[MUSIC PLAYING] DANIEL GOLEMAN: When we started,
meditation was not cool. It was very uncool-- ultra uncool. Now it's ultra cool. And we want to talk about
that arc, how that happened. But before we do, we
thought we'd try it. Over to you. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
So we thought we'd start with a little practice. By the way, how many of you have
participated in gPause here? Almost all of you. OK, wonderful. That's great. So let's start by bringing
our awareness into our bodies. You can sit with your eyes
closed or open, whatever feels most comfortable. And finding a posture that's
dignified but relaxed. Sitting with an upright spine. And bringing our awareness
to the present moment, and checking in with ourselves. What might you be
sensing in your body? Pleasant, unpleasant,
neutral sensations. Bringing awareness to
the body and recognizing this extraordinary quality
that we have to be aware, which really is, in many ways,
the essence of these practices. And as we sense our grounding,
feeling our feet on the floor, our sit bones on our
seats, reflecting for a few moments on our
motivation for being here. Recognizing that
these are practices which can be helpful
in calming our minds and opening our hearts not
just for ourselves, but even more importantly for
all of the other beings that we touch
throughout our days. And so let's spend a few
moments steeping ourselves in this altruistic
motivation and reflecting on how a calm presence
and a warm heart can be so helpful for
all of our interactions. And so just spending a few
moments bringing our awareness to different parts of our
body, and using the sensations in our body as support for
recognizing this basic quality of awareness. And let's also
spend a few moments reflecting on our intentions
for the work that we are all engaged with, work that depends
upon so many other people, and leaning into a sense of
gratitude and appreciation for all those who contribute
to the work that we do and the benefits that
are enabled by our work. And finally, in these
last few moments, one of the ways in which
some traditions organize a meditation session is to
reflect on our intention as we did at the
beginning, and then to have a period of
practice, and then in the closing moments to
dedicate whatever merit, whatever benefit may have been
derived from our practice, we dedicate it to the
welfare of others. And so spending a few
moments reflecting on how the kind of calm
demeanor that we can taste and open-heartedness can
bring benefit to others. And now for those
whose eyes are closed, we can open them, but maintain
that same quality of awareness as we bring ourselves back. And thank you all so much. DANIEL GOLEMAN: So that's
what we're talking about here. And our story begins in India. Is that OK? RICHIE DAVIDSON: Mm-hmm. DANIEL GOLEMAN: I somehow
wangled a predoctoral traveling fellowship from Harvard to go to
India and hang out with yogis, and swamis, and lamas. I was particularly interested in
a yogi named Neem Karoli Baba. He was well-known in those
days as Ram Dass's guru, the mysterious yogi
on the blanket, and I tracked him down. I'd been studying clinical
psychology at Harvard. Clinical psychology is
the art of figuring out what's wrong with anyone. Neem Karoli Baba
was all about what could be right with people. He embodied ongoing
presence, unconditional love, totally relaxed, happy,
joyous, and he was contagious. There's someone who used
to be here at Google. He's not here anymore. His name's Larry Brilliant. He was there too. And Larry put it very well. He said, the miracle wasn't that
he loved us unconditionally. The miracle was that we loved
each other unconditionally when we were with him. He just radiated this aura,
and it was contagious. And I met a few other
beings like that. I went back to Harvard, and
I said, hey, you know what? There's an upside
to human potential. [CHUCKLING] And they said, we don't
care, except for one person, who is now sitting
right next to me. [LAUGHTER] RICHIE DAVIDSON: So
I entered the picture as a beginning graduate
student at Harvard, and this was in the days
before the internet. Dan had published a few very
obscure papers in a journal by the name of the "Journal
of Transpersonal Psychology." DANIEL GOLEMAN: It was published
right here, annual publication. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Yes, a journal
not with a very high citation impact-- [LAUGHTER] --but nevertheless, I was
probably one of about eight people on the planet who
read these articles of Dan's. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Four of
them were relatives of mine. [LAUGHTER] RICHIE DAVIDSON:
So I knew that Dan was a graduate student at
Harvard doing this stuff, and actually, that was one of
my motivations for going there as a graduate student, although
I kept that very subterranean. I didn't tell the faculty
who were interviewing me that one of my attractions
was this crazy graduate student named Dan Goleman. But I attended my
very first class. It was late afternoon. And I sat down, and there's
a guy who sat next to me in this class. And I had never seen a
picture of him before. And I turned and looked at him,
and I said, you're Dan Goleman. Now, it's not because I have any
well-cultivated psychic powers. It's because Dan looked like
he'd just came back from India. DANIEL GOLEMAN: So
the giveaway was this. I owned one pair of pants. They'd been made in India. They were wide wale
purple corduroy pajamas, and I think that was a clue. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
That was a clue. DANIEL GOLEMAN: That
