January 11, 2018 • 62 mins
We all know what meditation looks like, and many of us know what it feels like. But what does it provide us in return for these brief periods of mental and physical stillness? Join Robert and Joe as they talk to Emory University meditation researcher Dr. Jennifer Muscaro about the challenges of objective scientific meditation research and the empathetic potential of compassion meditation. Plus they’ll check in with Vedic meditation instructor Jill Wener and discuss stress and adaptation energy.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert,
you're a guy who practices meditation sometimes, right, Well, I
practice yoga, which entails a certain amount of meditation. Uh,
(00:26):
And I have I have dabbled in meditation, but I
do not currently have a rigorous meditative practice in place
in my life. When you've dabbled, which of the schools
of meditation did you try? Oh? You know, it was
one of these where I just kind of ran up
to the buffet of meditation and tried what was you know,
which steamer tray had been most recently filled and was available?
(00:48):
So everything, Yeah, a little of everything. Because I've tried
some closed eye meditation, some um, some open eye meditation.
I've some monterra Ronian cheese. Yeah, I mean I've well,
I've tried stuff that's more on the secular side and
stuff that's that has more of a spiritual connotation to it.
(01:09):
And uh, it's one of those things where I feel
like the first time you try it, especially if someone
has convinced you that you need to try meditation or
you need to try Look like, it's the same thing
with yoga. When you're when someone tells you you need
to try this out, there's a strong chance you are
you're not going to really get it the first time,
that you might even dislike it the first time. But
(01:30):
when you have time to reflect on what you experience
and then you time to try it again, kind of
at your own pace, then you can begin to see
the value in it. You know, something I've noticed in
recent years about the role of yoga and meditation in
Western culture is that it has gone from something that's
widely considered a kind of uh, you know, esoteric practice
(01:52):
to something that is almost kind of a I don't
know what you'd call it. Like. Sometimes it seems weird
to meet people who don't do yoga. I don't do yoga, um,
but it seems like everybody I know it does yoga
at least a little bit or or talks about the
benefits of meditation. And I wonder if this is just
(02:14):
something that changed. I don't know, when I moved to
a bigger city. When I you know, when I moved
to Atlanta, I started noticing a lot more people were
into meditation and yoga. But I don't know. Have you
noticed this similar trend in the past five years or so. Yeah, well,
I mean part of it is urban centers are going
to have more opportunities for this sort of thing. But
there there has been a steady influx of meditative yogain
(02:37):
I just kind in Eastern and New Age ideas in general.
But it feels like these ideas have become mainstream in
Western culture fairly recently. Like they you know, they were
there as an esoteric practice in Western culture for some
number of decades, maybe since the middle late twentieth century,
and then and now they're fully mainstream. You see yoga
(02:59):
studios every where, their meditation apps that everybody's talking about there,
they've all got on their phones biz bros or trying
out meditation. I know you've seen this trend to right,
All all the biz bro manager types are like, yeah,
I use meditation to maximize my potential. You might not
remember this, but we had a yoga teacher come to
how Stuff works in recent years and he did a
(03:22):
yoga class for the company, of which I was the
only person who attended. But this was years ago. You
might not I don't know if you're even I don't
think I was aware of this, but he had a
full list of his offerings and it included like yoga
for golf fires, yoga for CEOs, that sort of thing,
you know, Um, yoga, yoga for how to fire people.
(03:46):
I guess, yeah, how to detach and all. Um. Yeah,
it is. It is interesting because on one hand, it's
easy to look at it and say, well, you're taking
you're taking something that maybe has more cultural value or
more religious or spiritual value, and then you're sort of
boiling it down or you're you're stripping it apart and
then selling those parts to people. Well, yeah, I mean,
(04:09):
and whether you take a a spiritual or religious or
a secular view of meditation, these are profound, meaningful cultural
practices that go back for thousands of years. Yeah. I mean,
there are certainly cases with especially with yoga, where we
don't we're not always aware of how recently they've been
changed by by Western hands and Western minds. But um,
(04:32):
I guess I was thinking specifically of meditation. Yeah. Well,
I keep I keep coming back to this example when
it comes to things like this. So, uh, years ago,
I was at like a dinner party or something, and
I got to talking about I think I think I
was talking about Buddhism or something with someone and Alan
Watts came up. Familiar with that one Watts a little bit. Yeah,
so uh. The other individuals said, well, you know Alan Watts,
(04:55):
he's he's kind of the Walmart of Buddhism, isn't he. Uh?
And I think she kind a minute as a as
as a put down of of Alan Watts. And and
sometimes I think back to that and and if you
if you look at it with the idea that the
Buddhism in this case has a central truth to it,
a truth that should be shared with the world, and
(05:16):
or even you know, wants to be shared with the world,
then don't you want it in Walmart? Like you need
you need there to be a Walmart of Buddhism, you
need there to be a Walmart of yoga and meditation
if you would all believe in the values of these things. Yeah.
So that's um, that's sort of the question I was
wondering about, Like, if you are somebody who participates in
(05:36):
in this deep, long rooted, profound cultural tradition of meditation,
so you're a you're a monk or something who does
meditation as part of your spiritual practice. Are are you
offended by yoga for golf? Are you offended by you know,
the meditation app that will help you be a better
business manager? Or is that or do you just say yeah,
(05:57):
that that's great. More more people are taking it up,
more people are seeing the benefits, and it's going to
more of the world. Yeah, I guess it's one of
those things where it's the answer is going to vary
from person to person and tradition to tradition. But uh, yeah,
we obviously we'd love to hear back from listeners on
that because I know we have a number of listeners
who are involved in various UH yoga or meditation practices.
(06:18):
So when we're talking about meditative practices and meditation here,
UH meditative practices date back at least as far as
the second millennium BC and UH and this goes back
to the Vedic traditions in India, and since that time,
countless models have spread throughout human culture, weaving their way
through Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Secular
(06:40):
approaches range from elementary school mindfulness instruction UH to meditation apps,
which you mentioned already from the modern tech savvy human
and styles of meditation also range from stationary to walking,
closed eye to open eye, seeded to floating. Yeah, and
there there are these major schools of meditation you've probably
heard about, such as like the mindfulness meditation or the
(07:04):
transcendental meditation or compassion meditation. Right, and then of course
there are different schools, transidental meditation being a major one.
That's the one that goes to the Mahirishi Maheshioki, right, yes, correct, Now.
I think it's worth noting though, that at the center
of all of these practices, essentially as you have awareness,
(07:24):
one of, if not the key attributes of human consciousness.
We come back to that again and again on the show.
So meditation you could maybe think of as uh, first
person experiments in attention something like that. Yeah, like I was,
I was thinking about it recently. Like it seems like
it's nothing short of the deliberate manipulation of the human
(07:45):
experience itself. I am changing my awareness, or I'm refocusing
my awareness, and in doing so, I'm kind of reshaping
my world. I'm kind of reshaping my uh, my experience
of reality. At least in the short term. It's weird
to think about how much of our lives we go
through without intentionally controlling what we're paying attention to. We
(08:07):
just pay attention to whatever it occurs to us in
the moment to pay attention to, rather than making a
deliberate effort to concentrate our awareness in one way or another. Yeah,
and it's one of the reasons I think everyone should
try some sort of meditation or some sort of yoga
at some point, like some sort of a mindfulness exercise,
even if it ends up not being the thing for you.
(08:28):
Uh it. At times it can kind of like, I
feel like you can kind of wake you up, You
can kind of force you to realize, um, you know,
what kind of noise is going on in your head
at any given moment. One meditative thought that you introduced
to me that I've never heard before, but you brought
it up on the podcast one time was just sitting
down and coming back to the thought repeatedly, I wonder
(08:49):
what my next thought is going to be. Since you
mentioned this, I've tried it and it's a really interesting experience. Cool. Yeah,
that one, I believe that was an Eckhart tolle uh idea.
I mean it's kind of a mantra, and in many respects,
but a very simplified, boiled down mantra. It's just kind
of like sticking a sticking a little roadblock into your
(09:10):
constant highway of mental traffic. Yeah. It has a way
of calling attention to the fact that your mind is
sort of this deep chasm through from which things emerge
without really you having any control over. And usually this
just happens to you and you don't notice. It is
just like, yeah, I'm just thinking, but thinking about thinking
(09:32):
makes thinking become very mysterious. Yeah, it does. It. It
forces you to to to reflect on your own cognitive
processes and trying to figure out what's going on there. Now. Meditation,
obviously is everyone can tell from the discussion thus far.
It touches on cognition, It touches on various aspects of
of of human health, and therefore there have been a
(09:55):
number of studies over the years that have looked into
it's it's possible effectiveness on mental or physical health, looking
at exactly what it does, like what is the meditative
meditative state look like in the brain and uh, and
you know, there have been some some key findings that
have certainly made the rounds over the years and sort
(10:16):
of forced people to to to look more closely in meditation. Uh.
One one study that they made a lot of headlines
was the two thousand twelve study from the Institute for
Natural Medicine and Prevention. They that found that African Americans
with heart disease who practice transcendental meditation were less likely
to experience a heart attack or stroke. Yeah, so I
(10:38):
want to come back to that claim in a minute. Uh.
I've got complex feelings about the medical research on meditation,
which we were talking about this off Mike before we
came on. But um, I would not put them in
exactly the same bucket with but sort of adjacent to
the bucket of prayer studies, meaning that both, I guess
(11:00):
both fit into a larger bucket in this world of buckets,
the Russian dolls of buckets that we live in. Um. So,
when it when it comes to these types of research,
I think some skeptics would look at prayer studies and
meditation studies and say, why would you waste your time?
You know what? Why what what can be gained from
studying this? You can already be pretty sure it's a
bunch of magical bs, and it's going to be conducted
(11:23):
by believers who are going to cut corners and their
methodology to make their worldview look good. And so there's
part of that I agree with. In part I don't
agree with. I don't at all agree with the idea
of why would you waste your time because I don't know.
I think it makes more sense to be the kind
of skeptic that says, well, bring it on, let's see,
um if it gets good results, and if other people
(11:45):
can replicate those results, especially hostile people who are you know,
not part of this worldview, can replicate the same results,
I think that's something we want to know about, and
certainly if it's something that can be scientifically studied. Yeah. Now,
on the other hand, I do think there's some merit
to the idea that things like prayer studies and meditation
studies require some careful scrutiny before we accept their results,
(12:08):
because there are some people who are convinced of the
results before they start looking for them. Now, that's definitely
not true of all meditation researchers, I think, right, Yeah,
I mean I mean for starters with prayer there, it
seems like that's more likely a problem because there's not
really much in the way of secular prayer out there.
I feel like, for the most part, if you are
(12:29):
praying to a deity or a group of deities, you
have some level of belief where you usually you're taking
on some level of belief in those deities. Though, I
think you could come up with secular explanations for the
successive prayer. Like, certainly if you had prayer studies that worked,
I think that wouldn't necessarily prove any kind of magical
thing and would just say, well, prayer has some kind
of benefits, and you could explain that in terms of
(12:51):
psychology of groups, social dynamics, all kinds of things. Yeah,
but again to I mean, to your point, there are
plenty of models of meditation that they don't involve belief
in the deity or belief in some sort of you know,
particular model of bodily energy or you know, some other
kind of like New age mechanism. Yeah. Absolutely, And in
a minute, we're actually going to air a an interview
(13:13):
Robert did with a local meditation researcher. What is this
researcher's name, Rob This is Dr Jennifer and Mascara, and
she's an assistant professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at
Immer University here in Atlanta, and she investigates meditation from
a secular scientific standpoint, So that can absolutely be done.
