Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 29: Dr. Richard Davidson

Episode Date: August 10, 2016

Dr. Richie Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, has been meditating for over 40 years. But it was the Dalai Lama himself who convinced Davidson to dedicate his life to researching the effects of meditation on the brain. Early in his career, Davidson said he "became a closet meditator" and the Dalai Lama "played a major role in me coming out of the closet and encouraging serious scientific research in this area." Davidson's team flew in monks from Tibet and Nepal for the study and asked them to meditate while undergoing scans. When they first looked at the scans, Davidson said the results were shocking. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

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

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things. And maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Loyal listeners slash viewers will remember my guests this time because he was actually on the first 10% happier podcast ever that was he was sitting beside a guy you may have

heard of who goes by the name of his holiness, the Dalai Lama. And his name is Richard Davidson, professor of Richard Davidson, everybody calls him Richie, and he is, the guy has really been at the tip of the spear in terms of using neuroscience to look at what contemplative practices like meditation do to your brain. And I think it's safe to say that if Richie hadn't done his work, I would never have started meditating because For skeptics, it's the science that gets you over the hump and gets you to start meditating at least at least for me Although interestingly and he and I will talk about this. I actually think I like to say this you might start to meditate because you think you're

You know because you see the science is it's intriguing that I think you can change your brain through meditation. But I don't think you keep meditating because you think your prefrontal cortex may be changing. I think you keep meditating because you're less of, well, usually I use the word that begins with A here, but you're less of a jerk to yourself and others. And so anyway, that is if I forgive my slight digression there, but Richie's a friend, he's a really, really interesting guy, not only in terms of the work that he's done that has been truly pioneering, at the, by the way, just to give props to his colleagues. He runs a center called the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, where

they do a lot of amazing work. So you'll hear about his work, but also he's a long time meditator, and he's taken some seriously interesting paths within the meditation world. So we're gonna talk about all that, but first Richie, thanks for doing this, appreciate it. Oh, it's a delight to be here, Dan. Thank you. Congratulations, you're a new grandpa.

I am really exciting phase of my life. You don't look like a grandpa just for the record. Um, I think this is a really interesting thing about you and this whole group that is sometimes referred to as the, uh, Jew booze, you know, these, uh, north of, let's say, north of 55, ARP range, uh, uh, Jewish kids, mostly from New York who are all, um, who are all got interested in Buddhism is you all look 10 to 15 years younger than you actually are. And so we'll talk a little bit about whether there's any biological basis for that, given your contemplative practice that spans many, many decades.

But first, before we do all that, how did you start meditating when, where, why? I started really in graduate school. I was at Harvard. In the early 70s, late 70s. In the early 70s. And I had the great fortune of being around some people who just seemed like they were nice people. They were people I wanted to be around. There was something about them that attracted me. They had a kind of magic sauce that I wanted some of myself. They had a kind of magic sauce that I wanted some of myself. And I learned that these were all people who were very involved with meditation. One of those people went on to be, and actually was at that time, becoming a famous spiritual teacher, Ramdas, who of course used to be Richard part of the used to be richard alpert uh... a someone who is on the faculty at harvard and then summarily fired for

his psychedelic research uh... and so i met him in a number of other people and they were all meditative uh... and i thought that this was something that uh... seemed extremely interesting and potentially really important and attractive. And I was sufficiently interested to go off after my second year of graduate school to India for the first time to explore and to find some meditation teachers that I can actually study with.

The faculty at Harvard, this is in the Harvard Psychology Department, most of them thought I was going off the deep end, and I think two-thirds of them were convinced I would never come back. I was pretty sure I would come back, because I really never swerved in my commitment to science, but I did go off for three months, and I went on my first serious meditation retreat during that period of time. And that was what started it for me. And I came back with a fervent aspiration to pursue research on meditation. I thought that this was something incredibly important for Western psychology and Western

science. And that's when it all began. So some interesting things happen when you came back, which I want to talk about, but just so I know, where did you go, for those three months, where did you go, who did you study with in India? I was mostly, I spent part of the time in Sri Lanka, and with some forest monks, I was actually with Dan Goldman at that time. Daniel Goldman is the author of a book called Emotional Intelligence, also part of this

cabal. I don't think you guys like the term but I'm going to use it in any way of the jubos and you and Danny will remain very close to this day. Yes, we do. And so we actually were living together in Candice Sri Lanka and going off and meeting with farce monks in the Tervadan tradition in Sri Lanka. And then I went to India and studied with Goenka. Goenka is a or was, he died very recently, a Buddhist meditation teacher in the teravodin tradition and I did my first serious meditation retreat with him at a small hill station in the Himalayas not far from Darmsala. Home of the Dalai Lama. So you got home and you started

discussing with your mentors and at Harvard your desire to study the impact of meditation on the brain and the psyche. Yeah, and I was just so incredibly naive. I'm one of my professors with someone who studies psychopathology, mental disorders, and basically looked at me and said, do you know that the one's dress is really often an indicator of their psychiatric illness? And of course I was dressed in these crazy clothes that we all got in India. And he was like, what kind of clothes are we going to try to find? You know, the baggy pants and flowy shirts and he was just, and I had long hair in those days and so he was basically looking at me

clearly saying that I'm nuts and that this was not a particularly appropriate way for me to behave or for me to pursue serious scientific research. But so it's interesting, you said he was an expert in psychopathology. Am I wrong in my assumption that actually most of the study of psychology and or neuroscience during its history has been around problems, disorders, as opposed to healthy mind states? And that's true. And I would say that that's broadly true. has been around problems, disorders, as opposed to healthy mind states.

