we respond to it, our own, you know, vital and compassionate and maybe intense way of reacting to that situation. And so I think that the story really points that out. Like you get to choose on a certain level,

how you respond to everything. And for me, it's in a way the essence of everything. Yeah. I mean, and I think the, the way that ties in so much to meditation, at least for me, is that the meditation has given me, um, the awareness of those choices, uh, more quickly. I think there's that old Victor Frankl quote where he says between stimulus and response, there's a space. And a lot of what I feel like, you know, meditation has done for me is increase that space so that I have time to make different choices or to direct my attention in a better way. Yeah, it does do that. And it's proven to do that scientifically.

It builds a kind of space between something occurring and your response to it. And the space gets bigger and bigger. And especially subjectively, the space gets very large. So sometimes, you know, I've been meditating for a while here, sometimes I'll hear a loud noise and be aware that I'm going to have a startle response because it's a really loud, sharp, sudden noise. But there's this long gap, subjectively long gap anyway, between hearing that noise and knowing I'm going to have a response and the startle response actually occurring. And I mean, that's on, you know, a very deep level of brain wiring that that kind of reaction's

going on. So it's, you know, this has been many, many decades of sitting, but it's still surprising when that occurs. Yep. And, you know, to the point I was just making you say in the book, when you use meditation to become more aware of what you're feeling, the unconscious or semi-conscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus. Your own motivation and drives become clearer, not just in a conceptual way, but in a way you can physically detect moment by moment throughout your day. This is the essence of emotional intelligence and it's life changing. Yes. You know, one of the most amazing things that I've ever experienced is how meditation, mindfulness meditation changed my relationship with my own emotions. It took a little while to really get in there, but I eventually realized that most emotional salient sensations are in

the body. Even though we do have a cognitive component to emotion, most of what's occurring is going on in the body. And once you can get a hold of it like that, once you realize that it's physical sensations like tightness in the belly or, you know, a feeling of upliftment in your chest or a lump in your throat or some kind of maybe tension or squint in your face, that that actually is the, you know, somatic or body component or expression of emotion and that you can meditate on that sensation, suddenly you have a handle on emotions that you never had before. And you can begin then to work with them in a new way because they're not some kind of nebulous concept or, you know, spiritual quality. They're actual physical events that you can monitor and track and have

a way of coping with. And it gives an unparalleled ability to both handle overwhelming emotion. When emotion's too big, you can work with being able to handle that giganticness and also an unparalleled sensitivity.. So when emotions incredibly small and this, when you learn to tune into these very fine emotions, it gives you a kind of almost like intuition or even kind of a sixth sense about what you're going to feel where, you know, where these very small emotions that are coming into awareness. So it works in a lot of different ways to get you more in tune with your emotions and also give you the ability to handle them more effectively. Yeah. And I'd like to really dive into the sensory experience part of this here in a couple of

minutes, but I want to start with when you say the word meditation, what do you mean by that? And then further from that is when we talk about mindfulness, how is that a more specific form of meditation? Like what are the differences and how do you talk about those two things? Right. So meditation is a very broad and general term and it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. And some of the things that meditation means to different people actually sound really opposite. So, you know, for some people, meditation is concentrating on a single object without deviating from that concentration. So kind of super intense focus. Whereas for other people, meditation is about not focusing on anything in particular at all.

So something that sounds completely the opposite. Another example would be for some people, meditation means having no verbal thoughts in awareness. Whereas for other people who do mantra meditation, mantras are verbal thoughts. And in mantra meditation, you're keeping those continuously in awareness. So, you know, in the one case, it's zero verbal thoughts. And in mantra meditation, you're keeping those continuously in awareness. So, you know, in the one case, it's zero verbal thoughts. In the other case, it's continuous verbal thoughts. Again, something that sounds completely opposite. So how can we unite all these different, completely opposite seeming ideas under one umbrella of the term meditation? And for me, as you saw in the book, I use a kind of a

psychological definition of a technique that helps to make elements of the unconscious conscious for the purpose of improving your life. Now, that's an incredibly general way of talking about it, and it would include things like psychotherapy and so on. But I think it's broad enough to cover the aspects of meditation that arose, you know, all around the world at various times in human history from very different cultures and very different religions. So we need a term that is that broad and that general. When we talk about mindfulness, though, it becomes very specific. In general, mindfulness is about, you know, enhancing present moment sensory awareness without judgment. So we are, you know, specifically meditating on sensory experience in the present moment, which I think is a, that clause is sort of unnecessary since present,

since sensory experience is always in the present moment and doing that non-judgmentally. We're looking into our own experience and trying to just allow it. And this in current American English or, you know, in Western cultures is called mindfulness. Traditionally, it would be called Vipassana or insight meditation. And mindfulness would be one of the qualities of meditation. You talk about a couple of myths in mindfulness or meditation in general. And I'd like to explore those a little bit because they certainly hung me up for a long time. They hang a lot of people up.

