Beyond Consciousness: Unlocking Flow Through Meditation with Dr. Richard Davidson

Flow Radio. I'm Dr. Michael Menino. I'm the Chief Science Officer at Flow Research Collective. And today I'm joined by my co-host, Flow Research Collective's Executive Director and bestselling author, Stephen Kotler, and Dr. Sarah Sarkis. She's a clinical psychologist with a rare blend of coaching expertise and deep insight into the subconscious. We are honored to have Dr. Richard Davidson with us, a distinguished psychologist and professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Davidson is celebrated both in and out of academic circles for his pioneering research on the neuroscience of meditation and its profound effects on the brain. Dr. Davidson's studies have revealed how meditation can enhance our well-being, reshape our brain structure and function, and his work spans a range of participants from long-term meditators to those new to the practice, showing how meditation can positively impact our health over time. And as the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, he has significantly advanced our understanding of how emotions and well-being are connected in the brain. His prolific contributions to science include over 300 published articles, 80 chapters and reviews, 14 books. He's been named Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2006, and his collaborations with figures like the Dalai Lama have underscored his role as a transformative thinker in psychological science. So today we'll explore the fascinating interplay between meditation, mental health, flow states with one of the most influential psychologists of our era, Dr. Richard Davidson. But before we get too deep into the conversation, both Dr. Sarkis and I would love to share a little anecdote, a little bit about how Dr. Davidson has personally impacted us in the work we do today. So for me personally, Dr. Davidson, I've been enormously inspired by your work and folks like Francisco Varela at the Mind Life Institute. I remember way back in high school reading a big book called Zen in the Brain by James Austin. And then, that actually ended up leading me to get my master's in philosophy focusing on Eastern philosophy. And then, I did my PhD in neuroscience. And this is not actually the first time we're meeting. The first time we met was a couple of years ago where you were interviewing me for a job. As the science director for the Center for Healthy Minds, which I didn't get, but I'm here now. Here we are again to talk again. So funny story. Dr. Sarkis, want to share a little bit about your inspiration with Dr. Davidson?

Yeah, so it's so great to connect with you, Dr. Davidson. Mine's actually personal. My mom was like a diehard fan of yours back in the I was in high school when she was talking about you and Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Dalai Lama. And she just thought you were a pioneer and really your work on emotion and meditation really shaped how she parented. So this is super fun for me. She's not alive, but I know she's sort of out there, very happy this conversation is happening. I want to ask for everybody who's listening, we've introduced you and many people listening know you for your pioneering work with meditation. But tell us a little bit about kind of how you came into the world of psychology. What drew you in? Was it meditation?

Yeah, well, first, let me just say thank you to all of you. I very much appreciate the kind words. And I do remember Michael, our interview, and I'm happy you landed this great position. So, and it's wonderful to reconnect. And to answer your question, and also please call me Richie. Everyone else calls me Richie. So, uh, uh, I really, uh, had a very early conviction that the mind, uh, was really key to, uh, everything important in life. And I, I had that conviction in high school, um, and my parents had nothing to do with this subject matter or academia more generally. My father was a businessman in New York City. And I volunteered at a local hospital in Brooklyn, New York, at a sleep laboratory, and became really excited about the possibility that physiological measures might correlate with specific mental states and states of consciousness. And the fact that we can wake a person up at night and they report a dream when specific changes are occurring in their brain was— as a high school student, that just completely blew my mind and was really an entree into this. And then Early on, I was a product of the '60s and meditation was kind of in the air. And I was lucky to meet some people whose demeanor really was infectious. These were very warm-hearted people. They were the kind of people that I wanted to spend more time around. And they all had in common a practice of meditation. And that's what really got me started. And I went through schooling quite quickly in those days. That was, you know, what kids who were, you know, at all smart were sort of encouraged to do. And I, and I, in graduate school, I became really quite excited about the possibilities of meditation for, for promoting well-being and also as something that would be important for psychology to elucidate the basic nature of the mind. And I went off to India for the first time as a graduate student and spent 3 months in India in the mid-1970s, and that was when I got my first taste of intensive meditation. And I came back from that experience really excited about pursuing research on this topic as a graduate student, but that's when I sort of faced the reality of the academy at that point in time and I was told very directly in no uncertain terms that if I wanted a successful career in science, this was a terrible way to begin and I had better find something else to study. And that's when I began pursuing research on the brain and emotion. And that was really a good near neighbor because one of the targets, if you will, of contemplative practice is to transform our emotions. And so if one is really going to study how meditation can transform emotions, it's important to know something about emotion and the brain to understand what it is that may be transformed. And so that all played out and, you know, worked out very well. But then it wasn't until 1992 when I first met the Dalai Lama that my life really changed. And he challenged me and asked why I couldn't use the tools of neuroscience that we were using then to study depression and anxiety and stress and use them to study qualities like kindness and like compassion. And I didn't have a great answer for him other than that it's hard. But, you know, it was hard when we first began to study anxiety. And I think most scientists would agree that there has been some progress made in understanding that. So that was really the beginning. And that led eventually to the founding of the Center for Healthy Minds. The Dalai Lama actually came out to Madison to inaugurate that center in 2010. And we've been going full blast since then.

