>>Ming: [Chinese accent]
Hello. Good afternoon, my friends. My name is Ming. I'm the jolly good fellow who at
Google. And I'm jolly today because our honored guest, Rich Hanson, brought this book, right?
This book is about happiness, love and wisdom and it's about a new science of happiness,
love and wisdom and is called Buddha's Brain. It's like, it's all my favorite topics in
one convenient value sized packet.
And so what-what's there not to like about this book, right? That's why I'm happy today.
Dr. Rick Hanson, he's a neuropsychologist, author and teacher at the intersection of
psychology, neurology and contemplative practice. He co-founded the Wellspring Institute for
Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and he's the author of the book called Mother
Nurture, which is one of very few books that I-I am aware of, maybe the only book, that
is about taking care of, about taking care of mothers. And he's also an-an authority
on how the arrival of children affect moms, fathers and marriages.
And Rick enjoys rock climbing, good conversations and good books and in his free time he tries
to save the world.
[laughter]
So with that let's welcome my friend, Dr. Rich Hanson.
>>Rick Hanson: Okay.
[applause]
>>Rick Hanson: Thank you, Ming, thank you.
Well, with Ming here, I'm in good company.
Can you hear me okay?
How's this sound?
It's okay, alright, great. And if it gets bad, please let me know.
I wanted to say first of all that I've never been to Google before. I use your products
many times a day of course, but one of the great things about being able to be here is
that gives me a little thing I can use to impress my kids. And that's very important
when you're a parent.
As you probably know or will discover, they are 22 and 19 and so this is one of the very
few things that actually made them pay attention to anything I had to say.
So, my intent here is to go through a number of topics, four in particular and to do it
fairly quickly.
So, my son to put be me at ease said, "Don't worry Dad, you're gonna be talking to some
of the smartest people on the planet."
[laughter]
And thanks Forrest. I'll, but in a way that's kind good because I do tend to zip along at
a fairly breakneck pace. And so my plan is to go through these topics kinda in four sections,
pause for breath at the end of each one, do some few questions or comments, and then keep
going, alright?
I'm gonna be working a lot within one of these three circles: Buddhism or really contemplative
practice generally, the one I'm trained the most in is Buddhism.
I'm not here to push Buddhism or any ism, but it's a source of great insight into actually
how the mind works, as well as psychology and neurology.
That said, I think it's humbling and appropriate to appreciate the fact that there's really,
literally, so little we actually know about the mind and the brain these days. It's a
nice quote here from Ani Tenzin Palmo here. Now, no one really still knows yet what a
thought actually is even though we're goin' to be talking about them a fair amount.
Okay, so prelims out of the way, let's get into your amazing brain.
First, some basic specs. It's kind of mind boggling for me endlessly to appreciate really
how complicated the brain is.
[laughter]
In particular, I wanna focus as an overarching theme on the fundamental idea of using the
mind to change the brain for the better, so that it benefits the mind and in widening
ripples, all beings.
So, to do that we wanna get, I wanna get first at some basic information about the brain
and about what I call self-directed neuroplasticity. The fundamental idea that mental activity
sculpts neural structure, which gives us opportunities increasingly to intervene actually inside
the black box of the brain.
That's important because there's a fundamental problem in that the brain through biological
evolution is highly inclined toward noting and responding to negative experiences, and
in particular has a kind of deeply engrained threat reactivity that's then increased by
personal history as well cultural and political factors that leads to what I call "Paper Tiger
Paranoia."
And so then last I'm gonna talk about what to do about that, with self-directed neuroplasticity
in terms of coming back to the natural state of the brain which is really the optimal brain.
So I thought, "This is my opportunity at Google, I'm gonna take a big swing and hopefully hit
the ball."
So, let's dive in.
And one way to think about this is purely abstractly, fine. But a more powerful way
to think about it is that what we're talking about is happening right here, right now,
right between your ears.
Okay. So here we go.
Back to where we were, the technical specs of the brain.
Kinda remarkable to realize that in roughly three pounds, about five cups worth of tissue,
are about one point one trillion cells, 100 billion neurons, a trillion support cells.
They're connected with each other in a variety of ways. A typical neuron connects with about
5,000 other neurons making about 500 trillion synapses.
Lots of information moves through the brain and the nervous system. The brain moves information
around like a heart moves blood around in effect.
A fair amount of, of the interaction between neurons is just noise. Noisy networks as you
all probably know are very, are the, are optimized for signal transmission, but that said, out
of all the noise there are so many signals going on in the brain that in the time it
takes roughly to take a single breath, roughly a quadrillion messages moved around inside
your head.
The brain is literally the most complex object yet known to science; more complex than an
exploding star; more complex even than the American economy.
[laughter]
So, here's a schematic neuron. You can see the receiving end at the le-at the left as
you face the screen. The output end is at the right hand s-side. It is like a little
on-off switch. Neurons are continually firing. A neuron that's not firing is a dead neuron.
And basically the summation moment to moment of roughly 5,000 inputs every few milliseconds
determines whether the neuron will fire.
[pause]
Okay? Great.
[pause]
So, I wanna talk now about two critical words that are really easy t-to lose. This is probably
the most intellectually danced slide I've got. I wanna talk about the mind and the brain.
I define the mind as the flows of information through the nervous system. The nervous system
has its headquarters in the brain. Information is represented by the nervous system much
like a computer hard drive represents information, or sound waves right now are representing
information; radio waves represent information. It's the classic and familiar distinction
between hardware and software.
In essence, therefore, apart from hypothetical transcendental factors, the mind is what the
brain does. No brain, no mind.
Now, I say the brain is the necessary condition for the mind; it's also a proximally sufficient
condition. It's only proximally sufficient because the brain is embedded in our nervous
system, embedded in a body, embedded, whoops, and embedded in culture and both here and
now and across time.
