Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today I speak with Rick Hanson. Rick is a neuropsychologist, and cofounder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom along with Dr. Rick Mendius. Rick is the coauthor of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, as well as the Sounds True audio learning programs “Meditations for Happiness” and “Meditations to Change Your Brain.” I spoke with Rick about the neurological structure of the brain, and how this knowledge can help us enhance and create a positive mental outlook, as well as healing negative memories and emotions. Here’s Rick Hanson on “You Can Change Your Brain.”
Tami Simon: Rick, to begin with, you’re a psychologist, and then someone who’s also been a longtime meditator, and I’m curious how you got involved in the study of neuroscience.
Rick Hanson: Well, I’ve always been really interested in the mind, and by that I mean just the usual mess: in other words, thoughts, feelings, desires, frustrations, longings, memories, all that, reactions to parents and schoolkids and so on. And then increasingly it’s become clearer, especially with science, that the mind is mostly if not entirely what the brain does. So if you’re interested in what your mind is doing, it really helps to understand what your brain is doing. And recently in the last ten, twenty years probably, there’s actually kind of a critical-mass knowledge about the brain that tells you enough that you can actually start to do things thoughtfully to light up the brain states that support positive mental states. So for me, someone who has a personal interest in this for himself, but also really wants to help people, that was like, “Oh my gosh, we found the golden key!”
Tami Simon: OK, OK, slow down here a minute. What has happened in the last ten or twenty years? What kinds of scientific breakthroughs have happened that have brought this “golden key” as you were saying?
Rick Hanson: Well, a lot of things have come together. It’s not just one thing. It’s estimated that by, literally the executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that knowledge about the brain has literally doubled in the last twenty years. We know twice as much today as we did twenty years ago, and a lot of that is due to the advent of new technologies. Just like the microscope revolutionized biology, say, or the telescope revolutionized astronomy, imaging technologies like with MRIs, fMRIs, which means you can get a moving picture of what’s going on, have really enabled people to look inside the head without hurting anybody, in other words. And that has literally just transformed the field. And that’s been one big thread.
I think a second big thread is very interesting in that, for all kinds of reasons, scientists have become much more interested in people who have really trained their minds, to see what’s happening in their brains, and so they’ve really turned to the contemplatives. They’ve taken a real hard look at long-term meditators, and for various reasons, some of them historical probably, Buddhism has been the main place they’ve looked, partly because its very [inaudible] mind is translatable to Western science, and also because the Dalai Lama in particular has really been interested in this.
So these two things have really come together: these new microscopes for peering into the brain, and combined with people who have trained their mind extensively, so you can really see what some of the impacts are on the brain. And all that has become increasingly a set of tools that regular people can use in daily life to feel a lot better, and have a lot more happiness, love, and wisdom in their life.
Tami Simon: OK, so let’s just take each of these two developments in the field of neuroscience and look at them for a moment. The first, as you were mentioning, is just that we know a lot more now about the brain than we did twenty years ago. What do we know about the brain that’s significant that I care about?
Rick Hanson: Oh, a couple examples. One, we know a lot, lot more about what happens when people get upset. When they’re stuck in traffic, frustrated, or aren’t doing what their spouse, or can’t get their child to act right or whatever. When they’re upset, we now know tremendously much more about how the circuits of the brain work when people are upset. For example, we understand increasingly how it is that people get emotionally hijacked by their upsets. In other words, parts of the brain, for example, one is called the amygdala, it’s an alarm bell, as it were, in the brain. The interesting thing about it is that the great majority of its neurons are focused on negative information. So it’s really looking for negative information. That was very useful when we evolved, to make sure that we had managed to duck all those sticks. I mean, it’s important to find carrots, but from an evolutionary standpoint sticks are much more important. Paying attention to sticks, to avoid lethal threats.
So anyway, we’ve learned that the amygdala tends to overreact and, for example, what happens when people are chronically stressed, the chronic cortisol release (cortisol is a hormone that’s a stress hormone) when cortisol gets released because we’re upset—because when we’re upset we’re stressed, or even mildly upset, like irritated or frustrated, you’re getting a cortisol release, all right, in your body. It takes quite a while for it to go away. Anyway, what cortisol does is it sensitizes the amygdala, and so it makes that alarm bell even more sensitive and louder, and it also undermines another part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is right next to the amygdala. The hippocampus forms new memories, but it also puts the brakes on the amygdala. So chronic stress has this really nasty one-two punch: one, it jacks up the alarm bell, and two, it weakens the brakes on the alarm bell. And that’s a series of discoveries that’s just been made really in the last ten or so years. That would be one example.
Tami Simon: Just in that example, to make sure that I understand it: you’re saying that we developed this response to stress, being hyperalert, as kind of a survival necessity?
Rick Hanson: That’s correct.
Tami Simon: But that that’s no longer necessary? Aren’t I still intensely interested in my survival and success, and don’t I want to be sensitive to threats at all times? I mean, I feel like I’m out in the open range as I say this to you, but I feel that way a lot.
Rick Hanson: Well, you want to be sensitive to real threats. I mean, there are two kinds of mistakes we can make in life: one is that we think there’s a tiger but there’s no tiger, or it’s really a little pussy cat. Or there is a tiger, but we don’t recognize it, that’s it’s a tiger. And the brain is designed to make the first mistake a lot, because just to avoid making the second mistake. In other words, we evolved an environment—and we’re talking, I say “evolved,” we’re really talking one hundred and fifty million years or more of mammal evolution, which is when these emotion systems developed over time. That’s a long time. And during that time, that’s a lot of ancestors that got eaten, frankly, by predators. Or in social groups, primates have been around for eighty million years, and in social groups a lot of threats come from other members of the group, very aggressive toward each other. And also the humans, hunter gatherers, stone tools came in about two and a half million years ago, those folks had brains a third our size. The brain has tripled in two and a half million years; most of it’s related to emotion and relationships, interestingly. But anyway, even in those environments, the battles between bands were really, really intense, estimates are maybe one in eight people were killed as a result of them, compared to one in a hundred killed in all the wars in the twentieth century, see what I mean? So these are really intense environments. So in those environments it makes sense to be paranoid, anxious, and irritable!
