#111 — The Science of Meditation
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
145.87814
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Daniel Goleman and Dr. Richard Davidson talk about how they came to meditate, the history of meditation in Western culture, and the current state of the science in regards to mindfulness and meditation. This episode is sponsored by the Center for Healthy Minds at the Weisman Center for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Dr. Davidson is the Director of the Department of Psychiatry, and Director of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Behavioural Analysis at the Center, as well as a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the WISeman Center, where he is a co-founder of the Centre for HealthyMinds, and a regular contributor to the New York Times and The Huffington Post. This episode was produced and edited by Sam Blumberg and features interviews with Drs. Daniel Gellman and Richard Davidson, and their co-author, Dan and Rachit Davidson, on the topic of mindfulness, meditation, and meditation in the modern Western culture and the practice of Buddhism and Buddhism in the 21st century, altered states of consciousness. We talk about an alternate conception of mental health, what it means to be identified with thought, and how non-optimal that is, the relationship between mindfulness meditation and so-called flow states, and other topics, including the stigma associated with meditation and introspection, and mindfulness, and why meditation is important in modern culture. This really is the conversation that will get you most grounded in the why and the what of meditation from a scientific point of view, from the scientific point-of-point of view. Enjoy! and remember: meditation is not just for the mind, it s about the mind. It s about your body it s for your mind, your body, your brain, your soul, and your soul and your mind not your body and your spirit . in other words, and it s a tool for your soul and your consciousness to help you become a better human being a better version of yourself of who you are, not you or you are , not you, what you , not so you . you , your , and the that you are , your being , or you. and that is ?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
today I'm speaking with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. Daniel is known for his
00:00:22.440
best-selling books on emotional intelligence. His book emotional
00:00:26.240
intelligence I believe was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 90s. If it's not
00:00:32.000
literally true, it is close. And Danny's interest in meditation goes way back to
00:00:36.680
his years spent in India as a graduate student at Harvard. He's a trained
00:00:41.120
psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral
00:00:45.000
sciences for the New York Times. He's been a visiting faculty member at
00:00:49.220
Harvard. He's received many journalistic awards including two nominations for
00:00:54.620
the Pulitzer Prize. And he received the Career Achievement Award for Journalism
00:00:59.620
from the American Psychological Association. And my experience with Danny goes way
00:01:05.980
back. We have spent many, many months on retreats together back in the day. We've
00:01:12.140
traveled to India and Nepal to study with various meditation teachers together.
00:01:18.020
And Danny has over the years given me advice with respect to publishing. So it's
00:01:23.100
great to be able to get him on the podcast. And Richard, known as Richie, to those who
00:01:29.160
know him, he's a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of
00:01:33.700
Wisconsin-Madison. And he's the director of the Weisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging
00:01:38.320
and Behavior there. He's also the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the
00:01:43.800
Weisman Center. Richie also received his PhD in psychology from Harvard and has been
00:01:48.740
in Wisconsin since 1984. And he's been a very prolific experimental scientist. He has published
00:01:56.280
more than 300 papers, as well as numerous chapters and reviews. And he's edited 14 books. And I think
00:02:04.060
it's beyond dispute that Richie has done the most important neuroimaging research on meditation
00:02:10.280
to date. He generally works with functional magnetic resonance imaging and EEG as well. All of those
00:02:18.640
articles you've seen with the French monk, Mathieu Ricard, with EEG electrodes on his head. That research
00:02:25.900
was done in Richie's lab. And really, there's no one better to talk about the current state of the
00:02:31.000
science for our understanding of mindfulness and meditation. And as luck would have it, Danny and
00:02:37.880
Richie have just published a book together presenting all of the relevant science. And that book is
00:02:43.140
Altered Traits. Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. And we get into all of
00:02:50.620
that in this conversation. We talk about the original stigma associated with studying meditation, the history
00:02:57.120
of introspection in Eastern and Western culture, the more recent collaboration between Buddhists mainly
00:03:04.020
and Western scientists, the difference between altered states of consciousness and altered
00:03:09.180
traits, the importance of actually practicing meditation. We talk about an alternate conception
00:03:15.400
of mental health, what it means to be identified with thought, and how non-optimal that is, the
00:03:23.300
relationship between mindfulness meditation and so-called flow states, and many other topics here.