But coming back to these medical effects that people claim
(13:34):
are demonstrated by meditation, I don't want to rule them out,
and I think research on this is valid and I
think we should pay attention to it. But I think
it does deserve scrutiny because coming back to that one
result you mentioned about heart disease and transcendental meditation, I
found an American Heart Association scientific statement from seventeen. It
(13:54):
was actually just released this year. So first, a general
comment they make, quote, further research on meditation and cardiovascular
risk is warranted. Such studies, to the degree possible, should
utilize randomized study design, be adequately powered to meet primary
study outcome, strive to achieve low dropout rates, include long
term follow up, and be performed by those without inherent
(14:17):
bias in the outcome. So generally, they're saying that it
does appear that there could be some some good places
to go with meditation and cardiovascular health. Research, but a
lot of the studies that exist today have some of
these problems with methodology that make them less robust or
convincing than they could be. And referring to that twelve
study about cardiovascular health and transcendental meditation, they say, quote
(14:41):
the study though, was conducted in two phases after a
one year hiatus, with fifty eight patients not participating in
phase two of the study, and some concerns about analysis
of the data have been raised. So it sounds like
that when you get this big claim like this, wow,
you know, you get these amazing results from transcendental NEETs aitation,
they're saying, Okay, we we might want to be cautious
(15:04):
about over interpreting these study results because the methodology was
less than perfect, right, and is consumers we have to
be careful about sort of having the red wine or
chocolate effect with studies like this, where we like red
wine or chocolate and then when a headline comes out
that supports the thing we like, we just kind of
we we kind of check it off in our mind
(15:24):
and move on. Well. Yeah, and to be cautious about
those studies is not to say that red wine and
chocolate do not have their their wonderful benefits in terms
of flavor and enjoyment, And the same thing could probably
be said about meditation. I would say, even if you
don't find that meditation has any measurable cardiovascular benefits or
anything like that, benefits on long term chronic health conditions,
(15:46):
or pain reduction or anything like that, it's still obviously
has this role in people's lives that you know, people
get imans pleasure from it. They find that it changes
the way they view the world. It it does do something,
even if it does do everything people claim it does.
So Ultimately, I think meditation research is a highly valid
field of study and I and I wouldn't be surprised
(16:08):
if it turned up really effective results. But I also
think it's a field where I would I would just
tend to treat claimed results with special caution and scrutiny.
Not a fault of meditation itself. Nothing wrong with the
practice of meditation. But but but I but I always
try to be cautious whenever I see a new claim
about meditation results. So I recently partnered with the videographer
(16:33):
and audio producer Tyler clang Here at the Office on
a couple of interviews for a meditation video project. Now,
company priorities changed and that kind of left the project
in limbo. But I didn't want to lose the great
time content we'd already achieved, So we're gonna feature some
interview content with every university meditation researcher Dr Jennifer Moscaro
and with a physician vedic meditation teacher, Jill Wiener. This
(16:57):
will also enable us to to finish the video in
some form and you can look for that in the
near future. Obviously, we'll put that up on Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com and and also on the
social media platforms. So let's go ahead and introduce Dr
Jennifer Mascaro here again. She's Assistant Professor of Family and
Preventive Medicine at Emory University here in Atlanta, where she's
(17:17):
also worked with the Department of Anthropology. She specializes in
the variation in and plasticity of human social cognition and
the biology of interconnectedness. She recently came into the studio
and chatted with us about the current state of meditation
research and her own fascinating contributions to the study of
not only mindfulness meditation, but compassion meditation. Robert. I want
(17:39):
to say I enjoyed this interview and I thought Dr
mscarro was great. Awesome. Well, let's take a quick break
and when we come back, we will just jump right
into the interview questions with Dr Muscarrow. Thank you, thank alright,
we're back. Hi. Dr Mscaa, thank you for joining us here.
So my first question is just broadly speaking, what's the
(17:59):
current foe because of your research at Amory, Yeah, a
lot of the research that we're doing is on different
meditation practices that we think have the most evidence for
impacting people's well being UM. And so in particular, we're
looking at two different types of meditation. So one is
called mindfulness meditation, and that's actually what most people think
(18:19):
of when they hear about meditation UM. But we're also
doing a lot of research on a compassion meditation practice
that comes from a very old Tibetan Buddhist tradition UM
and is thought to cultivate feelings of connectedness with others, UM,
feelings of compassion and empathy for others. And and it
turns out that that's really good for our well being.
So what's your personal history with meditation? I started dabbling
(18:44):
primarily with mindfulness meditation. Back when I was in high school,
I was a really serious athlete, and um, it turns
out that mindfulness meditation is really helpful for um mitigating
stress and anxiety, especially when you're performing. And so I
used to do mindfulness practices when I was anxious about
a big game or you know, in the aftermath if
(19:05):
I felt like I didn't perform very well. It was
really helpful for not ruminating. Um. And so I dabbled
here and there. Um. But then uh, it really it
um took a new direction when I started graduate school
and I was interested in the plasticity of the brain.
And here, you know, we have these practices that have
(19:27):
been um uh cultivated and perfected um over you know,
many many hundreds of years that we think impact the
brain and systems in the brain that I was really
interested in studying. And so UM, I really turned from
being a dabbling practitioner to really more of an at
least hopefully objective scientist. So how do you go about
(19:50):
conducting hard scientific research on something like meditation. We try
to do research on meditation similar to the way you
would do research on, for example, a dru or any
intervention So the gold standard is with a randomized clinical
trial where you randomize some people to the meditation practice
that you're interested in, and you have another group that's
(20:12):
randomized some control group. UM, the ideal study design has
your compared meditation to an active control group. And the
reason for that is because there are a lot of
things about UH an intervention that could be helpful, could
change people that aren't due to the meditation practice itself.
You know, if it's a group practice, it may just
(20:34):
be meeting with a group of people that you think
are like minded. Maybe meeting with a teacher, like a
meditation teacher is really helpful because you you have someone
to uh, you know, a role model. There could be
non specific things that are kind of doing the work,
so you really want to try to control for those
types of things. So UM, one of the big ways
that meditation is studies is with that sort of design.
(20:57):
Another thing though, that people do is UM. They point
out that that misses a lot of the cultural, um
and contextual factors that often accompany meditation. So some people
UM and I think this is really important research to
are doing research where they're really doing more qualitative research
to try to dig in and understand what meditation means
(21:19):
to people when they practice it. What are the fact
the sort of contextual factors, the cultural factors that that
might be UM at play. So you're talking about stripping
away some of the ritualized cultural aspects to understand what's
actually taking place in the body and mind. But isn't
the counter argument that you can't separate these two aspects
of meditative practice exactly? And that's an issue that accompanies
(21:42):
a lot of different scientific domains. UM. You know, when
you try to take something and put it in a
laboratory setting to study it, you necessarily strip it front
of UM extraneous features that might be really important UM.
And so that is a debate that happens in a
lot of domains of science, but it's particularly in portant
with meditation because there are these UM sort of cultural
(22:04):
embedded factors that might are likely very very important and
maybe the most important. So you are often the researchers
you study meditation are often sort of straddling this difficult
question of trying to UM to empirically study a practice
in the best way they can, but all the while
(22:24):
not removing and reducing it to something that is less
than than what it really is. Now at least one
of your studies, you even go so far as to
avoid calling it meditation, right, So um Exactly, one of
the challenges when you do meditation research is you don't
want to bias people um at the outset. Uh. You
don't want to bring people in and and and uh
(22:47):
sort of enhance the placebo effect essentially um uh. And
so with a lot of our research, we really try
to reduce some of the terms that we use that
might convey a bias to our articipants um uh. And
then the other thing is meditation, even though we talk
about it here is being secularized and sort of stripped
(23:08):
of its religious connotations. It's really impossible to to to
do that. And so um there are a lot of
populations for whom that term um. You know, it comes
with some baggage or some connotations that may dissuade them
people from from practicing or change the way they um
they sort of interpreted or or accepted. And so um
(23:29):
we we try to minimize that the bias and our
participants as much as we can. And so one of
the ways we do that is to sometimes we don't
even call it meditation. Now on the other end of
the spectrum, emory benefits from a partnership with Tibetan monks.
How do you incorporate traditional meditation practitioners into the research. Yeah,
that's crucial, and that's one of the really exciting things
(23:50):
about this research is this sort of partnership between scholars
of a lot of different areas that are really coming
together to try to understand a rich tradition in uh
the richest way that they can. And so UM we
have a sort of a constant dialogue with those contemplative
practitioners to try to understand um, the historical tradition, the
(24:15):
textual tradition, UH, and the monastic tradition. You know, UM,
those are all those are three different things that have
UM a real bearing on what we're studying, and and
it's impossible for scientists and scholars to have expertise in
all those domains, and so it's it's really kind of
a fun. Part of what we do is a dialogue
(24:36):
with UM, the the Tibetan practitioners that we get to
work with, whether dealing with a traditional Eastern model or
a modern Western model. I think there's a tendency to
see meditation as an exercise and shutting out the world.
But as you already said, Uh, empathy plays an important
role in many meditation traditions as well. Can you tell
us about the Tibetan practice of lo jan, right, yeah. So,
(25:00):
so we look at a compassion meditation practice that emerges
from the low Jong or mind training tradition UM, and
that is a tradition that UM places a heavy emphasis
on compassion. I mean that is Uh. One of the
ultimate goals is to be a being of of compassion.
And so these are practices that are thought to help
(25:22):
us feel compassion, not only to the people around us
that UM we often feel compassion for, but um to
others that we don't know, and to people that we
often have difficult challenges with. And so UM, that's not
one of the preconceived notions that we often have about meditation.
Often when the word meditation comes up, it's about focus
and attention, and often it becomes a tool of achievement. UM.
(25:46):
But this is a tradition where UM cultivating compassion for
others was of of the most importance and UM. Within
that monastic tradition, the practices were really UM done quite
often to benefit others, not not to benefit oneself, not
to reduce stress or anxiety in oneself, but to benefit others.
(26:07):
What have you learned from your research thus far? Can
meditation actually rewire our neural circuitry for empathic behavior? Yeah,
I mean I think it's um taking our research and
coupling it with the incredible research that's coming out of
other other universities. I think it's it's safe to say
that these practices, compassion meditation practices, loving kindness meditation practices,
(26:32):
and even mindfulness. There's evidence that mindfulness impacts are social
connections with others. Um and Uh. This research really suggests that, UM,
that we can augment the systems in our brain that
help us connect with others, that help us read others emotions. Um.
And then when you do that, it's very clear that
(26:54):
there are huge health benefits. So one of the emerging
UM lines that is connecting a lot of domains of
health researches the incredible importance of our social relationships. UM.
Our social relationships impact the way our immune system functions,
the way our stress system functions, and so as soon
as you are able to bolster a feeling of connectedness,
(27:17):
a feeling of sort of interdependency with others. UM. You
you really do change the way you respond to the
world around you, and you it becomes less threatening, changes
our body and our brain. You also used f m
RI I in this study were able to observe the
effects of meditation in a subject's neural activity. We did
so UM. There are two different ways that you can
(27:39):
use functional MRI to study meditation. So you could have
people actually meditate in the fm RI I scanner and
see what their brain is doing while they meditate. UM.
But we did a slightly different thing. We had people
practice meditation for several weeks and then we wanted to
see how that changed the way their brain UH function
when they did certain important cognitive tasks UM. And we
(28:02):
found that UM, when people practice compassion meditation, they actually
got more accurate when they read other people's facial expressions.
So what we did was we showed them photographs of
the eye region of people's faces and we had them
judge what they thought the person was thinking or feeling.
And after the meditation training, they actually got more accurate.
Their scores went up, and then the activity in the
(28:25):
systems in the brain that are important for doing that
UM for reading other people's facial expressions. The activity in
those regions actually increased as well. So do you think
meditation in the form of cognitive based compassion training can
be used to boost empathy and say an actual psychopath. Yeah,
it's such an interesting question, and it's one we immediately
thought about when we found, um, the results of our
(28:48):
first study where we were seeing this effect on people's
ability to read facial expressions. You immediately think of populations
of people that may benefit, so children, UM, or clinical
populations that really seemed to struggle with these types of
social interactions and social skills. Um, it's we we haven't
done any studies with clinical populations in that way. UM,
(29:09):
so it's definitely too early to say. The other thing
that I think is a really interesting and important UM
direction for meditation research to go is really to try
to understand whether there are differences in how amenable different
people are too actually practicing. And what I mean is, UM,
there's a real likelihood that, UM, there's a bit of
(29:31):
a catch twenty two where the people who might benefit
most from something like cognitively based compassion training may actually
really struggle to do it, or it may not resonate
with them, they may not understand it, um. And so
I think that's particularly important when we turn our attention
to clinical populations. It may be that the populations that
would really benefit the most, or could really stand to
(29:53):
benefit from something like compassion meditation or mindfulness meditation, they
actually may have a real difficulty with with doing it.