But today, much of the time, the truth is we’re not subject to lethal threat, we have many, many, many more resources so we can cope with them a lot better, and yet we still have this hair-trigger neurobiology that’s just ready to go. That’s why the brain has what’s called a negativity bias. It’s really biased toward negative information. You’re probably familiar with the findings from couples counseling from John Gottman and others that it takes five good interactions to make up for one bad one, because that one negative interaction has such an impact. And the problem with all that of course is that as you go through life, most of your experiences are neutral to positive, but the brain doesn’t particularly remember them. But anything that’s negative it fast-tracks it; the brain’s like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones. And the unfortunate thing is, it’s totally unfair. Now, even though most of your life is 99.5 percent or more neutral to positive, slowly over time you start building up what’s called implicit memory, not so much for events but just for feelings, this big pile of negative implicit memory that starts tilting your landscape of your mind in an increasingly negative direction.
And again, I think that brain science is really useful there, because it points to, OK, we have this—I won’t call it a design flaw, it worked really great to enable our ancestors to succeed and to have you and me talking on the phone today, but that predisposition, that negativity bias, really undermines well-being and also functioning. It really makes it harder for people to interact with each other and so forth. So what the scientists indicated is both the nature of that negativity bias, but also how you can use memory systems every day in daily life, in the little things of daily living, to counterbalance it and increasingly build up a pile of positive experiences by taking in the good.
Tami Simon: OK, so I get that there’s a part of my brain that’s biased toward negativity. I can confirm that from my own personal experience.
Rick Hanson: A lot of your brain, not just part of it!
Tami Simon: Oh, a lot of my brain?
Rick Hanson: All systems. Including in your body, because when we talk about the brain, that’s shorthand for the nervous system, which is intertwined with the hormonal system and other systems in your body.
Tami Simon: OK. All of me is biased toward negativity. I can still confirm that. My question is that through the science of the last two decades, what have we learned—you mentioned this thing about implicit memory—what have we learned to help shift this? If I’m being paranoid for no reason, how can I work with my brain to shift toward being more balanced in my view of the world?
Rick Hanson: Right. I’ll mention two methods that can be derived from two sorts of lines of research, in a real summary way. The first is that research has shown what lots of people already experienced in therapy, but researchers really clarified it, that when you put words to your feelings, when you just label them, that does two things. One, it really stimulates activity in what’s called the prefrontal cortex—the very front part of your brain, kind of just behind the forehead; and second, it really lowers activity in this amygdala alarm circuit. And so that’s a finding that shows that the simple act of naming to yourself what you’re feeling as you’re feeling it helps to dampen this overreaction that’s driven by this negativity bias.
Tami Simon: No matter what you’re feeling?
Rick Hanson: Good question.
Tami Simon: Naming positive feelings, naming negative feelings?
Rick Hanson: Oh, I see what you’re saying. That’s very interesting. Again, the thing about these technologies is they’re really in their infancy. I think honestly we have to think about hundreds of years before the brain is really, really, really understood. But meanwhile, so the studies—I’ve actually never seen a study about labeling positive emotions. It might exist, but what people are interested in, of course, are how to handle painful experiences. And it’s, also to be clear, it’s not just that labeling it will make yourself, “Oh yeah, I just feel great again!” I mean, things happen—There’s a place for negative experience, there’s a place for having a hard, open biode[?], tenderizing the heart with pain, using the anger to focus on social injustice and things like that, but very few people would say they’re not having enough negative emotions rolling through their mind.
So the point is that just labeling it won’t necessarily make it go away, you need to do other things as well, there are other disciplines and techniques, but that’s one example I wanted to give you where there’s good research that supports a method. Do you want to hear the other one about—
Tami Simon: Yes, I do.
Rick Hanson: What’s really interesting is that people are starting to understand, scientists are starting to understand, how memory is actually formed, and the way the brain does it is that it’s so fast and it has so many neurons that it can afford to rebuild a memory from scratch, or from some basic seeds, if you would call it that, each time it brings it up. So let’s say you had an experience when you were young, I’ll speak personally here, being picked last in sports. OK, so that’s an embarrassing and uncomfortable and painful experience. And so if I remember that, right now I’m remembering it, my brain basically is rebuilding that memory. OK, and here’s the interesting part: when my mind starts to move on to the next thing, that memory gets restored, it gets reconsolidated is the word, in memory stores. But when it gets reconsolidated, it’s vulnerable to change. Literally, for example, there are rat studies that if you inject rats with a certain chemical that blocks protein synthesis in different ways, that you can literally erase a memory. It’s interesting, the fellow Joseph LeDoux, who did much of the research on this said in his book Synaptic Cells that he actually got an e-mail from a guy who said, “Can you make me forget my ex-wife?” It doesn’t really work like that, right! But that’s the basic idea.
Well, with human beings, we can’t really take those drugs, although drug companies right today are working on it, because if you can patent that kind of drug, you’d make a lot of money. But anyway, what you can do instead yourself is, when something painful is in awareness, if you bring also to mind positive information, especially positive feelings that are really felt and intense, that are a counter to that negative experience, you gradually infuse that negative experience with positive associations when it goes back into storage. And so the next time it comes up, it’ll bring a little bit of that positive tinge with it. It won’t change overnight; you need to stick with it. But over time, you can gradually really help yourself from the inside out, shift your interior landscape. You won’t forget what happened, and there will probably still be some charge on it, but the charge can be really diminished over time by either taking good experiences and sending them into those old hurt places inside, or when you recall something from that old hurt place, also at some point that feels right to you, maybe bringing to mind something else that’s positive.
Tami Simon: So you’re saying that the memory isn’t a solid thing. Like the memory you brought up of not being picked for sport teams, how would you work with that in the present to bring this technique that you’re offering here?
Rick Hanson: Well, a couple sort of disclaimers. I think it’s important and fundamental to be able to just be with your experience as it is, without trying to tinker with it, and just be with it and bear it and be mindful of it, and be spacious and aware. That itself is a wonderful thing for many reasons, and is really fundamental. Second, I think there’s a pitfall. I lived through the sixties and the whole human potential movement and all the rest of it, I was a part of it, and there were a lot of good things about it, but you can take it too far to where you have this tinkering-with-your-mind-all-the-time obsession, and I think that’s a pitfall.
