#19: Science, Meditation & the Mind's Full Potential - Cortland Dahl, PhD

Right now, our understanding of the range of well being is quite limited. We tend to focus on extreme dysfunction. We think about well being as just getting back to quote, unquote, normal.

Hello and welcome to the FitMind podcast, where I speak with experts on the mind. From neuroscientists and psychologists to monks and Navy Seals, they share cutting edge research, fascinating stories, and proven advice for creating a fit mind. One that's full of focus, vitality, and joy. I'm your host, Liam, the founder of fitmind, a mental fitness company, and a reminder to check out the Fitmind meditation app. It's a mobile app that teaches over 50 different mental fitness and meditation techniques drawn from various traditions around the world. I'm pretty excited to share this episode with you. My guest today is none other than Cortland Dahlia, who is one of the leading neuroscientists researching meditation along with Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison's center for Healthy Minds. And more generally, he's at the cutting edge of exploring the interface between the body, mind and brain. Cortland has an eclectic background and has spent years studying and practicing meditation in Asia, including eight years living in Tibetan refugee settlements in India and Nepal. He is also the creator of the Healthy Minds program, a well being training program that integrates insights from scientific research with a comprehensive path of contemplative training. And in addition to his work with the center for Healthy Minds, Cortland is the co founder and chairman of Terragar International, a global network of meditation groups and centers. So one of the reasons I love this episode is that Cortland is really at the center of this fusion between Eastern methods for training the mind and Western science, corresponding with the Dalai Lama and other world leaders in this realm. And in this episode, we dig into some of the fascinating new research suggesting the mind's full potential and how it can unlock it. All right, Cortland, welcome to the FitMind Podcast.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, so I'm very excited for this conversation. We've had one other neuroscientist on, Dr. Sarah Lazar, and I just find it endlessly fascinating, all this research that's coming out to support some of the subjective claims about meditation's effects on the brain and the experience of meditators. So to start, I'd love to just hear about how you got interested in fusing your own meditation practice within studying of it from a research and a scientific perspective.

Yeah, that's a great question. And my. My training and my. My journey with this is. Is a bit Idiosyncratic. But I started a long time ago, almost. Well, actually more than 25 years ago now. My interest in both science and research and my interest in meditation started around the same time. So I was at that time, around 19 years old in undergrad. And I also had, at that same time, was struggling with a lot of anxiety. So I was just looking for some ways to deal with my mind and emotions, and by chance, stumbled upon the practice of meditation very quickly. Really changed my life. It became a huge part of my life and has been ever since. And that was the same time that I was beginning my studies in psychology. And I worked in a lab at that time studying models of intelligence and complex skill acquisition. Actually, which might sound unrelated, but actually the research we do now is very much looking at contemplative practice practices like meditation as essentially skills that we're learning and applying in daily life. So I was studying that and learning about that as a student at the same time that I was learning these skills in my own daily life. So that was 25 years ago. So I started working both with the science and these practices together. And then my life for many years took a complete right turn. I ended up living overseas. I spent about eight years living in Tibetan refugee settlements in Nepal and India. And there I was continuing my interest in meditation, but I wasn't doing anything related to science. I was translating these ancient Tibetan texts from Tibetan into English and doing a bunch of other things. And then it was probably about a decade ago that I reconnected with my interest in science. I met Dr. Richie Davidson and another scientist, another brilliant scientist named Antoine Lutz, who is now in France and is a dear friend. And reconnecting with them. And they are two of the real pioneers in the neuroscience of training the mind rekindled my interest, and they convinced me to come back into the academic, scientific world. So through a fortuitous set of events, I ended up back at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And now I'm very involved in all the research that's happening these days. So it's a very exciting time to have these worlds come together.

Yeah, very exciting indeed. And so much of the top research and the exciting findings are coming out of your and Richie's lab. And I want to get into all that, but I thought maybe just staying with your background for a minute. I just finished reading a fantastic book called In Love with the World by Mingyur Rinpoche. Who is Mingyur Rinpoche and what's your relationship with him?

