Brian Johnson summarizes Richard Davidson’s The Emotional Life of Your Brain, outlining Davidson’s framework linking emotional styles to brain circuitry and describing practical ways to change those styles via neuroplasticity. Key points: six dimensions of emotional style (resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, sensitivity to context, attention); epigenetics as “above the genes” (gene expression shaped by environment and behavior); and interventions shown or argued to change brain wiring—cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness meditation (practice strengthens attention and response flexibility). The talk emphasizes small daily practices (training on minor annoyances) that scale to major life challenges.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, a classic in neuroscience, the emotional life of your brain. The emotional life of your brain by Richie Davidson. Richie Davidson is one of the world's leading scientists and, and really the founder of two movements, affective neuroscience, which is essentially the study of the effect of emotions, affect on your brain and then also contemplative neuroscience. So the effect of meditation and contemplative practices on your brain. We have him to thank and his colleagues, but he really led the charge in all the neuroscience research that we're seeing come out these days. He, he started it decades ago. He was one of the first guys to meet with the Dalai Lama, Matthieu Ricard, and all we know about his brain, we talked about him and why meditate Richie Davidson and his research labs. So this book unpacks well, that book. In this note we talk about some of the ideas, unpacks the science of how we can optimize our brains, et cetera. Let's start with our first big idea, emotional styles. So one of the things that Richie does is differentiates between emotional states, moods, traits, and then styles emotional states, moods and traits. So a state is something you experience for a matter of seconds, right? And then a mood is something you experience for minutes, hours, even potentially days. Then a trait is kind of just a way of being you might experience for years. Now, a style is different than all of those and he talks about it in detail in the book. Right now, I'm just going to share six dimensions of emotional style. The important thing we're going to focus on this time is you can change it via neuroplasticity, you can change your brain, but he can bring your brain into a lab and get a good sense of how you are in your emotional style based on how your brain is wired and how it's mapped. Fascinating. And he's able to correlate your actual brain structure with emotional style. That's what makes his work so different, is that we can talk about a lot of personality styles, his map over to your actual brain. Certain parts of your brain are going to be lighting up in different ways vis a vis how you show up on these six dimensions really quickly. The six dimensions of emotional style include resilience, how quickly you bounce back from challenges, outlook, how you see the world, positive, negative, etc. Social intuition, self awareness, sensitivity to context, and then attention. Those are his six dimensions of emotional style. We're going to focus on what you can do to alter it. But fascinating stuff so that's our first big idea. You emotional style is the through line for this book. Second big idea is another way to think about epigenetics. So epigenetics literally means something like above the genes, epigenetics, again, I'm trying to break through the myth that as a culture we have that DNA is destiny. DNA is not destiny. We have an opportunity via our environment, which is our little physical environment and our minds, our mental environment and the behaviors and the thoughts and the food we eat. All the things we do influence our genetic expression. Here's a great metaphor. Imagine your DNA like music on your ipod. So you have music on your ipod. A ton of it, maybe. Right. Or on your computer, wherever it is you store it. Eight tracks, if that's your thing. Right. You've got all this music, but it's not all playing at the same time. You need to choose it and then it's played. Right. Our genes are kind of like that. It's not as if because we have the genes, the music is playing. Because you have a certain song doesn't mean that it's playing all the time and blaring at you. You, via your choices, which we talked about yesterday in your thoughts and behaviors and other activities literally impact which songs are played. We want to create better playlists and express our genetics kind of baseline more positively. It's a really cool idea. Another metaphor he uses is that genes load the gun and your environment pulls the trigger. So no matter what our genetic disposition may be, there are very few things that are absolutely determinative. Right. Almost everything else is influenced by our choices. So we want to choose wisely. And I like to joke that if you think you have less than awesome genes, I talk about, you know, my family's challenges, my father's challenges, and his father's challenges. That means that we need to pay even more attention. We've got a loaded gun with a hair trigger. Well, okay, cool. I'm going to do certain things and make sure that gun doesn't go off. I'm going to do the fundamentals of meditation and exercise and rest and good nutrition and keeping my mind right. So we don't want to become victims and say, oh, yeah, but I was, you know, horrible genius. You should see my father and his father and my mom and I was just a nightmare. Okay, maybe. But that doesn't mean that you then fall into that trap helplessly and you give up. It means that you need to take even more responsibility. And we can turn that poison into medicine. It can make us Even more stronger and a bigger gift to the world if we choose to see it that way. So there you go, DNA as music. Think about that. Think about the power you have there. Now a lot of the book is focused on what he's learned to scientifically change your emotional style. I'm going to focus on two ideas right now. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT and mindfulness meditation. M squared. So cognitive behavior therapy is really mental training. It's fantastic way where if you're practicing this, whether with a therapist or on your own, essentially what you're doing is training your mind to notice when you have unhelpful stories, if something negative happens to you, like maybe your genes, right? And you think, oh God, I don't have good genes. Okay, now you can go in a parade of horrible thoughts about that, or you can step back and say, what's a more positive interpretation of that? I just gave you one. In that scenario, you can look at losing a job. There's not only one way to look at that. And we need to challenge our negative thoughts. We need to see the positive within the negative. That silver lining in the cloud. It's always there. Cognitive behavior therapy is going to train us to see that. Literally, it's like going to the gym for your mind, just like mindfulness meditation. So the two of these combined can do extraordinary things. And again, just to emphasize the fact that with thoughts alone, you can change the wiring of your brain. We basically all know that by now, especially if you've watched many of these videos. But that's still stunning when you actually think about it. Merely changing your thoughts can groove different neural pathways. Fascinating stuff. So cognitive behavioral therapy is one great way to do it. Mindfulness meditation is another. One most basic way to mindfully meditate is to follow our breath. Richie has a bunch of guided meditations in here. But even just for a minute, watch your breath coming in through your nose, into your diaphragm and back out. That's mindfulness. You're training your mind. And what do we do when we do that again? We're going to the gym for our minds. Why is that important? It has nothing to do with the state we experience during our meditation. That's not what Richie wanted to study. He did not study, hey, let's get people in and see what they look like after a 30 minute or 60 minute meditation during their meditation. He was interested in that. He was interested in what meditation did when you weren't meditating. So when you're sitting down and you're going to the Relaxation, gym, Mindfulness, gym. Strengthening your concentration muscles. What's exciting is you just warmed up for the rest of your day. Then when something annoying happens, you have the strength to step in between the stimulus of challenge and choose a better response. You can only do that with a strong mind. So mindfulness meditation is one of his obvious huge ideas. And then he's got this great idea on the correlation between how people respond to little challenges and how they respond to big challenges. So short story is you can literally bring people into a lab and look at how they or study how they respond to tiny challenges. I don't remember the examples he uses, but think of someone cutting you off on the way to work or someone cutting you off in the line at the grocery store. Minor annoyances, not big deals. Little things. How you respond to those little things is going to predict highly correlated to how you respond to the big challenges. You lose your job. That's a much bigger challenge, obviously, than someone cutting you off on the way to work. You lose the loved one, which, wow, that's obviously an even bigger challenge. How you respond to those big challenges is going to be correlated with the little challenges. What's exciting about that is just like we talked about yesterday with tall Ben Shahar's choose the life you want. It's about the little choices. We don't want to wait until we have huge big challenges. If you want to run a marathon, you don't just hope you can run it one day. You train little bit every day. The way we train to deal with the bigger challenges in our lives is to deal with the little ones as well as we can. So all those little annoyances that used to let take you off center, play the equanimity game. Get back on balance. Master the little things, and you put yourself in a position to master the bigger things. It's a big idea. Mindfulness meditation, we're going to keep on coming back to that. How's your practice if you haven't started one yet, I'm going to keep on sharing this until you do. If you have, can you step it up a little bit? Can you deepen it a little bit? How do you tweak that a little bit? And how do you celebrate the fact that you are doing it? It's an extraordinary thing. Cognitive behavioral therapy is awesome. Challenge your negative thoughts. Always challenge your negative thoughts. Then go do what needs to get done. DNA, music. Remember genes. DNA is not destiny. We have so much more control than we think. Think about your ipod, Create a great playlist, and then emotional styles. Being able to map that over neurologically is pretty exciting. I hope you enjoyed this quick look at a classic book in neuroscience, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.
