Self-Directed Neuroplasticity - Rick Hanson | The FitMind Podcast

we have a stone age brain in the 20th 21st century but actually we have a mouse brain we have a monkey brain we have a lizard brain we have a worm-like brain in other words we're walking around as living museums with hardware inside us whose origins reach back 600 million years all right rick it's great to be with you on the fitmon podcast liam i'm really happy about this and i just think about the name of your podcast i mean fit and a fit mind i think it's such a great way to think of it and i also think about the fit between our minds i'm sure this meaning has not escaped you either the fit between our minds and the wider world and it's in that fit that we need to adapt and function and try to be resilient and retain some happiness along the way so i'm psyched i'm glad we're doing this yeah well that idea for a fit mind actually largely came from your work and reading some of your books because that's the first time i really got the idea that you could train your mind like a muscle that you could actually influence how your brain was wiring itself and this term that i'm not sure if you coined it but it i certainly came across it first in your work of self-directed neuroplasticity um i think that might be a good place for us to start and just kind of talking about what that is and how we can create fit minds oh thank you so well plasticity means the capacity of something to change for better or worse neuroplasticity is the ways in which our nervous system especially its headquarters the brain can be changed by the experiences we're having for better or worse trauma on the one end let's say and regular mindfulness practice let's say on the other and there's growing evidence that we can really influence that change process through simple deliberate mental activities inside our own minds kind of simple things which i'll talk about in a little bit so in a fact we can shape who we are becoming and i came up with a phrase self-directed neuroplasticity about 10 years ago and then in the writing of buddhist brain but then i found that jeffrey schwartz this brilliant brilliant scholar at ucla a great scientist studying how the brain changes including in psychotherapy he'd come up with that term first so i i give him pride of place right but the bottom line is that we have the power we have the power to use our minds to change our brains to change our minds for the better to help ourselves and everybody else rippling out into the world and that's a phenomenal power to claim for ourselves especially a time when there's so many externally powerful forces that are pushing us all around yeah it's a really power it's really empowering concept because it places the burden on each of us individually to really sculpt our future minds with how we're applying our attention and awareness um and i think at one point in in one of your books you mentioned that what flows through your mind sculpts your brain or something along those lines could you just explain kind of how that works scientifically yeah so the kind of cool summary statement from the work of the canadian psychologist donald hebb is that neurons that fire together wire together so much like with a physical muscle if you work a particular muscle again and again you're going to tend to build structure there in the same way if you work a part of the brain that does a particular good thing you're going to gradually build structure there and as you build structure there that part of your brain that does that thing like calm down over-reactions to small stuff let's say that part of your brain as it gets as it builds structure there is going to become more effective it improves its function so it's a lot actually like learning anything if you think about it learning to walk instead of crawl or learning how to be more patient with family members or you know the politics you see on television or in facebook these days you know any kind of lasting change of mind must involve a lasting change of brain that part is not breaking news it's always been understood that if a person acquires a new skill or develops a new attitude or becomes more of a jerk let's say for the worse something's got a change in the hardware but what is breaking news is the growing scientific understanding of the mechanisms of that and how pervasive it is and how much power we actually have many little moments a day a breath or two at a time actually to gradually nudge the structure building processes in our own brains in a better direction now if you want i'll give you a quick little list of some of the mechanisms inside the three pounds of tofu like tissue inside the coconut all right so right so neurons that fire together do start wiring together even over a time span of just minutes you can see with electron micrographs that the little tiny tendrils are extending in toward each other in the neural network inside your head forming new connections second existing connections called synapses and in your head are several hundred trillion little microprocessors these little synapses each one of them sparkling away processing information so existing synapses become more or less sensitive which is a mechanism of of learning broadly including social emotional learning third mechanism blood flow increases to regions that are busy tiny little tendrils little tiny threads of capillaries start extending into regions that you're working it's like working that muscle again so that they get more blood flow and therefore they're more effective a fourth mechanism has to do with epigenetic processes these are ways in which the genes deep down inside the nuclei of neurons get expressed or suppressed in different kinds of ways so for example people who routinely practice relaxation you seem fairly chill just even on brief contact and i don't know but are there many ways to practice relaxation deliberately or doing things that are deliberately relaxing well research shows that people that routinely practice deliberate relaxation have improved expression of genes that regulate the stress response in other words they get better at kind of calming down finding their footing getting centered and strong and thus being more resilient maybe one last mechanism a fifth one i'll just mention here and there's some others too of course different regions become better coordinated so for example just a detail one of the interesting findings consistently around meditation is that even in just around three days of practice on it's like a super short study on the great guinea pigs of social science college sophomores just three days of some kind of you know formal mindfulness practice a little bit every day improves the regulation the coordination and effect between executive regions behind your forehead in the prefrontal cortex it's called sort of where if there's a if the mind is like a big committee with a lot of unruly members grabbing the mic the chair of the committee lives right behind the forehead and with a little mindfulness practice that chair of the committee behind the forehead gets better at regulating a part of the brain in the middle toward the rear called the posterior which means rear cingulate cortex which fancy term but that part of the brain matters because um it's a key uh aspect of the default mode network another fancy term which is like a giant simulator or ruminator inside our brain where when we're daydreaming or mind wandering or having negative preoccupations resenting this person or that person rehashing conversations beating ourselves up that default mode network tends to