was a clue, yes. [LAUGHTER] RICHIE DAVIDSON: So and
then it went on from there. So Dan said, well, would you
like a ride back to your place? And my apartment was just a few
blocks from William James Hall, but I said, sure. So we walked to
his vehicle, which was a VW Microbus,
popular in those days. I get into this vehicle, and
plastered from floor to ceiling were pictures of
yogis and holy people. And it just completely
blew my mind, and I had the beginning
sense that this was going to be an
important source of my alternative education. So that's how it began. And then, Dan was able to
finagle yet another fellowship to go back to Asia a
couple of years later. And at that time, I was
finishing my second year as a graduate
student, and I decided that I needed to get a
firsthand taste of this stuff. And so much to the consternation
of the Harvard psychology faculty, I went off to
Asia for several months. Many thought I
would never return. I was pretty sure I would. But for part of that
summer, Dan and I were living together
in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and we were hanging
out with a forest monk, Nyanaponika, who was one of
the experts on mindfulness in this region. DANIEL GOLEMAN: In those days,
he had published the only book in the English language
that had the word mindfulness in the title. It was called "The
Power of Mindfulness." RICHIE DAVIDSON: So that was
a major motivation for us. And that summer, Dan
and I wrote together the beginnings of
what would become a lifelong journey together. And we wrote an article for
another very obscure journal, and we had a sentence that we
wrote in that article which ended up being a very prescient
sentence that we came back to many times since we wrote it. And we weren't quite
sure exactly what it meant at the time, but I'll
tell you what the sentence was. The sentence was this-- the after is the before
for the next during. I'll say it again. The after-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: It's not
going to help, Richie, if you say it again. [LAUGHTER] RICHIE DAVIDSON: The after is
the before for the next during. So what does this mean? Well, the during is about what
happens when you meditate, what happens on the
chair, on the cushion. That's the state effects. The after are the
lingering consequences. Now, when we put our
butt on the cushion or on a chair and meditate, it's
not for this experience we have when we're meditating
that we're doing this. It's for the impact
it has on every nook and cranny of everyday life. And that's what we
mean by the after. And so when we say the after is
the before for the next during, the after becomes
the new baseline. It becomes the new default.
And it becomes the new before for the next
time we meditate. And those cycles, when
they accumulate over time, are what is the key ingredient
to instantiating a trait. And a trait is something that
sticks, a quality that endures, and this is why we engage
in these practices. DANIEL GOLEMAN: We
should say at this point it was a huge speculation. The reason is that the
theoretical and empirical scaffolding for
this did not exist. That's the idea of
neuroplasticity. That was actually
discovered decades later. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Decades later. DANIEL GOLEMAN: So we
were making a lucky guess. Well, we'll call it
a smart guess now. [LAUGHTER] Smart guesses are lucky
guesses in retrospect. RICHIE DAVIDSON: So that's
really where all this began. And at the time that we started,
there were actually three scientific articles that had
been published on meditation-- one by Kasamatsu and Hirai on
three Japanese Zen meditators, the second article by Anand
et al., an Indian scientist, on some Indian yogis-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: No, no,
one yogi in Samadhi, and he put a hot
test tube on him. And nothing happened,
according to Anand. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Right, right. And then the third article was
an article by Keith Wallace and colleagues on
transcendental meditation. That was the sum total of
the empirical literature on meditation when we began. DANIEL GOLEMAN: However,
despite the advice to the contrary of our
mentors and professors at Harvard, we decided to
add to that literature, and we each did our
dissertation on meditation. However, now that we've
written this book, there are more than 6,000
peer-reviewed articles on meditation. There are more than a
thousand a year now. We used very rigorous standards. We boiled 6,000 down to 60. Our research didn't
make the cut, did it? RICHIE DAVIDSON: No. DANIEL GOLEMAN: No. Our early research--
his research does. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
Not the early stuff. And so in the book, one of the
key things that we describe is what happens at different
levels of practice. And so when we began the
serious scientific research on meditation, we actually
began on the far end of the continuum. And we did that because we were
urged by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to please study the minds
and the brains of practitioners who spent years
training their mind, to investigate using modern,
sophisticated neuroscientific methods what might be different. And so that was
where all this began. And for a couple of years,
we flew practitioners from India, Nepal,
Bhutan, and a few from France who were
living in a retreat center in southern France,
and they came to Madison. And we probed and interrogated
their brains and their bodies in many different ways
to see, initially, if there was a there there. And we decided to
start at this point because if we