Yeah, I love emotion as the— I think it's so clever to not get hung up on the resistance of you can't do mindfulness directly and that you chose its co-conspirator emotion as your portal in. Stephen, I know that you—

Yeah, I have a follow-up because I sort of come into this world, right? I did my undergraduate work in Madison, first of all, so I'm a Badger. And I was there from '85 to '89 and took some psychology stuff, but I studied writing in English predominantly. But I was already interested in neuroscience and consciousness. And my first mentor was Dr. Andrew Newberg. Who did some of the first imaging work on Tibetan Buddhists and gave us a look at why we feel one with everything, which sort of to me is like the parallel work to what you were doing. Everybody else who waded into this, it was a minefield. You couldn't talk about emotions. You couldn't talk about consciousness. The first time I heard scientists actually take emotions seriously was when Jaak Pons published Affective Neuroscience, which I think was '92, '93. That was the very first time I ever heard scientists say, okay, these emotion things might be real. That Skinner hangover was so bad. And you started with emotions, which as I just pointed out, was a very hot, difficult topic. We walked in with meditation and into consciousness studies and healing the mind-body problem and all these massive controversies. And you did it very cleanly. I just want to know what your secret was. Your kung fu is really good, man. Andy Newberg got drummed out at the University of Pennsylvania. A lot of other people got derailed by this work and you really sort of held it and did it very cleanly. And I just literally want to know how you did it because I was on the sidelines watching all these steps going, this is so fucking impossible to get people to take these topics seriously, trying to put flow science on a hard, like on a neurobiological footing, which has sort of been my mission for 30 years. It took me the first 15 years just to convince scientists that flow was real, that Csikszentmihalyi wasn't just making it up before we could even start talking about what is it.

Yeah, that's great. Thank you for that wonderful prelude. I think honestly, the secret sauce is two things. One is a commitment to really sort of intensive rigor. If we're going to do this, we have to do it even better than mainstream, typical mainstream science so that it's impeccable. And the second is really being honest. And if we get negative findings, publish them anyway. Some of the papers I'm most proud of, we've published, I think, 8 or 9 papers that either were major failures to replicate or were hypothesized benefits that we, um, we, we proposed from meditation that ended up not working out, and we published it anyway. Uh, and, you know, I think that's been really important in helping to establish our credibility and even among scientists that were otherwise skeptical.

Yeah, I think it keeps— it establishes credibility. It also shows a scientific method. How do you correct what your thoughts were without being proven, oh, okay, that's wrong, that didn't turn out right, let's now pivot and iterate. So it's a commitment to that scientific process. But I also think it keeps us honest with ourselves by, by making those, uh, what we call failures, um, known. Um, so I love that. Like, I cannot— we can't emphasize enough how much I think that is, um, an underutilized superpower right now.

So Let me ask a quick sort of follow-up, which is you stayed very much in your lane on meditation as far as I could tell, emotions and meditation. There's all the other altered states that are just sort of like floating just on the edges of your work. And a lot of other people have sort of worked on them and worked on. My question is really this, out of all this stuff that shows up in the contemplative traditions, the wisdom traditions, What is this stuff that you look at and just go, "I don't know what the hell that is. Meditation doesn't explain that. There's nothing in brain science that explains it." And, I'll give you one example that I always think of. If you don't talk about psychedelics, there's absolutely no way I can explain the Tibetan Bardo, the Tibetan version of reincarnation and what happens right after we die. Nothing. That brain science gives me helps explain psychedelics and what it does to consciousness may help explain that, but I'm out of ideas. And so what I'm wondering about is like what in the kind of altered state consciousness space can— has just continued to baffle you over the years?