00:03:29.480
This really is the conversation that will get you most grounded in the why and the what of meditation
00:03:36.200
from a scientific point of view. So now, without further delay, I bring you Daniel Goleman and Richard
00:03:43.340
Davidson. So I'm here with Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson. Dan, Richie, thanks for coming on the
00:03:52.060
podcast. Pleasure, Sam. Happy to be here. So just to clarify, this is not an undue sign of familiarity.
00:03:58.640
You actually go by Dan and Richie among friends, and I certainly consider myself a friend, so
00:04:04.080
you'll be referred to thusly. Let's talk about your history together and my history with you briefly,
00:04:12.380
just to orient people, because you guys go way back. I guess starting with you, Dan, just say
00:04:19.200
how you view your intellectual history briefly and how you came to this topic, and then we'll talk
00:04:27.020
about how you guys met. So my intellectual history took an unexpected detour. When I was a graduate
00:04:36.000
student at Harvard and I had a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, I had met Ram Dass, who five
00:04:42.720
years before had been fired from my own department at Harvard as Richard Alpert, gone to India and come
00:04:49.260
back with the name Ram Dass as a yogi and a teacher and a lecturer. I ran into him by accident, and I was
00:04:57.500
very impressed by what he was saying about his teacher in India named Neem Krolli Baba. So I went to India.
00:05:04.000
Harvard was nice enough to give me a free ride there, and I went to see Neem Krolli Baba, who was unlike
00:05:11.280
anyone I'd met before. He was completely present, completely loving to everybody, it seemed, open to
00:05:18.340
anyone, you know, high cast, low cast, anybody, and didn't seem to want anything for himself. And I
00:05:25.180
never met anyone like that. So I go back to Harvard, and I say, you know, there's a positive side to human
00:05:31.700
nature that we don't look at. I was studying clinical psychology, which is how to diagnose what's wrong
00:05:35.980
with people. And my professors were basically uninterested. There was one graduate student
00:05:41.800
there who was interested, and his name was Richie Davidson. And so Richie and I became friends,
00:05:49.120
and both of us did our research on meditation, and we've circled back to that with our book,
00:05:54.520
Altered Traits, after being under the radar for many years and then finding that the field of
00:06:00.760
meditation research has just exploded. It's been flourishing. When we did our dissertations,
00:06:05.640
there were three peer-reviewed articles we could cite. When we reviewed the literature some decades
00:06:12.040
later, there are now more than 6,000 on the topic, and we use very rigorous standards to winnow them
00:06:19.360
down to about 60. And that field has been flourishing largely because of the neuroimaging work that
00:06:24.400
Richie has been doing in his lab at Wisconsin. So Richie, give us your brief CV here and take us back
00:06:31.900
Well, I was very fortunate to meet some people during my early days in graduate school whose demeanor
00:06:41.040
and whose presence was infectious to me. These were the kind of people I wanted to be more like. I wanted
00:06:48.880
to know what their secret sauce was, and I learned that they were all meditators. I met Dan my very
00:06:57.020
first day of graduate school, and I decided that after my second year of graduate school, I needed to find out
00:07:06.160
more about this tradition and to get a taste of it more experientially. So I went to Sri Lanka and to India
00:07:17.540
and spent part of the time with Dan that summer. I spent about three months in Asia. That was the
00:07:25.320
summer during which I participated in my first meditation retreat, and so got a glimpse of what
00:07:33.980
these practices were like and came back with a conviction that this was something important for
00:07:41.480
Western psychology and neuroscience to take more serious account of. But it was made very clear to
00:07:50.120
me that if I wanted a successful career in science, studying meditation was a terrible way to begin.
00:07:57.200
Let's talk about why that was the case. You are coming right on the heels of the psychedelic craze in
00:08:05.540
the 60s that was largely kicked off by some of your elders at Harvard, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert,
00:08:13.820
a.k.a. Ram Dass. And they got fired, and most people's entrance into the topic of meditation at
00:08:23.200
that point as being of interest had some connection to the altered states that people were encountering
00:08:29.600
doing psychedelics. And this whole area was stigmatized to a significant degree in academia.
00:08:37.380
Is the connection to psychedelics relevant there, or was it just stigmatized on its own?
