EP 167: The Healing Power of Neuroplasticity and Epigenetics | Ron Siegel PhD

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Mall. In today's episode, I'm talking with my longtime friend and colleague Dr. Ron Siegel, one of the leaders of integrating mindfulness and psychotherapy. And we're going to be talking about harnessing the healing power of neuroplasticity and epigenetics through mindfulness practice. We're going to really dive into the profound connection between mindfulness and brain architecture and how these practices influence neural pathways. We're going to talk about uncovering the benefit of contemplative techniques and really cultivating greater focus and alleviating suffering and promoting compassion. And we'll also talk about everyday strategies for improving our memory and attention and just really enhancing the quality of our lives through mindfulness practice. So enjoy this episode with Dr. Ron Siegel. Welcome, Dr. Siegel.

Thanks so much for having me.

Well, it's really great to have another conversation with you, and this is right in the sweet spot of your expertise, so I'm really looking forward to this. So I'm going to share a bit of your bio and then we'll jump right in.

Okay, Sounds good.

All right, so Dr. Ron Siegel is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a longtime student of mindfulness meditation. He serves on the board of directors and faculty for the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and teaches internationally about mind body medicine and the application of mindfulness and compassion practices in psychotherapy. Dr. Siegel is the author of numerous books, including the Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, Finding Happiness Right where you Are, the Mindfulness Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems. And he co authored Fitting Essential Skills for Mindfulness Based Psychotherapy and Backsense. He is a regular contributor to numerous professional publications and is the co director of the annual Harvard Medical School Conference on Meditation and Psychotherapy. He maintains a private clinical practice in Massachusetts providing mindfulness oriented psychotherapy. And I know you wouldn't put this in your bio, but you have been at the forefront of the integration of mindfulness and psychotherapy, certainly one of the leaders of that development over the last couple of decades.

Yeah, I've actually, and this isn't just the usual false modesty, I've actually had the privilege of being part of a whole group of us here in the Boston area a lot with connections to Harvard Medical School who have been at this for a long time. So it's really a group effort.

And I think this is. It's been a really positive integration both for psychotherapy and I think, for the mainstream mindfulness movement. So this summit's all about rewiring your brain, which is somewhat of an analogy and somewhat reality, that we can reshape the neural architecture of our brains both in therapeutic settings and on our own through various practices and tools, in order to heal trauma, heal attachment wounds, and to optimize brain health for health and well being, for life performance in whatever domain of life might be important for us, for longevity and for happiness. So in that light, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how the field of psychology during your career and in the last several decades has evolved to understand the brain not as a fixed structure, a static structure, but more like a muscle that can be retrained or neural architecture that can be reshaped in positive ways, and the role of neuroplasticity and epigenetics in that. So that's a lot of territory to cover in the first question, but I know you can give it a shot.

Yeah, no, it's really been quite remarkable over the course of my career. When I was in graduate school, they pretty much taught us that the brain matures, develops in different ways, reaches a kind of peak maturity around age 25, and then starts to deteriorate after that. And what we now know is it's very much analogous, as you said, to being like a muscle. Yes, it's true that all other things being equal, perhaps muscle strength might peak around age 25 and deteriorate gradually after that. However, if we decide that we're going to take up an athletic pursuit at age 30, 40, 50, or 60 and hadn't done previously, we can develop strength and flexibility and endurance in our muscles that we never had previously. And if we pick up one pursuit, it's going to develop certain muscles, another pursuit is going to develop other muscles. And this turns out to be much more akin to how things actually work in the brain. One of the interesting early studies about this was close to home because I was actually a New York City cabbie for a little while when I was in college. And there's an exam that you have to take to become a New York City cabbie, and that's to identify 10 locations in the city of New York, and they actually tell you the locations in advance. Two of them are the same. They're Madison Square Garden and Penn Station. Two of them. You just have to say that Yankee Stadium is in the Bronx and Shea Stadium is in Queens. And you only have to get 60% right. And you're allowed to take the exam three times in one day. Which explains why New York City cabbies before the days of gps were not necessarily all that knowledgeable about.

Geography. However, to become a cabbie in London, you had to study for three years and memorize literally thousands of different locations. And the exam would be, they'd say, I want you to point X to point Y. And you had to tell them street by street, what it would look like, what the landmarks would be and what would happen. So some enterprising neurobiologists in the very early days of this decided to take a look at what the brains of London cabbies look like compared to. They didn't compare them to New York cabbies. They could have, but just to people generally. And they found that parts of the hippocampus which are, which are dedicated to memory were much bigger in London cabbies than they are, were with other people. And they even did studies looking at people who went into training to be a cabbie. Look at them before the three year training and after the three year training. And indeed it had beefed up. So. So it very much is like a muscle.

And that increase in the volume, if you will, in terms of hippocampal volume in this case has something to do with the process of neurogenesis, Right? Actually an increase in neuronal cells.

Absolutely. There's this principle that neurons that fire together, wire together. So any part of the brain, nervous system more broadly, but in particular the brain that we use a lot will tend to bulk up in very much in the same way that muscles that we use a lot tend to bulk up. So it's that use the firing of the neurons that then creates this neurogenesis, that then creates more synaptic connections and the like, and basically strengthens parts of the brain which correlates to strengthening various abilities.

To continue with your muscle analogy, that old phrase, use it or lose it holds true for the brain as well.

Totally. And yes, just like muscles, I mean.

We can speak, being a little bit on the older side, to say the least, that certain faculties, yeah, they do deteriorate, right? No question about it. You know, short term memory of various sorts of things, they tend to go, although less so if you use it more. And other faculties can actually be developed, including faculties associated with wisdom, faculties associated with compassion, that are actually in some ways easier to develop later in life. So that's where I think we separate a little bit from the muscle analogy in that I don't think there are any muscle groups that are actually easier to develop later in life, but there are certain neuronal patterns that are easier. Easier to establish.