Yeah, that's another Big strand of my life. Mingyur Rinpoche is one of the foremost meditation teachers alive today. He's a Tibetan monk and Tibetan lama. He's in his mid-40s and he's also one of the key contributors to the scientific. The dialogue between science, the world's contemplative traditions. So he was actually one of the first test subjects at our lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Some of the, in fact, maybe the first study that was published in a really high profile scientific journal. He was one of a small group of quote, unquote, Olympian meditators who were tested in that very, very early research on meditation by, you know, Richie Davidson and Antoine Lutz were really the two main scientists at that time. So he was kind of there on the ground floor in this pioneering research, not only as a test subject, but actually more than the other subjects, or I would say maybe perhaps along with Matie Ricard, who was another key contributor, was also part of the dialoguing with scientists like Ritchie and Antoine to help figure out how to study these practices, what questions to ask, how to measure them and so on. So he's been very pivotal to that, that whole world. And then he and I have a very close relationship as well. I actually met him about almost 20 years ago in Nepal when I was living. I mentioned I had been living in Nepal in India for many years. So that was actually at the beginning of my time there. I met him and he's been one of my own personal meditation teachers. And then at a certain point, we co founded an organization called Tergar, and this has now become a worldwide network of meditation centers. So I continue to work both with Tergar and Mingyur Rinpoche and my work at the center for Healthy Minds with Richie Davidson. So I kind of work across those worlds.

Yeah, it seems like you're really kind of in the center of things, connecting these two worlds, west and East. And I saw a video online where you were showing your app to the Dalai Lama, explaining the app that you're creating. Are you allowed to talk about the app at all? Is that.

Yeah, yeah, we can talk about that. And then actually that's. It's funny you mentioned that presentation to the Dalai Lama. There was a number of scientists, there's a few of us who were giving presentations to the Dalai Lama. And I had the very un enviable task of presenting to him about our work. But in particular, I was presenting a scientific model to describe different forms of meditation practice. So I was kind of lecturing the Dalai Lama on meditation, which was one of the more ironic experiences of my life. So it's kind of funny, but he really has a way of putting people at ease. So it was a great experience, but it was strange to be telling the Dalai Lama about meditation. Yeah.

Yeah, I'll bet. And. And because you speak all these. You speak Tibetan, is it? And poly or.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm fluent in Tibetan, and I speak a smattering, kind of small amount of other languages. But Tibetan in particular has been a big part of my life. As I mentioned, I've been a translator, translating classical Tibetan texts, essentially meditation manuals, from Tibetan into English.

Do you think anything gets lost in translation? Like, because you're reading the ancient texts themselves, and when Americans are trying to closely follow the traditions, do you think anything gets lost in translation?

Yes, definitely. It's always challenging and also rich and interesting when you have these ideas and teachings and practices moving across time or from culture to culture. And definitely a lot gets lost in translation. One example is around language and concepts. In Tibetan, for example, there's an incredibly sophisticated language and set of ideas and principles around different mental states. And in the English language, we just don't have that richness of language. So when you're translating, literally translating words to words, we're translating from, you know, a place where there might be 10 different words capturing subtle differences between different mental states into a language where there might be one word. So I always joke about one particular version of that is when. When. When there's live teachings. Actually, Mingy Rinpoche himself, I'm oftentimes assisting at meditation retreats, and he speaks fluent English, but a lot of times when he hits up, runs up against the limits of his English, he'll turn to me and say some particular word in Tibetan and say, how do you say that in English? And oftentimes he'll say it. He'll run through, like, five or six different words in Tibetan, and I'll. And I'll translate them all the same way. Like, it'll be, like, five different words that all I can say is, I don't know, maybe vivid or clear, you know, but there's all these rich words in Tibetan that capture this nuance, and in English, it just gets completely lost.

Yeah. And another thing I was thinking about, and I don't know if you would agree with this, but the fact that all these different traditions have created essentially maps of the mind as you're training it, this is what you can expect. And I imagine all the human mind has a ton of Similarities, no matter where you are. But there's also all these cultural layers that get put on top of the kind of evolutionary programming that's probably similar amongst us. And so I know one example of this was the Dalai Lama was shocked to hear that we have self hatred in America or that we can feel self loathing. And that just seemed like a completely foreign concept that you could even hate yourself to him. And so how does that play out? Do you think the map needs to be modified at all? If you're an American learning meditation?

