Seeking Serenity: Part 2

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Richard Davidson was a 22-year-old graduate student when he went to India to attend an intense meditation retreat. He quickly found the journey had a surprise in store for him.

The bus that we were taking up into the Himalayas got stuck in a landslide, which was pretty scary, actually.

Ritchie and the other passengers found themselves pinned on the edge of a cliff. On one side was a mountain wall, on the other, a sheer drop. Rocks rained down around them, and rain pounded against the bus window. They felt paralyzed. And then—

This unbelievable scene transpired where another bus pulled up from the other side, and we Exchanged. We literally took our belongings, we walked over this landslide into this other bus, and this other bus on these single-lane narrow roads that are literally 4,000 or 5,000 feet drop with no rail had to go backward for maybe a mile or two until it got to a place where it can turn around.

That trip to India would eventually prompt Ritchie to see his own life as a bridge across a divided road. One side of the road was represented by his teachers at Harvard and mainstream psychology. The other was represented by his meditation teachers in the United States and India, including eventually the Dalai Lama. Both the psychologists and the meditators were engaged with the life of the mind, but from different sides. The scientists wanted to study the brain from the outside in, using scans and monitors and probes. The meditators said, hang on, what we experience during our contemplative practices cannot be captured by crude photos of the brain. How can a Polaroid camera capture the complexity of an ocean. As we explored in part 1 of the story, Richie soon discovered that both sets of practitioners viewed the other with deep suspicion. If you missed that episode, I recommend you go back and listen to it first. Today on the show, we examine how Richie Davidson eventually found a way to synthesize 2 very different approaches to the mind. It would take courage and patience, like that dramatic mountain bus rescue. Bridging the Divided Road, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to insure them. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. Because when you've worked hard for something, choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May. Principal knows your star employees have their work quirks. Principal also knows how much those employees mean to your business.

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They need benefits. Work with Principal so they can help you help your team with a retirement and benefits plan that's right for them. Principal Life Insurance Company, Des Moines, Iowa. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. In 1992, Richie Davidson and his colleagues carried 5,000 pounds of scientific equipment with them to India. With the blessings of the Dalai Lama, Ritchie was hoping to use his scientific instruments to capture what was happening in the minds of highly experienced Tibetan meditators in remote mountain retreats.

Over the course of 3 weeks, literally zero of the practitioners agreed to allow us to put electrodes on their head. 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 they didn't want to participate. It was a complete bust, total and complete bust.

Ritchie and his team regrouped, dejected. But they had one further humiliation in store for them.

In the last couple of days, the Dalai Lama said, we have all this equipment and, you know, you're here to do this research. And he said, you know, the young monks will be interested in what you're doing. And he asked if we would please give a lecture. And we said, of course, happy to give the lecture. And so what we decided to do is, since we didn't get to use the equipment, To test these long-term practitioners, we're going to do a demonstration with the equipment for these young monks.

Rather than ask one of the monks to serve as a volunteer, one of the researchers, neurobiologist Francisco Varela, stepped forward to be the guinea pig.

So the way it worked is that I put the electrodes on Francisco's head, and then we were going to show all of these young monks what brain activity looked like on a computer monitor.

Richie told the monks that he would show them the inner workings of the brain by measuring Francisco's brain electrical activity. Specifically, the scientists told the monks they could demonstrate what compassion looked like when you measured it scientifically. Compassion, of course, is a core interest of Buddhist practice. The scientists figured that they could teach the monks a thing or two about the neural signature of compassion.

So there were about 200 monks who were sitting on cushions on the floor, very dutifully sitting, and we were futzing with the electrodes. And it took a while. Those were the older days where it took like 45 minutes to get it all set up and to have the EEG activity, the brain electrical activity, nicely displayed on the computer monitor. Finally, we were ready. And we sort of parted. And so they can now see Francisco clearly with this electrode cap on his head. And the 200 monks just burst out laughing. They were hysterically laughing. And we thought that they were laughing because Francisco looked kind of funny with the electrode cap on his head. And it turned out that we didn't realize this at the time, But it was pointed out to us the next day that that's not what they were laughing about. They were laughing at the fact that we were talking about studying compassion and we were putting electrodes on the head and not on the heart. That's what they were laughing about.