Yeah, I don't know if that's true for any muscles, but there certainly is research showing, and there's even they're developed some gyms and businesses using this kind of high intensity tension exercises, using machines which you can also do with straps and things, but really concentrated. And they're showing people going in in their 70s and developing incredible strength gains through these kind of exercises. So, yeah, Dr. Siegel, like you during, during my early education, certainly what I was taught, the brain is a static phenomena by the time you're an adult, if anything, that's going to deteriorate over the lifespan. And now for several decades now we know about neuroplasticity and the fact that the brain can change, it can grow and so forth, basically on what we expose it to and how we use it. Right. What about the role of epigenetics? And for people who are not familiar with that term, we all have the genes we receive from our parents, but they're not as determinant as we once thought. There's these epigenetic factors that determine how genes express themselves. And we can inherit epigenetic factors, but they're also changeable. And there's this kind of bioelectrical energetic environment around our at the cellular level. And those influences can change. We'll get into mindfulness in a moment. But various things that we do can change the express how our genes express themselves. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

You know, it's remarkable when most of us learn biology, we learned about this tension between Darwin and Lamarck. And Lamarck was this.

Had put forth the idea that, well, you know, giraffes have long necks because they stretch their necks in order to get at the tall leaves. And then that trade, after doing that throughout a lifetime, would be passed on to their offspring. And Darwin said, no, I don't think that's how it works. I think it's the giraffes that are born with longer necks through accidental mutations have a better chance of surviving and passing on their genes to their offspring. So that's how evolutionary process goes. Now, in general, we've moved to believe that Darwinian evolution and natural selection is largely how things work. But Lamarck was actually onto something. This is what we find with epigenetics, which is rather shocking. I'll give you just One example, I just heard this at a trauma conference from somebody who's a cutting edge researcher in the field. It turns out that if you traumatize psychologically stress in a, in a bad way, a, an adult male rat and then you collect that rat sperm and I know all of this, this is not nice to do, but, but we do learn something very interesting. You collect that, that adult rat's sperm and impregnate a female rat that has not been exposed to the trauma with this and then look at the offspring of that rat compared to others. That because you randomized assigned other adult male rats to not experience trauma and you collected their sperm and you did that. Well, it turns out that the new baby rats will come into the world traumatized. They come into the world much more fearful, much more.

Reactive to novelty, scanning the environment for danger and like it's pretty amazing. I mean, of course this has, you know, tremendous implications for societies and how we live lives because it turns out that when parents are psychologically distressed, yes, we know that that can result in kids being psychologically distressed because they're growing up in an environment which is more difficult and doesn't tend to meet their needs so well. But on top of this, what we're realizing is the parental genes are changed from their distress and this is being passed on to kids. Now by the same token, of course, and we have less research in this area, but there is some research about rats.

Who themselves are taken care of well and then are nurturing their. They both nurture their own kids, but if they're, their kids are separated from them and those kids that are the offspring of the rats that were cared for well are growing up, they will act like well cared for rats. So it goes both ways, right? That genes are changed by negative and difficult experiences and genes are changed by positive experiences. Which means that if we can construct a life including start to take up practices that are more wholesome, that are better for self care, that are better for our mental and physical health, we may actually change the expression of the genes that we've inherited. Things are.

On the one hand a lot comes from what we get genetically from our parents, including the epigenetics. But on the other hand we're rather malleable. Both are true.

Yeah. And that's really exciting thing, fascinating thing about the research that's going on today and really opens up tremendous possibly for further sense of self agency about our lives. And one of our presenters on the summit, Dr. Vu from LA, he talks about lifestyle as medicine that just basic you know, really basic, not even the, the high tech stuff but just basic lifestyle, how we take care of ourselves, the exercise, the food we eat and you know, our basic self care can really impact our, our health in very profound ways. For better or worse, obviously. So.

So let's talk about mindfulness and contemplative practices a little bit and why it's kind of, kind of difficult to do the research there especially to compare. You know, there's been some good research been done on basic, on a basic eight week mindfulness program like MBSR where there's an FMRI before they start to program, there's one afterwards. And these are new meditators and they, they show measurable differences in neuronal thickness and neural pathways associated with emotional balance, cognitive control and so for forth. But then the really pronounced effects or benefits from long term practice, deep practice and studying deep practitioners, advanced practitioners, people have been really making this a big part of their life for decade or decades who've logged thousands of hours of practice. Kind of hard to study those and create comparison groups and etc. Etc. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about where the research is about the benefits of contemplative practices like mindfulness meditation.

Sure. I mean my friend and, and colleague Sarah Lazar, who was actually one of the first people at Mass General Hospital here in the Boston area to show that meditators, people who've been doing this for a long time, had different brain structures than non meditators. But as she points out as a good scientist, but were they also vegetarians where they all, you know, who becomes a long term meditator, who becomes a Tibetan monk. This starts to become very complicated because we of course can't randomize people to. You're going to become a lifelong monastic and you're going to become a.

Hedonistic pleasure seeker and then we're going to look at both of your brains after 30 or 40 years. That's how I started to pull off. So we're always somewhat guessing, right? We're always somewhat guessing except in the case of the studies that you point out. People can be randomized to the eight week mindfulness training, they can be randomized to an eight week say health education class that at least meets for the same number of hours. And so the support that comes from group contact and socialization and that kind of thing is similar in both. And see that there are, and indeed there are measurable differences. The other question that people sometimes don't think about is there's a difference between what we call state mindfulness and trait mindfulness. State mindfulness is basically how mindful of am I in the moment? And there are various ways to try to measure that. Trait mindfulness is am I generally more mindful in my life? And as you might imagine, it seems likely that when people practice longer and more consistently that more of the trait mindfulness develops. Even if somebody can develop a fair amount of state mindfulness in the short run. The other problem we have is measuring something like mindfulness.