So, to talk about the brain as the, the brain as the local, the locally, it's the necessary
condition and it's the locally sufficient condition for the mind. And as we'll see,
the brain also depends on the mind.
Now the way to understand the brain is really in a context of biological evolution. The
nervous system is about 600 million years old. As you know life came on the planet about
three and half billion years ago. Multi-celled creatures arose around 650 million years ago
and they were complicated enough to need some method of communication between their sensing
organs and their motor systems around 600 million years ago, thus the beginning of the
brain.
In terms of vertebrates it essentially evolved more or less in the way you see. This is kind
of a schematic picture. The inner reptile brain and there's the squirrel monkey brain
and there's the early stone tool making hominid brain, the cave man brain and the modern brain.
The modern brain is essentially identical with the cave man brain.
How many of you by the way have blue eyes or green eyes? Okay. You are mutants. In other
words, until about 5,000 years ago nobody had blue eyes. I mean biological evolution
is continuing. The first blue eyed person was identified probably about 5,000 years
ago; probably around Denmark and then blue eyes have proliferated around the world for
various reasons.
But evolution is continuing.
So, in terms of that evolution the brain developed three fundamental goal-directed systems. You
could say they're motivational systems; this why we do stuff.
The first system was the avoid system: withdraw from threats; freeze; back up; get away. On
top of that then with roughly invertebrates, crustaceans, lizards and so forth, and fish
in the sea, a more sophisticated approaching system developed to pursue opportunities.
And then with birds and mammals and then primates and particularly humans, the attach system
developed. That's the social system in the brain that forms connections and bonds with
us and seeks proximity, closeness, intimacy, love, and belonging.
Although the vagus nerve as it evolved loosely matched to these three systems, they're anatomically
blurred in their distinctions in the brain and they intertwine with each other and any
single system can use two others for its ends.
This typology by the way: approach, avoid, attach or avoid, approach, attach is one we'll
be returning to again and again. And it's a really useful way to think about how people
are motivated and also think about how suffering and dysfunction and harm arise in terms of
each one of those three systems.
And also, on the other hand, how happiness, benevolence, and helpfulness arise in a different
mode of action in each one of those three systems.
So, love and the brain. It's interesting to realize and this is what's called the social
brain theory, that probably the primary driver of evolution of the brain in the last hundred
million years has been social capabilities or love broadly defined.
For example, reptiles and fish approach and avoid, they don't attach, right? They have
their babies, they swim away, if the babies are still there a few hours later they'll
eat them, mos, in most species. Whereas birds and mammals do raise their young and often
form para-bonds at least temporarily.
It's interesting that the brain developed in three major stages driven really by the
reproductive advantages, which is the engine of biological evolution of social skills,
if you will.
The first stage was with birds and mammals. They've got bigger brains per body weight
than reptiles and fish do because the quote unquote "computational requirements" of raising
young and picking a partner require a bigger brain.
Similarly, at the next stage of development, there is a correlation between the size and
complexity of the social group of a primate species and the size of the cerebral cortex
in proportion to body weight.
In other words, the grooming, the hierarchies, who's up, who's down, who's alpha, who's beta,
how can I still get some if I'm beta, the coalitions and all the rest of that. Right?
You've gotta have a pretty big brain.
And then last, since the first hominids began making stone tools around two and a half million
years ago, the brain has tripled in size.
They were smart enough to make stone tools. How many here can make a stone tool? I can't
make a stone tool. I don't know, but they could do. Ah, you maybe could? That's good.
Most people don't raise their hand when I ask them that question. That's a good one.
Yet the build out of the brain has been primarily devoted to social capacities: language, cooperative
planning, empa-empathy, the presentation of self, both authentically and with artful deception
and all the rest of that has been much of what the volume of the brain, that's as I
said tripled, the other two-thirds is devoted to.
Interestingly, for babies or humans to have a bigger brain there's a kinda physical limit
on how big the brain can be in a newborn and still enable its mother to walk upright. And
so you start hitting a limit there.
Most species, primate species, there's basically a two-to-one ratio between the volume of the
brain at birth and how big it eventually gets. The human brain it's probably about a four-fold
maybe even a five-fold increase; to do that we needed a longer childhood.
To have a longer childhood with a very vulnerable infant you needed to develop bonds between
mothers and infants and also bring fathers into the mix. And also the band itself because
it quote unquote "takes a village to raise a child."
And those requirements helped drive the evolution of the social capabilities and inclinations
that would enable that to occur, which then enabled bigger brains. And the advantages
of those bigger brains drove them increasing social capacities and here we are today.
So, three facts about the brain in terms of self-directed neuroplasticity.
So, first fact about the brain: as the brain changes, the mind changes; in good ways and
bad. The left is a good slide hopefully, caffeine, sugar, pleasure; right slide, a concussion.
The second fact about the brain is that as the mind changes, the brain changes. This
is a critically important fact. In other words, immaterial mental activity, the movement of
information through this hardware substrate maps to material neural activity that produces
temporary changes as well as lasting ones.
Temporary changes include alterations in brain waves, increased consumption of supplies like
oxygen and glucose, ebbs and flows of neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine, other neurotransmitters
and so forth.
And I'm gonna show you some slides of temporary, fleeting changes in the structures of the
brain or brain activity that mapped to mental activity.
This is a slide of someone who's head's been kinda cut this way and that's the caudate
nucleus lit up because it's consuming more oxygen. It's a part of the brain that's involved
in the rewards center and it activates in this particular study when college sophomores
who are absolutely in love are shown a picture of their sweetheart. Male and female they
both get a major light up in the caudate nucleus.