didn't see anything in these really
long-term practitioners, it would be unlikely that
we can use the same tools and investigate rank beginners. And so that was the
original strategy, and it was a strategy
that really paid off because we saw a
number of things that were very unusual in
these long-term practitioners. Now let me say that these
are professional meditators. They meditate as
their full-time gig. So the average lifetime
practice of these individuals is about 34,000 hours. DANIEL GOLEMAN:
I think we should explain the different levels. So we see meditation as
falling into different baskets. The first is the hard-core
professionals, like these yogis that are flown over. They live in a
culture that supports people to just meditate. They are professionals. They're monks. They're nuns. They're yogis. They do it all the
time, and these cultures understand the value of that. So they get very
deep in practice, but a very small
proportion of people actually do it at that level. Then there's one level
out, how these practices are brought to the West. For example, I don't know
if you know Spirit Rock up in Marin, which is
a traditional Vipassana Theravadhan meditation practice
which has been exported. It's been taken out of
the cultural context. A lot of things get
left behind, but it's adapted so that it is
more accessible to us, to Westerners. So you may not go as deep. That's an open question. I suspect not. But many, many more people
will have the experience. Then there's a further remove,
which actually the Dalai Lama urged Richie to kick off. He said to him at one
point, our tradition has many methods for managing
destructive emotions. Take them out of the cultural
and religious context, test them rigorously in the
lab, and if they're of benefit to people, spread them widely. And that's the third level. It's methods like mindfulness
that have been brought to scale so anybody can do it. But you don't have to have
a particular belief system. You don't have to have a
particular cultural attitude. And those three
tranches, if you will, are the subject of different
levels of the research that's been done. So you're back to the yogis. RICHIE DAVIDSON: So
back to the yogis. Let me just give you
two examples of findings from the yogis that are
particularly striking. One is-- and this is actually
the subject of the very first paper we published,
which was published in 2004, and it came out in the
"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." And it was the first time
a paper on meditation had ever appeared
in that journal. And if you look at the graph
of the number of publications per year in meditation
or mindfulness, you'll see an inflection
point in 2005. There's a very noticeable
inflection point, and that, we think, has to do
with this initial paper coming out basically showing that
there was a there there, and it helped catalyze
a lot of research. DANIEL GOLEMAN: I thought was
my book "Destructive Emotions." [LAUGHTER] We'll talk later. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Your book
"Destructive Emotions," what year did it come out? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Around then. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Yes, OK. DANIEL GOLEMAN:
It doesn't matter. RICHIE DAVIDSON: They
both played in a role. DANIEL GOLEMAN: OK, thank you. [LAUGHTER] He is such a diplomat, and
he's gotten much better since he's been a meditator. I knew him back when. And my wife says I've gotten
nicer too, by the way. That's the metric that counts. RICHIE DAVIDSON: And those are
the best unobtrusive measures, getting reports from
significant others around you. And we'll tell some
stories about that. So back to the yogis. We put EEG electrodes on them. And one of the
things that we found which was very, very unusual-- and it took us about a year to
run all these control studies to convince ourselves that
this was actually for real-- is we saw a very pronounced
gamma oscillations. Gamma oscillations can be
recorded from the scalp surface using brain electrical
measures, but typically in the average
brain, they are seen for very short periods of time,
typically less than one second, most often around a
quarter of a second. And these oscillations
appear when there is a particular
insight that you may have. So if you're
engaged in a problem and a solution emerges just
spontaneously and very quickly, you will see a burst
of gamma at that point. And there are
experimental studies-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: You know what? I think Google runs on
these bursts, doesn't it? [LAUGHTER] RICHIE DAVIDSON: We
call it intelepsia. So you see that kind of thing
in normal, untrained people, but in the yogis we see it go
on for seconds and minutes. And that was really
unusual, and we had to rule out all kinds of
alternative explanations, which we had to do to get this
in a high-profile journal. And subsequently,
it's been replicated by a number of other
people and interestingly in some other work that
we've done with practitioners who are not as
advanced, but still are long-term practitioners, but
more like those with day jobs. We see the presence
of gamma oscillations even during sleep, which may be
indicative of a residual strand of awareness that
persists throughout sleep. So that's one unusual finding. The second finding
is something that I think we all can relate to. It was a study that we did
on pain, on physical pain. And using strong
stimuli of this sort is one effective way
to challenge and probe the mind and the brain. It's like a cardiologist
using a cardiac stress test to look at