There's a really interesting, important point about that very anecdote about the Dalai Lama not being familiar with self hatred and low self esteem. And there's two different ways to look at that. And actually the scientific research on this is quite interesting. One view would be to hear that story and think, oh, the Tibetans don't have low self esteem. Like they seem to just generally have positive self regard and healthy sense of self. And I think that what the science would say on this, that actually it's a very different understanding of emotion, which is not so much that Tibetans don't have a word like low self esteem because they just all think really good things about themselves and just they have a kind of healthy conception of self. But actually the way in which cultural ideas, cultural concepts shape our emotional life. For example, you could say that the very fact that Tibetans don't have the concept of low self esteem leads to almost a different interpretive mechanism that shapes their emotional responses. The research in emotions, like in many areas of cognition, is that we are not so much just perceiving the world as it is in this case, just experiencing an emotion, like something happens in the environment and then we have this emotional response, but that we are in some way constructing our emotions. It's more of a dynamic process in which our cultural conditioning, even our language, in this case in interacting with our body and our environment, shapes or creates an emotional experience. So that would be a kind of more sophisticated way to look at that same anecdote, is that it's not that they don't have the concept because it's not happening, it's that because they don't have the concept, they don't interpret their emotional cues in the same way that leads to a particular experience, emotional experience, in that way. So it's very interesting. And this actually lines up very well with the Buddhist way of thinking about emotion, which very much focuses on the role that concepts play in shaping experience.

Yeah, that's so interesting. And I guess we could never Know for certain whether the lack of language is the root cause or if it's that the experience is not there. So there was no language developed around it. Right?

Well, there's been some interesting research on this. For example, if you go to tribes in remote places that have very little interaction with other cultures, other peoples, you can do this very interesting research on emotions. And this has actually been done. And a lot of it interestingly depends on how you ask the questions. For example, a lot of the historically the research, the way it's been done, is that you might go and you could show somebody pictures of people with different expressions. A quote unquote sad expression, a quote unquote happy expression, a quote unquote fearful expression. And then you could ask the question and give them a list of responses, showing them somebody with a shocked look on their face. And then give them a bunch of options to choose from. Is this person happy? Is this person sad? Is this person afraid? And so forth. And what you find across cultures, whether it's a remote isolated culture or in east or west, is that they will give predictable responses. People will identify them similarly, which would make it seem as though, oh, we just have these universal emotions and they're always there, they're always recognized. It doesn't matter where you are from or how you're raised. But then if you do the experiment a little bit differently and you don't give them a set of questions or a set of responses to choose from, and instead you just say, I just say to you, hey, Liam, here's this picture. Look at it. What's going on here? And I don't constrain it with make you choose from a list of my options, then what you find is that actually it's not consistent and people give very, very different responses and it's kind of all over the place. So it simply goes to show that if you don't predispose somebody to think of something in a particular way and you leave it completely open, people will give all sorts of different responses to even what we would think of as the most obvious emotional responses.