00:08:42.100
Well, I think it is relevant. Ruchi, you probably add to this, but basically the department people
00:08:48.420
who are professors then were pretty much the people who had been traumatized by all the publicity,
00:08:54.520
the adverse publicity around Leary and Alpert and their firing. And I think that anything that had
00:09:01.700
to do with consciousness in any way was rather anathema to me. I think it was, to them, rather,
00:09:06.600
it was scary. And so I think they reacted to us and our interest in meditation from that framework.
00:09:16.620
I would agree that that played a role, but I also think there are other factors at play as well.
00:09:21.680
Remember, this was at the end of the behavioral era. Behaviorism was still a force in the academy
00:09:31.320
within psychology. And in fact, another encounter that I had during my first year in graduate school
00:09:39.040
was running into Skinner in the elevator in William James Hall. And there's a very extraordinary
00:09:45.880
encounter that I had with him because this was actually my first couple of weeks at Harvard,
00:09:51.120
and I didn't know exactly where I was going. And I pushed a button on the elevator. And then I
00:09:56.040
mumbled to myself, whoops, I changed my mind. And I hit another button, realizing that I needed to go
00:10:01.840
to another floor. And Skinner was standing next to me in the elevator. And he put his arm on my
00:10:07.480
shoulder and he said, son, you did not change your mind. You changed your behavior.
00:10:15.220
The sixth floor of our building had his pigeons, along with Dick Ernstine.
00:10:19.940
That was another element that we had to contend with.
00:10:23.280
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because the influence of behaviorism, I think it's to some
00:10:28.560
degree still felt, although very few people would answer to the name of behaviorism now. But it's one
00:10:34.120
of those intellectual influences that, in retrospect, seems almost impossible. The idea that people
00:10:43.280
thought, and most of the people who made it their business to study something about the human mind
00:10:48.720
and human nature thought that all of this could be captured in terms of the outputs and inputs to
00:10:56.000
the system, and that the brain and mind in between could be treated like this black box that really
00:11:02.180
was doing nothing of interest. That was the view then. But, you know, on another floor in that
00:11:07.520
same building was a subversive guy, Jerome Bruner, who was starting to found what's now cognitive
00:11:13.420
science. And as cognitive science and then neuroscience developed better methodologies,
00:11:20.640
really they swept behaviorism aside. Behaviorism was only interested, as you point out, in what you
00:11:26.440
could observe. But cognitive science was a way of cleverly tracking what's going on within the mind.
00:11:34.280
And now, of course, cognitive science is quite ascendant. Behaviorism is pretty irrelevant.
00:11:40.320
I think there's another piece here, which is that introspection was always more or less stillborn
00:11:46.620
in the Western tradition. Briefly in your book, you talk about the Western precursors to meditation.
00:11:53.780
You point out that the Greeks had a piece of this. Aristotle had a concept of human flourishing or
00:12:01.280
eudaimonia, which many Greek philosophers thought about. And presumably there was some methodology there
00:12:08.660
among the Stoics and the skeptics that was analogous to what we're calling meditation. But it really died
00:12:17.360
out in Western philosophy, this idea that you could train the mind to be different than it is,
00:12:23.400
and that the point of philosophy would be a life well-lived or a way of maximizing human well-being.
00:12:31.440
And even then in psychology, you had people like William James try their hand at introspection,
00:12:37.720
but it did peter out into some kind of cul-de-sac by virtue of just a lack of depth of experience
00:12:50.180
No, I was going to say, I think to some extent it's still that way today, largely because there
00:12:56.500
is still the presumption that the instrument of our mind that we use to interrogate the nature of our
00:13:06.840
mind is relatively constant across people. And the notion that we can train our mind to,
00:13:15.160
in some sense, polish the lens and have a more accurate observing apparatus is still something
00:13:24.040
quite foreign to most people in the academy. And so, you know, it's always been interesting to
00:13:32.960
reflect on the project of looking at correlations between what's going on in the brain and what
00:13:43.060
people report in their experience. And those correlations historically, while when you arrange
00:13:53.240
the experimental situation in the right way, you can find positive correlations,
00:13:58.820
they've never been particularly strong or overwhelming. And there's never really been
00:14:05.480
the questioning of the veridicality of the reports themselves and asking whether an individual who
00:14:14.620
has trained his or her mind to clean lens, so to speak, might actually have better introspective
00:14:22.960
access, more accurate introspective access, and therefore the correlation between the reports
00:14:28.780
of experience and what's going on in the brain potentially might be higher. And of course,
00:14:32.960
this is the project of neurophenomenology that Francisco Varela, the biologist who co-founded
00:14:39.560
the Mind and Life Institute, was really pushing. But in his life, which ended prematurely because he died
00:14:47.780
of liver cancer, he really never saw the fruition of that dream. And we still haven't. But I think that
00:14:56.740
the framework is now in place to actually do this in a systematic way.