Yeah, so that's a great question and I'll answer it, but let me address another related issue first that pertains to how you ask the question. So you're asking about altered states of consciousness. And Dan Goldman and I a few years ago published a book called Altered Traits. And thank you. And one of the intentions of the book is to provoke with the title itself and then its content that really the sort of the thing we should be interested in is not altered states. It's altered traits. Because we're really interested in human transformation. We're interested in how we can transform every nook and cranny of our everyday lives. We're not interested in the buzz, the high that you might get when you take a drug or when you put your butt on the cushion. That's not what it's about. What it's about is exactly what the Dalai Lama was asking about. How can we become more kind and compassionate in every aspect of our lives? That's a trait. Those are enduring characteristics. And so So that's an important preface. You know, it's the altered trait that really counts. Altered states are a dime a dozen. There are many different ways of producing them. And frankly, they're not interesting to me unless they lead to an altered trait. And only some do.

Yeah, as a clinician, I have to tell— I have to say, this is where You know, you go, you get all this education, and then you're, you're in a private practice and you're working with people. And this is the holy grail of long-term sustainable psychological flexibility inside of people, is this, this world where you realize that you have the levers and the widgets to kind of move through even suffering in a way that doesn't necessarily break us. And I do, I think that's such a great point to emphasize.

But to get to your question, which I did promise to answer, there are many things and, you know, I think that we need to allow our noses to be rubbed, if you will, in the complexity and also in what we can explain. And so, you know, a number of years ago, the Dalai Lama asked me to study this very unusual phenomenon that is written about in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition called tukdam. And tukdam is a clear light stage of meditation that occurs after the conventional Western definition of death. And so it is a very specific stage in the bardo. And it is a stage during which, according to the traditional Tibetan texts, there is a preservation of a kind of primordial awareness that is occurring while a person has stopped breathing and their heart is no longer beating. And according to our measurements, the brain activity is also not occurring. And, you know, if this stuff is real, then our accounts of how things work are totally wrong. Or let's put it this way, they're completely incomplete.

My first mentor, one of my first mentors was Dr. Robert White, who is the man who convinced the Pope that the definition of death should not be the cessation of heart function. It should be brain death so we could harvest organs from coma patients, right? It was why it happened back in the '60s. But I just want to point out coming off your comment that our definition of death has been a moving target for a long time. And sometimes it gets changed for reasons like we want to harvest organs to help people who are almost dead from corpses essentially before there's brain death, after there's heart death. So, we change it for weird reasons. So, staying that our conceptions are wrong, death seems to be a moving target as well.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And in the West, we have this strange idea that all of a sudden, you know, one moment a person is alive, and then literally the next moment they're dead. And, you know, biological systems don't work like that. Biological systems are not digital. And the, you know, just going back to first principles, the idea that one moment we're alive and the next moment all of us are dead, It makes no sense biologically, even if you're a strict materialist. So there's a huge amount that needs to be unpacked here and raises really deep fundamental questions about the traditional Western biomedical scientific accounts of the relationship between the mind and the brain. So, you know, and I mean, if you ask me what my explanation is, I, you know, I have absolutely no idea.

Well, but did you— where did you get with your research in the tuk-tuk? Did you get anywhere?

Well, we've gotten a little bit. I mean, we've made a little bit of progress, very little, but a little. We have basically confirmed that the bodies of these practitioners do not decompose according to what would be expected based on our conventional understanding of death. So, you know, we have studied Tukdam practitioners in the south of India in a, you know, tropical climate with no air conditioning, where we've seen bodies more than 2 weeks after death that are totally fresh with no decomposition. And we've brought in some of the world's top forensic experts who really know about bodily decomposition and In fact, we're just about to publish a paper on the lack of bodily decomposition in Tukdam practitioners that will, you know, I think, cause some interesting ripples in the scientific community. So, you know, we're approaching it really step by step, doing what we can. And it's a very complicated phenomenon to study, as you might imagine, since we don't know who's going to go into Tukdam. And that makes it really complicated. And even the Dalai Lama, I've asked the Dalai Lama myself, I asked whether he can predict who's going to go into tukdam. And he reflected on it and he said, I don't think I can. So, you know, it makes it very challenging. But I should also say that I myself have witnessed one tukdam personally, and that was a very deeply moving experience, I must say. And, you know, this was a very eminent Tibetan Buddhist lama who was in Tukdam for 8 days. And he died sitting in an upright posture. And he stayed in Tukdam upright. And I was right next to him. If I didn't know he was dead, I would— I thought he was just meditating. Um, yeah, amazing.