And that's true. And I would say that that's broadly true. We have an entity in Washington in Maryland called the National Institutes of Health, but really it should be labeled the National Institutes of Disease. It's mostly focused on illness, not really on health, despite the fact that the World Health Organization's definition of health includes well-being and emotional and spiritual qualities. That is part of the WHO definition of health, and they clearly distinguish between the absence of illness and the presence of health. And so much of psychology has been focused up until I think quite recently on the negative

side of things and on psychopathology. So you had these conversations, on deeply unsuccessful conversations with your mentors at Harvard, and you actually, you kind of allowed them to deter you for a bit. Didn't you? Not from the meditation, but from the study of the meditation? I did. So we actually, I published a few papers which are never cited anymore that were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s on meditation. And that was it. And then they basically shut it down. I was a beautiful student student and I really did want, and I still am unswervingly committed to

a scientific career, and so I wanted to do what I needed to do to become a serious scientist. And so I, as I often say, became very much a closet meditator and didn't talk to any of my colleagues about my interest in meditation after this very early period when I tried to pursue it, but I ran into one obstacle after another in a very formidable way, and it was clear to me that this was not gonna go anywhere. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like.

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So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wondery app. I was just thinking as you were talking about your story, there's so many similarities. Mark Epstein has been a previous guest and it's a close friend of mine. Has a similar story about being a closet mediter.

So many of the people you were generation have this story and yet the fact that you, first of all, that you know, Mark and I were friends at Harvard back in the day. Yeah, he's part of this aforementioned kebal. You, you, you, you, you kept meditating and B, you ultimately came out of the closet and actually, you know, are the collective of this sine qua non for, for what is now a really phenomenal, but not

uncomplicated boom in meditation and mindfulness in the culture. And so, I salute you for that, because had you not done that, we'll be sitting here talking. Well, thank you, I appreciate that. And I attribute a lot of it to the Dalai Lama, who played a major role in me coming out of the closet and encouraging serious scientific research in this area, and that was pivotal in sort of the shift which occurred in the mid-1990s. How did that happen? Where were you and how did you come in contact with the dollar well? Well, I first met him in

Darmsol, India where he lives and he invited me to come meet with him I he had heard about me through some colleagues at mind and life mind and life is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1987 by the Dalai Lama and Francisco Verella Francisco was a very well-known neuroscientist who imagined doing this kind of work, but never actually got to do it. He died prematurely of liver cancer in 2001. But Francisco and the Dalai Lama founded this organization in 1987. And after a few years, the Dalai Lama learned enough about modern neuroscience

to understand the potential of neuroscience contributing to furthering the interest in these areas. And so he invited me to meet with him at his residence in India to talk about the possibility of doing serious neuroscientific research on Tibetan practitioners who spent years training their mind. And at that meeting he challenged me and he said, you've been using the tools of modern neuroscience to mostly study anxiety and depression and fear all these negative qualities. Why can't you use those same tools to study qualities like depression and fear, all these negative qualities. Why can't you use those same tools to study qualities like kindness and compassion and equanimity? And I didn't

have a very good answer for him, and it was a total wake-up call for me, and really was a pivotal catalyst. And as my dear friend John Kabatin, another member of this cabal, said to me, he said, my life at that moment went through what he called an orthogonal rotation. Your life? My life, yeah. And it really just completely reoriented my career. And really since that time, I have been dedicating my life to this work and this I really feel as why I'm here on the planet. So what what did you do first? What were the first studies you

conducted? Well, we did the very first study that we conducted was actually something in collaboration with John Kabatzen where we did the first randomized control trial. I'm just going to jump in for a second. Just for people who don't know, John Kabadzin is a moly. I remember late to do this, so I apologize to everybody. John Kabadzin is one of the most famous meditation teachers and proponents on Earth. He's written a number of amazing books, as has Richie and all lists, some of Richie's books, toward the end of the podcast.

John was on 60 minutes recently and he basically invented something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is derived from Buddhism, but really strips away the metaphysical claims and the religious lingo and can be taught in an entirely secular context. And that has been another huge contributing factor to the blossoming of scientific research around meditation because it provided a protocol, an eight-week protocol where people take this class, and that can then be studied. Yes. And mindfulness-based stress reduction is probably the most commonly taught form of mindfulness

meditation at academic medical centers worldwide. the most commonly taught form of mindfulness meditation at academic medical centers worldwide. And so it has really penetrated particularly the medical establishment. And because of that, it's had an enormous impact. But it turned out that when John and I were talking in the late 1990s, at that point, there hadn't been a single randomized controlled

trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction. There'd been some scientific studies, but they all suffered from many serious methodological limitations. And so we decided to do the very first randomized controlled trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction that had ever been done. And we did it with employees at a high-tech corporation in Madison, Wisconsin.