be active including its portion the posterior cingulate cortex well this means that if you improve the coordination between your prefrontal cortex and your cingulate cortex in the rear and so that the chair of your mental committee in the prefrontal cortex can regulate that part of the brain can calm it down can inhibit it more well you're going to want your mind's going to wander less you're going to be less caught up in yourself you're going to be less sucked into loops of negative rumination again and again and again and again because you've got better control over a part of your brain that does that thing so there are other mechanisms i'll finish there but that's the gist of it we really can gradually shape ourselves we're still who we are i'm still a fairly introverted determined stubborn person who loves wilderness i'll probably always be that way but i've also helped myself shed a lot of feelings of inadequacy and and worries and feelings of worthlessness along the way and i've helped myself shed a lot of you know negative reactivity of one kind or another and hopefully cultivated greater grit determination as well as gratitude and compassion and happiness all together and i think that's available for all of us yeah thank you for that explanation and i think one of the the key implications of this and one of the light bulb moments for me was realizing that we're training our minds however we apply them whether it's intentional or not and the distinction here between this kind of experience dependent neuroplasticity as i think you call it where the environment's shaping our minds based on how we're interacting with it and then the self-directed neuroplasticity piece is more intentional shaping of who do we want to become and how can we start to train those traits is that is that a good way of thinking about it it's fantastic way of thinking about it i'm just a technical term alert here so experience dependent neuroplasticity is the general process then that's a common term in in the research literature i didn't come up with it and the distinction you're making is wonderful between to realize the brain is always changing the only question is is it for better or worse and who's in charge right that's kind of it so you bottom lined it really well there exactly right so now what role does evolution play in all this because one of the um explanations you give for the reason that we should that we have to train our minds is that it does come with a lot of evolutionary software that's pre-programmed on it and a lot of tendencies that might not be so helpful in the modern world well that's a great framing so we have a stone age brain in the 20th 21st century but actually we have a mouse brain we have a monkey brain we have a lizard brain we have a worm-like brain in other words we're walking around as living museums with hardware inside us whose origins reach back 600 million years that's a fact and to me it's humbling and gratitude inspiring and responsibility inducing to recognize this and so we have a nervous system and other parts of our body that were shaped in the hot forge of evolution brutal tough most animals die while they're being eaten by other animals including our own ancestors the human species itself anatomically modern humans are 300 000 years old that's a long time just think about your own lifespan kind of maxing out maybe at 100 years if you're really unusual and fortunate okay and then string together what thirty thousand of those like or sorry three thousand of them three thousand generations three thousand life spans the human species has walked this earth you know i look out in my backyard i live in northern california north of san francisco smoky air today and i know that the miwok people the native people are walking through my backyard which kind of sits in a little suburban area on the edge of open space into the hills that's a watershed you know they were walking through my backyard three thousand ten thousand years ago wow we've been here a long time so in that context of long time right we have tool manufacturing hominid ancestors who began making tools two and a half million years ago people were using fire a million years ago with brains roughly half our size and then you just extend further back okay so all that we've been really shaped one of the ways in which we're walking around with the effects of that evolution is with what scientists call the negativity bias of the brain in which as i put it we've got a brain that's like velcro for bad experiences but teflon for good ones and we have a brain that for raw survival purposes back in the stone edge back in jurassic park we've got a brain that automatically does five things scans for bad news over focuses upon it over reacts to it over learns from it and becomes gradually sensitized to the negative over time so we're all familiar with many examples of that you know you have a partner or co-worker something happening 10 things happen in your day nine are good one is bad what do you think about or what lands hard research shows that in couples relationships that negative interactions have much more impact than positive ones so to have a good long-term relationship including a marriage let's say or such as a marriage you need to make sure that your positive interactions including from the perspective of the other person vastly outnumber the negative ones three to one five to one even more than that so that's really powerful and another thing is to realize that we've got a brain that's designed to become gradually more sensitive to stress gradually more irritable in the face of irritated irritants we become sensitized to the negative and we then become hyper acute learners of negative because we become sensitized to it and so to me one of the points of taking the good routinely is to become more sensitive to the positive to develop a greater capacity to learn from ordinary authentic beneficial experiences so your brain becomes more like a really receptive sponge for little moments throughout your day when you're feeling grateful or strong or learning a new thing or calmer or happier and that's one of the great opportunities i think um so i'll bottom line it for me deal with the bad for sure and if you've got to get stress out to deal with it pull your kid away from a bus run out of a burning building speak truth to power do it deal with the bad and second turn to the good not to bypass the bad not to suppress it i don't believe in positive thinking i want to believe i believe in realistic thinking turn to the good though what's also true beware that tendency in which your brain is controlling you mother nature the stone age brain is controlling you if it sucks you into the negative and forces you to lose perspective on the bigger picture go wide see what else is going on the stuff that is working the kids that are laughing the technology that's functioning the scientists that are working on cures for coved the good people trying to help other people vote however they vote just vote it all right the goodness in your own heart your own inner strength your own lovingness your own without needing to be a saint fundamental decency inside you recognize what is also good so deal with the bad turn to the good and third take in the good really help it sink in so that you don't waste it on your brain so that this good experience doesn't just wash through you like water through a sieve take in the good slow down receive it into yourself you know feel it in your body focus on what feels good about it let yourself budge let yourself shift into a slightly new way of being