The neuroscientists thought it was obvious that anything related to behavior had to be entirely shaped by the brain. The monks were equally confident. The scientists didn't know what they were talking about. On their way out of India, Ritchie asked the Dalai Lama for advice. The trip had been a failure from start to finish. The scientists and the monks were starting with different assumptions, and they came from entirely different cultures.

And he said, well, what you need to do then is to study practitioners who've been teaching in the West.

When Richie got home to Wisconsin, he followed the Dalai Lama's advice. He recruited meditation practitioners who had familiarity with the United States to come into his lab.

They were mostly people who were teaching in the West, but all of them had really deep meditation experience. All of them, uh, one of the requirements for the study is that they have completed at least one 3-year retreat. and doing at least 8 hours of practice every day for 3 years.

Ritchie recorded their brain electrical activity, and he observed something unusual.

We observed these very high amplitude gamma oscillations. Gamma is a very fast frequency of brain electrical activity. It's a frequency of about 40 cycles per second. You and I have gamma activity. Everybody has gamma activity, but it's typically seen for really short periods of time in most of us. And it's seen during moments of insight. And so, for example, if you've been working on a problem and suddenly something comes to you, during that sort of quarter of a second where you just have this flash, We often see this kind of gamma activity. Gamma activity is also seen at the moment where different elements of a percept come together. So for example, imagine biting into a juicy apple. When you imagine that, there are different elements that you can— that often occur to most people. You can imagine the tactile sensation of your teeth digging into a crisp apple. You can imagine the juice sort of being released and the taste. You can imagine the color of the apple. You can hear the sound of the crunch. So all of these different elements come together in a single unified percept. It turns out that gamma activity that is synchronized in different parts of the brain is the core mechanism that binds those different elements together to create a unified percept in our experience. So they had long durations of gamma activity, and it wasn't just when they were meditating, but it was also during their baseline state.

Long-term practitioners of meditation often report heightened states of perception, and awareness. They report seeing connections that most of us might miss. That twig on the tree isn't just a twig; it's also a leaf, a fruit, and a new branch, just in embryonic form. Change, in the Buddhist tradition, is the only constant. Meditators say they often have a deep appreciation of the nature of change, including changes that transform the worlds of life, into the worlds of death and regeneration. The gamma bursts Ritchie saw offered a clue to what might be happening in the minds of master meditators.

The amazing thing about this was that, unlike most other signals in brain electrical activity, this was visually apparent to the naked eye. Most of the time when we do this kind of research, We have to process these signals with fancy computer algorithms. And, uh, you know, after months of processing, we get a finding, which is a statistical finding. Here it was visually apparent, and it was so apparent that we thought it was an artifact at first. We thought it was something, you know, wrong. We thought it was muscle artifact. We were convinced it couldn't be real. because it was so, so large and so prominent. And we had to do a whole year of various kinds of control experiments to convince ourselves that this was indeed real.

The finding was nothing short of remarkable. Ritchie found that meditation, at least in some circumstances by some practitioners, could lead to structural changes in the brain. It could literally change our minds. The paper received a lot of attention, both in the public and within academia. It led to a windfall of interest in the science of meditation.

But when this paper came out in 2004, it was a real inflection point because it was the first time that a paper on meditation had ever been published in this august scientific journal. Scientific journal. And if you look at the publication rate of papers, scientific papers on meditation, you will see an inflection point at around 2005 where there— it just begins to steeply rise. And, um, I would like to think in part it was stimulated by the work that was represented in this paper.

When we come back, Richie runs an unusual study where he subjects experienced meditators to intense bursts of pain. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next. Because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud. New customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/fraud. Support for Hidden Brain comes from US Bank. With a US Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa US Banking Services.

