Transcript

To 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 Best Selling Author, Steven 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 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 times 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 and 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 and Life Institute, I remember way back in high school reading a big book called Zen in the brain by James Austin and 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 and with Dr Davidson, yeah, so it's so great to connect with you. Dr Davidson, I Mine's actually personal. 

My mom was like a die hard fan of yours back in the like I was in high school when she was talking about you and Jon Kabat Zinn and the Dalai Lama and and she just thought you were a pioneer, and really, like your your work on emotion and meditation, like really shaped how she parented. So this is super fun for me. She 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 I really had a very early conviction that the mind was really key to everything important in life, and I had that conviction in high school 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 and I in graduate school, I became really quite excited about the possibilities of meditation, 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 three 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're 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 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. And Stephen, I know that you. Yeah, I have a follow up, because I sort of come into this world, right? Like I'm in mad. I went to 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, I studied writing in English predominantly, but I was already interested in neuroscience and consciousness. And, you know, my first mentor was, was Dr Andrew Newberg, who did some of the first imaging work on Tibetan Buddhists, and gave us a look at like. Why? Why we feel one with everything. Which sorted to me is like the parallel work to what you were doing everybody else who waded into this. It was. Minefield. You couldn't talk about emotions. You couldn't talk about consciousness. I don't like the first time I heard scientists actually take emotions seriously was when Jansa published Affective Neuroscience, which I think was 9293 like 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, you know, consciousness studies and, you know, healing the mind body problem and all these, like, massive controversies. And you did it very cleanly. Like, I just want to know what your secret was like, What did you like? Your kung fu is really good, man. Andy Newberg got drummed out at the University of Pennsylvania. A lot of other people got, like, derailed by this work, and you really sort of held it and did it very cleanly. And, like, I just literally want to know how you did it, because I was, you know, on the sidelines watching all these steps going. This is so fucking impossible to get people to take these topics seriously, to, you know, trying to put flow science on a hard like, on a neurobiological footing, which has sort of been with my mission for 30 years. You know, it took me the first 15 years just to convince scientists that flow was real, that chick sent me a high. Wasn't just making it up. And, you know, before we can even start talking about, what is it? Yeah, that's great. 

Thank you for that wonderful Prelude. You know, I think, honestly, the secret sauce is, really, 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, eight or nine papers that either were major failures to replicate or were hypothesized benefits that we we proposed from meditation that ended up not working out, and we published it anyway. 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, what we call failures, known. 

So I love that like I cannot. We can't emphasize enough how much I think that is an under utilized underutilized superpower right now. So let me ask a quick sort of follow up, which is, you stayed very much and you're laying on meditation. As far as I could tell, my emotions, meditation, um, there's all the other altered states that it is 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 my question is really this, out of all this stuff that shows up in the contemplative traditions, the wisdom traditions, what is the 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. I'll give you like one example that I always think of, if you remove, if you if you don't talk about psychedelics, there's absolutely no way I can explain the Tibetan Bardo like 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 is just continue 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 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 and I do, I think that's such a great point to emphasize that. 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 tuktam. And tuktam 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 sprained death so we could harvest organs for from home patients, right? It was, was why it happened back in the 60s, but it, 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, you know, almost dead from, you know, from corpses, essentially, before there's brain death, after there's heart death, right? Like, so we change it for weird reasons. So like saying that, like, 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 in the next moment, all of us are dead, makes no sense biologically, even if you're a strict materialist. so there's a huge amount that is 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, and I mean, if you ask me what my explanation is. I, you know, I have absolutely no idea what you where'd you get with your research and detect up? 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 tuk tum practitioners in the south of India, in a tropical climate with no air conditioning, where we've seen bodies more than two 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 took down 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, you know, we we don't know who's going to go into tuk DOM, and that makes it really complicated. And you know, even the Dalai Lama. I've asked the Dalai Lama myself, you know, I asked whether he can predict who's going to go into took DOM, 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 took down personally, and that was a very deeply moving experience, I must say. And you know, I this was a very eminent Tibetan Buddhist Lama, who was in, took down for eight days, and he died sitting in an upright posture. And he stayed in, took them upright so, and I was right next to him. If I you know, if I didn't know he was dead, I would. I thought he was just meditating. I um.

Yeah, amazing, Richie, I want to not push back, 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 occur, 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, like it's well known, the more flow we have in our lives, it increases well being, right? It increase. 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, 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 undergrad.

Budget, 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 open that conversation, you quote William James, and it's the first half of that quote, and where, which is what led you to look at meditation as a way to control attention, as you know, as a lever here. So I think we've both ended up as, you know, ways to alter consciousness, to improve performance, or, you know, be whatever, well being, um. And so my question is, is that, do you think of, do you think of flow and meditation like is, are there other states that work training this way? Um, what's the overlap? I know, and this is where we start our conversation, right before you hopped on Michael Posner that sort of The Godfather potential 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 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 and but he's also a performance artist. And you know, when these guys are playing, they always talk about, you know, 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 you know, 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 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 are 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 net 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 imagine this is at the point of meditation. I mean, you're going to say that there's meta awareness of meditation, but you want to be completely absorbed in the moment. I want to stare at that cattle plane and that kind of flame is my reality, action awareness have merged. That's my meditative experience, not not at the same thing I'm getting from a movie a misconstrual of meditation, to be honest. So let me just finish this. So the the other possibility in going to the movie theaters, 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, 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 what 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 in to 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 that flow in and of itself. It's not prescriptive to happiness. I had a question that I wanted to drive down into that 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. I mean, there are findings that show that our brains can change pretty quickly, even aspects of the 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 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 compliment to that is that there are certain changes that have been hyped in the media that may be produced by meditation that I you know, we and others have shown are probably not real. And one of them is to, for example, increase the the size of your prefrontal cortex, increase the gray matter in your prefrontal cortex.