that's a little bit better a little more skillful a little happier a little more patient than that other way of being and that's the gist for me deal with the bad turn to the good take in the good yeah i think we can all relate to that example of you know you receive a couple of compliments in a day you know it could even be 10 compliments 10 nice things people said to you and if there's one bad if there's one insult you receive that's what your brain naturally focuses on and then you have you have the news cycle seems to be taking advantage of this because they know our brains like that negativity and get fired up by it and it's more emotional bleeds it leads do you know that saying if it bleeds it leads yeah that's right and you've got some really good practices in your book hardwiring happiness for doing what you just suggested which is really learning to focus on the positive so your brain starts paying more attention to it and that becomes what you start to focus on more naturally and so i was wondering if you could briefly walk us through this hgal heal process oh that's really great so if you think about it we go to school right and we learn all these things but we're not really taught how to learn and if you think about it we have all these various inner strengths of one kind or another i think learning is the strength of strengths it's the superpower of superpowers because if you're good at learning and i mean learning now not just school learning mainly i mean social emotional somatic attitudinal spiritual learning including spiritual learning let's say if that's meaningful to a person that kind of learning is the process by which we develop and heal and grow and become more skillful and capable every day learning is the basis of self-reliance if we're to be independent autonomous self-reliant people in a challenging world we need to get good at learning what we're talking about here could be understood as some sort of optional luxury item la di da for a bunch of rich yuppies at yoga camp it's totally not true the more your life is hard the more people are kicking you in the teeth the more you're being dealing with systemic systems of prejudice discrimination and oppression um the worse it is the more important it is to be self-reliant and the heart of that is to get good at learning helping yourself grow a little heal a little change a little for the better every day so what i've done is develop a fundamental model of how we can help that learning process occur in our own space i didn't invent many of the little neuropsychological methods in it you can find them spread out all over the place you know in how kindergarten teachers are taught to be effective with their kids you know how scientists train worms to turn left at a junction rather than right because left is where the sweet water is and on the right side is icky vinegar so the heel acronym stands for have enrich absorbent link and have just means have a beneficial experience usually because you're already having it there you are you're just like i feel good having this conversation you know we're kind of on the same page right we've never met before doing this there's a natural rapport here it's not more than what it is but it's not less than what it is why not notice it or one could deliberately create a beneficial experience call up a feeling of inner strength to deal with somebody you got to assert yourself with or remem remind yourself why you need to exercise or not eat so many cookies or not drink so many beers you know you can call up an experience for yourself either way you have it those neurons are now firing together that song is playing in the inner ipod you're having a beneficial experience and then to learn from it though involves two aspects i call enriching and absorbing and this is how you can help yourself you can enrich the experience to help it have lasting impact in other words the whole point is to change your brain to leave lasting physical change behind in neural structure or function how do you actually do that well so in enriching i'll just go through the list really fast there are five ways you can help yourself get more out of the experiences you're having so let's say you're um you know just feeling kind of good about yourself you know you got something done or you know somebody's complimented you it's nice or maybe you're with your partner you realize oh like with my wife oh it's it's going to go better if i act like this next time and you want to let that really sink in all right so you're having the experience so five factors of enriching one duration stay with the experience for a breath or longer the longer the neurons are firing together the more they're gonna wire together second factor of enriching intensity the more intense you make that experience the more it's going to tend to sink in so kind of turn up the volume on feeling really grateful or really compassionate or really committed to your exercise program third factor i call multi-modality it's a fancy way of saying the more aspects of experiencing you bring to bear the more it's going to sink in so bring to bear thoughts you know what are your thoughts related to that experience of compassion or self-worth bring bring to bear sensations uh or perceptions what are you recognizing what are you feeling in your body third factor emotion or third aspect of experience is emotion what's it feel like that's just the idea a lot of people do gratitude practice they'll have ideas of what they're grateful for but they won't feel anything and then also what are the desires desires in aspect what do you want what do you wish what do you long for what are your intentions what are your values what what are the highest aspirations of your heart those are all different aspects of the desire component of experience and then one last actions you know how do you move your body when you feel a little stronger when you feel a little more determined or confident or caring what's that expression in your face when you're more caring these are all different things and i'm still with multi-modality and then fourth factor of enriching is personal relevance why does it matter to me you know what's what's it got to do with me and so the more that you if you really want to help an experienced sink in focus on why it is good for you to shift a little bit in this direction to take this into yourself maybe even to heal something inside or fill some hole in your heart salience that's a fourth factor and you don't need to do them all any one of them is useful but i'm systematically going through all right you want to know how to take on board the superpower of learning this is it and then fifth factor of enriching is novelty the more that an experience seems fresh or new the more we regard it with beginner's mind child mind don't know mind the more we're going to grow from it and you know there we are let's say trying to help ourselves feel a little more you know self-worth and like oh i got that done today whatever boring you know it's not going to sink in but oh i got that thing done today and wait a minute i want to come to it as if it's the first day of my life with a sense of freshness and not knowing and resting in the emergent edge of now continually receiving the new as it passes through basically what enriching means is make the experience big absorbing means make your brain really good at internalizing that experience so if you intend to receive an experience into yourself you're more likely to do that if you sense it sinking into your body it's going to become part of you and also if you focus on what's