Yeah, yeah. No, and I find it over and over when I talk to people about meditation that these two things, I feel like I'm always trying to help people clarify. So let's talk about the first myth. Okay, so the first myth is that you're going to have no thoughts. And specifically, usually by verbal thoughts. So, you know, the dream of consciousness in verbal thinking is going to somehow cease. And, you know, this is a very pervasive idea. I run into it constantly and there's a lot to say about it, but the quick and dirty is that's not true. You're probably going

to have a lot of thoughts and you can be an incredibly advanced meditator with a very deep practice whose life is being dramatically improved every single day through this meditation practice. And you're still having a lot of verbal thinking. It's true that if you're on a long meditation retreat, or if you are doing certain types of practices, your verbal thinking can get very still or very quiet for a long time. And you know, there's no doubt that's pleasant. I started meditating mainly because I had anxiety, but also because I just couldn't stand my own mind. Meaning, you know, those verbal thoughts were really busy and unpleasant and sort of driving me nuts. So all of us would probably feel a lot better if our verbal

thinking ceased. But if you go into the meditative endeavor, imagining that you're going to stop your thinking, you're going to be disappointed. That's not going to happen. Yeah. You're going to be disappointed and you're going to think that you're absolutely doing it wrong and you can't meditate. You know, somebody said that to me recently, I can't meditate, but you know, doing it wrong and you can't meditate. You know, somebody said that to me recently, I can't meditate, but you know, I sit down and my mind's still full of thoughts. And I was like, well, that's, you know, like you just said, that's not exactly, um, the, the point we talk about just being aware of the fact that the thoughts are happening. That's right. And in fact, it's also coming from an entirely different style of meditation.

So in mindfulness meditation, any amount of verbal thinking that's arising is fine. If we're doing more concentrative meditation or jhana meditation of a very specific style, it can be the case that thoughts get greatly reduced. But that's not even the style we're doing. Not the goal. It's not even the style we're doing. Not the goal. It's not the goal. And in that particular way of working, it almost always requires like long months of monastic retreat where you're not speaking to anybody. So second misconception.

The second misconception comes, it's not as common, but I still run into it. And that is that your meditation experience is always supposed to be happy and light and sweet and blissful. Sometimes I even hear, you know, I'm not having an ecstatic, blissful, you know, rapture. So I'm doing something wrong. But usually we run into it in the form of like, well, I had a bad time. That was difficult. Some difficult emotions came up and you know, that's going to happen forever. The goal of meditation is not to turn you into, you know, a Teletubby where you're just

completely, you know, like. If it was, I would do it a lot more. I'd be meditating all the time. You know, but that's not any way to live life. Like, oh, my dog just got hit by a car. I'm completely happy. You know, it's just inappropriate to think that somehow you're going to be blissful and light at every moment. In mindfulness meditation, it's much more about accepting whatever emotions are arising in the moment and working with them skillfully, whether they're difficult or pleasant.

And we're not sitting down with the intentional goal of like having a happy time necessarily. Instead, we're going to connect with what's really going on. Yeah, this was another big one for me because I, you know, I've, I've meditated on and off for, you know, 25 years, um, and a lot of off. And what would happen would be that I would do it for a while and I just wouldn't, my meditation sessions were rarely pleasant. It's not for me, whatever, you know, sometimes it's pleasant, but a lot of times it's, I'm restless or I'm, I'm in the mood to get up or I'm thinking a lot. I just wasn't having really pleasant experiences. And when I pivoted my mindset to looking at meditation being, uh, something more like, um, brushing my teeth or going to the gym in that it could really give me benefits the other 23 and a half hours of the day. That's when it got better for me. And then once I stopped expecting either of those things to happen, it actually got easier for both those things to happen for me to be me to

