Well there's been a lot in the news in recent years about the brain and meditation. You may have read that meditation increases gamma wave activity. Or you may have read that over time meditation can increase the amount of white matter in the brain. Well I'm not sure of which of these findings are going to hold up in the long run, and in some cases I'm not even really sure what they mean. But there is one finding that's easy to relate to meditative experience in a pretty straight forward way. You tell meditators about this finding and they say, yeah, it makes sense that my brain would be doing that while I'm meditating. And this finding has to do with the part of the brain called the default mode network. And the basic finding, as in this paper that was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that when people meditate, the default mode network kind of gets quieter. It gets less and less active. And this leads to the question of what the default mode network is. And for the answer, we turn to the lead author of this paper, Judson Brewer, who, when he did the study, was at Yale University and now is at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. >> So, it's called the development network because it seems to be active when we're not doing anything in particular. And if you think about any average person walking down the street not doing anything in particular. There's actually a whole lot going on in there brain. They're thinking about themselves usually. So they might be regretting something they did in the past. Worrying about something that's coming up. Planing for something. fantasizing. There's lots of things that are happening in our brains. When we're not doing anything in particular. And this network or brain region seems to get activated, or co-activated when we're doing these types of self-referential processing tasks. >> So, you might say that what the default mode network does is take your mind somewhere other than where you are. It does that in a spatial sense. In other words, you're probably not going to be focused on your immediate environment when, when the network is active. And it does so in a temporal sense along the dimension of time, as well. They've done studies where they interrupt people while their minds are wandering and basically the, the default mode network, is your mind wandering And they asked them what they're thinking about. And usually they're thinking either about something in the past, or something in the future. More the future than the past, but they're usually not thinking about the present. Now it makes sense, in that light, that the default mode network would get quiet, as you meditate, because after all, one way to phrase, kind of one of the main points of meditation, is be here now. That is the title of a famous book that was published in the 1970's about meditation and spirituality. Now when your meditating, you may notice, that the default mode network does not always surrender. Quietly, right? You're trying to focus on the breath and suddenly a thought bubbles up, you know, what about this email I've gotta write later today. It's kind of delicate, how should I handle it? Or, you'll think of someone you may have offended a couple of days ago, wonder how you can make amends, or you'll think about somebody you've got a crush on, how you can impress them when you see them in a couple days. Whatever. Those things are your default mode network asserting itself. And, in a way, it's just doing its job, you know? The, the, the job of the default mode network seems to be to take advantage of free time. So in other words, if you're not engaged in some task that requires focus. And you're not playing some sport. Writing some report, or, or just looking at somebody and wondering whether that's somebody you know. You know? If you're not doing one of these things that requires conscious focus, then, in a way, that's free time. And what the default mode network does is try to use that time, in some sense usefully. You know, taking care of your business, your social business. Your professional business, whatever. Now, when the default mode network does quiet down during meditation that doesn't necessarily mean you've entered a state of mindfulness. The studies show that, the network quiets down during various kinds of mediation. Mindfulness mediation, but also, concentration mediation, for example. Now, it certainly is an important first step toward mindfulness for the network to calm down, for you to kind of get beyond the kind of self involvement that the network keep you enmeshed in. But in order to reach a state of mindfulness, there's a second sense in which you have to escape self involvement remember? To look at something mindfully. So look at it objectively. To look at it not, from your ordinary subjective perspective. So a true test of mindfulness would be say, to think of someone you don't like, and see if you can just kind of look at a feeling of dislike and not get caught up in it. Not let it carry your train of thought away. So that you don't wind up rehearsing a litany of grievances against the person. Or plotting revenge against the person. Then, then you're closer to a state of mindfulness. It's a common aspiration to carry mindfulness out of the meditation hall, into the real world. To carry this attitude of kind of, non-reactivity into your ordinary life. One reason that's hard is because life is full of things you do react to. Psychologists have done studies where they show people pictures of various kinds of objects and things. And sometimes they ask them, how do you feel about this and the people say well, I like it, I don't like it whatever. Sometimes the methodology is subtler. There's a, there's a more kind of [INAUDIBLE] of figuring out whether people. Are having a positive or negative affective reaction to the thing, whether they are or are not feeling a favorable or an unfavorable feeling to it. And, the general finding is that people do have affective reactions to a whole lot of things. In one study, they actually asked people to morally evaluate Everyday objects, ask them if these things are good or bad in a moral sense. And people were pretty willing to do that. As Paul Bloom who was one of the co-authors of that study explained to me recently. Paul is a well known professor of psychology at Yale, and here's what he said. >> The paper's titled something like is a refrigerator good or evil. And so we just had a list of items. Now some of the items were meant to have veillance. They were, like a thumbscrew. Or a vaccine. [INAUDIBLE] thumbscrew. Bad vaccine but [INAUDIBLE] refrigerator. Sock. Cloud. [SOUND]. And you know? People would, would, would, had no problem at all. I mean we thought at first that they'd find the question nonsensical. How good is it? How bad is it? They readily answered all of them. And there're, there was considerable consensus. >> Now none of this is to say, that most things in the world elicit a strong positive or negative affective reaction in us. In fact you can look around at things in your environment now. There are plenty of things. We don't have any particular reaction. You might say I kind of like that. Or it's mildly annoying. But, it's you know, it's far from overpowering. However, it is the case that the things that occupy our awareness do tend to be things that we feel positively or negatively about in a somewhat strong way. So if you're walking down the street And you see an enemy or you see a friend, somebody you feel bad about or good about. Or, you smell some horrible odour, or some sublime smell from a restaurant, that will get your attention. That will be what you focus on. And this makes sense when you