rewarding about it what's enjoyable or meaningful about it that's going to increase dopamine and norepinephrine activity in your brain which is going to flag the experience as a keeper for long-term storage so super fast i've listed eight things you can do inside your mind any one of them are good the more you do the better duration extend the experience uh intensity help it be more intense multi-modality help it be a very full and rich experience salience help it be personally relevant a novelty help yourself you know recognize what's fresh or new about it intention intend to receive it into yourself sense it coming into you and focus on what feels good about it that's the essence of the process it sounds complicated but we all know how to do it we just keep skipping it it's like a fire i think of these three steps i've named hea have enrich absorb you know in terms of a fire have fire you'll have a beneficial experience often noticing you already have it second enrich it don't just walk away from the fire put more logs on it right don't let anybody rain on your parade stay with it right that's enriching and then absorb ah receive the warmth of the fire into yourself and then if you want optionally l stands for link in which you hold two things in your mind at once positive and negative make the positive bigger such as a big experience of feeling like a decent good lovable person have that be big in your mind and off to the side let's say in my example here our old experiences of feeling small and worthless like a loser an inadequate unwanted and since neurons that fire together wired together if you do this linking step in the way i've described the positive will associate with the negative and put it in context compensate for it soothe it ease it and even eventually replace it that's the fundamental process if i were to summarize it in four words it would be have it enjoy it have the experience but especially enjoy it don't forget the second necessary stage of learning internalization or if i were to summarize it in two words mo betta mo betta in other words more episodes of you know beneficial experience and then more depth of engagement with them while you're having them i love that yeah i mean our minds when you observe when you get something that's pleasurable the mind is so prone to just start thinking immediately about what it wants next and yeah are i guess as you know as you talk about in your books our ancestors were not the ones who were easily satisfied and just kind of sitting around happy-go-lucky they were kind of the skittery ones who were always looking for the next potential threat and another area of um other than the negativity bias that we just went over another area of evolution that you've talked about is this idea that there's uh a good wolf in us like positive um tendencies like in-group love and uh collaboration and mother love and then there's also this kind of bad wolf all these negative tendencies for outgroup exclusion and um and and hatred and greed and so there is kind of this even on some level i mean it it makes sense that this is this is a recurring kind of um archetype over to over time in all the major religious traditions what not but this battle of good and evil is being waged inside us just on a biological level between our different tendencies and and and i think a lot of it had to do with the fact that there was individual uh selection and evolution happening on one level and we wanted our personal interest we wanted to survive but then there was also group selection on another level so maybe you could help parse that out for the listeners well you had a super summary i'll just build on what you said there liam um so until just 10 000 years ago our human ancestors and then their hominid ancestors close relatives live their lives in small bands with 40 or 50 people may be loosely associated in a friendly way with some other bands but very often competing in brutal tough ways with other bands competing for scarce resources so the current life in which we you know have several million people living cheek by jowl and uh in a city that's completely unusual completely strange you know so what enabled our ancestors to survive was getting really good at two kinds of things that had to do with group living one bands that were better at cooperating internally were more like were more likely to support uh individual passing on genes that passed on genes you know evolution as you said at the individual level and also bands that bred mainly internally uh that were better at cooperating uh with each other with they were more able to do empathy or bonding or love or cooperative planning or use language in ways that brought them together bring together things like music or who knows what religious activities that promoted group cohesion bands that were better at that could out-compete other bands it's also true that bands that were better at dehumanizing the other at hating them at fearing them at being cruel to them and being vicious and violent toward the other you know frankly kill the men take the women take the kids move on you know it's that story has been played out so often and obviously we saw it as well and things like game of thrones so we have inside us co-evolving metaphorically speaking the wolf of hate and the wolf of love i i think the wolf of love is much stronger because our ancestors spent much more time inside their bands than fighting or fleeing from other bands but still all around us you can see the terrible effects of the unleashed wolf of hate so to me the takeaway is to accept the wolf of hate or the wolf pact you know of aggression and anger and and um intensity and fieriness and to accept it and to draw upon it to the extent necessary but be very careful about it because that wolf of hate um is very prone to you know poke its head up and start looking for someone to bite as soon as we start to feel that our group is mistreated by them right and we're very vulnerable to the appeals of various authoritarian demagogues throughout history who tell us about how they are mistreating us they have betrayed us they are getting all the good stuff you know and you know they're not human they're not real people they're not like us they're lesser and uh we're very vulnerable to those appeals so we need to be very careful about not being swayed by them and to see through them you know deal with real adversaries deal with real adversaries as you need to but to be very careful about the siren song of made up grievances you know and resentment and sticking it to those other people where that's really bad for us and it's really important for us to appreciate that in an interdependent world there's just one human tribe now just one human tribe seven and a half billion or so in a rapidly warming planet running out of important resources like water and we need to work together we need to cooperate we need to see everyone we need we need to expand the circle of us to include all of them right right that bad wolf software is no longer useful and i mean unless you're playing on a sports team or something i mean sports i guess is one kind of beautiful manifestation of that but then there's also all this buggy software that gives us the tendency to discriminate for example which i was reading one of the reasons that we that we have this kind of uh even at a subconscious level we start to someone who who looks different or who acts different we start to think that they might carry pat our groups our tribal groups wanted to avoid outsiders in part because they might carry harmful pathogens and as well as compete