cardiovascular function. We were using a
mental stress test to look at the
mind and the brain, and we can do this
with physical pain. So we use a device
that neurologists use to test
temperature, and it's a device that's compatible for
the MR scanning environment. And it's a very thin
metal plate that gets strapped to the ulnar
area, which is very sensitive. And we have very
rapidly circulating water that goes
through there, and we can regulate the temperature of
the water very, very precisely. And the temperature of the
water for this is at 49 degrees centigrade-- around 137-ish
degrees Fahrenheit-- and we have this stimulus
on for 10 seconds. And most people can take
it for a few seconds, but after the fourth
or fifth second, it's pretty excruciating. But we can adjust
it so that it's just below the threshold for
producing tissue damage. So we can deliver
it quite safely. And so here's the experiment. We give people a zap of this so
they know what it feels like. And then in the experiment,
we give them a cue-- for example, a tone-- which denotes that
in 10 seconds, they will get zapped
with this pain. So there's an
anticipation period that begins with the
tone, which is 10 seconds. They then have 10
seconds of pain, and then they have 10 seconds
that we call a recovery period, which is
simply 10 seconds after the thermal
stimulus goes off. Now, if you take
an average person off the street who
has no mind training and you give them an
initial taste of the pain, you then put them
in the experiment and present the tone
which tells them that they're getting the
painful stimulus in 10 seconds, in response to the tone alone,
virtually the entire pain matrix of the brain activates. So it's as if
they're experiencing the pain in response to the
tone, and it's dramatic. And they show that. They then get the pain. The pain matrix
continues its activation. And then during the
recovery period, they're still activated. They are still
reverberating and ruminating about the painful stimulus. And what you then
end up seeing is they're essentially getting
a triple dose of the pain during these three blocks. You take the long-term
practitioners and you present the tone,
and you see activation of the auditory cortex. That is, they heard the tone. DANIEL GOLEMAN: No pain matrix? RICHIE DAVIDSON:
Virtually no pain matrix. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Wow. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
It's really flat. In response to the
painful stimulus itself, they actually show significantly
heightened activation compared to controls in the
sensory regions of the brain. So if you look at somatosensory
cortex for example, they actually show
greater activation in that region compared
to the controls. And then in the recovery period,
they come right back down to baseline. So it's a very sharp
inverted v-shape function. And among the controls,
they are showing this very flat and
highly activated across all three periods. And the activation in the
anticipation and the recovery period actually accounts for
a very significant amount of the variance in
reports of distress. And so this is something
quite practical and one of the most dramatic
differences that we see. DANIEL GOLEMAN: There
was another one. I happened to see the
first subject run. I was there in the
FMRI control room. And for statistical analysis
reasons, the subject-- the person in the human cigar
tube, the FMRI, the MRI-- was asked to do the following. We'd like you to do a
concentration practice for-- 90 seconds? RICHIE DAVIDSON: 90 seconds. DANIEL GOLEMAN: 90 seconds,
and then you'll hear a tone. Stop for 60. Then do it again for 90. And then stop, and-- like four times, and then three
different kinds of meditation. I don't know about you, but
when I sit down to meditate, it takes a while for my
mind to actually focus on the meditation. There's a saying in Tibet-- at
first, it's like a waterfall. They're talking about
the mind and thoughts. Then it becomes like a river. And then finally,
it's like a lake. But these people all went
to the lake immediately. There's this amazing
mental agility that goes along with it. So I don't know if you
ever published that, but I think that's
important too. RICHIE DAVIDSON: No,
it's really important. And by the reports, they're
able to do this and their brain changes instantaneously. DANIEL GOLEMAN: But what about
people right at the beginning? Let's talk about that. So let's say you're
just starting this for the first time. You're not like a professional
yogi, but it's interesting. What happens with beginners
is really telling. The benefits start
from the get-go. One of the things that
you see, for example, is how it impacts multitasking. I don't know that that
happens here at Google, but-- [LAUGHTER] --other places, I understand. So multitasking, of course,
means you're working on that one thing, that really important
thing you have to do today. You're very absorbed. Your concentration is here. Then you think, oh,
I better check my-- do you have some
incoming-- what's your-- AUDIENCE: Email. Email. DANIEL GOLEMAN: No, but
there's a special Google thing. AUDIENCE: Email. [LAUGHS] It's still email. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Email. OK, you have to
check your email. People, on average, check their
e-mails more than 70 times a day. If you do your email, well, then
you have to answer the email. Then you have to look
at that other email. Then there's your text. And then there's your
this, and that, and that. And then you go back
to that original thing. Your concentration was up here. Now it's down here, and it
