Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we
discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman. And I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing meditation. We are going to discuss the science of meditation. That is what happens in the brain and body. While we are meditating and we will talk about the science of meditation as it relates to how the brain and body change as a consequence of meditation.
That is what you export or take from a meditation practice that can impact everything from your sleep to your mood. For instance, meditation has been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression. And we will also talk about how meditation can be used to enhance focus and other states of mind that are useful for work and other aspects of life. Now, of course, most of you have probably heard of meditation and when we think of meditation, most often we think of somebody either sitting or lying down. If they're sitting, we might imagine them in the so-called Lotus position, you know, sitting with legs crossed.
Very upright with hands on the knees or, you know, crossed in our lap or something of that. Sort typically, we think of somebody who's in a very calm State eyes closed focused on their so-called Third, Eye Center, the third eye center is the area just behind ones forehead, there's no third eye there, at least, there shouldn't be, but I'll tell you why it's called the third eye center. What the origins of that are, and why it's relevant to actually for a meditative practice with all that said, it turns out that meditation encompasses a huge variety of different practices.
Has some of those practices. Indeed are done sitting or lying down with one's eyes closed, focusing on the third eye center. Other of those practices are focused on a body scan, you know, really focusing on one area of the body and its contact with whatever surface. You happen to be sitting or lying on, or can be done walking. In fact, there are walking meditations done with eyes open. So there are many different forms of meditation. But today, we are going to focus mainly on how specific types of meditation and specific areas of the brain that are activated during those meditations.
Change our way of being in fundamental ways, not just, during the meditation practice, but afterwards, as well. So, if you're somebody who's interested in changing your default state of mood, or of thinking, or enhancing your ability to focus or improving your sleep, or improving performance in some cognitive or physical, Endeavor meditation is powerful, but you want to make sure that you pick the right meditation practice. So we will talk about picking a meditation practice, that isn't just feasible because you'll do it. But is actually
Acted at the goal specific to you and what you need most. So to give you some sense of the Contour of today's episode first, I'm going to talk about some of the underlying biology, the mechanisms, and the Brain areas and also the areas of the body that are activated, During certain forms of meditation and equally important, which areas of the brain and body are shut down or reduced in their activity during specific types of meditation, then I'll transition into how to best do a meditation. Practice how to get the most out of that meditation practice.
And then I will talk about how to change your alter your meditation practices according to your specific goals and as you get better and meditation and this can get a little bit counterintuitive, but in a positive way, what I mean by that is for instance, a lot of people think that as you meditate and get better at meditating, you need to meditate more and more and more sort of like, if you get better at running endurance races that you need to keep running longer and longer, you know, first a 5k than a 10K than a marathon then Ultras with meditation is actually quite the opposite, the better that you get at drop.
Going into a particular brain State and the more your so-called traits of brain State shift, not just States as they're sometimes referred to. But traits this is a theme that I picked up from a terrific book that I'll refer to later that the more that you can get into specific neural circuits quickly actually, the less you need to meditate in order to derive, the benefits of meditation. So that's a wonderful aspect of meditative practices. That's unlike a lot of other forms of mental exercise and
Of
enhancing exercises. So, we'll talk about all of that today. And I promise that, by the end of today's episode, you will have a rich array of meditative practices to select from. You'll know why each of them work and why they can be directed toward particular goals and how to do that. And you'll also know how to modify those meditation practices under conditions, where you might get busier, or where you're suffering from. Lack of sleep. I think a lot of people will be excited to know that today, we are going to discuss a specific form of meditation that can indeed reduce your need for sleep and still allow you to enhance.
Dance, your cognitive and physical abilities before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform. The analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you meet your health goals. Now, I've
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Okay, a.com and enter the code huberman to save 20% off your first order. Again, that's Roca are okay, a.com and enter the code huberman at check out the huberman Lab podcast has. Now partnered with Momentis supplements to find the supplements, we discuss on the huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentous. Spelled ous live, momentous.com huberman and I should just mention that the library of those supplements is constantly expanding again. That's live momentous.com /, hubermann, Let's talk about meditation. As I mentioned earlier, we are going to talk about
Out what areas of the brain and body are active during meditation and after meditation and why that can be so beneficial, we will also talk about when and how best to meditate. This is a topic. I've long been interested in. I was first given a book on meditation when I was in high school because to make a long story short, was a bit of a wild one early, in my high school years and as a consequence of a program that I was in somebody handed me a book on meditation. That book is still available. Now that book is called wherever you go.
There you are by Jon kabat-zinn. He was one of the first, not the only but one of the first people to really start popularizing meditation mindfulness practices in the United States. So this was in the late 1980s and it was really only until recently that there were very few studies of meditation. All those really picked up in the 90s. Now, you can find many, many thousands of studies on meditation and their mechanistic basis of brain Imaging, studies changes in hormones in the body but in the
The late 1980s and in the early 1990s because functional Imaging of the brain. So called MRI or fmri was really just starting to emerge as a popular tool in Laboratories and hospitals. There really wasn't that much mechanistic understanding about how meditation worked. But of course, there was a deep understanding from cultures outside the United States. That meditation was extremely useful. I should just mention as long as we're talking about the history of meditation, any discussion about meditation is going to be a discussion about
States of mind and any discussion about states of mind, invokes the word Consciousness. I kind of dangerous topic to get into in any format because a lot of people talk about Consciousness but people use Consciousness, the word to mean different things. It doesn't have one standard operational, definition a scientist, call it however discussions about Consciousness are often part and parcel with conversations about things like psychedelics and kind of alternative therapies and so in the
In 60s and especially in the 1970s meditation and psychedelics. We're actually close cousins in the conversation about Consciousness and states of mind that conversation started to split into two different divisions and I'll explain why. In a moment, it's gets to a little bit of interesting academic sociology but what happened was there were a couple of guys at Harvard including Timothy Leary and others, who got really interested in psychedelics in particular, LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide
And at that time, that was part of the whole counterculture movement. It was considered very anti-establishment and they were really encouraging students at Harvard to take LSD. They were also very interested in meditation. But what ended up happening is they essentially got kicked out or fired from Harvard and there's a book that I'll refer you to in the show. No captions. If you're interested in learning more about all this, but they got kicked out and fired for their emphasis on psychedelics nowadays. There's a lot of interest in psychedelics we've had episodes with dr. Matthew John.
In from Johns, Hopkins, University, who's running clinical trials on psychedelics, like psilocybin and LSD for the treatment of depression and PTSD. We've also had dr. Nolan Williams on the podcast, my colleague at Stanford who is doing incredible studies on some of those compounds as well. So nowadays the conversation about psychedelics is coming back and it's somewhat divorced from the conversation about meditation, but in the 1960s and 1970s the conversation about psychedelics and meditation was sort of one in the same that changed.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s. When people, like, Jon kabat-zinn started writing books that were purely about meditation and suggesting that people explore meditative practices for the utility to bring calmness adjust stress. Improves sleep at cetera, divorced from the conversation about psychedelics. Now, that's not to say that the scientific Community immediately embraced the conversation about meditation. In fact, it took quite a long while for schools like Harvard and Stanford and other universities around the world to start embracing.
Sing and funding, studies of meditation asking what sorts of brain areas are involved how it changes the body. And perhaps most importantly, how a meditation practice can shift the brain and body. When somebody is finished, meditating, and is off in their life, doing their everyday things in the late 1980s, and especially within the 1990s, the Advent of brain imaging technology, like magnetic resonance imaging MRI or functional magnetic. Resonance imaging was a way to look at the brain while it was active.
Just to get an image of its structure but also how its functioning there, is that so-called light up, when all of that technology became accessible in popular, well, that allow done. Large number of Laboratories to start asking how specific patterns of thinking and breathing, maybe people sitting in the Lotus position. But more often than that, it would be people inside of an MRI magnet because it isn't magnets or put you into a little tube and push you into the tube not against your will, of course, but put people into the tube, have them meditate and then look at how the brain changed and to do that.
