Dawson Church explains that humans are evolutionarily hardwired toward a negativity bias (illustrated by a "stick vs. snake" ancestor example), which makes meditation difficult because negative thoughts readily surface. He argues that ancient practices (Vedic and mystical traditions) can be filtered through modern neuroscience—citing EEG, gene, hormone, and MRI studies—to create evidence-based techniques that retrain the brain. Church highlights memory reconsolidation and extinction as mechanisms by which long-established negative memories can be rewritten, allowing people to 'rewire' for greater positivity relatively quickly with targeted training.
Chapters
Foreign. You're right that we evolved this way and our brains are hardwired this way. I mountain bike usually twice a day and there's a big nature preserve near me. And as I'm biking along these woodland trails and seeing what's in the trail in front of me, and I'll either be mountain biking or I'll be walking the trail and I notice what's laying on the trail. And there are these little branches that fall from the trees and there'll be a branch laying there. But also there are snakes. There are a few rattlesnakes, and there are a lot of gopher snakes that look like rattlesnakes. And so I picture my ancestor in the same situation a million years ago. And so here she is walking down the path a million years ago, and there's this little squiggle on the path in front of her is the stick, is the snake. Now the optimist says, you know, it's hardly ever a snake, it's almost always a stick. And she's right. 999 times out of a thousand, it you get close to it, it turns out to be a stick one time, only one time in a thousand is it a snake. The pessimist looks ahead, sees every single stick as a snake, assumes it's a snake. And so the pessimist has a much bleaker worldview, a much worse life, a much higher level of cortisol, much higher level of stress, because she is thinking that every single single one of those sticks is a snake, whereas the optimist is thinking that everything's always a stick. But the problem with that kind of worldview is that the one time that it really is a snake, the optimist gets bitten and dies and weeded out of the gene pool. And the pessimist, who's all worried about every single possibility of a stake, lives. And so our happy people were weeded from the gene pool. And after repeating this process for millions of years, you have human beings who can have no threats in their environment and they still will get upset and stressed. So we are truly hardwired for this. And when we try and meditate, we close our eyes, we say, okay, I'm going to try and escape all of these thoughts in my mind, all of these stress filled imaginings, and I'm going to meditate. And you close your eyes and of course all of those negative thoughts flood in. So meditation is really difficult for most people. As a result, you're trying, you're, you're swimming against the tide. Of 14 billion years of evolution. So what do you do? How do you, how do you fix this? How do you shift it? And you need techniques and tools, and we have a whole bunch of them that have been passed down over thousands of years through the Vedas, through the mystical tradition, wonderful tools. And what we now have that our ancestors didn't have even 50 or 100 years ago is we have modern neuroscience and we can now filter those ancient techniques through the lens of neuroscience. So I've done a bunch of EEG studies, a bunch of gene studies, hormone studies, MRI studies, and we filter all these ancient techniques through that lens of what really works scientifically. And we now can train people in those methods and start to overcome that negativity bias. Not immediately. It's going to take some training and some focus and some time, but. But not 10,000 hours. Not, as the Bhagavad Gita says, 10,000 lifetimes. But we can learn to retrain ourselves fairly quickly and rewrite those old messages. The old messages do get overwritten in time. There's this wonderful new field of psychology called memory reconsolidation and extinction. And you can take even somebody with a really established, long established memory of the bad, and if you use these evidence based techniques, you can start to reconsolidate those negative memories, often in just a few sessions of the therapy or a few practices of an effective technique. So we're just really at an amazing time in history when we can literally rewire our brains for positivity quickly.