for resources so um so we have to be on the lookout for us for that and even when we when we look at history and we can easily say oh those people were awful and i never would have behaved like that that software is still in us somewhere and so we have to be on very careful alert for it um and it occurs to me that we all have to kind of do this work of consciously doing the self-directed neuroplasticity to overcome those tendencies yeah i i'm really glad you said that and and paradoxically it i think it really helps to claim your power and i think about different people public figures let's say in america let's think about john lewis and ruth bader ginsburg and both of whom fought really hard you know for different kinds of civil rights for people of color and also for women i would say and they were tough they were fierce i think about our founding fathers i think about george washington hamilton thomas jefferson they were tough they beat off the greatest military power in the world great britain you know in the american revolution and yet uh they did not let themselves be poisoned and corrupted by hatred and demagoguery and i think of the dalai lama another current example dealing with his adversary the chinese government and he makes it very clear that that government is his adversary there they are currently as we talk right now doing terrible things in tibet to the tibetan people peaceful non-violent buddhist people trying to live their lives uh you know so even people like the dalai lama or you know john john lewis or ruth bader ginsburg were able to be strong and if you know you can be strong toward your adversaries and fearless in a certain sense you take into account what they can do to you you're not stupid but you're fundamentally clear-eyed about what you see and what you value and what you plan you hold on to that clarity in your innermost being when you know you can do that and i think that's very important these days when you know you can do that then you don't have to get caught up in hatred you don't need to get preoccupied with helpless outrage you see what you see you know what's maya angelou saying when people show you who they are believe them the first time and i think it's very important frankly in terms of dealing with the major threats right now which is a disruption of truth-telling which is the core of any kind of mental health or group health or anything truth telling and fair play you know in our political life that's being attacked by and aided and abetted by mechanisms like facebook you know which are itself neutral but whose algorithms can be immediately co-opted by evil actors who just want to disrupt the cohesion that can bring a country together and help it stay connected so to me it's really important to be tough and strong about that and clear-eyed and not weak and to have the moral courage to stand up but when you know you have that kind of courage you don't need to um get all cruel and horrible and dehumanizing toward them and to me you retain a fundamental freedom in your own heart to speak truth to power to be fiery as appropriate without letting yourself be corrupted by hatred um so i want to shift gears slightly here and talk about some of the work in your most recent book neurodharma yeah and more like what are the heights of human potential in terms of the mind and um i don't know maybe you could start by just defining that term neurodharma for us and uh and yeah kind of what this what this is what this angle is all about oh yeah great so basically what neurodharma is is the intersection of two ways of knowing ourselves we can know ourselves objectively from the outside in that's the neuro we can also know ourselves subjectively in our experience from the inside out through both psychology and perennial wisdom the perennial wisdom of the ages around the entire world of people who've done the deepest possible dive into their own minds uh sometimes called the olympic athletes of mental training so neurodharma is where these two ways of knowing ourselves meet and what i did in the book which is a culmination book for me it is really cool it's really hardcore and it's accessible for beginners but i think it's especially available especially useful for someone who has just a little bit of inner practice at least under their belt of one kind or another who's really interested in going all the way so what the book's about is developing seven qualities inside yourself that when perfected to me constitute awakening full awakening and enlightenment i'm not there yet myself but i'm you know heading as best i can each day up the mountaintop in that direction so what are these seven qualities the way i talk about them is a little poetic and i talk about them as practices we develop them by practicing them what you practice grows stronger so steadying the mind developing a fundamental stability of present moment awareness including the depths of it in deep deep deep meditative concentration second warming the heart bringing your heart to bear heartfeltness courage openheartedness kindness love compassion for yourself compassion for others warming the heart and third i call it resting in fullness by which i mean equanimity emotional balance little basis for craving little basis for drivenness or aversion or grasping or clinging because you feel full already you feel rested in an underlying sense of peacefulness contentment and love so that you don't so that you become much more resilient and much less agitated by the waves of the world landing upon you so those three qualities together you can imagine and pick your person who for you is an exemplar of a very high level of human development very high level of human potential pick your person you see immediately oh yeah they're solid they're present their minds are steady they're not distracted all the time they're not chasing one shiny object after another like you said earlier they're loving their hearts are open even when they deal with their adversaries and there's tremendous kind of inner calm and stability and a sense of contentment deep down inside themselves even when life is challenging so those are those three the first three steadiness lovingness and fullness and what i do in the book and with each one of these seven qualities is going to the underlying brain science the coolest latest neuroscience about how can you really develop the circuitry that underlies steadiness lovingness and fullness all right then the next three also cluster together the next three of the seven wholeness is the fourth quality a sense of feeling whole nothing left out not divided internally feeling undivided feeling complete as you are rested in a sense of beingness with your mind as a whole your consciousness as a whole in which different kinds of doing can occur so you see that as well in these people there's a sense of they accept themselves fully their minds are wide their minds are spacious their minds are open and whole wholeness fifth quality nowness developing the capacity to really be here now in the present radically and continuously getting as close as you can experientially to the emergent edge of now as it passes through you and again you see this fully developed in people who are very very far along they're completely in the present and as the buddha said a long time ago their expressions are serene because they're in the present they're really close to the present moment as it disappears beneath their feet and living in the freshness the emergence of the present moment before the qualities of selfing me myself and i my precious have time to sink in they're