Over time, when those studies were done what was discovered was really quite miraculous. Really. And now, we don't think of a surprising, but what was discovered was a huge laundry list of brain changes. And then when people were evaluated in their outside life. So when they would fill out reports of their subjective, feelings of happiness, or they would report their sleep, or even if objective measures were taken with changes in hormones, or markers of inflammation, etcetera, a large list of information fell out of that.
That which revealed that indeed, there are many a dozen or more clear benefits of a regular meditation practice. And some of those meditation practices could be quite short. So, nowadays, we think of meditation is pretty commonly accepted and then fact that has a lot to do with the fact that many of the major tech companies in the Bay Area during the 2000s, such as Google and apple, and any number of different social media companies and other companies and business ventures. Etc, investment firms all over
World started hiring people to train meditation or had online courses for meditation. So nowadays, we think of meditation as this thing that almost everybody understands can benefit us. But we now sit at an interesting Frontier where most people think of meditation as one thing. So like the word exercise which of course could mean weight training, it could be running. It could mean high intensity interval training, all of which as you know, will get you different results. Depending on what you do, how often you do it. And the
Facts of what you actually do. So to meditation can give you very specific results. It can give you more focus, it can give you better sleep and can give you a combination of results, just like exercise can depending on the exercise. So what we are going to talk about next is the specific changes that happen in the brain with specific aspects of meditation. That is what happens when you close your eyes, what happens when you focus your attention, inward versus focusing, your attention outward. Because as I mentioned before, there's third eye meditation where you close your eyes.
And focus on that spot, just behind your forehead and you focus on your breathing. There's also meditation practices where you're focusing on what you're eating with a lot of. So called mindfulness being very present to whatever's happening, not letting your mind wander or think about yesterday or tomorrow what's happening next but really focusing on the present. Their also meditation practices, of course where you are in a format of interpersonal communication where you're really listening very intensely that too is a form of mindfulness. So we're going to parse each of these things. And we are going to ask what?
What's happening in the brain and body during each of these meditation practices, so that you can develop specific meditation practices that you can invoke in your real life on a daily basis. Or thankfully, I would say for some who are pretty busy that you could even do once a week or even once a month, that will still clearly benefit you in specific ways. I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so. Talking about the Neuroscience of meditation, I promise you, I'm not going to just list off a bunch of different brain areas that are active during meditation. That wouldn't be useful to.
In fact, I don't believe in throwing out a lot of nomenclature without also giving some mechanistic explanation as to what different brain areas do you can say, well what good is it knowing what different brain areas do and their names. If I can't actually manipulate those brain areas, but the good news is you actually can manipulate those brain areas. As I'll tell you today, you can turn up the activity in certain brain areas and turn down the activity in specific, brain areas with specific elements of a meditation practice, that's quite exciting and quite different really from
Other aspects of Neuroscience that we might discuss on this podcast so there are a few different brain areas whose names, I'd like to arm you with and again the names themselves aren't essential, but if you can grasp even the top Contour of what I'm about to say, you'll be in a much better position to parse and use the information that follows there's an area of your brain that sits right behind your forehead, that's called the prefrontal cortex, basically. It's the front bumper of your head just behind the bone, okay? That area, just behind your forehead that we call the prefrontal
So cortex actually encompasses a lot of different things and actually you have two of them, you have one on the right side of your brain and you have one on the left side of your brain and they're connected to one another, but they actually do different things. The area that I'd like to focus on today for a bit is the so-called left. Prefrontal cortex. Or if we were going to get really specific. We'd say the left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex dorsal means up. Lateral means to the side. So if you want to touch the left side of your head and move your hand, just toward the midline toward the
Of top of your head a little bit. So that's dorsal. And then laterals, your hand is still on the side of your head. You're in the left, dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex. Okay. So you got your hand, probably, right over your left dorsal, lateral. Prefrontal cortex that area of the brain, we know from lesion studies where it's been damaged and animals are humans and we know from stimulation studies where it's been selectively stimulated in animals, or yes, indeed also it's been done in humans has an incredible ability to control.
All your bodily senses and to make sense that is to interpret what's going on in terms of your emotions and your bodily Sensations. So from now on, unless I say otherwise, if I say prefrontal cortex, I'm specifically referring to the left, dorsal lateral, prefrontal cortex. But I'm going to shorten that up just for sake of Simplicity and ease of communication. If I'm going to talk about another area of prefrontal Cortex, I'll talk about another area but if I say prefrontal cortex today, what I mean is left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex stimulation of left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal
Prefrontal cortex, or I should say more appropriately. When you're left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex is active. You are in a great position to interpret what's going on with you emotionally to interpret your bodily signals of comfort or discomfort. And then make really good decisions on the basis of that interpretation. And that's because the left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex is in direct communication with and is directly connected.
To another brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex racc. Now I'm just going to refer to it as the ACC, okay? The ACC is an area of your brain. That is interpreting a lot of different things about bodily signals. For instance, how fast your breathing whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly. And more importantly, whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly for the circumstance that you are in. So, for instance, if you're running up a hill,
And it's a your even in great shape and your heart is beating very fast. It's unlikely that your are going to be concerned about your heart, beating fast because that is appropriate for the circumstance. However, if you're just walking along and all of a sudden, your heart starts beating very quickly for no apparent reason. Well, then you are going to interpret that as either pathologic or uncomfortable in appropriate for the context that you happen to be in the left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal
X is the area of the brain that actually has some control over and especially can interpret what's going on in this ACC region. Now, most of you probably haven't heard of the ACC, most of you probably have heard of a brain area called the amygdala, is an almond-shaped structure on the two sides of the brain. People talk about as the fear Center etcetera, but your ACC the anterior cingulate cortex gets input from areas, like the amygdala, your threat detection centers, but it also gets input from an enormous number of other areas.
Of your brain and body including your heart, your gut. So it gets information about how full that is distended or how empty your gut is. It gets information about how quickly you're breathing from input from your lungs and related structures. It's an absolutely critical station for making sense of what's going on in your body. And it works very closely along with one other structure and I promise is it going to be the third structure in this Triad and then I'll stop listing off names. We have dorsal.
Prefrontal cortex think of that as sort of The, Interpreter of what's going on. Inside of you, you have the ACC or anterior, cingulate cortex, which is the area of your brain. That's bringing in all this information about what's going on inside your body and he had been on the surface of your body. You know, if you have any pain or an itch or a mosquito bite on the surface of your body or a cc would definitely register that. And then there's this other absolutely incredible brain structure, which is called the insula ins Ula insula. The insula has a bunch of different parts to it, but the insula is another
Area, that is interpreting signals of what's going on in your brain and body. So the ACC and the insular working together, trying to figure out, you know, what's going on inside. Me. And in addition to that, the insula is interpreting information about what's going on outside of you. So, your insula is saying, for instance, this is a steep hill that I'm running up. And as a consequence, whatever, heart rate increase, that, I'm experiencing or heavy, breathing, or burning in my lungs, this all make sense. I don't have to be worried. I don't have to be scared.
Might want to
slow down, but this makes sense, whereas it, for instance, in the example, I previously gave where if you're sitting in a room and everything is pretty calm. And all of a sudden, you start feeling really uncomfortable like your stomach doesn't feel right or you start breathing quickly, you start having a so-called anxiety or panic attack in large part. That's because the shift in your bodily, Sensations doesn't match or doesn't correspond to Something in the outside world. So there's this incredible Triad which includes the left or Salado? Prefrontal cortex. The cingulate
Or anterior, cingulate cortex, and the insula and those three are working together in a kind of conversation. It's a neural conversation but a conversation nonetheless trying to figure out. Okay, what's going on inside me? How do I feel what am I thinking about? And this could be thoughts about the past or the future or the present. They are also in a conversation as to whether or not the sensations that you're experiencing. Meaning how quick your breathing is or how slow your breathing is how your heart feels how your skin feels any sense.