takes a while to ramp up again. The brain does not
operate in parallel. It switches rapidly, and you
lose concentration, unless you did 10 minutes of mindfulness. It turns out that 10
minutes of mindfulness mitigates that loss
of concentration. If you do it three
times during the day, your covered for
the day, it seems. So that's something
really handy. Attention gets better. Handling stress gets better. And I'm talking about
the stuff of life. Life is stress. So ordinarily, when
we get stressed, the amygdala and circuitry
around the amygdala is a trigger point for the
fight, or flight, or freeze response. So the amygdala gets
triggered, and stress hormones flood the body. And the recovery time-- the time from peak of
that to calm again-- is an operational
definition of resilience. It gets shorter, and the
long you've been a meditator, the shorter it gets, the
less often you're triggered. And when you do get triggered,
you don't get triggered as-- it doesn't become as high in
terms of stress hormone levels and so on. And then the third impact,
which is really interesting, has to do with the meditation
called loving-kindness, kindness, which is
traditionally done at the end of a
mindfulness session. In loving-kindness--
I think you actually did a kind of loving-kindness--
you think about not just yourself, but people you love,
people you know, strangers, a widening circle, and
you wish them well. You wish yourself well, and
you wish everybody else well, that they be safe, and happy,
and healthy, and so on. And it turns out that that,
which is really more cognitive, it's not just trying to keep
your attention in one place and bring it back
when it wanders. That's the basic repetition
in most meditation. This is a mental exercise. It's almost
attitudinal, but it has remarkable effects on the
biology and on the brain. For one thing, the mammalian
circuitry for parental love, a parent's love for a
child, becomes stronger. People become more likely to
notice when someone else needs help and actually help them. People get more generous. So at the beginning
level, just doing, say, eight weeks,
half hour a day, 15 minutes, whatever,
it does have an impact. And then-- RICHIE DAVIDSON: And one
of the other findings with the loving-kindness that's
so interesting and important in our national scene
today particularly is a reduction in implicit bias. And so implicit bias
is an unconscious bias, a bias that is obsessed
with more objective means. So a person can fill
out a questionnaire, and on the
questionnaire, you can report that you have no
bias against various kinds of out-groups. But on these implicit
measures, many people still show evidence of some bias. And what's been found is
that even short amounts of loving-kindness practice
have lingering effects in reducing implicit bias. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Hey, that might
be relevant to the diversity program. RICHIE DAVIDSON: I
think it might be. DANIEL GOLEMAN: It might be. OK. I just wanted to
drop that hint here. So then there are the mid-range. So how many people
here who are meditators have been doing it for
more than a year or two? OK, these findings apply to you. To us-- I'm in
that category too. What are they? RICHIE DAVIDSON: So
with middle range meditators, here
is where we begin to see evidence of trade
effects, and by trade effects we mean that the baseline
is now different. And so using various
kinds of indices, we see evidence of
changes in the brain and in the body
which do not depend upon being in a meditation state
itself, but rather represent enduring changes both in
the brain and in the body as well as in behavior. So let me give you
one example of that in the realm of
behavior, which turns out to be quite important. There is a phenomenon known
as the attentional blink. And the attentional
blink is seen when a series of rapid
stimuli are presented and you're asked to look for
a particular kind of stimulus, and you notice one
instance of that. And if a second instance occurs
in a closely spaced point in time, you will not notice it. You'll be unconscious. Your attention will blink. And scientists have regarded
the attentional blink as a kind of refractory
period of the mind. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Wait a minute. Don't you mean like spacing out? RICHIE DAVIDSON:
Spacing out, yes. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Exactly. This happens to us
all all the time. So basically, your
attention wanders. I remember talking
to one guy who said, when I'm in a business
meeting and my mind wanders, I wonder, what opportunity
did I just miss? Or if you're with someone that
you happen to be in love with and your attention wanders,
what emotional cue did you just miss? That's what this
is about, really. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
Right, and so if you stop to notice
cues, for example, during into personal
interaction, whether it's with a
partner, with a team member, there's an enormous
amount of information that gets transmitted
very quickly in a given unit of time. And our ability to
function effectively depends upon us picking
up on those cues. And if we can reduce
the attentional blink, we will be noticing more stuff. And it turns out that
the attentional blink is significantly
reduced among people who are doing longer-term
meditation practice, and it does not depend upon
being in a meditation state. That is, it is a
lingering trait effect. In the domain of
attention, we probably have some of the
very best evidence that these effects endure. DANIEL GOLEMAN: But isn't
that like a no-brainer, because meditation of any kind
