Seeking Serenity: Part 1

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. One morning in March each year, I raise the window shades in my home and see that the cherry tree outside has exploded into bloom. The tree has bare branches one day, a riot of delicate white flowers the next. The last time this happened, the change was so spectacular That I reached for my phone to capture the moment. But the photo failed to show what my eyes had seen. For one thing, the camera included lots of details my brain ignored— stray branches, the edge of my windowsill. The light in the picture was not as brilliant as it had appeared to me just moments earlier. More importantly, The image didn't capture the meaning my brain perceived when I saw the tree in bloom— the message that winter was nearly over, that spring was around the corner. Let me now ask you a question. Which version of the cherry tree represents reality better— the one in the photo or the one inside my head? Today we launch a 2-part series that explores what happens when 2 ways of understanding come into conflict with each other. One is objective, the other subjective. One aims for precision, the other is attentive to meaning. Each can be bewildered, even suspicious, of the other. Two Ways of Seeing, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser, With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for Powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive. and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Richard Davidson grew up in Brooklyn during the 1960s. When he was in high school, he came across an article in the magazine Science News about a study.

I had read about a sleep laboratory that was based in a hospital in Brooklyn, Maimonides Hospital, actually the hospital that I was born in.

Ritchie called the hospital to ask if he might be able to volunteer in the lab.

You know, I talked to some receptionist who kind of dismissed me, and it took more persistence. I actually wrote a letter, a handwritten letter, And then followed it up with another phone call. And although they had never had a high school volunteer before, we were able to work out an arrangement.

In the afternoons after school, while other kids were playing sports or doing homework, Richie would take the subway to the hospital. He got to help around the lab, doing basic work like cleaning electrodes. But one time, he got permission from his parents to stay up all night and watch the scientists in action.

The research subject was sleeping in another room that was adjacent to the room that I was in. It had a bed, and they were wired up, so they, they were recorded for brain electrical activity measurement. Also, electrodes were on their eyes to record eye movements. And so I saw the electrodes being put on, I saw this person going to sleep.

The scientists would let the person drift into dreams, the REM cycle.

And then a person was awakened and asked, was there anything going through your mind just before we awakened you? And, you know, one of the interesting things is that although Most people don't remember their dreams. When you wake a person up immediately after a REM period like this, typically you do get recall in the vast majority of cases.

What was amazing to Ritchie was that scientists could learn about the dream in 2 completely different ways. They could objectively measure the dreamer's eye movements and capture patterns of brain activity. But they could also match this objective data with the dreamer's subjective account of the dream.

You know, I was just more taken with the whole process, that here is a strategy for looking at the physiological correlates of mental experience. And this was a way to study this. It was a whole kind of paradigm that was unfolding before me. that I had never thought about before, and it was super exciting to me.

It was exciting for Ritchie at age 14, and it was revolutionary for the time. For centuries, the main way to understand someone's thoughts was to simply ask them. The person would describe what was happening inside their head. But we humans are prone to bias and blind spots. forgetfulness, and vanity. Everyone from scientists to marketers to political consultants know if you really want to learn people's preferences, you should observe how they behave rather than listen to what they say. With the brain measurement technologies Ritchie saw at the lab came a new way to study the mind objectively, from the outside in.

Here was a situation where There was simultaneously a distinct change in the brain that was accompanied by a report of a conscious experience, a mental experience. And that to me was just mind-blowing and captured my, you know, my imagination. And really, at age 14, as corny it is to say, I knew that my life was somehow going to be dedicated to the study of the mind. I did not know what specific path I would take, but I knew that the mind was really essential to everything that we do, and, uh, that that was really the most important thing that I can dedicate myself to.

In time, Richie was to become a student of 2 techniques to understand the mind. One technique tried to understand the mind from the inside out. It paid attention to the variety and complexity of mental experiences by turning the spotlight of attention inward. This approach would say that my subjective appraisal of the cherry tree represented reality more accurately. The other technique said the mind could best be understood by studying it from the outside, using scientific tools and the scientific method. The goal was to eliminate subjective appraisal as much as possible because, especially when it came to looking inward, self-perception was flawed and flaky. When we think about our own minds, it's like standing in a hall of mirrors. We cannot tell where reality ends and reflection begins. Richie found himself irresistibly drawn to both techniques. He felt each had much to teach the other. He was soon to learn the many ways that practitioners of each technique would be deeply wary of the other. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When I was a teenager, I remember discussing a famous thought experiment with friends. A philosopher in China went to sleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. He fluttered from flower to flower, thinking butterfly thoughts and taking butterfly-sized sips of nectar. Then he woke up and realized he wasn't a butterfly, but a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly. The next moment, a disturbing thought occurred to him. He had really felt he was a butterfly in the dream. He was convinced he was a butterfly. Now, having woken up, he was absolutely convinced he was not a butterfly but a man. If a man could dream that he was a butterfly, was it not possible that he was now a butterfly dreaming that he was a man? The thought experiment reveals a deep truth: what we perceive as reality cannot be extricated from the workings of our own mind.