Into pain or pleasure for that matter, whether or not that makes sense for the situation you're in and trying to determine whether or not you are doing the right things as a consequence of those Sensations, okay? So again, if you can't remember the names of these different neural structures in the brain, don't worry about it. It's really not that critical. What is critical is that you understand that there's a conversation that's constantly occurring. As long as you are awake trying to figure out what's going on inside of you whether or not
Not, it makes sense relative to what's going on outside and around you now. Humans are smart. That is, we are to some extent conscious of the fact that we have memories of the past awareness of the present and anticipation of the future. So we do realize, for instance, that we can be sitting seated at the dinner table, scuse me and have a thought about something tomorrow. Maybe it exam that stressing us out or something like that and that will change our bodily state in a way. That is not
Two more for what we're doing in the moment, but that can still make sense to us. Because that exam is important. Maybe we're feeling some pressure about a hard conversation. We have to have, or maybe we are very excited about the next day, and we can't eat because we're so excited, and that can make perfect sense to us. Because we do have access to this knowledge about self that we can think about the past, the present, or the future. So that makes the conversation, these three structures are in even more interesting and dynamic because what it means is that we can be doing something.
Eating talking running any number of different activities and our bodily state may or may not match what we are doing in a way that's adaptive for that. And yet that can be completely, okay? Or at least understandable for us. Now, a major emphasis of a meditation practice is to make us so-called more mindful. What is mindfulness will again? There isn't one perfect universally accepted operational. Definition of mindfulness that
Basically nerd speak for saying people can't agree. Exactly what mindfulness should be is and means for everyone, but most people assume and I think agree that mindfulness includes something about being present. And when I say present, that doesn't necessarily mean present to one's surroundings because of course, a lot of meditation practices that are designed to make us more Mindful and present are designed to make us more Mindful and present to what's happening internally while ignoring everything that's happening. Externally.
But they are designed to make us more present to our bodily Sensations and in particular our breathing and our thoughts in the moment. So let's now explore what a generic meditation practice looks like and let's evaluate how that tends to change the activity of these neural circuits in the brain and body, and then from there, we can split the conversation into a couple of different bins. That is meditation practices that are ideal for enhancing Focus meditation practices that are ideal for improving mood meditation.
Is that are ideal for improving sleep and meditation practices that believe it or not benefit, all of those things in one Fell Swoop, okay? So what happens during a meditation practice at the neural level. In order to answer that question, we are going to be scientists. That means you and I are going to be scientists. Now, we are going to break down a practice into it's different component parts and address what we know for sure about the brain activation states that occur with those
different component parts. In order to do that, let's use a somewhat generic form of meditation, but it's generic and pretty far-reaching, because I would say that for most people about 75%, let's say a meditation practice is going to involve stopping meaning, getting out of
motion
sitting or lying down, and in most cases closing one's eyes, although it is absolutely not required to close ones eyes during meditation, there are many forms,
Meditation that are done eyes open, but for most people, it's going to involve stopping our movement that is not ambulating, not walking or running. So, see seated or lying down with eyes closed when we do that. Meaning, when we sit or lie down and close our eyes, as trivial as that shift, might sound to you. It actually is a profound shift in the way that your brain and other neural circuits in your body function for the following reason.
When we close our eyes, we shut down a major Avenue of what's called extra reception. What do I mean by XT reception? Well, very briefly. We are sensing things on our body and in our body all the time we are also sensing things from outside of us all the time. So these could be sights or sounds touch on our Body Sensations with inside our body Etc. Now sensation is distinct from what we call perception perception is put
Lee the sensations that we happen to be paying attention to. So at any given moment, you are sensing many, many things, there are sound waves hitting your ears, there are pressure receptors on the bottoms of your feet, sensing your shoes, or your sandals are the floor, Etc. But you're not perceiving them until you place your attention on them. Now, the way perception works is that you have. So called spotlights of attention, you can't perceive everything all at once. Every sound, every sight, every touch, that would be
Overwhelming in fact, that would be terrible rather. You have spotlights of perception that can either be very narrow. So for instance, you could focus all of your perception right now on your big toe of your right foot and really pour all of your awareness, your attention into what you're perceiving their what it feels like if there's tingling or pressure heat or cold at cetera, or you can broaden that Spotlight to include both feet. Are all your toes on both feet and then your legs and your whole body, or the entire room.
Perception is like a spotlight and I should mention there are very good data that we can split our attention into two but probably not more than two spotlights and we can make those spotlights of perception either very Broad and diffuse or very narrow, you can practice this. Now, if you like you can pick a spot on the wall away from you anywhere, or if you're driving, you can look at some location and you can focus intensely on one small location. For instance, a tree in the horizon or a person on the street or
Or any number of different things outside of you, or you can broaden that Spotlight to include the entire scene at once. You can also focus a spotlight of perception on your body, say on the left upper portion of your chest. And of course you can focus on the left upper portion of your chest and something. Outside of, you can split your attention between those two perceptual spotlights. It's very hard, although not impossible to have three perceptual spotlights, but most people can split to two points of
Tension or perception, pretty easily. The other thing that most people can do pretty easily is merge those two spotlights or rather to have just one Spotlight of attention. So you don't always have to have two spotlights of attention on. And here, I'm using the word attention and perception interchangeably, but you could, for instance, have two points of attention. So you're talking to somebody and you're paying attention to whether or not somebody's walking in the door. Not, so that's 2 or you could be completely focused on the person you're talking to or you could be completely focused on the stomach ache or the great sensation of hunger that you
have in your belly while talking to somebody. In fact, you're not even listening to what they're saying at all, okay? So you have two spotlights of perception, you can split them or merge them into one. And this is very important. Those spotlights of perception can intensify or dim. And there, I'm using analogy. What I mean by that is your perception of what's happening within. Those spotlights can be very, very high Acuity. That is you can register very fine changes in detail, like tingling on one side of your big toe of your
Right foot versus the other or it can be somewhat more diffuse. You're just thinking about your whole toe, which in that case seems like a small area. But the point is that you can consciously adjust the Acuity. That is the finest of your perception. All of this is under your power because of the incredible ability of a brain structure whose name, You Now, understand, and know which is the left. Dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex. Although there are others of your brain involved as well. Your ability to direct your attention to specific
Perfect things in your environment or within your body or to split those points of attention or merge them, or dial up, the intensity of how closely you're paying attention to every little shift, a ripple and change in sensation there, or to kind of dissociate, if you will, for lack of a better word to disengage from that perception. All of that is under control because of your ability to engage this area that we call the prefrontal cortex. And in particular, the left dorsal lateral. Prefrontal cortex.
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Except athletic greens while you're on the road in the car on the plane at cetera and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again, that's athletic greens.com huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K to. Okay? So now if we look at the example of what happens, when you sit or lie down and close your eyes and decide to meditate, you should immediately realize that that's a tremendous shift in your perceptual ability. Why? Because that Spotlight of attention,
Tension while it can be oriented toward for instance. What you hear in the room or maybe the feeling of wind moving trees in the environment that you happen to be in, when we close our eyes, we shut down one of the major avenues for sensory input, which is vision. And when we do that, there's a tendency for those perceptual spotlights to be focused more. So on what happens at the level of the surface of our skin. And inside of our
He's and that informs us about something very important which is that there are actually two axes or two ends of a Continuum of perception up. Until now, we've been talking about perception and intention is kind of the same thing. And indeed, they are at least for sake of this conversation, but within that word perception or within that word attention, there's a Continuum. And that Continuum has on one end, something called interoception, interoception, spelled with an i is everything.