00:15:03.520
I'm glad you mentioned Francisco. I want to just come back and speak about him a little bit more
00:15:08.440
here. But just to not give people the wrong picture here, this notion of mental training
00:15:13.660
is actually esoteric even in the East, even among Buddhists. I mean, most Buddhists don't meditate,
00:15:21.240
and I've even met Buddhist monks who don't meditate. I've even met Western Buddhist monks,
00:15:27.260
Westerners who have gone to Thailand and ordained and become monks who themselves didn't meditate. So
00:15:33.920
meditation is esoteric as a practice even among Buddhists. And that's just something that is
00:15:40.920
especially strange in that context to me. But it's not like everyone east of the Bosporus is spending
00:15:48.240
half their day in meditation. Well, Sam, if I could say, I think every major spiritual tradition,
00:15:53.620
certainly in Eurasia, has had an esoteric center, which is training the mind. Now, in modern day,
00:16:00.700
we talk about neuroplasticity. But, you know, in the second century, there were Christian monks
00:16:06.280
in the desert of Egypt who were meditating, essentially. And they're doing the same thing a yogi
00:16:11.960
in India might be doing. And I think you're right that, you know, being a full-time meditator,
00:16:18.020
as occurs in some Asian cultures, but means you have to be a monk or a nun or a yogi. And even among
00:16:24.620
monks and nuns, not everybody will do that. It takes a particular kind of dedication.
00:16:30.980
And it's a narrow slice. Those are the people who go the deepest. Then there are the meditative
00:16:36.260
traditions as they've been brought from Asia to the West. And a lot's been left behind,
00:16:42.340
but it's accessible to a larger swath of people. And then there's the remove beyond that, where
00:16:47.320
you've got, you know, McMindfulness. You have mindfulness of every kind in schools and businesses
00:16:53.020
and so on. And that's a pretty thin experience, but it goes to scale. So I think that generally,
00:16:59.500
there's a trade-off between doing a little bit and lots of people doing it, or doing it very
00:17:05.280
intensely and very deeply. And every, you know, Sufis do a kind of meditation. Certainly there are
00:17:11.220
Hindu meditations among yogis. There are, the Christian tradition of meditation, by the way,
00:17:17.900
was wiped out by the church as heresy. It's too bad because it ended that tradition in the West.
00:17:24.760
But I think that what we were able to capture in looking at the meditative traditions that have
00:17:32.900
had research done on them, it's interesting, it was mostly Buddhist. It's mindfulness, it's Zen and
00:17:39.240
Vipassana, which is another Buddhist method. And then Dzogchen or Mahamudra, which is done by Tibetan
00:17:46.500
yogis. And that's the bulk of the research so far. It's not an accident that you and Western science
00:17:53.800
in general has focused the collaboration between third-person scientific methods and first-person
00:18:01.280
contemplative methods along Buddhist lines, because there's so much in Buddhism that is just
00:18:07.900
perfectly designed for export into a secular context. It's not to say that Buddhism doesn't
00:18:13.520
have its literature on magic and iconography and rituals that seems as religious as anything else,
00:18:20.620
but there's a central strand there that is empirical in a way that doesn't presuppose
00:18:26.700
any religiosity or any doctrines that need to be accepted on faith. And it's much harder to say
00:18:33.500
that of these other contemplative traditions. And on your point about the stamping out Christian
00:18:40.380
esotericism as a heresy, the problem has always been that the moment Christians become too
00:18:46.840
contemplative, people like Meister Eckhart, they begin to sound like Buddhists. It's not an accident that
00:18:52.660
the fires of the Inquisition had more or less reached Eckhart's door.
00:18:56.820
It's more sinister than that. They're saying that, hey, I can have an unmediated relationship
00:19:03.560
with something greater than myself. I don't need the church. And of course, the church didn't like
00:19:10.460
So one of you or both of you briefly describe the recent history, I guess going back to Francisco's
00:19:19.680
time, of collaboration between Western scientists and Buddhism.