reduces to attention training? I mean, other things go on. But for example, if you're
doing mindfulness of the breath, your contract with
yourself is, I'm going to keep my attention,
my focus on the breath. But the mind wanders. Maybe you're familiar with
the famous study at Harvard where they gave
people an app that rang their phone at
random times a day and asked three questions-- what are you doing? What are you thinking? How do you feel? Well, if what you're thinking
doesn't match what you're doing, your mind is wandering. And they use this
to get a metric for how frequently it wanders
and in what situations and also the mood it puts you in. So the mind, on average,
wanders 90% of the time during commutes. Right? You know that. The next term I'm a
little sorry to say. When you're looking
at a video monitor-- this is for other
people, not Googlers-- and when you're at work. 90% of the time for most people. Not here, but for most people. It's only 10% of the time
during romantic moments. Well, wait a minute. Who answers an app at
the moment like that? I think that data
maybe we'll put aside. And then the general take-home
is that the more your mind wanders, the less happy you
are, because the mind tends to wander to problems
we're having-- problems in relationships,
particularly; that email. 2:00 in the morning,
you're thinking about, why did she send me that email? Why did I send her that email? But that happened two weeks ago,
and we're still thinking about. So in other words,
the mind ruminates. But when you meditate,
your contract is, I'm going to bring it back
every time it wanders off. So you focus on the breath. Mind wanders. You notice it wander. Bring it back. That's the mental
equivalent of going to a gym and lifting weights. Every time you lift
the weight for a rep, your muscle gets
that much stronger. And what you're doing
here is amping up attentional circuitry. RICHIE DAVIDSON: So maybe we
should take questions now. So we have 15 minutes or so. AUDIENCE: I had two
questions today. The first one is just
a quick clarifier on the yogis that could
handle the anticipatory-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: Could you hold
the mic closer to your mouth? AUDIENCE: Yes, the
anticipatory pain response. Were they primed to be in
a meditative state before? RICHIE DAVIDSON: No. AUDIENCE: OK. And then my second
question-- this is maybe a little more general. It's really out of curiosity
of your guys' experiences in bringing meditation
from an Eastern place and taking it to the West. I know here in the
West, we all often use timers to help us
bound the time between when we enter the practice and
get out of the practice. And I'm curious to know if
that is heavily more Western or if you found that-- are there timers within temples,
if you will, with people-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: OK, so when
I lived in India two years, I never saw a timer. They may not have
been invented then. But I think it's a
typically Western thing. I mean, I hung
out with Tibetans. In old Tibet, among nomads,
there were two times a day. They lived in yurts. They had fire in the
middle, and they had a hole so the smoke would
leave the yurt, in the middle of the yurt. So one time was before
the sun hits the fire, and the other time was
after the sun hits the fire. In other words, being
so pressed for time is a uniquely Western
condition, particularly in these traditional cultures. AUDIENCE: I feel
like I can't really meditate unless I have a
timer because I'm anticipating that I'm going to just get
lost in it or something, and I'm going to
lose track of time. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well,
I think it's good. I mean, a timer is
fine, because you don't have to peek at
a watch or something to see what time it is. I mean, I've used timers too. Just not in the Asian culture. AUDIENCE: I have a question,
actually, about the Center of Healthy Minds. So can you share
a little bit more about what you're doing
there and how that's impacting well-being
in the workplace and what we can learn about it? RICHIE DAVIDSON: Sure,
thanks for asking, Rachel. So our center at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison is called the Center
for Healthy Minds, and we have three
major pathways. One is a research pathway,
which is our core DNA, and we do both basic research as
well as translational research in field settings. We also have two other pathways. One is an innovation pathway
where we're committed now to being activist scientists. Our mission, by the
way, of the center is to cultivate
well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific
understanding of the mind. That's our mission statement. And in the innovation
pathway, we formed a nonprofit corporation
to partner with our center where we are developing
products and services to bring out into the world
that are based on our research. And so one of the
things that we're doing, a major, signature
project, is to develop a comprehensive digital
platform to cultivate well-being in workplace settings
initially, but we envision this being more generic
and revising it so that we have versions for different sectors. And it's not a
mindfulness program. It includes mindfulness,
but it has four modules. One is called Awareness. A second is called Connection,
which is really about kindness, compassion, appreciation. The third is Insight, which is
focused on cultivating insight, particularly into
how the self works, what our healthy relationship
is to the narrative that we carry around in
our minds about ourselves. And the fourth module