You know this as somebody who's done a lot of deep practice. If you ask somebody who has is relatively new to mindfulness practice and you come up with a simple definition like awareness of present experience with acceptance, and you ask that person, are you aware of your present experience with acceptance? People relatively new to the practice will tend to endorse that. Like yeah, I am, I'm pretty accepting guy, you know, or, or a person. You ask somebody who's been at it for decades and they'll say, oh yeah, I remember, you know, there's this time I was up in Vermont, I was sitting a silent retreat for about three weeks and one afternoon I was on the hillside and there on the hillside, oh, I don't know, might have been five or 10 seconds. I was really present, I was really aware of my present experience with acceptance. And then that passed, like all things do. So we have the tremendous problem that if you try to measure this by asking people about their experience, people who've done a lot of practice have what they call a Google high res resolution consciousness. They have more, more pixels of awareness per square centimeter of consciousness. So they notice that even when they're relatively calm and focused, there's a lot going on and, and, and the mind is all over the place. Whereas people who are relatively new feel that, well, if they're a little bit calm, yeah, it was real mindful. So, so it becomes. It's very hard to study this.

Well, yeah, it's really important to keep in mind the distinction between correlation and causation correlate. There's lots of correlations you find in research that doesn't mean you've found the cause. Right, right, absolutely. So that mind being all over the place that you just referenced, this is often based on our understanding of the brain today, attributed to a brain network called the default mode network that tends to be active when we're not directing our attention, when we let the mind just wander or do its thing, driven about by habitual patterns and circumstances. It loves the time travel, going to the past and ruminated. Bob, love to go into the future, fantasize, worry about the future constantly, you know, thinking about ourselves, what I think about ourselves, it's that whole self sensing and selfing and creating, you know, what we call the ego or that, that separate self identity. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, maybe some of Judd Brewer's research around that. He used to be at University of Massachusetts, now I believe he's at Brown University.

Right.

And he's done a lot of research on the pulp mode network and on the posterior cingulate cortex and how all that functions in terms of the progress that you were describing that we hope to see with mindfulness or that we see, but maybe it's difficult to really establish it with the research.

Yeah. Now this is a fascinating area of inquiry and fascinating and very important because while our friend and colleague John Kabatson introduced mindfulness practice to the medical community and got remarkable acceptance of it by calling, calling it mindfulness based stress reduction. The reduction of stress is only one of many, many different things that can happen through mindfulness practice. And I would argue that the more life changing effect of mindfulness practices are that they can really alter our very sense of self. They can actually shift us from thinking about ourselves as separate individuals and in which we're terribly preoccupied with our narratives about how well we're doing. You know, you had graciously mentioned my book the Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary, Finding happiness right where you are. And it was really about noticing after decades of mindfulness practice and involvement in Buddhist activities, as well as decades working as a psychologist, as well as having been in my own therapy, you would expect that I might have developed something like a coherent, secure, comfortable sense of self. But the reality was that, you know, there I was in my 60s and nope, hadn't happened. Right. Instead, my sense of myself and how I was feeling about myself was going up and down pretty much with every email that happened. You know, oh, somebody invited me like you did, you know, to participate.

In a really nice offering and, and, and that's great and you know, my work is valuable and how wonderful and I'd feel good about myself. And then the next email in which I saw my friends being invited to something that I wasn't, you know, the, the collapse of, oh well, you know, I guess my time has passed. People aren't so interested in what I do, just as one of many, many, many, many, many examples of what would unfold over the course of the day. So what's with this? What's with this constant preoccupation with how am I doing? What do people think of me? Am I a good person, am I not a good person? Am I successful, am I not successful? You know, really still this stuff is occupying consciousness. But yeah, really still it was occupying consciousness. So this is where this dovetails with, with Judd's work, is he. He tried to dig into so what is the neurobiology of cell thinking? What's going on when we're making these evaluative judgments of ourselves? Where is it happening in the brain? And here's a tremendously clever idea. Might we come up with, in essence, a form of neurofeedback to help to train us to be less self preoccupied, less caught in our narratives of how am I doing and how do I compare to others and am I good enough and.

Or am I down in the dumps and feeling inadequate or not good enough in some ways? So he identified as others have one particular area of the brain called the posterior cingulate cortex. Fancy name, it's abbreviated the pcc. And this was when he was still at Yale, which was prior to UMass in the biography that you outlined, where he teamed up with a computer scientist to get people into functional MRIs, which means basically a video of brain activity, and figure out a way to filter out all the different noise, because there's a lot of noise going on there, gazillions of neurons firing all the time, and identify when there's particular activity in this part of the brain, the pcc, and when there isn't. And then he trained people well, some were already meditators. And then he tried with novice people. But the idea was you would sit, have.

Your brain activity being monitored by the functional MRI and you would be able to look at a screen. And the way it worked was blue vertical lines on the screen would indicate that the PCC was relatively quiet, and.

Red lines pointing downward would indicate that there was activity of the pcc. And he's teaching people, basically, they'd come in and they start fooling with this. And the meditators pretty early on would get the blue lines. How did they get the blue lines? Well, they got it by quieting the pcc, which as you mentioned, is part of this default mode network where we're thinking about ourselves and talking to ourselves about ourselves, and particularly where we're evaluating ourselves. But then you see the unfolding of the actual experiments and it's like the person's there and how are they doing this? They're dropping into their breath, they're dropping out of their thought stream. They're coming to their senses, if you will, to really attend to sensory reality. And they would do that. And the blue spike would show up, right? And they would go, oh, yeah, it's working. I'm getting this. And the minute the thought I'm getting this would pop into consciousness, there it would go. You'd suddenly have the red spike going downward. And then the. Oh, damn, I'm not getting this. And then more red. Red. I'm really not getting. Wait a minute. If it were me, it would be. Wait a minute, Ron, just come back to your breath. Let go of self evaluation. Then the blue spike comes again. Hey, I'm getting it. And you can see how this would unfold, right? Hilarious. On the one hand, remarkable that we can actually see selfing occurring in real time. And very interesting. I mean, Judd's a longtime Buddhist practitioner, and his thought was, can we train ourselves to be less self preoccupied through neurofeedback? And he's still playing with that. They figured out a way to.