So some brains are going to be a little more
susceptible to meditation than others. Well that's the hypothesis. Um,
there is a little bit of evidence. Now, UM we did, uh,
we have one study where we found that UM, people's
(30:15):
brain activity that related to empathy actually predicted how much
they would engage with the training. In other words, people
who had a brain that seemed to be more empathic
at the outset actually practiced more UM. And that does
suggest to us that there may be some populations of
people that take to meditation more that may find it
(30:36):
easier or it may resonate with them. And conversely, there
may be populations of people where for whom it's really
a struggle, they may not understand or may um not
resonate with them as much. Exactly. So, what does cognitive
based compassion training look like and what does it feel like. Yeah,
that's a great question. So UM, it's it's quite different
(30:57):
actually than the mindfulness meditation and practices that are often
talked about in popular media. UM. But it actually does
start with a little bit of mindfulness practices. So the
first segment of of CBCT actually is the goal is
to entrain attention um. And so there it begins with
some mindfulness to the body, mindfulness to the breath, and
(31:20):
then mindfulness to sort of everything, all the thoughts and
sensations that stream throughout our our mind constantly UM. But
put pretty quickly, you know, the goal there is to
to just sort of cultivate this awareness so that we
can move on to the compassion components. And UM. What
it does from there is it begins with um uh
(31:41):
an appreciation for our um, our ability to be more compassionate,
our ability to um cultivate the positive mental skills that
we have, and and a compassion for ourselves as humans
that these things are difficult um. And then it moves
from there to discussions of and and deep contemplation of
(32:02):
our interconnectedness with others. So um, you might think deeply
about people in your life and how much we rely
on them, even people that we don't think of very
often as being very important to us UM when we
really get down to it, we rely on so many
people in our lives for essentially everything, UM. And then
we move on to an awareness that UM, all of
(32:24):
those people that were interconnected with interconnected with UM, they
are at base so similar to us. UM. We are
also similar in UM wanting well being for ourselves and
for our loved ones, and really wanting to be free
of distress and suffering. And UM. Those recognitions are quite powerful,
(32:45):
the recognition that we are so connected with one another
and that we are at base so similar to one another. UM.
The thought is that from there emerges a natural compassion
empathy for for those around us. Broadly speaking, what sort
of rides have been made in meditation research over the
past twenty five years. Meditation research has UM come a
(33:06):
long way. So when it started UM years ago, it
was not in the mainstream. It was really the pioneers
of meditation research really had to do a lot of
it kind of in the back room, on the hush hush.
It was not considered rigorous science or or rigorous health. UM. Uh,
(33:27):
you know, a rigorous subject of to study UM. But UH,
since then those pioneers have really demonstrated, especially in the
case of mindfulness meditation, how powerful Uh some of these
practices can be how UM for a lot of different domains,
(33:47):
both for UM reducing suffering, so reducing depression and anxiety,
but also for enhancing the positive things like resilience. UM.
And as soon as some of that research started to
get out and started to be conducted really rigorously, UM,
it started to be taken more seriously. And so when
it is taken more seriously, doors open up, so more
(34:09):
research funding goes into you know, big studies with lots
of people, and all of that has a snowballing effect
because we're able to ask UM more nuanced and better questions.
We moved from just UM really clunky questions like is
meditation good for us, to you know, better questions like
(34:29):
what is it good for UM? And are there potentially
negative effects? You know, could it be that there are
some situations in which meditation is harmful? We start to
get a a better tool for for really studying these
things in a better way. So that's kind of how
I see it is UM evolving over the last twenty
five years. In the paper the neural mediators of kindness
(34:52):
based meditation a theoretical model. You mentioned that two factors
are necessary for empathic response, a shared effective experience iriant
and a cognitive understanding. How did these come together in
empathy and what happens if either component is missing? The
idea is out there from the amazing social cognitive neuroscientists
(35:12):
that have moved this field forward, that there are these
UM that when you look at empathy as we define it,
UM as as scientists define it, it does seem to
have a few different components. And so in particular, those
do seem to be UM sort of a shared resonance
and ability to essentially try on someone else's emotions. But
(35:34):
at the same time there has to be some sort
of cognitive awareness that those emotions are you're feeling them
because someone else is feeling them. They're not necessarily just
your own emotions, but UM, you are recognizing them and
someone else UM. And so uh, how that plays out
is I think the million dollar question, because those seem
(35:55):
to be really UM dynamic processing UM. They're talked about
as different systems in the brain that allow us to
do those different things, and it's quite likely that UM
those UH skills sort of interact where you know, sometimes
you may very cognitively attend to someone and then the
(36:16):
emotions follow, or quite often it's probably the reverse. So
there's probably a very dynamic um complex interplay going on
to UH that that probably differs in every experience. You know,
every we think of the times we empathize with someone,
it's it's not the same every time, you know, UM,
And so I think there's a really dynamic process going
(36:39):
on there. But one of the um to your second question,
one of the pieces of evidence that scientists look at
to suggest that they are there, that there are these
different components is that it does appear that there are
clinical UM cases in which one is missing but not
the other. And so this is not cut and dry.
But UM, you mentioned psychopaths, and there is a large
(37:03):
bit of agreement that psychopaths tend to UM really be
missing more the affective sort of resonance component of empathy. UM,
they often do okay on the more cognitive um UH
aspects of empathy, and and that the deficits really seem
to be in their ability to to mirror someone's um
(37:25):
UH emotions, especially negative emotions. UM, they really seem to
not resonate with others anxiety and fear and suffering the
way we do. UM. And then there are other clinical
domains autism is often brought up where there's a different
picture of what's going on. There may be more of
(37:47):
the sort of cognitive piece that is that is problematic there,
and they may actually um do quite well at at
taking on other's emotions, maybe even too well. UM. So
there's it's not a cut and dry sort of situation,
but it does look like UM, there are different clinical
domains in which one or the other is more problematic,
and that tells us that these are um at least
(38:11):
just slightly discrete systems that are not completely synonymous. Now
when you explain it like that, I can't help but
wonder how it all shakes out in my own head,
like how much of how much of it is call
um A, how much of it is call them B?
And how does it come together? Right? Yeah? And then
there are there's a new movement of thought out there
that um. There there are some scholars that are arguing
(38:33):
that we should put us push aside empathy altogether, because
what really translates into compassionate behavior is not those things,
but um, our morals and our ethical code and uh
and some of those types of things, and that's a
whole other domain completely, um. But there is some uh
dynamic interaction that occurs between those components that allow us
(38:57):
to to empathize and then are are deep seated sort
of ethical, moral and cultural codes that help us translate
that into action. So tell me this, do you think
the world would be a better place if everyone practiced meditation?
Most of the things that we do in meditation, so
(39:17):
whether that's mindfulness or compassion meditation. Um. I think the
reason that they're so impactful is they're very different from
the things that we generally get sucked into doing in
our day to day life and um so um uh
it's especially in our you know, fragmented, incredibly busy lifestyle
(39:42):
here in the sort of modern West. Um, we are
often disconnected from that interdependency and notions of interdependency that
are quite obvious when we're able to take some time
and look each other in the eye. Um. And so
taking the time to to reconnect with those sorts of
(40:03):
feelings and thoughts I think would be very powerful and
very powerful for everyone. Um Uh. There are a lot
of different meditation practices out there, and so I think
the next the way that this field is going, the
next step for the field of meditation research is really
to try to understand which practices benefit whom and for
(40:24):
what and um, so that will better help us answer
the question of should everyone do mindfulness meditation, should everyone
do compassion meditation? Or is it that some people could
benefit more from one or the other. Um, we're all
busy people and we don't have time to do everything. Um.
But but anything that can help us feel more connected
(40:46):
and look at one another in the eye and um
and notice our shared humanity, I think that would benefit
all of us. For your own part, what is the
meditative state like and what do you feel you gain
from it personally? Yeah? Um, so you know, I grapple
with a lot of this stuff, you know, from the
(41:06):
day to day, and so I noticed that it casually
impacts me all the time, you know. Um, well, I
shouldn't say all the time. Maybe not as much as
it it should. But there are many times where you know,
I'm in traffic and someone cuts me off, and I
behave differently than than I might have if I if
I wasn't thinking of these things quite often, but there's
a deeper, richer personal experience that comes, for example, UM,
(41:30):
when I am lucky enough to go on a meditation
retreat or have UM you know, longer periods of time
in more contemplative states and UM. That always strikes me
as a very interesting phenomenon of UM, this incredible emotional
richness that sort of bubbles to the surface UM and
(41:52):
UH in both positive and negative ways. UM. You know,
sadness and happiness are closer to the surface. UM. But
even when the sadness is close over the surface, UM,
it's it's often uh feels like a really powerful positive thing. UM.
And so those deep moments of extended contemplation UM really
(42:12):
just feel like to me like an opening up of
this emotional life that often is numbed UM when when
we're busy and not attending to it. What are your
thoughts on the implementation of mindfulness in grade school. Yeah,
so there's a big movement to UM to implement especially
(42:33):
mindfulness in UM in in the K through twelve curriculum. UM.
And there is some good research indicating that it is helpful,
especially with emotion regulation UM social interactions for young children. UM.
And so I think that has a lot of potential UM.
(42:54):
And then we are looking at the possibility of incorporating
UM some compassion for because practices in K through twelve,
and it's striking how quickly children pick up on it UM,
even faster often than adults do. UM. A lot of
the examples and exercises that come with cognitively based compassion training,
(43:15):
kids pick up on it right away. And so I
think it has a real powerful potential for helping kids
remain connected with one another UM, and remain connected not
with just with their close friends, but maybe with UM
others that they may have trouble with, others that they
may not see as one of them, all of a
(43:36):
sudden become you know, a shared human human, you know,
with the the shared childhood experience that they're going through UM.
And so I think there is a lot of potential.
Do you know if there are any cultures out there
that that introduced children to meditation at at at a
really young age. Monastic traditions are so rich and so
different from one another, but there are a lot of
monastic traditions where children UM go away quite young and
(44:00):
and begin a monastic lifestyle. I'm a little hesitant because
there are a lot of monastic traditions that UM, you know,
don't practice a lot of meditation. So there's a lot
of diversity in terms of what UM goes on in
different monastic traditions, but certainly UM, there are a lot
of traditions in which the training starts quite early. All right, Well,
(44:22):
once again I want to thank Dr ms Garrow for
setting down and chatting with me about her meditation research
and just meditation research in general. I thought one thing
that was really interesting was the sort of the two
factor empathy model she talked about. What are your thoughts
about that, Robert, Does that ring true to you in
in your life? Like the idea that there is a
(44:43):
cognitive component to empathy and then the affective mirroring component
of empathy. Yeah, Like I say, it really made me
tease apart my own experience with meditation, but also my
own experience with things like empathy, Like you know, just
how much of it, how much of all may how
much a column B? How is this coming together in
my mind state? And how might it be coming together
(45:05):
differently or not at all in other mind states? You know,
because because it's so easy to fall into the trap
to think that we all have essentially the same hardware
and software firing up every time we're engaging with the world.
Do you ever think that if you are, if you
happen to be in euro atypical person, that like you
can catch yourself having failings of empathy and that's you're
(45:27):
sometimes failing in one column and sometimes failing in the
other column. Yeah. Yeah, I think so, because I guess
I'm paranoid enough that occasionally I'll I'll think back on
my day and I'll particularly I'll think about conversations and
I wonder who did was I? And was that? Did
I have enough empathy in that particular conversation? Did I?
