Dr. Richard Davidson

Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

loyal listeners slash viewers will remember uh... my guest uh... this time because he was actually on the first ten percent happier podcast ever uh... that was uh... he was sitting uh... beside a guy you may have heard of uh... goes by the name of his holiness the dollar lama uh... and his name is richard davidson professor richard davidson everybody calls him richie

And he is, the guy who's really been at the tip of the spear in terms of using neuroscience to look at what contemplative practices like meditation do to your brain. And I think it's safe to say that if Richie hadn't done his work, I would never have started meditating because for skeptics, it's the science that gets you over the hump and gets you to start meditating, at least for me.

Although, interestingly, and he and I will talk about this, I actually think, I like to say this, you might start to meditate because you think you're, you know, because you see the science is intriguing that I think you can change your brain through meditation. But I don't think you keep meditating because you think your prefrontal cortex may be changing. I think you keep meditating because you're less of

Well, usually I use the word that begins with A here, but you're less of a jerk to yourself and others. So anyway, forgive my slight digression there, but Richie's a friend. He's a really, really interesting guy, not only in terms of the work that he's done that has been truly pioneering. By the way, just to give props to his colleagues, he runs a center called the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, where they do a lot of amazing work.

So you'll hear about his work, but also he's a longtime meditator and he's taken some seriously interesting paths within the meditation world. So we're going to talk about all that. But first, Richie, thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Oh, it's a delight to be here, Dan. Thank you. Congratulations. You're a new grandpa. I am really exciting phase of my life.

you don't look, you don't look like a grandpa just for the record. This is a really interesting thing about you and this whole group that is sometimes referred to as the Jubus, you know, these North of, let's say North of 55 ARP range Jewish kids, mostly from New York to our old, who all got interested in Buddhism is do you all look

10 to 15 years younger than you actually are. And so we'll talk a little bit about whether there's any biological basis for that, given your contemplative practice that spans many, many decades. But first, before we do all that, how did you start meditating when, where, why?

I started really in graduate school. I was at Harvard. In the early 70s, late 60s? In the early 70s. And I had the great fortune of being around some people who just seemed like they were nice people. They were people I wanted to be around. There was something about them that attracted me. They had a kind of magic sauce that I wanted some of myself.

And I learned that these were all people who were very involved with meditation. One of those people went on to be, and actually was at that time, becoming a famous spiritual teacher, Ramdas, who of course used to be Richard Alpert, someone who was on the faculty at Harvard and then summarily fired for his psychedelic research.

And so I met him and a number of other people and they were all meditating. And I thought that this was something that seemed extremely interesting and potentially really important and attractive.

And I was sufficiently interested to go off after my second year of graduate school to India for the first time to explore and to find some meditation teachers that I can actually study with. The faculty at Harvard, this is in the Harvard Psychology department, most of them thought I was going off the deep end. And I think two thirds of them were convinced I would never come back.

I was pretty sure I would come back because I really never swerved in my commitment to science, but I did go off for three months and I went on my first serious meditation retreat during that period of time.

And that was what started it for me. And I came back with a fervent aspiration to pursue research on meditation. I thought that this was something incredibly important for Western psychology and Western science. And that's when it all began. So it's an interesting thing to happen when you came back, which I want to talk about. But just so I know, where did you go for those three months? Where did you go? Who did you study with in India?

I was mostly, I spent part of the time in Sri Lanka and with some forest monks. I was actually with Dan Goldman at that time. Daniel Goldman is the author of a book called Emotional Intelligence, also part of this cabal. I don't think you guys like the term, but I'm going to use it in any way of the Jubus and you and Danny remain very close to this day.

Yes, we do. And so we actually were living together in Candi Sri Lanka and going off and meeting with forest monks in the Teravadan tradition in Sri Lanka. And then I went to India and studied with Goenka. Goenka is a, or was, he died very recently, a Buddhist meditation teacher in the Teravadan tradition.

And I did my first serious meditation retreat with him at a small hill station in the Himalayas, not far from Dharmsala. Home of the Dalai Lama. So you got home and you started discussing with your mentors at Harvard your desire to study the impact of meditation on the brain and the psyche.

Yeah, and I was just so incredibly naive. I'm one of my professors with someone who studies psychopathology, mental disorders, and basically looked at me and said, do you know that one's dress is really often an indicator of their psychiatric illness? And of course, I was dressed in these crazy clothes that we all got in India. And it was like, what kind of clothes are we talking about here?

You know, the baggy pants and flowy shirts and he was just, and I had long hair in those days. And so he was basically looking at me and clearly saying that I'm nuts and that this was not a particularly appropriate way for me to behave or for me to pursue serious scientific research.

So it's interesting you said he was an expert in psychopathology. Am I wrong in my assumption that actually most of the study of psychology and or neuroscience during its history has been around problems, disorders, as opposed to healthy mind states?

And that's true. And I would say that that's broadly true. We have an entity in Washington and Maryland called the National Institutes of Health, but really it should be labeled the National Institutes of Disease. It's mostly focused on illness.

not really on health, despite the fact that the World Health Organization's definition of health includes well-being and emotional and spiritual qualities. That is part of the WHO definition of health, and they clearly distinguish between the absence of illness and the presence of health.