And John Kabazin felt sufficiently strongly about the importance of this study that he actually flew out weekly to Madison for 10 consecutive weeks, and he himself was the instructor of this course because he wanted to ensure that it was taught at the highest standards. Could be worse medicine is a pretty cool place? Yes, so it was wonderful having him out for 10 consecutive weeks like that. And the paper based on that study was published in 2003 and here's a confession. First of all, the fact, it is my most widely cited scientific paper that I've ever published. And so if you look at Google Analytics at the citation counts, it has more citations in the scientific literature than any of my other scientific papers. The confession is that it was a really important study because there hadn't been a randomized

controlled trial prior to that, but it itself has many limitations. And so while it's my most widely cited paper, I certainly wouldn't consider it my best. What did it show? It showed that eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction produces a systematic change in certain aspects of brain function that is associated with better emotion regulation.

And it also showed that after eight weeks of meditation, what we did is we gave people in the meditation group, and we had a group of people who were in a control group. And this was a group of people that wanted to receive MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction. But they were told that they couldn't accommodate the full group in the initial training and that they would be trained at a later point in time, but they were asked to go through the assessments

at the same time that the group that was given the mindfulness meditation was given the assessments. So we call that a weight list control group. They were waiting to get their intervention until a later point in time. So we gave all of them at the end of this eight-week period a flu shot. And an ordinary flu shot, the only difference was that from the way you get it typically is we took blood samples before and after the flu shot was given at specific intervals to quantify the antibody titers mounted in response to the vaccine. This gives us a quantitative index of how effective the vaccine is working.

Turns out that when you receive a vaccine, there's a lot of variability among people in how effective it is. And if you're exposed to the same level of flu virus, some people have a lot of immunity conferred by the flu shot, and other people have much less. And so we wanted to determine if the eight weeks of meditation influenced their response to the vaccine. And amazingly, it did.

The meditators actually showed a boost in their antibody titers, which was the first time anyone had ever shown this. And so that was an important finding because it suggested that the changes go beyond simply reports of greater calmness or less anxiety, but they also extend into important biological functions that may play an important role in our mental and physical health. So I still get sick. Does that mean I'm a terrible meditator? Or is that because I live with the EF5 tornado 18-month-old vector for disease?

I suspect it's the latter. Okay. And when my kids were young, my rate of illness was far more frequent than it is now. And I attribute it primarily to the difference in who I'm living with. now, and I attribute it primarily to the difference in who I'm living with. So yeah, and you know, I think it's important for listeners to understand that this is not something that's going to cure illnesses. Meditation was not originally designed to cure illnesses. And so the extent to which it impacts these kinds of biological processes, I think is interesting and important.

But certainly our view of this is that it can modulate a person's symptoms, it can modulate their receptivity to certain illnesses. But this is not going to be a cure for everything. And I think it's really important to appreciate that. That's why we call this thing 10% happier. No, we're promising. It's what I like about the meditation world when it behaves properly. There's not a lot of over-promising. Just so everybody gets a sense of the breadth of your research,

where did you go next after this first paper that you say is flawed but was unquestionably very successful? Well, the next thing that we did, so that paper came out in 2003, at the same time we began a very very unusual experiment. We began that experiment roughly in 1999, a few years after my first meeting with the diolomit, it took us a while to sort of get to this stage. But we began a very unusual study that involved bringing extremely long-term meditators, kind of the Olympic athletes of meditation.

People who've practiced a ridiculous amount. The average number of hours of lifetime practice is 34,000 hours among this group. They're professional meditators, if you will. They don't have a day job. And most of them live in Asia. We flew them from India and Nepal, where most of them lived. And we flew them to Madison, Wisconsin, where they spent roughly a week in residence.

And we probed and tested them in all kinds of different ways during their time with us. And the very first paper we published from that group of practitioners was published in 2004 and it came out in a journal called The Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences. And that's a very prestigious journal. And the journal has been around more than 100 years, and this was the very first time in the August history of this journal that a paper on meditation had ever appeared. And that got an enormous amount of attention. And that kind of cracked open

the area, I think, because it showed that there were systematic differences in the brain of these individuals that were really unusual. Like. So what we did in this study was really simple study. We simply asked these people to meditate, and then we asked them for certain periods of time not to meditate, and we were looking at the difference in their brain when they're meditating and when they're not meditating. How?

MRI, F-M-R-I-E-G, what we're using. So we use both EEG and MRI, F-M-R-I, functional magnetic resonance imaging. The first paper that came out was based on the EEG findings. So that's just electrodes on the head. Electrodes on the head, and so we had a whole glom of electrodes. We had 256 electrodes on the head. And what we saw was the presence of gamma oscillations. These are very fast frequency oscillations

that are about 40 cycles per second. And we saw them at very high amplitude and we saw them for very long periods of time. These gamma oscillations are very well studied in modern neuroscience. for very long periods of time. These gamma oscillations are very well studied in modern neuroscience. We know a lot about the underlying neural basis of these gamma oscillations,

mostly from sort of very hard-nosed molecular animal research. In humans, the presence of these gamma oscillations has been observed many times before, but typically they are, when they are seen, they are typically seen for less than one second. They are very, very short, very brief bursts, and they are typically seen when different elements of a percept get bound together. So for example, if you, if I ask you to imagine biting into a juicy apple. Just imagine that. You have the visual image, you have the sort of tactile feel of what it is to bite. You have the gustatory taste sensations,

you have the smell, you have the sound of the crunching, there's a lot of different sensory elements that together form this interesting percept or image. And at the moment, they sort of all come together in a typical person, you see a burst of gamma and it typically lasts for under one second. So is gamma then associated with kind of positive? Not necessarily positive, but it's associated with lots of different things coming together, like an insight.