we called Purpose, and it's focused on
helping an individual to identify their core
meaning and purpose in life and, most importantly, to
align their everyday behavior with what that purpose is. And we also have a suite
of assessment tools that will be implemented
on mobile devices that will enable the measurement
of each of these four modules. That is, measuring the specific
constructs that are impacted by each of these four modules. And the measurements
are in four categories. One is questionnaires,
which are obvious. The second is experience
sampling of the sort that Dan described in
that Harvard study. The third are
neuroscientifically grounded behavioral tasks. So they are tasks that measure
reaction time and accuracy that are implemented on a mobile
device that will enable measurement of different
aspects of attention, empathic accuracy, generosity
with economic decision-making tasks, and so
forth, all of which have been studied
neuroscientifically, all of which can be
implemented on mobile devices. The fourth category are
device-generated data. That is, data using
GPS coordinates to help an individual understand
where their well-being may be particularly high, where it may
be particularly not so good, and also to provide information
on social media use and doing some initially simple content
analyses of the content of social media,
particularly, for example, the use of personal pronouns-- I, we, they. It turns out to be
very diagnostic. And also emotion adjectives--
pleasant, unpleasant, for example-- are things that we
can easily capture. So this is a work in progress. IDEO has partnered with
us as a design firm to help design the key
aspects of the user interface. And we will be doing some
pilot testing of this and rolling it out
beginning in January. So that's our
innovation pathway. And let me just say very
briefly the third pathway is our movement pathway. We believe that we are part
of the social movement, and the simplest way to
capture it is the movement is about changing the cultural
meme around the simple idea that well-being
can be cultivated. AUDIENCE: How do
we regard or how do you regard a
meditation or stillness practice with
emotional intelligence or emotional awareness? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Oh,
the relationship between meditation practice
and emotional intelligence. AUDIENCE: Yes. For example, one could
argue that if you're on a mountaintop
for many decades, that that may not necessarily
invest in your ability to be in relationship with
people, hypothetically. DANIEL GOLEMAN: OK. I think there is an indirect
way in which elements of emotional intelligence
are definitely boosted by meditation practice. I think your point about having
no relationships at all is well-taken, because that's
the arena in which you would probably
display and experience emotional intelligence. But for example, there are
four main components the way I look at it. There's self-awareness,
using that awareness to manage yourself better,
either positive motivations, positive outlook, and so on,
or handling stress better. The third is empathy, bringing
this to your relationships and sensing what other
people are feeling, and then putting
that all together to have positive relationships. And I can see a
very definite way in which the experimental
literature points to how the first two are
boosted by mindfulness practice, by meditation. Your ability to introspect-- I mean, it's training
and looking within. And then to use that to manage
yourself better in many ways and probably to extend
that to empathy. On the other hand, I don't think
that it does the whole trick. I think that there-- I have a model of 12
competencies that are nested in each of those four domains. For example, persuasion
and influence, or conflict management,
or a positive outlook-- they might be helped
to some extent, but I think each of those
is learned and learnable over and above. By the way, there's something
that you didn't mention. For those of you who like to
listen to books instead of read books-- and it may be people
who are seeing this on screen-- this is available as an audio
book from Key Step Media. Key Step Media also
has primers on each of the 12 emotional
intelligence competencies. You could look at those
and decide for yourself which meditation helps a lot,
a little, or not so much. RICHIE DAVIDSON: And Dan
himself read the book, so an added benefit. DANIEL GOLEMAN: It's my
[? mellificent ?] voice on it. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: I heard a
study on NPR where they were studying
unconsciousness, when you take certain
kinds of drugs, anaesthesia to put you out. And they said it was a wave
that goes back and forth, a very long wave that
just oscillates back and forth through the brain. And I was thinking that in
terms of your gamma bursts and also in terms of how-- I know this is a field--
but how consciousness works. So if the mind just has
lots of different centers that are constantly
communicating with each other, and that's what it
is to be conscious, how does meditation affect
that and that communication? RICHIE DAVIDSON: Answering
that question really deeply would require
a lot of time, but let me give
you a few tidbits. One of the things that we
see when we see these gamma oscillations is not simply
their elevated presence, but we also see a
striking synchrony. So if you look at the phase
relationships of these gamma oscillations across widespread
regions in the brain, you can compute a metric of
synchrony based on the phase. And it turns out that these