think about it, because the brain is designed to get us to focus on things that matter to us. And the way the brain encodes the extent to which things matter to us, is to assign them a positive or negative feeling. And the more they matter, the stronger the feeling. So it, it, it just makes sense that you're awareness would tend to be occupied by these kind of meaningful things. Things that do elicit a strong a reaction. And it also makes sense that the, the, default mode network would tend to, to inject these things into your consciousness that also you feel somewhat strongly about, they matter to you. For, for good or for bad. And this points to the basic challenge of mindfulness. The idea of mindfulness. is to take an objective attitude. In some sense the detached attitude toward the things you're paying attention to and yet your brain is designed to pay attention to those things it is hardest to be objective and detached about. So here's an experiment you might try when you're walking down the street. Try to pay attention to things that you don't normally pay attention to. Now what those things are will depend on what demographic you're in. So suppose you're a young heterosexual male. And you're probably in the habit of paying attention to young females and especially if you find them attractive or intriguing, paying even more attention to them, and you probably pay some attention to young males. kind of size them up, compare them to yourself maybe they are after all in some sense the competition. Well, try paying attention to like elderly people. One thing you'll find is that it's hard and it's not natural to pay attention to these people becaus you don't care that much about them. But you may also find if you do pay attention to them it's easier to appraise them calmly. You're, you're less involved, you have less at stake, and for that reason you may look at them more objectively. You know, my brother, when he reached an age where he felt that women were no longer paying attention to him said, you know, it's not that they think I'm unattractive, they just don't realize I exist. And that's kind of true. You know, our, our unconscious mind I think often excludes from our awareness the things that we're just not that interested. So all of this explains why it really is hard, and in some sense unnatural, to just walk down the street. With a truly mindful attitude toward everything we're paying attention to. And this subject came up in my conversation with Paul Bloom. What we've kind of said is that everything you notice, you have an affective reaction to and eh, that makes sense in the sense that. If it is not relevant to your Darwinian prospects for good or bad. There's no reason to notice it in the first place. >> That's right. That's right, I mean stripping the effective reactions away from our perception seems so profoundly anti-Darwinian. It is, and I know you've made this point before, but it seems like that the strongest way to give the middle finger to our selfish genes. [SOUND]. Which, which is, you know, we're going to take away this sort of taint, everything and, and for normally, you know, the whole world is colored by, by whether it's good for us or bad for us. And, and, and to try to live without that seems interesting. >> That is, I think what kind of hardcore Buddhism aspires to do. I would just add a couple of asterisks to that. First of all, when I associated a Buddhist perspective with the things that Paul had said, I didn't mean to say that everything he had said was phrased exactly in a technical sense, the way a Buddhist scholar would phrase it. So for example, when he talked about stripping perception of affective reaction, you might say it's actually more like training your perception on the affective reaction. And in that way, sometimes kind of de, depriving the reaction of its power. And for that matter more broadly. I want to emphasize that whenever I speak of detachment or getting a critical distance from a feeling, that terminology can be misleading because there's a sense that when you're observing something mindfully like a feeling. You're actually getting quite close to it, closer than usual. because ordinarily, our reaction to a, kind of, negative feeling like anxiety or fear, they want to push it away. They want to think of something or do something that will rid us off it. And to view it mindfully, it's kind of to be unafraid of it. To be willing to just get up close to it and, and look at it and then sometimes it will tend to loose it's power. So in that sense, talking about distance from, detachment from, can be misleading. And for that reason some people prefer terms like non-attachment to terms like detachment. The final thing I would say about that exchange with Paul is that when I refer to a hardcore Buddhism. I don't mean to suggest that there's anything harsh. In the mindful sensibility, and I also certainly don't mean to suggest ever that there's no pleasure to be found in it. And in fact you see this sometimes on meditation retreats. A lot of people on retreats report how much pleasure there is to be found. Which is interesting because a meditation retreat is a place where it's relatively easy, relatively easy. To get into a kind of mindful frame of mind. And one reason is just because that, you know, a lot of the stuff that annoys you in life is not there. You're not getting emails, some of which may agitate you, you're generally off the grid, you're not hearing any news about the world. So, so it's easier to sink into a mindful Point of view. And, people have been to retreats can tell you about things like mindful eating. When I first went to a meditation retreat I went into a dining hall, I couldn't understand you know, why do so many people have their eyes closed as they eat? Before long I got the picture, which is that if you close your eyes and focus. On that moment of eating, you're not looking, ahead to, to the next bite you're going to take. You're not being distracted by the default mode network which is pretty quiet and you're not having a conversation because these are silent meditation retreats nobody's talking. If you do that, you can find a pleasure in, in one moment of eating that is pretty much unprecedented in my experience. Similarly, people on meditation retreats often report and I can vouch for this, that your appreciation of beauty can reach a new level. Including the beauty of things that normally you might not even notice like the, the pattern of grain in wood, which if your default mode network were bubbling along, you just might not even see. So we're going to close by revisiting our friend Yife, the Buddhist nun as she describes what it's like to meditate, because her description sounds to me very much like what you would expect it to feel like for the default mode network to start to quiet down. >> When you meditate it, it's just like there will watch, you know, in the water, if you let the dust just settle down. So water become maybe clean and also very peaceful. >> Mm hmm. >> Or even stilled. So you've heard the water's still. The surface like a mirror and you would reflect the surrounding as things they are. So meditation is a help, is to help us to see things as they really are. >> Speaking of Yife, in the final segment of this lecture we're going to get back to a question that she originally raised earlier. When she said that, during meditation, she gets this sense that her feelings are not real. I promised I'd get back to that question, and that's what we'll do now. We're going to ask, what does it mean for feelings to be real or not real? To be true or false. How can we tell when our feelings are trustworthy, and when they're not? [BLANK_AUDIO]
