Interview: The Neuroscience of Emotion + Meditation with Richie Davidson

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Richie Davidson, one of the world's leading authorities and really the founder in of the neuroscience movement. We're going to talk about some of my favorite big ideas from the emotional life of your brain. We have a short amount of time this morning, so I'm going to jump straight in. Richie, thank you so much for taking the time.

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

So I'd like to start with the emotional life of your brain. Can you tell us what you were thinking as you named the book that?

Well, the book is really a summary of 30 years of brain research from the neuroscience laboratory. And it gave me an opportunity to reflect on what we had discovered over that long period of time. And we think that it's information that is valuable for each and every person to know about him or herself. I talk about six different styles of emotional responding. All of us have each of these styles, which we differ in the extent to which the style is expressed. And so, just to give a few examples, one style is resilience. And resilience reflects the rapidity or the speed with which you recover from adversity. Some people recover quickly and other people recover more slowly. And this turns out to be a very key attribute of well being. The more quickly you can recover from adversity, the higher levels well being you have. And one of the things we've learned about each of these emotional styles is that they are instantiated in specific brain circuits. And these circuits are plastic. That is, they are shaped by experience. And they can also be shaped by training so that we can actually learn to become more resilient. And all of this, by the way, inevitably leads to the conclusion that well being actually is a skill. You don't normally think of well being as a skill, but all of this work leads us inevitably to that conclusion. So just to continue on, I'll just mention two other emotional styles out of the six. The second one we call outlook or positive outlook. And it reflects the extent to which a person views the world through a more positive lens. The extent to which a person is able to savor positive experiences. The extent to which they can regard another person as sharing the same basic wish to be happy as they have. This kind of positive orientation turns out to be extraordinarily important for well being, and we understand something about the brain mechanisms that underlie it. A third emotional style Something we don't normally think of as being within the realm of emotional style is attention. And to quote a subtitle of a recent scientific article on this topic, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. And so the greater ability we have to focus our attention to be in the present moment, the happier we are. And that also fundamentally contributes to our well being and is also something that can be learned. William James in 1890, in his classic two volume the Principles of Psychology, talks about how attention can be educated. And using very simple meditation practices that come from the mindfulness tradition, we and other scientists have clearly shown that different attributes of attention can be learned.

This is so good and there's so much we can talk about. Richie founded both effective neuroscience, the field of effective neuroscience, studying the emotional styles as we just very briefly discussed, and then contemplative neuroscience. And I just love your own personal story over the last 30 years and your own hero's journey, really, as you explored those different aspects of optimal living. I want to jump into the practice. So two things that you talk about a lot in the book are cognitive behavioral therapy or cognitive therapy and mindfulness meditation as ways we can train our minds to cultivate and optimize our emotional styles. Can you talk to us about cognitive therapy?

Sure. Cognitive therapy is probably the most empirically well validated psychological treatment for depression and anxiety. And it basically involves teaching people to think differently about the causes of their behavior. So if something bad happens, if we undergo some stressful event and there are some negative consequences, some people attribute those to internal causes. They regard it as a sign that they're not a very effective person, that they may not be smart and so forth. And that's attributing it to these stable and internal causes. If we can train our mind to not regard it in that way, but to reappraise the situation as maybe the situation was unfair. Maybe if, for example, you didn't do well on an exam or a job interview, maybe the examiner or the interview was simply unfair and that most people would also not do well in that situation. So rather than attributing it to causes within yourself, attributing it to causes that are more transient in the environment. And so a person can be trained in that way to think differently about the causes of these events and change their mood and behavior as a consequence. So those are some of the elements that are key to cognitive therapy. It's kind of cognitive retraining.

Yeah, I love that. And I love how often you use the word train. Right. If we want to Achieve excellence in our mental emotional style. It requires training, hard work. Right. Can you share with us kind of your favorite practice, the actual practical thing that one can do within the realm of cognitive therapy?

Well, within the realm of cognitive therapy, I think the most important is to engage in perspective taking. Sometimes we get so locked into things that we think we're the only ones suffering and experiencing these kinds of problems and taking a broader perspective and understanding that most people in this circumstance would probably have very similar feelings. And so it's not really about me. And that can really help to give some distance and enable some leverage in the situation.

That's awesome. So kind of the common humanity, I think that phrase you are not alone, that was huge for me as I went through my own issues and just realizing it's not about me, it's not a function of me, it's a function of being human. These things arise, Right?

Absolutely.

How do we respond? Let's talk about mindfulness meditation and the power of mindfulness meditation. Again, it's exciting for me to chat with you and for our audience to hear you as, you know, the kind of father of the contemplative neuroscience movement. What have we learned? And then we'll get into some of the practical stuff.