(45:48):
Did I talk too much about my own stuff that?
Did I? Did I ask enough about someone else's stuff? Uh?
You know you can drive yourself nuts with those questions. Yeah,
I know what you mean. Um. Yeah. And so now
we have a whole other way to to dive into
that paranoid self criticism exactly. All right, Well, I think
we should do a quick break and then when we
come back from that break, we can talk about your
(46:08):
conversation with Dr Jill Weener. So when working on the
meditation video, I also interview Jill Weener, physician specializing in
Vedic meditation for wellness and stress management, and she is
also based here in Atlanta. She came in and she
had a lot to share about the particular strategies of
vedic meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and the use of mantras. Uh.
(46:33):
But but probably most importantly for our discussion here, she
had a lot to say about stress. So she is
is an instructor of what she calls vedic meditation, which
from what I could tell, is very similar to or
maybe the same thing as transcendental meditation. Yeah, it seems
to it seems to be very too closely related fields
(46:54):
of meditation, Like it involves using mantras to achieve this
state of trends. And yeah, I think that that that
sums it up. So we're not gonna, you know, the
entire interview here with with Jill, but I wanted to
to just are a portion of it because it sets
sets us up for a nice discussion about one particular
(47:15):
quality of both veting meditation and the general science of stress.
I think it's I think it's mandatory. I think that
stress is probably the biggest epidemic we've ever faced. Um
It underlies everything, and it underlies immune dysfunction, digestive digestive issues,
(47:37):
pain regulation, all these medical issues that we see as
physicians and as as patients that we experience, and if
we don't have a meditation practice to help us regulate
the way our bodies process stress, we it's like you're
not you can't ever catch up to it. The stress
keeps accumulating and accumulating and making you sicker and soer.
(48:00):
So for me as a health care provider helping me
be able to care for people, that having the meditation
is that personal practice for me was hugely important. But
also as a human being who has stress and stress
related symptoms and illness, um it also helps with that
(48:20):
quite a bit. So Adaptation energy we like to think
of it like your bank account of patients, your ability
to adapt and what typically gives you adaptation energy is sleep, eating, well, exercise,
anything you find to be restorative, like working on cars
or gardening or knitting or walking your dog. When life
(48:44):
throws you a little curveball, um, it takes away a
little bit of adaptation energy. And if you have enough
adaptation energy, you can handle anything that comes at you.
What happens is we only have a certain amount typically,
and as it starts to run out, your patient runs
a little thin, and you feel a little a little thready,
(49:06):
and then one little thing happens it doesn't seem like
that big a deal, and you lose it and you
snap and have a full stress fight or flight reaction.
So Vata meditation and lots of other forms of meditation
give you rest as well. So one of the key
ideas that the Jail mentions here and references a lot
is that of adaptation energy. This concept that you have
(49:30):
a personal depletable energy reserve for dealing with stress, a
reserve that can be replenished as well as diminished. And
you see it referenced in meditation, and I think it's
easy to simply dismiss something like that is just a
meditation buzzword or something. But when I started looking into it,
like what what is adaptation energy? Does it? Does it
(49:51):
exist outside of the terminology of a particular school of meditation,
it really gets quite fascinating. So the term originates with
Austrian indocrinologist Hans Celier, which I imagine a number of
people may be familiar with that name because he is
he is a huge name in the science of stress,
(50:12):
just the understanding of stress, the the cultural use of
the word stress today. He's sort of I mean, I
imagine that stress was just a concept that had always
been around, but he pretty much introduced the modern medical
concept of stress. Right. Yeah, it's hard to it's hard
to imagine that right now, to to think back, you know,
you think back on even ancient figures. You can imagine
(50:34):
Odysseus saying, oh man, this is such a stressful voyage home.
I'm just so stressed out. I can't wait to get
get home and just relax. So they talked about like
wearisomeness and anguish, but they didn't talk about stress. That's true.
So yeah. In in nineteen thirty five, he identified stress
as a syndrome occurring in laboratory rats. In night, he
(50:57):
defined general adaptation drum, which is also known as is
G a S or gas. I've seen some commentators say
that this is, you know, rather unfortunate, that that that's
what what one can refer to it as. But he
signaled this out as a three stage biological response to stress.
(51:19):
So the the three stages are as follows. First alarm,
This occurs when you encounter stress. The also known as
the alarm reaction stage the a R stage, and includes
the arousal of your fight or flight response to a stressor,
and all of your internal alarms are activated and you
prepare to face danger or runaway. And then he lays
(51:41):
out the second stage, the resistant stage, the stage of
resistance or SR. And in this UH the human response
to dangers in full swing, So your pupils dialate, your
heart rate and respiration go up, and your muscles contract.
And then where you really get into the general adaptation
syndrome here is a third stage of exhaustion. This is
(52:01):
when your body stays in an excited state for prolonged
perioded inner of the final state of of the gas
UH the state of exhaustion or SC and This this
occurs when in response to a stressor that has gone
on too long. In the state of hyper arousal, the
body's immune system begins to wear down and as a result,
the person will become more susceptible to infections and other
(52:23):
illnesses as the body's defenses have been spent on dealing
with the stresser. So one interesting way I read to
think about stress is that you think about a disease
or an injury or something like that causing symptoms. You know,
there there are symptoms that result from some type of
damage to or pressure upon the body, but there are
(52:47):
also these general symptoms that seem to happen basically no
matter what you're doing to the body, as long as
it's having some kind of cumulative negative effect. So like
whether it's some whether you're tired and deprived of sleep,
or infected by a disease, or you have gotten a
(53:08):
bodily injury, or you know, any number of things that
could happen, do you they all seem to sort of
lead to this similar cluster of symptoms, And so you
could think one way to think about stress is the
body's general response to negativity. Yeah, and I mean, and
I guess the other side of it too. To consider
(53:28):
with stress is that a lot of like the basic
evolved biological adaptations, you know, we weren't we were we
evolved to deal with tigers essentially, but not paper tigers
so much. And that's one of the problems with the
modern world, right, is that we we we get so
stressed out over things that are not actual mediate threats,
(53:50):
but they never go away. Yeah, they never go away.
They're constantly coming at you. Uh. So you can definitely
see the modern application of this, this idea, the general
adaptation syndrome, and the idea that you would have only
so much like bodily and mentally mental energy to deal
with a barrage of stressors. Yeah, and Celia, he did
(54:12):
sort of have an idea that there were this was
a modern problem in a way, right. Yeah, Like so
you could imagine maybe our ancestors living living on a
savannah somewhere would have a fight or flight response if, like,
you know, a large leopard comes near them or something.
You know, you that's like an immediate stress point that
(54:32):
you've got to deal with. But what if it's like
you have put yourself into a state of being where
you're almost never facing actual acute danger, but your entire life,
there's a leopard over there on the horizon and it
never gets too close to you, but it also never
goes away. Yeah, it's always potentially in your email folder.
(54:54):
It's always potentially in your mailbox or on your doorstep.
I mean it's yeah, it's uh, this is this is
the paper tiger that we've we've grown accustomed to, or
haven't grown accustomed to if you rather so. One of
the interesting things about Celia's work is is that the
modern use of the word stress stems from his work UH,
and interestingly enough, his findings that were rejected by physiologists
(55:16):
until the nineteen seventies. As Russell Winer put put it
in his h his paper Putting Stress in Life hand
Celier in the making of Stress Theory UH, Celia used
stress to describe an organism's adaptation response to the environment
quote that is, the state manifested by the gas. In
this reconceptualization of stress, Celier believed himself to have discovered
(55:40):
a universal truth regarding the relationships of organisms with their environment.
And he also pointed out that Celier had some pretty
lofty ideas about his stress theory UH, that civilization was
disordered on two vital levels. The quote diseases of civilization,
such as cardiovascular diseases. These were caused by poor adaptation
(56:04):
to modern industrial life. And on another level, entirely he
saw that Western civilization bore the cracks of intense social instability,
and stress theory, he argued, could save us from both
of these. So he was he was not shy about
championing stress theory. According to Viner, the US military were
(56:26):
among the first to really embrace his ideas on stress
and operational efficiency in the post war period, and they
somehow doesn't surprise me. Yeah, they jumped right in there.
It fall does fall in line with a lot of
the recent topics we've covered, uh, related to Cold War research,
Like mid century military research went into a lot of
(56:46):
fringe territory, though I guess this is one that eventually
became mainstream science. Yeah, because on one hand, there's you
want to know how your troops are going to behave
in a stressful situation, but they also considered stress a
useful weapon in potential psychological warfare based on his work
and the work of others. Uh. In fact, Viner says, quote,
the military's fascination with stress became such that by nine
(57:09):
seventy six, over one third of prominent researchers in the
stress area were based in US military institutions. So it's
it's no surprise then. I suppose that one of the
papers that I found on adaptation energy came from a
two thousand nine issue of the FBI Law Enforcement bulletin
title Alarmingly enough, on the Edge colon Uh, integrating spirituality
(57:34):
into law enforcement. Did you read it? I mean, what
kind of a read is this? Um? It was an
interesting read. I just basically just made me just kept
coming back and saying, wait, is this the real FBI Bulton?
Is this something else? Does FBI stand for something other
than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because it's certainly it's
certainly interesting to see this article in an FBI publication
(57:58):
after watching um My Hunters, which of course displays a
sort of the old school FBI the Netflix series Mind. Yes,
the old school FBI of the sixties and seventies, like
entering into a new um a new age that is
open to psychological science. And you can find that arcase
(58:20):
everyone wants to read it for them stuff. You can
find that online. It's by in Knees Tuck. But the
concept of of of adaptation, energy and stress. Uh. This
was also embraced by transcendental meditation. To bring us back
to meditation, and Celier himself became interested in the use
of transcendental meditation as a stress management method after meeting
(58:42):
with the Maharishi mahash Yogi, the founder of the transcendental
meditation movement in the nineties seventies, something that he discussed
in later interviews. Interesting. Now, adaptation energy itself remains hypothetical,
but many scientific studies surrounding meditation uh relate to the
physiological effects of stress. Yeah. I was thinking when listening
(59:04):
to uh Dr Weener's interview that even if the adaptation
energy theory is not um but if it's not literally
correct in that you have some kind of fixed number
of reserves that are depleted, I think it could be
could be very easily an analogy for something that is
very true of the body, which is that there is
(59:27):
such a thing as cumulative stress. You might not have
a number that could be measured and that can be
built up and stuff like that, but there are cumulative
effects of stress, and it can behave sort of analogously
to what she describes. Yeah, I mean, you can think
of it just like, how many times would you need
to be, say, reminded of something stressful in your life?
How many times would you or you would you need
(59:48):
to have someone jump out at you and scare you
before it would begin to wear you down, you know,
just in the course of a day. And therefore it
might be useful to find a room where nobody jumped
stout at you, or nobody shouts something stressful at you,
And of course for the most part, we don't. We
don't even have to rely on someone else to jump
(01:00:08):
out or someone else to yell something stressful, because we
have the this wonderful dialogue that's going on in our
minds most of the time, the email leopard and the
email leopard as well. But yeah, we have the default
mode network in our mind, constantly fretting over past in future.
It's it's shutting off that voice. It's finding a room
where that voice cannot reaches, that that has value. And
(01:00:31):
that's where meditation comes in. Yeah, and I can certainly
believe also that meditative practices could increase one's resistance to
uh to to these stressors as they come at you,
even after you've stopped practicing it for the moment. Indeed.