on to the next thing before they've had time to get neurotic about the last thing right nowness and how does how do you actually do that in the brain very cool stuff and then the sixth quality i call it poetically opening into allness it's that sense of being one with everything you know if you're clear there's a distinction there's liam over there there's rick over here the hand is not the cup it holds okay fine but uh bigger than that when you're opening into allness as i put it you have a wise the boundaries between self and world start softening you start having more and more of what you know a non-dual experiences of everything altogether as one fast integrated process of which you are a local ripple a local expression i call it you are a local eddie in the stream patterning allness as you go and that feels great you feel less isolated less separated less beleaguered you feel more buoyed more supported more connected really beautiful stuff and also in the book i talk about you know extreme versions of that oneness these radical unusual but actually quite common about a third of the people in the world report experiences like this with or without psychedelics usually without in fact in which the sense of self suddenly drops away and the sense of the world shines forth with radiant perfection what in the world is going on in the brain when that happens and what can we learn from that for everyday life to soften the boundaries between self and world almost and then last finding timelessness this is where i really go after the the pinnacle really the ultimate where we can explore amidst the continual changes of our own experiences what is still what is where what is the stillness the spaciousness the unchangingness inside us what could be called unconditioned conditioned experiences come and go what is relatively unconditioned through which experiences pass like awareness and then ultimately what might be transcendentally unconditioned meaningfully distinct from the ordinary conditioned big bang universe so many mystics saints and sages have pointed to that i'm not trying to persuade someone to that in the book i'm just exploring the sense of what's possible a sense of unconditioned possibility always just prior to conditioned actuality maybe a sense of consciousness necessarily woven into the fabric of the universe so that quantum possibility can become actuality right at the emergent edge of now um you know a sense of inner freedom so that people uh in my experience of people uh who are very very far along in their practice of any tradition jewish hindu muslim sufi first people indigenous people around the world secular christian whatever people who are really far along you sense that a light shines through them that's not entirely their own right and as we develop ourselves in this way we start to become increasingly porous or permeable to the absolute to the infinite to the eternal to what is timeless because it's not changing it's not conditioned thus timeless and we we start to feel more like almost as if the front of our being is receiving or entering into the emergent phenomena of the ordinary universe while the the back of us in effect is resting in timelessness continuously so that's what the book's about it's not a religious book it's very practical it's super pragmatic it's incredibly well referenced it's very experiential it's full of practices people can check it out they might want to listen to it because i read the book in the audio version and take people through many many guided meditations they also might want to really check out i highly recommend it my online neurodharma program which is based on a 10-day meditation retreat i taught grounded in this material and we've turned it into a very well organized video program that's a great companion to the book and people can learn about the book and they can learn about that online program at my website rickinsonson.net and i should say that the program itself is very affordable it's really inexpensive considering how much is in it and of course we have scholarships for people with genuine financial need that's great and this really excites me too is like what is the mind fully capable of and i like how you've said it across different cultures like there have been these systems developed for training the mind in a lot of different traditions not just buddhism but you know hinduism and the christian mystics and all these different traditions where then people are reporting almost these psychological phenomenon that are similar and they kind of frame it in the context of their belief system but it seems like they're all kind of pointing to the same experiences and kind of following some kind of similar map and um i guess the listeners when they hear you talk about mental olympians might be curious to hear about some of those studies that show that these are actually meant olympians and might bring some kind of healthy skepticism like what you know sure these people are reporting these things but have they just kind of gone mad like how do we know what's going on in the brain there that shows that they've that their practice has paid off yeah yeah well the the uh the proof of the pudding is uh what a person is experiencing regularly kind of what their basic mood is and also how they are especially when they're they're pressed and challenged and if we recognize in ourselves that we are developing in ways that that can feel increasingly profound our brains must be changing or if we're in the presence of beings who are really impressive really developed well obviously something had to change in their brains as well you know just think of it in sports uh michael jordan we watched the tv series really deeply interesting about the last season he was on in the chicago bulls and clearly he's a guy who trained himself incredibly well and i mean came in with incredible talent and then he trained the heck out of it and so you see the results so if you're seeing extraordinary results on the court or in or in the kitchen you know when the oatmeal starts to fly that those extraordinary results must reflect underlying changes in the brain just period now that said um two findings really come forward for me as examples uh one is that um when people with 10 20 30 000 years of meditative of of meditation 20 000 hours of meditation background let's say when they know they're going to get an electrical shock in an experiment we won't kill them but it's unpleasant normal people regular people when they know the shock is coming parts of their brain start getting really agitated it's going to hurt i don't like it you know these people with these 30 000 hours of meditation they're super chill they're like no shock now no shock now no shock now why borrow trouble why fear the future they're so right there they're totally in the present i'm in the present the president's fine don't know the president's fine i'm doing okay right and then they get shocked all right so they notice they get shocked the brain of the buddha is still going to react if a brick drops on his foot right so they don't like it but then whoop they recover back to baseline really fast so compared to untrained people people with this kind of training around a well-controlled experiment like getting a pain don't fear it before it comes they don't get all caught up in it before it comes and after it passes they let it go they let it go they don't keep obsessing oh i'm going to get shocked again they just let it go that's pretty wild right and you can think of immediate applications of that kind of very specific well-controlled