enjoy meditation more and to have a little bit quieter thoughts. But it was only when I kind of gave that up as a goal or expectation. That's right, Eric. I mean, the idea that you're going to sit down and have a good time almost precludes sitting down and having a good time. It just makes it so hard. And that's not the goal anyway. So I love to compare it to weightlifting. You know, I weightlift, I really enjoy weightlifting, but it's not like every single time, you know, you're bench pressing or something that it's like a great feeling. Sometimes it really hurts. Sometimes my joints hurt. Sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes it's

difficult. But every one of those experiences is building the muscles, right? It's building your muscles, even if it's a difficult experience. Sometimes the difficult, heavy experiences are building your muscles even more. So, you know, if you look at it in that light, by letting go of this misconception that it's always supposed to be blissful or happy, suddenly you realize you can be making progress, whether it's a quote, happy meditation or a difficult one. Yeah.

Chris often screams through his whole meditation, so I can't tell how it's, it's a new, it's a new type of meditation he's working on. He wanted to talk to you about it after the show. And now the rest of the interview with Michael Taft. One of the things that I like about your book and I like about Shinzen Young, who is a teacher that I know you have have done some work with, is that there are different ways to approach meditation. 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 stunt man 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. 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. I spent probably 15, no, I probably spent 20 of those 25 years thinking that my only approaches to meditation were to follow my breath or to repeat a mantra word. And for whatever reason, for me, my breath is just not the most useful anchor for me. And when I started to do some of the things you describe in the book, and I'd like to walk through what those are, when I started to go towards paying attention to sounds or sensory experience or my current moment experience, meditation changed for me dramatically. And I really like how in the book,

you're laying out a variety of different approaches and styles. like how in the book you're laying out a variety of different approaches and styles. Yeah, it turns out that sensory experience doesn't have to be just feelings in your body or words in your head. There's pictures in your head, there's external sound and sight, even thinking can be considered a kind of internal sense. And there's a really wide array. I mean, Shinzen is great for creating a taxonomy of all this that's super useful. And I have to say that his work is the basis of all the stuff in the book, The Mindful Geek. But when we look at this greater taxonomy of all the different possible things to meditate on and the different ways of approaching meditating on those things, there's something for

everyone. There's definitely something that anyone can get interested in meditating on and get, you know, real progress out of doing the practice with. You talk about within meditation, there are three components that ideally are present in some degree or other. Concentration, sensory clarity, and acceptance. This is one of the places where I made a major departure from Shenzhen because he would call the third one equanimity. But I just preferred to use the more secular term, acceptance. And so can you walk us briefly through what those three things mean to you and how they factor into meditation? Sure. The two that most people who are familiar with meditation

are familiar with are the concentration and acceptance pieces. So to do any form of meditation, some amount of concentration is usually going to be required. For many traditions and many practices, the concentration aspect is the meditation. Just bringing your focus back to a single object over and over again, that's the essence of meditation for many people. That would be the sort of jhanic style meditations I was describing earlier. And even in meditation that supposedly isn't so focused on concentration, like mindfulness, and even some forms of non-dual meditation, concentration still plays a part. You may not be focusing on any particular object, but you're concentrating on where your attention is going, or even on your attention itself. So concentration always plays a role. And what's

so amazing and beautiful about concentration is it's a cultivatable skill. It's something that the more you do it, the better you get at it. And the better you get at it, the better it feels. So this is the whole area of psychology called flow with the work of Csikszentmihalyi, who, you know, describes the flow state. What he's really talking about with a flow state is a concentrated state. You know, what in meditation would be anything from the way, anything from light concentration to a pretty deep state of focus. The fact that you can say his name, it shows me concentration to a pretty deep state of focus. The fact that you can say his name, it shows me that you have got some advanced mental skills.

My girlfriend is Hungarian. So I've been schooled in this. Um, he, um, is just wonderful at really unpacking how excellent it feels to focus. Right.'s something that I, you know, I'm just one of these people with a personality that in meditation, I just, for decades, just tried hard and tried hard and tried hard because the harder you try, the better you do. Right, right. And it turns out that that's not such a good style to have to do well in meditation. At least perseverance pays off eventually. But what I did learn is that, especially with concentration, it's something that you want to have a lightness of touch with.