Well, what we've learned is that we can use the simple tool of our own mind to recognize this basic quality of awareness that we all have, as well as basic qualities of what I call innate basic goodness. That human beings are endowed with a propensity to be kind toward others and to prefer warm hearted, altruistic kinds of interactions compared to those that are selfish. And there's increasing scientific evidence that supports that conjecture. And so this practice is really about recognizing those qualities and nurturing them. And we can think of these qualities in a way that's very similar to language. Each of us is born with a capability for language. It's part of the human biological repertoire. But it requires us being raised in a normal linguistic community in order for that propensity to be nourished and expressed. And there have been case studies of kids raised in the wild as feral children without a normal language community around them. And they don't learn to speak correctly. And the same could be said for these basic qualities of mindfulness and kindness. They require nurturing by a supportive environment. And if that supportive environment is present, these incipient capabilities can flourish. And so the training is really about strengthening and nurturing these seeds that already exist in each of us.

Yeah, that's so inspiring. And before we get into the practical side of meditation. I want to step back and you used another great metaphor of the music collections. Talking about which music is played is going to determine how our genetic code is expressed. Can you talk to us about that a little bit for people who may think, well, yeah, but I was just kind of born this way and there's not a lot I can do.

Well, as we have learned and with regard to the brain, we talk about neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain changes in response to experience and in response to training and in similar ways. That same concept can be applied to genomics. So we are all born with a fixed complement of base pairs, which is our DNA, and that's pretty much not going to change. But what will change is the extent to which different genes are turned on or turned off. We can think of genes having little volume controls, and the setting on those volume controls is highly malleable and it's influenced by experience. We know that the way, for example, a mother treats her offspring will induce these, what we call epigenetic changes in the offspring. It will regulate the genes of the offspring, it will set the volume controls. And so there's a lot more plasticity at the genomic level than we ever thought was possible before. And we've published a recent paper, for example, showing that one day of intensive meditation among long term meditation practitioners was sufficient to detect an actual alteration in gene expression. Wow.

So the mother can not only affect her child, but herself through these activities that we're talking about now. Your research.

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's unbelievably inspiring. Again, we can talk about that for a weekend. And you do. Okay, so let's go back to the mindfulness training and meditation. If someone is either aspiring to create a meditation practice or to deepen their practice, what tips would you give them?

Well, we often talk about a. First of all, more generally to cultivate well being a 531 tip. And here's what the 531 refers to. Spend five minutes a day in a simple mindfulness practice. And it could be as simple as bringing your awareness to your breathing or bringing your awareness to bodily sensations, and just simply paying attention without reacting, without trying to change what exists, just simply being aware of. So that's the five minutes. And then the three refers to three acts of gratitude. And so simply pay attention to three periods of gratitude during your day. And we all have these. They often go unnoticed, and this is an invitation to bring them more into your awareness. And the one refers to engage in at least one act of kindness each day. And this simple five, three, one prescription is something that really doesn't take a lot. The only thing that requires you to do anything outside your normal activities is the five minutes. But even that five minutes can be done while you're commuting. It can be done while you're walking. It doesn't need to be in any special place. It's really spending five minutes bringing your awareness into your body, into your breathing. And if everyone did this regularly every day, I honestly believe the world would be a different place. And it's not that hard. And so our aspiration is that this kind of mental exercise will be as commonly practiced in a few years as physical Exercise is today.

Inspiring. 5, 3, 1. Realize we have limited time. Is there anything else that you think is important to share in this context?

I think I've given some good tidbits. I don't think there's much more I need to follow up with.

Well, where can people learn more about you? Obviously, I highly recommend the emotional life of your brain, so listeners check out the notes on that and the book wherever you buy your books. And where's the best place for people to learn more about you and your work?

At our website, which is centerforhealthyminds.org and you can learn all about what we're doing. It's center. Actually, it's Center Health. We have a new web address. It's CenterHealthyMinds.org all one word. Center Healthy Minds and then.org Fantastic.

Center HealthyMinds.org Richie, thank you so much for taking the time and thank you for dedicating your life to such important work.

Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that interview. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. Me. Two basic things. One, our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And two, our optimal living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. Ten bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there, philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that Goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my optimal living classes. This is where I take all the ideas we cover in the Philosopher's Notes and boil it down to the most practical stuff you can apply today. Classes include Confidence 101, Getting Stuff Done 101, Relationships 101, Habits 101, etc. You'll also get access to what we call micro classes that I think you'll love. We aim to astonish, and we're blessed to have thousands of members telling us we're helping them change their lives and that this is the best 10 bucks they invest in themselves every month. Go to BrianJohnson ME membership to learn more. Thanks for your support and have an awesome day.