Not quite as accurately, but more or less duplicate this with a high resolution eeg, which means a lot of electrodes on the head. And this is easier because I forget what it costs. It's like $1,000 an hour or something to run somebody through a functional MRI machine. So that's obviously not practical as a. As a way to change the consciousness of the planet. But. But maybe there's this other way to do it. And there are many other ways, of course, that we can work on letting go of this self preoccupation, which is many of which was the. The kind of point of my book was. Was trying to collect ways we can do this in our lives, including through mindfulness practice.

So this summit's all about rewiring the brain. And so is there research demonstrating that if we, through neurofeedback, through mindfulness practice, through various types of mind training, if we become a little less prone to getting pulled into that hyperactivity of the default mode network.

A little less involved in continual self sensing? So if they're.

If we're reporting a significant difference, if the subject is reporting a significant difference in that, then does that show up in differences in the neural architecture of the brain, in particular the hippocampal complex?

Yeah. Well, the study that I'm most familiar with around this is a classical one.

That classical dates back to 2007, which in terms of neurobiology and mindfulness research, that's like, like the old stuff, right? The. And in this study what they did was they trained people in two different kinds of self reference. And this is interesting. So cognitive scientists actually have said, well there's at least two different ways that we can experience a sense of self. And one of them they call the narrative self. And that's where talking to myself about myself. So if it were me, it would be, hi, I'm Ron, I'm a psychologist. I'm an old guy in my 60s now.

I've been married for a long time. I have a nice relationship with my wife. I have two kids who, you know, who are wonderful and I love very much and you know, still pretty intact verbally and able to think clearly and explain things. My artistic abilities were frozen in the third grade and if you saw my, one of my pictures, you'd say, hey, a third grader drew that. And you'd pretty close. And on and on my strengths, my weaknesses, my identities, my positionality, all of the ways in which we talk to ourselves about ourselves that include, which wasn't emphasized here so much but you know, a little bit, all of the positive self judgments and the negative self judgments, you know, I'm good in these ways, I'm inadequate in these ways and, and all the preoccupation about that. And so that's our narrative mode mode, experiential mode. If I were to talk to you right now out of experiential mode and I wouldn't be talking because experiential mode is largely non verbal, but I'll try to put words to it. I'd say mouth is a little bit dry, maybe causes a little bit of anxiety just being on a public stage, even though you're very comfortable to be with fleet, tiny bit of hunger in the stomach, it's been a while, but basically feeling well and temperature's okay, you know, it would be just about, you know, the mind body in action. And it turns out that cognitive scientists can train people by giving them lists of adjectives and different kinds of exercises can train people to more or less hang out in narrative mode. Talking to ourselves about ourselves in this evaluative way and identities way or experiential mode, staying with the mind body.

And it turns out also that another part of the default mode network called the medial prefrontal cortex, when we're involved in narrative mode, it's particularly active and it's less active when we're in experiencing mode. So what they did was here you could randomize people. They randomize people to either an 8 week mindfulness based stress reduction course or I'm not sure what the control group did, whether it was a health education course or something, but they did something else. And then they put them in a scanner and they asked both groups to operate out of narrative mode, the selfing mode, if you will, and try to operate out of experiential mode to.

To speak about their experience in experiential mode. And predictably for both groups when they were in narrative mode, there's a lot more activation of this medial prefrontal cortex. And when they're in experiential mode, there was less. However, the people who had been randomly assigned to mindfulness meditation were able to quiet the medial prefrontal cortex much, much more in experiential mode. Basically, they had learned how to enter into experiential mode. They had learned how to be with the mind, body, organism in a way that wasn't caught in the thought stream and wasn't just involved in the sort of endless self evaluation that our thought stream can generate during the day. And as I'm sure you've experienced, and I've certainly experienced, most people who have done a fair amount of meditation practice know this. Sometimes we get into this.

State or this way of relating to experience where the way I would best describe it.

Is.

It feels as though I'm experiencing the organism we call Ron unfolding.

Walking is happening. Even right now, a bit of it talking is happening, but the sense of meanness in it, not mean, but me ness in it is just diminished. It's. There's just more of a sense of experiencing the organism unfolding. And there's a tremendous relief that comes with that because then, you know, the, the main point isn't what's everybody think about me, how am I doing? And you know, you know, how long am I going to live and will I get good fortune or bad fortune? Less of that and more simply experiencing the remarkable wonder which is any ordinary moment of consciousness. Right? Because like, you know, as I think it was Thich Nhat Hanh used to say, a lot of religious traditions, they're really impressed by walking on water. And no argument with that, but for me, I'm amazed at walking on land, right? This experience of, of just the remarkable magic of a moment of consciousness that's not so self preoccupied.

So that's another example where we have some neurobiological evidence that's connecting with this movement toward being less involved in selfing and more involved in being the organism unfolding. Which to my mind is the. Of all the many benefits of mindfulness practice, it's the prize. It's, it's the most important thing to be cultivating because so much flows from this. Our, you know, our capacity to be in connected relationships flows from less self preoccupation, our ability to deal with mortality, which you know, people you are or my stage of life think about. Right. You know, totally transformed because you know, if, if I'm invested in Ron and.

You know, where he's going, you know, the next developmental steps, you know, thrilling like assisted living, skilled nursing. I mean the ability to, to actually be present without self preoccupation is such a gift. So the fact that we're beginning to look at the neurobiology of this and how this might unfold neurobiologically and that it's, it's thing, if you will, is, is, is just fascinating, inspiring and to my mind all around wonderful.