You know, we have that image of Rodin's statue, you know, the thinker. And the guy is like concentrating so hard and he looks like he's bashing himself in the head with his concentration fist. It's just so intense. of touch where you're just very gently, very gently guiding yourself back over and over in this kind of repetitive cycle that gets you the most bang for your buck there. You want to really just kind of gently come back over and over and realize that it is a kind of coming back. Concentration represents a returning to the focus object. And so, I mean, I had this idea that concentration would be like a laser beam, that it never leaves the focus object. And then I would get frustrated over and over because it tends to leave and go on to other objects. But when you realize that's going

to happen and you allow it to happen and build in the idea that that's going to happen and then just gently guide your attention back, it becomes much easier. Yeah. I think the other thing with that is that exactly your point when you expect that it'll happen. And when you actually realize that that concentration is wandered and the bringing it back, that is to a certain degree, that is a big part of the practice when you're doing that. That's actually, you know, you are building that muscle. It's not a failure. It's the fact that you found it, noticed it and brought it back is the point. You know, it's like they hit it because, you know, they're so mad at it for running away in the first place. And I always think, man, you're going to train your dog to never come back.

You know, like this is behaviorism, you know, he comes back and you hit him. Like, what do you expect? Right. But it's the same thing with the way people work with concentration. It's like if every time you bring your concentration back, you're all frustrated and angry at yourself that you lost your concentration. And now, you know, damn it, I got to bring it back. And you get tense up and you get angry. You're subtly teaching your like deep mind to really dislike concentration and to feel tense and upset while you're trying to concentrate. So that's why this kind of really loose, really friendly, like, oh, let's just bring it on

back and actually enjoying that feeling of bringing the attention back is so much more effective because you're subtly training sort of like the deeper circuits of your brain that this is a positive experience that feels good. Right. And I think that sort of then leads naturally into the acceptance part of meditation. Yeah. And, you know, acceptance is in a way the simplest idea to understand, you know, just don't resist it, except what's arising. But it's the one that typically I have the most trouble with in terms of communicating it to students, simply because they tend to resist acceptance. They don't accept it. And, you know, there seems

to be a sense, maybe this is the third misconception or something about meditation, but there seems to be a sense in our society that if you ever accept anything, you're like a loser and a doormat who's going to get run over by life. And yet, you know, it's obvious that there are things we need to accept, things that we can't avoid. But even beyond that, we need to practice acceptance in order to do the practice of mindfulness for one really important reason. And that is you can't really examine something carefully while you're busy changing it. First of all, you have to see what it is and get a sense of what it is before you go about changing it in any way. And in order to get a sense of when something really is, you have to be open to seeing what it really is. So that openness to seeing it as it is in the

moment is the acceptance I'm talking about. So just for a concrete example, you know, an emotion comes up and let's say it's an emotion that most people would say is negative. Like let's say some real sorrow is arising. And it's quite common for us even you know walking about during the day to be like oh that sadness if we even know what we're feeling we'd be like oh that sadness uh you know i don't want that i'm going to do something you know i'll have a candy bar and make it go away or watch the teletubbies exactly you know wow there's so much to say about that. There really is. There's some kind of satanic backmasking joke in there. But anyway, that propensity to sort of judge and not accept our emotions gets even worse in meditation if we feel like we're supposed to be having only nice experiences or only happy feelings. And so the sadness comes up and then it's like, oh,

I either have to suppress that or deny it or make it go away in some way. And so the net result of all this is we're never actually experiencing the sadness. We don't know what it's about. We don't know how deep it is, how big it is, whether it's maybe just a tiny passing, you know, mood of the moment, or if it's some kind of deeper background, you know, sense of depression, who knows, we'll never know if we are continuously denying and suppressing it. So, you know, a big part of the endeavor of mindfulness is like, what's really going on here? If sadness is arising, we're going to contact that and really begin to explore it skillfully. And there's, you know, ways to even to go very deep into contact or to go very deep

into even changing it eventually if we decide that's what's necessary. But the first movement is a movement of acceptance. It's a saying of yes to whatever's arising in the moment. Yeah, I really like the way you put it in the book. You say it's important to notice that acceptance means accepting your sensory experience, not accepting the conditions of your life. That's right. You're, you're free to take all the actions necessary or desirable to make your life better. Acceptance doesn't mean becoming passive or inactive. It just means that the current sensory experience is what it is and you accept that part of things. And even more simply, you know, I invite everyone to do this exercise where you like tense your fists and just say no. So try that right now. Tense your fists and your face and your whole body