And it's typically in an untrained mind, it's typically very, very short. The other context where you see Gamma is if you're problem solving, some difficult problem. All of a sudden, the answer just occurs to you. It just comes into your mind and you know it's right. That moment, which we've all had, they're unfortunately quite rare, but that moment, and you can create this experimentally in the lab with certain kinds of tasks where you can increase

the likelihood of those moments, but at that moment you see a burst of gamma. And what we saw in these individuals is not a burst of gamma, but long durations for minutes while they're meditating, which was crazy because we thought that actually we thought that there was a problem in our recording equipment, because this had never been seen in a human brain before. What do you think is going on experientially when they're having these gamma bursts? I guess they're not even bursts, they're gamma runs. I think what they're doing, a kind of meditation that involves what we call open awareness,

where they are not focused on a single object but their perceptual world, their phenomenological world is expansive and they are including the external environment and the internal environment in their consciousness. Instead of just focusing on the feeling of their breath coming in and going out, they're just letting their senses rip. Whatever comes into their five senses and plus their thinking and emotions, they're just noticing. Exactly.

All channels are open. And the phenomenological reports of these individuals is that their awareness at those times has two important qualities. One is clarity, a real sense of clarity, and also accompanying that they talk about it is luminosity, whereas it's just very vivid. And the other element is vastness or expansiveness where they report awareness of just an enormous range of phenomena at once.

And so what we see with these gamma oscillations is not just their presence, but they're also highly synchronized among different parts of the brain. And we think that this is a neural echo of this kind of vastness and panoramic awareness, which they are reporting during this particular style of meditation. And to get there, do you have to be a meditation Olympian or can any of us have this kind of gamma jagged? I would say that any of us can have it, and we may not be able to sustain it. That's the difference. So these individuals can sustain it

and can turn it on pretty much at will. I think for you and I, it's more likely that we can show this, but a thought will come into our mind which will get lost in for a couple of moments. And so the ability to sustain it is something that I think really requires much more practice. And for them, the thought can come, go without them getting on the train

and go on a few stops. Exactly. It doesn't perturb them at all. It's like the metaphor that they often use is their awareness is like a clear blue sky. And occasionally, they'll be a cloud, which is like a thought. And, and occasionally there'll be a cloud, which is like a thought, and the cloud will appear, it may move, and then disappear,

and it doesn't disturb the clear blue sky. This does speak though, even at the JV level, where somebody like me, or I don't know, and I would imagine most of the listeners would be maybe even the freshman team. It does speak to the, one of the fundamental shifts, or maybe the fundamental shift that happens through meditation, which is we live most of our lives when we're untrained in thought.

But in fact, our senses are ripping all the time. There is a perceptual reality, which is probably not paying attention. We're not paying attention to it. So everything from the feeling of your phone in your hand, your butt on the seat, the sounds of vibrating in your ears, the sights that you're seeing, these are all, you can kind of relax back into this and out of the thinking mind and actually it's a source of enormous relief.

Yes, absolutely. So as I'm talking to you now, I can be completely aware of the feelings of sitting here, of my sit bones on the chair, of my feet on the floor, and not have it disrupt my ability to completely focus on the details of the conversation, but be aware in the kind of background of all that's going on. So importantly, this is not, again, just for people who wear robes and have to be flown in from India and Nepal, if you want to meet with them, that this is our birthright. We all have the capacity to do this.

Another word for it would be just being mindful. It's just about training the mind to do this. Another word for it would be just being mindful. It's just about training the mind to do it. Right, and I would say it's really also about another way to phrase it is recognizing a kind of innate propensity that we all have. And when we recognize it and become more familiar with it, we can sustain it and strengthen it. And so I would say that it's something, at least in a in in CIPIAN form, is within all of us from the start. But it's kind of like language. In order for language to develop, which is a biological propensity that we all have as human beings, we need to be raised in a linguistic community, we need to have it nurtured, and the same thing for

qualities like awareness and also for compassion. Which is another thing you've studied, compassion, which we will, we should and will talk about. But let me just ask a question about this study, this experiment that you were, these experiments that you were running with these people, these Olympic athletes of meditation. One of the questions that sometimes gets asked is, are there brains different because they've meditated or their brains different and therefore they meditate? So that's a really important question. And the honest answer is we cannot answer that question from the work that we've done

with the long term meditators because it's inherently confounded. You can't go back in time. Can't go back in time. And also it's not unreasonable to think that someone who makes a decision to dedicate their life in this way and to become a monastic, they're likely to have been different from the start. They're not, most people don't make that choice, right? And so, so from a scientific perspective, and this is something I think your question

really is pointing to, and something that we realized early on from a scientific perspective, even though working with these monastics that we were flying in from India, there was a certain allure and mystique, and really it was cool to do this research from a scientific perspective. It's fundamentally unsatisfying. I mean, we needed to start there because we wanted to convince ourselves that there really was a there there. If we didn't see any difference between these individuals and untrained individuals, the

likelihood of us finding something with eight weeks of mindfulness training would be unreasonable. And so we needed to see if we can get a signal there. But once we did, then our interest in doing that really is not, I mean, we're still interested for certain kinds of questions but our focus has much more been on work that is scientifically A more rigorous and B has immediate practical benefit. So walk us through some of the studies you've done since that one. What are you look at?