The world that we experience is actually constructed by our minds and our brains. And so, yeah, there are things out there, but the way we perceive those things that are out there is entirely a function of how we construct it in our own individual minds and brains. And so if we can construct it differently, we can literally live in a different world.

As Richie Davidson came of age, he became very interested in how his mind constructed reality. The counterculture movement of the 1960s was in full swing. Musicians like Jim Morrison were exploring how you could pierce the veil of your own perception and break through.

Try to run, try to hide, break on through to the other side. Break on through to the other side. Break on through to the other side, yeah. I was definitely a product of the '60s, and the culture was very much an important influence on my life. It was sort of in the air. I was quite taken with, with the Beatles and other musical groups who were Experimenting with their minds and considering the possibility that the kind of standard way that many of us were raised and taught to approach the world, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven that are dreamt of in, in your philosophy.

Bands like the Beatles invited listeners to test the limits of their own minds. When they sang Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, this was widely perceived to be a reference to the hallucinogenic drug LSD.

I did hear the Beatles.

Live.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was certainly an important song for me growing up.

The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary was experimenting with magic mushrooms and encouraging volunteers in studies to explore psychedelic drugs. In 1967, he spoke to a group of 30,000 hippies at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He urged them, To turn on, tune in, and drop out. And drop out. In 1968, the Beatles went to India to learn from a meditation master named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Guitarist George Harrison in particular developed a deep interest in what was known at the time as Transcendental Meditation. Ritchie was fascinated by these ideas But increasingly, he found himself drawn to a related concept. What happens inside our minds doesn't stay inside our minds. The thoughts we think, the feelings we have, can shape and influence the world in which we live. There was a link between our minds and the broken state of the world. Imagine there's no heaven.

Some of John Lennon's songs, specifically Imagine, was really an important song in that whole album. The idea that there is a different way of being that is accessible to, to all humans, and I would say a way of being that is imbued with greater peace and compassion and kindness and love. You know, in many ways, those are still the relevant themes today. And the world will live as one.

And was the impulse here a curiosity about the mind, or was it an impulse that was shaped more by wanting to see a different kind of world? In other words, when I think about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and I think about Imagine, I actually have a very different impression of those 2 songs. One is very much about the things that you can do with your mind. Exploring your minds and the way in which your mind can do amazing things. And the other one is very much about how a changed mind can actually influence and speak and act in the world. So which was it for you?

That's a beautiful insight. And I would say it was really both. I was very involved in the peace movement, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. And very committed social activist, and at the same time recognizing that our minds have such an important relation to the world in which we live. And so I think we really need both.

The year after Imagine came out, Ritchie started graduate school in psychology at Harvard. It was 1972.

And this was just a little bit after a very controversial psychologist by the name of Richard Alpert was fired from Harvard for giving psychedelic drugs to Harvard undergraduates. And of course, he then went off to India and became known as Ram Dass. And when I started my graduate work at Harvard, one of the people that I knew was a fellow graduate student, I did not know him at the time, I read a few papers that he published as a graduate student. His name was Daniel Goleman. I had never seen a picture of Dan, but I knew he had published these crazy papers on meditation. And in my very first class as a Harvard graduate student, I sit down and this guy sits next to me and I turn to him and I say, you must be Dan Goleman. And this is not a reflection of any kind of psychic power that I may have. It's simply because he looked like he just came back from India. Anybody would've been able to spot him from a mile away. He was wearing these Indian pants and an Indian shirt, and he had beads, and his hair was wild. He looked different than any of the other students in this class. So indeed, he was Dan Goleman. And That began our friendship. And that night, he asked me if I wanted to come over to his house. We had just started talking, and it was clear we had so much to share. So I, of course, accepted his kind invitation. And he, he had a VW Microbus that was plastered from floor to ceiling with pictures of these yogis. And he drove me to his house, and I get there and— This guy opens the door and it was Ram Dass.