Now for this episode, thanks as always to Alexander Williams
for running the boards on this one, and thanks to
Tyler Clang and Tari Harrison, who also came up with
(01:00:53):
a couple of the questions that we used in the
interview with Mascarrow. Thanks of course to Dr Jennifer Mascarrow
for talking with us and to Dr Jill Weener. And
by the way, if you want to check out Dr
Joel Weiner's work, you can head on over to Jill
Weener dot com. That's w E N E R. And
if you want to check out our work here's Stuff
to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all
(01:01:15):
the episodes, as well as links out to our various
social media accounts. And if you want to get in
touch with us directly, as always, you can email us
at blow them Minto's how stuff Works dot com for
(01:01:35):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff Works dot com by No Mo
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert,
you're a guy who practices meditation sometimes, right, Well, I
practice yoga, which entails a certain amount of meditation. Uh,
(00:26):
And I have I have dabbled in meditation, but I
do not currently have a rigorous meditative practice in place
in my life. When you've dabbled, which of the schools
of meditation did you try? Oh? You know, it was
one of these where I just kind of ran up
to the buffet of meditation and tried what was you know,
which steamer tray had been most recently filled and was available?
(00:48):
So everything, Yeah, a little of everything. Because I've tried
some closed eye meditation, some um, some open eye meditation.
I've some monterra Ronian cheese. Yeah, I mean I've well,
I've tried stuff that's more on the secular side and
stuff that's that has more of a spiritual connotation to it.
(01:09):
And uh, it's one of those things where I feel
like the first time you try it, especially if someone
has convinced you that you need to try meditation or
you need to try Look like, it's the same thing
with yoga. When you're when someone tells you you need
to try this out, there's a strong chance you are
you're not going to really get it the first time,
that you might even dislike it the first time. But
(01:30):
when you have time to reflect on what you experience
and then you time to try it again, kind of
at your own pace, then you can begin to see
the value in it. You know, something I've noticed in
recent years about the role of yoga and meditation in
Western culture is that it has gone from something that's
widely considered a kind of uh, you know, esoteric practice
(01:52):
to something that is almost kind of a I don't
know what you'd call it. Like. Sometimes it seems weird
to meet people who don't do yoga. I don't do yoga, um,
but it seems like everybody I know it does yoga
at least a little bit or or talks about the
benefits of meditation. And I wonder if this is just
(02:14):
something that changed. I don't know, when I moved to
a bigger city. When I you know, when I moved
to Atlanta, I started noticing a lot more people were
into meditation and yoga. But I don't know. Have you
noticed this similar trend in the past five years or so. Yeah, well,
I mean part of it is urban centers are going
to have more opportunities for this sort of thing. But
there there has been a steady influx of meditative yogain
(02:37):
I just kind in Eastern and New Age ideas in general.
But it feels like these ideas have become mainstream in
Western culture fairly recently. Like they you know, they were
there as an esoteric practice in Western culture for some
number of decades, maybe since the middle late twentieth century,
and then and now they're fully mainstream. You see yoga
(02:59):
studios every where, their meditation apps that everybody's talking about there,
they've all got on their phones biz bros or trying
out meditation. I know you've seen this trend to right,
All all the biz bro manager types are like, yeah,
I use meditation to maximize my potential. You might not
remember this, but we had a yoga teacher come to
how Stuff works in recent years and he did a
(03:22):
yoga class for the company, of which I was the
only person who attended. But this was years ago. You
might not I don't know if you're even I don't
think I was aware of this, but he had a
full list of his offerings and it included like yoga
for golf fires, yoga for CEOs, that sort of thing,
you know, Um, yoga, yoga for how to fire people.
(03:46):
I guess, yeah, how to detach and all. Um. Yeah,
it is. It is interesting because on one hand, it's
easy to look at it and say, well, you're taking
you're taking something that maybe has more cultural value or
more religious or spiritual value, and then you're sort of
boiling it down or you're you're stripping it apart and
then selling those parts to people. Well, yeah, I mean,
(04:09):
and whether you take a a spiritual or religious or
a secular view of meditation, these are profound, meaningful cultural
practices that go back for thousands of years. Yeah. I mean,
there are certainly cases with especially with yoga, where we
don't we're not always aware of how recently they've been
changed by by Western hands and Western minds. But um,
(04:32):
I guess I was thinking specifically of meditation. Yeah. Well,
I keep I keep coming back to this example when
it comes to things like this. So, uh, years ago,
I was at like a dinner party or something, and
I got to talking about I think I think I
was talking about Buddhism or something with someone and Alan
Watts came up. Familiar with that one Watts a little bit. Yeah,
so uh. The other individuals said, well, you know Alan Watts,
(04:55):
he's he's kind of the Walmart of Buddhism, isn't he. Uh?
And I think she kind a minute as a as
as a put down of of Alan Watts. And and
sometimes I think back to that and and if you
if you look at it with the idea that the
Buddhism in this case has a central truth to it,
a truth that should be shared with the world, and
(05:16):
or even you know, wants to be shared with the world,
then don't you want it in Walmart? Like you need
you need there to be a Walmart of Buddhism, you
need there to be a Walmart of yoga and meditation
if you would all believe in the values of these things. Yeah.
So that's um, that's sort of the question I was
wondering about, Like, if you are somebody who participates in
(05:36):
in this deep, long rooted, profound cultural tradition of meditation,
so you're a you're a monk or something who does
meditation as part of your spiritual practice. Are are you
offended by yoga for golf? Are you offended by you know,
the meditation app that will help you be a better
business manager? Or is that or do you just say yeah,
(05:57):
that that's great. More more people are taking it up,
more people are seeing the benefits, and it's going to
more of the world. Yeah, I guess it's one of
those things where it's the answer is going to vary
from person to person and tradition to tradition. But uh, yeah,
we obviously we'd love to hear back from listeners on
that because I know we have a number of listeners
who are involved in various UH yoga or meditation practices.
(06:18):
So when we're talking about meditative practices and meditation here,
UH meditative practices date back at least as far as
the second millennium BC and UH and this goes back
to the Vedic traditions in India, and since that time,
countless models have spread throughout human culture, weaving their way
through Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Secular
(06:40):
approaches range from elementary school mindfulness instruction UH to meditation apps,
which you mentioned already from the modern tech savvy human
and styles of meditation also range from stationary to walking,
closed eye to open eye, seeded to floating. Yeah, and
there there are these major schools of meditation you've probably
heard about, such as like the mindfulness meditation or the
(07:04):
transcendental meditation or compassion meditation. Right, and then of course
there are different schools, transidental meditation being a major one.
That's the one that goes to the Mahirishi Maheshioki, right, yes, correct, Now.
I think it's worth noting though, that at the center
of all of these practices, essentially as you have awareness,
(07:24):
one of, if not the key attributes of human consciousness.
We come back to that again and again on the show.
So meditation you could maybe think of as uh, first
person experiments in attention something like that. Yeah, like I was,
I was thinking about it recently. Like it seems like
it's nothing short of the deliberate manipulation of the human
(07:45):
experience itself. I am changing my awareness, or I'm refocusing
my awareness, and in doing so, I'm kind of reshaping
my world. I'm kind of reshaping my uh, my experience
of reality. At least in the short term. It's weird
to think about how much of our lives we go
through without intentionally controlling what we're paying attention to. We
(08:07):
just pay attention to whatever it occurs to us in
the moment to pay attention to, rather than making a
deliberate effort to concentrate our awareness in one way or another. Yeah,
and it's one of the reasons I think everyone should
try some sort of meditation or some sort of yoga
at some point, like some sort of a mindfulness exercise,
even if it ends up not being the thing for you.
(08:28):
Uh it. At times it can kind of like, I
feel like you can kind of wake you up, You
can kind of force you to realize, um, you know,
what kind of noise is going on in your head
at any given moment. One meditative thought that you introduced
to me that I've never heard before, but you brought
it up on the podcast one time was just sitting
down and coming back to the thought repeatedly, I wonder
(08:49):
what my next thought is going to be. Since you
mentioned this, I've tried it and it's a really interesting experience. Cool. Yeah,
that one, I believe that was an Eckhart tolle uh idea.
I mean it's kind of a mantra, and in many respects,
but a very simplified, boiled down mantra. It's just kind
of like sticking a sticking a little roadblock into your
(09:10):
constant highway of mental traffic. Yeah. It has a way
of calling attention to the fact that your mind is
sort of this deep chasm through from which things emerge
without really you having any control over. And usually this
just happens to you and you don't notice. It is
just like, yeah, I'm just thinking, but thinking about thinking
(09:32):
makes thinking become very mysterious. Yeah, it does. It. It
forces you to to to reflect on your own cognitive
processes and trying to figure out what's going on there. Now. Meditation,
obviously is everyone can tell from the discussion thus far.
It touches on cognition, It touches on various aspects of
of of human health, and therefore there have been a
(09:55):
number of studies over the years that have looked into
it's it's possible effectiveness on mental or physical health, looking
at exactly what it does, like what is the meditative
meditative state look like in the brain and uh, and
you know, there have been some some key findings that
have certainly made the rounds over the years and sort
(10:16):
of forced people to to to look more closely in meditation. Uh.
One one study that they made a lot of headlines
was the two thousand twelve study from the Institute for
Natural Medicine and Prevention. They that found that African Americans
with heart disease who practice transcendental meditation were less likely
to experience a heart attack or stroke. Yeah, so I
(10:38):
want to come back to that claim in a minute. Uh.
I've got complex feelings about the medical research on meditation,
which we were talking about this off Mike before we
came on. But um, I would not put them in
exactly the same bucket with but sort of adjacent to
the bucket of prayer studies, meaning that both, I guess
(11:00):
both fit into a larger bucket in this world of buckets,
the Russian dolls of buckets that we live in. Um. So,
when it when it comes to these types of research,
I think some skeptics would look at prayer studies and
meditation studies and say, why would you waste your time?
You know what? Why what what can be gained from
studying this? You can already be pretty sure it's a
bunch of magical bs, and it's going to be conducted
(11:23):
by believers who are going to cut corners and their
methodology to make their worldview look good. And so there's
part of that I agree with. In part I don't
agree with. I don't at all agree with the idea
of why would you waste your time because I don't know.
I think it makes more sense to be the kind
of skeptic that says, well, bring it on, let's see,
um if it gets good results, and if other people
(11:45):
can replicate those results, especially hostile people who are you know,
not part of this worldview, can replicate the same results,
I think that's something we want to know about, and
certainly if it's something that can be scientifically studied. Yeah. Now,
on the other hand, I do think there's some merit
to the idea that things like prayer studies and meditation
studies require some careful scrutiny before we accept their results,
(12:08):
because there are some people who are convinced of the
results before they start looking for them. Now, that's definitely
not true of all meditation researchers, I think, right, Yeah,
I mean I mean for starters with prayer there, it
seems like that's more likely a problem because there's not
really much in the way of secular prayer out there.
I feel like, for the most part, if you are
(12:29):
praying to a deity or a group of deities, you
have some level of belief where you usually you're taking
on some level of belief in those deities. Though, I
think you could come up with secular explanations for the
successive prayer. Like, certainly if you had prayer studies that worked,
I think that wouldn't necessarily prove any kind of magical
thing and would just say, well, prayer has some kind
of benefits, and you could explain that in terms of
(12:51):
psychology of groups, social dynamics, all kinds of things. Yeah,
but again to I mean, to your point, there are
plenty of models of meditation that they don't involve belief
in the deity or belief in some sort of you know,
particular model of bodily energy or you know, some other
kind of like New age mechanism. Yeah. Absolutely, And in
a minute, we're actually going to air a an interview
(13:13):
Robert did with a local meditation researcher. What is this
researcher's name, Rob This is Dr Jennifer and Mascara, and
she's an assistant professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at
Immer University here in Atlanta, and she investigates meditation from
a secular scientific standpoint, So that can absolutely be done.