What are you excited about? Well to give one example, a study that was published not too long ago, we took people and we advertised in the community for a study where people were going to be taught an intervention that's designed to cultivate well-being. That's what they were told. And they were told that they were going to be randomly assigned to one of two interventions, both of which are designed to cultivate well-being. And so that's how this study was advertised. And what we did is we randomly assigned people to two weeks of compassion training, and I'll say something about that in a minute, and that was one group.

And another group was randomly assigned to two weeks of cognitive therapy training that came straight from cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is one of the most empirically well validated psychological treatments for depression and anxiety, and generally a treatment that can improve well-being. Cognitive therapy is one of the most empirically well validated psychological treatments for depression and anxiety and generally a treatment that can improve well-being. And they were structurally matched so that there was the same amount of training, it was delivered in the same way, the same time of day, everything about it was perfectly matched. And we can genuinely say that both interventions are designed to cultivate well

being. And so that was the experiment, basically. And before they went through the two weeks of training, we scanned their brains. After they went through the two weeks of training, we scanned their brains again. And then we got a bunch of psychological measures in addition. But that's the kind of study where any changes that we see that's specific to one group, we can say definitively that it's because of what they were doing because we randomly assigned them so that when they started off, we confirmed that there were no differences between these two groups when they started. They were all the same. So what we found is that the brains of people who are given two weeks of compassion training

look different after the two weeks than the brains of people who are given two weeks of compassion training look different after the two weeks than the brains of people who are given the cognitive rear-praise training? I didn't let you describe what compassion training is. Yeah, so I'll say, let me say a little bit about that. So with compassion training, what we do is we ask people to start with a loved one. Someone who is a close family member or very close friend or it could even be a pet. And just in vision a time in their life when they may have been suffering.

And we ask them to then bring that person or being into their mind and heart and cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved from that suffering. And we have simple phrases that they use, like may you be free from suffering, may you experience joy and ease, and they silently repeat these phrases to themselves,

and they're asked to notice whatever visceral sensations may be present. They're also instructed to say the phrases authentically with emotion and not to simply repeat them cognitively. That's basically the instruction. And we have them start with a loved one. They then move on to themselves. They then move on to what we call a stranger,

which is someone, the way we define a stranger, is someone whose face they recognize. But they don't know much about them. It could be a neighbor. And they just really don't know much about the neighbor. Someone who lives in their building. But you see them, you recognize them, but you don't know much about their life. And just envision a time in their life when they may have been suffering, even if you don't know that about it.

Then we have them move on to a category that a famous Tibetan Lama named Mingyue Rinpoche that I'm doing an event with tonight said. Who's been a guest on the show? Because of your insistence. Thank you. And he has said in print that one hour doing this practice with a difficult person is equivalent to a hundred hours doing this practice with a difficult person is equivalent to 100 hours doing this practice with all the other categories. And so a difficult person is someone who pushes your buttons. And we instruct people, don't pick the most difficult person.

Don't start with Hitler. Yeah, start with someone who just is mildly irritating. And so we have them do this and we underscore the importance of doing this really authentically, bringing them into your mind and heart in an authentic way and going through this process. And then finally we have them move on to as many individuals, as many people, beings as they can. And that's the process and we have them do this for 30 minutes a day for two weeks. And they, actually the practice is delivered online. And it enabled us to monitor exactly what they were doing and to check on how much they

were doing. And so they logged on to a protected website and received this practice. And by the way, anyone who wishes can go to our center website, which is Center for Healthy Minds. And the same exact practice that we used in this study is available for free download from our center website. So any listener can try it for themselves and see if it might be helpful. That's great.

And so more about what you found? So what we found is we found that, first of all, we gave them these hard-nosed measures to measure altruistic behavior, pro-social behavior. And the best kind of behavioral evidence for this in the laboratory comes, believe it or not, from paradigms and methods that have been developed by economists from the field of behavioral and neuro-economics.

And this field has created these really interesting ways of looking at pro-social behavior that primarily uses financial incentives. And so people are actually giving away real money. There's no deception in these studies, it's all real, and we use lots of money to jack up the stakes. And so the basic measure in this case was how much money is a person willing to give? Their own money that they're earning in this experiment to render another transaction to be more fair. So if you observed one person getting screwed in an interaction, are you willing to use some

of your own money to make it a more fair interaction? That's basically what the measure reflects. And it's real money and it's quite substantial. So people can spend up to $100 of money that they can earn for themselves and actually render this transaction to be more fair. And so what we found is that after two weeks of compassion training, people actually behaved more altruistically than people who went through the two weeks of compassion training, people actually behaved more altruistically than people who went through the two weeks of cognitive training. A lot more or a little more. That's a good question, and about 15% more.