I'm gonna go through by the way a number of examples here. It's fascinating to get into
some of the detail, but I'm gonna keep us moving along.
Here's another slide that looks at envy and schadenfreude. This is a study done in Japan
with college students who were told about someone very much like them who was spectacularly
more successful.
And in the scanner what arose inside them were activations in the physical pain network,
in other words, emotional pain much as evolution. Evolution's a big pludge, essentially. It
just uses lower systems and adapts them to higher purposes. So, social pain uses physical
pain as a fundamental basis. Similarly, social pleasure uses physical pleasure systems.
So, in phase one, they told these students that there is this spectacularly wonderful
person who made them really look horrible; envy, physical pain.
And then in phase two of the study they were told that this person encountered a humiliating
downfall, schadenfreude, pleasure at the suffering of others and the pleasure network was activated.
As you can see an example in this study.
Here we go.
Here's another one. This is self in the brain.
We were talking about this at lunch. These, in this study basically it's kinda hard to
see maybe, but maybe not. The squares, the-the diamonds, and the crosses have to do with
different activations of self-related activity in the brain.
For example, recognizing yourself in a photograph distinct from others or naming a personal
memory like what I did last summer, or making a difficult choice.
What's interesting -
[pause]
[coughing]
in this picture is to see how widely distributed self-related activations are throughout the
brain. There's no part of the brain that's special for I, for me, for ego, for mine.
It's widely distributive which has some pretty profound implications.
How 'bout consciousness? The big magilla, right? Well again, when a person is conscious
or is entering different kinds of consciousness, different parts of the brain are activated.
And if you mess with those parts of the brain like intersect at the linkages between the
thalamus which is the central relay station in the brain and the cerebral cortex, you
anesthetize somebody.
On the other hand, as consciousness changes or activates it uses different parts of the
brain. Something as ineffable as awareness alters or engages neural activity.
Now, let's talk about meditation. This is a slide, this is this, in this shot the head
is cut this way, if you will. Of a Buddhist mediator doing compassion meditation, and
the part of the brain that is activated there is called the anterior which means frontal
cingulate cortex which is a part of the brain that's involved in the executive control of
attention; staying concentrated and attentive. It also is an area where the thinking and
feeling are brought together as well.
So, it's interesting to realize that when this person is in the scanner doing a kind
of spacious, infinite, boundless compassion meditation, that this part of the brain is
activated.
Interestingly, this is a slide of Christian nuns in prayer who are doing a very different
kind of spiritual activity which activates some of the same region, ACC in the upper
left hand slide, left ACC, anterior cingulate cortex.
It lights up 'cause they're focusing their attention, but also interestingly they got
activation in the insula, which is a part of the brain that tracks the interior sensations
of the body, which suggests that for these nuns who are women, of course, doing that
particular practice it had a very embodied quality, which kinda makes sense intuitively.
And also they got an activation in the caudate nucleus. Again, it was very emotionally rewarding
to bring to mind their most profound spiritual experience.
[pause]
Okay.
In essence, now I wanna talk about lasting changes in the brain 'cause those were all
temporary, fleeting changes, mostly having to do with which part of the brain uses metabolic
supplies.
[pause]
Mental activity shapes neural structure. It leaves lasting residues behind. This is the
essence of what's called neuroplasticity. It does it in a variety of ways, I lis-I listed
some of the mechanisms of action. Busy regions get more blood flow over time. Existing synapses
get strengthened. You also get interestingly altered gene expression. That's epigenetics.
In other words, ineffable mental activity can alter the expression of strips of atoms
inside this long chain of DNA. Right, for example people who routinely activate relaxation
training get improved gene expression of the portions of DNA that down regulate the stress
response.
Isn't that kind of amazing? To think that doing this long, deep breathing or going to
one of Ming's classes is actually gonna alter the expression of this strip of atoms inside
some molecules somewhere. That just is pretty far out.
Classically there a line from the Canadian psychologist, Donald Hebb, "Neurons that fire
together, wire together." In other words when neural circuits or even individual neurons
start associating with each other the connections between them are strengthened. Okay, great.
So, this has a number of implications and I wanna show you a slide here of some of the
effects of this.
This was a study that was done on Buddhists meditators taking a look at people in terms
of years of practice and looking at changes in neural structure.
In this particular study they found that people who had significant long term practice, which
has probably amounted to 20 to 40 minutes most days, in the real world of-of Western
practitioners, they actually had thicker cortical tissues in two key regions.
One is the insula, that's number one, where they're tuning into their body and their deep
emotions and self awareness in general.
And also area number two is the executive portions of the prefrontal cortex that have
to do with controlling attention.
The third region is the sensory motor strip where they were tracking their body sensations.
The interesting other finding is in, is seen in the lower right hand graph where the blue
circles were compared to the red squares. Red squares are the control group. They experienced
what's called cortical thinning with aging, normal cortical thinning.
People lose probably by the time they're 80 about three to five percent of cortical mass.
But the people who routinely used those regions, those are the blue circles, did not lose cortical
tissue in those regions as a function of using it and not losing it.
There are other examples. Some of them are quite down to earth. I don't know if you've
ever been to London. It's a spaghetti snarl of streets. Taxi cab drivers who have to memorize
the streets of London have a thicker hippocampus at the end of their training than they did
at the beginning. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that's involved in visual, spatial
memory.
Pianists who work routinely with certain kinds of movements have thicker, mo-motor cortices
in the parts that control fine motor regions.
In one study I read it's very interesting. They took two groups of skilled pianists and
they had them practice a certain kind of song or piece that involved certain specific motor
movements. And then they divided the group and they had one group do it like 10 minutes
every day and the other group just imagine doing it 10 minutes every day. And each group
had roughly equivalent build out of neural structure. Wow. Okay.