And so much of psychology has been focused up until I think quite recently on the negative side of things and on psychopathology. So you had these conversations, deeply unsuccessful conversations with your mentors at Harvard, and you actually, you kind of allowed them to deter you for a bit, didn't you? Not from the meditation, but from the study of the meditation.

I did. So we actually, I published a few papers which are never cited anymore that were published in the late 1970s and early 1980s on meditation and that was it. And then they basically shut it down. I was a dutiful student and I did, I really did want, and I still am unswervingly committed to a scientific career. And so I wanted to do what I needed to do to become

a serious scientist and so I as I often say became very much a closet meditator and didn't talk to any of my colleagues about my interest in meditation after this very early period when I tried to pursue it but I ran into one obstacle after another in a very formidable way and it was clear to me that this was not going to go anywhere.

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I was just thinking, as you were talking about your story, there's so many similarities. You know, Mark Epstein has been a previous guest, and it's a close friend of mine, has a similar story about being a closet meditator. So many of the people of your generation have this story. And you get the fact that you, first of all, I was like, Mark and I were friends at Harvard back in the day. He's part of this aforementioned cabal.

Uh, you, you, A, you kept meditating and B, you ultimately came out of the closet and actually, you know, are the, collectively the cynic one nonfer for what is now a really phenomenal, but not uncomplicated boom in meditation and mindfulness in the culture. And, uh, so I salute you for that, uh, because had you not done that, wound would be sitting here talking.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I attribute a lot of it to the Dalai Lama, who played a major role in me coming out of the closet and encouraging serious scientific research in this area. And that was pivotal in sort of the shift, which occurred in the mid 1990s. How did that happen? Where were you and how did you come in contact with the Dalai Lama?

Well, I first met him in Darmzal, India, where he lives, and he invited me to come meet with him. He had heard about me through some colleagues at Mind and Life. Mind and Life is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1987.

by the Dalai Lama and Francisco Varella. Francisco was a very well-known neuroscientist who imagined doing this kind of work, but never actually got to do it. He died prematurely of liver cancer in 2001. But Francisco and the Dalai Lama founded this organization in 1987.

And after a few years, the Dalai Lama learned enough about modern neuroscience to understand the potential of neuroscience contributing to furthering the interest in these areas. And so he invited me to meet with him, at his residence in India, to talk about the possibility of doing serious neuroscientific research

on Tibetan practitioners who spent years training their mind. And at that meeting, he challenged me and he said, you've been using the tools of modern neuroscience to mostly study anxiety and depression and fear, all these negative qualities. Why can't you use those same tools to study qualities like kindness and compassion and equanimity? And I didn't have a very good answer for him and it was a total wake-up call for me.

and really was a pivotal catalyst. And as my dear friend John Cabuzzin, another member of this cabal, said to me, he said, my life at that moment went through what he called an orthogonal rotation. Your life. My life. Yeah.

and it really just completely reoriented my career and really since that time I have been dedicating my life to this work and this I really feel is why I'm here on the planet. So what did you do first? What were the first studies you conducted?

Well, we did the very first study that we conducted was actually something in collaboration with John Kabat-Zinn, where we did the first randomized control trial.

I'm just going to jump in for a second. Just for people who don't know John Cabbid's in, I remembered late to do this, so I apologize to everybody. John Cabbid's in is one of the most famous meditation teachers and proponents on Earth. He's written a number of amazing books, as has Richie and I'll list some of Richie's books toward the end of the podcast. John was on 60 Minutes recently, and he basically invented something called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is derived from Buddhism but really strips away the metaphysical claims and the religious lingo.

and can be taught in an entirely secular context. And that form, that has been another huge contributing factor to the blossoming of scientific research around meditation because it provided a protocol, an eight-week protocol, where people take this class, and that can then be studied.

Yes, and mindfulness-based stress reduction is probably the most commonly taught form of mindfulness meditation at academic medical centers worldwide. And so it has really penetrated, particularly the medical establishment.

And because of that, it's had an enormous impact. But it turned out that when John and I were talking in the late 1990s, at that point, there hadn't been a single randomized controlled trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction.

There had been some scientific studies, but they all suffered from many serious methodological limitations. And so we decided to do the very first randomized control trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction that had ever been done. And we did it with employees at a high-tech corporation in Madison, Wisconsin.

John Kabat-Zinn felt sufficiently strongly about the importance of this study that he actually flew out weekly to Madison for ten consecutive weeks, and he himself was the instructor of this course because he wanted to ensure that it was taught at the highest standards. It could be worse, Madison is a pretty cool place.

Yes, so it was wonderful having him out for 10 consecutive weeks like that. And the paper based on that study was published in 2003. And here's a confession. First of all, the fact it is my most widely cited scientific paper that I've ever published.

And so if you look at Google Analytics at the citation counts, it has more citations in the scientific literature than any of my other scientific papers. The confession is that it was a, I think, a really important study because there hadn't been a randomized controlled trial prior to that, but it itself has many limitations.

And so while it's my most widely cited paper, I certainly wouldn't consider it my best.

It showed that eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction produces a systematic change in certain aspects of brain function that is associated with better emotion regulation. And it also showed that after eight weeks of meditation, what we did is we gave people in the meditation group, and we had a group of people who were in a control group.

And this was a group of people that wanted to receive MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, but they were told that they couldn't accommodate the full group in the initial training and that they would be trained at a later point in time, but they were asked to go through the assessments at the same time that the group that was given the mindfulness meditation was given the assessments.

So we call that a weightless control group. They were waiting to get their intervention till a later point in time. So we gave all of them at the end of this eight-week period a flu shot. And an ordinary flu shot, the only difference was that from the way you get it typically is we took blood samples before and after the flu shot was given at specific intervals,

to quantify the antibody titers mounted in response to the vaccine. This gives us a quantitative index of how effective the vaccine is working. Turns out that when you receive a vaccine, there's a lot of variability among people in how effective it is.

And if you're exposed to the same level of flu virus, some people have a lot of immunity conferred by the flu shot, and other people have much less. And so we wanted to determine if the eight weeks of meditation influenced the response to the vaccine. And amazingly, it did. The meditators actually showed a boost in their antibody titers, which was the first time anyone had ever shown this.

And so that was an important finding because it suggested that the changes go beyond simply reports of greater calmness or less anxiety, but they also extend into important biological functions that may play an important role in air mental and physical health. So I still get sick. Does that mean I'm a terrible meditator or is that because I live with the EF5 tornado 18 month old vector for disease?

I suspect it's the latter. When my kids were young, my rate of illness was far more frequent than it is now, and I attribute it primarily to the difference in who I'm living with.

Yeah, and I think it's important for listeners to understand that this is not something that's going to cure illnesses. Meditation was not originally designed to cure illnesses, and so the extent to which it impacts these kinds of biological processes I think is interesting and important, but certainly our view of this is that it can modulate a person's

symptoms, it can modulate their receptivity to certain illnesses, but this is not going to be a cure-all for everything. And I think it's really important to appreciate that. That's why we call this thing 10% happier. No over-promising is what I like about the meditation world when it behaves properly. There's not a lot of over-promising. Just so everybody gets a sense of the breadth of your research. Where did you go next after this first paper that you say is flawed but was unquestionably very successful?

Well, the next thing that we did, so that paper came out in 2003. At the same time, we began a very, very unusual experiment. We began that experiment roughly in 1999, a few years after my first meeting with the Dalai Lama. It took us a while to sort of get to this stage. But we began a very unusual study that involved bringing extremely long-term meditators, kind of the Olympic athletes of meditation.

people who've practiced a ridiculous amount. The average number of hours of lifetime practice is 34,000 hours among this group. They're professional meditators, if you will. They don't have a day job.

And most of them live in Asia. We flew them from India and Nepal, where most of them lived. And we flew them to Madison, Wisconsin, where they spent roughly a week in residence. And we probed and tested them in all kinds of different ways during their time with us.

And the very first paper we published from that group of practitioners was published in 2004. And it came out in a journal called the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that's a very prestigious journal. And the journal has been around more than 100 years. And this was the very first time in the August history of this journal that a paper on meditation had ever appeared. And that got an enormous amount of attention.

And that kind of cracked open the area, I think, because it showed that there were systematic differences in the brain of these individuals that were really unusual. So what we did in this study was really simple study. We simply asked these people to meditate, and then we asked them for certain periods of time not to meditate, and we were looking at the difference in their brain when they're meditating and when they're not meditating.

How MRI, FMRI, what we're using. So we use both EEG and MRI, FMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. The first paper that came out was based on the EEG findings. That's just electrodes on the head. Electrodes on the head. And so we had a whole glom of electrodes. We have 256 electrodes on the head.

And what we saw was the presence of gamma oscillations. These are very fast frequency oscillations that are about 40 cycles per second. And we saw them at very high amplitude, and we saw them for very long periods of time.

These gamma oscillations are very well studied in modern neuroscience. We know a lot about the underlying neural basis of these gamma oscillations, mostly from sort of very hard-nosed molecular animal research.

In humans, the presence of these gamma oscillations has been observed many times before, but typically when they're seen, they're typically seen for less than one second. They're very, very short, very brief bursts. And they're typically seen when different elements of a percept get bound together. So for example, if I ask you to imagine biting into a juicy apple, just imagine that.

You have the visual image. You have the sort of tactile feel of what it is to bite. You have the gustatories, taste sensations. You have the smell. You have the sound of the crunching. There's a lot of different

sensory elements that together form this interesting percept or image and at the moment they sort of all come together in a typical person you see a burst of gamma and it typically lasts for under one second. So is gamma then associated with kind of positive

Not necessarily positive, but it's associated with lots of different things coming together, like an insight. I see. And it's typically in an untrained mind, it's typically very, very short.

The other the other context where you see gamma is if you're problem-solving Some difficult problem and all of a sudden the answer just occurs to you you just comes into your mind They read you know, it's right that moment which we've all had there unfortunately quite rare But that moment and you can you can create this experimentally in the lab with certain kinds of

tasks where you can increase the likelihood of those moments. But at that moment, you see a burst of gamma. And what we saw in these individuals is not a burst of gamma, but long durations for minutes while they're meditating, which was crazy because we thought that actually we thought that there was a problem in our recording equipment because this had never been seen in a human brain before.

What do you think is going on experientially when they're having these gamma bursts? I guess they're not even burst. They're gamma runs. I think what they're doing, a kind of meditation that involves what we call open awareness, where they are not focused on a single object, but their perceptual world, their phenomenological world is expansive.

And they are including the external environment and the internal environment in their consciousness. And instead of just focusing on the feeling of their breath coming in and going out, they're just letting their senses rip. Whatever comes into their five senses and plus their thinking and emotions, they're just noticing.

Exactly. All channels are open. And the phenomenological reports of these individuals is that their awareness at those times has two important qualities. One is clarity, a real sense of clarity, and also accompanying that they talk about it as luminosity, where it's just very vivid.

And the other element is vastness or expansiveness, where they report awareness of just an enormous range of phenomena at once. And so what we see with these gamma oscillations is not just their presence, but they're also highly synchronized among different parts of the brain.

And we think that this is a neural echo of this kind of vastness and panoramic awareness, which they are reporting during this particular style of meditation. And to get there, do you have to be a meditation Olympian or can any of us have this kind of gamma jag?

I would say that any of us can have it, and we may not be able to sustain it. That's the difference. So these individuals can sustain it and can turn it on pretty much at will. I think for you and I, it's more likely that we can show this, but a thought will come into our mind, which will get lost in for a couple of moments. And so the ability to sustain it is something that I think really requires much more practice.

And for them, the thought can come and go without them getting on the train and, you know, going a few stops.

Exactly. It doesn't perturb them at all. It's like the metaphor that they often use is they are awareness is like a clear blue sky and occasionally there'll be a cloud which is like a thought and the cloud will appear, it may move and then disappear and it doesn't disturb the clear blue sky. This does speak though even at the JV level where somebody like me or I don't know I would imagine most of the listeners would be maybe even the freshman team.

It does speak to one of the fundamental shifts, or maybe the fundamental shift that happens through meditation, which is we live most of our lives when we're untrained in thought. But in fact, our senses are ripping all the time. There is a perceptual reality.

we're not paying attention. We're not paying attention to. So that everything from the feeling of your phone in your hand, your butt on the seat, the sounds vibrating in your ears, the sights that you're seeing, these are all, you can kind of relax back into this and out of the thinking mind and actually it's a source of enormous relief.

Yes, absolutely. So as I'm talking to you now, I can be completely aware of the feelings of sitting here, of my sit bones on the chair, of my feet on the floor, and not have it disrupts my ability to completely focus on the details of the conversation, but be aware in the kind of background of all that's going on. So importantly, this is not

Again, just for people who wear robes and have to be flown in from India and Nepal, if you want to meet with them, that this is our birthright. We all have the capacity to do this. Another word for it would be just being mindful. It's just about training the mind to do it.

And I would say it's really also about another way to phrase it is recognizing a kind of innate propensity that we all have. And when we recognize it and become more familiar with it, we can sustain it and strengthen it. And so I would say that it's something, at least in a incipient form, is within all of us from the start.

But it's kind of like language. In order for language to develop, which is a biological propensity that we all have as human beings, we need to be raised in a linguistic community. We need to have it nurtured. And the same thing for qualities like awareness and also for compassion.

which is another thing that you've studied, compassion, which we will, we should and will talk about. But let me just ask a question about this study, this experiment that you were, these experiments that you were running with these people, these Olympic athletes of meditation. One of the questions that sometimes gets asked is, are their brains different because they've meditated or their brains different and therefore they meditate?

Yeah, so that's a really important question. And the honest answer is we cannot answer that question from the work that we've done with the long-term meditators because it's inherently confounded. Right, you can't go back in time. Can't go back in time. And also, it's not unreasonable to think that someone who makes a decision to dedicate their life in this way and to become a monastic

they're likely to have been different from the start. Most people don't make that choice. So from a scientific perspective, and this is something I think your question really is pointing to,

and something that we realized early on from a scientific perspective even though working with these monastics that we were flying in from India there was a certain allure and mystique and really it was cool to do this research from a scientific perspective it's fundamentally unsatisfying.

I mean, we needed to start there because we wanted to convince ourselves that there really was a there there. If we didn't see any difference between these individuals and untrained individuals, the likelihood of us finding something with eight weeks of mindfulness training would be unreasonable.

And so we needed to see if we can get a signal there. But once we did, then our interest in doing that really is not, I mean, we're still interested for certain kinds of questions, but our focus has much more been on work that is scientifically a more rigorous and b has immediate practical benefit. So walk us through some of the studies you've done since that one. What are you excited about?

Well, to give one example, a study that was published not too long ago, we took people and we advertised in the community for a study where people were going to be taught an intervention that's designed to cultivate well-being. That's what they were told. And they were told that they were going to be randomly assigned to one of two interventions, both of which are designed to cultivate well-being.

And so that's how this study was advertised. And what we did is we randomly assigned people to two weeks of compassion training, and I'll say something about that in a minute, and that was one group. And another group was randomly assigned to two weeks of cognitive therapy training that came straight from cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy is one of the most empirically well validated psychological treatments for depression and anxiety, and generally a treatment that can improve well-being.

And they were structurally matched so that there was the same amount of training, it was delivered in the same way, the same time of day, everything about it was perfectly matched. And we can genuinely say that both interventions are designed to cultivate well-being.

And so that was the experiment, basically. And before they went through the two weeks of training, we scanned their brains. After they went through the two weeks of training, we scanned their brains again. And then we got a bunch of psychological measures in addition. But that's the kind of study where any changes that we see that specific to one group, we can say definitively.

that it's because of what they were doing because we randomly assigned them so that when they started off, we confirmed that there were no differences between these two groups when they started. They were all the same. So what we found is that the brains of people who are given two weeks of compassion training look different after the two weeks than the brains of people who are given the cognitive reappraisal training. I didn't let you describe what compassion training is.

Yeah, so I'll say, let me say a little bit about that. So with compassion training, what we do is we ask people to start with a loved one, someone who is a close family member or very close friend or it could even be a pet and just envision a time in their life when they may have been suffering.

And we ask them to then bring that person or being into their mind and heart and cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved from that suffering. And we have simple phrases that they use, like, may you be free from suffering, may you experience joy and ease, and they silently repeat these phrases to themselves.

and they're asked to notice whatever visceral sensations may be present. They're also instructed to say the phrases authentically with emotion and not to simply repeat them cognitively. That's basically the instruction. And we have them start with a loved one. They then move on to themselves. They then move on to what we call a stranger, which is someone, the way we define a stranger is someone whose face they recognize.

But they don't know much about them. It could be a neighbor, and they just really don't know much about the neighbor. Someone lives in their building. But you see them, you recognize them, but you don't know much about their life. And just envision a time in their life where they may have been suffering, even if you don't know that about it.

Then we have them move on to a category that a famous Tibetan lama, naming your impache that I'm doing an event with tonight said. Who's been a guest on the show? Because of your insistence? Thank you. And he has said in print that one hour doing this practice with a difficult person is equivalent to 100 hours doing this practice with all the other categories.

And so a difficult person is someone who pushes your buttons, and we instruct people, don't pick the most difficult person. Don't start with Hitler. Yeah, start with someone who just is mildly irritating. And so we have them do this, and we underscore the importance of doing this really authentically, bringing them into your mind and heart in an authentic way and going through this process.

And then finally we have them move on to as many individuals, as many people, beings as they can. And that's the process. And we have them do this for 30 minutes a day for two weeks. And actually the practice is delivered online.

And it enabled us to monitor exactly what they were doing and to check on how much they were doing. And so they logged on to a protected website and received this practice. And by the way, anyone who wishes can go to our center website, which is Center for Healthy Minds,

And the same exact practice that we used in this study is available for free download from our center website. So any listener can try it for themselves and see if it might be helpful. That's great. And so more about what you found? So what we found is we found that, first of all, we gave them these hard-nosed measures to measure altruistic behavior, prosocial behavior.

And the best kind of behavioral evidence for this in the laboratory comes, believe it or not, from paradigms and methods that have been developed by economists from the field of behavioral and neuroeconomics.

And this field has created these really interesting ways of looking at pro-social behavior that primarily uses financial incentives. And so people are actually giving away real money. There's no deception in these studies, it's all real. And we use lots of money to jack up the stakes.

And so the basic measure in this case was how much money is a person willing to give their own money that they're earning in this experiment to render another transaction to be more fair. So if you observed one person getting screwed in an interaction, are you willing to use some of your own money to make it a more fair interaction?

That's basically what the measure reflects. And it's real money and it's quite substantial so people can spend up to $100 of money that they can earn for themselves and actually render this transaction to be more fair.

And so what we found is that after two weeks of compassion training, people actually behaved more altruistically than people who went through the two weeks of cognitive training. A lot more or a little more. That's a good question. And about 15% more. Not nothing. Yeah, not nothing. And what about the changes, if any, to the brain?

So there were systematic changes that we found in the brain, and those changes were primarily to two circuits. One circuit that we know is involved in empathy, the ability to take another person's perspective, and the other circuit is involved in reward and positive emotion where we found increased activation in those circuits. And interestingly, we found that those people who change the most in each of these circuits actually behave the more altruistically.

So it predicted the extent to which they behaved altruistically. Now, one of the important limitations of this study, just to sort of be totally transparent and honest about this, is we did not follow these people up systematically after this experiment. And so we're not making any strong claims about how long these changes are going to last. I'm frequently asked about that.

And the honest answer is we don't know, but my conjecture is they're not likely to last unless the person continues to practice. And it's kind of like physical exercise. If you went to the gym for two weeks and had a really great trainer and really got buffed up, I'm sure most people would notice that it's helpful and that they can feel a difference after two weeks. But if they stop exercising at that point, no one is going to think that those changes are going to endure. And I think it's the same with these kinds of skills.

So I'm going to say something, man, just correct any errors in what I'm going to say, that one of the, there are many important headlines out of this field of contemplative neuroscience, as it's sometimes called, of which you are a leader, if not the leader. There are many amazing conclusions to be drawn based on this work, of which we've had just a tiny sample in this conversation thus far.

One of the big ones, though, is this idea of neuroplasticity. For a long time, the dog, the received dogma in the neuroscience world was that the brain stops changing.

at a certain age, like in your mid-20s or something like that. But what you've shown is that actually we can change the brain at any time. The brain is changing. I think you've described it as the organ of experience. It's changing in response to the world. If I learned violin right now, parts of my brain would change. But what you're doing, meditation is training certain attributes

And that, to me, is kind of an earth-shattering conclusion that we can change. So did I say this correctly? Perfectly. And one of the things we often say is that the brain is changing wittingly or unwittingly. Right. It might as well be in control of it. Exactly.

So, what is the least amount, I'm sure you get this conversation, this question all the time, because I get it all the time. What is the dosage question? What is the least amount of meditation I can do to get some of the advertised benefits? You know, it's a very difficult question to answer from a scientific perspective. We know there are published studies which show that as little as eight minutes of meditation can actually produce a measurable objective change.

But again, it says nothing about how long these changes will last. And so I think my own view is that you can probably get a change pretty quickly. Certainly after 30 minutes, you can see a change, but it says nothing about the extent to which those changes will last.

So it leads to a question I've been thinking about a lot, because I'm now oddly a small businessman, because I have been doing this app that teaches people how to meditate with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, who are the guiding teachers on the thing. And I've always been of the view of what I tell people. It's dangerous that I'm out there talking about meditation, because I really don't know enough. But what I often tell people is you should do it every day.

But we've noticed that our active users on the app aren't doing it every day. They're doing maybe the best, you know, four or five, six, some seven days a week. What is your advice to people? Should you be doing it every day or is four or five times a week enough?

My advice is that it's particularly at the early stages, it's really good to get into a daily habit. And one of the things that we often suggest is that people be asked, how much time do you think you can actually practice and do it every day? You choose. And even if it's 30 seconds,

What we like people to do is pick a number that they choose themselves and then make a 30-day commitment and do it every day for 30 days, whatever that number is. It doesn't matter how small that number is, but do it every day.

Don't be surprised if this functionality shows up on my app. Because that's a great way to do it. And we talk a lot about UX user experience and how to structure this so that we can help people establish a habit. Anyway, very interesting. Let me ask you some other questions about this field of contemplative neuroscience. Because it's been lots of interesting little debates that this field has generated.

One of them is that you're very close with his holiness, the Dalai Lama. As I said before, you were sitting next to him in our first podcast. We didn't let you talk much because

That was appropriate. Fair enough. You're very close to the guy. He's a religious leader. And you've been criticized as you pointed out to me on the front page of the New York Times by some of your fellow travelers in the scientific community for being so close with a religious figure and that this is viewed as inappropriate in some way. What's your pushback on that?

Well, you know, I understand the concern and really my pushback is simply that we are trying to do the science at the highest possible level with the most integrity. And we publish the work in very high profile scientific journals with very stringent peer review.

And the scientific evidence will get adjudicated in the scientific literature. We'll put it out there. No one believes the scientific finding unless it's replicated by others. And I think that my relationship with the Dalai Lama has been an inspiration. He's been a real catalyst.

We really look to him as a kind of public intellectual, more than a religious figure, and he is one of the most vocal advocates for teaching these practices in a secular way. He often says that if we're going to reach the 7 billion people on this planet,

There are a lot of them who are non-believers, many of them who are practitioners of many other religions, we need to present this in a way that's acceptable to anybody. And so we view this as simply training the mind in a way which is accessible to anyone irrespective of their religious convictions. And I think it's possible to do that. I understand the concerns that people have, and I do think we need to be super careful.

about it and some of our work involves extension to children and education and we're working now in public schools and so that's an area where I think one needs to be especially cautious and we try to do it in that way and I think it's possible.

But you are a long time dedicated Buddhist practitioner. And you are a public proponent for secular meditation. Are you not rooting for a certain outcome in your studies?

You know, that's a really important question. This was exactly the question that was raised in this New York Times article to which you're alluding. And it basically said that how can Davidson be objective when he's admitted in public that he himself meditates? And that would be like telling a cardiologist who studies the effect of physical exercise on the heart

that they can't do any physical exercises for the rest of their active career because they're biased. How can they possibly be objective if they admit that they do physical exercise? Or for that matter, someone who studies perception, are they going to stop perceiving? I mean, I think at a certain point, I had a great time with that, really. It was just fun. I actually believe that if you're going to study meditation scientifically, you've got to meditate yourself.

And I've come out and said that. I think it's crazy to think that a person can actually study meditation and not be a meditator. And so I think it's actually mandatory. But I think there needs to be important firewalls. And I think you need to do it in a way that guards against bias.

And one of the wonderful things about science is that it very much is democratic. You put this stuff out there in scientific journals. You describe the methods in as careful and as detailed the way as you can. And if it's an important enough finding, people are going to want to replicate it.

And if they find that it doesn't replicate, it's going to be a problem and people aren't going to believe it. Three of the most important studies that I'm most proud of that we've published are non-replications. That is, our failures to find effects that we thought or others thought would be present in meditators. And so we've made a real commitment to do this in a way which is honest.

And so we did a study just to give a very specific example. There's a phenomenon called introception. And introception involves the experience of one's own internal bodily signals. And many mindfulness practices involve mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of breathing, mindfulness of bodily sensations.

And we thought this was kind of, so to speak, a no-brainer that people would be much better at perceiving intraseptive cues if they've meditated. And so we did a study where there's an objective way of measuring this. I won't go through all the technical details, but it involves basically your accuracy in perceiving your own heartbeat as one example of an intraseptive process.

And so we measured this objectively. We also got measures of how confident the individuals were in their accuracy. And so they just filled out a little questionnaire just telling us how confident, like on a seven-point scale. And what we found is that the meditators were really confident that they were doing this accurately, and they performed exactly at the same level as the non-meditators.

they were equally terrible and absolutely no difference and we really looked to see if there was a difference i mean we we thought we would find a difference

And we published that study. Right. So I think that is all reassuring. I think I will be reassuring to skeptics, no question about it. But the other sort of debate that's, and there are a few others, that has emerged from your field is

about the quality of the science. I'm not going to be able to say this chapter in verse and you'll correct me no doubt. There was what's called a meta-study where somebody, people looked at all of the studies that are out there. Meta-analysis. Meta-analysis. And they found that actually there wasn't, if you took the good studies and there weren't that many of them, there wasn't much of an effect or something like that of meditation. So that was kind of dispiriting for a lot of people in the community.

Maybe restate the conclusion more factually than I've done and then talk to me about what your conclusion was based on their conclusion.

Yeah, that was a very important meta-analysis that was published. It was done by a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins University. And what they did, interestingly, is they divided the studies into two groups. One that didn't use rigorous controls. And another group of studies, as you mentioned, a much smaller group of studies that use much more rigorous control groups.

And what they found is that the studies that didn't use rigorous control groups tended to find bigger effects for meditation. The studies that use really rigorous control groups found very little. And this was looking at the effects of meditation on specific illnesses and particularly psychiatric illnesses, measures of anxiety and depression and things like that.

And so the conclusion of these researchers was that when you look at the studies that use rigorous controls, you really don't see that meditation does any better than any other kind of treatment. And so that was really the conclusion. Okay, well I have two responses. One is, is that a damning

result for contemplative neuroscience writ large and to well if so it's not more effective than things like antidepressants or exercise or whatever those things are effective so didn't that suggest that this is just another arrow we should have in our quiver when it comes to dealing with these things

Yeah, so those are all important concerns. I mean, the one of the major conclusions, though, which I think is really important for the field to take to heart, is that the days of doing sort of crappy limited study should be over. I mean, we really need to move on. And those kind of studies are really a waste of time and money.

It's better to focus on a fewer number of studies that are done well than studies that are not done well, because no one is going to take the studies that are not done well seriously anymore. And the studies that are done well, your intuition is absolutely right. If these studies don't show any more effectiveness than another treatment that it was also found to be effective, that's okay.

And we can potentially, one of the things that has not really been done, very much at least, is looking at combination treatment. So if we add meditation to another treatment that already has been established to be effective, does that accentuate the positive benefit?

But this meta-analysis was looking at studies that you said investigated specific illnesses, like depression and anxiety, all of which I proudly suffer from. But it wasn't necessarily looking at some of the effects on the brain that you looked at. So it didn't look at all, didn't say that all meditation research is subpar.

It specifically excluded basic research, the sort of stuff that we've been talking about prior has mostly been basic research on the effects of meditation on the brain. What is your personal practice?

Well, my practice has gone through a lot of change in evolution over the course of the decades that I've been practicing. I really first began a daily practice in 1974, which is when I attended my first meditation retreat in India with Goenka. And for many, many years, I was practicing in the Taravadan tradition, doing basic

I'm going to jump in on that, because Terevan, just for those, I've had to explain this in almost every podcast we do, but is these old school Buddhism, it was literally old school, the people who are following what they believe are the closest to those sort of Buddhas and original instructions. So anyway.

Right, so I was practicing in that tradition for many years and deriving what I felt was a lot of benefit. And then I met the Dalai Lama as I said in 1992 and I started to become more familiar with the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

At first, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, to be really bluntly honest, was a big turn-off to me because it involves a lot of ritual, and it's complicated, and the older school, as you said, the Taravadhan path was much simpler. It had many fewer rituals and forms, and I was attracted to that kind of simplicity and austerity in many ways.

And I found the Tibetan world to be just excessively impenetrable. And so I was going along doing my terra-vaden practice and still interacting with these Tibetans, and I should say that

I've had a daily practice and it's been virtually every single day. I've missed a few days and when my kids were younger my practice was more sporadic. I was practicing daily but often just for a few minutes a day.