Not nothing. Yeah. Not nothing. And what about the changes, if any, to the brain? So there were systematic changes that we found in the brain, and those changes were primarily to two circuits. One circuit that we know is involved in empathy, the ability to take another person's perspective, and the other circuit is involved in reward and positive emotion where we found

increased activation in those circuits. And interestingly, we found that those people who changed the most in each of these circuits actually behaved the more altruistically. So it predicted the extent to which they behaved altruistically. Now, one of the important limitations of this study, just to sort of be totally transparent and honest about this, is we did not follow these people up Systematically after this experiment and so we're not making any strong claims about how long these changes are gonna last I'm frequently asked about that and the honest answer is we don't know

But my conjecture is they're not likely to last unless the person continues to practice. And it's kind of like physical exercise. If you went to the gym for two weeks and had a really great trainer and really got buffed up, I'm sure most people would notice that it's helpful and that they can feel a difference after two weeks. But if they stop exercising at that point, no one is going to think that those changes are going to endure. And I think it's the same with these kinds of skills. So I'm going to say something, man, just correct any errors about in what I'm going to say.

That one of the, there are many important headlines out of this field of contemplative neuroscience, as it's sometimes called, of which you are a leader, if not the leader. Well there are many amazing conclusions to be drawn based on this work of which we've had just a tiny sample in this conversation thus far. One of the big ones though is this idea of neuroplasticity. For a long time the dog, the received dogma in the neuroscience world was that the brain

stops changing at a certain age, like in your mid-20s or something like that. But what you've shown is that actually we can change the brain at any time. The brain is changing. I think you've described it as the organ of experience. It's changing in response to the world if I learned violin right now with parts of my brain would change, but what you're doing, meditation, is training certain sort of attributes. And that, to me, is kind of an earth-shattering conclusion that we can change. So did I say this correctly? Perfectly.

And one of the things we often say is that the brain is changing wittingly or unwittingly. Right. It's going to be a good problem. Exactly. So what is the least amount of conversation? I do this question all the time. I get it all the time. What is the dosage question?

What is the least amount of meditation I can do to get some of the advertised benefits? You know, it's a very difficult question to answer from a scientific perspective. We know there are published studies which show that as little as eight minutes of meditation can actually produce a measurable objective change. But again, it says nothing about how long these changes will last. And so I think my own view is that you can probably get a change pretty quickly. Certainly after 30 minutes, you can see a change, but it says nothing about the extent to which those changes will last.

Right. So there's a leads to a question I've been thinking about a lot because I'm now oddly a small business man because I have been doing this app that teaches people how to meditate with Sharon Salzburg and Joseph Goldstein, who are the guiding teachers on the thing. And I've always been of the view that what I tell people, it's dangerous that I'm out there talking about meditation because I really don't know enough. But what I often tell people is you should do it every day. But we've noticed that our active users on the app

aren't doing it every day. They're doing it maybe the best, you know, four, five, six, some, seven days a week. What is your advice to people? Should you be doing it every day, or is four, five times a week enough? My advice is that it's particularly the early stages. It's really good to get into a daily habit.

And one of the things that we often suggest is that people be asked, how much time do you think you can actually practice and do it every day? You choose. And even if it's 30 seconds, what we'd like people to do is pick a number that they choose themselves and then make a 30-day commitment and do it every day for 30 days. Whatever that number is, it doesn't matter how small that number is, but do it every day. Don't be surprised if this functionality shows up on my app.

Because that's a great way to do it. And we talk a lot about UX user experience and how to structure this so that we can create a staff, help people establish a habit. Anyway, very interesting. Let me ask you some other questions about this field of contemplative neuroscience. Because it's been lots of interesting little debates

that this field is generated. One of them is that you're very close with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. I mean, as I said before, you were sitting next to him in our first podcast. We didn't let you talk much because that was appropriate. Yeah, fair enough. You're very close to the guy. And he's a religious leader. And you've been criticized as you pointed out to me on the front page

of the new york times by some of your uh... fellow travelers in the scientific community uh... for being so close with a religious figure and that this is viewed as inappropriate in some way what's your what's your pushback on that well you know i understand the concern uh... and uh... really i i my pushback is simply that we are trying to do the science at the highest possible level with the most integrity. And we publish the work in very high profile scientific journals with very stringent peer

review. And the scientific evidence will get adjudicated in the scientific literature. We'll put it out there. No one believes a scientific finding unless it's replicated by others. I think that my relationship with the Dalai Lama has been an inspiration. He's been a real catalyst. We really look to him as a kind of public intellectual, more than a religious figure, and he is one of the most vocal advocates

for teaching these practices in a secular way. And he often says that if we're going to reach the seven billion people on this planet, there are a lot of them who are non-believers, many of them who are practitioners of many other religions, we need to present this in a way that's acceptable to anybody. And so we view this as simply training the mind in a way which is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their religious convictions. And I think it's possible to do that. I understand the concerns that people have. And I do think we need to be super careful about it. And some of our work involves

extension to children and education. And we're working now in public schools and so That's an area where I think one needs to be especially cautious and we try to do it in that way and I think it's possible But you you are a long time dedicated Buddhist practitioner And you're a public proponent for secular meditation are you not rooting for a certain outcome in your studies uh... you know that's a uh... really important question this was exactly the question that was raised in this new york times article to which you're looting and it basically said that how can david's in the objective when he's

admitted in public that he himself meditates uh... and that would be like telling a cardiologist who studies the effect of physical exercise on the heart that they can't do any physical exercise for the rest of their active career because they're biased. They, how can they possibly be objective if they admit that they do physical exercise? Or for that matter, someone who studies perception,