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I think having some flexibility in the approach is really important. And actually, just prior to this conversation, I was meeting with a colleague of mine, Dr. Christine Wilson Mendenhall, and we're doing some work mapping these different constructs related to, well, being, drawing both on contemplative literature and also scientific research, empirical research. And we were talking specifically about one. One area that we're very, very interested in, that we've been focused on, which is. Which is this what we refer to as meta awareness, which you might think of as the. The capacity to be aware of one's own mental processes. So in the moment to. To be aware that one is thinking while one is thinking versus absorbed in one's thought, or be aware that one is perceiving something in addition to being aware of what one is perceiving. So that sounds very abstract, but to give you a concrete example, you might imagine being in a movie theater. This is the one I like to give. And you might have an experience where you're completely attentive to the movie, but you're so enthralled and absorbed in the movie that it's almost as though you forget your sense of self. It's just the plot of the movie. You're completely absorbed in that. And then in another moment, something might happen. Maybe somebody makes a loud noise in the audience, or you notice a sensation in your body. Could be anything that triggers this, but suddenly you are aware that you're in the theater watching the movie again. And in both cases you're attentive to the movie, but in one case, you're absorbed in it. And in the second moment, you are aware that you're watching the movie. So that second moment when you're aware that you are watching is a moment of what we would call meta awareness. So we were talking about meta awareness, and in a paper that we're working on, we've been struggling with the definition of that, and in particular to reconcile that with some of the mindfulness research which focuses very much on being non judgmental, on acceptance and some qualities like that. And what we were talking about is whether or not those qualities are essential to meta awareness or they're separate from meta awareness. That was what we were essentially talking about. And what we came to is that what's often going on is that you can have that quality of stepping back and being aware of experience, but what you do with that can be very different. So you can employ a particular strategy in mindfulness practices would use this particular approach, which is what you might call an acceptance based strategy, where you're not trying to change experience, it's simply about being with your experience as it is with an attitude of nonjudgment, being accepting towards it, just exploring it with curiosity. But you could just as equally take what you might call an elimination based strategy, where you're aware of it, but what you then do in that space of being aware is you try to change it. So there are contemplative practices where you might be angry, for example, and you're really reactive and you're caught up in that anger, suddenly you notice that you're angry and you sort of stepped outside of it, so to speak, and you can be aware of it and then you might do something to disrupt the anger. So classical Buddhist practice would be to meditate on compassion or loving kindness and you do that essentially as an antidote to the anger. So you're not accepting the anger. In fact, the whole point of it is to get rid of the anger. You're replacing one experience with another. Both of those require meta awareness. It's just that one is strategy of acceptance and one is a strategy of replacement or elimination. Or maybe an antidote model, you could say. So we've been very interested in that. And to go back to your original question, this is a very long way of answering this question. But I mention it because it's an example of how you might adapt these practices or emphasize different things based on a particular culture. And now I think these mindfulness approaches, which are very much rooted in an acceptance strategy, are coming to the fore and people are finding so much benefit from them precisely because we have so much in our world these days that is amping up self criticism, feelings of dissatisfaction, being oriented to our faults and shortcomings. We just have so much that is getting us to always be overly critical of ourselves that the acceptance tends to short circuit that. Whereas in times past that might not have been such an issue for people and you might have found more of these other approaches emphasize So I think that cultures tend to prioritize depending on what's going on in that particular context. And certain practices might come to the fore and others might be de emphasized depending on the need of that particular context. So it's quite important. And you can see this happening across history, how certain things are emphasized or de emphasized.

Yeah, absolutely. And it seems to me also one of the big differences is that now we're trying to figure out how to use this as a tool to become, you know, 10, 20% happier, whereas the goal in some of these other traditions was always 100% happy or whatever, you know, enlightenment, whatever you want to call the end of the path. And a lot of those traditions, I think, would say, you know, this is not going to. It's not going to be pleasant the whole time. In fact, a lot of these experiences that come up might be very unpleasant. And yet you need to deal with that conditioning. And, you know, if you don't deal with it now, you'll deal with it at some other point. And so we're still figuring out how do we bring this into a Western context or an American context where maybe we're not trying to follow the path all the way to the end, but how do we modify the tool to make it useful for someone who's just trying to handle their life a little bit better?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's another interesting aspect of our modern culture that because at some point we really de emphasized a lot of our cultural understanding and even cultural practices around human potential, we shifted the goalposts of well being. And right now, if you look at whether it's a medical understanding or a scientific understanding or even popular culture, our understanding of the range of well being is quite limited. And so oftentimes we tend to focus on extreme dysfunction or disorders, and we tend to think about well being is just getting back to, quote, unquote, normal. And that's sort of the range. And I think that's somewhat of a byproduct, an unintended byproduct of what happened essentially through the Age of Enlightenment, when you had all the pushback against, in particular with the mystical strands of Catholicism, which was really a lot of the. Where you found a lot of these contemplative practices. And for various reasons, some of them healthy and perhaps some of them unhealthy, we just dropped a lot of that. We kind of threw the baby out with the bathwater. And that constrained our understanding of really what's possible for the mind and how it can be trained in many ways. I think a lot of what's happening now is we're just rediscovering that full range of human potential. Some of the research we've done at the center for Healthy Minds is really showing that some of these understandings we have are quite limited. And the possibilities for the human mind are dramatically far beyond what we would ordinarily think is possible.

Yeah. So I think that research is just way too fascinating to not talk about. So when you. When you've brought in these, as you call them, the Olympic athletes of meditation, like Mingyur Rinpoche, and is it Matthieu Ricardo Matthieu Ricard, what are you finding is going on in their brains?