So, some perspectives here.
Marvin Minski, one of my favorites, probably well know here, probably of godfather of cognitive
science, Society of Mind, a great book. Anyway you can see here he's saying a principal activities
of brains are making changes in themselves.
I wanna offer a bit of perspective on this which is that neuroplasticity is not breaking
news. It gets talked about a lot as if it's some new finding. No, it's been understood
for a hundred years or more that obviously mental activity had to change brain structure.
What else is learning? The news is in the details.
Most neuroplasticity is not dramatic; it's very, very incremental. Like do, can you remember
what you had for breakfast or didn't have for breakfast this morning? That's neuroplasticity.
Now what's the capital of Nebraska? Right? That's neuroplasticity. It's pretty hum-drum.
It's interesting though that even though neurons that fire together are wired together throughout
the nervous system; the ones that really wire together do so in the field of awareness.
That means that residues of conscious experience are continually sifting into neural structure.
Implicit memory is mainly where they do this. This is not memory for specific events, that's
explicit memory for recollections. This is the internal felt sense of what it feels like
to be me, action, dispositions, biases, emotional residues, and all the rest.
The point of all this really the take away, for me there are half a dozen key take aways
and this is one of them, is to really be a lot more thoughtful about what I experience
moment to moment. Because whatever those neurons are doing, for better or worse, they're wiring
together.
Dwell in one's experience on themes of stress or tension or frustration or imminent failure
or self doubt and all the rest of that, guess what, we're building neural structures of
pessimism, depression, anxiety, lack of confidence, insecurity, and inadequacy, self-criticism,
etc.
On the other hand, rest experience and cultivate experiences that have a certain ease to them,
a certain relaxation; never be more than 100 feet away from food, things like that. That's
gonna cultivate neural structures that promote optimism, resilience, a positive mood, confidence,
a willingness to reach high and take big risks.
Our experience really, really matters. Much of it is in the back [inaudible]. People don't
really know what they're experiencing. That's why mindful, self-awareness is so critical
or as Ming says, "Searching inside yourself."
I'm really happy I was able to get that line in here.
Alright. So, that's right.
[laughter]
As I was saying earlier, most people are not very good a mindful attention. Attention is
the preeminent way to build neural structure. It's like a combination spotlight and vacuum
cleaner. It illuminates what it rests upon and then shloop sucks it into the brain.
But for most people that spot light and vacuum cleaner is very skittery. They can't rest
it and keep it at some place where they wanna keep it or they can't move it very readily
if they're getting sucked into obsessive ruminating, right? Just kinda goin' over and over and
over again about some technical problem or some personally upsetting experience.
That's why as William James said, the father really of American psychology, "The education
of attention would be an education par excellence."
So now what are we gonna do with this mindful self awareness, with the idea of self directed
neuroplasticity? It's the fundamental idea that we can use the mind to change the brain
to change the mind for the better.
It was always understood that if people did mental activity A they would get mental result
C and then it was increasingly understood during the last hundred years that somehow
mental activity A produced mental result C via the black box B of the brain.
But nobody knew how the black box worked. Increasingly though with these modern technologies
that can peer inside the living, active brain non-invasively we are now getting clearer
and clearer about the circuitry, about the levers, the dials, the buttons, the dynamics
inside the black box so that it's increasingly possible to do reverse engineering.
In other words, to identify what is the neural substrate in the black box of optimal states
of functioning, happiness, relationship, stress res-relief, and all the rest of that and then
use mental activity alone. Not medication, not electroshock treatment, but mental activity
alone to target those neural substrates and build them out in increasingly skillful ways.
That's the opportunity. And by the way, it's a historically unprecedented one.
The knowledge about the brain has essentially doubled in the last 20 years. I mean, we live
in an historically extraordinary time for many reasons, this is certainly one of them.
And it's also historically unprecedented in the coming together of those three circles
that I talked about previously: psychology, neurology, and contemplative practice; the
contemplatives being the Olympic athletes of mental training for millennia.
And so I'm really excited about this. We're just at the beginning of it all. I think modern
neuroscience is roughly where biology and medicine was about 100 years after the invention
of the tele, of the microscope, which is to say about 1720.
Where is it gonna be 300 years? Okay.
So, let's talk about some of the challenges now. What are we gonna do with this self-directed
neuroplasticity? We've gotta deal with the negativity bias.
This is a really, really, critically important slide. In order words, in our evolutionary
history we had to track carrots and sticks, right? Approach carrots, avoid sticks. That's
really important. But for survival purposes in very harsh frequently lethal environments,
sticks are more salient than carrots.
In other words, if you miss a carrot today you'll probably get a chance at one tomorrow.
But if you fail to avoid a stick today --
[claps hands together]
whap. No more carrots forever.
So, the brain responded because Mother Nature is a harsh teacher. Whatever confers reproductive
advantages, that's what gets built out in the brain. So there are number of ways this
is done. I've listed just a few.
For example, the amygdala which is the alarm center of the brain is primed to flag negative
events. Probably about two-thirds or more of its cells are dedicated processors if you
will for negative information or potentially negative information.
And the amygdala and hippocampus are very close to each other. The hippocampus does
visual spatial memory but more broadly it does memory for context, rapidly flag anything
that's remotely negative, store it, and retrieve it on a fast track. The bottom line is that
the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones, unless it's
a million dollar moment.
So, in effect all those three systems: avoid, approach, attach; the avoid system is very
fast in that reptilian brain if you will, and it routinely hijacks the approach and
attach systems and puts them to its bidding. And therefore, as a result, in the title of
a very famous paper, Bad Is Stronger Than Good.
By the way, I'm gonna post these slides on my Website and you'll be able to access them
if want and at the end of them are a bunch of excellent books as well as a number of
papers and a ref-and the references for this presentation.