are they gonna stop perceiving? I mean, I think at a certain point, I had a great time with that, really, it was just fun. I actually believe that if you're going to study meditation scientifically, you've got to meditate yourself. And I've come out and said that. I think it's crazy to think that a person can actually study meditation and not be a meditator. And so I think it's actually mandatory. But I think there needs to be important firewalls and I think you need to do it in a way that guards against bias. And one of the wonderful things about science is that it very much is democratic. You put this stuff out there in scientific journals. You describe the methods in as careful

and as detailed the way as you can. And if it's important enough finding, people are gonna wanna replicate it. And if they find that it doesn't replicate, it's gonna be a problem and people aren't gonna believe it. Three of the most important studies that I'm most proud of that

we've published are non-replications. That is our failures to find effects that we thought or others thought would be present in meditators. And so we've made a real commitment to do this in a way which is honest. And so we did a study just to give a very specific example. There's a phenomenon called interception. Interception involves the experience of one's own internal bodily signals. And many mindfulness practices involve mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of bodily sensations. And we thought this was kind of, so to speak,

a no-brainer that young people would be much better at perceiving interceptive cues if they've meditated. And so we did a study where there's an objective way of measuring this. I won't go through all the technical details, but it involves basically your accuracy in perceiving your own heartbeat as one example of an interceptive process. So we measured this objectively. We also got measures of how confident the individuals were in their accuracy.

And so they just filled out a little questionnaire just telling us how confident like on a seven point scale. And what we found is that the meditators were really confident that they were doing this accurately and they performed exactly at the same level as the non-meditators. They were equally terrible and absolutely no difference. And we really looked to see if there was a difference. I mean, we thought we would find a difference. And we published that study. Right, so I think that is all reassuring. I think it will be reassuring to skeptics, no question about it.

But the other sort of debate that's, and there are a few others, that has emerged from your field is about the quality of the science. I'm not going to be able to say this chapter in version, you'll correct me no doubt. There was a what's called a meta study where people looked at all of the studies that are out there. Metanalysis. And they found that actually there wasn't, if you took the good studies and there weren't that many of them, there wasn't much of an effect or something like that of meditation. So that was kind of

dispiriting for a lot of people in the community. So maybe restate the conclusion more factually than I've done and then talk to me about what your conclusion was based on their conclusion. Yeah, that was a very important men analysis that was published. It was done by a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University. What they did interestingly is they divided the studies into two groups, one that didn't use rigorous controls. Another group of studies, as you mentioned, a much smaller group of studies that use much more rigorous control groups.

And what they found is that the studies that didn't use rigorous control groups tended to find bigger effects for meditation. The studies that use really rigorous control groups found very little. And this was looking at the effects of meditation on specific illnesses and particularly psychiatric illnesses, measures of anxiety and depression and things like that.

And so the conclusion of these researchers was that when you look at the studies that use rigorous controls, you really don't see that meditation does any better than any other kind of treatment. So that was really the conclusion. Is that, okay, well I have two responses to that. One is that a damning result for contemplative neuroscience writ large. And two, well, if it's not more effective

than things like antidepressants or exercise or whatever, those things are effective. So, doesn't that suggest that this is just another arrow we should have in our quiver when it comes to dealing with these things? Yeah, so those are all important concerns. I mean, one in the major conclusions, though, which I think is really important for the field

to take to heart is that the days of doing sort of crappy limited studies should be over. I mean, we really need to move on. And those kind of studies are really a waste of time and money. It's better to focus on a few number of studies that are done well than studies that are not done well, because no one is going to take the studies that are not done well, because no one is going to take the studies that are not done well seriously anymore. So and the studies that are done well, your intuition is absolutely right.

If these studies don't show any more effectiveness than another treatment that it was also found to be effective, that's okay. And we can potentially, one of the things that has not really been done very much at least, is looking at combination treatment. So if we add meditation to another treatment that already has been established to be effective, does that accentuate the positive benefit? But this meta-analysis was looking at studies that you said investigated specific mental

illnesses like depression and anxiety, all of which I proudly suffer from. But it wasn't necessarily looking at some of the effects on the brain that you looked at. So it didn't say that all meditation research is subpar. It's specifically excluded basic research. The sort of stuff that we've been talking about prior is mostly been basic research on the effects of meditation on the brain. Gotcha.

Yeah. Interesting. What is your personal practice? Well, my practice has gone through a lot of change in evolution over the course of the decades that I've been practicing. I really first began a daily practice in 1974, which is when I attended my first meditation retreat

in India with Goenka. And for many, many years, I was practicing in the Teravaden tradition doing basic... I'm going to jump in on that because Teravaden, just for those... I've had to explain this in almost every podcast we do, but is the sort of old school Buddhism, it was the literally old school, the people who were following what they believe are the closest to the sort of Buddha's original instructions. So anyway.

Right. So I was practicing in that tradition for many years and deriving what I felt was a lot of benefit. And then I met the Dalai Lama, as I said in 1992, and I started to become more familiar with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. At first, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to be really bluntly honest was a big turnoff to me, because it involves a lot of ritual,

and it's complicated, and the older school, as you said, the Teravodin path was much simpler. It had many fewer rituals and forms, and I was attracted to that kind of simplicity and austerity in many ways. And I found the Tibetan world to be just excessively impenetrable. And so I was going along doing my teravodin practice and I'm still interacting with these Tibetans. And I should say that you know I've had a daily practice and it's been virtually every single day. I mean I've

missed a few days and when my kids were younger, my practice was more sporadic. I was practicing daily, but often just for a few minutes a day. But I really have had pretty much a daily practice since 1974. So I've been practicing a long time. So I've been practicing a long time. And I would go on retreats periodically, typically once a year, and found them to be of benefit and retreat as a time when you can practice more intensively. And then as I learn more about the Tibetan world, things became a little bit more transparent and clear to me. And then as part of my research actually, I met Mingyue Rinpoche.