But that said, a lot of us are afflicted in some ways with these painful experiences that just keep coming back or haunting us in some way. So let’s use mine of being picked last. So I’m thinking about being picked last. First I allow myself to feel what I feel. I bring compassion to myself about it, I accept it, I name it: “Oh, there again: feeling inadequate, feeling unwanted, lame-o, everybody’s watching, ugh, what a loser!” So I’m aware of all that stuff, and feelings, and I can feel it in my body. I can even feel it right now in this phone call, that funny feeling in the chest when you get back in touch with that sort of stuff.
And then what I would do is I would deliberately bring to mind counters to that, not at an intellectual level—there’s a place for that, that’s like cognitive therapy—but what I’m talking about is emotional and felt in the body. So I would bring to mind the feelings I’ve had countless times in rock climbing, where I feel really strong, I feel fit, I’m good at it, I succeed at it, it’s challenging and scary and when I get through it, I feel good. I’m doing it right now. That feeling that I’m bringing into memory is a great counter to that old experience of feeling kind of weak and inadequate, for example. So I would just think about rock climbing or something else; it could be playing touch football—I’m good at it, I like it, I feel good, so it makes me feel good, I’m bringing that association to mind. That too is starting to get mingled with—because the brain is a giant networker. The World Wide Web is inside the head. It’s constantly networking, so it associates things, for better or for worse, in this case hopefully for better by bringing in positive memories.
Tami Simon: Interesting. So what you’re saying is that there’s a kind of fluidity or plasticity to the brain where things aren’t solid; you can reimprint these memories such that the next time it comes up, it won’t come up with the same kind of pain because you’ve grounded these positive experiences and networked them with the old pain. Is that what you’re saying?
Rick Hanson: That’s very well said. And to stress the point you made, plasticity or fluidity, you’re aware of the phrase “neuroplasticity” these days. For the brain to learn, for us to learn at all, the brain has to be plastic. In other words, for a child to learn to walk or to talk or to read, the brain has to be plastic. But plasticity doesn’t end when you graduate from high school; I mean, it’s a lifelong process. And most of the plasticity of the brain is in social, emotional learning. It’s not so much in conceptual, linguistically based learning. And so the fundamental idea is that I think is that it’s so common to feel kind of like we’re stuck with our mind. You know, it is what it is, and we just kind of make our way regardless, but to feel increasingly that you can gradually but definitely influence your own mind, resting on the brain, by changing the brain, you can gradually, gradually sift new, positive influences into the tapestry, you can weave those positive influences into this dynamic, evolving, changing, very alive tapestry of the brain—wow, that’s fantastic! It just gives you a little feeling in your heart, from the inside out, that you can actually do something that’s real. It’s grounded in science, it’s grounded in the brain, it’s lasting, it’s enduring, you can do something that’s real, that really helps yourself feel better, and be kinder and more gracious and less abrasive and contentious to other people around you.
Tami Simon: I’m curious what’s happening in the brain if a negative past experience comes up in memory, and I’m just with it, as you mentioned that that in and of itself is beneficial. I’m just sitting with it, I’m not reacting, I’m just accepting it. Is there something happening in my brain at that point, even if I don’t call in this positive association?
Rick Hanson: Well, it’s a tricky thing. So first off, there’s this classic phrase, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, that’s a major mechanism for the way in which what we experience leaves a lasting trace. In other words, what we experience seems immaterial, right? It’s a feeling, it’s a thought, it’s an image, what have you. But actually it’s leaving a trace in neural structure. And any single trace doesn’t matter that much usually, but it’s the slow, accumulating weight of traces that makes a difference. So if we’re thinking about a painful memory, those neurons are firing, and an extra little bit of wiring is occurring just by thinking about it. So that’s one reason why one of the take aways for me from what I’ve learned in the last five, ten years in this field, is I really think of my own mind kind of like a temple and be thoughtful and mindful about what I allow in it, because what’s in my mind is wiring away if it’s firing away. So a take away there is to be thoughtful and a little cautious about ruminating about negative experiences. That’s the first thing.
Second, some people who have a trauma history should not try to think about their painful memories, because it just triggers a loop, and that just starts looping. When it’s looping, those neurons are firing and therefore wiring, and that’s not a good thing.
Now let’s say that’s not what’s happened here. There’s just kind of being with it. And being with it has a lot of positive qualities. For one, there’s a detachment from what you’re with, right? You’re not just totally sucked into it. You’re mindfully aware of it. Often people are aware of it with an attitude of kind of a kindness or acceptance. That attitude is itself powerful and beneficial for people; very often if people did not experience much of that kindness or acceptance from their family or in their schools with their peers as would be ideal, so they’re giving to themselves today what was missing or in short supply when they were young, and that sinks in. That is also firing away, and therefore wiring away. And the last thing is when people move to that place of mindfulness and being with, it tends to activate what’s called the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system, which is sort of the soothing, calming, bodily relaxing antidote to the fight-or-flight sympathetic wing of the nervous system. So all those are good things.
Tami Simon: Makes sense. Now, in the beginning of our conversation, you were saying that in the last ten to twenty years, we’ve learned all of this new information about the brain, and in addition we’ve begun studying the brains of meditators to discover interesting things, and I’m curious if you can talk some about that: what have we discovered about the brains of people who do a lot of intensive meditation?
Rick Hanson: Sure. Well, the studies are in their infancy, they’ve been done mainly on two groups of meditators—well, actually it’s really three groups. Number one, people who do or did transcendental meditation; second, people doing quite deep contemplative practice in Buddhism, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism; and also there’s been a growing number of studies of people who’ve had fairly brief mindfulness–meditation training or mindfulness stress–reduction training, and what are the results there. So those three groups have been studied.