That we sense at the level of our skin and inward. So the sensation inside our stomach, the sensation of our heart beating. Some people can sense their heart beating pretty easily other people have more challenge doing that, what we are feeling on the surface of our skin. How hot or cold? We feel that's interoception in contrast at the other end of the Continuum is so-called extra reception. Spelled with an E. Extra reception is perception of everything that's outside or beyond the confines of our
Skin. So, by shutting our eyes and in particular, in a meditative practice where we direct our attention toward our so-called Third, Eye Center this area right behind our forehead, which not. So, incidentally is the prefrontal cortex or in some cases, where people will focus on their breathing. So the movement of their stomach or the movement of their diaphragm, or the lifting of their chest, or the extension of their belly. While they Breathe by doing that, we are taking what? Ordinarily is a perceptual State. That's
Split between the outside world, extra reception and usually also toward our inner State. You know, most people are generally in touch with how they are feeling from the skin inward while they are. Also paying attention to what's outside of them. You can think about somebody, for instance, at a restaurant or sandwich, shop about to order a sandwich and you're reading the menu, so that's Xterra ception, right? The menu is outside the confines of your skin and little ideas or maybe Big Ideas come to mind about what the roast beef sandwich or the vegetarian sandwich. Will taste like what it will do for you.
What what's in it? What you like, what? You don't like etcetera, that's splitting interoception, an extra reception. But when we close our eyes, we stopped, we slow down, we focus on our breathing, or that third eye center, the majority of our perception, then shifts to interoception. And when we shift down to that end of the Continuum of interoception, something very important happens, what happens is that those two regions, the ACC, the anterior, cingulate cortex and the insula
Really ramp up their levels of neural activity and that should make perfect sense to you because those are areas of your brain that are registering and paying attention to the various sensations of how full or empty your stomach feels whether or not the surface of your skin feels hot or cold and on and on. So by just sitting down or lying down and closing your eyes, your brain, undergoes a massive shift from external ception to interoception. Now, that's not to say, you can't be distracted by external events. And in fact, many people are. But the early stages
Of transitioning into a meditative State involve, this shift down the Continuum, or I should say to one end of the Continuum, because there's no down up, there's just the Continuum Shift along the Continuum to heightened levels of interception. Now, I mentioned this briefly before, but many people are very interested, cept of Leah, we're just naturally. Even if they don't do a meditation, practice other people are not and there's a pretty good measure of whether or not you have high.
Levels of interceptive awareness or capability. And that is your ability to count your heartbeats without placing your fingers anywhere with any pressure to take your pulse, you can do this. If you like you can actually try and estimate your number of heartbeats simply by trying to feel your heartbeat. Some people are very good meaning, they're very accurate at doing this. Other people are not, it does seem to be an ability that can be trained up quite a bit and in fact, meditative practices will improve your intercept of awareness but and this is a very important
Point. Heightened levels of intercept of awareness. While that might sound attractive oppa to re really in touch with your body, that is not always beneficial, why? Because many people who, for instance, have excessive levels of anxiety, have excessive levels limit of anxiety because they are very keenly aware of any subtle shift in their heart rate, or breathing, or change in their the sensations within their stomach. Whereas other people who are less aware of their body,
Only state that can be beneficial, right? It can be adaptive or not, depending on the circumstances, it's probably not adaptive to be very, very aware of your internal state. If, for instance, you're doing public speaking, you don't want to be thinking about what's going on in your stomach, or how quickly you're breathing. I'm certainly trying to ignore all those signals those Sensations now, but for somebody who has no awareness of what's going on, very little intercept of awareness that can be problematic to. Because these are the very people who can ignore the
They're having a
heart attack or can ignore the fact that they have high blood pressure and are carrying about life focused on everything external with no awareness of their own body, their quote, unquote out of touch with their body. So we want to be very careful about placing valence, which is a sort of value of good or bad. On interoceptive awareness forces, extra receptive, awareness, more importantly, we want to emphasize that when you undergo a meditation practice, if it's of the sort where you stop your movement and close your eyes, you are training.
Being for interoceptive awareness, this becomes important later we get into discussions about meditation for reducing anxiety. Some people may opt. In fact, I would say some people ought to opt for a meditative practice which involves more extra receptive awareness. Actually a meditation like a walking meditation, or even a seated meditation where they are bringing their focus to a place outside their body as opposed to inside their body. And in fact, there are examples of people who have meditated
Quite a lot Who develops such a heightened state or awareness of their interceptive components. That is just fancy again nerd speak for so aware of their breathing and of their heart and of their the state of their gut that it actually is intrusive for daily activities. So I will ask you to ask this question of yourself now are you somebody who tends to be very in touch with your bodily Sensations? So for instance, from the skin in words or are you somebody who tends to be less in touch with or
Aware of your interest, cept of State. There is no right or wrong answer. You don't get an A or an F or a deer or C depending on your answer. It's just a good question for each and every one of us to answer and I think most people will answer that. It depends, it depends on whether or not you are in a social setting or whether or not you're alone. But we are going to return to that answer. So keep it in mind because it will become very beneficial in building an optimal meditation practice for you. But for now just know there's this Continuum of perception interception and
Reception closing your eyes increases interoception opening your eyes dramatically increases extra reception, just automatically just automatically because so much of your brain. In fact 40% or more is dedicated to vision and this I should say for those of you that are low vision or no vision and those of you that are blind or have poor vision, this entire process is translated to the auditory to the sound domain.
So it's true for people that can see. That's true for people that can't see. Of course, people that can't see. Closing the eyes doesn't have this huge shift towards interoception but there have been a few studies, not as many as I would have liked to find. But if you study as a, for instance, people who are blind or have low vision, don't see very well. And when they close their ears and they can't hear the external world where they put headphones on or noise-canceling headphones, then the world inside of them becomes very prominent relative to the world outside of them for obvious reasons.
So, I asked you to ask yourself whether or not you are somebody who tends to be more interested Lee aware or not more, Xterra receptively aware or not. And some of you might not be able to answer that question and if you can't chances are that you are effectively sliding along that Continuum depending on the activities that you're doing. So you're probably the kind of person where if somebody comes over to you and starts talking to you, you will engage in that conversation and you don't feel so inside your body that you're thinking about your heart beating and whether or not you're flushing read. It said,
You're going to pay attention to what they say, many people. However, when somebody talks to them, if they have social anxiety or even a slight, bit of social anxiety, will be thinking about whether or not their cheeks are flushing or whether, or not they look right or sound, right? Or whether or not they have something in their teeth. These are normal responses, but they really speak to this issue of whether or not you tend to shift more towards interoceptive awareness or extra receptive weariness. And, of course, it's context-dependent. It will depend on whether or not you're out on a date with somebody that you know, you would love
To find out later that you had food in your, in your teeth or whether or not you're with somebody, you're more familiar with where that would not really matter much. Or the other person would tell you this kind of thing. What does it mean to be at one location or another location along? This Continuum of interception or extra reception? What we know what it means, Neroli, right? We know that if you are more interested, Leah where your insulin ACC or active, but that's not very useful. That's not, that's not helpful as a tool that's just a fact. Now, there have actually been studies of what
A meditation practice can do in terms of moving, you along this Continuum from where you naturally sit, in order to help you function, not just during the meditation, but at all times. And in order to illustrate this, I want to start with a description of what is now, a classic study. It's a very cool study. Has a very cool name talks about something very important that will come up again. And again in today's conversation, that's something called the default mode Network. The default mode network is a collection of different brain.