00:19:26.100
Let me give some background, then Richie can fill in the answer to that. The background has to do
00:19:31.340
with the upsurge in meditation research itself. And I think a lot of that has to do with the efforts
00:19:38.480
of the Minded Life Institute. Richie and I are now stepping down as board members. It was originally
00:19:44.160
founded by the Dalai Lama Francisco Varela, the scientist and a businessman, Adam Engel.
00:19:49.920
And the idea was to create dialogues with the Dalai Lama about different sciences. And they're
00:19:55.140
quite in-depth, you know, and they cover the quantum physics and astrophysics, you know,
00:20:00.120
all kinds of things, including neuroscience. And that said, the institute also very early started
00:20:07.940
having summer research institutes. Richie actually was one of the most active people in founding
00:20:13.640
where graduate students and postdocs in cognitive and neuroscience came together who were interested
00:20:19.900
in meditation, but lonely in their own institutions. Nobody else cared. But here they found a network,
00:20:25.880
a supportive family, if you will, of fellow scientists. And that's encouraged a lot of the
00:20:31.360
research. Many of the studies that we cite in our book actually were done by graduates at institute.
00:20:37.060
And at the same time, in parallel, there was the impetus given by the Dalai Lama at a Minded Life
00:20:44.480
meeting where he turns to Richie and he says, this is around 2000, year 2000, our tradition has many
00:20:51.540
methods for managing disturbing, upsetting emotions. Take them out of the religious context,
00:20:57.580
study them rigorously in the lab, and if they're of benefit, spread them widely.
00:21:01.400
Now you're spreading them widely with this book, which we will get into in a minute. But I guess just to
00:21:07.060
describe my point of contact with the history you just sketched, I knew you already, Dan, but I met
00:21:13.700
up with you guys in Dharamsala for one of your Mind in Life meetings, and that's where I met Francisco
00:21:18.680
for the first time. And Francisco was the one who strongly recommended that I go to Nepal at that
00:21:25.220
point and study Dzogchen. I had had years as a Vipassana meditator, and I had studied with, you know,
00:21:30.800
various Advaita teachers in India, but I hadn't yet connected with a Dzogchen master, and so Francisco
00:21:37.540
recommended that I go to Nepal to study with Tukurgin, and he was instrumental in that happening.
00:21:43.440
And also he wrote me a letter of recommendation to graduate school for neuroscience, and so that was,
00:21:49.980
as you know, he's a neuroscientist, so he straddled both these worlds before I really knew these worlds
00:21:57.020
were being straddled by anyone. And then I think I went to your first summer research institute,
00:22:04.220
Richie, and also was, I at least collaborated with you in setting up that first Vipassana retreat at
00:22:10.460
IMS for scientists, where we put up a hundred scientists in silence around, I don't know, it's
00:22:15.780
like 2006 or somewhere around there. Let's get into the book, because this book is really the most
00:22:22.740
comprehensive and up-to-the-minute presentation of the scientific research on meditation in general,
00:22:32.120
and specifically mindfulness, which, as you just pointed out, Dan, is everywhere, and people are
00:22:38.180
making extravagant claims for its benefits, some of which are grounded in the science and some of which
00:22:44.500
aren't, or at least aren't yet. Richie, give us this basic distinction that you make early in the book,
00:22:50.180
which carries throughout it, between altered states and altered traits.
00:22:55.220
Well, altered states refer to the experiences that we have sitting on the cushion or sitting
00:23:01.700
on a chair when we're meditating. And the importance of meditation lies not really in the transitory
00:23:10.100
experiences that we have when we're meditating, but it is in the impact of these practices in every
00:23:16.160
nook and cranny of our everyday life. And this is what we refer to as altered traits. Altered traits
00:23:23.120
are enduring changes that are consequences of our practice that impact every aspect of our lives,
00:23:33.920
and can be discerned in specific kinds of measures that are taken when we are not explicitly meditating.
00:23:41.600
And so while much of the early work, including the early work from my own lab,
00:23:48.720
was focused on the changes during the meditation period itself, what really counts in terms of the
00:23:59.360
impact of these practices are the enduring changes. And so one of the central questions that we ask in the
00:24:07.200
book is how do the more fleeting experiences that we have when we're practicing ultimately become more
00:24:17.440
enduring changes that persist? And one of the key answers to that is practice. Practice really makes
00:24:25.120
a difference. And there is no substitute for practice. This is a question that we get so often,
00:24:32.400
particularly in America. How can we shorten the process? Are there strategies or technological aids
00:24:40.400
that we can use to shorten the time? But I don't think this is fundamentally different than learning
00:24:47.520
any other kind of skill. It takes time to become a chess master. It takes time to learn to play the
00:24:53.520
violin. It takes time to learn to be a collegiate athlete. In the same way, practice is important here.