What was that first evening like when you and Dan went home and visited with Ram Dass? What did you talk about? Did you practice meditation that evening? What did you do?

Yeah, we did some practice and, you know, it was a kind of deep sharing. And I had never met anybody like that before, yet I yearned for it. And it just completely blew my mind. I had seen pictures of Ram Dass because Ram Dass by then was famous and his pictures were in the media. And he sort of became my informal teacher and provided an alternative education to my formal Harvard graduate education. He ran this group that met once a week in this house that Dan was living in. And so this— these were some of the really early influences that were so important in shaping my career.

In his classes at Harvard, Ritchie's professors were teaching him about the science of psychology, about techniques being developed to objectively measure what happens inside the human mind. Much of this work was informed by a deep desire to help people suffering from mental disorders, to find cures for human anguish. Outside his classwork, Richie was learning an entirely different education in his weekly meditation sessions. Another member of this group was Jon Kabat-Zinn, who would go on to become one of the foremost practitioners of mindfulness training in medicine. Richie soon began his own daily meditation practice. Even at this early stage, he was starting to see the same connection that the Beatles had preached between changing your mind And changing the world.

So here was Dan, who was a graduate student at Harvard, John, who had just finished his PhD at MIT. You know, these are really high-powered academic institutions, and they were kind, warm-hearted people. They exemplified the qualities that I was really looking for, and they were the kind of people that were infectious to be around. I really wanted to spend more time with them and learn what their secret sauce was. You know, that's when I discovered why— with Dan, I knew that he had a practice of meditation, and this was why I was drawn to it, because I had the intuition that their practice of meditation was somehow connected with them being Such wonderful people, so warm-hearted. And I knew that that was important, not just for me, but for the world.

Once Richie tasted meditation, he wanted more. So 2 years later, in 1974, he decided to go on a meditation retreat in India. His girlfriend Susan joined him.

I was, uh, 22 years old at the time. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And, uh, it was really, you know, a hard-nosed kind of meditation boot camp. It was, uh, in a Himalayan hill station called Dalhousie, which is not far from where the Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala. The men were all staying in one area, the women in another area. We were staying in tents. We had no running water. We had to get a pail of water each morning. We brought it to this fire pit and heated it up for our hot water for the day. And it was— we were meditating about 16 hours a day. We typically meditated till midnight and, you know, around midnight. And then the— The bell would ring to get us up at 4:30 in the morning. Then we'd go back. Yeah.

The first day, Richie was woken up at 4:30 in the morning by the bell. He joined the other meditators and sat cross-legged in a half-lotus position. Richie attempted to focus on his breath. After some time, he felt a twinge of pain in his right knee. Then the pain spread to his lower back. He tried to recast his attention to his breathing, but the pain was too much. By the end of the day, he thought, I can't believe I have 9 more days of this.

That was really tough and gave me my first taste of intensive meditation. There was a lot of physical pain involved, and it was very intense.

And was there a part of you that sort of said, you know, 4 hours into it on the first day, this is not for me, I need to bail?

Well, it's interesting that you bring that up. The teacher, by the way, was a very, very famous Buddhist meditation teacher by the name of Goenka. And each night he gives a talk. And on the 3rd day, he said, many of you probably are wanting to leave because the pain is unbearable, your mind is going crazy, and, uh, you think that this is just not the right thing for you. And I was so invested by that point in meditation that I was going to just power through this no matter what.

But Richie's girlfriend, Susan, had reached a different conclusion.

She was in the middle of writing me a letter. On the 3rd day where she was just telling me in the letter some practical details that she's leaving, uh, she's gonna stay in town, she'll meet me, uh, after the retreat is over, but this is not for her. And she was gonna give me the letter later that night and was gonna leave the next morning. And Goenka said at this talk, he said, for those of you thinking of leaving, I ask one thing. Please stay another 24 hours. And if at that time you want to leave, you have my blessings. Please leave. But I want you to make a commitment to stay one more day. So Susan heard this and she honored that request. And by the 4th day, everything changed.

The next day, the teacher Goenka instructed the meditators to scan their body from head to toe and back again, from their toes up to their head, all the while paying close attention to what they felt. For Richie and Susan, it was a breakthrough.