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Some restrictions may apply. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Through much of his career, psychologist Richie Davidson has wanted to bridge 2 approaches to understanding the mind. The first he learned while getting his PhD in psychology at Harvard. This approach examined the brain from the outside using tools like electrodes and brain scanners. The other approach came from meditation retreats that Richie attended and involved deep introspection and observation. During the first of those retreats, Richie found himself in agonizing pain as he sat still for hour upon hour of meditation. But when the pain became nearly unbearable, Richie decided to turn toward it instead of trying to avoid it. He studied the pain, Try to tease apart its sensations. Instead of responding to the pain, he observed it.

Uh, you know, I remember very distinctly having the experience, uh, 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.

Back home in the United States, Richie decided to run a study where he measured the effects of pain on the brains of long-term meditators, And non-meditators.

The way I often talk about this is many listeners recognize that when they go, for example, to a cardiologist to get their heart examined, the cardiologist would often have you do a cardiac stress test where you would exercise on an exercise bike or treadmill and exercise the heart to evaluate its function. And what we are doing in some sense is a stress test for the mind and the brain. One of the ways we can do that is with physical pain. We use pain that is extremely real. We use heat as a painful stimulus, and we can deliver heat in a very, very safe and very controlled way where we can very precisely regulate The degree of heat. And it's a plate that goes on the ulnar area of the wrist. It's a very sensitive area. And we have water that circulates through this plate very rapidly, and we can precisely control the temperature of the water. We give them one experience of this pain, and I've had this done to myself many times, and I can tell you it is really, really painful, and it feels like Your skin is burning. And you can sort of tolerate it for 1 or 2 seconds, but then after 2 seconds or 3 seconds, you really feel it's unbearable. And we have this device strapped on so you can't just simply pull your hand away. So we give them this experience and then we bring them into the MRI scanner. We tell them that when they hear a tone, When they hear beep, it means 10 seconds later they're going to get zapped with this pain. The pain lasts for 10 seconds, and after those 10 seconds, there's another 10-second period which we call a recovery period, where nothing happens and we can just look to see how the brain response subsides. And one of the things that we know is where the networks in the brain are that process this kind of physical pain. This is known in the scientific literature as the pain matrix. It's a well-defined set of brain regions, so we know exactly where to look.

So again, the volunteers, both meditators and non-meditators, are given an experience of excruciating pain. They're then told that when a beep goes off, they will get zapped again in 10 seconds. The brains of the non-meditators respond immediately.

The areas in the brain that are part of this pain matrix begin to activate immediately. Nothing has happened other than the tone. They haven't received any painful stimulus. And Just presenting the tone was sufficient to activate most of the pain matrix.

When the actual physical pain started, the pain matrix continued to ping.

After that—

And then they had a very slow recovery over the next 10 seconds. The advanced meditators come in And when the tone occurs, there is no significant activation in any area of the pain matrix.

None. Flat.

Zero. Nothing. So there's absolutely no change in any area of the pain matrix when they hear this anticipatory tone. Then when the pain comes on, they actually show a huge response. And in certain areas of the brain, it's actually a larger response, significantly larger than in the controls, particularly the areas that are sensitive to the sensory qualities of the pain. And then when the pain goes off after the 10 seconds, they come right back down to baseline. And this is, we believe, The neural signature of resilience. And it is paralleled in their reports of pain. So they report that the painful stimulus is very intense, and actually the intensity ratings that they give it are no different than the intensity ratings that are given by the control So what is this telling you?

What is the fact that they're not showing a reaction in the pain matrix when you play the tone? What do you think that's telling us at a conceptual level here, Richie?

I think it's telling us in part that they're living in the moment, so to speak. They're not worrying before they need to. There's a big chunk of real estate that we have in the front of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. And it's larger in humans in relation to the rest of the brain mass than in any other species. And it is responsible for many of the things that are characteristically human. And one of the things that is characteristically human is our ability to do what psychologists have called Mental time travel. We can anticipate the future, and we can reflect on the past in ways that far exceed what any other species can do. This is obviously extremely important for all of the amazing things that humans can do and for their adaptability, but it also is what gets us into trouble. And it gets us into trouble because we're worrying about the future and ruminating about the past so much of the time.