Okay.
So, what are some examples of bad being stronger than good? In relationships on the average
it takes about five positive interactions to even out a single negative one. Alright,
what's the history of the last three days in your intimate relationships, with family
members, lovers, or children? It-it's quite cautionary to think about that.
Or ultimately people will do much more to avoid losing a loss than getting an equivalent
gain. In order words, people will work harder or they'll put up with more electrical shock
to avoid losing a hundred bucks you gave 'em in an experiment than they'll work hard to
get a hundred bucks you put on the table that they gotta fight for.
Or last, it's really easy to make people feel helpless. In dog studies, for example, who
have a limbic system and emotional system very much like our own, you can train a dog
in helplessness in about five tries. Five cycles where bad things happen that they have
zero control over, roughly you can train 'em in helplessness and then it takes dozens even
a hundred or more trials to untrain them. And the parallels for human beings are much
the same.
That's why I think it's really important to pay a lot of attention to feeling helpless
and a sense of futility and to work really hard to not feel that way. And if nothing
else redefine the game into one you can actually win at, where you actually do have efficacy.
Now on the, this next question naturally arises here: yeah, but isn't there some good with
negative experiences? Well sure, okay.
Remorse keeps us kinda on the path of virtue; sorrow opens the heart; negative experiences
can increase resilience and all the rest.
But walk down downtown or walk around this campus which is a pretty rarefied environment,
look at faces, look at my face. You can see the suffering in faces.
Is there any shortage of negative experiences in the world? Is anyone here; would you like
more negative experiences? We could give you some of ours.
[laughter]
Any volunteers? I've never had a volunteer yet who'd like more negative experiences.
So what are we gonna do about this?
Now, negative experiences it's important to realize have significant mental and physical
health consequences.
I'll just zip through this slide, I won't get into the detail of it, but chronic stress
is one of the main results. Because when we're upset our stress response systems are activated.
Getting angry, even just irritated, getting nervous about something, feeling depressed,
feeling ashamed or inadequate or alarmed in any way, shape, or form triggers the fight/flight
response systems through the sympathetic nervous system and HPAA stands for hypothalamic pituitary
adrenal axis; the endocrine system in other words, because the nervous system and the
endocrine system work together in terms of stress response. It's pernicious.
Chronic stress is the enemy particularly for people who are interested in living past 35.
In order words, unlike our great, great grandparents in the cave man days, most of us wanna live
past 35.
What kind of life are we gonna have the slowly accumulating impacts of chronic stress were
pretty irrelevant on the Serengeti, three, five, one millions years ago, but they're
very relevant today in modern times. Okay.
So, how would you like to do something experiential for a minute or two, get out of this head
stuff for a second?
So, now that I gave you the bad news and I'm gonna give you more bad news in a minute,
I wanna talk about self-compassion for a moment.
This is a hot area of research. A lot of the benefits of self-esteem actually boil down
to self-compassion. Arguably self-compassion's more powerful, partly 'cause it's so emotional.
Self-compassion is not self-pity, it's not wallowing, it's taking a moment and it's usually
typically less than 10 seconds to just have a sense of, "Ow, that hurts. This sucks. That
doesn't feel good. I wish it was better. Eh, shoo, pause then suck it up and move on, right?
But first do that self-compassion phase.
And people just suck it up and move on without having done self-compassion first they haven't
fueled themselves in a deep way.
Now self-compassion's actually quite hard for many people. So, as a little example of
this reverse engineering idea I talked about earlier, I've thought through what are things
that activate the neural substrates of compassion so that people can do self-compassion who
may find it difficult. And that's in those three bullets right there.
So, I'll do it right now. This is private. You don't have to do it. You can think about
anything else. You could really even get involved in self-criticism and self-loathing, but that's
really up to you.
Okay, so first step bring to mind a sense of being cared about by somebody.
[pause]
Could be a pet, a grandparent, someone in your life today, a spirit entity, a group
of people, just the felt sense. What's it feel like to feel cared about?
[pause]
Second and you can go at your own pace or not do this at all.
Bring to mind also someone that you naturally feel compassion for. In order words you naturally
wish that they not suffer. And you have an attitude of tender concern. Maybe a child,
a dear friend, relative, a group of people, starving refugees somewhere, whatever.
[pause]
Third step, this is a mindfulness practice now, sink into the experience of compassion
in your body. What's it feel like?
[pause]
Stay present with it.
[pause]
And then come from that embodied felt sense of compassion to yourself. With the sense
of the ways in which life is hard, it's not perfect, you might combine it with some verbal
inner language like, "You know may I feel better, may I feel better about this thing,
may it go better for me with that man or woman in my life, may I not suffer."
[pause]
Okay, great.
I guarantee you if you did it, you let out neural circuits of self-compassion and every
time you do this it doesn't build much structure but it builds a little bit of structure. And
if you do it routinely over time those neurons fire together, therefore they wire together
and you're building the neural substrates of self-compassion. Alright.
So, now let's get into some more bad news.
I wanna talk here about threat reactivity and Paper Tiger Paranoia.
If you think about it there're two major mistakes we can make in life. We, on the one hand we
can think there is a tiger in the bushes when there isn't one. Okay?
On the other hand, we can think there's no tiger in bushes and its all fine, but there
really is one about to pounce.
Now, we evolved to make the first mistake a hundred times, ten thousand times to avoid
making the second mistake even once 'cause that's how you stop having gene copies, alright?
This evolutionary tendency which is deeply ingrained in people to be threat reactive
is then intensified by temperament; some people are more anxious than others. Then life happens,
personal history. Then you have culture and then you have political manipulation.