One of the important insights from this kind of practice is you begin to not avoid the pain, but you really look directly at the pain And you begin to see that what the pain is comprised of is not homogeneous, but actually is quite differentiated. And so, you know, I remember very distinctly having the experience this first time of having the pain be completely transformed, where I was experiencing it as tingling, as heat, as different kinds of sensations. And when you really penetrate it, you can see all of these varied qualities. And it's not just one thing. You know, we label it as pain, but that's a label. And that the actual experience is far more granular and differentiated. You know, the pain was completely transformed. The positive qualities of this kind of practice became Robust and apparent. And we just don't appreciate, we don't look, we're not aware of those kind of granular details typically, but we can be with the right kind of training and mindset.

So what were the positive things that you experienced, Richie? I mean, so you've described sort of how you're able to look at the pain and realize the pain is not one thing but many things. But when you sort of say you had this feeling You mentioned that the benefits were apparent on the 4th day to you and to Susan. What were those benefits that you were seeing in your own mind?

I would describe it as a kind of calm clarity where the mind really settles and is very, very clear and very awake. Just taking everything in and really being calm and having this sense of peacefulness and also a kind of contentment where there was almost a sense that anything can come down the pike now and it's going to be okay.

You write in your book, Altered Traits, we did not have to be controlled by the mind with its random associations, sudden fears and angers, and all the rest. We could take back the helm. And so there was some element of this that was very much about saying you could actually be the master of the ship in some ways, the captain of the ship, and actually not just be essentially a passenger that your mind was taking where it wanted to go.

The invitation in this work is that we can become the master of our own mind, and we can intentionally direct our mind. And when we do, the capabilities that are unleashed are really quite extraordinary. And every human being has this capacity.

Tell me, you returned from India with this feeling of having sort of almost on a high. What was it like to come back to Harvard, come back to graduate school? What was that like, the juxtaposition of what you were seeing, feeling, and experiencing in your meditation practice and what you were learning about, hearing about, and being taught in your classes?

It was tough in many ways. One is that You know, when you go on one of the kind of meditation retreat that I went on, where you're doing this intensive practice, you're in complete silence, completely sequestered, it's a little jarring to go back into the world. You know, the first few days, the sense of calm is mostly preserved. But then after a few days, it honestly quickly wore off. It was a very difficult lesson in how fragile this is, and what it takes for these qualities to really endure. And that 10 days of sitting for 16 hours a day, although to some people it may sound like a lot, really, to change the course of our mind, you need a lot more. So that was the first thing. The second thing is that As a graduate student, you know, I was learning a lot about psychopathology, psychiatric illness, and we were being taught to look at people and try to figure out what's wrong with them. And, and the path of meditation and the contemplative traditions in which I was beginning to learn a little bit about really had a very different orientation— to look at people and to try to figure out what's write about them. And so there was this really difficult juxtaposition between the orientation that I was beginning to glean from these contemplative traditions and modern psychology, which for the most part was really focused on the negative qualities of our experience and our behavior.

To Richie, it seemed like his teachers at Harvard were missing out on something important. During meditation, he could feel his own mind becoming clear. He paid better attention to his surroundings. He felt less anxious, more compassion. Psychologists and neuroscientists were studying the mind in order to alleviate the suffering of people with emotional disorders. So why were they ignoring techniques developed in contemplative traditions that also promised an antidote to misery.

I came back with this incredible conviction that meditation was relevant to Western psychology and Western science. And we really needed to bring this into our science. And I still remember the visceral feeling I had when I encountered for the first time this passage in William James' great 2-volume tome that was written in 1890, The Principles of Psychology. He has a whole chapter on attention, and he said in that chapter, the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment character, and will. And that to me was just incredible and was an invitation, because what I was learning through meditation was at least in part how we can educate our attention.

How did your professors, your colleagues, the other people in your department, how did they process what you were doing? I mean, some people must have thought you'd just gone off the deep end here.

They did. Some people did. And I won't name names, but there was one professor in particular at Harvard. I will never forget this in a class on psychopathology where, you know, I had just come back from India and was adopting the same dress that Dan Goleman had when I met him the first time. And he was staring at me and he said, you know, one of the easy indications of psychopathology is the way people dress. And first of all, it was a ridiculous statement. You know, it was clear that I was very much being singled out. I turned red. You know, I— you know, those were days when I was more volatile. And so I didn't say anything in class. But after class, you know, I didn't mince words in saying what I thought of this professor. It was hard. And fortunately, most of my classmates were also rooting for me and appreciated what I was trying to do. In fact, I was celebrating the opportunity to bring rigor to the study of these qualities. And so my fellow classmates appreciated that.