Think about the last time you suffered an injury or fell sick. If you're like most people, the suffering caused by the injury or the illness was compounded by your thoughts. Maybe you asked yourself why the illness had to happen to you. Maybe you replayed the injury and berated yourself for getting in harm's way. Maybe you fantasized about what it would feel like to be healthy again, only to find yourself returning to the despair of your suffering.

And so what this experiment shows is that meditation training can really help us to be more in the present. So when this tone comes on that signifies that a pain is about to occur, What happens in the brain of these meditators is that the auditory part of their brain registers the tone, and that's it. And then when the pain comes on, it's not like they're blocking out the pain. They're not blocking it out at all. In fact, their sensory channels are even more open. But then when the pain goes off, they recover very quickly. And again, it's being able to turn off the prefrontal cortex when it's no longer necessary, and they don't ruminate about what just happened. So this is something that I think is very instructive for how these practices can change our everyday behavior.

What Richie is talking about here is a core tenet of many spiritual and psychotherapeutic techniques. Suffering may be inevitable in our lives, But the way we respond to suffering is not inevitable. With practice, we can spend less time ruminating about the past or fantasizing about the future and more time fully experiencing the here and now. In another study, Ritchie examined the effects of contemplative practices on the immune system.

What we did in this study is we used employees of a high-tech corporation who reported a lot of stress. We randomly assigned them to a condition where they went through mindfulness-based stress reduction. Another group was a control condition, and we gave everyone a flu shot. What we did was simply that we took blood samples before and after the flu shot, which allowed us to quantitatively determine the efficacy of the flu vaccine for each individual. That is, we can look at the antibody titers that are mounted in response to the vaccine, which provides a hard-nosed objective indicator of how effective the vaccine is. And the data were really clear in showing that there indeed was a significant effect such that the individuals who went through the meditation condition had a significantly more robust response to the flu vaccine compared to their controlled counterparts.

Why do you think this would happen? Why would meditation affect the immune system, Richard?

Well, first of all, the most honest answer is we don't fully know at this point in time. It is a topic of active investigation, but we have some Clues. We know that the immune system is very influenced by stress neurobiology. And we know that some of the hormones, for example, that are released during stress will directly impede with an immune response. And so if you engage in a strategy that decreases your stress response, it can have an effect on immunity.

Richie has also discovered that our tendency to focus on ourselves is dampened after meditation. Other research has found that regular meditators show less anger than a control group. Some of Richie's most interesting research has explored something he noticed when he first became entranced by meditation. The friends who introduced him to meditation seemed to be among the kindest, most compassionate people he'd met. Was their meditation an engine for their kindness? This was a difficult question to study scientifically. But in one experiment, Richie gave volunteers $50. One group underwent training in compassion-based mindfulness techniques. Another group did not. Then all of the subjects observed a financial transaction between 2 strangers.

It's an unfair transaction where, where funds are being distributed highly inequitably between 2 people. So one person is going to make out with a lot of money and a second person is going to get very little.

Notice that the volunteer doesn't have to get involved. This is a transaction between 2 strangers. The volunteer could easily tell herself, I've got my $50, I'm all set. Who cares if some stranger is a victim in an unfair transaction?

And they're given the choice. We then tell them as part of the experiment that they can render a transaction between 2 people who are strangers to them to be more fair if they use their own money that we just gave them, if they use some of the $50 that we just gave them to make that transaction to be more fair and more altruistic. And we ask whether training in compassion leads people to be more monetarily altruistic in this circumstance. We've done this with people who are just learning to meditate, who've just done a few weeks of compassion meditation training. And what we find is that they indeed behave more altruistically than their randomly assigned counterparts who received another kind of training that did not entail any compassion. Another example in a very different age group is work that we've done with young children, because we've been interested in how we can train these qualities starting in kids who are in preschool. Who are 4 and 5 years of age. So what is a currency that is valued by a 4-year-old? Well, kids love stickers, and we did a very simple experiment. What we did is we found out through various kinds of ratings who the child's best friend was in the class, who the child's least favorite person was in in the class. And then we had a child that they had never seen before. And a 4th category was an obviously sick-looking child who was in bed with a bandage on his head. And we had pictures of each of these kids. And what we did is we put these pictures on envelopes, and we also had one envelope which had their own picture. And we told the kids, here are 20 stickers. You can keep all the stickers for yourself, and if you want to keep them all for yourself, put them in the envelope with your picture on it. But if you want to give some to other people, you can do that too. And please distribute the stickers according to which kids you want to have these stickers.