00:25:03.360
You can sort of flip it and acknowledge that at every moment in your life, you are practicing
00:25:09.840
something. You're using your attention in a certain way. And for the most part, if you're like most people,
00:25:16.560
you're using it in ways that lead to predictable sorts of dissatisfaction. You're practicing
00:25:25.520
a kind of meditation on all the things you want, all the things that make you anxious,
00:25:31.120
and a kind of a perpetual distraction for which a method like mindfulness is put forward as an antidote.
00:25:38.880
But as your mind is, your life becomes. And so you're ingraining various tendencies and habits
00:25:46.560
and neurophysiological states, moment by moment, every moment of your life.
00:25:51.600
One of the things I frequently say is that neuroplasticity occurs winningly or unwittingly.
00:25:57.200
Most of the time, it's occurring unwittingly. Most of the time, we're being shaped by forces around
00:26:02.400
us, about which we have little insight and little control. And the invitation in this work is that
00:26:10.720
we can actually more intentionally take responsibility for our own minds and brains by cultivating healthier
00:26:18.160
habits of mind. Your brain is constantly changing in response to experience. Maybe if the three of us
00:26:26.160
us remember having had this conversation, that will be by virtue of having laid down a physical memory
00:26:33.120
trace in our brains. Genes get transcribed. Receptors get made. This is a change in the physical structure
00:26:41.040
of the brain to encode any memory. So neuroplasticity is just a background fact of our brains all the time.
00:26:50.000
And what's happening with meditation or any kind of practice of anything, you know,
00:26:54.560
learning to play golf, learning to play the piano, you are deciding to change your brain in a way that,
00:27:02.000
you know, in this case, takes attention and effort.
00:27:05.520
There's another point here, Sam, and I think it's the social context and technological context
00:27:11.680
in which this is now happening. Because we're living in an age that's never been more distracted and
00:27:18.640
never had more luscious, seductive distractions available day or night on our tech devices.
00:27:26.240
I just was witnessing or hearing one of the guys who was on the team that developed the iPod and the
00:27:33.840
iPhone at Apple, the very first one. He said, we're all, you know, single 20-somethings, we had no life,
00:27:39.360
and we tried to make it as seductive as we could. Now I'm a parent and I really regret that.
00:27:45.520
And I think any parent knows what he's talking about. You don't want your kids to spend all their
00:27:50.640
time pulled in to staring at a video screen for hours and hours. You want them to be,
00:27:57.360
you know, relating, looking around, experiencing the world. So things are changing in a direction I
00:28:04.080
think people may feel a little helpless about, but meditation or cultivating the ability to
00:28:10.640
concentrate and ignore distractions, I think, has a special cachet and virtue now that wasn't
00:28:17.440
true in the past, if only as an antidote to a social trend. There was a research at Harvard that,
00:28:23.200
you know, that famous paper in Science where they monitored how distracted people are during the day,
00:28:28.880
and the title was, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, because the more your mind wanders in
00:28:34.720
distraction, the more depressed you get. There really is a different conception of mental health
00:28:41.280
here that we are tacitly endorsing, because the assumption has been, for most people and certainly
00:28:47.440
for most of science, that certain default facts about our mind are normal and the idea of changing them
00:28:56.640
just simply wouldn't occur to a person. Most people don't even know that their minds are continuously
00:29:02.480
lost in thought, and it's not even considered, it really is just the white noise of our
00:29:10.000
worldview. And then when you enter a contemplative tradition, and in particular a discussion of
00:29:18.640
mental training in the Buddhist tradition, you see really as almost your first claim that this is
00:29:26.720
absolutely pathological, to have your attention continually buffeted by the winds of discursive
00:29:34.560
thought, and you're helplessly carried away by every single thought that enters consciousness, and not
00:29:40.640
only are you carried away by the emotions that it invokes, you know, desire and fear and boredom and all
00:29:47.600
the rest, you are identified with it such that it seems to be you. I mean, your sense of self is bound
00:29:55.360
up in the flow of thought in a way that most people have never, it's never occurred to them
00:30:00.480
to question, and there's very little in, has been, you know, heretofore, very little in Western science
00:30:07.520
that has inspired questioning it. And I want to talk about, you know, how you both view the self, but
00:30:15.440
do you want to say anything about what it means to have a healthy human mind in light of this meditation
00:30:22.400
There is a growing body of scientific research which is suggesting that
00:30:28.560
attentional distraction, mind-wandering, as well as reification of the self.