Areas that essentially are active when we're not doing much of anything and certainly is active when we are not focused on one particular task or conversation or activity. The default mode Network can be thought of more or less. As the network that generates mind-wandering or our thoughts drifting from the past to the present to the Future. Remember earlier, I talked about how your perceptual Spotlight can either be two spotlights or they can merge well similarly human beings. Can think about the
The past, surely the present, definitely, and the future. And it turns out we can also split our thoughts, just like we can split our perception into two of those three things. So I can think about the past a past event and I can think about the present I can split my thinking and my memory in that way, I can also think about the present and the future, I can also think about the future and the past, although it's very difficult, although not impossible to split one's thinking, and memory into the
The present and future simultaneously not easily done but pretty easy to split, one's attention and thinking into two of those three things. Either the past the present, the future, or any two of those three things. Okay. Just like with attentional spotlighting you can place your mind. You're thinking in your memory, your cognition on to one of those things would be very, very present, or the past and the present and so on and so forth, the default mode Network, while it involves a lot of different brain areas,
Can be thought of Simply as the network of brain areas that are active, when your mind is wandering between these different time, domains and the paper I'd like to share with you as I mentioned before is now a classic paper has a wonderful title which is a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Now that sounds almost like a news article or a news article about a scientific paper but that's actually the title of the scientific paper which was published in the journal science which is one of the three Apex journals, you know, scientific publishing is
Competitive but it's especially competitive to get manuscripts accepted into science into nature and into the journal cell. So it represents kind of the one of the Super Bowl NBA championships and Stanley Cup. If you will view Sports afficionados of scientific publishing. This is a paper from Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert. It was published in 2010 but it's still considered a classic and this paper, a Wandering mind is an unhappy. Mine has a number of very important points. I'm going to paraphrase certain elements of it for you because they say
So essentially what I would like you to know far better than I could, and I could say. So first of all, they start out with a statement, which I confess I disagree with which is unlike other animals human being spend. A lot of time thinking about what is not going on around them contemplating events that happened in the past might happen in the future or will never happen at all. I agree with their assertion that human beings, do that. That's certainly my experience. Although I must say, I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever that other animals don't do.
Also, so my apologies Killingsworth in Gilbert but I'd be happy to go toe-to-toe with you on that. I am not aware of any data that prove one way or the other what other animals are thinking. So let's set aside other animals. And let's focus on the human animal. Now, their point is still a very good one, which is that humans have this wandering of the mind that they call stimulus. Independent. Thought that is, there's nothing happening to create these thoughts or anything happening in the immediate environment. These thoughts are just
It happening on their own internally. That's the default mode Network. This study was important. In fact it was a landmark study because they did it right about the time that smartphones became a widely available and in use. So again 2010 so they basically pinged people they contacted people on their iPhones many times per day and they did this for well over two thousand two hundred adults. They had a mix of male and female people in this study the mean age.
34 years, but there was a rain mean, of course, being average, but there were a range of different ages and so forth. And at any moment, they ask people, what are you feeling right now? And they also asked them, what are you doing right now? So they were looking for the match or mismatch between what people were doing and what they were feeling. They were essentially trying to probe what people were thinking about and they also address that and they came up with a kind of a bubble chart. If you will, where the bigger the bubble, the more answers came back about one particular thing.
And they assess, whether or not people were happy or not in that moment or sad or not, whether or not they were focused on what they were doing or not. There are a lot of bubbles in this chart so I'm not going to read them all but the important points that came from the data. And again, there's a very large data set, was that? And here, again, I'm paraphrasing. First people's minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing in nearly half of the samples taken. People were generally thinking about something else, except it turns out, there's just one little bubble, sitting way far out on the horizon.
Here
people claimed, and I'm inclined to believe them, that they tend to be very focused on making love if they were making love in the moment where they were pinged on their iPhone now why their iPhone was there with them at that moment? I don't know. That's wasn't included in this description of the study but all the other activities, grooming and self-care listening to the news watching television, relaxing working, etc, etc. During all those activities, people claim that their mind wandered a lot. And then,
They also assessed, of course, their mood and how those people felt at any given moment, depending on what they were doing and how well their mind and their emotions matched, what they were doing. And what they say here is second
They revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not and this was true during all activities. And then third, what people were thinking at a given moment was far better a predictor of their happiness than what they were doing. So this is interesting and I think matches a lot of people's experience. In fact, I think as you hear about this study, many of you will probably just say, Well, done. I mean, if you're working and you don't like your work in your thinking about something bad that happened,
Well then of course you're not going to be happy but the key point of this study is that it did not necessarily have to be the case that people were thinking about something unpleasant. In fact if people were working and they were thinking about something else that was pleasant, that also made them feel unhappy. In other words, the mismatch between being in an activity and having our mind elsewhere LED people to report themselves as feeling more unhappy in that moment. And when you total,
Up what you find is that people are often not present to what they are doing and that is a great source of unhappiness. Even if their thoughts are those of happy joyful thoughts. So, this is interesting and I think runs counter to what most of us have heard or been taught, which is, you know, think good thoughts. You know, try and suppress bad thoughts. Have a good internal landscape, you know, create a good narrative, that is all true, but equally if not more important is to have the ability to
T to be fully engaged in what you are doing at a given moment that is the strongest predictor of being happy. And there were several other studies that followed up on this but their conclusion that they put in the final short paragraph of this paper. I think really captures it beautifully. They say in here I'm quoting directly in conclusion. A human mind is a Wandering mind and a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening in a moment, I added the in a moment, part is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional.
Just so I know I'm not alone in believing that this paper, I wandering, mind is an unhappy mind and we will provide a link to this paper in the show. No captions is absolutely key in understanding why a meditation practice is so important because a meditation practice is really about adjusting your place along that interoceptive extra receptive. Continuum to what you happen to be experiencing in that moment and while most people think of a meditative practice as focusing on,
On what's going on internally with your eyes closed, Third Eye Center. Focusing on your breathing at cetera, for any number of minutes or maybe even an hour or longer. There are other forms of meditation in which your exterior reception dominates, in which you are actively focusing on things outside or beyond the confines of your skin and internal landscape. And that too is meditation. And if we are to take the work of Killingsworth and Gilbert, this a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind, seriously. And I know know,
Other Laboratories have and have supported This research with their findings again and again and again. What this means is that meditating is not necessarily a practice that we do divorced from the rest of Life. Meditation and mindfulness in particular being present to what we are doing in a given moment, is one of the essential keys to happiness and improved mood, even if what we are doing is unpleasant, so that brings us to a tool and it's a tool that any and all of us can use whether or not
you tend to be interceptive, Lee dominant, right? That you tend to pay more attention to your bodily, Sensations or extra receptively dominant. And again if you don't know the answer to that question, there's a simple test that you can do. You can just sit down or lie down, close your eyes and you can ask yourself or assess whether or not your attention tends to Fleet to things outside of you, alright? Cars, honking or going by people in the room or whether or not you tend to be able to focus on your
Colonel landscape to the exclusion of extra reception and attention to things outside the confines of your skin easily. Now, of course, this will depend on context and situation even how well rested you are etcetera, but that's exactly the point. This is the sort of thing you want to do every time you decide to do a meditation practice. In fact, I would suggest that you use this to determine what meditation you do at any given moment. So let's say you are somebody who is a regular meditator or let's say you're somebody who's never meditated
Dated, and you'd like to develop a meditation practice, I suggest that you do a test of whether or not you are more interceptive, Lee dominant, or extra receptively, dominant in that moment. This again this is not a personality trait. This is a question about where you happen to be in a moment. So let's say you're on a plane or you're in the car, if you're in the car, please Don't Close Your Eyes while driving that sort of obvious, but do this in a safe way, please. But stop close your eyes and assess, whether or not
You can access and focus your attention primarily on your internal state, or whether or not your attention and perception gets pulled to something external to external ception. And again, that will vary depending on circumstance and who you are, then I suggest opening your eyes and trying to focus your attention to something external to you and seeing or evaluating the extent to which you can divorce your perception from Sensations that occur at the level of your skin.