But coming back to these medical effects that people claim
(13:34):
are demonstrated by meditation, I don't want to rule them out,
and I think research on this is valid and I
think we should pay attention to it. But I think
it does deserve scrutiny because coming back to that one
result you mentioned about heart disease and transcendental meditation, I
found an American Heart Association scientific statement from seventeen. It
(13:54):
was actually just released this year. So first, a general
comment they make, quote, further research on meditation and cardiovascular
risk is warranted. Such studies, to the degree possible, should
utilize randomized study design, be adequately powered to meet primary
study outcome, strive to achieve low dropout rates, include long
term follow up, and be performed by those without inherent
(14:17):
bias in the outcome. So generally, they're saying that it
does appear that there could be some some good places
to go with meditation and cardiovascular health. Research, but a
lot of the studies that exist today have some of
these problems with methodology that make them less robust or
convincing than they could be. And referring to that twelve
study about cardiovascular health and transcendental meditation, they say, quote
(14:41):
the study though, was conducted in two phases after a
one year hiatus, with fifty eight patients not participating in
phase two of the study, and some concerns about analysis
of the data have been raised. So it sounds like
that when you get this big claim like this, wow,
you know, you get these amazing results from transcendental NEETs aitation,
they're saying, Okay, we we might want to be cautious
(15:04):
about over interpreting these study results because the methodology was
less than perfect, right, and is consumers we have to
be careful about sort of having the red wine or
chocolate effect with studies like this, where we like red
wine or chocolate and then when a headline comes out
that supports the thing we like, we just kind of
we we kind of check it off in our mind
(15:24):
and move on. Well. Yeah, and to be cautious about
those studies is not to say that red wine and
chocolate do not have their their wonderful benefits in terms
of flavor and enjoyment, And the same thing could probably
be said about meditation. I would say, even if you
don't find that meditation has any measurable cardiovascular benefits or
anything like that, benefits on long term chronic health conditions,
(15:46):
or pain reduction or anything like that, it's still obviously
has this role in people's lives that you know, people
get imans pleasure from it. They find that it changes
the way they view the world. It it does do something,
even if it does do everything people claim it does.
So Ultimately, I think meditation research is a highly valid
field of study and I and I wouldn't be surprised
(16:08):
if it turned up really effective results. But I also
think it's a field where I would I would just
tend to treat claimed results with special caution and scrutiny.
Not a fault of meditation itself. Nothing wrong with the
practice of meditation. But but but I but I always
try to be cautious whenever I see a new claim
about meditation results. So I recently partnered with the videographer
(16:33):
and audio producer Tyler clang Here at the Office on
a couple of interviews for a meditation video project. Now,
company priorities changed and that kind of left the project
in limbo. But I didn't want to lose the great
time content we'd already achieved, So we're gonna feature some
interview content with every university meditation researcher Dr Jennifer Moscaro
and with a physician vedic meditation teacher, Jill Wiener. This
(16:57):
will also enable us to to finish the video in
some form and you can look for that in the
near future. Obviously, we'll put that up on Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com and and also on the
social media platforms. So let's go ahead and introduce Dr
Jennifer Mascaro here again. She's Assistant Professor of Family and
Preventive Medicine at Emory University here in Atlanta, where she's
(17:17):
also worked with the Department of Anthropology. She specializes in
the variation in and plasticity of human social cognition and
the biology of interconnectedness. She recently came into the studio
and chatted with us about the current state of meditation
research and her own fascinating contributions to the study of
not only mindfulness meditation, but compassion meditation. Robert. I want
(17:39):
to say I enjoyed this interview and I thought Dr
mscarro was great. Awesome. Well, let's take a quick break
and when we come back, we will just jump right
into the interview questions with Dr Muscarrow. Thank you, thank alright,
we're back. Hi. Dr Mscaa, thank you for joining us here.
So my first question is just broadly speaking, what's the
(17:59):
current foe because of your research at Amory, Yeah, a
lot of the research that we're doing is on different
meditation practices that we think have the most evidence for
impacting people's well being UM. And so in particular, we're
looking at two different types of meditation. So one is
called mindfulness meditation, and that's actually what most people think
(18:19):
of when they hear about meditation UM. But we're also
doing a lot of research on a compassion meditation practice
that comes from a very old Tibetan Buddhist tradition UM
and is thought to cultivate feelings of connectedness with others, UM,
feelings of compassion and empathy for others. And and it
turns out that that's really good for our well being.
So what's your personal history with meditation? I started dabbling
(18:44):
primarily with mindfulness meditation. Back when I was in high school,
I was a really serious athlete, and um, it turns
out that mindfulness meditation is really helpful for um mitigating
stress and anxiety, especially when you're performing. And so I
used to do mindfulness practices when I was anxious about
a big game or you know, in the aftermath if
(19:05):
I felt like I didn't perform very well. It was
really helpful for not ruminating. Um. And so I dabbled
here and there. Um. But then uh, it really it
um took a new direction when I started graduate school
and I was interested in the plasticity of the brain.
And here, you know, we have these practices that have
(19:27):
been um uh cultivated and perfected um over you know,
many many hundreds of years that we think impact the
brain and systems in the brain that I was really
interested in studying. And so UM, I really turned from
being a dabbling practitioner to really more of an at
least hopefully objective scientist. So how do you go about
(19:50):
conducting hard scientific research on something like meditation. We try
to do research on meditation similar to the way you
would do research on, for example, a dru or any
intervention So the gold standard is with a randomized clinical
trial where you randomize some people to the meditation practice
that you're interested in, and you have another group that's
(20:12):
randomized some control group. UM, the ideal study design has
your compared meditation to an active control group. And the
reason for that is because there are a lot of
things about UH an intervention that could be helpful, could
change people that aren't due to the meditation practice itself.
You know, if it's a group practice, it may just
(20:34):
be meeting with a group of people that you think
are like minded. Maybe meeting with a teacher, like a
meditation teacher is really helpful because you you have someone
to uh, you know, a role model. There could be
non specific things that are kind of doing the work,
so you really want to try to control for those
types of things. So UM, one of the big ways
that meditation is studies is with that sort of design.
(20:57):
Another thing though, that people do is UM. They point
out that that misses a lot of the cultural, um
and contextual factors that often accompany meditation. So some people
UM and I think this is really important research to
are doing research where they're really doing more qualitative research
to try to dig in and understand what meditation means
(21:19):
to people when they practice it. What are the fact
the sort of contextual factors, the cultural factors that that
might be UM at play. So you're talking about stripping
away some of the ritualized cultural aspects to understand what's
actually taking place in the body and mind. But isn't
the counter argument that you can't separate these two aspects
of meditative practice exactly? And that's an issue that accompanies
(21:42):
a lot of different scientific domains. UM. You know, when
you try to take something and put it in a
laboratory setting to study it, you necessarily strip it front
of UM extraneous features that might be really important UM.
And so that is a debate that happens in a
lot of domains of science, but it's particularly in portant
with meditation because there are these UM sort of cultural
(22:04):
embedded factors that might are likely very very important and
maybe the most important. So you are often the researchers
you study meditation are often sort of straddling this difficult
question of trying to UM to empirically study a practice
in the best way they can, but all the while
(22:24):
not removing and reducing it to something that is less
than than what it really is. Now at least one
of your studies, you even go so far as to
avoid calling it meditation, right, So um Exactly, one of
the challenges when you do meditation research is you don't
want to bias people um at the outset. Uh. You
don't want to bring people in and and and uh
(22:47):
sort of enhance the placebo effect essentially um uh. And
so with a lot of our research, we really try
to reduce some of the terms that we use that
might convey a bias to our articipants um uh. And
then the other thing is meditation, even though we talk
about it here is being secularized and sort of stripped
(23:08):
of its religious connotations. It's really impossible to to to
do that. And so um there are a lot of
populations for whom that term um. You know, it comes
with some baggage or some connotations that may dissuade them
people from from practicing or change the way they um
they sort of interpreted or or accepted. And so um
(23:29):
we we try to minimize that the bias and our
participants as much as we can. And so one of
the ways we do that is to sometimes we don't
even call it meditation. Now on the other end of
the spectrum, emory benefits from a partnership with Tibetan monks.
How do you incorporate traditional meditation practitioners into the research. Yeah,
that's crucial, and that's one of the really exciting things
(23:50):
about this research is this sort of partnership between scholars
of a lot of different areas that are really coming
together to try to understand a rich tradition in uh
the richest way that they can. And so UM we
have a sort of a constant dialogue with those contemplative
practitioners to try to understand um, the historical tradition, the
(24:15):
textual tradition, UH, and the monastic tradition. You know, UM,
those are all those are three different things that have
UM a real bearing on what we're studying, and and
it's impossible for scientists and scholars to have expertise in
all those domains, and so it's it's really kind of
a fun. Part of what we do is a dialogue
(24:36):
with UM, the the Tibetan practitioners that we get to
work with, whether dealing with a traditional Eastern model or
a modern Western model. I think there's a tendency to
see meditation as an exercise and shutting out the world.
But as you already said, Uh, empathy plays an important
role in many meditation traditions as well. Can you tell
us about the Tibetan practice of lo jan, right, yeah. So,
(25:00):
so we look at a compassion meditation practice that emerges
from the low Jong or mind training tradition UM, and
that is a tradition that UM places a heavy emphasis
on compassion. I mean that is Uh. One of the
ultimate goals is to be a being of of compassion.
And so these are practices that are thought to help
(25:22):
us feel compassion, not only to the people around us
that UM we often feel compassion for, but um to
others that we don't know, and to people that we
often have difficult challenges with. And so UM, that's not
one of the preconceived notions that we often have about meditation.
Often when the word meditation comes up, it's about focus
and attention, and often it becomes a tool of achievement. UM.
(25:46):
But this is a tradition where UM cultivating compassion for
others was of of the most importance and UM. Within
that monastic tradition, the practices were really UM done quite
often to benefit others, not not to benefit oneself, not
to reduce stress or anxiety in oneself, but to benefit others.
(26:07):
What have you learned from your research thus far? Can
meditation actually rewire our neural circuitry for empathic behavior? Yeah,
I mean I think it's um taking our research and
coupling it with the incredible research that's coming out of
other other universities. I think it's it's safe to say
that these practices, compassion meditation practices, loving kindness meditation practices,
(26:32):
and even mindfulness. There's evidence that mindfulness impacts are social
connections with others. Um and Uh. This research really suggests that, UM,
that we can augment the systems in our brain that
help us connect with others, that help us read others emotions. Um.
And then when you do that, it's very clear that
(26:54):
there are huge health benefits. So one of the emerging
UM lines that is connecting a lot of domains of
health researches the incredible importance of our social relationships. UM.
Our social relationships impact the way our immune system functions,
the way our stress system functions, and so as soon
as you are able to bolster a feeling of connectedness,
(27:17):
a feeling of sort of interdependency with others. UM. You
you really do change the way you respond to the
world around you, and you it becomes less threatening, changes
our body and our brain. You also used f m
RI I in this study were able to observe the
effects of meditation in a subject's neural activity. We did
so UM. There are two different ways that you can
(27:39):
use functional MRI to study meditation. So you could have
people actually meditate in the fm RI I scanner and
see what their brain is doing while they meditate. UM.
But we did a slightly different thing. We had people
practice meditation for several weeks and then we wanted to
see how that changed the way their brain UH function
when they did certain important cognitive tasks UM. And we
(28:02):
found that UM, when people practice compassion meditation, they actually
got more accurate when they read other people's facial expressions.
So what we did was we showed them photographs of
the eye region of people's faces and we had them
judge what they thought the person was thinking or feeling.
And after the meditation training, they actually got more accurate.
Their scores went up, and then the activity in the
(28:25):
systems in the brain that are important for doing that
UM for reading other people's facial expressions. The activity in
those regions actually increased as well. So do you think
meditation in the form of cognitive based compassion training can
be used to boost empathy and say an actual psychopath. Yeah,
it's such an interesting question, and it's one we immediately
thought about when we found, um, the results of our
(28:48):
first study where we were seeing this effect on people's
ability to read facial expressions. You immediately think of populations
of people that may benefit, so children, UM, or clinical
populations that really seemed to struggle with these types of
social interactions and social skills. Um, it's we we haven't
done any studies with clinical populations in that way. UM,
(29:09):
so it's definitely too early to say. The other thing
that I think is a really interesting and important UM
direction for meditation research to go is really to try
to understand whether there are differences in how amenable different
people are too actually practicing. And what I mean is, UM,
there's a real likelihood that, UM, there's a bit of
(29:31):
a catch twenty two where the people who might benefit
most from something like cognitively based compassion training may actually
really struggle to do it, or it may not resonate
with them, they may not understand it, um. And so
I think that's particularly important when we turn our attention
to clinical populations. It may be that the populations that
would really benefit the most, or could really stand to
(29:53):
benefit from something like compassion meditation or mindfulness meditation, they
actually may have a real difficulty with with doing it.