Number one they’ve found that meditation makes a difference in the brain, and I’ll go back to what some of those differences are in a second. Second, those differences are based on what’s called dosing. They talk about dosages of meditation, which is funny because it’s not dosages of Prozac or something, but anyway, in other words, you get practice effects: the more you meditate, the better the effect, for example. And then they’ve also found some very interesting findings that people who have a strong meditation practice can do pretty remarkable things and unusual things with their brains that people who don’t meditate can’t do. So to kind of rewind and summarize, major findings about effects of meditation on the brain are, in no particular order, it literally thickens the amount of gray matter; it increases grey matter in the prefrontal cortex, that very frontmost part of the brain just behind your forehead. It increase grey matter—
Tami Simon: Can you go ahead and explain what grey matter is and why I want more of it?
Rick Hanson: Yeah, really! Sounds so dull and yuck, right? Grey—who wants that, right? Anyway, quick summary here. The brain has 1.1 trillion cells, weighs about three pounds, looks kind of like tofu basically, but packed into that brain of three pounds are 1.1 trillion cells. One hundred billion of them are neurons, so of the grey matter—let’s see, there’s grey matter and white matter. White matter is the non-neurons, which is the great majority of the cells in the brain, and second it’s the axons, which are the little fibers that connect the cell bodies of the neurons to each other. Neurons are like a little switch in a sense, it’s on-off, it either fires or it doesn’t, and the axons are like little wires connecting one hundred billion switches together inside your head.
So you want more grey matter, because what that means is that you are building connections between neurons. It means that you’re actually getting more connections going in the brain, which increases your functionality and performance, if you will, in that part of your brain. Other than a very small percentage of the neurons in the brain, you don’t grow new neurons, generally speaking. You do grow some new neurons in the hippocampus—and exercise really helps, by the way, to grow new neurons, so I think there are a lot of new neurons in Boulder, personally! But most of what you do is grow connections. So it’s good to have more grey matter in different parts of the brain.
Tami Simon: Does that mean connecting the left and right side of my brain, or just connecting various different thoughts, and that’s making me more creative and able to see synchronicities and that kind of thing?
Rick Hanson: Well, the findings on meditation are more that you are—it’s not so much you’re connecting the left and right hemispheres together more, although I personally bet that people are, by the nature of meditation, because you’re feeling things and you’re also labeling them, but it’s more that, what the scientists have found, at least so far, is that you’re building up grey matter in certain areas that have some really important functions.
For example, I was going to say that the second place that you build up grey matter is called the insula; it’s right in the middle of the brain. And that part of the brain is what we use to sense our own internal state of being, particularly in our body, and our deep feelings, but we also use it for empathy. It’s what we use to tune into the feelings of other people and resonate with them by stimulating inside ourselves a kind of echo or resonance with what they’re feeling over there. So by meditating, or doing other related forms of brain activities, like listening to guided visualizations or doing mindfulness-based stress reduction, things like that, or listening to people in other Sounds True products and so forth, they’re building up their insula, so they’re more in touch with themselves. And that will also help spark creativity, because a lot of creative stuff comes from the bottom up, it kind of bubbles up, so if you’re more in touch with yourself, you’re going to be able to access inspiration and creativity, but it also makes you more in tune with other people. So that’s one of a number of findings of the effects of meditation on the brain. It increases serotonin, it increases activation in the left side of the prefrontal cortex—
Tami Simon: Go a little slower with me, Rick. On the increasing serotonin, what are the effects of that?
Rick Hanson: Sure. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, and neurotransmitters are these little chemicals in between neurons, that’s how neurons communicate with each other. Serotonin is a really important one; a lot of people have heard about it because it’s very centrally involved in depression and mood, and also being able to manage stress and sleep well, and digestion too. But in terms of the psychological aspects of it, if you’re meditating more, you’re probably increasing serotonin levels. So it’s a good thing.
Also, like I was saying, one sign too that meditation, both in terms of people who have meditated a lot, but also literally people— Richard Davidson took people, it was either a six- or an eight-week course with people who are technology types, not into their bodies, not into meditation, and after I think just eight weeks, they had more activation in the left prefrontal cortex, the left side of the very frontmost parts of the frontal lobes, than the right side, and what’s interesting is that the activation of the left side is associated with positive emotions. So in other words, when you meditate more, you’re strengthening a part of your brain, you’re stimulating and therefore strengthening the part of your brain that deals with increasing positive emotions, and regulating negative emotions.
Tami Simon: OK, Rick, let me ask you a question that may sound a little idiotic. I’m imagining someone who is a long-term meditator will have a natural way to feel into what you’re saying, and say, “Yeah, that makes sense, I’ve noticed some kinds of changes like that.” Somebody who’s not a meditator might think, “Wait a second, I don’t get it. There’s that person sitting over there on a cushion, watching their breath, working with feelings of love and loving-kindness and expanding those feelings—how is something that simple creating all of these changes in the brain? What’s the operational functioning there that’s happening?
Rick Hanson: Well, if I got you right, I’d say, well, play a board games with your kids or your friends, or get in a conversation with someone, or just plan a summer vacation—in all those cases, you’re engaging in a lot of brain activity. And listening to this podcast, you’re engaging in brain activity.
Tami Simon: That’s for sure!
Rick Hanson: I hope I’m not overwhelming you!
Tami Simon: That’s OK, I’m just kidding.
Rick Hanson: And firing and wiring: as soon as those neurons start firing, they start wiring. And so little things—like for example, I love some of this stuff because it’s so goofy, it’s far out. Like taxi drivers in London, who have to memorize all these twisty streets, their hippocampus—remember the hippocampus again, it forms memories, it especially forms memories of where you are in space—their hippocampuses (hippocampi, they’re two of them) get bigger. They get more grey matter in the hippocampus just by memorizing London streets. So mental activity changes neural structure.
It just so happens that meditation is a certain kind of mental activity that changes neural structure that’s related to meditation, things like self-awareness, control of attention, positive mood—those for example are used when you meditate, and therefore, no surprise, those brain regions develop when you do those practices.
Tami Simon: OK. Now the program that you created here with Sounds True is called “Meditations to Change Your Brain.” And what I’m curious about is, first of all we’re using the mind to change our brain, and so we have to make some distinctions here between the mind and the brain, and I’m wondering if you can help orient me.