00:30:37.040
Rishi, what do you, what do you mean reification of self? Can you translate that?
00:30:41.200
Yeah. Believing the thoughts that we have about ourselves as a true depiction of reality,
00:30:48.240
considering them to be veridical. That you see in depressed people, for example. One of the
00:30:55.200
characteristics of depression is that negative self-thoughts are actually taken to be a veridical
00:31:08.240
Well, for a positive thought, I think that there's less of an obvious deleterious consequence,
00:31:15.520
but I think there's another more subtle kind of suffering that may be associated with that as
00:31:21.120
well, which certainly the Buddhist tradition speaks to. And this whole idea we call experiential
00:31:29.840
fusion, where you have the experience of being completely fused with the thought rather than
00:31:39.360
having a quality of meta-awareness, which is knowing that there is actually a thought occurring and
00:31:46.240
being able to see it as a thought. And that's something that, of course, we know can be taught through
00:31:54.000
the kinds of contemplative practices that we're considering. And one of the most important findings,
00:31:59.760
really, is the finding that meta-awareness can be strengthened. And meta-awareness is simply
00:32:05.760
knowing that you're knowing, recognizing that a thought is a thought rather than being swept up
00:32:13.040
One of the main principles of cognitive therapy is that you don't have to believe your thoughts.
00:32:18.000
That's a very revolutionary idea for most of us.
00:32:20.400
Well, we should probably define mindfulness at this point. You know,
00:32:24.560
most of the listeners to this podcast will be familiar with this concept because I've spoken
00:32:29.040
about it before and I've had our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein on twice. And so this is
00:32:33.440
not the first time I've hit this, but for those who are new to the topic, and this really is the
00:32:39.920
center of the bullseye as far as the meditation instruction that has been mostly studied by
00:32:45.840
Ritchie and others at this point, how would you define mindfulness?
00:32:51.360
I'll take a crack. I think mindfulness, as it's taught in the classic traditions, encourages us to take
00:32:59.760
a equanimous position amidst the coming and going of our own feelings and thoughts and to see them as
00:33:07.520
feelings and thoughts rather than that's me and to just note them without judgment or without
00:33:14.560
reactivity and let them come and let them go. That's a very radical stance internally.
00:33:20.400
And so is there any distinction between what you're calling meta-awareness, Ritchie, and
00:33:26.240
mindfulness as you just used it? Well, I think that, you know, in the classical traditions,
00:33:32.240
mindfulness often has a more, has some additional components in addition to the ones Dan described.
00:33:40.320
It includes remembering to bring a certain view to each and every encounter. And what is it that we
00:33:48.880
mean by a view? Well, in part, it means recognizing that every human being shares the same wish to be
00:33:56.240
happy and to be free of suffering, and also a view that has an altruistic intent, the disposition to
00:34:03.600
help relieve the suffering of others whenever it's encountered. And remembering to bring that conviction,
00:34:10.560
if you will, that stance to every encounter is also part of mindfulness. Now, it's not typically how it's defined
00:34:20.000
by psychologists or neuroscientists, but in the contemplative traditions, it certainly, in part, has that
00:34:27.360
flavor. When we talk about meta-awareness, I think meta-awareness is a psychological feature that is strengthened by
00:34:36.480
mindfulness training. There are very specific ways that psychologists have devised to measure
00:34:43.920
meta-awareness objectively. And all of them, in one way or another, have to do with recognizing the nature of
00:34:55.760
what is occurring in our mind, recognizing that we are knowing, recognizing that we are engaged in
00:35:05.360
certain kinds of behavior. We often experience things and actually behave and not have that sense of
00:35:14.560
recognition. We do it in the absence of meta-awareness. And one metaphor which might be helpful for listeners to
00:35:22.240
better appreciate this is one that we sometimes use. Most people have had this experience of being in a movie
00:35:30.320
theater, watching a very engrossing movie, and completely losing awareness that you're in the
00:35:37.600
theater, that you're sitting in a chair, you're just so wrapped up in the plot. That is what we would call
00:35:43.040
experiential fusion, where there's no meta-awareness. But we can be equally attentive to the movie and
00:35:49.760
sitting in the theater and in the background recognize that we're sitting in a theater. And that would be
00:35:55.120
akin to having meta-awareness, which is that background recognition. And in the case of thoughts,
00:36:01.360
it's recognizing that these are thoughts. This is not who we are, but rather these are thoughts.