Now, teachers and parents routinely preach the importance of sharing and generosity to their children. Richie went a step further.

In the work that we do with children, we do simple forms of contemplative training where children are asked, when thinking about a peer in their class, to bring them into their mind and think about the fact that they are the same in many ways as As they are in wanting to be happy and not have pain or suffering. I mean, obviously in age-appropriate language. And we do these really short practices with these kids, you know, typically 1 or 2 minutes of practice. We find that the kids behave significantly more altruistically on this task. They give more stickers, to others and particularly more stickers to their least favorite person and to the sick child and to the kid that they've never seen before compared to their randomly assigned counterparts who do not receive this training.

I'm wondering if you might be able to tell me about some of the studies you've conducted where you have not found an effect, where you— or maybe you found a negative effect and some of the critiques that have been raised about your work and about the larger work of basically trying to prove the benefits of contemplative practices. Because again, going back to the concerns that your professors at Harvard were raising, you're a practitioner. You're a believer. You're an enthusiast. You're also the scientist. When pharmaceutical companies conduct trials of their drugs, we have a regulatory organization that evaluates the quality of those studies because we understand that there is a conflict of interest. Now, I'm not sure there's a financial conflict of interest here. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't, but there's certainly an emotional conflict of interest here. Are there ways in which that the science has basically not worked out the way you think? Are there studies that have failed to pan out?

Yeah, so those are really great, super important questions, and I really appreciate you raising them, and particularly the way you've raised them. And let me just say a few things. First, to just clarify, you know, we have a nonprofit entity that I created called Healthy Minds Innovations. I should say that it is a nonprofit corporation. I have never been paid a penny by this Healthy Minds Innovations organization, nor will I ever be paid a penny by them. And in fact, I've made a commitment to donate all of my speaking and consulting fees for the remainder of my active career directly go to this nonprofit. So there is no financial conflict of interest. But as you do correctly and rightly point out, there is in some sense an emotional conflict of interest, which is a legitimate question. And let me just share a story which is worth sharing. I was one of the ringleaders that helped to invite the Dalai Lama to speak At the Society for Neuroscience meeting, which is the world's largest convening of sort of mainstream hard-nosed neuroscientists. I think this occurred in maybe 2005 or '06, around then. And if you go back to this time, you will see that there was actually a front-page New York Times article about this because there was a petition by scientists who are members of the Society for Neuroscientists protesting the Dalai Lama's appearance at this meeting because they said that a religious figure has no business giving a talk at a scientific meeting. So, but in this article on the New York Times on the front page, it also mentioned our work and singled me out and said Davidson has admitted in public That he himself meditates. And so how could he possibly be an objective scientist when it comes to this? Well, let me ask a cardiologist who studies the effects of physical exercise on the heart and does physical exercise him or herself. Same might be said of them. Is it appropriate for them to ever do physical exercise? They— what about a scientist who studies perception? Should they stop perceiving? You know, in certain ways it was ridiculous, but I had a lot of fun with it. But nevertheless, there's something real in your question, which I do think is important. So how do we address this? Well, we have published a whole series of articles that are non-findings, that don't replicate findings in the literature, or that are contradicting a hypothesis that we had where we thought that meditation would produce benefit in some way, and it didn't. And we have been really rigorous and tenaciously committed to publishing all of our non-findings. And those are honestly some of the most important scientific papers of which I'm really proud of as a scientist.