Rick Hanson: It’s an ultimately really deep question that science is grappling with, and no one knows how neural activity translates into conscious experience. In other words, the classic example is the color red: you see something red, or if you’re color-blind, you see something that’s a different shade of brown or whatever, you see a difference out there—no one knows how light bouncing off that object and hitting your retina and going through your brain becomes that experience. That said, it’s increasingly clear that when your brain changes, your mind changes. In other words, if you fiddle with the brain, you can create mental experiences for people in all kinds of ways. For example, fiddle with your brain with your morning coffee: that creates mental experiences of a different kind.
But the other side is true: in other words, when the mind changes, the brain changes. And it changes both temporarily but also in really lasting ways. So the point is that by using your mind, but in a targeted way, a clever way, you can build up the circuits that you really want to build up, and you can control the circuits you want to control, and in fact you can slowly almost erase the circuits that you kind of want to get rid of. Within limits, but you actually have a lot of influence over your own brain by using your mind in a targeted way. And I guess the point is that science has given us those targets; in other words, it’s not perfect yet, this is like a really good early draft of an effort at this, but already there’s a lot of promise here in the multiple meditations in the product I did with you. There are a lot of very focused uses of the mind that will reliably change the brain in some targeted ways.
Tami Simon: OK, again, just to go a little bit further, the brain is the sort of physical apparatus. What is the mind?
Rick Hanson: I think of the mind as the flow of information to the nervous system. So for example, think of it this way. Listeners are hearing sounds right now, but what they’re really doing is they’re extracting meaning. In other words, that’s information.
Tami Simon: We’re hoping so!
Rick Hanson: We hope so! They’re pulling meaning out of a physical substrate that starts out with sound waves from whatever they’re listening to into their ear, whether it’s earphones, a speaker, or in their car or something like that. So the point is that information is being carried by hardware. Software is being carried by hardware. The point is that it could be all kinds of hardware. For example, when we originally recorded the program, it got put on a certain kind of digital recording and that got transferred onto other forms, and now the meaning is traveling through sound waves. The brain and the mind are the same: the mind is like the software; it’s the meaning, it’s the information flowing through that’s supported by this hardware, the nervous system. Most of the mind is out of awareness; it’s unconscious—we’ll never be aware of it, and that’s the way it is. But the point is that for mental activity to occur, including just understanding these words right now, or just remembering if I said, “Birthday cake,” and whoosh, associations pop up for birthday cake: that mental activity could not occur without underlying neural activity. So there’s a one-to-one correspondence, a mapping if you will, a relationship between the mind and the brain.
To be clear, the mind makes the brain as much as the brain makes the mind. They codependently arise if you will; they work together. But by using the mind in a very focused way, you can change over time the neural activities that mental activity is mapping to.
Tami Simon: Now this gets metaphysical, but the obvious question is, if there’s this one-to-one mapping, is there no consciousness without the brain?
Rick Hanson: That’s again a great question. Very early on I slipped something in, which is that the mind is mostly if not entirely what the brain does. I slipped that in mostly because some people—and science does not deal in terms of some ultimate or transcendental factor, it just sets it aside. It’s possible that we’ll discover that for human consciousness to occur. And then you have to ask yourself, would it apply to the consciousness of a dog or a squirrel or a mosquito? For consciousness to occur, there has to be something mysteriously transcendental at work that goes beyond the physical universe, that goes beyond the operation of the brain. We don’t know yet. But meanwhile, boy, every day scientists are discovering tighter and tighter connections between the mind and the brain.
I personally am a transcendentalist; I think there really is something mysteriously transcendental; I think there’s something irreducible that’s required for mental functioning to occur, but most thoughts, feelings, most of what we care about in terms of daily living, I think it maps really, really closely to brain activity. And therefore, by being able to influence brain activity, you can influence mental activity.
Tami Simon: OK, because I’m interested in you, Rick, I’d like to know what has given you this bent toward a transcendentalist view. What experiences in life, or why is that your instinct?
Rick Hanson: All right, the deep end of the pool! I’d say there’s two things. One, I’d guess I’d just say I experience it. I just experience that there is something conscious, blissful, awake, alive, that arises as this universe. I just experience it. Now, whether that experience is an artifact of my imagination—I can’t prove it, right? But I can say I totally experience it, and it’s frankly one of the most important experiences (if that’s even the right word for it) of my life. But it’s not an idea. It’s not conceptual. It’s a sense of the way things really are. And when I read certain teachings that speak of that more eloquently than I just did, and from a more mature place of realization too, I instantly feel the truth of it. I guess I would just say that. You know, stuff we feel is true. Maybe we’re wrong, but we feel it’s true.
Second, it makes sense to my mind. One, the fact that pretty universally, very, very realized people who have really gone about as far as you possibly can in human development, they usually all say kind of the same thing, which is by whatever language they use, it varies from culture to culture, there’s an X factor. Call it God, call it the ground, call it nothing at all, the nameless, the unconditioned—there’s something there. The fact that we have the testimony of so many independent people across all kinds of cultures, never met each other, is very persuasive to me. Second, when you think about how the universe was created, or emerged, the notion that it just bubbled out, and it arises in this and out of and as, who knows, this underlying matrix could be eleven dimensions in strength, who knows—I don’t know, it just seems to make sense to me that there’s something bigger than this universe that’s making a difference in this universe.
Tami Simon: Thank you. Now from the deep end of the pool to maybe the most challenging end of the pool, I know that you’re a parent—
Rick Hanson: Yep.
Tami Simon: —and I’m curious what you’ve discovered about the brain that has helped you in parenting.
Rick Hanson: Wow. Well, let’s see here. I wish I had known more about it earlier on!
Tami Simon: Fair enough!
Rick Hanson: A couple of things. One, I really learned how sensitive the brain is to physiology, and I really appreciate coming to see it in my own kids, who are both very sensitive to gluten grains and protein, for example. A lot of people are. And it’s not that it’s going to put them in the hospital, but boy, it’ll make them cranky and depressed and forgetful and irritable.
Tami Simon: And those nutritional inputs are affecting their brain?