In or internally. Now, I should say that there's no technology, at least, not that I'm aware of absence of fmri machine. In which case you are inside an fmri machine while you do this, but unless you are in that experiment and most of us aren't there's no technology that can tell you, for instance, whether or not you are, interceptive, Lee, dominant or extra receptively dominant and whether or not the ratio is, you know, 75 to 25 or what-have-you at any given moment. You have to assess this objectively. However, if you sit down for
And you notice that you can equally split your attention between internal Sensations and external Sensations or whether or not you find yourself pulled into external. Sensations. When you're trying to focus inward or you find yourself pulled inward when you're trying to focus outward. Well, that will dictate the sort of meditation that you, perhaps ought to perform in that moment. Let me give an example of how you would do this. You would stop in some way. So, sit or lie down, close your eyes and evaluate whether or not you can essentially
Rule out or eliminate attention to all outside events. Most people won't be able to do that entirely but try and focus your attention for instance on your breathing or the typical Third, Eye Center. You know, focusing at a spot right behind your forehead. If you feel you can do that reasonably well to the exclusion of what's happening around you. Well, then an important question arises, should you meditate in a way to enhance that interoceptive awareness or rather? Should you meditate in a way? For instance, with your eyes open and your attention on a particular portion of the landscape? You
Like a tree or or maybe even a you know, an object or a plant or something else in your immediate environment to try and cultivate or enhance your extra receptive awareness that's up to you but my bias would be one in which you work against your default State. Again the default mode network is where you land on this interoceptive extra receptive, Continuum is going to lead to more mind-wandering whereas when you encourage or we could even say force yourself a little bit,
To Anchor, your attention to either inside your body or outside your body, and you make that decision, according to what you are doing less easily. Well, then you are actively training up, the neural circuits you are engaging. So called neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience. You are deliberately engaging a shift along that Continuum to make this Crystal Clear? What I mean? Is this? Let me give an example. If I were to sit down and I want to do some
Meditation, let's just say, 3 minutes of meditation. There's good evidence that even three minutes of meditation can be beneficial for a variety of things, including enhanced focus and enhanced anxiety management. Let's say I sit down and I notice that I can really focus inward on what's happening at the level of my skin, and my internal organs, and I can rule out everything. Maybe that's because the room is quiet. Or maybe it's just because my brain is in a state that I'm particularly good at that at that moment or maybe it's just a natural ability. Well, then,
Then I would opt for three minute meditation practice in which I deliberately Xterra cept, that I build up the circuitry to focus on something external to me because I want. And I think most people would like to have an Adaptive mechanism within them, so that they can slide along that Continuum, and they don't default to whatever it happens to be easiest for them in that moment. Now, if I were to sit down and try and focus on what's going on internally, and I kept getting distracted by things happening outside of me, opening my
eyes.
Eyes are feeling like I need to reach for my phone or paying attention to sounds in the room. Well then I would actively engage a meditation practice. In this case, a three-minute example but it could be longer where I'm deliberately trying to focus my perception on events at the level of the confines of my skin and internally. Why do I say this? Well you know I love to use the phrase any time with kids. You know, when they say this is really hard or something's challenging or adults will say that's really tough. Well, as my graduate advisor used to say that.
You're learning. If something were easy, if you can perform any activity or thought at cetera, well then there is absolutely zero reason for your neural circuits to change. Its the friction. It's the feeling that something is hard that turns on the enormous variety of mechanisms at the level of cells, Etc, that allow you to potentially change your neural circuitry so Challenge and discomfort is the signal to your brain and body that something needs to change. So I'm encouraging you to embark on.
Out of practices that are not your default, okay? To essentially go against the grain of where your interceptive bias or your extra receptive. Bias happens to be at a given moment and again, this will change for some of you. This will change across the day where early in the day, you are very, very good at doing an interceptive biased meditation. And later in the day you aren't, I actually believe based on the data that I've covered in will get into a few more papers about this, and my lab is actively working.
Working on this, as well. That a meditative practice can be made far more effective. That is. It can invoke more neuroplasticity, more shift in brain States and brain circuitry. If we do not take the easy path, that is we go against the grain of what our brain would naturally do in a given moment. So if you're in a crowded airport in you're finding that everything is very distracting. Well, then that would be a great time.
To do some interceptive, focused meditation. Whereas, if you are really in your head, you're looping thoughts about the past and present, maybe you're even in obsessive thought. Well, that would be a terrific time and ideal time, really to do a short meditation focused on something external to you in both cases whether or not you're focused on interoceptive bias or extra receptive bias, you are going against or I should say you're pushing back against your default mode Network. I would argue it's going to be far more effective.
Effective that is you're going to reduce or shift the activity of that, default mode Network far more and in a far more beneficial way if you actively try and suppress your bias toward being more interceptive or extra receptive. Now I think that's immensely beneficial both for the immediate changes that you experience what others have called a state change, because that's what it is. And it also can lead to as we refer to earlier more neural. Plasticity, more changes in the brain circuits that
Rely your default mode Network and lead to what are called trait changes and I want to be very clear that I am not the first to make this state versus trait distinction. That's a distinction that was raised in a really wonderful book. In fact, I can't recommend this book. Highly enough, the book is altered traits science, reveals how meditation changes your mind brain and body. This is a book by Daniel goleman and Richard Davidson have done a terrific work, and many writings and many. TED Talks Etc about meditation, I would say that circuit.
2016, 2017. This book really captured, what I believe to be the most essential elements of the science of meditation and a lot of the history of it as well. Today, we are focusing on much of what's covered in this book, but also a lot of things that have happened happened. Scuse me since 2017. In fact, most of the papers that I'm going to talk about our papers that were published after 2017. Again, there's a wonderful book where they very clearly distinguish between State changes and trait changes trait changes, being the more long-lasting, one's mine,
Read of this book, and the literature that follows is again. That when you sit down to meditate, it is going to be most effective to do that interoceptive extra receptive. Bias assessment, ask yourself whether or not you are more in your head or outside your head, if you will. And then to do a meditation practice that runs counter to where you happen to be at that. Is that pushes you more externally? If you're in your head and if you're more focused on what's going on around you, that pushes you more
or internally. Now I think most people are familiar with how to do an end to receptive. Biased meditation again, that would be setting a timer or maybe you don't even set a timer. You just sit or lie down. Close your eyes, focus on that third eye center behind your forehead, or focus on your breathing or your bodily Sensations. That's typical in often discussed extra receptive. Based meditations. You pick a focal point outside or beyond the confines of your skin so that could be for instance, a point on the wall, if you are indoors could be a plant, it could be a
Point on the horizon, far away. What you will find is that your visual system will fatigue a little bit when you concentrate your visual focus at that location. I want to remind you that it is perfectly, okay? And in fact necessary to Blink. So you should blink, you can relax your face, you can change your expression. There is no rule that says that you can't do those things. This is not, you know, just beaming a particular location in space and holding your eyelids open. I've been accused many times of not blinking very often. That's for other reasons. It's part of the way I access memory about what I want to say.
A, I don't use a prompter here. So I'm accessing from a sort of internal image, in my head, that's how my memory works. But in any case, if you're going to do an extra step Tobias meditation, there is absolutely no reason why you wouldn't look away from that location every once in a while, and the same way that if you're focused on internal Thoughts, with your eyes closed and focused on your breathing, every once in a while. Your thoughts will skip away from that breathing, or from your third eye center, in fact, and this is discussed in
The book alter traits, but by many other people as well, one of the key elements of any meditative practice whether or not it's interceptive, Lee focused or extra receptively focused. Is that it's really a refocusing practice, the more number of times that you have to yank yourself back into attending or perceiving one specific things. In other words the more time your mind wanders and you bring it back actually the more effective that practice is again if you can just focus on one location with laser Precision in your mind, never
Away from that and you don't have to bring it back. Well then there's no neuroplasticity. Nothing needs to change because your nervous system will effectively know it's performing perfectly. So if you're somebody who tries to do meditation, you find the your mind just wanders. Just remember every time you Scruff yourself and pull yourself back to focusing on some location externally, or Focus back on your breath or your third eye center. Each one of those are just opportunities to do better. They are essential to the improvement process, think about them as a sending a staircase of refocusing every time you
Focus, you're going up one more level, another stair, another stair, another stair, and I think that will move you away from the kind of judgmental process of thinking. Oh, I like, I can't focus on anything pretty. Soon, what you'll notice is that the refocusing process will happen so quickly that you don't even perceive it. And again, this is something that's borne out in the neuroimaging data. A lot of people think that they can focus with laser Precision but actually what they are better at doing is refocusing more quickly and consistently overtime.