After Richie's original paper came out in 2004, a wave of research on mindfulness supported its benefits. But over the last few years, other research has come out challenging many of the findings. Critics have argued the benefits of mindfulness are overhyped. There are so many different kinds of meditation that it's simplistic to say that all meditation is the same. that it's universally beneficial. Plus, critics say, mindfulness training can actually cause harmful side effects. In other words, it's a mistake to think of meditation as a one-size-fits-all solution to human misery. Some of those critical studies have been published by Richie himself.

We have now, I think, about 8 of these papers that have been published, and the last one was published quite recently And really made a big splash. It was in a very high-profile journal, Science Advances. And what it showed is that, contrary to a lot of hype, that mindfulness-based stress reduction, this 2-month program of training, does not lead to structural changes in the brain. You know, there was a lot of media hype about how You can grow your prefrontal cortex by doing 2 months of meditation. Well, our findings show that that's just very unlikely to be true. I'm not afraid to publish that kind of work. It doesn't diminish my personal commitment to meditating. It just even encourages me more. 2 months is not going to do it. Maybe you have to meditate longer. Longer than that. And so I view science as a community enterprise where the work, the findings, are going to be adjudicated in the community. And so, you know, we use the most rigorous methods that we possibly can use. We're not afraid to publish non-findings, and we encourage others to take our data, take our findings, and see if they can replicate them.

When we come back, I ask Richie how he has applied his scientific findings to his own life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. Hiring Pro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/hp. Terms and conditions apply.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Psychologist Richie Davidson has tried for decades to study the effects of mindfulness and meditation on the mind. He has run experiments, scanned the brains of countless volunteers, and tried to understand what is happening inside the heads of meditators when they say that contemplative practices make them less stressed and more compassionate. But even as he has run studies and published scientific papers, Richie has practiced meditation himself. And he has found that it has changed the way his own mind works. Take, for example, a fear that will be familiar to many people: the terror of public speaking.

In 1992, I was scheduled to give this major scientific talk, and I used to have a lot of anxiety about public speaking. One of the ways that I learned to mitigate my anxiety is to literally write out word for word my talk. And so that's what I did. And I was sitting in the audience waiting for my turn to be called up, sitting next to a very senior colleague who I had great respect for. So this guy, he didn't realize what I had done, but he said, the worst thing someone can do is to get up there and read a talk. It's just so boring when scientists do that. He didn't know that I had done exactly that. And I just sort of looked at him and turned white. And so I made the kind of outrageous and courageous, I think, decision. 2 seconds later, someone gets up and introduces me, and I'm starting to get up. And as I got up, I handed this guy, David, my talk and just got up there and delivered it. Spontaneously. It was the first time I had ever delivered a spontaneous talk like that. And, you know, I would say it was okay. It wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible.

Hmm.

I'm wondering, does meditation help with something like this when it comes to these kinds of anxieties? Does it help sort of soothe these anxieties? Does it make it easier? Do you meditate before you give a talk in public now?

Yes, I do meditate for a brief period of time, typically before I give important talks. That's the way I prepare for them. It's really helped me, I would say, a lot. I really used to get quite nervous giving public talks, and I don't have that experience anymore. And I know others very well who've had very similar experiences, and different kinds of meditation has really given them tools to help them with this.

Notice that the fear of public speaking, like many fears, is about your concerns about what will happen to you in the future. It's like the beep you hear that tells you you are going to experience pain 10 seconds in the future. Your anticipation of the pain is itself a source of pain. You haven't bombed your speech. You're just afraid it might happen. And your anxiety makes it harder for you to do well. Richie has also found that meditation has helped him deal with the anger that marked his early adulthood and his experiences as a parent.

Well, those were challenging times. When my son was a teenager, we lived through 3 very tumultuous years, and it was really difficult. And he really challenged us in all kinds of ways. He didn't want us to be his parents anymore at the age of like 15 and thought that he should just go out and go on the street and hang out with his friends and be liberated from our parental constraints.

How did you react when he said that, Richard? How do you react when your 15-year-old says, He doesn't want you to be his parent anymore. What was your reaction?