Richie, I want to, uh, not push back, uh, but, but just maybe delve into a little bit more, go deeper into this idea of state versus trait. And, and you mentioned at the end that, that be, you know, unless you can use states and have them occur frequently to lead to traits, then that's a positive outcome. And so, I want to take the conversation to the flow state and get under the hood a little bit about what happens in the brain during meditation and how those states can lead to reduced depression, reduced anxiety, because the same thing happens with flow. It's well known the more flow we have in our lives, it increases well-being, right? It increases, it reduces depression, it improves life quality of life and life satisfaction. So it leads to those, those, you know, more enduring traits when we experience that state more often.

Right.

And so there must be some similar mechanisms.

I want to want you to say, Michael, can I build on this for us for one second? Just add it because this so interestingly, Richie, you and I both, I think, stumbled upon William James back when we were at Wisconsin, an undergraduate. And we actually both centered on the same quote. And I've heard you quote the first half of it and I quote the second half of it. When people ask me, what is peak performance? I always say it's getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. And it's not a new idea. William James, back in 1890, in the first psychology textbook he ever written, said that the main thing in any education is to make our nervous system our ally rather than our enemy. And you, I've heard you quote, I think at the JCC in New York, when you opened that conversation, you quote William James. And it's the first half of that quote, which is what led you to look at meditation as a way to control attention as a lever here. So, I think we both ended up as ways to alter consciousness to improve performance or whatever, well-being. And so, my question is, do you think of flow and meditation, are there other states that work training this way? What's the overlap? I know, and this is where we started our conversation right before you hopped on, Michael Posner, that sort of the godfather of attention neuroscience back in the '80s, said he thought meditation would be good training for flow.

Yeah. So I'm glad you asked me about it. And I know you guys are aligned on flow. And let me offer some reflections about flow. Hopefully you'll regard them as friendly amendments to help think about flow a little bit more deeply. So, you know, you, Michael, said that flow states lead to increased well-being and so forth. And I would say some do, but probably not all do. And so let me just offer some reflections. Flow is often talked about, for example, by jazz musicians. I have a close friend who's a jazz musician and a scholar. He's written a lot about the history of jazz, but he's also a performance artist. And when these guys are playing, they always talk about when they're really grooving, they're in flow. What does it mean in that case to be in flow? And also, if you look at the lives of famous jazz musicians, I don't think you would hold them up as a paragon of well-being and mental health. And if flow was so great for their well-being, why are their lives so screwed up? And I think that we need to ask this question. So one of the important issues which I have not seen anywhere written about, but we consider it to be absolutely fundamental, is the following. Flow can occur with or without meta-awareness. You can be totally absorbed in what you're doing and say after the fact that you were in flow. Like a jazz musician, but they're totally absorbed in what they're doing and there's no meta-awareness most of the time, I would argue. And meta-awareness is actually being aware of what your mind is doing, not being absorbed in it, but being aware of it. So let me try to make that distinction a little bit more clearly by analogy. We've all had the experience of going to a movie, to a movie in a movie theater, where we're so engrossed in the plot of the movie that we lose awareness that we're in a theater. We may even lose awareness that we're watching a movie. We're so engrossed in the plot. That would be equivalent to flow with no meta-awareness.

Now, Isn't that the point of meditation? I mean, you're going to say that there's meta-awareness in meditation, but you want to be completely absorbed in the moment. I want to stare at that candle flame and that candle flame is my reality. Action and awareness have merged. That's my meditative experience. Is that the same thing I'm getting from a movie?