Actually, I met him first when he attended a mind and life meeting with the Dalai Lama in Darm Sala, India in the year 2000. That was my first meeting with him. And then a couple of years later, he came to my lab. And I picked him up from the Madison Airport. And really still knew relatively little about him. But there was something about him that attracted me. And his presence and his demeanor.

And I listened to a few instructions that he had given. And there was a kind of simplicity that I was attracted to about his instructions, even though he was operating in the Tibetan world. And another thing that I felt strongly about was that while my practice up until that point was very valuable, there was a certain kind of heart opening, a warmth that I wasn't experiencing. And in the early days of my interest in contemplative activities, when I was a graduate student

Harvard, I used to do sufi dancing once a week, which was very ecstatic. And I'm a touchy-feely guy. I like to hug people. And I just didn't feel like there was a lot of warmth in what I was doing. And so, and I felt more of that in this other path. And so, and I think it's one of the things I always say is that one size does not fit all. And I think that's really important and I think there are many different paths that are very beneficial and different people for because

of their personalities, all kinds of individual differences, do better with certain kinds of paths than others. And I think that, and so this is not about any particular path that's better or not better, it's really individual preferences and what speaks to different kinds of people. But I needed, I recognized that I needed more of that heart stuff. And then when I got more of that heart stuff. And then when I got more involved in it, I really found that. I found there is an emphasis on compassion.

And that just really attracted me and certain practices that involved devotion that also attract me. Devotion, meaning prayer, frustration. Well, frustration is part of it, but not so much prayer, but frustration. Will you devote yourself to? To the teachings. Okay, so it's not too like a deity.

No, it's not to a deity, but it's to it's basically saying that I am meditating, not primarily for my own benefit, but I'm meditating for the benefit of others. Do you think that's true? Really? I really do. I really do. You know, there are days when I live this crazy life, and there are days when I'll have meetings literally for 10 straight hours and that's not an exaggeration. And in the morning after I do my period of meditation I'll look at my calendar and I'll just very quickly doesn't take me more than two or three minutes to do this. I'll just go down and look at every meeting that I have that day and just just in for a few seconds reflect on how I can bring the right stuff,

be present and be most helpful for each individual that I'm meeting with. And it's a simple kind of thing and it's enormously helpful. I don't do this all the time, but I can go through a day where I have 10 straight hours of meetings, and at the end of that period feel totally nourished and refreshed. And it's just, I think it's a simple shift of intention. And if you do that systematically, it can change everything. Last question. There are a lot of metaphysical claims right at the forefront of Tibetan Buddhism. There are deities in there. There is prayer in this school of Buddhism.

There's rebirth as a huge part of it. I mean, your Rinpoche, your teacher is allegedly the reincarnation of not one but two previous Buddhist masters. These guys really got to go on. So, as a scientist, how do you feel about all this? Not to mention all this tantric meditation where I don't know, I'm going to probably state this incorrectly, I think the idea is that like you're kind of moving the bodily energies up through and that may include like kind of semen maybe up through the top of the channel and down through the other I mean whatever I'm probably butchering this but there's a lot of what there a lot of material in this

school of butters and that that people like me would find weird. How do you deal with that? People like me find it weird too. Okay. And so as a scientist, I throw up my arms and I say, I have absolutely no idea. But what I try to do is say that, say that I have no idea, and that I just don't know rather than

immediately jumping to the knee jerk reaction that that's just total crap. And so I've had extensive discussions with the Dalai Lama about some of this, although a lot of the time, particularly in public meetings, he'll tell us this is Buddhist business, and he doesn't want to talk to scientists about that, but he's talked to us about that in smaller venues. about that, but he's talked to us about that in smaller venues. And I sort of bracket that, and I don't let it bother me too much. I let it bother me a little. I certainly don't unabashedly embrace it.

And I don't reject it immediately either. And I just put it in the category of total not knowing. And basically, I think there are so many important issues that we can work on where there is a lot of common agreement and shared understanding that we can be very helpful without resorting to this other realm in this tradition where I think there is some conflict between the modern scientific understanding and Buddhist understanding. Thank you. Thank you for making time for this.

Thank you for letting me probably take you to a point where you're gonna miss your next meeting or be late for it. And thank you for making time for this. Thank you for letting me probably take you to a point where you're going to miss your next meeting or be late for it. And thank you for your work, which has really just definitely changed my life and I think changed many people's lives, so really appreciate all of the above. And I want to thank you for everything that you're doing to help promote these ideas and bring them out into the public in a way way which is really remarkably helpful. And now I tell people that if they are first interested in meditation, that the first book they should read is 10% happier. Alright, there's another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you like it, I'm going to hit you up for a favor. Please subscribe to it, review it, and rate it. I want to also thank

the people who produced this podcast, Josh Cohan, Lauren Efron, Sarah Amos, and the head of ABC News Digital, Dan Silver. And hit me up at Twitter, Dan, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.