It was very difficult. There was definitely some anger that was part of my response. And, you know, the anger in retrospect was extremely unhelpful. So we didn't really appreciate the kind of social and emotional consequences of this. But, You know, my wife is a physician by training. My daughter was, you know, extremely successful academically. You know, I've had a successful academic career. And then my son sort of felt like he landed in a foreign family because school was challenging for him. You know, and at one point in time, we really thought he would— this was a kid who was not going to be able to go to college. And so, you know, it really required completely changing our expectations. And, you know, these are areas where I feel like my meditation practice has made an enormous difference over the years and, you know, has really changed that domain of my behavior. And once we started giving up all of our hopes and dreams and expectations and really had just one hope and dream, which was simply that he'd be happy. Once we were able to get to that point, then everything started changing.

But you mentioned something interesting a second ago, which is that the role that we have, the expectations that we have, in some ways prevented you perhaps from being the father that you might have wanted to be. But talk about that, because it seems to me that part of what you're talking about with these contemplative practices is also about the role of ego And how the ego is actually shaping our behavior.

It feels like there's a connection there.

Yeah, there definitely is. And, you know, I very much had the view, you know, I'm a successful academic and I'm going to have kids that are going to be very successful in this realm. And that was part of my, you know, my self-image. You know, I attributed to my practice that we were able to pretty quickly see that and see how destructive that could be and able to let that go. And once we did that, you know, we kind of allowed natural resilience and growth to emerge. And then he went to college, he went to graduate school, he became a school psychologist. He's Married with a 15-month-old now and wonderful father. But you know there was a lot of work that went into that, and on both his part and our part.

You you tell a story about time when the Dalai Lama came to visit the United States, and one time you were you were greeting the Dalai Lama and having one of your students. present some work. Tell me that story of what happened, because it was a— it sounds like it was a meaningful moment for you in your life, Richie.

Yeah, that was a very powerful, um, moment. Uh, so when the Dalai Lama used to travel to the United States, he asked us to convene these very small meetings where we would just have maybe 12 people in the room. We would brief him on scientific research on meditation. So one year, uh, it was decided that rather than having the old senior folks like myself give the presentations, we're going to have young people who are graduate students and postdocs give the presentations. And one of the individuals who was selected happened to be my graduate student. I was asked to simply serve in the role of a moderator. And I introduced each of these trainees. I said a little bit about who they were and set the context for the research that they were doing, and then moderated the discussion after they presented. And the student of mine who was presenting was the last person. Her name is Helen Wing, and she's done some wonderful research on compassion. So when it came time to introduce Helen, I said, you know, this is Helen Wang. She's my graduate student. She's worked in my lab. And then I said a few other things. And my experience of what happened next was the Dalai Lama grabbed my arm and in a very stern way, almost harsh, he said, don't use My. Just like that.

As in my graduate student, my lab.

Yeah. And he was clearly seeing something in me that he wanted to give me feedback on. And I was shocked. I mean, I was just— my world completely stopped. I was shaken by it. And I, to this day, I reflect I reflect on that all the time, and it was just this unbelievably powerful teaching for me about humility. You know, it's not really about me and my, uh, it's, um, that's just my ego, myself grasping. You know, clearly the work of any student is the product of so many different causes and conditions. to personally own it in this way was just so biased, really, and just narrow.

I mean, it speaks to what you were telling me at the start of the conversation, which is really that there is a world that is out there, but we process that world through our minds, and paying attention to how our minds are processing the world Exactly.

I could not put it any better.

Richard Davidson is a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He is the author of Altered Traits and the founder and director of the university's Center for Healthy Minds.

Richie, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much, Shankar, for your wonderful questions. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Hidden Brain listener and supporter Amy Guldner. She writes, My husband and I both love, love, love this podcast. We both geek out over neuroscience, And find it so applicable to our personal and professional lives. If you also find Hidden Brain to be useful to you in your daily life, please consider joining Amy in supporting our work. You can do so by joining Hidden Brain Plus, our subscription program, via Apple Podcasts. You can find it on the Apple Podcasts app or at apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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