There's been a lot of interesting research on these very advanced meditation practitioners. So there's a lot to say. Maybe I'll just mention a few of the early studies that. That came out of our lab. So I think some of the two of the studies that were particularly influential. One of them was a study that showed sustained gamma activity. So these are a particular range of brain oscillations that typically only happen in short bursts. So gamma activity, for example, happens in a moment of insight. When you're trying to figure something out. And suddenly you have that aha moment and you seize upon the answer. There's a flash of gamma activity. So there are different periods where gamma activity occurs, but typically it's for very short bursts. And one of the things that it signifies is neural synchrony. So the synchronization across different regions in the brain. So you could think of it as a different. Almost the orchestras playing well together in a moment of gamma activity. And what they found in these advanced meditators was that. This type of activity was sustained for much longer than had ever been observed. And I think neuroscientists, prior to that thought it simply wasn't possible. It was just the nature of gamma activity that happened in short bursts. And they saw that this was not only sustain, but sustained for, you know, for. For long periods, way, way longer than they thought possible. And typically when. When you hear. I wasn't there when this research was being conducted, but I've heard Richie talk about it many times when he. What he talks about off. What he mentions oftentimes is that typically when you are doing research, whether it's brain imaging research or other forms of investigating brain activity, you don't see anything with the naked eye. It's usually very complex statistical analyses that are needed before you can detect a signal and see what's going on across subjects. But in this case it was so dramatic that they could actually see as they were watching this that something was going on to the point where they thought maybe something was happening with the, that there was just artifacts. It wasn't actually a real signal, but there was maybe a problem with how they were measuring it. Or movements, for example, scalp movements can sometimes mimic this kind of activity. So it took them quite a while to do the necessary analyses to show that this was actually real, that it was really this sustained. Because most people, without doing all the checking and double checking wouldn't have believed it. So that was one.

And sorry to interrupt. Was that one that neurobiological signal or state, was that in meditation or in a resting state?

Great question, and the answer is both. So it was most pronounced during the state of meditation. And maybe it's especially interesting to note that these meditators did a number of forms of meditation that were observed. And the one that had the strongest signal in this respect was what is referred to in the Tibetan tradition as non referential compassion. This is a state of effortless awareness that is infused with a feeling of warmth and unconditional compassion. That was quite interesting to me in particular, both as a meditator and as a scientist looking at all the kinds of meditation they were looking at and seeing that that was the one that seemed to really have a strongest signal. But they also found that in the baseline state when they weren't asked to meditate, that there was more gamma activity than you would expect in a typical individual. So this showed that not only were they able to sustain this when they were meditating, but that it was essentially had changed their baseline. It had become an enduring trait. Not just a state of meditation that they could enter into, but a trait that would endure outside of formal meditation. So I can, I can. There's another study too, but I don't know if we want to. I'm happy to do.

Oh yeah, let's, let's hear that one as well.

So another, another study and actually this one was right before I started working at the Center. I actually was a participant subject in this particular study. So I could, I could speak to it from both ends. This was a study of long term meditators and the way in which the brain responds to pain. In this particular study, this was an imaging study where we were in an FMRI and we had these small metal boxes on our wrists and they would pump scalding hot water through at regular intervals. You can calibrate the heat. So it's just on the Limit of what you can handle before you start damaging the skin. So it was really hot. It really, really hurt. It was very hot. And we do this over and over and over again. Essentially what would happen is there would be a stimulus, and then you would know that 10 seconds later, after perceiving that stimulus, that the hot water was going to arrive, that you were going to get burned, essentially. And then that would last for a little bit and then it would stop. And then we'd wait a while and then do that all over again. And this went on for a very long time.

That sounds torturous.