neurological experience inside an mri scanner you know that costs lots and lots of money how that applies to everyday life another example is that people who have lots and lots of practice have much more gamma range brainwave activity the gamma range is synchronized firing of millions maybe billions of neurons together 30 to 100 times a second so that's tremendously synchronized and that quality of tremendous gamma range synchronization is associated with more rapid learning because for neurons to fire to if to for neurons to wire together they have to fire together within a few milliseconds well if you're getting a lot of synchronized firing together you're going to be more likely to get a really exact firing together within a few milliseconds if your brain is already doing a lot of synchronized firing 100 times a second if you think about it also that sense of gamma range activity that has spread throughout the entire brain is probably also associated with a feeling of personal integration and wholeness and feeling whole as you are which really you know rings true for me and my own background with meditation you have a growing sense of just what's called singleness of mind or unification of consciousness the mind as a whole in the broadest sense consciousness as a whole is just unfolding and it's okay with all these little elements within it little experiences that uh here and there that are parts of the conscious the stream of consciousness little parts of the mind um you know unfolding uh self-occurring and self-liberating along the way so you get less and less attached to that whole process so those are two major findings those are two major findings um that i think are you know examples of the benefits of long-term mental training yeah well it's fascinating and um i i'm sure that folks who want to read more into this we'll check out neurodharma and uh i know we're coming up on the top of the hour here do you have a couple uh time for a few rapid fire questions i love them bring it and i'll have i'll give you some rapid-fire answers rather than my kind of super complete answers okay so the first question is what's your favorite meditation style or practice oh okay um well i've i've been meditating since 1974 in lots of different kinds of ways and um people sort of evolve in their practice as they grow you know and there's a wonderful saying from milorepa the tibetan sage who described his life of practice he said that in the beginning nothing came in the middle nothing stayed in the end nothing left and so with practice you become increasingly able to just drop into the traits that you've cultivated right from states that were not yet stable so myself i really try to how can i put it rest my mind upon what draws my heart and what i mean by that is to open into and stabilize being where i'm going in my own practice which is to feel just profoundly open and present and unidentified with anything going through the mind and abiding as consciousness feeling as a local expression or a local patterning of all that is so that might sound very fancy but that's that's what i aim after and then i get distracted i think about my shopping list or my email and i go oh and then i go back into it again um it's sort of like you know if the mind is like a pond we tend to be preoccupied from time moment to moment with these little waves moving through it and that's okay but increasingly with meditation you abide as a pond as a whole and and that feels pretty great yeah well i like how that's not something that you know is is just applicable to the cushion it's like an everyday practice of collapsing into self and then recognizing and coming back into this more optimal way of being recognizing the whole collapsing it seems like something that's um can be done in any moment um yeah so another question is uh what's the most promising research that you're interested in right now um well i think a whole chunk of work that's really neat has to do with the power of a wider view widening your perspective and there's a lot of research that shows that when we're negatively preoccupied we tend to move into tunnel vision we fixate on that one light in the inner dashboard that's flashing red and we lose sight of the larger context including all kinds of other things that are not read that are actually going okay so there's research there there's also research that neurologically when you go out into the sense of things as a whole including if you do it visually like moving your gaze out to the horizon line there are different ways to do this so i'll talk about you know experiencing your body as a whole while you breathe let's say or while you walk your whole body rather than just one part of it after another or you can get a sense of the room as a whole or you can get a sense of a panoramic bird's eye view as soon as you move out into the hole many good things happen neurologically in terms of coming into the present reducing inner chatter inside your head that's you know murmuring away muttering away all the time taking life less personally and feeling less threatened and put upon so there's a lot of research about going out into the sense of the hole widening your view that i think is really promising and and for me that's one of my core practices you know it's slow down take a breath widen your view just that right there is so helpful even over just a few seconds slow it down take a breath widen your view that's really cool yeah i actually just came off of a maha mudra retreat where one of the practices we did was recognize becoming aware of awareness and then noticing that the mind constructs kind of artificial boundaries to that that awareness which might be the edge of your visual field or whatever and then and then just kind of pouring awareness into those boundaries and noticing that it can just keep going in all directions and until it just goes wider and wider and wider that's wonderful and what you just said there liam uh relates to something you said earlier which is um there's only one human brain basically there are many different traditions but you start seeing the same thing here there and everywhere and the kind of way i think of it using because i'm a long time rock climber you know wilderness person um if awakening is like a mountain that we progress up from the dusty plains of neurosis up into the lower meadows we're starting to get a little more chill and happy all the way up to the pinnacle the pinnacle that let's say defines the absolute upper reaches of human potential well there are many roots up that mountain of awakening you're the maha mudra root within tibetan buddhism they're different roots then you have the zogtin root the vajrayana root say and then you have the christian root the secular root and the human potential route and the tony robbins route and okay great you have all these different routes up the mountain fine but on each one of those routes again and again you find the same seven moves the same seven steps steadiness lovingness fullness wholeness nowness wholeness timelessness again and again and again and again and again and um to me it doesn't really matter which route you take take it take some kind of route and take the step in front of you right if it's a path with heart you don't need to know for sure you know how far you're going to go you just need to know that it's worth taking the next step and then the step after that so yeah that's great all right wonderful um okay a couple more of these if you could have dinner with any historical figure who would it be well well the buddha i thought so amazing yeah jesus that would