It's a classic story obviously throughout human history to build up a sense of external
threat or even internal threat and on the basis of that get more compliance from the
populace. I mean that story's been told a thousand times or more in human history.
This threat reactivity happens at the individual level, happens inside me, happens inside you,
it happens between people like in a relationship, within a family; happens at the level of organizations.
It's interesting to think about how that may or may not be happening at Google and how
you've taken wise steps here to stop it from happening.
And it obviously happens at the national level and the international level; the level between
nations in the world all together.
This has a lot of implications, really, if you think about the current moment in world
history.
What are some of the results of this threat reactivity, both at the individual, organizational,
and national level?
First, initial appraisals are mistaken. There's a tendency to overestimate threats, underestimate
opportunities and underestimate resources either for coping with threats or for capturing
opportunities.
We tend to update these appraisals with information that selectively confirms them and we tend
to through the mechanisms of what's called cognitive dissonance, we tend to ignore, devalue,
or alter information that doesn't fit these pictures.
Thus we end up with views of ourselves, other people, and the world, and the future and
the past that are ignorant, selective, and distorted.
Any comments or questions so far?
[pause]
That's the bad news. Now, the good news.
Actually there's more bad news, I apologize.
[laughter]
I turned the page too quickly, my mistake. I was eager to get on.
So I thought to myself, "What's a short list in one slide of the major costs of threat
reactivity." You could probably add a few items to this list with a little thought.
For one, feeling threatened feels bad. As soon as we feel threatened activates the stress
response system. We start getting stress hormones. We start focusing around the threat and with
all the consequences I talked about before.
Feeling over threatened makes people over invest in threat protection and not invest
in things like raising kids or schooling or building infrastructure or taking long, making
long term plans.
Then you've got the story of the boy who cried "Tiger." In other words, if people feel flooded
with threats that are actually not real or, or are overstated or are easily managed by
one thing or another, it's easy to miss the needle in the haystack of the actual threat.
That's really important to think about.
I think that's one of the things that's happened with things like global warming, people are
so caught up in this endless list of murders on the evening news and a sense of global
threat all-all around us, and that they miss long term things that are actually gonna very
consequential.
If we act when we're threatened we tend to overreact; that creates cycles in which other
people feel threatened and confirm our worst fears. The approach system gets inhibited
when people feel threatened, when the avoid system activates so we tend to not pursue
opportunities or we play small, lose our nerve, or give up too quickly.
And then the approach system is, pardon me, the attach system is put in the service of
threats; people tend to really bond with us; they increase their sense of fear and anger
toward them; and they put up with more mistreatment within us to "protect me, protect me." Strong
father figure if you will, from them out there about to get me.
[pause]
Obviously threat reactivity, and you can think of it on the global scale or even inside this
country, red state, blue state, or even more locally in terms of different groups of us's
and thems.
Threat reactivity is a major source of prejudice, oppression, and war. And if we wanna make
this world a better place helping people see through Paper Tiger Paranoia is a fundamentally
profound and powerful way to do that.
And my little hope is that Google will in some ways help that happen.
So, now let's talk about the optimal brain. Let's talk about how to deal with this kind
of Paper Tiger Paranoia. And these, by the way, are practices and tools you can use in
your own personal life and I'm gonna talk about them.
So, think about reverse engineering. What's the state of the brain in peak performance
modes, peek productivity? Or in a state, of let's say self actualization? Or enlightenment
or close to it?
Clearly there've been many people throughout human history that have been in these states.
Many of us in this room, probably everybody in this room has gotten into that zone at
one time or another.
What in the world could be happening in the brain when a person is in that zone?
Well the home base of the human brain which alas we are so, so easily driven from is characterized
by I call 'em the four C's: calm, contented, caring, and creative.
And you can see how calm, contented, and caring map to the three systems, right? Avoid, approach,
and attach, and creative, generative. People are generative. Obviously, it's extraordinarily
generative here.
People are generative in particular when they go into the zone of calm, contented, and caring.
This is the brain in its natural; let's call it a responsive mode. It's not offline; it's
not anesthetized; it's engaged in the world, it's embodied and it's enactive. It's continually
leaning forward into the future, but it does so in a particular mode of operation.
To look at it in a schematic you can see this triangle here in which the three systems,
and by the way, this graphic comes from a little earlier form of this material in which
I called the attach system "affiliation system."
It can see the way in which the brain operates; your brain, my brain operates, our brains
operate when we're in this natural state.
The problem though is that to survive we leave home. In other words, on a hair trigger Mother
Nature has given us the capability of activating any one of these three systems or all three
of them in concert in a different kind of mode. Call it a reactive mode that then drives
us from home. It's a kind of inner homelessness.
In other words, when people feel threatened or harm they're in the reactive mode. When
they can't attain important goals, they're frustrated or disappointed, reactive mode.
When they feel isolated, abandoned, devalued, they're not getting the healthy normal narcissistic
supplies they need, when they feel left out, dissed, shunned, and so forth that also triggers
this reactive mode.
And it too has a number of consequences. So here's a little slide that summarizes that.
So those are the choices really, reactive mode which is the ordinary experience. Look
at the front page, it's all reactive mode. Watch the evening news, mostly reactive mode.
A lot of life. Think about dealing with some issue with an intimate, a friend, a partner,
a family member.
As they say in the spiritual biz, "Think you're enlightened? Go visit your parents for the
holidays." What's it like in the real world? What's it like in traffic when someone flips
you off? What's it like when you, the person you like least as a political figure is yappin'
away on the evening news? What happens then? We easily get triggered into this reactive
mode.
So now, what to do about it; how to come home. How to recover the fundamental natural responsive
mode of the brain right in the middle of the trenches; not in a cave in Tibet; not in a
monastery, but in daily life one step at a time, one breath at a time.