You know, the 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 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, you know, a deeper understanding of how these kinds of practices affect the, 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, though, 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. But I think was back in 2014 or 15, you published a paper where you looked at epigenetic impacts of meditation, short term meditation, I think, was eight hours of meditation, and you found decreases in most inflammatory markers in the brain. My when I one of the things that I've been wondering since we found decreases in most inflammatory markers in the blood, not in blood, excuse me, not in the brain, in the blood, excuse me. Revolutionary method, if we actually found it in the brain. You're right. That would be cool, though. I so here's my question. Well, you know, in when you look at some of the new research around peak performance aging, that all the major causes of aging are now are linked to inflammation and stress. So my question is, have we done the inverse, if we looked at long term longevity, impact of of meditation, etc, etc, has that? 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 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 neuro inflammation 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 micro glial 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, not completely non invasively 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 neuro inflammation.

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 MR. A structural MRI scan. And if you look at like 1000 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 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 minger 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 1000 people, and he was the most extreme data point. His brain was aging more slowly compared to all 1000 normative people in the same age range. He went on a walk about right. He left his monastery and spent a couple years in India having like, very like, near death experiences, etc, etc. Are your images of his brain and that transformation before after he left his monastery, just out of curiosity? Yeah, good question. One of the last data point we have is after that retreat, is that was there a big difference? There was a fairly substantial difference? Yes, that's interesting. Okay, that's cool. Me, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was. He was away for four and a half years.

doing a wandering retreat. Yeah, he's pretty I love, I love that book, the book he wrote about that experience, 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, yeah, it's a gorgeous film. It's called wandering, but not lost.

You know, he's the only Tibetan Budd have ever he is in one of his talks. He actually uses a term for flow, which I like, I've been looking for that term for 30 years. Like, what is the you know, all what? 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, um, he finally used the term. And I was like, it is a different thing. It's not the same thing, you know, it's a distinct state, you know, in the these other experiences,

do you remember what the name was? I knew that was going to be the next question. And no, it's, I got it. I did. I have my notes. I'll get it to Lady today perfectly. We'll put it in the show notes. I have a, like, a sort of a practical question. 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 one minute a day, that's perfectly fine if you're able to do it every day.

So you know what 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 the recommended is 45 minutes a day. It's, it's biggest impediment inside my like my clinical practice, when I would suggest it is that the length of time, which one maybe cut down. But nobody does that.

Yeah, nobody does it. No one does it. But that's the, that's the the expert. Where did John cavid come up with that number? Though, right? It came out of it came out of research, or just John. I mean, John's a very close friend of mine. I love John. He's a, an amazing person. It comes out of his experience, you know. 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 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? Like, I can do three 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 five minutes a day for 30 days, you will see dramatic changes in their behavior. We've published randomized control trials. We have an app that we've released called the Healthy Minds program, which is a it's totally free. There's no pay wall, and the New York Times wire cutter has named it as one of the three best meditation apps for three years in a row. 

And we and it's the only app out there that's actually evidence based. We have two published randomized control trials and two more that are coming out soon, and we show that five minutes a day leads to a 20% reduction on standardized measures of anxiety and depression and improvements in well being five minutes a day. And the the analogy that I use is what you know, when human beings first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth, and somehow we've all learned to spend

five 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 of 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's it just 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 base meditation, etc, etc, what?

 So how clinical are we getting in our use of style of meditation, time of meditation, day. So daily, five minutes a day, 30 days, you're going to get change what style and 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 four 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 out, we have a 30 day training program where people learn practices to cultivate each one of those four key pillars, they spend one week on each. And the meditations are variety of different meditations, their mindfulness, their compassion meditation, their 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, the one of the buzz words 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 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 them, 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 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, 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 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 just so flow better access as well being Richie, I wanted to ask you one quick question, maybe before we end, maybe this is a pen umbrella question on the relationship between empathy and meditation. And, you know, I know Dr Sarkis and Steven, I know you had a podcast while back on empathy, but it's 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 that meditation can dampen down and correct me if I'm wrong. Parts of the 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 the 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 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 nonpathy, a bottom up, mirror neuron driven process, and your passion, 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 that are bottom up as you put it, and may be driven by mirror neurons, although, you know, the mirror neurons 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 of neurons. At most. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. That's cool. I did not know that. Then they're only found in a few 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 mindfulness and meditation can 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 affected 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 the 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, Min yar Rinpoche books on meditation, is 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 is, I mean, like, there's gotta be 1000 practices that I'm exaggerating, 100 practices that I 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 sort of a question about compassion and disassociation. And I should the reason that, guys, I'm just mindful of time I'm going to 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, 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 two and a part three. 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 try Healthy minds.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. Very 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. Bye.