be amazing um leonardo da vinci that'd be amazing uh you know that's i'll just leave it there those would be pretty great three good picks yeah yeah a fascinating conversation um i wonder what they would say about our current times yeah that's one thing to think about um what's something you believe that most people would disagree with that most people would disagree with wow disagree with this is a cool question yeah it comes from peter thiel uh peter thiel has a book um i'm forgetting the name of it but he said that he asks everyone that in an interview before he hires them and so i kind of stole it from him wow i'm going to reflect on that how about toss me the next the next one well i kind of look at this one yeah that yeah it's it's tough one and sorry to put you on the spot that's great um okay so the other one is you have a 15 second commercial that goes out to the entire world and what would your message be well it would be basically deal with the bad turn to the good take in the good in a nutshell and um claim the power you have to grow a little every day and realize that it's your responsibility no one can do it for you to me it's a really tough-minded honest take on things no one can grow for you on the other hand no one can defeat you and to claim that kind of moxie to help yourself every day bingo lovely do you want to end there i can also just edit out that other question if you don't want to if nothing's coming to mind right now well it's an interesting question i mean it i don't know if there is anything and and i'm i'm frankly i'm not sure i'd hire someone who was convinced that they knew something that most people disagreed with because i think it may maybe i could reframe it it doesn't have to be i mean it could be something that you you know a lot of people could be uninformed about it i feel like a lot of your work is um most people wouldn't understand it until they've read it like most people might not like understand that they can train their their mind so it could be something like that it doesn't have to be like a strong opinion you have where you're saying like i'm right and everyone else is wrong about this like controversial subject i guess i'm i'd like to say this which is there is definitely something that um i believe is incredibly important it's an absolute first principle it's foundational with it there's hope without it there's no hope and this thing which i'll name in a moment is almost never talked about it's almost never addressed it's blown right by again and again it's obscured in all kinds of ways so i think it's something that it's not so much that people disagree with it it's that they don't recognize its profound importance and that is the fundamental principle of telling the truth and playing fair as the basis for our politics and any kind of community life if we don't fight seriously fight for that principle and confront people who violate it routinely we're never going to get out of this mess and we're just going to perpetuate the game of thrones rule of authoritarian elites that we've seen over the last 10 000 years we have to fight for truth-telling and confront people immediately and disqualify them for public life if they're clearly committed to lying or disinformation uh or gaslighting or other things that make it impossible to discern the truth or if they attack truth-tellers uh it's fake news or they attack scientists who are trying to figure out what's true or journalists uh if they're casual about the brutal murder or murder of journalists like khashoggi um boom instant dq so that's one thing i think is really true and you can see routinely is that you have someone who's you know you watch on tv or you see debates you just sit around the dinner table you've got someone who's actually interested in what are the facts and then you know some kind of reasonable problem-solving about dealing with the facts and then you see another person who has no interest in facts they're deeply committed they're caught up in a cult they believe what they believe they're not interested in anything any evidence that would contradict it and they attack the process of fact-finding and truth-telling and then what you see is the ed the first person doesn't actually call that out directly the first person chases one bizarre charge or statement or made a piece of bs after another which plays into the game of the second person who wants to disrupt truth-telling and fact-finding right and so to me that's the one thing i think that i would really assert the the absolute vital importance of that and and the need to punish freeloaders what enabled our ancestors to develop altruism was the punishment of freeloaders because because if there's no punishment for freeloading then it creates a survival cost for someone to be altruistic to share their food with another person in other words if i'm altruistic with you today and give you my banana and then you rip me off tomorrow when i'm hungry and i need one of your extra bananas well i'm not going to be altruistic the next time so in the public sphere if we don't punish people who lie casually or support liars or promote disinformation or don't regulate vehicles like facebook which are vast machineries of misinformation preying on many many people in the most divisive ways possible if we don't do that we're in trouble we're in deep trouble tell the truth and play fair yeah thank you for bringing that up and you said in one of your books this is a quote from one of your books you say we've armed a stone age brain with nuclear weapons and it's true the stakes are pretty high right now and and i couldn't agree more that if we're going to pull back from the brink here we have to at the very least have a an equal playing field for conversation for good ideas to emerge like we need we need truth as like a fundamental value in order for those conversations to even take place yeah so that's right and and to me it just becomes immediately uh it needs to get foregrounded when truth is what's at stake if truth-telling it's not a particular truth that's that's at stake it's when truth-telling altogether is at stake that needs to be foregrounded and fought for wonderful listen thanks so much for joining me on the podcast and finally i guess where can people find more about your work and connect with you oh thank you liam this has been a pleasure uh rick hansen.net my website chock full of freely offered resources tons of talks videos slide sets it's really offered you can also learn more about my online programs of different kinds some of which are super bite-sized and easy there's one i call just one minute which is you know like almost 60 little one minute two minute or so practices of different kinds you can do and then all the way out to these year-long really deep dives in personal growth so rick hansen.net awesome well thanks so much for your time it's been a real pleasure ditto liam bows to you [Music] you

Channel: FitMind Training

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Keywords: rick hanson, podcast, fitmind, rick hanson podcast, meditation, neuroplasticity, self-directed neuroplasticity, neurodharma, rick hanson neurodharma, dr rick hanson, negativity bias, heal model, psychology, mental fitness, neuroscience, internal good and bad wolves, good wolf, bad wolf, taking in the good, resilience, mindset, positive brain change, positive mindset, brain science, happiness, rick hanson meditation, rick hanson neuroplasticity, rick hanson heal, rick hanson resilience

Id: U84aMW2BkDI

Length: 69min 16sec (4156 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020