00:36:08.320
I like that analogy for many reasons, although it's potentially misleading for some people because
00:36:14.720
what you just described about movie watching, this experiential fusion, is what is so good about
00:36:21.280
movies. We want to disappear into the movie because it's much less fun to be constantly reminded that
00:36:27.600
you're sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and you're looking at light on a wall. But what we
00:36:33.200
should remember is that the movie of our lives, with which we are fused in every moment that we're not
00:36:39.920
aware of being lost in thought, is very often a bad movie. It's a depressing movie. It's a scary movie.
00:36:47.680
It's a movie that's filled with feelings of sadness or at least dissatisfaction much of the time. And what
00:36:56.000
you're describing is the ability to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as transitory
00:37:04.240
appearances in the flow of consciousness. And those moments of recognition provide real relief from the
00:37:12.320
dissatisfaction and mediocrity and even extreme physical pain that may be arising in consciousness
00:37:20.800
Right. But to go back to a point that Dan made, even if the movie was a good movie, so to speak,
00:37:27.760
even if they're positive thoughts, the same would be true. And so I often get the question
00:37:36.720
whether meditation is like flow. And, you know, Chiksa Mahai, the psychologist who studied flow,
00:37:42.560
studied rock climbers, for example, who have this extremely ecstatic state when they're rock climbing
00:37:51.120
and are totally engrossed in what they're doing. But that is a case, again, of experiential fusion.
00:37:57.840
There is no meta-awareness. Rock climbers, you know, or else all rock climbers would be enlightened
00:38:05.920
Yeah. Well, that's an important distinction because this connection with flow is often made
00:38:13.440
and it's often meditation as an idea is often sold by kind of advertising this possible connection.
00:38:22.960
And I've done it myself in emphasizing that the moments in life that we all love are the moments
00:38:30.320
in life where attention is fully captured by the present moment, where we're lost in our work
00:38:37.280
or we're lost in the pleasure of some athletic experience. People very frequently reference things
00:38:43.440
like athletics and sex and peak experiences as moments where there's no distance between attention
00:38:50.800
and its object. You're not wondering what you're going to have for lunch because you're fully
00:38:56.160
engrossed in what you're doing. I mean, it really is the concentration component of meditation that is
00:39:02.400
And some meditation types, TM, a mantra, what's called the jhana practices in Vipassana or insight
00:39:11.600
meditation, are concentrative methods that get you into a blissful state in much the same way,
00:39:18.240
because it's using your attention fully, concentrating a hundred percent. And then you feel wonderful
00:39:26.880
when you do it. But there's a different path, which has to do with pulling back into meta awareness.
00:39:34.560
And I think that shifts from joy, bliss to equanimity, which is a different kind of contentment.
00:39:45.120
Well, one other consideration here is that when you are no longer in that concentrated state,
00:39:53.440
the monkey mind rears its ugly head again. It's back to where it was. It is an altered state and not
00:40:03.680
Well, this is true. And in our original formulation, way back when we were at Harvard together,
00:40:09.440
Richie, remember we said, the problem with altered states is that after you come down,
00:40:14.560
you're the same schmuck you were before you went up. And that got us to think about altered traits.
00:40:20.400
What's really lasting? What are the real benefits?
00:40:22.640
Yeah, actually, there's a very poignant story about that from Richie's first time sitting with
00:40:29.760
Goenka in India that you tell in the book, where he had this peak experience of having quite a
00:40:36.240
wonderful alteration in his state. And then, well, Richie, you can tell that you can tell the story
00:40:41.520
you had. This is your, I believe, your first 10 day retreat with Goenka that that got you something
00:40:51.040
If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
00:40:55.840
You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber
00:41:00.560
only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the
00:41:05.840
Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support.