as tight as you can and just say no a couple times like no. Right. So that's resistance. And all I'm talking about with acceptance is like opening your fists and letting your face and body relax and just saying yes for just a minute and noticing the difference there, which is fundamental. So the last part of meditation then that you talk about in the book is sensory clarity. And you talk about it a lot in the book and you really sell it as a big benefit. So let's talk about what it is, why it's important, and then, you know, what are ways to develop it? Concentration and acceptance or equanimity are two aspects of meditation that most teachers, most people would recognize. The sensory clarity aspect is a little more unusual. It's something that Shinzon talks about a lot. And what it means

is essentially upping the resolution on your senses. So seeing things in much more detail with much more resolution, with a much finer grain. And I was listening to the podcast you did with Rick Hansen, who's a good friend of mine, and I love his book, Hardwiring Happiness. And you guys were talking about how to not only have a good experience, but take in a good experience and how important that is. You know, we pay a lot of money, for example, to go on a, you know, nice vacation, but nice vacation, which is good. And we get on that nice vacation and we don't enjoy anything because we're just busy racking through the experiences. So sensory clarity is a real answer to the question of how to take in an experience, how to enjoy an experience, how to make it salient.

and experience, how to enjoy and experience, how to make it, you know, salient. And so, for example, sensory clarity means not just saying, oh, feel your breath when you're meditating, but actually getting into every little tiny, tiny, tiny detail of the body sensations of the breath. You know, how it feels between these two ribs versus those two ribs, how it feels in this little part of the lung, as opposed to that little part of the lung, things like that. It may seem almost mundane or meaningless when I ask people to do that. Like, why would you want to zero in that deeply? But it's actually building the part of your brain that allows you to take that experience in at a very deep level. So it's, it's in a way, a major key to getting the real benefits of meditation. Yeah. And I've, I've experimented with it to some degree. And I will say that

I think like other things in meditation or pretty much anything in life, it takes some practice to, because my initial reaction is there's no, I don't feel anything there, right? There's nothing happening in my foot right now, right? One thing that I found as a great way to practice this is to try it in the shower, because in the shower at any given moment, some, 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 gonna drop by. Mr. Brian 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. God 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. Every part of your body has some experience happening. Water's running down it, water's hitting it. It's not quite as warm because it's not in the water. It's, it bring, for me, it brings the body to life and it makes, it makes it easier for me to start to train that muscle of paying attention to those things. And then I'm a little bit better able to do it outside of that

time, but it's still one that I recognize the value in, but really feel like I've got a long way to go. Well, working on it little by little is the only way to do it. And it's, you know, it's experience dependent neuroplasticity at work, right? The more you do it, the better you get at doing it. And this is one of the things they've shown. Uh, at least if we're only talking about body sensation, the insula, the part of the brain that feels internal body sensation, is thicker in people who have meditated a long time. And in fact, you can predict the thickness based on the number of years they've been meditating. So it appears to be the case that when you are feeling into your body sensation, you're getting better at feeling into your body sensation. So the more you do it, the better it gets.

at feeling into your body sensation. So the more you do it, the better it gets. The long-term result of this though, is that, you know, even an experience, for example, of taking a shower can be quite pleasurable because you've got such a richer ability to experience it. If you've got a Teletubby in the shower, that's, I should have just let that one go, but it popped right in my head. You know, the blue or the pink. Yes. They're all great. So one of the parts in the book that I really, like I said, I liked a lot of it, but one of them that really hit me was you talk about that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

And I think there's a few things there that I'd like to add and then ask you to extrapolate a little bit further. But one is you talk about a study that was done by Daniel Gilbert at Harvard, and I actually have participated in it a bunch of times, where they just send people messages and sort of check in with them about how they're doing at any given moment and ask a variety of different questions. And one of the big findings was that, because one of the questions they ask is how sort of how much attention are you paying to what you're doing right now? And, um, one of the big findings was that people, when their mind is wandering all over the place, they are distinctly more unhappy. And I have certainly found that to be true for me. Yes. You know, they did this study with thousands and thousands of people too. It's a very robust statistic that people's minds were wandering almost 50% of the time. They weren't paying

attention to what they were doing. And during the times that their mind was wandering, they were significantly less happy. It turns out that paying attention, i.e. concentrating on what you're doing makes you feel good, which backs up the research of Csikszentmihalyi. Right, exactly that flow state. And so you also in the book talk about something called the default node network. Can you talk about what that is and how that applies to the mind-wandering idea? Yeah, so this was a new idea in neuroscience that came out of all the fMRI studies. They realized that the brain doesn't just turn off when you're not, quote, doing anything. When you're just sitting around, like, waiting for something to happen, in this case, usually waiting for the experiment in the fMRI machine to begin um your brain is still doing something and so this was a big revelation to scientists um when they discovered that um this activity of the brain that occurs when you're not involved in a specific task actually involves a dedicated