Well, this is so important what you're, what you're talking about because that overactive default mode network, that constant rumination about the past and the future and thinking about me and whatever think of that whole thing you've been describing is really the source of all our self created suffering. I mean being alive in a human body, we can't escape some suffering. But, but we have a lot of self created suffering that we could learn to have less of. And that's really the source of it is that overactive default mode network and.

And, and, and, and just want to. And virtually all the world's religious traditions have noticed this.

Yeah.

Or another.

I mean I think even, even St. Paul said something episode like if you want to be happy, forget about yourself. Something like that, you know.

So. Yeah. And it appears that, you know, even John Kabat Zinn, I've seen him describe the practice. You know, there's not. Your mind wanders. That's what minds do. Every time it does, you have the opportunity to gently bring it back and every time you bring it back to the present moment, it's like doing another rep. You're building that muscle. And we now know that's not just an analogy we are building, you know, the strength of neural networks that make it easier to come back from that distracted hyperactive default network work and make it easier to stabilize our attention. And part of what you were describing, I think we know from current research, is that often I think when people are learning to meditate, sometimes they get the idea I have to stop my thoughts or even if they don't have that idea, they just struggle with it.

And actually we understand that what you described was that basic shift in all mindfulness practice away from the narrative to the sensorium. Right. And to the senses and to feeling that the senses are happening right now. And you know, our, our recognition of how now our experience of them is changes over time. You talked about the experienced meditator during one moment on a retreat. Oh, that was really now. Right. But not. But nonetheless, the senses are more or less now, much more now than some narrative we're lost in. And so coming back to that sensorium, and we know that activates something called the task positive network, something sometimes called the executive network. And to one degree or another, it's a little bit of an oversimplification of brain science, but to one degree or another, they're mutually inhibitory. So when we focus, the pulpal network just naturally quiet down. We don't have to make it quiet down. We have to get rid of our thoughts. It's just focusing, joining our attention with something that's happening right now. The body, the breath, send perceptions, it naturally quiets down. And, and then it seems like the more, the more time we spend there, the more time we spend doing that, we're building that muscle. We're building the strength of those neural networks that allow us to do that more often.

And they allow us to have what psychologists call metacognitive awareness, which is again, it's not about stopping thoughts as you, as you.

Point out, and importantly point out, because people do get confused about this, but it's about seeing a thought as a thought thought, rather than identifying with each thought as though it's a reality. Because when we're mostly living in the thought stream and we're not grounded in the sensorium, as you said, what happens is we believe in our thoughts more and, you know, a moment's reflection, we start to see that.

Boy.

Well, thoughts are useful, but they sure are colored by our feelings. Right. When we're, when we're feeling, you know, depressed, we have a lot of depressive thoughts. When we're feeling anxious, we have a lot of frightened thoughts. When we're feeling safe and connected, we have a lot of loving and sweet thoughts. So, you know, they're, they're not exactly trustworthy since they're so powerfully influenced by, by emotion. And it's very interesting how this kind of grounding in the sensorium, the quieting of the default mode network, also gives us this perspective on thoughts. They still arise, but we don't, we, we don't react to them in quite the same way because we have a little bit more perspective on them.

Yeah. There's something where they become less sticky. And you know, in a sense just the basic cognitive activity of thought could be considered part of the sensorium. But when we're just, when we're not getting caught up in it, when we're not. And it seems like one of the things that gets loosened and this is globally what you were talking about here is identity. I mean most of us, until we start doing this kind of work, develop some level of metacognition, begin some kind of practice, we believe we are our thoughts. That that kind of radio station that's been going non stop between our ears for however many years, that's who I am. Right. We, we over identify with those thoughts and when we loosen up that identity and we're more just involved in the identity of being a living being that's unfolding in the present moment as you were describing, that changes our whole relationship to that and the thoughts become less sticky, less sticky and then are just another perception arising within that sensorium, another phenomenon. Know.

Yeah, yeah, well, and, and, and what you're pointing out is so true. You know, Descartes was right, you know, when he said, I think, therefore I am. Yeah. That is how we construct this sense of self. We do it through these endless narratives.

Yeah. Maybe not a completely existential way, but on that level he was certainly right. And you know, you were talking about the relationship between feelings and thoughts at a causative level. There's certainly a chicken or the egg thing there. You know, we can think ourselves into feeling depressed and if we are depressed, we're likely to have depressive thoughts. So, so definitely. So I want to talk a little bit about pain. And you know, as human beings we're fairly hardwired to avoid discomfort and pain and chase comfort and pleasure. And that keeps us locked into a frame. And we may think, well that course that makes sense that we would avoid discomfort and seek comfort and pleasure. But the problem is it keeps us locked into a fairly mechanical way of being, a fairly habitual way of being. And actually one of the tried and true strategies for awakening is to lean into discomfort a bit. Not, not to.

Not. We're not punishing ourselves, but it's always there. There's all, every, every sense perception we have, every thought, everyone, it's all arising on the spectrum from pleasant to neutral and unpleasant all the time. It's always part of our life. And so living a life addicted to pleasure and comfort and really almost in terror of discomfort and pain is once we no way to live, once we once we kind of realize that. And there's this. This.

I guess, phenomena or theory or description in psychology called the pain paradox, you know, where, yes, we naturally avoid pain, retract from pain, push pain away. But we know that most of the good stuff in life, the transformative stuff, the deep stuff, is on the other side of pain they're willing to embrace and go through. Right. And so I wonder if you could talk about how these practices sort of increase our tolerance or our ability to be with pain, both physical pain and emotional pain, thus that we can move through into a more transformative way of being, instead of just being controlled by the circumstances of physical or emotional pain constantly. Right?