It's a misconstrual of meditation, to be honest. So let me just finish this. So the— The other possibility in going to the movie theater is you can be completely attentive to the movie, unwavering, but you can still have in the penumbra of awareness the recognition that you're in a movie theater and that you're watching a movie. And, you know, the fact is that this is actually what reality is. We're all watching a movie. The movie is constructed by our own minds. And that's happening all the time. And if we're not, if we don't have meta-awareness of that, we really have limited capacity to transform. And so flow can occur with or without meta-awareness. And my conjecture is that it often occurs without meta-awareness. And if it's occurring without meta-awareness, it is not going to be beneficial for our well-being. You need meta-awareness. It is a necessary prerequisite for flow to contribute positively to our well-being. And you can learn meta-awareness. It's a trainable skill.

It's a practice. Yeah, it's a practice that you can incorporate. And I think like a lot of— I think what places like the Flow Research Collective does is bring that meta-awareness to it. It's like, no, be aware of what is happening. Be aware of how you can actually call this trait state into your life, and then you can translate it into kind of everyday behavior. And I think that is a really, really valuable point to make, that flow in and of itself, it's not prescriptive to happiness. I had a question that I wanted to drive down into that's sort of adjacent to this, which is in general, the discussion about neuroplasticity, like in general, what have you been surprised by? What was more malleable than you thought? What was more fixed?

Yeah, those are important questions. Um, I mean, there, the, uh, there are, um, findings that show that our brains can change pretty quickly, uh, even, uh, aspects of the, uh, the connections in our brains, the physical connections, which is the white matter. There are experiments that show that you can actually see changes occurring within a matter of hours, maybe even less than that. And so the fact that our brains can change so rapidly in a way that's actually measurable is really cool. And and surprised, I think, the whole field initially that we really could see those kind of changes. Now, the other, you know, the sort of complement to that is that there are certain changes that have been hyped in the media that may be produced by meditation. That we and others have shown are probably not real. And one of them is to, for example, increase the size of your prefrontal cortex, increase the gray matter in your prefrontal cortex. We've published evidence to show that that's likely not a real finding. And, you know, in some sense, it's, I mean, you can't expect that the size of particular brain areas is going to continue to grow and grow and grow with more practice. I mean, that's just not how brains work. You know, it's physically impossible for that to happen. So, there needs to be a deeper understanding of how these kinds of practices affect at least the physical anatomy of the brain, the anatomical plasticity, if you will. And so that's complicated. And the fact that we now have ways of measuring the connectivity of the brain in a very sensitive way, that's something that's showing some real effects, and those effects can be discerned very early on. So that's, you know, I think, really exciting and interesting. I think that we need to better understand the relationship between changes in the brain and expertise. So it can't be a linear function. It just makes no sense. And there may be changes that occur in the brain initially as a person is acquiring certain skills. And then, you know, those changes begin to recede as the person develops more and more expertise and it becomes more and more a trait, if you will. And so taking into account the developmental history of the skill learning is really important and really complicated because if you look at a group of people who are experts or, you know, have some degree of expertise, you don't really know a lot about their prior history because you haven't studied them. And so it's not clear where in this curve they may be. And so, you know, you might not find very much, but it may be because all the, you know, structural neuroplasticity happened earlier on as they were acquiring the skill. And they already have kind of reached expert-level performance, if you will. So those are all really complicating factors and make this, you know, a very nuanced kind of area of study.

Let me come off that with a question. I think it was back in 2014 or '15, you published a paper where you looked at epigenetic impacts of meditation, short-term meditation. I think it was 8 hours of meditation. And you you found decreases in most inflammatory markers in the brain. One of the things that I've been wondering since I heard about that—

We found decreases in most inflammatory markers in the blood, not in the—

Blood, excuse me, not in the brain, in the blood, excuse me.

Yeah, a new revolutionary method if we actually found it in the brain.

You're right. That would be cool though. So, here's my question. Well, when you look at sort of the new research around peak performance aging, all the major causes of aging are now linked to inflammation and stress. So, my question is, have we done the inverse? Have we looked at long-term longevity impact of meditation, et cetera, et cetera? Has that been done?