network it's a dedicated system of your brain that's sort of like the idle setting or what I call in the book, the screensaver. And so this screensaver setting of your brain is called the default mode network. And it mainly involves the medial prefrontal cortex and the post-singulate cortex and a couple other areas of the brain that are involved in thinking about yourself. So in other words, when your mind is wandering, what you're typically doing is daydreaming. You're thinking about the stuff from the past that you did and things in the future that you want to do. And it turns out that daydreaming about the past and the future and the stuff you're going to not get wrong this time and

the things that you should have done differently in the past, even positive daydreaming ends up making you feel kind of bad. One of the things that we talk about on the show of Fair Mountain, I've wrestled with and work with people that I work one-on-one with is this idea of rumination, right? Where we just circle the drain on the same awful thoughts over and over again. I wonder if that's a default mode network piece or if that's a completely different area. Cause that's sort of where it starts in those, your mind isn't on anything. And all of a sudden those thoughts start sort of in that, you know, in the default mode, but then, you know, does it, does it transition to a different place? I'd just be curious. I don't

know if you know that or most rumination is in the default mode network, because if it's thinking about yourself, if it's self-referential about the present or the past or the future, you're in the default mode network. So meditation seems like a good way to help move ourselves out of the default mode network. And again, just like the flow state psychology experiments show, you know, getting real involved in a task like really difficult music, really extreme sports, things like that tend to get people in very deep flow states. And people tend to feel very joyous. Why is that? They're not in their default mode network. And in fact, you know, the default mode network more deeply is about having a sense of self at all. And the more deeply you get involved in an activity, playing the piano, riding a mountain bike, something like that, you begin to notice a loss of the sense of self, right? You become, quote, one with the activity. activity. That's because that default mode network, which generates a sense of self or is involved in generating a sense of self is going offline. Yeah. One of the things for rumination, a game that I

play and I've, I've talked about on the show, I call it the alphabet gratitude game, but you start with the letter A and you try and think of something you're grateful. It starts with a, that starts with B, et cetera. And it's the gratitude part is, is, is by far the secondary benefit to the giving your brain something else to do, you know, making it cause you can play the same, you can do the same thing with trying to think of songs that start with the letter a that you like, or I just find that's a good way to move out of when I'm just in that spinning spot and I don't have anything specific to focus on. Well, this is why things like Sudoku and crossword puzzles are actually really useful because even though they seem, you know, sort of

useless on the everyday level, they make you feel good because they're giving you a complex task to focus on, uh, and thus getting you out of default mode network activity. And you can get lost in them if they're, um, you they're at the right level of difficulty. But what's interesting is all these things, playing the piano or riding a mountain bike or playing Sudoku, anything, these are all very specific tasks that people spend years to get good at. And they have their intrinsic pleasure, and they also have this effect of, you know, getting you out of default mode network activity. What's interesting about meditation is that it's a general activity that does this. It makes you better at getting into a flow state doing anything. So because meditation is kind of a general practice of doing this, you can learn to go into a flow state when you're just walking or when you're doing the dishes or when you're just staring out the window.

And in fact, there's some preliminary research that shows that meditators actually have a different default mode network after a while. They're not defaulting into rumination. They're defaulting into presence, you know, present moment awareness of sensory phenomena. So it deeply changes your brain structure and changes your whole relationship to rumination. the ability to just be more present, like just to notice what's around me and have the things that are around me capture my attention in a more engaging way versus looking at the tree and thinking, oh, that's pretty. And then my mind wanders back off. I mean, it's getting a little bit better. And for me, that's reason enough to keep doing it.

That's right. And what you're describing is sensory clarity. You know, you're able to engage the sensory experience of the tree more deeply rather than just kind of dismissing it with the word tree yep well this is i think a good place to wrap up we could probably do this for two or three hours there's a ton of things in your book that i didn't get to and a lot of other stuff but this has been a really enjoyable conversation i appreciate you taking the time to come on the show well Well, I really enjoy it, Eric. And I also congratulate you on your podcast, which is amazing. Thank you so much. You too. Have a good one. You too. Bye.

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