gamma oscillations are highly synchronized across the brain. So it's not simply
that they're elevated, but they're also
highly synchronized. And the amplitude
and the synchrony are not necessarily correlated. They're not always correlated. In these practitioners,
they're highly correlated. And so the synchrony,
we think, is-- synchrony as a metric
of brain connectivity has been intensively
investigated in the basic
neuroscience literature. And it is indicative of
increased communication among brain regions. And so the way
these practitioners describe phenomenologically
their experience, it's a kind of
panoramic awareness. It's a very broad
panoramic field that they report in
their experience. And it may be that
this synchrony is a kind of neural
echo, if you will, of that panoramic awareness. The stuff you mentioned
about anesthesia, anesthesia is associated with
pronounced delta oscillations, which are very low frequency. And one of the really
intriguing things is-- I alluded to this earlier. It's a published study,
and you can get all our scientific publications. They're available
free on our website. But one of the things that you
see in experienced meditation practitioners is
gamma oscillations superimposed upon these delta
rhythms during deep sleep. It's the first time anyone has
ever seen gamma oscillations during deep sleep. And it may be indicative of a-- these highly experienced
practitioners often report that even
when they're sleeping, they never completely
lose awareness. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Tell them
about the Dalai Lama. [AUDIO OUT] RICHIE DAVIDSON: --story. I was with the Dalai
Lama a few years ago when he was about to
undergo some minor surgery. And we were just chatting,
and he said to me that he's concerned about
one thing about the surgery. And I asked him what
that was, and he said, this will be the
first time in his life that he is unconscious. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Meaning he has
awareness even when he sleeps. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Yes. AUDIENCE: Hi there. I have two questions,
hopefully quick. The first one, Dr.
Goleman, you said that the one of the
benefits of meditation is recovery time from an
amygdala trigger is reduced. Does it also change
the threshold at which the amygdala is triggered? DANIEL GOLEMAN:
Yes, I did say that. AUDIENCE: OK. DANIEL GOLEMAN: You said it
better, but I did say that. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: And the
second question was, how often and for how long
do the two of you meditate? RICHIE DAVIDSON: Yes,
there's some evidence to indicate that the
threshold changes, but that's still very
much preliminary, I would say, at
this point in time. DANIEL GOLEMAN:
The second question was how much do we meditate? AUDIENCE: Yes, sir. DANIEL GOLEMAN: You
mean for how many years have we meditated or-- AUDIENCE: No, no, your practice. Daily, hourly-- DANIEL GOLEMAN: Oh,
it depends on the day. Some days not a lot,
and some days a lot-- AUDIENCE: (LAUGHING) OK. DANIEL GOLEMAN: --for me. I don't know about Richie. RICHIE DAVIDSON: For me,
anywhere between a half hour and a couple hours. DANIEL GOLEMAN: We're
hard-core, though. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Hard-core what? [LAUGHTER] DANIEL GOLEMAN: Meditators. AUDIENCE: I also
have two questions. And my first question
is, is the meditation only useful to a
certain type of person? My other question is,
can we do other activity and do meditation together? For example, my friend
told me when she's driving, she's also doing the meditation
while staring the license plate of the front car. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
When she's driving? AUDIENCE: Yes. RICHIE DAVIDSON: So those
are great questions, really great questions. And let me address the second
part of your question first. We don't really know from
a hard-core scientific perspective whether engaging
in meditation practice while you're doing
something else, so to speak, is as effective as simply
sitting and doing meditation in the more conventional way. In this digital platform,
this healthy minds program that we're building, we actually
give a person an option, because we've heard
this from so many people that the very idea of taking
another minute out of the day to do something to
reduce their stress will increase their stress. And so what we say
is that that's fine. You actually don't need to take
even a minute out of your day. What you should do
is simply identify an activity of
daily living that's non-cognitively demanding in
which you regularly engage. It could be commuting. It could be doing your laundry,
washing the dishes, whatever it might be. And during that activity,
you can engage in a practice. But we don't know-- there isn't any
data at this point. There aren't any data that speak
to whether practice in that way is as effective. Maybe it's 70% as effective. We just don't know. We are studying that now. And the first question you
asked is whether meditation is for all people. There are hundreds of
different kinds of meditation, and one of the things
that we often say is that one size
does not fit all. But I will tell you what the
very best kind of meditation is to do. So are you ready? This is really the best. The very best kind of meditation
based on everything we know is the meditation
that you actually do. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: Well said. RICHIE DAVIDSON:
Whatever that might be. SPEAKER: Thank you. We are out of time,
but thank you so much, Dr. Goleman, Dr. Davidson. RICHIE DAVIDSON: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