It's starting to be done and it's really an important question. And, Let me say a few things. First, you know, I would agree with your statement about the important role of inflammation and also to suggest that inflammation occurs not just in the body, but inflammation also occurs in the brain. And when inflammation occurs in the brain, it actually exacerbates neurodegenerative kinds of processes. And is one of the key factors that may lead to premature dementia. And so, and the cool thing is we now have ways of measuring neuroinflammation in the brain relatively non-invasively in the human brain for the first time. So Well, the gold standard is with positron emission tomography. There's a particular PET tracer that labels microglial activation, which is a direct marker of neuroinflammation. And there is now some very recent work to suggest that we may be able to look at microglial activation completely noninvasively with MRI. And we're one of the few groups in the world using that. And really, I think the only group in the world that is now using that to study the effects of meditation directly on neuroinflammation. So, but getting back to your, you know, your central question, there are a few studies in the literature which claim to find meditation slowing brain age. So you can compute the age of the brain objectively from an MRI, a structural MRI scan. And if you look at like 1,000 people and you look at the correlation between their chronological age and their brain age, there's a very, very high correlation, as you would expect. But some people have brains that are aging more quickly compared to their chronological age, and other people have brains that are aging more slowly compared to their chronological age. And so we can ask the question whether meditation slows brain age or it slows brain aging. And, you know, just to give you one data point here, we published a case study of a Tibetan monk who provided permission to identify him. His name is Mingyur Rinpoche. He's a very well-known Tibetan monk. And he was— he's been to our laboratory many, many times over a period of 12 years. And we had serial MRI scans over this 12-year period. And so we can compute the slope of his brain aging by looking at the serial MRI scans objectively using— it's a machine learning algorithm to compute brain age from structural MRIs. And we compared the rate of the slope of his brain aging to a normative database of 1,000 people, and he was the most extreme data point. His brain was aging more slowly compared to all 1,000 normative people in the same age range.

Which he went on a walkabout, right? He left his monastery and spent a couple years in India having like very like near-death experiences, et cetera, et cetera. Are your images of his brain and that transformation before or after he left his monastery? Just out of curiosity.

Good question. One, the last data point we have is after that retreat.

Is there, was there a big difference?

There was a fairly substantial difference, yes.

Oh, that's interesting. Okay, that's cool. Neat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, he was away for 4 and a half years. Yeah, doing a wandering retreat. Yeah, he's pretty—

I love that book. The book he wrote about that experience is really beautiful.

One of my favorite books. Yeah. It's called In Love with the World. It's a beautiful book. And I don't know if you know, there's a documentary movie that's been made of it. It's a gorgeous film. It's called Wandering But Not Lost.

You know, he's the only Tibetan Buddhist I've ever— he is in one of his talks, he actually uses a term for flow, which I've been looking for that term for 30 years. What are we actually translating out of Sanskrit as flow, out of Tibetan, out of the older languages? What's the translation for flow? And, he finally used the term and I was like, it is a different thing. It's not the same thing. It's a distinct state in these other experiences.

That's interesting. Thing.

Yeah. Do you remember what the name was?

I knew that was going to be the next question. And no, it's, uh, I gotta—

I did—

I have my notes. I'll get it to you later today.

So you teach perfectly. We'll put it in the show notes. Um, I have a, like, a sort of a practical question. Um, do you have, or has your research found, that there's sort of like a meditative dose that to the To the average listener who is thinking to themselves, okay, I'm convinced, there's enough, I have enough curiosity, I'm going to start a meditation practice. Is there for you a dose?

It's a great question. And the answer is yes and no. So the yes part is the dose that I would recommend is the dose that a person really is able to adhere to on an ongoing basis for at least a month or two. Whatever that dose is, even if it's 1 minute a day, that's perfectly fine if you're able to do it every day. So, you know, does the daily matter more than the length of the dose? Yes and no, too. Regularity really matters. But if you miss a day, it's okay. You know, it's not like it's the end of the world. You just keep—

especially because if you convince yourself it's the end of the world, you won't start again.

Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you have to be, I think, kind to yourself. And also, I think it's so important to meet people where they are. Most people, you know, if you look at mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is the most commonly taught—

11 minutes a day, right?

No, the recommended is 45 minutes a day.

It's the biggest impediment inside my clinical practice when I would suggest it is the length of time.

But nobody does that.

Nobody does it.

No one does it. But that's the expectation.