When the professor said this, I mean, this professor doesn't sound like a particularly nice person. It certainly wasn't a very kind comment. But where do you think this was coming from? So there's clearly the tension between the fact that what you were learning in graduate school was fundamentally focused on psychopathology. What you had learned in your meditation practice was about potential, the ways in which our minds could be better than they are. So it wasn't so much about fixing something that was wrong.

Right.

reaching a higher mountain, if you will. But besides that distinction, can you talk a moment about the suspicion or the hesitation that, justified or unjustified, was present at Harvard about the work that you were doing itself, the whole enterprise of basically studying the mind from the inside out rather than from the outside in?

Yeah. It's a great question. I think that there are a few things that were driving this. One is a a suspicion that this might lead to bad science. You know, everyone knew that I went to India, that I went on a meditation retreat, that I was doing this personally. And there was this sense that somehow this was tainting my objectivity and I was going to become, you know, a religious zealot as a consequence. And so I think that there was some concern about that. You know, there were a few papers at the time on meditation research that were frankly pretty bad. And so, you know, I think that there was a sense that this was a kind of boondoggle area that just was replete with bad science and not something that, you know, a Harvard graduate student should be involved with.

Yeah. You know, going back to that sleep study you did when you were a kid, you know, there's the experience that we all have when we are dreaming and, you know, it feels rich, it feels subjective. I remember at least how it felt like when I was dreaming last night. And then someone comes in and says, I can put EEGs on your skull and on your eyelids, and I can measure something that is in some ways an artifact of what it is that you're experiencing. And they're both ways of perceiving something that's happening inside our brains, but they are very, very different approaches. They're approaching the question from entirely different perspectives. And so it's perhaps Not entirely surprising, Richie, that people from each of these paths will look at the people on the other path with some suspicion.

Yeah, I think that's very true. And there is this great neurobiologist who prematurely passed away from liver disease in 2001. His name was Francisco Varela. One of the hallmarks of his career was to talk about the importance of bringing first-person and third-person methods together. First-person are the reports of our own experience. Third-person is measurements that a— like a scientist can do, where we record brain activity or eye movements on another person. And being able to bring these To bring these 2 very different modes of knowing together and look for points of convergence is really exciting because of that promise, because it was bringing these 2 together.

When we come back, Richie tries to bring the 2 paths together. You're listening to Hidden For Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey, With priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When he was a graduate student, Richie Davidson was fascinated by 2 different languages that tried to describe the mind. One reported from inside the mind. The other peered into the mind from the outside. As Richie became an academic, older faculty members warned him, stay away from explorations into meditation and mindfulness. They were bound to be unscientific, unsound.

I had this fervent aspiration to do research on meditation, and I was told in no uncertain terms, Richie, if you want a successful career in science, this is a terrible way for you to begin.

Richie followed the advice. He dove into the field of affective neuroscience— how the brain processes emotions. He spoke almost exclusively in the language of mainstream science and wrote papers that examined the mind from the outside in. He used tools like EEG tests to measure the electrical activity of the brain. Richie's career flourished. He published his work in prestigious journals, received awards, and got a tenured position at the University of Wisconsin. All the while, he maintained his daily meditation practice and attended more retreats. In 1992, an opportunity arose to do what he had been trying to do since he was a graduate student: build a bridge between these 2 languages that describe the mind, become a translator between the outside-in approach and the inside-out approach. Besides, this opportunity came with a very special invitation to meet the ultimate meditation teacher, the Dalai Lama.

He was interested in encouraging serious neuroscientific research on meditation, particularly the practices from his tradition, through some common acquaintances, he, he heard about me. He knew that I was a serious neuroscientist and had interest in meditation. And he invited me, along with 2 other scientists, to meet with him at his residence in Dharamsala with the explicit purpose of beginning to investigate Practitioners who have spent years meditating, who are living in the mountains around Dharamsala. And so the way this visit was constructed is we were going to meet with him first, and then we schlepped about 5,000 pounds of equipment with us. We looked like this strange melding of a bunch of geeks and like a traveling rock band because we had these huge cases.

Uh-huh.