Yeah. So there's two broad components to this that I think I'd like to address. One of them is how these practices, how mindfulness practices in this case, actually change our relationship to pain, and then what that looks like in the physical realm and what that looks like in the emotional realm. So, fascinating study done. Again, this is now a classic done some time ago, where they took people who were experienced in mindfulness meditation practices and people who were novices, and they exposed them to physical pain. So they're in a functional MRI scanner. They're brains are in the mri and they're torturing their feet with a heat laser, which apparently is not actually damaging, but.

It'S quite uncomfortable.

They're looking at different brain structures. And two of the brain structures they were looking at were a part of an area called the insula. The insula.

It's always risky to say anything about what any brain structure does because the brain's so complex and all different structures do all sorts of things. But in raw generalities, there are parts of the insula that are quite involved in what we call interoception, meaning sensing what is happening inside the body. And another area that they looked at were parts of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved, again, in many things, but in planning, evaluating, thinking, analyzing that kind of. And what they found was that when the meditators were being exposed to the heat laser, they had very strong activation in the insula, this part of the brain, associated with sensing what's happening in the body, and modest activation of the prefrontal cortex, basically oversimplified thinking about it, evaluating it, including having thoughts of, you know, oh, damn, is this going to get worse, I hate this, when's it going to stop? That kind of thing. The non meditators had actually less insula activity. We might presume they were feeling less intensity with feeling with less intensity. The sensations on their feet from the heat laser, but they had more prefrontal activity, more thinking about it, reacting to it, judging it, not wanting it. And when they then interviewed both groups and they said, well, rate your pain. There's a thing called the visual analog pain scale, which is used routinely in pain research, where you basically have a line from 1 to 10 and you have to show the researcher physically with a pencil mark, where along the line is the level of pain. Basically, those who had been doing the, who had not been trained in mindfulness practices rated the pain as quite high, as rather severe, and those who had done it rated the pain as not so bad. So here we're having a very interesting situation where the part of the brain that's involved in sensing the sensations of pain is actually more active in the meditators, but they're saying it's less bad than in the people for whom than the non meditators with this insula is less active, but their think about it is more active. So step back for a moment and in mindfulness practice, what we learn how to do is, as you said, lean into discomfort so that if we have an itch or an ache while we're involved in sitting practice, and those things happen, especially if you're sitting on a cushion and sitting for a long period of time, the idea is to try and experiment. Instead of just scratching the itch or changing the posture to get rid of the ache, try just being with the sensation and letting the sensation be the object of your awareness. Oftentimes what we find is it changes by itself. Not always, but often it does. So this attitude of being with rather than fighting against the pain seems to actually make us experience the pain as less intense, which is quite interesting. We're feeling it more vividly, but we're less distressed by it. And there's a classic differentiation made in mindfulness practice circles and in the traditions that teach it, differentiating between pain and suffering. And the idea is that pain is inevitable because we inhabit a body and there are moments where the body is going to be infirm or exposed to stimuli that are unpleasant. But suffering is what is generated by hating it, fighting it, wanting it to stop, and the like. And it's that which was represented neurobiologically by this prefrontal activity that is what is relatively quieted. So ironically, we actually feel discomfort more vividly because we've got this higher resolution consciousness, we've got more sensitivity, but because we're learning to be with it rather than fight it, we actually are Suffering less. So we rate the pain as less distressing. And this is very interesting in the physical realm. In the physical realm, reacting to pain sometimes is quite sensible. If I experience pain because I've just put my hand on a stove which is still on, and I have a sudden impulse to withdraw it, well, that's going to be good for the survival of the organism and passing on my DNA to my offspring, because we don't want to fry her hands. However, in the emotional realm, if I start to avoid public speaking because I hate that feeling of anxiety and I constrict my life accordingly, or even I avoid feeling my sadness and.

Fear and anger and become stuck in depression because my whole emotional apparatus has shut down, or I'm turning to substances all the time because I want to make discomfort go away, that, in the emotional realm, leads to all sorts of very significant difficulties. In fact, we might say that pretty much all of what we call psychopathology or psychological distress comes from our efforts to try to avoid something which is uncomfortable. So if we can learn through mindfulness practices to be with discomfort again, we're going to take our hand off the stove. Absolutely. But when the wave of sadness comes up, the wave of fear comes up, the wave of anger, which are physically uncomfortable in the body, if we can learn how to stay with those experiences, that could be quite transformative to us. And we know from the neurobiology that, hey, you know, we see how this is working. The mindfulness practices actually change the activation patterns in the brain in this direction of feeling more vividly but fighting it less. And to my mind, that's fascinating because it's, you know, this is such a fundamental principle for navigating our heart minds in the world. And to see that, oh, yeah, we can see it neurobiologically, we can see the effects of mindfulness practices, and we can see the effect in terms of people's ratings of their suffering.

This is useful information for us all.

Yeah, this is so important, and it's really at the heart of what this summit is all about. I think. I love Dan Siegel's framework for the window of tolerance. Some of us call it the zone of resilience, that bandwidth of life that we can engage with with relative skillfulness and, you know, staying relatively well regulated. And it's not the same as the comfort zone. It could include things that are very uncomfortable, but we're able to work with them. We're able to be in a responsive relationship with what's going on, rather than letting it get us triggered back into fear and survival mode and so forth. And this is really about reclaiming our lives as well as opening up to the unlimited possibilities of life. Right. So, yeah, it's, it's so important.