So some brains are going to be a little more
susceptible to meditation than others. Well that's the hypothesis. Um,
there is a little bit of evidence. Now, UM we did, uh,
we have one study where we found that UM, people's
(30:15):
brain activity that related to empathy actually predicted how much
they would engage with the training. In other words, people
who had a brain that seemed to be more empathic
at the outset actually practiced more UM. And that does
suggest to us that there may be some populations of
people that take to meditation more that may find it
(30:36):
easier or it may resonate with them. And conversely, there
may be populations of people where for whom it's really
a struggle, they may not understand or may um not
resonate with them as much. Exactly. So, what does cognitive
based compassion training look like and what does it feel like. Yeah,
that's a great question. So UM, it's it's quite different
(30:57):
actually than the mindfulness meditation and practices that are often
talked about in popular media. UM. But it actually does
start with a little bit of mindfulness practices. So the
first segment of of CBCT actually is the goal is
to entrain attention um. And so there it begins with
some mindfulness to the body, mindfulness to the breath, and
(31:20):
then mindfulness to sort of everything, all the thoughts and
sensations that stream throughout our our mind constantly UM. But
put pretty quickly, you know, the goal there is to
to just sort of cultivate this awareness so that we
can move on to the compassion components. And UM. What
it does from there is it begins with um uh
(31:41):
an appreciation for our um, our ability to be more compassionate,
our ability to um cultivate the positive mental skills that
we have, and and a compassion for ourselves as humans
that these things are difficult um. And then it moves
from there to discussions of and and deep contemplation of
(32:02):
our interconnectedness with others. So um, you might think deeply
about people in your life and how much we rely
on them, even people that we don't think of very
often as being very important to us UM when we
really get down to it, we rely on so many
people in our lives for essentially everything, UM. And then
we move on to an awareness that UM, all of
(32:24):
those people that were interconnected with interconnected with UM, they
are at base so similar to us. UM. We are
also similar in UM wanting well being for ourselves and
for our loved ones, and really wanting to be free
of distress and suffering. And UM. Those recognitions are quite powerful,
(32:45):
the recognition that we are so connected with one another
and that we are at base so similar to one another. UM.
The thought is that from there emerges a natural compassion
empathy for for those around us. Broadly speaking, what sort
of rides have been made in meditation research over the
past twenty five years. Meditation research has UM come a
(33:06):
long way. So when it started UM years ago, it
was not in the mainstream. It was really the pioneers
of meditation research really had to do a lot of
it kind of in the back room, on the hush hush.
It was not considered rigorous science or or rigorous health. UM. Uh,
(33:27):
you know, a rigorous subject of to study UM. But UH,
since then those pioneers have really demonstrated, especially in the
case of mindfulness meditation, how powerful Uh some of these
practices can be how UM for a lot of different domains,
(33:47):
both for UM reducing suffering, so reducing depression and anxiety,
but also for enhancing the positive things like resilience. UM.
And as soon as some of that research started to
get out and started to be conducted really rigorously, UM,
it started to be taken more seriously. And so when
it is taken more seriously, doors open up, so more
(34:09):
research funding goes into you know, big studies with lots
of people, and all of that has a snowballing effect
because we're able to ask UM more nuanced and better questions.
We moved from just UM really clunky questions like is
meditation good for us, to you know, better questions like
(34:29):
what is it good for UM? And are there potentially
negative effects? You know, could it be that there are
some situations in which meditation is harmful? We start to
get a a better tool for for really studying these
things in a better way. So that's kind of how
I see it is UM evolving over the last twenty
five years. In the paper the neural mediators of kindness
(34:52):
based meditation a theoretical model. You mentioned that two factors
are necessary for empathic response, a shared effective experience iriant
and a cognitive understanding. How did these come together in
empathy and what happens if either component is missing? The
idea is out there from the amazing social cognitive neuroscientists
(35:12):
that have moved this field forward, that there are these
UM that when you look at empathy as we define it,
UM as as scientists define it, it does seem to
have a few different components. And so in particular, those
do seem to be UM sort of a shared resonance
and ability to essentially try on someone else's emotions. But
(35:34):
at the same time there has to be some sort
of cognitive awareness that those emotions are you're feeling them
because someone else is feeling them. They're not necessarily just
your own emotions, but UM, you are recognizing them and
someone else UM. And so uh, how that plays out
is I think the million dollar question, because those seem
(35:55):
to be really UM dynamic processing UM. They're talked about
as different systems in the brain that allow us to
do those different things, and it's quite likely that UM
those UH skills sort of interact where you know, sometimes
you may very cognitively attend to someone and then the
(36:16):
emotions follow, or quite often it's probably the reverse. So
there's probably a very dynamic um complex interplay going on
to UH that that probably differs in every experience. You know,
every we think of the times we empathize with someone,
it's it's not the same every time, you know, UM,
And so I think there's a really dynamic process going
(36:39):
on there. But one of the um to your second question,
one of the pieces of evidence that scientists look at
to suggest that they are there, that there are these
different components is that it does appear that there are
clinical UM cases in which one is missing but not
the other. And so this is not cut and dry.
But UM, you mentioned psychopaths, and there is a large
(37:03):
bit of agreement that psychopaths tend to UM really be
missing more the affective sort of resonance component of empathy. UM,
they often do okay on the more cognitive um UH
aspects of empathy, and and that the deficits really seem
to be in their ability to to mirror someone's um
(37:25):
UH emotions, especially negative emotions. UM, they really seem to
not resonate with others anxiety and fear and suffering the
way we do. UM. And then there are other clinical
domains autism is often brought up where there's a different
picture of what's going on. There may be more of
(37:47):
the sort of cognitive piece that is that is problematic there,
and they may actually um do quite well at at
taking on other's emotions, maybe even too well. UM. So
there's it's not a cut and dry sort of situation,
but it does look like UM, there are different clinical
domains in which one or the other is more problematic,
and that tells us that these are um at least
(38:11):
just slightly discrete systems that are not completely synonymous. Now
when you explain it like that, I can't help but
wonder how it all shakes out in my own head,
like how much of how much of it is call
um A, how much of it is call them B?
And how does it come together? Right? Yeah? And then
there are there's a new movement of thought out there
that um. There there are some scholars that are arguing
(38:33):
that we should put us push aside empathy altogether, because
what really translates into compassionate behavior is not those things,
but um, our morals and our ethical code and uh
and some of those types of things, and that's a
whole other domain completely, um. But there is some uh
dynamic interaction that occurs between those components that allow us
(38:57):
to to empathize and then are are deep seated sort
of ethical, moral and cultural codes that help us translate
that into action. So tell me this, do you think
the world would be a better place if everyone practiced meditation?
Most of the things that we do in meditation, so
(39:17):
whether that's mindfulness or compassion meditation. Um. I think the
reason that they're so impactful is they're very different from
the things that we generally get sucked into doing in
our day to day life and um so um uh
it's especially in our you know, fragmented, incredibly busy lifestyle
(39:42):
here in the sort of modern West. Um, we are
often disconnected from that interdependency and notions of interdependency that
are quite obvious when we're able to take some time
and look each other in the eye. Um. And so
taking the time to to reconnect with those sorts of
(40:03):
feelings and thoughts I think would be very powerful and
very powerful for everyone. Um Uh. There are a lot
of different meditation practices out there, and so I think
the next the way that this field is going, the
next step for the field of meditation research is really
to try to understand which practices benefit whom and for
(40:24):
what and um, so that will better help us answer
the question of should everyone do mindfulness meditation, should everyone
do compassion meditation? Or is it that some people could
benefit more from one or the other. Um, we're all
busy people and we don't have time to do everything. Um.
But but anything that can help us feel more connected
(40:46):
and look at one another in the eye and um
and notice our shared humanity, I think that would benefit
all of us. For your own part, what is the
meditative state like and what do you feel you gain
from it personally? Yeah? Um, so you know, I grapple
with a lot of this stuff, you know, from the
(41:06):
day to day, and so I noticed that it casually
impacts me all the time, you know. Um, well, I
shouldn't say all the time. Maybe not as much as
it it should. But there are many times where you know,
I'm in traffic and someone cuts me off, and I
behave differently than than I might have if I if
I wasn't thinking of these things quite often, but there's
a deeper, richer personal experience that comes, for example, UM,
(41:30):
when I am lucky enough to go on a meditation
retreat or have UM you know, longer periods of time
in more contemplative states and UM. That always strikes me
as a very interesting phenomenon of UM, this incredible emotional
richness that sort of bubbles to the surface UM and
(41:52):
UH in both positive and negative ways. UM. You know,
sadness and happiness are closer to the surface. UM. But
even when the sadness is close over the surface, UM,
it's it's often uh feels like a really powerful positive thing. UM.
And so those deep moments of extended contemplation UM really
(42:12):
just feel like to me like an opening up of
this emotional life that often is numbed UM when when
we're busy and not attending to it. What are your
thoughts on the implementation of mindfulness in grade school. Yeah,
so there's a big movement to UM to implement especially
(42:33):
mindfulness in UM in in the K through twelve curriculum. UM.
And there is some good research indicating that it is helpful,
especially with emotion regulation UM social interactions for young children. UM.
And so I think that has a lot of potential UM.
(42:54):
And then we are looking at the possibility of incorporating
UM some compassion for because practices in K through twelve,
and it's striking how quickly children pick up on it UM,
even faster often than adults do. UM. A lot of
the examples and exercises that come with cognitively based compassion training,
(43:15):
kids pick up on it right away. And so I
think it has a real powerful potential for helping kids
remain connected with one another UM, and remain connected not
with just with their close friends, but maybe with UM
others that they may have trouble with, others that they
may not see as one of them, all of a
(43:36):
sudden become you know, a shared human human, you know,
with the the shared childhood experience that they're going through UM.
And so I think there is a lot of potential.
Do you know if there are any cultures out there
that that introduced children to meditation at at at a
really young age. Monastic traditions are so rich and so
different from one another, but there are a lot of
monastic traditions where children UM go away quite young and
(44:00):
and begin a monastic lifestyle. I'm a little hesitant because
there are a lot of monastic traditions that UM, you know,
don't practice a lot of meditation. So there's a lot
of diversity in terms of what UM goes on in
different monastic traditions, but certainly UM, there are a lot
of traditions in which the training starts quite early. All right, Well,
(44:22):
once again I want to thank Dr ms Garrow for
setting down and chatting with me about her meditation research
and just meditation research in general. I thought one thing
that was really interesting was the sort of the two
factor empathy model she talked about. What are your thoughts
about that, Robert, Does that ring true to you in
in your life? Like the idea that there is a
(44:43):
cognitive component to empathy and then the affective mirroring component
of empathy. Yeah, Like I say, it really made me
tease apart my own experience with meditation, but also my
own experience with things like empathy, Like you know, just
how much of it, how much of all may how
much a column B? How is this coming together in
my mind state? And how might it be coming together
(45:05):
differently or not at all in other mind states? You know,
because because it's so easy to fall into the trap
to think that we all have essentially the same hardware
and software firing up every time we're engaging with the world.
Do you ever think that if you are, if you
happen to be in euro atypical person, that like you
can catch yourself having failings of empathy and that's you're
(45:27):
sometimes failing in one column and sometimes failing in the
other column. Yeah. Yeah, I think so, because I guess
I'm paranoid enough that occasionally I'll I'll think back on
my day and I'll particularly I'll think about conversations and
I wonder who did was I? And was that? Did
I have enough empathy in that particular conversation? Did I?
(45:48):
Did I talk too much about my own stuff that?
Did I? Did I ask enough about someone else's stuff? Uh?