Where did Jon Kabat-Zinn come up with that number, though? Right. It came out of research or just—

No, Jon— I mean, Jon's a very close friend of mine. I love Jon. He's an amazing person. It comes out of his experience. And he said, put your fucking butt on the cushion for 45 minutes a day, and that's what you should do. And I don't care if you sleep less, put your butt on the cushion for 45 minutes a day. That's what he says, you know, using that language. And, and for those who can do it, it's great, you know, but—

but everybody has a different relationship with resistance. And you have to meet people where they are at when there is resistance. And I love your approach. People will always say to me, like, how much should I do? I'm like, How much are you willing to do? They're like, I can do 3 minutes. I'm like, that sounds like a perfect place to start.

Yeah. And the cool thing is that we have data showing that if a person practices on average 5 minutes a day for 30 days, you will see dramatic changes in their behavior. We've published randomized controlled trials. We have an app that we've release called the Healthy Minds Program, which is a— it's totally free. There's no paywall. And the New York Times Wirecutter has named it as one of the 3 best meditation apps for 3 years in a row. And, um, uh, we— and it's the only app out there that's actually evidence-based. We have 2 published randomized controlled trials and 2 more that are coming out soon. Um, and we show that 5 minutes a day leads to a 20% reduction on standardized measures of anxiety and depression and improvements in well-being. 5 minutes a day. And the analogy that I use is when human beings first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And somehow we've all learned to spend 5 minutes or so a day brushing our teeth. And virtually every person on the planet does this. And it's not part of our genome. We've somehow learned to do it because it's important for our personal physical hygiene. And what we're talking about is something important for our personal mental hygiene. And I think most people would agree that their minds are even more important than their teeth. And yet we don't— we don't care for our minds in the same way. And the data show that if we spent even as short a time as we spend brushing our teeth nourishing our mind, this world would really be a different place.

Let me ask you a follow-up to this related, and it comes right off this. I don't mean to interrupt you, but what style is my next question? I've seen the research that shows if you want to amplify creativity, you're looking at a vipassana-based meditation. If you want to decrease anxiety and stress, you're looking at a focus-based meditation, et cetera, et cetera. How clinical are we getting in our use of style of meditation, time of meditation? So daily, 5 minutes a day, 30 days, you're going to get change. What style of meditation am I using? And this is like, and I get there's going to be a different answer depending on where I'm starting, but I just want to know how you think about this problem.

Yeah, it's a really important question. And Our Healthy Minds program is built on 4 key pillars of well-being that we call— I'll just name the pillars. The first is awareness. The second is connection. The third is insight. And the fourth is purpose. And we have a 30-day training program where people learn practices to cultivate each one of those 4 key pillars. They spend 1 week on each. And the meditations are a variety of different meditations. They're mindfulness, they're compassion meditation, they're analytic meditation to cultivate insight. So it's a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Having said that, I also very much believe that one size does not fit all, and we are moving toward more personalized kinds of recommendations. Just like, you know, one of the buzzwords in biomedicine these days is precision medicine, figuring out ways of making medicines or treatments very specific to an individual's genotype in the case of medicine. And what we're interested in is, can we do a better job in recommending to a person what kind of meditation may be, in fact, most efficacious for that person, given where she or he falls on a whole variety of metrics that we can measure? And we believe we could do a much better job. If you look at research on meditation, or for that matter, look at research on any intervention to change behavior, even pharmaceutical interventions, some people show a lot of benefit, other people show, you know, a little benefit, and there's always people that actually end up doing worse. On average, there may be benefit, but there's a lot of variability, and we can probably do a much better job in figuring out which people will benefit most from which kinds of meditation.

Didn't I just see a study that said people who suffer from excessive rumination don't like meditation, makes well-being go down significantly? I think I just saw a study.

I mean, there may well be. It wouldn't surprise me. And I would expect that for certain kinds of meditation, but not for all kinds of meditation. I mean, this is a great example of where, you know, if someone had a lot of rumination, um, there would be, you know, specific kinds of meditation that I think would likely be much more efficacious than other kinds of meditation.

Low— those lower in meta-awareness, perhaps.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It goes back to our flow conversation. There's one kind of flow, let's just say, although it's context-dependent, but there's different kinds of meditation. Maybe there's a optimal relationship to training up that metacognition and meta-awareness so you could so flow better access as well-being. Richie, I wanted to ask you one quick question maybe before we end. Maybe this is the penumbral question on the relationship between empathy and meditation. And, you know, I know Dr. Sarkis and Stephen, I know you had a podcast a while back on empathy, but there's different kinds of empathy in the brain, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, or perspective-taking. And I know Paul Bloom has talked about this, and maybe there's some research on this, that meditation can dampen down— and correct me if I'm wrong— parts of the brain involved in affective empathy or emotional empathy, and that allows us to be more compassionate and better take others' perspectives and so on. Can you speak to that? Is that Is that true?