You know, mindfulness practices sort of do two things at the same time. They increase our sensitivity, which, which I've been mentioning, but they also increase our capacity to bear discomfort, which is the, the point I think that you're, that you're making. And as our capacity to bear discomfort grows, well, we can be with greater and greater level of discomfort and still be within the zone of tolerance because we've learned to tolerate higher levels of discomfort. And this gives us so much freedom. I remember my first meditation retreat and when it dawned on me, which something which now is. Seems extremely obvious, but oh my gosh, all of my fears, and I'm a fearful guy. All of my fears are that I will experience some kind of discomfort and that it won't go away. My gosh, my. You know, I'm afraid of being rejected because I don't want the discomfort of that. I'm afraid of, you know, academic failure because I don't want the discomfort of that. I'm afraid of physical pain because I don't want the discomfort of that. You know, on and on and on could take up several hours with. If I were to go through a catalog of my fears.

But.

The take home point is that they're all about trying to avoid some kind of discomfort. And if instead I can develop this capacity to be with discomfort and trust that it will pass on its own.

Wow.

I would be free in life. And that's exactly where this can lead.

Absolutely. Those things you described that we would usually think of in their big narrative term. Well, of course we. But what we really are afraid of is the actual experience of discomfort we imagine that will bring. Right.

Yeah.

Which I think in some yogic spiritual traditions, they. There's this thing called the old dog stage, which is where you would voluntarily just go out into the community and be a beggar on the street and let people throw rocks, you become the fool, just become the object of derision to finally, you know, just, just give it all up. You know, he talk. If you did nothing you're holding on to anymore in terms of frameworks about what would make you feel good. But it's so helpful that it comes back to what we can work with in our practice. The actually felt experience of discomfort. Yeah.

And I find in general in terms of spiritual practice that it's not necessary to lie on the bed of nails or probably to go out as a. As a mendicant. Like regular life, even privileged life, seems to produce quite a lot of pain to be able to work with. So there's a lot of opportunities right here and right now.

Yeah, there's plenty to work with. I mean, another description for that has been called the charnel grounds. And one teacher I remember said, you don't have to go looking for a charnel ground. We all have one right between our ears.

Yeah, exactly.

So I know in your work you talk about these three basic motivational systems. You have the fight or flight system. You have drives such as hunger, thirst, and sex. And then you have caring and compassion. I wonder if you could talk about the interrelation between these and what this has to do with. With the ways that we can reshape the neural architecture of our. Of our brain for thriving, for happiness and thriving. Yeah.

There are a lot of people in the psychology world that have pointed out that these three systems are all really useful for survival, but we can get into trouble. And particularly that third system, what's sometimes called the mammalian tendon befriend system, our caring, nurturing, comfort, connecting system, can get overwhelmed by the other two. And when that happens, life doesn't unfold so well. So briefly, three systems. The first one is our emergency response system. Right. It's shared by other animals, shared by birds, it's shared by fish. Reptiles have this to some degree. It's the way in which when we're threatened, we go into either fighting, fleeing, or freezing in some form. And neurobiologically, what's going on here is.

There'S activation of a part of the brain called the amygdala. That's our kind of central switchboard for sensing whether we're under threat or not. And hormonally much is activated through adrenaline that we're all familiar with. What it feels like to have adrenaline coursing through the body. And the activation of something called the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access, which does this. Actually, the fight or flight system is activated by, on the one hand, a branch of the autonomic nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system being activated. That's immediate, but then followed a few seconds later is the adrenaline that goes into the bloodstream through the HPA axis. We all know what this is like, and this one.

Trumps all the others when it's activated, because when that's activated, we're not so concerned with where our next meal is coming from. We're not so concerned with building shelter, getting warm, we just want to jump out of the way of the bus. We just want to go for safety. The second system is as you said, the drive system. And that is when we're thirsty, we seek water. When we're, or something else. When we're hungry, we seek food. If we have sexual interests, we seek a sexual outlet. If we're cold, we seek shelter and warmth as well as mediated by our long term thinking. We realize, hey, winter's coming, I think I better build a shelter. I think I better in modern days find an apartment. In the old days.

Find a cave, right? And then this third system, which is the one that is really quite developed in primates and particularly in humans, is this capacity to notice the suffering of others and to want to help. We feel this most automatically with our kids because we share their DNA. We have a very strong impulse to protect them. And you know, almost all of us will nurture our children, almost all of us will feel warmly and protective toward a very cute puppy, right? We'll, we'll do it there. And indeed we sometimes are caring and self compassionate toward ourselves and sometimes toward others, towards strangers, though that usually only happens if the other systems aren't activated. So the, the.

One observation is that there's kind of a hierarchy of needs in terms of the way these systems are organized. As I said, the fight flight fleet system freeze system.

If that's activated, that's going to take precedence over everything else. If we're not threatened, then we notice, hey, I'm hungry. The stress physiologists say there's no need to digest your own lunch when you're about to become somebody else's lunch. So the drive system kind of shuts down when we're under threat. But if we're not threat, then we notice we're hungry, we go out to seek lunch or whatever it is. It's only when those other two systems are pretty much satisfied that then our care and capacity comes online. And demagogues know this, right? They, they say, you know, be very afraid of those bad others or be very afraid that you're going to run out of the things that you need. And when you're doing that, you really don't care for strangers and particularly you don't care for those groups who aren't like me. I mean, one can understand a fair account of the horrible things that humans have done to one another over world history as basically this function. People being either frightened or concerned that their basic needs aren't going to be Met and as a result dehumanizing another group. As humans, what this means is if we actually are living a life in which we're basically safe, which most privileged people living, you know, in, in modern industrialized societies at a middle class or better level, if you're, if you have that privilege, you probably are mostly safe most of the time. Our problem is not that we don't have enough to eat by and large. Our problem is how do we stop ourselves from eating too much? Is more the difficulty.