You know you can drive yourself nuts with those questions. Yeah,
I know what you mean. Um. Yeah. And so now
we have a whole other way to to dive into
that paranoid self criticism exactly. All right, Well, I think
we should do a quick break and then when we
come back from that break, we can talk about your
(46:08):
conversation with Dr Jill Weener. So when working on the
meditation video, I also interview Jill Weener, physician specializing in
Vedic meditation for wellness and stress management, and she is
also based here in Atlanta. She came in and she
had a lot to share about the particular strategies of
vedic meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and the use of mantras. Uh.
(46:33):
But but probably most importantly for our discussion here, she
had a lot to say about stress. So she is
is an instructor of what she calls vedic meditation, which
from what I could tell, is very similar to or
maybe the same thing as transcendental meditation. Yeah, it seems
to it seems to be very too closely related fields
(46:54):
of meditation, Like it involves using mantras to achieve this
state of trends. And yeah, I think that that that
sums it up. So we're not gonna, you know, the
entire interview here with with Jill, but I wanted to
to just are a portion of it because it sets
sets us up for a nice discussion about one particular
(47:15):
quality of both veting meditation and the general science of stress.
I think it's I think it's mandatory. I think that
stress is probably the biggest epidemic we've ever faced. Um
It underlies everything, and it underlies immune dysfunction, digestive digestive issues,
(47:37):
pain regulation, all these medical issues that we see as
physicians and as as patients that we experience, and if
we don't have a meditation practice to help us regulate
the way our bodies process stress, we it's like you're
not you can't ever catch up to it. The stress
keeps accumulating and accumulating and making you sicker and soer.
(48:00):
So for me as a health care provider helping me
be able to care for people, that having the meditation
is that personal practice for me was hugely important. But
also as a human being who has stress and stress
related symptoms and illness, um it also helps with that
(48:20):
quite a bit. So Adaptation energy we like to think
of it like your bank account of patients, your ability
to adapt and what typically gives you adaptation energy is sleep, eating, well, exercise,
anything you find to be restorative, like working on cars
or gardening or knitting or walking your dog. When life
(48:44):
throws you a little curveball, um, it takes away a
little bit of adaptation energy. And if you have enough
adaptation energy, you can handle anything that comes at you.
What happens is we only have a certain amount typically,
and as it starts to run out, your patient runs
a little thin, and you feel a little a little thready,
(49:06):
and then one little thing happens it doesn't seem like
that big a deal, and you lose it and you
snap and have a full stress fight or flight reaction.
So Vata meditation and lots of other forms of meditation
give you rest as well. So one of the key
ideas that the Jail mentions here and references a lot
is that of adaptation energy. This concept that you have
(49:30):
a personal depletable energy reserve for dealing with stress, a
reserve that can be replenished as well as diminished. And
you see it referenced in meditation, and I think it's
easy to simply dismiss something like that is just a
meditation buzzword or something. But when I started looking into it,
like what what is adaptation energy? Does it? Does it
(49:51):
exist outside of the terminology of a particular school of meditation,
it really gets quite fascinating. So the term originates with
Austrian indocrinologist Hans Celier, which I imagine a number of
people may be familiar with that name because he is
he is a huge name in the science of stress,
(50:12):
just the understanding of stress, the the cultural use of
the word stress today. He's sort of I mean, I
imagine that stress was just a concept that had always
been around, but he pretty much introduced the modern medical
concept of stress. Right. Yeah, it's hard to it's hard
to imagine that right now, to to think back, you know,
you think back on even ancient figures. You can imagine
(50:34):
Odysseus saying, oh man, this is such a stressful voyage home.
I'm just so stressed out. I can't wait to get
get home and just relax. So they talked about like
wearisomeness and anguish, but they didn't talk about stress. That's true.
So yeah. In in nineteen thirty five, he identified stress
as a syndrome occurring in laboratory rats. In night, he
(50:57):
defined general adaptation drum, which is also known as is
G a S or gas. I've seen some commentators say
that this is, you know, rather unfortunate, that that that's
what what one can refer to it as. But he
signaled this out as a three stage biological response to stress.
(51:19):
So the the three stages are as follows. First alarm,
This occurs when you encounter stress. The also known as
the alarm reaction stage the a R stage, and includes
the arousal of your fight or flight response to a stressor,
and all of your internal alarms are activated and you
prepare to face danger or runaway. And then he lays
(51:41):
out the second stage, the resistant stage, the stage of
resistance or SR. And in this UH the human response
to dangers in full swing, So your pupils dialate, your
heart rate and respiration go up, and your muscles contract.
And then where you really get into the general adaptation
syndrome here is a third stage of exhaustion. This is
(52:01):
when your body stays in an excited state for prolonged
perioded inner of the final state of of the gas
UH the state of exhaustion or SC and This this
occurs when in response to a stressor that has gone
on too long. In the state of hyper arousal, the
body's immune system begins to wear down and as a result,
the person will become more susceptible to infections and other
(52:23):
illnesses as the body's defenses have been spent on dealing
with the stresser. So one interesting way I read to
think about stress is that you think about a disease
or an injury or something like that causing symptoms. You know,
there there are symptoms that result from some type of
damage to or pressure upon the body, but there are
(52:47):
also these general symptoms that seem to happen basically no
matter what you're doing to the body, as long as
it's having some kind of cumulative negative effect. So like
whether it's some whether you're tired and deprived of sleep,
or infected by a disease, or you have gotten a
(53:08):
bodily injury, or you know, any number of things that
could happen, do you they all seem to sort of
lead to this similar cluster of symptoms, And so you
could think one way to think about stress is the
body's general response to negativity. Yeah, and I mean, and
I guess the other side of it too. To consider
(53:28):
with stress is that a lot of like the basic
evolved biological adaptations, you know, we weren't we were we
evolved to deal with tigers essentially, but not paper tigers
so much. And that's one of the problems with the
modern world, right, is that we we we get so
stressed out over things that are not actual mediate threats,
(53:50):
but they never go away. Yeah, they never go away.
They're constantly coming at you. Uh. So you can definitely
see the modern application of this, this idea, the general
adaptation syndrome, and the idea that you would have only
so much like bodily and mentally mental energy to deal
with a barrage of stressors. Yeah, and Celia, he did
(54:12):
sort of have an idea that there were this was
a modern problem in a way, right. Yeah, Like so
you could imagine maybe our ancestors living living on a
savannah somewhere would have a fight or flight response if, like,
you know, a large leopard comes near them or something.
You know, you that's like an immediate stress point that
(54:32):
you've got to deal with. But what if it's like
you have put yourself into a state of being where
you're almost never facing actual acute danger, but your entire life,
there's a leopard over there on the horizon and it
never gets too close to you, but it also never
goes away. Yeah, it's always potentially in your email folder.
(54:54):
It's always potentially in your mailbox or on your doorstep.
I mean it's yeah, it's uh, this is this is
the paper tiger that we've we've grown accustomed to, or
haven't grown accustomed to if you rather so. One of
the interesting things about Celia's work is is that the
modern use of the word stress stems from his work UH,
and interestingly enough, his findings that were rejected by physiologists
(55:16):
until the nineteen seventies. As Russell Winer put put it
in his h his paper Putting Stress in Life hand
Celier in the making of Stress Theory UH, Celia used
stress to describe an organism's adaptation response to the environment
quote that is, the state manifested by the gas. In
this reconceptualization of stress, Celier believed himself to have discovered
(55:40):
a universal truth regarding the relationships of organisms with their environment.
And he also pointed out that Celier had some pretty
lofty ideas about his stress theory UH, that civilization was
disordered on two vital levels. The quote diseases of civilization,
such as cardiovascular diseases. These were caused by poor adaptation
(56:04):
to modern industrial life. And on another level, entirely he
saw that Western civilization bore the cracks of intense social instability,
and stress theory, he argued, could save us from both
of these. So he was he was not shy about
championing stress theory. According to Viner, the US military were
(56:26):
among the first to really embrace his ideas on stress
and operational efficiency in the post war period, and they
somehow doesn't surprise me. Yeah, they jumped right in there.
It fall does fall in line with a lot of
the recent topics we've covered, uh, related to Cold War research,
Like mid century military research went into a lot of
(56:46):
fringe territory, though I guess this is one that eventually
became mainstream science. Yeah, because on one hand, there's you
want to know how your troops are going to behave
in a stressful situation, but they also considered stress a
useful weapon in potential psychological warfare based on his work
and the work of others. Uh. In fact, Viner says, quote,
the military's fascination with stress became such that by nine
(57:09):
seventy six, over one third of prominent researchers in the
stress area were based in US military institutions. So it's
it's no surprise then. I suppose that one of the
papers that I found on adaptation energy came from a
two thousand nine issue of the FBI Law Enforcement bulletin
title Alarmingly enough, on the Edge colon Uh, integrating spirituality
(57:34):
into law enforcement. Did you read it? I mean, what
kind of a read is this? Um? It was an
interesting read. I just basically just made me just kept
coming back and saying, wait, is this the real FBI Bulton?
Is this something else? Does FBI stand for something other
than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because it's certainly it's
certainly interesting to see this article in an FBI publication
(57:58):
after watching um My Hunters, which of course displays a
sort of the old school FBI the Netflix series Mind. Yes,
the old school FBI of the sixties and seventies, like
entering into a new um a new age that is
open to psychological science. And you can find that arcase
(58:20):
everyone wants to read it for them stuff. You can
find that online. It's by in Knees Tuck. But the
concept of of of adaptation, energy and stress. Uh. This
was also embraced by transcendental meditation. To bring us back
to meditation, and Celier himself became interested in the use
of transcendental meditation as a stress management method after meeting
(58:42):
with the Maharishi mahash Yogi, the founder of the transcendental
meditation movement in the nineties seventies, something that he discussed
in later interviews. Interesting. Now, adaptation energy itself remains hypothetical,
but many scientific studies surrounding meditation uh relate to the
physiological effects of stress. Yeah. I was thinking when listening
(59:04):
to uh Dr Weener's interview that even if the adaptation
energy theory is not um but if it's not literally
correct in that you have some kind of fixed number
of reserves that are depleted, I think it could be
could be very easily an analogy for something that is
very true of the body, which is that there is
(59:27):
such a thing as cumulative stress. You might not have
a number that could be measured and that can be
built up and stuff like that, but there are cumulative
effects of stress, and it can behave sort of analogously
to what she describes. Yeah, I mean, you can think
of it just like, how many times would you need
to be, say, reminded of something stressful in your life?
How many times would you or you would you need
(59:48):
to have someone jump out at you and scare you
before it would begin to wear you down, you know,
just in the course of a day. And therefore it
might be useful to find a room where nobody jumped
stout at you, or nobody shouts something stressful at you,
And of course for the most part, we don't. We
don't even have to rely on someone else to jump
(01:00:08):
out or someone else to yell something stressful, because we
have the this wonderful dialogue that's going on in our
minds most of the time, the email leopard and the
email leopard as well. But yeah, we have the default
mode network in our mind, constantly fretting over past in future.
It's it's shutting off that voice. It's finding a room
where that voice cannot reaches, that that has value. And
(01:00:31):
that's where meditation comes in. Yeah, and I can certainly
believe also that meditative practices could increase one's resistance to
uh to to these stressors as they come at you,
even after you've stopped practicing it for the moment. Indeed.
Now for this episode, thanks as always to Alexander Williams
for running the boards on this one, and thanks to
Tyler Clang and Tari Harrison, who also came up with
(01:00:53):
a couple of the questions that we used in the
interview with Mascarrow. Thanks of course to Dr Jennifer Mascarrow
for talking with us and to Dr Jill Weener. And
by the way, if you want to check out Dr
Joel Weiner's work, you can head on over to Jill
Weener dot com. That's w E N E R. And
if you want to check out our work here's Stuff
to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all
(01:01:15):
the episodes, as well as links out to our various
social media accounts. And if you want to get in
touch with us directly, as always, you can email us
at blow them Minto's how stuff Works dot com for
(01:01:35):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff Works dot com by No Mo
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