Rick Hanson: Yes. They intertwine. In other words, for example, the immune system and the nervous system are really intertwined. There’s a whole field now called psychoneuroimmunology, because it all goes together. The psycho part has to do with the mind; you know, psychology, that’s conscious experience, generally speaking. So our conscious experience is influenced by our nervous system interacting with our immune system. If we are allergic to a food, say, or sensitive to it, that’s activating our immune system, we’re getting a systemic inflammatory reaction through our whole body, and that is also affecting things like concentration and mood and reactivity, irritability, for example. So that’s one thing I’ve learned; I’ve really come to appreciate the impact on conscious experience of small things being not quite right in a person’s physiology that really add up over time.
Second, boy, I’ve really come to appreciate the importance of taking in the good. This whole thing about the negativity bias of the brain, it’s really alive and well in children, and also kids who are particularly anxious, say, or particularly spirited, in other words, on either end of the temperamental spectrum, they especially need to take in the good, because anxious kids tend to not notice it, and spirited kids move on so fast to the next thing that they don’t really allow their neurosystems time for the positive experience they just had. So doing little things like really just helping your kids to just take a few seconds to feel something when it’s good, or particularly when they’re young and will put up with this, because they want to keep you in the room when you’re putting them to bed, late at night just before they go to sleep, when their minds are very open, just reviewing the day for a minute about things that happened that were really good, or just good things about them so they feel those good things, and then focus on having them sink in, really go in. I’d say that’s a big thing.
Another, frankly, is to really recognize the power of anger. Anger in our evolution is incredibly salient. They’ve done primate studies that the one emotion that primates, gorillas, baboons, monkeys, orangutans, whatever, or a chimp, the one emotion everybody notices is anger. You know, sorrow, eh, fear, eh—anger, that’s the one. And you just see that in interactions, like in a crowded restaurant, a lot of voices, you pick out someone talking in an angry voice, everybody gets quiet, right? It’s, wow. And just really appreciating the impact of anger in families, on children, on marriages. There’s a place for anger, I think; there’s certainly a place for experiencing it. I think it’s wise to be thoughtful and careful about how we express it, especially with kids, but just to be really thoughtful about the impact of anger, that was another take away for me from all the stuff.
Tami Simon: Are there any studies that demonstrate what’s happening when someone is in the field of anger?
Rick Hanson: I did my early work on child development. Well, there’s a lot of research on the impact on children of parental anger, I can say that, and generally speaking it’s not good. There’s a place for mild, contained, parental anger, but chronic parental anger, or parental anger that’s just way over the top, or parental anger that gets violent—phew, those are all really problematic. Those are red flags, they’re bad.
For adults, there’s a fair amount of research that when we’re around people that are angry, we tend to get a stress reaction. Cortisol levels start to rise, the heart starts beating faster—we are even so sensitive, frankly, that we pick up on vibes. There are interesting studies now where they present angry faces to people in like a hundredth of a second or a fiftieth of a second, so it’s so fast they can’t consciously see it. Consciously they’d say, “I don’t know, I don’t know what I saw.” They don’t even know they saw a face. But the fact that they saw that angry face for that tiny amount of time primes them, in other words, inclines them, tilts them, toward reacting angrily and fearfully themselves to something neutral, for example.
Tami Simon: Makes sense. Now, one area that I’m personally really interested in, and I’m sure that other people who are meditators are interested, is where the sense of “me” comes from, and how that relates to what we know about the brain at this point.
Rick Hanson: [Laughs] Wow, another deep end question! Can I say one thing that’s tangential, because it’s in my mind, an important point, and then I’ll come back?
Tami Simon: Please.
Rick Hanson: One thing that strikes me is that a lot of us feel at the affect of our reactions.[sic] We have these thoughts, we wish we had different thoughts; we have these feelings, we wish we had different feelings. Or they obstruct us; we feel afraid to really tell someone that we love them. Or we feel really inhibited about taking a chance in our career or our work because we don’t want to flop, even though everyone tells us we ought to try it, that it’s actually low risk, whatever it is. And then also out in the larger world, not just inside our heads, in the larger world we see all these forces that we have no control over. War, terrorism, the economy, the recession, politics—we just feel like, “Wow, there’s so little I can have an effect on.”
But the one thing that makes the most difference in your life is the operation of your brain, and wonderfully. That’s the thing that you can actually have the most effect on. You have pretty limited ability to affect your marriage or your kids or your job or your neighbors or your government, but boy, you have a lot of power to affect your own brain, which then will change you gradually over time. It’s not like it will make you a different person, but it will make a lot of little differences that will add up to big differences over time. And to feel that you have efficacy, in other words, that you can be a cause there, that you can be a hammer instead of being a nail in life, boy, that just makes people feel really good. And it also lifts mood, because one of the key antidotes to depression is feeling like you actually are not helpless, but can actually make things happen in your life. For me that’s one of the fundamental ideas behind this meditation to change your brain; it’s not just the meditations themselves, it’s the larger point that you really have the power in your own hands to change your brain, and if you change your brain, you change your life.
Tami Simon: That was a very empowering tangent, Rick.
Rick Hanson: Okay, good. Yeah, now, “me.”
Tami Simon: What about “me?” Where does “me” come from?
Rick Hanson: Well, it’s interesting, I just got back from a conference about that actually, which was really interesting, where they brought contemplatives together with neuroscientists to tackle exactly that question. And it’s a huge question, Tami, so I’m trying to think what would be short and sweet here and useful to people.
Tami Simon: And not too brainy. Just a little brainy, but not too brainy.
Rick: Well, here’s some interesting things. On one hand, people have a really strong sense of “me,” right?
Tami Simon: Yeah.
Rick Hanson: In fancy language, people have a really strong sense of what’s called ownership; in other words, that they’re having their own experience. In other words, I’m having my experiences of this phone call; I’m not having Tami’s experience. That’s pretty basic right there. The second thing is that they have a sense of agency, that I’m the one who decided to listen to this, to turn the volume up or down or, God forbid, turn it off. I’m the one who decided that. So we have that really strong sense.
What’s interesting is that it’s really hard to find that in the brain. In other words, when we think of self, we think of a lot of different things. Like recognizing our photograph as distinct from other people, or recalling our own memories, or knowing how we feel about baseball or Republicans or chocolate ice cream or whatever, and all kinds of other things as well. Well, when you have people engage these different, seemingly fundamental “me” related activities, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop: the brain’s like a gigantic popcorn machine. All kinds of parts of the brain light up. It’s not like it’s located in one spot; it’s not like there’s the “me”-ygdala. There’s no “me”-ygdala! It’s whoosh, everywhere. And that totally goes to the Eastern teachings about “me,” which is that “me” is made up of many, many parts, and second, never exists in its own right, but it’s always a result of all these conditions coming together to make it happen.
I personally have concluded that I am a unicorn. What I mean by that is that the thoughts of “me” exists. People ask the question, “Do I exist?” and I say, “Well, thoughts of ‘I’ exist, just like a thought of a red apple exists; as soon as you hear the words, you think about a red apple.” Those thoughts exist, and because it’s a thought and you need the brain to make a mind, the pattern of information that corresponds to a red apple in your mind is supported by a pattern of neural activity, a momentary pattern. OK, it’s real in that sense. But we have thoughts of unicorns; we can make a story about a unicorn, we can imagine a unicorn, but we all know a unicorn really isn’t true. And the notion of the “me,” an “I”—
Tami Simon: OK, I was with you till then! I followed you through the transcendentalist deep dive and everything, but unicorns? You’re really sure they never existed?
Rick Hanson: Well, maybe they did, I don’t know! Pick your own mythical being, I don’t know!
Tami Simon: OK, OK!
Rick Hanson: A snake-headed woman, I don’t know!
Tami Simon: I’m sure they exist, Rick!
Rick Hanson: Santa Claus! The Easter Bunny!
Tami Simon: OK, I get the metaphor.
Rick Hanson: It’s a real representation of a mythical creature, that when we think about the “I” or the “me” in Western psychology in ordinary conversation, we think of it as this coherent being, this entity, that’s sort of the same over time, that’s kind of coherent and autonomous, and there is no such being in the brain. And I don’t think there is any such being at all. I think what happens is that there are moments of awareness that have content in them, and what the brain does is called indexing; it indexes across all these little snapshots to find a movie, and then it strings the snapshots together so it kind of looks like a movie. And in ordinary language, I call you Tami, I don’t call you Geoff or Erin, whatever, there’s a difference there. It’s useful in ordinary life to be a “me.” And I think evolution developed “me”; we have the strongest “me” of any animal on the planet, probably because it’s served a lot of functions as we’ve evolved, especially in relationships, for example. You know, there’s a place for “me”: “‘I’ love ‘you'” has so much more juice than “There’s love arising here between us.”
That said, boy, “me” makes me suffer! You know, getting really possessive, or getting really identified with things just makes us start suffering right then and there. And taking things superpersonally, getting self-conscious, getting all worried about what other people think of us—that just starts making us suffer. So as soon as you start thinking you’re a real unicorn, you start to suffer. Even though unicorns are wonderful and they’re pretty and they’re white and they have long horns, I like them, but if you think you’re a unicorn, you’re going to start to suffer.
Tami Simon: Well, I have to say, “I” have really enjoyed talking to “you”! And I would like to talk to you for a lot longer. I hope we get another chance, because you’re so knowledgeable about this whole area. But I want to end with just one final question, which is that our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and what I’m curious about is, here at the edge of research and this whole field of discovery, if you had the power, whatever, if you had gajillions of dollars available to you, and you could set up labs to do certain kinds of tests, what would be the most interesting to you? What research do you really want to see done?
Rick Hanson: Wow, that’s a wonderful question. And by the way, “I” really have enjoyed speaking with “you”!
Tami Simon: Wonderful.
Rick Hanson: Even though I know you’re not really there! But anyway, you’re a person, see; you’re a person, not a self. I mean, that’s the distinction. We’re people, we’re persons in that we’re unique, but as soon as we start getting into “I” and “me,” trouble usually starts beginning.
Anyway, let’s see. Well, you know, I’ll tell you one thing that really gets to a larger subject, but there’s this Native American teaching I heard of, which as always really touched me, which is that this Native American elder was asked, “Grandmother, how come you’re so revered? Everyone listens to you, you’re respected, everyone loves you—how did that happen? What did you do?” And she said, “Well, honestly it was kind of simple, in that I know that in my heart are two wolves, one of love and one of hate, and it all depends on which one I feed each day.”
And you know, we all have a wolf of love and a wolf of hate inside us; in spiritual circles we have kind of disowned the wolf of hate, which doesn’t do any good, it just grows in the shadows. Actually, in evolution the wolf of love is bigger, but it’s slower, and when we feel threatened, that wolf of hate comes out to howl. And the wolf of hate comes out really quickly as soon as we make a distinction between “us” and “them.” In other words, literally just in the past five years, there’s been a strong thread of research that has shown that humans evolved cooperative altruism toward “us”; in other words, love toward “us” alongside fearful aggression, “hate,” if you will, toward “them.” And the two coevolved, because in these really intense and competitive struggles between bands over millions of years for scarce resources, being aggressive toward “them” and succeeding at it meant that you needed a lot of strong teamwork with “us.” And the threat of “them” really strengthened the teamwork of “us.” So the wolf of love and the wolf of hate evolved together.
That said, when we look out at the world today, it is so quick and easy to go “us” and “them”: blue state, red state; progressive, conservative; fundamentalist, open-minded; Muslim, Christian; Catholic, Protestant—whatever, it’s really fast. Serb, Croatian, Kosovar; Palestinian, Israeli; Shiite, Sunni—bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Studies have shown that even if you break people randomly into groups, and then just assign something meaningless to each group—you see it on Survivor; you know, one tribe is something and the other tribe is the other thing, and instantly they start to feel superior to the other tribe and kind of against them.
So I would do studies on how to help people expand the circle of “us” in ways that are realistic, to start seeing other people as “us” rather than “them.” They may be “us-es”[[this is supposed to be the plural of “us”]] that need to be negotiated with, or “us-es” that need to be dealt with in some practical and effective way in the real world, but you know, even in schoolyards, cliques that form, how do we help people to expand this notion of “us”? Because when we were in breeding groups, which we have been until the last ten thousand years—we evolved in breeding groups of about one hundred people, ballpark—we have all the instincts in us that came from that breeding, and in that environment it worked to have a small circle of “us” surrounded by threatening “them-s.”
But now in the world today, we’re so intertwined. There’s a revolution in some country ten thousand miles away, and oil prices go crazy here at home, and suddenly there are lines at the gas pumps, whatever. It’s a very intertwined world. We can’t afford to have these tiny little islands of “us” surrounded by a threatening sea of “them.” We have to expand that circle of “us.” So that’s the research I would nominate.
Tami Simon: Why did you say that the power of love is slower but stronger? How do we know it’s stronger?
Rick Hanson: Let’s see, really fast. There have been three major jumps in brain size over the last, ballpark, one hundred fifty million years, and each one has been driven by getting good at relationships, and by that I mean kind of as a synonym for love. Getting good at relationships, even squirrels and sparrows, has to do with bonding, attachment, and empathy, which are certainly very fundamental to human love, both romantic and also agape or selfless love.
And so these three steps very quickly were— If you think about it, reptiles and fish have the same problems to survive as mammals and birds, but in proportion to body weight, mammals and birds have substantially bigger brains. What do mammals and birds do that reptiles and fish don’t do? We raise our young, and we pair-bond, often for life, sometimes for life. And so to mange that—in other words, to pick a mate carefully, to figure out how to raise kids as well, how to keep them alive as you go off to get food and bring it back, how to deal with their stuff—all of this stuff a parent has to learn how to do, and work stuff out with your mate, oh my God! How do you share the teamwork, who gets the nuts, who watches the little baby squirrels—you know, what do you do? You need a bigger brain. So that’s the first jump in vertebrate evolution.
Then along come primates. Primates are incredibly social. The more social the primate group—in other words, the bigger it is, the larger the group size is, the more politics is going on in the group, who’s got alliances, who’s beta, who’s alpha, who’s up, who’s down, all that stuff—the more social the group is, again, the bigger the primate brain. And with primates we start to see very human relational capacities, for empathy, reading the intentions of other people, deception, playing politics, working it out, building alliances, sneaking off to betray your alliance there in the corner, everything you see in Survivor—that’s a baboon troupe right there!
Last, human beings. It’s this thing I said to you earlier that in the last two, three million years, our brain has tripled in size. That’s an extraordinary, a huge thing in evolutionary time. Very few analogies to that in any other species. And most of that neuro real-estate is zoned for social/emotional functioning and cooperative planning, because that’s what was at a premium as our ancestors evolved in these really harsh environments with, frankly, very high death rates.
So that’s why I say number one that—it’s called the social brain hypothesis. It’s not unique to me; a lot of research has been done on this, and I see there’s a growing consensus that the survival benefits of being skillful at relationships were a major, if not the major, driver of brain evolution over the last hundred and fifty million years. Certainly over the last ten, twenty million years.
Second, if you think about it, it’s like when you look at the sky and there’s a cloud in it, what do you notice? You notice the cloud, especially if it’s dark. But you don’t really notice the sky, because the sky is huge, but it’s just the sky. It’s the same thing as we notice the drums of war, we notice the howling of the wolf of hate, because it really stands out. But what’s the backdrop? Most human interactions are cooperative. They’re not perfect, but they’re basically cooperative. They’re nonviolent, they’re interactive, people tend to have goodwill for each other when they’re not threatened; in other words, what I said earlier, the wolf of hate is quick. It responds to threat. We’re highly threat-sensitive.
That’s another thing that’s really helped me with my family; I’ve really come to appreciate how hair-trigger the human brain is to threats. And so I do little skillful things to preempt their sense that I’m threatening. Little things, like saying for example, “It’s totally up to you what you want to do about this, son. And I gotta tell you, if you don’t fix the muffler on your car, it’s gonna cost you a lot more later. But it’s up to you.” See what I mean? Because I know that he’s primed to feel that dad’s trying to be the big boss again, blah, blah. He’s twenty-one. And a great guy.
So my point is that the wolf of hate is quick. It’s quick to pounce. That’s why I think it’s very important to pay attention to not being threatening needlessly, and not overreacting to things in our own life that seem threatening.
But without that threat trigger, what do we see? We see the wolf of love. Friendships, bonding, caregiving, people go out of their way to help the children of other people that they don’t even know, people will help strangers. I don’t know the number, but it’s an enormous amount of money, hundreds of billions of dollars every year, I think, if not more in this economy, are charitable contributions of one kind or another, from church tithes to giving to the Red Cross to putting a dollar in the cup of some homeless guy in the street. People do that. So that’s why I think the wolf of love is more powerful than the wolf of hate.
Tami Simon: But it’s interesting that I asked you this question about research, and you’ve given a very kind of inspiring answer about a kind of big vision where we’re not separating “us” and “them.” But what kind of research is going to help forward that kind of agenda?
Rick Hanson: Well, I think some of it is being done; we just find a lot more of it. For example, I think I’d be interested both in what happens when people make distinctions, in other words, between “us” and “them,” or how we’re different from each other, dualisms. I’d be very interested in how people do that, and how they can learn to be aware of it, and not do it so much. That would be one thing.
Second, I’d be very interested in research in high-conflict situations—you know, gangs in the inner city, going on the West Bank in the Middle East, and in other places—and really studying what actually makes people more aware of the commonalities with other people. I’d be very interested in that kind of research too. And people are doing this kind of thing; I would just really, really support it, because I personally think that if we don’t come to grips with that in this century, our great-grandchildren will curse us.
Tami Simon: Well, thank you, Rick. It’s been a really wild ride of fun conversation—thank you.
Rick Hanson: [Laughs] I hope our great-grandchildren will bless us! I hope they will say that this generation, which came up— I have some grey hair, the greybeards of this generation, you know, the current group of adults on the planet today, the greybeards that came up in the West during extraordinarily creative time with enormous promise and resources and change, radical, wonderful change— And also I think the flow of information and the rise of nongovernmental-based organizations worldwide is creating a real possibility that is unprecedented in human history, to really change this planet. And I hope our great-grandchildren will bless us for taking that opportunity and running with it.
Tami Simon: I will invest in that neuro-pathway right now!
Rick Hanson: [Laughs] Great!
Tami Simon: Thank you, Rick.
Rick Hanson: Thank you very much.