That we actually don't need those first two systems so very much most of the time. And we could get along a lot better and be a lot more at peace if we could activate this compassion caring system. And here again, mindfulness practices, they're really heartfulness practices. And increasingly over the years as they've been adopted in Western societies, there's much more of an emphasis on loving kindness and cultivating compassion. And as you know, because you're steeped in these traditions, you know, in Buddhist traditions, wisdom, kind of clear seeing and compassion are seen as two wings of a bird. The idea is the bird can't fly without both, or two wheels of a cart that can't roll without both. So what's interesting is we actually have some neurobiological understanding of why we need to deliberately do compassion practices. Why this third motivational system, if you will, falls behind or is trumped by the other two systems on so many occasions and actually can benefit from our care. And circling back around to the original muscle metaphor, the muscle of compassion is one that we really might want to be working on because it's going to make us all considerably happier in the long run. And it's not one that will automatically get exercised as easily as the other to.

Well, everything you're describing is really one of the real reasons for this summit because our world needs a lot more compassion today. It needs many more well regulated. People who can operate with more of that tend to befriend those systems engaged more of the time. And you know, all these systems, as you said, they're all there for a reason. But unfortunately we're either out of habitual patterns, getting triggered into these fight or flight systems, or unnecessarily into the other kind of survival systems, or we're getting manipulated into that as you described, unnecessarily and not spending enough time in these broader systems, and especially in relation to people we don't necessarily know or perceive that are similar to us in our nation state groups or our ethnicities, or our religious identifications or what have you, our gender and so forth. So this is, I mean, seems really critical to the survival of humanity at this time. And so really the reason we're doing all this. And you know, I just appreciate the way you described it so much. And these pro social qualities, I love the work of Richie Davidson, who I know, you know, you know, identifying these substrates, the neuronal substrates of well being that have to do with things, these pro social qualities and things like mindfulness and attention and awareness and meta awareness, things like insight and wisdom, things like gratitude and generosity. And we actually know how to train up in these things now. And, and we know that pro social behaviors are highly correlated with a sense of felt sense of well being and anti social behaviors are highly correlated with a lack of well being. Right. So across our whole society, everything we could do to help more people learn how to experience more well being is going to probably one of the most leveraged ways we can transform society for good. So I just love the way you, you made that so clear. And the last thought, you know, as you were describing, I think our relationship to pain and how, you know, we may actually experience, whether it's physical or emotional pain actually more acutely, more vividly, but because we're not creating the suffering side of it through resistance or avoidance or, you know, or the time sense, it's going to last forever, that we rate it as lower. And so it makes me think of the Buddha who's been historically described as someone who, because of his profound meditative equipoise and profound insight into the nature of suffering, pretty much became incapable of personal suffering. He was no longer creating any personal suffering. And so someone might think, well then what would motivate him to do anything in the world, world? Well, actually he was now acutely aware of the suffering in the world, but absent his own personal suffering added to it, so what naturally arises from that profound compassion? And so that's just kind of a story I've heard or description I've heard about the Buddha many times. And the way you're describing the neurobiology and the psychology, all this seems to line up with that pretty well.

Yeah, no, it, it makes sense that, that what happens is, I mean in, in Buddhist traditions, certainly Vajrayana, some of the traditions that evolved in Tibet and Nepal and.

Also in China and Japan, there's this idea of Buddha nature that in essence, if we're not preoccupied with fight or flight, or we're not preoccupied with trying to get our drives met, our drive needs met, that this naturally radiant and compassionate human being shows up. And I think there is really a lot of truth to that. I don't want to.

Describe it in a way that's going to make all our listeners feel horribly inadequate because I certainly don't hang out in that space very much. I hang out in the space of all my wishes, desires and fears and the like. But there are glimpses, there are glimpses of seeing that, oh yeah, we actually do have this other potential and we can try to cultivate it.

Well, you know, I think we can normalize it. I don't think we have to go to an exalted figure like the Buddha or some of the other great spiritual figures in human history. If you think about what are the vast majority of human beings do every day. Absent fear. We get up, we take care of ourselves, we take care of our kids, we queue up at the well, at the store, we drive on the right side of the road. We're incredibly cooperative and collaborative. Absent fear. Yeah, we have a reasonable, reasonable sense of confidence that we can get our basic needs met. We behave quite nicely.

Yeah, no, it's really, it's really true. We really do have this, this, this wonderful capacity and it's, it's. Oh gosh, you know, I just came back from a week in Berlin, which for me was basically a tour of Nazis and the Stasi and, and you just see when, you know, when fear predominates. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. You know, how, how compassion and, and even seeing others as humans goes offline. But it actually comes back online as you're saying.

When we're able to feel safe and sufficiently satisfied.

I think everything we can do to reshape, rewire our own brains to feel a greater confidence in our own well being that is there already. And even how to cultivate greater well being and less be prone to especially unreasonable fear. And then the things we can do to give more human beings on his planet greater confidence that they're going to get their needs met in a reasonable way is what's going to really change our world.

So, yeah, absolutely.

So thank you so much for everything you've shared with us today, Dr. Siegel. And where can people find out more about your work?

So I have a website which is drronsegel.com just my name that way. And yeah, all sorts of podcasts and meditations. If you want to take up mindfulness practice, you can, there's all sorts of things you can download for free and a little bit of description of the, of the book that I'm I feel enthusiastic about because it feels so important to me personally to try to free myself from the endless self preoccupation. If I can help others free themselves, that would be. That would be a plus.

Us to be happy right where we are could be so wonderful. And I know you offer lots of programs and retreats as well, so I encourage people to check out your website drromsegel.com thank you so much.

Thank you Fleet. And thank you for all your efforts in organizing this and bringing so many good teachings to so many.

Thank you. Be well.

It is Ryan Seacrest here. There was a recent social media trend which consisted of flying on a plane with no music, no movies, no entertainment. But a better trend would be going to chumbacasino.com it's like having a mini social casino in your pocket. Chumba Casino has over a hundred online casino style games all absolutely free. It's the most fun you can have online and on a plane. So grab your free welcome bonus now@chumbacasino.com sponsored by Chumba Casino.

No purchase necessary.

VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply.