Richie Davidson: New Frontiers for Creating Healthy Minds

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Dr. Richard Davidson. Richie, as he is known by friends and associates, is a research professor of psychology and psychiatry, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006. His research is broadly focused on the neural basis of emotion and emotional style and methods to promote human flourishing, including meditation and related contemplative practices. His studies have included persons of all ages from birth through old age, and have also included individuals with disorders of emotion such as mood and anxiety disorders and autism, as well as expert meditation practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of experience.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Richie and I spoke about what we know and don’t know at this point in time about how meditation practice changes the brain. We also talked about new neuroscientific research studies currently being conducted at the Center for Healthy Minds in the area of epigenetics, and also in the area of bringing contemplative practice on a wide scale into daily activities. Finally, Richie gave us his neurologically informed prescription for cultivating healthy well-being. Here’s my informative and very illuminating conversation with Richie Davidson.

Richie, I want to begin just by thanking you for taking time away from your research activities to be an educator, if you will, and to spend time sharing what you’re finding as well. Thank you so much for your commitment to doing that.

Richard Davidson: Happy to do it. Thank you for asking me.

TS: I wanted to begin by hearing your reflections on this. I’ve heard from different people, “Meditation is now going mainstream. More and more people see the benefits of meditating because scientists like Richie Davidson have shown that meditation changes the brain in positive ways.” Wow! We’re in the midst of a revolution in our culture in relationship to meditation. How do you see that and your role in that?

RD: On the one hand, I’m heartened by it. I think that we are a culture that pays attention to scientific evidence—at least some parts of the culture—and to the extent that the scientific evidence is enabling groups of people who might otherwise not come into contact with meditation and other contemplative practices. I think that the science is serving a very beneficial function in bringing awareness to those segments of our culture about the potential benefits that may accrue as a consequence of these practices. All that, I think, is really very, very positive and exciting.

I think that there also is a bit of a downside. There is a lot of hype about the scientific research. The scientific evidence is still at a very, very early stage. I think some of the claims that have been made in the media about what has been established scientifically are way out of proportion to what actually has been found in serious scientific research.

I think there’s going to be some correction needed, but all that is understandable and not unexpected. I think there’ll be some healthy pushback and recalibration of expectations, but I think that all this is basically a positive influence. I think we’ll see meditation and maybe contemplative practices enter into different segments of a culture where it can really be of great benefit, I believe.

TS: Now, you said some of the facts about how effective meditation can be have potentially been exaggerated or distorted. Can you give it to us just in very plain, down-to-earth—because here you are; you’re on the ground, you’re actually doing these research studies. What do we actually know at this point in time about how meditation affects the brain?

RD: We can say certain things in broad strokes. So, we can say with a lot of confidence that certain kinds of meditation will impact a number of different circuits or networks in the brain. One is [the] networks that are important for attention. We know that there are specific components of attention that can be strengthened or improved through meditation, and the corresponding circuits in the brain that are associated with those components of attention have been found to be altered. Now, whether they are altered structurally or functionally or both is still very much a matter of an open question, I would say. This certainly has not been resolved in scientific research. But the fact that there is some change in networks associated with attention, I think, at this point, is pretty clearly demonstrated.

The second related fact, I would say, is that networks that are important for the regulation of emotion are also altered by meditation. Different kinds of meditation can have different effects, but there is a common impact on circuits important for the regulation of emotion. There are different aspects of the regulation of emotion that are affected. But, again—and so a lot of the details are still to be worked out. The extent to which these are functional changes and/or structural changes still needs to be studied much more intensively—but there is good evidence to suggest that these networks involved in the regulation of emotion are altered in ways that may promote well-being.

Those are two broad facts. We also know that networks associated with the narrative that we construct about ourselves—the self-relevant narratives in our mind—we know something about the brain networks they are associated with that from basic neuroscientific research—and we also know that those networks are impacted by meditation. Those are three broad networks in the brain that are impacted. Let me quickly though add what we don’t know.

We don’t know to what extent any form of meditation may really be effective in treating a specific illness. There is certainly interest and a lot of excitement about the possibility—that different forms of meditation or mindfulness-based this or that can be potentially effective in treating specific kinds of disorders.

The best evidence is in the area of depression with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. I would say that that is really the only place where there really is decent scientific evidence that a meditation-based intervention has met the bar in terms of high standards of scientific rigor and has established some impact.

There are a lot of simple, basic questions that we don’t know. For example, if a person were to engage in some kind of meditation practice for a certain period of time each day—let’s just say 20 minutes—we don’t know whether it’s best for that person to do it in a single 20-minute period, in two 10-minute periods, in five 4-minute periods, or maybe even in ten 2-minute periods that is sprinkled throughout the day. On that simple very basic question, we have absolutely no idea. It’s very likely from everything that we do know that the answer to that question is likely to be different for different kinds of people.

While there’s a lot to be excited about by the available scientific facts, there should be equal excitement about all the things we don’t know because there’s a huge opportunity for learning new things as we move forward in this area in the future.

TS: OK. Well, I want to talk more about what we do know, but just for a moment: what about what we don’t know is most exciting and interesting to you right now? And what are you actually working on in terms of what we don’t know that you want to find out about?

RD: We have a large center here—the Center for Healthy Minds—at the University of Wisconsin, and we do lots of different things that include both basic research as well as more applied or translational research. On the basic research side, there are some really exciting questions about epigenetic changes—changes in gene expression that are just beginning to be studied, and there are some new techniques that are available to look at this in ways that were never possible before. This is going to be a whole new arena that’s going to open up all kinds of exciting possibilities. We’re doing a bunch of basic research along these lines and we expect that there are going to be all kinds of new discoveries around this in the future.

The radical idea here is that we can use our minds—mental training—to actually influence the expression of our genes. That’s just a mind-blowing concept—but the fact that it can occur is by now pretty well-established. How that occurs—the mechanisms by which it occurs, the extent to which it occurs, and the kind of impact that it might have—all those are still to be determined, but there’s a lot of interesting questions that could be asked there.

TS: Now, can you tell me what the new technique is that is allowing these epigenetic studies to show this new information?

RD: Yes. One of the principal new techniques that we can use is we can take a blood sample from a person and extract from the blood peripheral mononuclear cells, which are in the blood, and we can turn those cells in a dish into pluripotent stem cells. Once they are turned into stem cells, we can then turn them into any kind of cell in the body, including neurons, and we can turn them into very specific neurons that are found only in specific brain regions. For example, we can turn them into intercalated GABAergic neurons in the amygdala from a blood cell. Then, in a dish, we can actually grow these brain cells and study their properties and look at their gene expression.

In effect, we are studying the properties of these molecular mechanisms in cells that are specific to particular parts of the brain. The only way that could have been done in the past is invasively in animals with a brain biopsy—actually cutting through the brain—which you obviously cannot do in human research, but this allows us to do the same kind of research completely non-invasively. It’s totally extraordinary what can be done now.

TS: Very good. Now, you were going to say more before I asked you to explain that a little further—in terms of what we don’t know that you’re currently focused on.

RD: Yes. The other thing that I was going to mention is the translational research. One of the important issues, which we’re studying, is this: You and many others who are around this area know from our experience that when we talk about this kind of work to certain groups of people, they’ll often tell us, “Well, the idea of taking more time out of my day to do yet something else is not only not going to be stress-reducing, but it’s going to be stress-producing. It’s just unthinkable.” This is the kind of response that we get in many sectors now from busy people, particularly in corporate America as well as elsewhere in the world.

One question, which we’ve been interested in is, “OK, if we meet people sort of where they are, is there a way that we can engage them in this kind of training without them taking a single minute extra out of their day? And how would this occur?” Well, one way it would occur is actually a way in which behavioral scientists had began to find that new habits can actually become more readily established, and it’s through the simple mechanism of “piggybacking.”

We can have a person identify an activity of daily living. It might be cleaning their house. It might be going shopping for food on a regular basis. It might be commuting. Whatever the activity of daily living is, what we can do is piggyback a specific practice on that activity of daily living and then it could be a guided practice where they’re essentially listening to a mini-podcast that they can have playing in their ears as they’re going about this activity of daily living.

That’s something that we’re very interested in exploring. We have the opportunity now through a major initiative that we are developing that we call the Healthy Minds Program, which is a comprehensive program to promote well-being that we’re developing. We will be disseminating this initially in workplace settings. It will allow for people to go through this program in different ways, but one of the modes in which a person can go through this program is actually not requiring them to take any additional time out of their regular daily routine, but rather do it in this piggybacking way. Then we can determine whether the impact of these practices when they’re done in this way is the same or different than if they’re doing formal meditation.

Again, we don’t know the answer to that. It may be that doing this while you’re going shopping in a store—and actually they’re maybe emphasizing practices that focus on care and connection with those around you—may actually potentially be more effective than doing that same practice when you’re sitting alone. We are developing this program, which will enable us to actually collect data from massive numbers of people at scale because we’ll be collecting data on mobile devices using objective measures that can be implemented on mobile devices, and so we can collect the data in a large-scale way.

TS: OK, I just have to ask a couple more questions about this, because it’s pretty exciting, what you’re describing. I’m imagining going shopping and I’m listening to some kind of guided practice that is somehow connecting me to my heart and to feeling my inner connection with other people—and now I’m part of this study. I’m directed to enter something or other into my iPhone that’s somehow going to be an objective measurement? That’s the part where I lost you.

RD: Yes. Let’s say you do that, Tami, and you’ve just spent 15 minutes in a store shopping. You’re asked to indicate when the shopping is over and then at that point, you’re asked if you can take, say, three to five minutes and engage in some simple assessments that will be presented on your smartphone. You would then be given, for example, a measure of emphatic accuracy that is an objective measure that’s neuroscientifically grounded, that is actually based on neuroscientific research, but can be implemented on your smartphone. That takes three minutes. You can actually get an objective measure of your empathic accuracy.

Not only would you be given feedback about that—you can think of this as like Fitbits for the mind—but also this data would then be wirelessly transmitted to our center and part of our database. We expect to do this in millions of people within the next 18 months.

TS: Oh my, we really are at a frontier. OK, but I have to ask another question. Is this a self-assessment that I’m doing in these few minutes? Is it some self-assessment? What makes it “objective?”

RD: It’s not a questionnaire. We’re not asking you, “On a one to seven point scale, tell me how emphatically accurate you are,” because I don’t believe that would be very useful. This is an objective measure that is grounded in neuroscientific research. It would take me a while to go through how—

TS: It’s OK, yes.

RD: —how the measure was constructed, but it’s a measure that basically presents very, very short video segments that are like ten seconds snippets of a person describing an emotional episode and you’re asked to rate the intensity of that person’s emotions by sliding your finger on the iPhone. Basically, the measure of emphatic accuracy is how closely your ratings of intensity matches the person who actually is on your iPhone describing this emotional episode—how intense she or he rated them in real time as they are describing it.

We know a lot about that kind of measure, and people who are more accurate on that task have greater activation in a specific brain network that we know a lot about that’s strengthened by compassion practices.

TS: It’s very exciting, and especially when you talk about the number of people who potentially will be participating in the very near future. I notice I feel very excited and grateful, so thank you, Richie. I’m happy that you guys have put that much work into place to make something like this launch so soon.

RD: Thank you. It’s a big initiative in our center and we’re really excited about it.

In June, we’re having a very, very small meeting with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, when he’s here in the United States, and he’ll be meeting with CEOs of a number of very, very large global corporations with us who are interested in adopting this Healthy Minds platform in their workplace. His Holiness has been involved with us as the “inspirer-in-chief” and also as a consultant. He’s reviewed the curriculum with us in detail that’s part of this, and so he’ll be meeting with these CEOs and talking to them about the potential impact of some like this.

TS: For people who aren’t aware, can you share a little bit your connection with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and how really that relationship has been at the very root of the work that you’ve been doing in this field of contemplative neuroscience?

RD: Certainly. I first met His Holiness in 1992. In that meeting, that was a very pivotal meeting for me both personally and professionally. His Holiness challenged me, because at that time, we really weren’t doing much of this kind of work—although I was very much closet meditator. But, His Holiness encouraged us to use the tools of modern neuroscience to focus on positive human qualities like kindness and compassion, and he basically said that, “You’ve been using these tools to study adversity and stress and anxiety. why can’t you use these same tools to study kindness and compassion?” It was very much a wake-up call for us. That began this turning toward this work and eventually led to the founding of the Center for Healthy Minds.

These days, I—for reasons that I don’t completely understand—have the opportunity to meet with His Holiness three or four times a year. I was just with him in India last month. It’s just been an extraordinary relationship.

His Holiness had been so committed to fostering this interaction between modern science and with contemplative traditions—particularly Buddhism—and very committed to helping in whatever ways he can. He sees this as an important path for the more wide scale dissemination of strategies to train the mind to cultivate these positive human qualities. He’s always reminding us that there are seven billion people on the planet and that we need to find ways to reach them. He strongly believes that the scientific approach is going to be important for a large swathe of humanity.

TS: I know that some of your early studies involved doing research on the brain of people who were termed “Olympic meditators,” people who had meditated for thousands of hours. Have you ever studied the brain of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama? Has he ever gone into the machine?

RD: He has not, no. Yes—I mean, when we first began this work, everyone around me said, “Ask His Holiness to participate.”

TS: Sure.

RD: I did. I was very much expecting the answer that I received, which was, “Thank you, but no, thank you.”

When he’s in the United States, it’s such a media circus. I think that he was concerned about what the media would be reporting about it—and I, frankly, was concerned, too. It’s almost impossible to do this completely off the radar, and so the decision was made not to.

TS: Now, it’s interesting: in listening to you describe what we do know about the science of meditation, you talk about certain networks that we know are important to things like attention or the regulation of emotion. You’re not saying, “This particular singular part of the brain,” or—so, I thought that was interesting that you kept using this word “networks.” I wonder if you can say something about that.

RD: Yes, that’s very—it’s very important that you picked up on that and it’s very important idea. These days, everything we know about the brain suggests that there is no single area that is implementing any complex functions. There’s no area in the brain that is the compassion area, or no area in the brain that is the attentional focus area, or no area in the brain that’s the self area.

More and more, what we’ve learned about the brain—and, in part, it’s a consequence of having methods that enable us to see these things—it’s very clear that when we engage a person in a complex mental process that lots of things are going on in the brain at once. It is way too simplistic to think about a specific region during this or that.

That’s the reason we prefer to use the term “networks” or “circuits.” When a long-term meditation practitioner engages in compassion meditation practice, for example, or more of an awareness meditation practice, lots of things in the brain are changing—not just one specific area. This is just a choice of language to be more faithful to the reality of the complexity.

TS: Now, you mentioned in terms of what we do know that there are certain kinds of meditation that are important to attention. I thought, “Well, let’s dig into that a little bit because there’s all different kinds of attention.” You could have very focused attention and sometimes that’s what’s wanted, sometimes it’s more of a open panoramic attention. There’s also all different kinds of meditation. In preparing for this conversation, Richie, I read that you talked about meditation analogously is like referring to something like sports. There are all different kinds of sports: tennis, football, whatever. “Sports” is a big umbrella category just like “meditation” is a big umbrella category. We really have to get more nuanced if we’re going to talk about a certain type of meditation having a certain neuroscientific impact. Help unpack a little bit this idea: what specific types of meditation do we know impact what kinds of attention?

RD: Yes, well, it’s a great question and is super important. I’ll answer your question specifically in a minute, but just to give a very concrete example, in some of our studies—this is all published research—we have looked at very long-term meditation practitioners. [These are] people who we would consider among the Olympic athletes, if you will, of meditation practice in the world. In numerous spots, the identical stimuli in two different kinds of meditation practice in a specific network in the brain, we find totally opposite effects. In one meditation practice, we find an attenuation of activity in this network. In another meditation practice we find an extenuation of activity in response to the identical stimuli in the same person.

This is just a very concrete example: that to say that meditation does X to the brain as a blanket general statement is so imprecise as to border on just really inappropriate given the kind of findings that are out there now in the scientific literature.

To address your question more specifically: in the domain of attention as you’re suggesting, Tami, there are certain kinds of meditation practices that focus attention or that invite the practitioner to focus her or his attention. Other practices that invite the practitioner to have a more open, panoramic kind of attention—and attention is explicitly not focused on any one thing. There are data to suggest that—again, within the same practitioner—those two different kinds of meditation have different effects—different immediate effects, at least—on the brain.

This simply underscores the importance of heterogeneity among different forms of meditation practice. Now, there is something important so that in a higher level say about this. Most people who are long-term meditation practitioners, as we know, practice multiple forms of meditation. They typically don’t just practice one. By engaging in multiple forms of practice, they are exercising these circuits—if you will, from a neuroscientific perspective—in different ways.

One of the things that they might be doing when you put all that together is exercising a certain kind of flexibility in the deployment of their brain networks. You might think of it as: if you go to a physical trainer who is very attentive to different parts of your body, the trainer might have you do lots of different kinds of exercises to strengthen different parts of your body—not just one exercise, but many different kinds of exercise. What may be optimal is a more global program where you’re exercising multiple parts of the body.

And in the same way, it may be optimal that different parts of your mind are exercised, which may strengthen different circuits in the brain that may ultimately result in a certain kind of flexibility that allows an individual to bring, if you will, what may be optimal to a particular situation—the resources required, if you will, for a particular situation can flexibly adjust as the environment changes.

But that’s hypothetical at this point. We don’t know that for a fact, but that is a conjecture based upon the tidbits that we are learning.

TS: Now, Richie, I’m curious: in performing all of these different research investigations and testing different types of meditation and different types of practices—different kinds; compassion practices, gratitude practices—did it at any point occur to you, “Gosh, I need to integrate X, Y, Z practice into my own life and do more of it based on these results. This is so compelling. I’ve been doing this thing, whatever it might be, but I really need to include this additional practice. I really have to do it. Look at the results.”

RD: [Laughs.] It’s interesting that you ask that. It is really interesting. Certainly, I’m inspired by some of the findings in the scientific literature and there are many times during the week when I will—as I sit down to practice each day, I spend maybe a moment or two reflecting on how, based on everything I know, I’m really changing my brain. That’s really cool and it’s probably healthy in some—with a capital H—in some basic ways.

But more than that, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about it in terms of my own personal practice. I have a teacher and I feel like I’ve got really all of the resources that I need for myself in terms of that, and I’m following a particular path that seems right for me.

One of the things that the science has convinced me of really strongly is that—I mean, it’s something that I knew before, but the science really makes it so clear—is that one size does not fit all and that what’s good for one person is not necessarily going to be good for the next person. That has really helped me respect and honor individual variation and invite me both personally as well as professionally in the scientific work we do to think about, “How can we be most helpful to this person as she or he is presenting her or himself right now, given a particular unique cognitive, emotional, contextual, cultural context in which this being is presenting?” And that what’s good for me is not necessarily going to be good for this person. I think that that’s just really important.

TS: How did the science show you that?

RD: The science shows us that by—if you take a look at any randomized, controlled trial of meditation-based intervention and look carefully at it—at the kind of dirty laundry, which often is hard to find, but as a scientist I know where to find it—you see that some people are really benefiting a lot and there are other people who show very little benefit, and there are still other people who are likely actually made a little bit worse.

That’s really important. I don’t think we should hide that laundry under the rug, which we tend to do. I think that it’s very informative. It’s telling us something important and I think we need to listen.

TS: Well, I think it also keeps any one of us out of a fundamentalist attitude about whatever practices we happen to be turned on and excited about, and generates an incredible amount of tolerance and acceptance of difference. So, it’s a very powerful idea.

RD: I think that’s true, too, and I think that is really important. Yes.

TS: OK, so here you are investigating what makes a healthy mind. I’m curious: have you come up of any kind of working framework, if you will, that says, “This is what a healthy mind is like.”

RD: [Laughs.] That’s a great question. Our center has gone through some evolution. In its first incarnation, we called it the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. We dropped the “Investigating” not because we’ve stopped investigating, but investigating is not the only thing we do. We are also trying to promote healthy minds.

But, I certainly have some conjectures about some of the key elements of a healthy mind. It’s built around four domains. One is a awareness and being able to recognize certain basic qualities of awareness and deploy awareness in a volitional way. The second has to do with care and connection and interpersonal relationships.

The third has to do with a understanding of the self, and an inquiry into the self and insight into the narrative that we carry around—that each of us carries around—and what a healthy sense of self is, and what an unhealthy sense of self is. The fourth is connecting to a sense of meaning and purpose.

These are all elements of a healthy mind. I don’t pretend to suggest that this is an exhaustive list. There are many different constituents within each of these, but these are four domains that are really important, where there is good scientific research, and where also [we know there are] practices that can help cultivate these qualities. This is something that will be part of our ongoing stream of investigations as we go on.

TS: OK. Well, let’s talk more about the third domain that you talked about, which is understanding the self and having a healthy sense of self—because you did mention in the things that we do have some results from neuroscience about—and the effects of meditation—that there is a relationship between meditators and the narrative we have about the self and how that changes with meditation. Tell me a little bit about that. I’d love to know, first of all, what you think in your honest view a healthy sense of self might be. What does the neuroscience tell us about meditation and how this impacts our sense of self?

RD: Yes. So, I mean, I can spend a long time on this, and there’s a huge amount that is happening around this topic these days. But let me just summarize a few things.

If you put a person in an MRI scanner and tell them to simply rest for a few minutes, and don’t give them any other instruction, and measure their brain, there are certain networks in the brain that are very active in most people—the vast majority of people. It turns out that these networks that are active in the brain when we don’t give a person an explicit instruction happen to be networks that seemed to have something to do with these narratives about the self that we carry around.

To put in another way, when you’re in the bore of an MRI scanner, you can’t really do very much other than lay there. When you are left to your own devices, most people who don’t have a meditation practice begin to have self-related thoughts. Most of our thinking in this context is focused on the self. We’ve constructed this narrative over the course of our development about ourselves. The narrative often can ensnare us and get us into trouble when there is an excessive reification of the self—when we overly identify with the self; when the thoughts that we have are taken to be who we are as opposed to just thoughts, if you will.

Part of developing a healthy sense of self is gaining insight into the construction of this narrative and the relation between the narrative and who we actually are—and to be able to see our thoughts as thoughts and to begin to loosen the identification that we have with the self. As we do this through meditation practice, there is a corresponding change in the brain where the connectivity between the networks that are involved with this self-narrative and other networks in the brain begin to decrease.

One way to think about this is that these self-narratives hijack lots of other resources in the brain. With meditation practice—particularly longer-term meditation practice—we see this influence diminishing. It’s not that the thoughts go away. The thoughts are still there, but they don’t hijack us in the same way because these connections are being broken or at least diminished. That is really part of the development of a healthier sense of self and how it may be echoed in the kinds of measurements that we can take of the brain.

TS: OK, and then I need to ask you about this domain of meaning and purpose in terms of having a healthy mind. How possibly could neuroscience tell us anything that would help us develop this deep inner sense of why we’re here?

RD: Here’s where neuroscience has played an important role. Neuroscience helps us to distinguish between people who do have a clear sense of meaning and purpose in their life and those who don’t. One thing that we can say at a very simple and basic level is that there’s the big difference in the functioning of the brain in specific circuits between people who report a strong sense of meaning and purpose in life and those who do not. The ways in which the brains of people who have a strong sense of meaning and purpose in life and those who don’t are interesting and informative, and may begin to help us understand what some of the elements are—or at least the consequences are—neuroscientifically of having this sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Just to give a concrete example: One of the things that seems to happen when a strong sense of meaning and purpose develops is that there is a quality of resilience that occurs. Here, we mean “resilience” in a very specific way—and that is the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. People who have a very strong sense of meaning and purpose in life recover much more quickly from adversity. In part, it’s because they conceive the adversity really as part of a larger whole, if you will, and it doesn’t disrupt their sense of meaning and purpose. Alternatively or complementarily, their sense of meaning and purpose enables them to recovery quickly from adversity. There [are] very specific structures in the brain that we and others have studied that show quite dramatic differences as a consequence of this sense of meaning and purpose.

I would say that we’re beginning to nip at this around the edges. I certainly wouldn’t want a listener to think that we fully understand how this might work in the brain. But we’re beginning to understand some of at least the correlates in the brain of meaning and purpose.

TS: OK, just to conclude here, Richie, I’m imagining someone who’s listening who has heard you say each one of us is very individual. So, the practice that works for some other person may or may not work for us, but it’s clear that meditation as a category of practices clearly have shown certain benefits for certain people. What I’m wondering is: if you could say anything else in a definitive way about what you feel very confident in, [what] will actually create positive changes in someone’s life besides the practice of meditation? Like, “If I could only recommend a handful of things that people intentionally cultivate in their life for greater well-being, here’s what I recommend.”

RD: Things that are not contemplative practices?

TS: I’m going to leave it open to you, but we’ve talked a lot about any type of meditation, but you could be more specific if you want. Yes, like, “Here is like Richie’s neuroscientifically informed—granted it’s limited—prescription for well-being. Train in this.”

RD: Yes. I’ll go out on a limb and say the following” One of the things that we haven’t talked about, Tami, that’s just [a] super exciting development in modern scientific research in the behavioral neurosciences is what I call “innate basic goodness.” Innate basic goodness. What I mean by that is there’s more and more really good. hard-nosed evidence that suggest that each of us comes into the world with an innate propensity to prefer the good—to prefer warm-hearted, altruistic, cooperative interactions compared to those that are selfish, greedy, and aggressive.

The data are really strong—that suggest that we come into life early in development with this very strong propensity. I would go so far as to say that innate basic goodness is really a fundamental property of the human mind that each of us share. As a consequence, practices which nurture this capacity are practices that I think are really important for everyone and are accessible to everyone, and they could be really simple practices—practices simply reflecting on the simple idea that we all share the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering, that we all have this basic innate goodness. We may forget that we have it. We may be distracted from it. We may have been raised in circumstances which minimize the likelihood that we connect to this, but we all have it.

It’s very much like language. We all come into the world with a biological propensity for language, but in order for this propensity to be expressed—in the case of language—we need to be raised in a normal linguistic community. There are cases of feral children who’ve been raised in the wild that don’t develop normal language. I think the same is true for qualities like kindness and compassion and appreciation. There are simple things that we can do in our lives to remind us of this basic innate goodness. If we do those, and sprinkle them throughout the day, I’m absolutely convinced from a scientific evidence that we can improve our individual well-being, we can improve the well-being of groups, and we can improve the well-being or organizations and of the world.

It really is building upon this innate basic goodness and cultivating it that makes it so accessible. From a scientific research, we know that a practice like this that’s as short as eight minutes can produce measurable changes on objective indices that we’re not suggesting necessarily will endure, but if the practices are done over time, we think that—we know change will happen.

TS: I have to say ending on that note makes me incredibly happy! Cultivating our innate goodness, our shared humanity. Richie, I just want to say I know you as a researcher and an educator, but in this conversation, what I really feel is your bodisattvic activity, if you will, and what a pioneering social activist you are—and how your work really is creating such positive waves of social change. I feel incredibly grateful to you and bowing on the inside to you for your work. Thank you so much.

RD: Thank you for your wonderful questions, Tami. I appreciate all that you do in helping to disseminate and promote this kind of activity in so many different sectors. A deep bow of gratitude to you.

TS: Thanks everyone for listening. I’ve been speaking with Richie Davidson. He is the author of the book The Emotional Life of Your Brain.

SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey.

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