There's a classic study about this in very experienced meditators, that was done in Japan where they had people with varying levels of meditation ability. So some would never meditated others who are really expert meditators with many hundreds. If not thousands of hours of meditation under their belt and they had those people listen to 20 tones, repeated over and over the same tone and they found that the expert meditators could really focus and they did this by brain Imaging. They could really focus on all 20 tones, whereas most people kind of a
Peter, what's called habituate to the tone so that by the 10th or 11th own their mind is really going to something else. Now. That's wonderful but that really just tells us the expert meditators have better focus but it turns out that the more modern neuroimaging Studies have shown that, they don't have better focus such that they're staying in a very narrow trench of focus. What they're doing is they're exiting focus and going back in more quickly, more quickly, more quickly over and over again. So, rather than think about your ability to focus, think about your ability to refocus, and the more number of times you have to refocus.
The better training you're getting. So earlier I mentioned doing this interoceptive biased or extra receptive bias meditation for three minutes. Why did I say three minutes? Well, three minutes seems like a reasonable number for most people to do consistently once a day. And in fact, there are some studies of one minute meditations and three-minute meditations and 10 and 60, my laboratory has been studying a five minutes, a day meditation. And that clearly has benefits, but I think it's also clear that by three minutes, many of the benefits are
Going to arrive. And so, while I'm not pointing any one particular data point here, it's very clear that forcing oneself to direct one's perception. That is your attention to your internal state or to something external to, you is immensely beneficial. If you do it, consistently and is again, especially beneficial, if you're focusing your attention on the portion of your experience, either internal or external to you. That is not the one that you
Would default to in that moment and some people have taken this to the extreme to say that you can even just move about your day. And then, every once in a while just do a one breath meditation. To be honest, when I look at the whole of the data, it seems, as if it doesn't really matter in order to derive, most of the benefits of a meditation practice. Now, I'm a big fan of some of the newer meditation apps that are out there. One in particular that I've been using and that actually started using because my dad is a big fan of it, and he does now fairly long meditation.
He's doing about 10 or 20 minutes, at least every other day and often every day. And he convinced me to check out the waking up app. That Sam Harris has put out. I looked at it. I think some of it sits behind a pay wall, but you can access much of it, or at least, to a trial and try it out without having to get behind that pay while they're not a sponsor of this podcast, I should mention, but I decided to use the waking up app. I think it's terrific. And I think one of the reasons it's terrific is that Sam include short descriptions of what meditation is doing.
And what a specific meditation can do for you. Just prior to doing that meditation. So those meditations can be quite brief. Some of them are a minute-long two minutes, long, some are longer or even quite a bit longer that app, I think includes a variety of meditations, that really encompasses the huge range of possibilities that are possible with meditation. And that at least by my experience of the waking up app has led to my most consistent meditation practice. And of course, I would love to get Sam on the podcast as a guest. So we could talk
About the sort of underpinnings of the waking up app and his views on everything from meditation to. I know he's big in the discussion about Free Will and Consciousness some of the very deep and somewhat abstract discussions. Really, hope to get Sam on the podcast at a time. Not too far from now, meanwhile we've never met in person but I absolutely love the waking up app Sam and I know my father does as well and I know many of you already use it, if you haven't tried it already. I really do encourage you to check it out. I want to talk just briefly about this third eye center business.
Because it turns out to be pretty interesting. The third eye is actually a name that's been given to another neural structure where I should say structure because it's not strictly neural and that's the pineal gland. And this has an interesting history, I promise, I'm not taking off on a tangent here. That isn't relevant to meditation so you have a brain of course and on both sides of your brain, you tend to have mirror symmetric representations of the same things. What do I mean by that? Well you have a prefrontal cortex on the right. You have a prefrontal cortex on the left and they actually do slightly.
For things language is sometimes lateralized to one side but in general, for every structure of the app, on one side of the brain, you have the same structure on the opposite side of the brain, there's one clear exception to that and that's the pineal gland. The pineal gland, is the gland that makes melatonin which at night when it gets dark secretes melatonin. And that melatonin makes you sleepy. Helps you fall asleep and not stay asleep decart. Right. The philosopher Descartes asserted that the pineal was the seat of the Soul. Because it
Is the one structure in the brain that he saw was not on both sides of the brain. It was only one of them and in the middle. Now, I don't know. If it's the seat of the Soul or not, I'm not in a position to make assessments like that. But what do we know about the pineal? The pineal, as I mentioned, is involved in releasing melatonin, it does a few other things as well, but it is also considered the third eye for a couple of reasons. One, is that it responds to light, although in
Is not directly so in birds and lizards and snakes, they actually either have a thin skull or believe it or not. Two holes in the top of their skull to allow light to go directly in. If you look at the head of a snake, like can go directly into their brain through these holes and activate the pineal to suppress melatonin and and control their wakefulness sleep. Rhythms in Birds, they don't have holes in their skull but they have very thin skulls and believe it or not, light can penetrate the thinness of those of the skull and many birds.
And communicates information about time of day and even time of year and that's translating to hormonal signals such as melatonin released from the pineal. And so, the pineal has been called the third eye, because it's a light-sensitive organ, inside the brain. In humans, the pineal sits deep deep, deep to the surface and light cannot get in there. In fact, if light can get into your brain unless you are part of a specific experiment where that's the intention or you're having neurosurgery or something of that sort then.
You've got serious issues, happening, that pine needle. Sits deep deep, deep near What's called the fourth ventricle, and it absolutely should not see light directly. So, the idea that the pineal is the third eye in humans is not true. It just isn't true. So anytime, someone says, oh, the pineal is your third eye. That's not the third eye center that people are referring to when they talk about meditation. Now, you'll see a number of different forms of art where somebody will.
Will it will be a picture of a face and the eyes will be closed or sometimes open. They'll be literally a third eye, like a cyclops eye in the middle of the forehead that has been proposed for many thousands of years to be quote unquote, the seat of our Consciousness. Now that's interesting because that real estate behind the forehead actually turns out to be the prefrontal cortex, which we know from lesion studies and stimulation studies. If you remove that brain area, people become very reflexive. They are not thinking intentionally. They
Come deliberate. In fact, and this is kind of an eerie result, but if you inactivate, you turn off the prefrontal cortex and you give somebody the opportunity to play a shooting game, for instance, their accuracy goes through the roof. They become essentially like a machine. They see a stimulus, they shoot at. They see a stimulus. They shoot at it. Their accuracy is exceptional, but their ability to distinguish between enemy and friend completely disappears.
So they become at a highly effective motor or I should say sensorimotor machine, but their assessment and their judgment about right or wrong completely disappears. This is also true for people that have prefrontal damage, they often will have inappropriate behavior or a hard time suppressing, behaviors Etc. So the third eye center as the seat of Consciousness and Our intention is something that makes sense generally with what we know about the neuroscience and neurology but there's something more to it.
That I think is especially important for all of you that goes beyond anything about ancient Traditions or pine needles or birds, or snakes and pits in the top of the head. And here's what it is.