Yeah, yeah, it's— that's a great question, and you framed it beautifully and accurately. And there's a lot to say about this, but briefly, empathy, particularly affective empathy, where you are essentially feeling the emotions of another, When you're empathizing with a person who's in distress and you're feeling the distress yourself, it's, you know, I mean, even just casual reflection will suggest that that's not going to be a very sustainable kind of stance to take with respect to someone who's suffering. And it will eventually be quite toxic and lead to burnout. And so this is really what Paul Bloom was talking about in his book, The Case Against Empathy. And so, you know, and in terms of neuroscience, there is a big difference in the brain between empathy and compassion. They're completely— when you're empathizing with a person who's in distress, versus you expressing compassion for a person who's in distress, the brain networks that are activated are totally non-overlapping. They look like, you know, just completely different circuits in the brain. Totally non-overlapping.

Richie, is empathy a bottom-up mirror neuron-driven process and compassion a top-down process?

You know, it's an interesting way of putting it, and it's likely the case that There are aspects of it that are bottom-up, as you put it, and may be driven by mirror neurons, although, you know, the mirror neuron story is one of those issues that's been hyped. You know, even in the small regions of the brain where there are mirror neurons, they don't occupy more than about 35% of the total population. Population of neurons at most.

I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's cool. I did not know that.

And then they're only found in a few very, very small specific areas of the brain. So empathy has to involve, and clearly does involve, circuitry that has nothing to do with mirror neurons. It may also involve mirror neurons. We don't really know that. We can't measure mirror neurons directly in the human brain. You know, you need to put electrodes in the cells to actually identify them as being—

But mindfulness and meditation can affect empathy and affect compassion, I guess, because it does it. Is that true? It like sort of dampens down or attenuates that neural activity involved in that affect of empathy?

Yeah. And compassion meditation specifically activates networks in the brain that are involved in compassion and positive emotion, which are very different than the networks involved in empathy. So, you know, so you can— one of the interesting questions which this whole discussion sort of points us toward, which is not really resolved yet, is whether empathy is a necessary prerequisite for compassion. That is, in the course of developing compassion, is empathy important at some stage? You know, we've talked to the Dalai Lama extensively about this. And, you know, from the discussions and from just reflecting on their own experience, the Dalai Lama being someone, you know, who has spent just an extraordinary number of hours cultivating compassion. He would say that compassion can be activated directly without activating empathy. But in the course of his training, you know, earlier on, maybe empathy was an important prerequisite in developing compassion. We don't really know that.

But I mean, and I'm just going from like Mingyur Rinpoche's books on meditation. Isn't there's a whole sequence of Tibetan meditations where you're putting yourself into other people's roles? Is that not— that's, that's about compassion rather than empathy? Isn't the whole point to like walk a mile in everybody's moccasins? I mean, like, it's got to be 1,000 practices that I'm exaggerating, 100 practices that are like that.

Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I think that you're absolutely right. Those are practices which Certainly, at least in the way they're described, would involve perspective-taking. The perspective—

Cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy. Exactly. Yeah. But not affective empathy.

I have to go off this question a little bit because what fascinates me about this is it's sort of a question about compassion and disassociation. And the reason that—

Guys, I'm just mindful of time. I'm gonna have to go in a minute.

I said this should not be our last question. It's way too geeky. Let me pass it over to Sarah or Michael.

Well, I just want to make sure that we, uh, if you can get us the link to your app, we can put it in the show notes as well, because I want to make sure listeners have access to that resource that you noted in here. And this has just been a ball for me. So I feel there could be a part 2 and a part 3. I'm really appreciative of the, of the hour together.

Sure. And I just put a link in. You can learn about the app by going to tryhealthyminds.org and you can download the app from wherever you get apps.

Richie, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much.

Wonderful hour.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you so much.

And thank you all. And I appreciate all the work you guys are doing to bring awareness to these important issues and spread the word. So, and it was just fun interacting with all of you. So keep up the good work.

You too. Thank you so much for your time.