As the Tibetans say, "If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves."
So how can each one of us take care of the minutes in our own life or help others take
care of the minutes in their lives so that year, so that the years will get better and
better for this planet?
Well, first I wanna talk about three fundamental pillars of practice that show up in contemplative
traditions as well as in Western psychology: mindfulness, virtue, and wisdom.
And by different terms you see these again and again and again and I think that's because
they map to three central functions arguably the three central functions of the nervous
system which is to say receiving and learning; regulating and prioritizing which map very
closely to mindfulness, virtue and wisdom. And which also map to the three fundamental
phases of any kind of personal growth or emotional healing which is to say, "Open up to it. Experience
it. Be with it. Be mindful of it."
Second phase at the just right moment, help it move along, release that negative stuff.
And then third phase when there's a space there replace it with something better. Or
in six words, "Let be, let go, let in."
And the reason I think that these fundamental pillars of practice are found again and again,
including in traditions that were certainly pre-technical, is because they map so closely
to the universal human nervous system.
As a take away point at the bottom, mindfulness is viable but it's not enough. Mindfulness
needs to be matched with virtue, with values, and with wisdom. Some fundamental understanding;
somebody who wants to find wisdom always asks, giving up a lesser pleasure for a greater
one.
I mean it's that clarity about what is the greater good here that I'm gonna sacrifice
this lesser pleasure for. I mean that's-that's wisdom.
Additionally, I wanna talk, there's some general factors for the responsive mode that I just
wanna call to your attention here.
If you wanna drop your brain into its natural state of calm, contented, caring, and creative,
self-compassion, getting on your own side. So many people are not on their own side.
In other words they're not for themselves.
It's so interesting to think about it. That's a critical mo-moment to actually say, "No.
How it feels to be me matters. My brain matters over time. I'm gonna be for myself. I'm gonna
try to do little things everyday that will build a better brain or other aspects of my
life gradually over time."
Mindful self-awareness I've talked about.
Seeing the world clearly. I think Google has helped enormously here and it can continue
to help in the future particularly by appreciating the depth of threat reactivity; the depth
of the paranoid trance and the insidiousness of it.
Taking life less personally; appreciating increasingly that it's not really about me
and one particular practice which is the chapter in my book, Buddhist Brain, and will probably
be very central to the book I write after the one I'm writing now, is taking in the
good.
And so if we could I'd like to do a little practice here with you about taking in the
good, 'cause if you think about it continually the brain is taking in the bad, 'member? It's
like Velcro for negative experiences; Teflon for positive ones. It has dedicated --
[snapping fingers] snap, snap, snap
systems that just suck any kind of negative information into the brain.
Think about a hundred things happen in the course of the day, right? Seventy are pretty
good, 28 are neutral, 2 are kinda sucky. What are the ones you think about as you fall asleep?
Usually it's the stuff that was a drag, right? And that's the brain. It just wants to grab
hold of that.
That's why using mindful awareness for about 20, 30 seconds in a row can actually build
out neural structure in a much more positive way.
So if you like, let's do it together. And you don't have to do it, but let's give it
a crack.
So first off, first step, pick a positive fact. It could be I-I particularly like picking
a positive fact about a good quality inside yourself. Where ever you go, there you are,
right? Or you could think about a good condition in the world or a good event recently; someone
was nice to you, some good thing happened.
And then let yourself really feel it. All kinds of good facts occur, but we don't register
them. They don't move the needle, but in this case we're helping ourselves 'cause we're
on our own side to let our self feel good. It's a private act; no one needs to know you're
doing it.
There are lots of taboos about feeling good, feeling happy, you can hide it behind your
face, but let yourself feel good and then in particular in the second step savor it
for 15, 20, 30 seconds in a row. Stay with feeling good for a quarter of a minute.
[pause]
And as you do it, sense and intend that this good experience is gradually sifting down
into you. It's sinking in and even perhaps filling a hole in your heart. Gradually soothing,
even replacing perhaps old places of pain.
[pause]
Or at a minimum simply being a moment of good experience.
[pause]
And that's it.
Now, any single time you do this won't make much difference, half a dozen times a day,
continually looking for opportunities to take in the good to make your brain like Velcro
for positive experiences will make it like Teflon for negative ones.
And over time, everyone I've ever worked with whose done this within a week or two people
start feeling different, within a few weeks and certainly a few months quite radically
different.
This is also a fantastic method for children, particularly kids that either the spirited
or anxious, rigid ends of the temperamental spectrum. Jack rabbits and turtles, right?
They're all normal. There's no disorder there in jack rabbititis; it's a normal temperamental
variation, but it's tough to be a jack rabbit in a turtle culture in some ways, certainly
in turtle schools.
So, anyway taking in the good for a few moments just before bed is a great way to fill the
heart of kids. And I'll use metaphors with them like putting a jewel in their heart and
so forth.
It naturally comes up of course, why do this? Which inter, is an interesting question, like
what a taboo right there on feeling good.
Benefits of positive emotions are kind of a proxy for the benefits of taking in the
good. There's a lot of research on positive emotions. I'll just leave that slide there
for a moment. But positive emotions, wow, have fantastic benefits. Happiness really
is skillful means.
If you take a look at my Website, wisebrain.org you'll see the slide sets for a number of
talks and one of the nice things about positive emotions is they steady the mind 'cause they
do it in various ways having to do with dopamine and working memory, but it's a great way to
support concentration and productivity to encourage positive emotion.
Also it comes up whether it's selfish to feel happy. And I think Bertrand Russell had a
fantastic line here. He pointed out that as he conceived of it right, "The good life is
a happy one because happy people are good people."
And there's a lot of research that shows that, with some significant exceptions, people who
have basic well being, who already have a sense of overflowingness inside themselves,
are more inclined to offer benefit to other people.