We have many good ways to torture people at our center. So what happened with this particular study, or what this showed, was that the meditators, in comparison to a control group of non meditators who just came in and were essentially told to do the same thing, was that their subjective experience and the way the brain was behaving were completely different. And essentially what that difference, what the difference was that if you look at the pain matrix in the brain, the non meditators learn to pair the stimulus with the pain. The moment that the stimulus would happen, there would be a sound. Then you would know, oh, in 10 seconds I'm going to get burned. The moment that would happen, the pain matrix of the brain would start, would become active. It's almost as though the brain was simulating pain before the painful stimulus actually happened. There was this anticipation period where purely when you were looking at the brain, you would think the person was experiencing pain, at least in certain parts of the brain. That was the before the anticipation period. Then of course, they were experiencing this activity in the pain matrix during the pain. But then after as well, in the recovery period, there would be a very slow, gradual recovery before the brain returned to its normal state. Before, during, and after the actual stimulus, there was a lot of activity in this pain matrix. In the meditators, it was very, very different. Essentially, there was very little activity in the pain matrix until the stimulus arrived. Then it would spike up and it was actually slightly higher during the stimulus compared to the non meditators. In other words, the meditators were very much experiencing the painful stimulus, perhaps even more acutely than the non meditators were. But then when it ended, it would just drop straight down to baseline so that there wasn't this long recovery period. We think of this as a measure of resilience, essentially showing that you can recover from adversity very, very quickly versus that it sticks around and hangs in your system for a while. So that was Looking at the brain, how the brain was responding to this painful stimulus. The other interesting thing was the subjective experience. So there was two questions that were asked, which is how intense was the pain and how unpleasant was the pain? There was no difference between the two groups with how intense they felt the pain was, but there was a very significant difference with how unpleasant they thought the pain was. Essentially, the meditators could see that the pain was intense and experienced it as intense, but they didn't view it as unpleasant. They weren't bothered by it in the same way that the non meditators were. Another way to think about that is for the meditators had learned to disentangle pain from suffering. They could experience the physical pain without all the mental and emotional suffering that usually accompanies it.

Yeah, I often cite. I think it's probably this study where there was a 40% increase in pain tolerance. Is this the same study that found a 40% increase in pain tolerance for meditators?

I think that might be a different study, but sounds related. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's just a shocking statistic until you understand what you just explained, where there's this difference between our emotional response to the pain stimulus and the pain itself as it's experienced. Right. As it's happening. Like it's our anticipation of the pain continuing or reoccurring that's actually causing most of our suffering, rather than the pain itself in that moment.

Yeah, it's very true. I oftentimes describe that since I was one of the subjects in this particular study, when people ask what I was doing as that was happening, that allowed for that different pattern of brain activity and a different reaction to the experience is that I describe it as I was having the experience of pain while it was happening, but not before it was happening or after it was happening, just while it was happening. Which seems kind of strange, but if you think about the application to real life, oftentimes we are. We're anticipating a difficult experience before it ever happens. Like I used to be phobic of public speaking. If I knew I had to give a presentation and you told me even months ahead of time, I would think about it and I would be having a whole physical and mental and emotional experience that was essentially simulating the challenge long before it was happening. And then of course I had the painful thing when it was happening, and then I would be reliving it long after it was happening. I'm still experiencing it over and over again. So it's really the capacity to just have the experience without all the stimulation.

Yeah. And our experiences of actual pain are few and far between. I think for those of us who are lucky, it's stubbed toe here and not getting a knife wound or a tiger mauling us on a daily basis. But there is so much mental suffering. So I want to, in the time that we have left, get into the way that you categorize the different meditation practices, because I find that very interesting and informative as well. The way that you've broken them down into attentional, constructive and deconstructive practices. Could we maybe start with attentional and just go through why those are lumped into one category?

Sure, sure. So one of the things that we have been interested in for quite some time now and have been trying to create the foundations for a research agenda that looks beyond mindfulness, builds on all the research that has happened on mindfulness, but it takes it in new directions, is seeing that we need some kind of framework that helps us to see what that range of practices is and what these different forms of practice are designed to do. So the framework that you're talking about, which was published in a journal called the Trends in Cognitive Sciences, was really looking at that from the point of view of the mechanisms of different practices. So in other words, what are the active ingredients in different styles of practice and categorizing them based on those different active ingredients. Attentional practices, in brief, are, are all oriented around the cultivation of what we call meta awareness. This is that quality of simply the capacity to be aware of the processes of thinking, feeling and perceiving. In other words, you know what's happening in your own mind in the present moment. So there are many different practices that strengthen that capacity of meta awareness, and then along with that oftentimes is the regulation of attention. So different practices work with attention in different ways. All of them require meta awareness. You need to know what's happening in your mind to be able to regulate what's happening in your mind. But in some cases, you might be narrowing the aperture of attention and being laser focused on a particular object. So the point would be to be concentrated and maintain, to direct and sustain attention for periods of time. There's other practices where you go the opposite direction. You widen the scope, attention as wide as it can go. In some cases, you release all attentional focus altogether and you just rest in an open receptive state. But regardless of what you're doing with attention, the common thread throughout all these attentional practices is that capacity to know what's happening in the mind and to sustain that presence.