But I really have had pretty much a daily practice since 1974. So I've been practicing a long time. And I would go on retreats periodically, typically once a year, and found them to be of benefit and retreat as a time when you can practice more intensively.

And then, as I learned more about the Tibetan world, things became a little bit more transparent and clear to me. And then, as part of my research, actually, I met Mingi Rinpoche. Actually, I met him first when he attended a Mind and Life meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, in the year 2000. That was my first meeting with him.

And then a couple of years later, he came to my lab and I picked him up from the Madison airport and really still knew relatively little about him, but there was something about him that attracted me and his

presence in his demeanor, and I listened to a few instructions that he had given, and there was a kind of simplicity that I was attracted to about his instructions, even though he was operating in the Tibetan world.

And another thing that I felt strongly about was that while my practice up until that point was very valuable, there was a certain kind of heart opening, a warmth that I wasn't experiencing.

And in the early days of my interest in contemplative activities, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, I used to do Sufi dancing once a week, which was very ecstatic. And I'm a touchy-feely guy. I like to hug people. And I just didn't feel like there was a lot of warmth in what I was doing. And I felt more of that in this other path.

And so, and I think it's one of the things I always say is that one size does not fit all. And I think that's really important and I think there are many different paths that are very beneficial and different people because of their personalities, all kinds of individual differences do better with certain kinds of paths than others. And I think that

And so this is not about any particular path that's better or not better. It's really individual preferences and what speaks to different kinds of people. But I needed, I recognize that I needed more of that heart stuff.

And then when I got more involved in it, I really found that. I found there is an emphasis on compassion, and that just really attracted me, and certain practices that involve devotion that also attract me. Devotion, meaning prayer.

Prostration? Well, prostration is part of it, but not so much prayer, but prostration. Who are you devoting yourself to? To the teachings. Okay, so it's not too like a deity.

No, it's not to a deity, but it's basically saying that I am meditating, not primarily for my own benefit, but I'm meditating for the benefit of others. Do you think that's true? Really? I really do. I really do. There are days when

I live this crazy life and there are days when I'll have meetings literally for 10 straight hours. And that's not an exaggeration. And in the morning, after I do my period of meditation, I'll look at my calendar. And I'll just very quickly, it doesn't take me more than two or three minutes to do this.

I'll just go down and look at every meeting that I have that day and just in for a few seconds reflect on how I can bring the right stuff, be present and be most helpful for each individual that I'm meeting with.

And it's a simple kind of thing and it's enormously helpful. And I don't do this all the time, but I can go through a day where I have 10 straight hours of meetings. And at the end of that period, feel totally nourished and refreshed. And I think it's a simple shift of intention. And if you do that systematically, it can change everything.

Last question. There are a lot of metaphysical claims right at the forefront of Tibetan Buddhism. There are deities in there. There is prayer in this school of Buddhism.

uh... rebirth is a huge part of it i mean you're in the shaker teachers uh... uh... is allegedly the the the uh... reincarnation of not one but to uh... previous buddhist master these guys like uh... that really got it going on so

as a scientist, how do you feel about all this? Not to mention all this tantric meditation, you know, where they're like, I don't, I'm going to probably state this incorrectly. But I think the idea is that like you're kind of moving the bodily energies up through and that may include like kind of semen maybe up through the top of the channel and down through the other, I mean, whatever, I'm probably butchering this. But there's a lot of, there's a lot of material in this school of Buddhism that people like me would find

Weird. How do you deal with that? People like me find it weird too. Okay. And so, as a scientist, I throw out my arms and I say, I have absolutely no idea. But what I try to do is say that, say that I have no idea, and that I just don't know, rather than immediately jumping to the knee-jerk reaction that that's just total crap.

And so I've had extensive discussions with the Dalai Lama about some of this, although a lot of the time, particularly in public meetings, he'll tell us this is Buddhist business, and he doesn't want to talk to scientists about that, but he's talked to us about that in smaller venues. And I sort of...

bracket that and I don't let it bother me too much. I let it bother me a little. I certainly don't unabashedly embrace it.

And I don't reject it immediately either. And I just put it in the category of total not knowing. And basically, I think there are so many important issues that we can work on where there is a lot of common agreement

and shared understanding that we can be very helpful without resorting to this other realm in this tradition where I think there is some conflict between the modern scientific understanding and Buddhist understanding.

Thank you. Thank you for making time for this. Thank you for letting me probably take you to a point where you're going to miss your next meeting or be late for it. And thank you for your work, which has really just definitely changed my life. And I think changed many of those lives. So really appreciate all of the above.

And I want to thank you for everything that you're doing to help promote these ideas and bring them out into the public in a way which is really remarkably helpful. And now I tell people that if they are first interested in meditation, that the first book they should read is 10% happier.

All right, there's another edition of the 10% Happier podcast. If you like it, I'm going to hit you up for a favor. Please subscribe to it, review it, and rate it. I want to also thank the people who produced this podcast, Josh Cohan, Lauren Efron, Sarah Amos, and the head of ABC News Digital, Dan Silver. And hit me up at Twitter, Dan B. Harris. See you next time.

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