So, from the standpoint obviously of productivity and reducing turnover and anything like that,
whether it's at Google or any company in the world, helping people feel happy at work is
a great way to promote productivity and generosity and teamwork and team building with other
people.
Moving to an end here and then hoping to have a few more minutes for questions and discussion
at the end.
I also took a look at specific factors that are, may not be so obvious for activating
the responsive mode of the brain for each one of these three fundamental systems.
In the approach system for example, focusing on gladness and gratitude; fantastic.
People do things like the three blessings exercise at the end of the day. They just
list three things to be grateful for; take half a minute to focus on them. That has had
amazing results for such a simple intervention.
And giving one's self over to one's best purposes is another way to activate the approach system
in a context of prior contentment and wisdom.
The affiliating system, one I wanna call out there is the last one the idea of acting with
unilateral virtue. In other words, living by your own code of integrity and good conduct
regardless of what the other person does. In other words, not getting involved in this
kind of Mexican standoff.
I do couples counseling as well as other things where people basically say, "I'll treat you
well if you treat me well. You go first." And we know where that really gets us.
On the other hand, if you act with unilateral virtue, it makes you feel good right off the
top; it also gives you a sense of initiative; and it puts you on the high moral ground so
that after a few days or weeks even you can then say very rightfully to the other person,
"I stopped being a jerk. I'm givin' you what you want. I'm lining off your reasonable complaints.
Alright, how 'bout me?" Okay?
And then last with regard to the avoid system, calming the body in general. As soon as we
get activated in the stress response system we're primed to go negative 'cause those systems
are disposed and lean toward negative responsiveness.
So, activating a calming, soothing response whenever we feel stressed or upset is a good
basic default.
And then I would say last, tolerate risking a dreaded experience. We live small. We live
in a way to avoid experiences we dread, and then that becomes the new normal and after
awhile we start to forget about it.
It's a little bit like these tigers that are in cages, speaking of tigers. They remove
the cage because they've built a park around them, but the tiger will not cross the line
that's written, that's painted there on the cement because they still live within that
box. They still presume that limitation.
The trick is to risk the dreaded experience instead of avoiding it. In other words, put
one's neck out in a meeting; tell someone you love them; open up to some feelings and
see that it goes well which it usually does. Okay?
In effect, this is in the traditional phrase, "taking a fruit as the path." In other words,
taking the end as the means. Taking the end of calm, contentment, and caring are here
in this, and I reordered it, gladness, love and peace, taking that as the method as well
as the destination.
In, for example, literally I found myself increasing; I just named these three words
to myself. I did before I came down here to give this talk which was making me nervous
I said, "Rick, gladness, love, peace, okay, good. In the zone. Okay. Good place."
Whatever works for you to get in your zone, different things work for different people.
All the great teachers have offered huge tool boxes with a diversity of tools. Neurological
diversity is the most critically important and fundamental and substantive kind of diversity
there really is.
And so, that's why I think is really important to find one's own way.
That gives us a fundamental choice, right? Reactive mode which is the ordinary lot, characterized
tries by suffering, ignorance and harm. Or the responsive mode; the natural state of
the brain which can see through Paper Tiger Paranoia and can be gradually cultivated with
self-directed neuroplasticity.
And that's the opportunity for us all today. It's historically unprecedented; it's grounded
in science; papers are coming out everyday basically with new opportunities to figure
out how to reverse engineer the brain and each one of us can do this in our own lives
with benefits that ripple throughout the entire planet.
So, I thank you for your attention. It's a great privilege to be here.
[applause]
Thank you, very much.
Question or comment for the last minute?
One or, one? Yes, no?
>>male in audience #1: I have a question about I-I-I've heard that
a number of traditions anyway say that if you're trying to make a change in your consciousness
when a point comes, the point comes when you can actually make a shift, there will be an
opposite, there will be a-a resistance, there'll be like a, a pull from where you came from
that will try to keep the status quo.
How does that, is-is that know as an actual something that happens in the brain that tries
to keep us in our, in our previously more contractive consciousness?
>>Rick Hanson: I think that's true in two ways and wonderfully
untrue in a third, alright?
First, the brain is a giant association network. Everything's connected to everything else.
So if we have a breakthrough over here we still have that old learning over there. People
say to me sometimes, "I feel guilty that I'm still upset about my childhood." Right? Well
of course you are. The brain learned. It's designed to learn and that learning persists
until it gradually is replaced or overcome, first.
Second, it's very interesting how the brain is organized. It's very much basically yin
and yang, in effect, on stop and go. Inhibitor fire, that's the way the brain are organized.
And I think a lot of knowledge structures in the brain are organized around figuring
ground or something in its thesis antithesis in effect.
So, when you break through in one area or you think about something very often the opposite
comes up.
For example, think about something that makes you feel proud of yourself; pause. Very often
something will come up that's associated with self-doubt. So-so what you're saying I think
is natural.
That said, very often people will have a breakthrough and they get a release, they're done with
it. They saw through it; they changed; they got it.
I love the line from practice, "Gradual cultivation, sudden awakening, gradual cultivation, sudden
awakening, gradual cultivation, sudden awakening."
So very often what we have, is we have awakenings; we have insights; we realize something. Then
we've got to cultivate around it; we've got to back fill; we've gotta build an infrastructure
which then enables the next awakening; the next insight; the next breakthrough; the next
release to be even deeper.
But something I've really come to see, honestly, I've been a therapist a long time; it's made
me more compassionate, but it's made me tough as nails in this sense that most people will
not do the work. But if you do the work, the sky's the limit in the changes you can make
in your mind, your brain, and your life, and in this world.
Okay, thank you.
[applause]
Thanks.