Yeah. And it seems to me like that's really the foundation of any meditation practice is the ability to not get lost in thought and remain aware of the practice that's going on. So the other practices, constructive and deconstructive, seem to also rely on those same mechanisms or at least some foundational training into not just getting lost in your thoughts.

Yeah, yeah. And I would just maybe add an important footnote and say. I wouldn't say it's not getting lost in thought, it's not getting lost because you can get equally lost in perceptual experience. So I gave the example of watching a movie where you're absorbed in the movie. There's been a lot of research on the experience of flow, for example, and we think there's likely different variations of the flow experience, some of which may have meta awareness and most often do not involve meta awareness. So you can be absorbed in a sensory experience, like watching a movie or binge watching a show on Netflix, or reading a good book or having good conversation, or, you know, my son's a video gamer, so I'm pretty sure he's, he's very attentive and absorbed, but he's. He's not lost in thought, but probably very little meta awareness going on. So the important thing is not. Is the not getting lost, not getting absorbed. So we refer to that as experiential fusion. But you're absolutely right in the sense that that meta awareness is the precursor. It's a necessary prerequisite for any style of mental training. So going into the constructive and deconstructive practices, you need to have meta awareness to do those practices. By definition, any kind of mental training is going to strengthen meta awareness because it needs to be there for that. But in these other styles of practice, meta awareness is not the main point. It's kind of a byproduct. It's a necessary prerequisite and it's a byproduct as well, but it's not the main emphasis. Right.

And so what are we practicing in? Constructive and deconstructive? What fits into those categories?

So in constructive practices, it's a very rich category. And you find these across contemplative traditions and virtually all the world's religious traditions. Contemporary psychotherapy, essentially, you could think of this as the cultivation of character strengths. In traditional terms, these would oftentimes be referred to as virtues, particular qualities that are conducive to well, being. So I would say in a nutshell, it's the strengthening, nurturing, cultivation of qualities that are conducive to well being. So it could be patience, equanimity, compassion, courage, could be a great many, but it's strengthening those qualities. Deconstructive practices, on the other hand, are more related to what we would in classical terms refer to as insight or wisdom. These are oftentimes less about cultivating or strengthening particular qualities, but more about understanding, self inquiry, self knowledge, really investigating experience, again within the context of awareness. So you need to, for example, be aware of what's happening in your own mind and then be looking into it, investigating and inquiring, how does the mind work? How are these emotions shaping my experience? And so on. And the whole idea is that there, by looking deeply into experience, it tends to dismantle a lot of the mental and emotional habits that create and perpetuate suffering and different forms of, you could say maladaptive mental and emotional states. Right?

Yeah. It seems like all three of these practices have their benefits and importance, and combining all three would be important in a practice. My last question to you is, what's the exciting research that's going on now in the center for Healthy Minds these days?

I think we're most excited about really thinking about the next chapter of research on contemplative practices and how we can train the mind to promote well being. We are now focused on developing programs and research protocols and programs so that we can begin to investigate some of these other styles of meditation, for example, the ones I just mentioned, practices that are meant to generate insight and wisdom. So we're developing a whole program that we can teach that and train that and then study it. We're also really working on how we measure well being. So we're trying to develop a richer set of measures so we can more adequately assess the degree to which people are cultivating these qualities to understand how they're cultivating them and things along those lines. So there's a lot more to say, but I think the advent of smart technologies, we're actually working with some of the biggest technology companies on the planet and we're collaborating in ways to find ways to scale some of these tools and understandings in a way to promote well being.

Fantastic. Well, that's all very exciting and I encourage those listening to check out CenterHealthyMinds.org and thanks Courtland, so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a real pleasure.

Thanks, Glenn. It was great to talk about all this with you.

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