We brought all this equipment and, um, and there we were. And so I was the leader of this group, and this was the first time I was meeting the Dalai Lama. So we were meeting him at his residence. I was the spokesperson. And so we were sitting there waiting. And I had what was the closest I've ever come to having a full-blown attack, panic attack. I was so anxious and my heart was palpitating and I could not envision what my first words would be. And I was beginning to be flooded with self-doubt. Who am I to waste the time of the Dalai Lama? Why am I here? All of those thoughts. And then all of a sudden, someone comes in the room and said, please come with me. Took us into the next room, and literally 2 seconds after that, the Dalai Lama walks in. And, uh, within maybe Within 10, 15 seconds, all of my anxiety was completely and totally dissipated. I mean, just radically eliminated. I'm convinced he saw my anxiety, he saw my suffering, and he, he behaved in a way that completely eliminated it. I don't exactly know what he did. He held me, he held my hand, he brought my head to his head, he touched me. I mean, he uses touch a lot. It is an expression of genuine compassion and love. It is enormously helpful. And I felt more comfortable than I think I've ever felt in my life. And was just— felt deeply secure and that this is where I needed to be.

Hmm. And you had the sense this was, again, not just somebody who happened to be a nice person. You had a sense that it was his practice, his— perhaps his meditation practice, his years of practice that were bringing something out in him that touched you.

Absolutely. I am absolutely convinced of that. Uh, he practices on average 4 to 5 hours every day. One of the things that he does is recites some texts from Shantideva, the great Indian saint. And I actually have this right on my desk here. I read it every day. Shantideva says, for as long as space endures, And for as long as living beings remain, until then may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world.

So you visit the Dalai Lama, you're moved by this visit. You also have 5,000 pounds of equipment that you've carted from the United States to, to India. Uh, what happens? Do you, do you start to study people? On this trip?

So each day we literally hiked up into the mountains. We took a car as far as we can take a car, and then the road stops, and then the rest of the way you need to go on foot. And we had a bunch of Sherpas with us, and they were carrying equipment on backpacks. And we literally hiked up, in certain cases, quite a long time. 2 hours, 3 hours to these huts and caves where these long-term retreatants are living in retreat for the remainder of their lives. Of course, we would never be able to find these people if we went on our own. We went with someone who was a representative of the Dalai Lama and who obviously knew where these people resided. And over the course of this 3 weeks, we saw maybe about 12 of these very long-term practitioners, some of whom have been in retreat for more than a decade. The response that we got from every one of them was this, that if we wanted to learn about meditation, they'd be happy to teach us. They'll be happy to spend, you know, the next couple of years teaching us if we wanted. And remember what year this was. This was in 1992. Most of these people, with the exception of maybe 2, had actually never seen a laptop computer before. They were completely untutored in Western technology. And so what these people basically said to us is that they're happy to talk to us about meditation. They're happy to teach us about meditation. But they don't want to participate in the research. They had this view that somehow if we put electrodes on their head, it's going to put something into their head. And we explained to them that the electrodes don't transmit electricity, they simply pick up electricity. Nevertheless, they were skeptical. And, uh, they didn't want to participate. And so, uh, over the course of 3 weeks, literally zero of the practitioners agreed to allow us to put electrodes on their head. It was very frustrating and challenging and ultimately important and revealing. It was a complete bust, a total and complete bust.

I mean, it's interesting that I just want to note the irony here for a second, which is it wasn't just the professors at Harvard who were skeptical and suspicious of, you know, the ideas coming from the meditators. It was also the master meditators who are skeptical and suspicious Exactly.

Exactly. So I was really screwed from both ends. But the way you put it is absolutely right, and it's totally true.

Ritchie had given himself a dauntingly ambitious goal: to become a translator between 2 ways of understanding the mind. That endeavor had failed and failed spectacularly. In part 2 of the story, in our next episode, Richie discovers something very strange about the minds of master meditators. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Christian Wong, Laura Corell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes today are Heather Harris, Max Koch, and Jenny Nguyen. They worked with Richie and helped to organize this interview. Between my hectic schedule and Richie's busy calendar, Believe me, it took some doing. Thank you, Heather, Max, and Jenny. If you find Hidden Brain to be useful to you in your daily life, please consider joining our new podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. Hidden Brain Plus is where you'll find even more of the ideas and insights that you love. To subscribe, find Hidden Brain Plus in the Apple Podcasts Or go to apple.co/hiddenbrain. That site again is apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Thank you.

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