The brain itself, meaning the brain tissue does not have any Sensory neurons. What do I mean by that? Well, if I touch the top of my hand, I can feel that if I want to sense my heartbeat, if I work at it, I can feel that if I want to sense how I feel internally at the level of my stomach, is it full? Is it empty? Am I hungry? Is it acidic? It does it ache? Or does it feel Pleasant Etc? I can sense that and that's because we have Sensory neurons on our
Again, and in our body Etc. We also have Sensory neurons in her eyes that let us perceive things externally. We have no Sensory neurons on our brain. This is one of the reasons why you can remove the skull and do brain surgery on somebody who's wide awake and be poking around in there. And they don't need any anesthetic on the brain itself. They need anesthetic for the incision site but they don't need anesthetic on the brain because it has no feeling you have emotions, but there's no feeling. So normally we are perceiving and paying attention to what we are.
sensing either externally sights and sounds again, extra reception or internally interoception touch etcetera. But by focusing, our perception, our in, and our attention, not on our bodily surface, like a body scan, but to a point, a couple centimeters or inches behind our forehead, we essentially are bringing that attentional that perceptual Spotlight to a location in which there is no sensation. There's nothing to feel there. And when we do that by closing our eyes,
Isn't focusing on that. Quote, unquote, Third Eye Center, which is the prefrontal cortex to be quite honest when we do that, something else happens. And what happens is when we are not thinking about in perceiving our Sensations because there are none there.
Our thoughts and our emotions and our memories from mushroom up. They more like a better way to put. It would be that they guys are up and take on more prominence in our perception. What I mean by this is that normally you know, I'm not thinking about the contact point between me and this chair but as I'm speaking I'm in contact with the chair and those neurons are firing. But if I focus my energy and attention on them, they're going to fire the same but more of my perception goes there. Similarly I'm
Things all the time, you are too, and I'm perceiving things all the time and I'm remembering things all the time. And I'm anticipating things all the time about the future. But by focusing, my attention on the one organ for which I have no Sensation. That is my brain. Well, then thoughts feelings and memories feelings. Meaning emotional feelings, start to grow in their prominence, in my awareness and in my perception. And so, this is why
Why when you sit down to a meditative practice, if it's a meditative practice, where you close your eyes, or you're focused on that third eye center, where you're focused on your brain, as opposed to your bodily surface or something external to you, the thought seemed to come by in waves, and they can almost be overwhelming. It's very hard to, as it's often described just sit back and watch your thoughts go by because there are so many of them actually. The best way to stop thinking is to really focus on something external or to focus on sensation,
That's less thinking than it is perceiving senses. Okay, so I don't want this to get too abstract. When people talk about the third eye center, they're not talking about the pineal, they're talking about prefrontal cortex. And when you direct your own attention to the very area of your brain that directs attention, there's nothing to sense. They're the only things that will become present to you or feelings emotions that is thoughts and memories and they will often arrive in a what seems to be a very
Disorganized fashion, and the reason they arrived in somewhat disorganized fashion is because normally we just don't perceive things that way. Normally, we are splitting our Attention. Our perception that is to multiple things are sensation and our thoughts. When we put all of our perception into our thoughts, we see how disorganized, how wondering they are and how in fact, how random and intrusive. Those can be again random and intrusive and much of what we talked about in that paper
Earlier the one where they asked people, what are you doing and what are you feeling and how happy, or how unhappy you are? You are what they discovered was that most people are sort of in their head a lot. They're not really present to what they're doing which leads me to the statement that I believe at least based on the data that paper included that most people have an intercept of bias. They're focused more on what's going on internally than they are focused on what's Happening externally. There are certainly people who for the opposite is true.
But I think that this is an issue because we hear so often about the need to do a meditation practice that allows us to focus Inward and that we're getting yanked around by all the stressors of Life etc. Etc. And we are we're getting yanked around by all the stressors and demands of life, but as we do that, we tend to be very focused on what's happening with us, the data clearly point to the fact that being Mindful and being aware can enhance one's level of presence and happiness, but
we can go so far as to say that being Mindful and aware of what's Happening. Not just with us but external to us in our immediate environment that includes what other people are saying. And doing that also can really enhance our sense of well-being and happiness. At least that's what the data point to. Let's briefly recap where we've been so far, we've talked a little bit about the brain networks that are activated during meditation which include prefrontal cortex ACC the insula. We also talked about the difference between interoception and extra reception and
Importance of assessing where you are along that Continuum and I should mention, of course that you can be right in the middle of that. Continuum, you might sit down to do meditation and find that you are smack, dab in the middle of being able to attend to things outside of you. But also attending two things inside of you, in which case, I suggest doing a meditation that is either extra receptive biased or interoceptive biased. But as I mentioned earlier, if you find that, you are more critical in your head or in your body, well, then focus on an
Yosef to biased meditation to build up that set of circuits. Whereas, if you are more extra receptively focused at any given moment, well then I encourage you to do an intercept of Lee focused meditation practice. And as I mentioned earlier, there's this issue of how long to do a practice. There are a lot of different data on these but some of the practices we've covered on this podcast before when we had guests for instance highlighted the 13 minute meditation that dr. Wendy Suzuki from New York University's laboratory. Has popularized
And they popularized it because they have a wonderful paper that we will provide a link to which shows that a daily 13 minute meditation. Which is of the traditional third eye, interoceptive Lee biased focus on breathing and focus on that location. Directly behind one's forehead or both that meditation done daily for about eight weeks, may be shorter. But in that study eight weeks greatly improved. Mood. Improved ability to sleep. Improved, cognitive ability and focus memory. A huge number of metrics where looked at very specifically.
Oh, so that's a terrific one. And you may be asking yourself, do you need to do the full 13 minutes? Could you get away with five minutes or three minutes will? My laboratory has shown benefits and stress reduction Improvement in sleep etcetera with a 5 minute a day meditation. However, in trying to establish how long you should meditate, I would ask yourself a couple of questions. First of all, what is a practice that you can do consistently? And by consistently? That doesn't necessarily mean every day. If you answer the question about consistency, honestly and you find that you can only
Do one meditation session per week? Well, then I would encourage you to go a little bit longer maybe 10 or 15 minutes, maybe even 30 minutes. Again understanding that you're going to have to refocus repeatedly throughout that meditation regardless of whether or not you're focusing on internal perceptions or external perceptions. If however you can set aside five or 10 or 15 minutes per day and you can meditate every day. Well then I think you have a little bit more flexibility in terms of how long you meditate. Maybe it's three minutes one day. One minute the next day, 10 minutes in the next. And so,
So on and so forth. Just like with exercise, the key component is consistency and this is borne out in all the data that's covered in Altered traits. It's also for now in all the recent studies that have come out, since that book was published consistency is key. So ask yourself what you can do consistently and also don't necessarily burden yourself with always having to do the same amount or duration of meditation. So earlier, we decided we were going to parse or find slice to meditation practice. And indeed, we've been doing that. We've talked about
Interoceptive versus but extra receptive bias and we've been talking about where you place your perception or your focus. Another key component of meditation is the pattern of breathing that you Embrace. In fact, the pattern of breathing that you Embrace during your meditation practice can itself be its own form of meditation. What do I mean by that? Well, these days we hear a lot about breathwork. Breath work, has really grown in popularity, in the last 5-10 years and there are a number of reasons for that.
At first of all, I think we need to credit win. Ha for, can we call him? I think appropriately, the great win Hoff, you know, certainly there were people before with who are doing deliberate breath work and talking about deliberate breath work, but it was really about 2015 or so that Wim Hof started to grow in recognition and popularity for a particular style of breathing which in the laboratory we call cyclic hyperventilation. I know there are other names for it, that come from ancient Traditions, he named it or people named after him with
Off women. For those of you that don't know is a Dutchman who is known to hold many world records for deliberate cold exposure, including swimming under icebergs longest period of time, buried in ice up to his neck Etc, but who's also expert in the use of breathing in particular ways in order to manage and maneuver through those challenges and he started speaking about different patterns of breath work in particular, the use of cyclic hyperventilation deep deliberate breathe,
Being so big inhales exhales big hit inhales exhales in the laboratory. Again we call that cyclic hyperventilation. It's very clear from studies, both done on whims specifically but on the general population as well by my lab and other labs that that pattern of cyclic hyperventilation have deliberately breathing deeply and repetitively. Typically in through the nose out through the mouth, generates a lot of adrenaline or causes adrenaline released from the brain and body. It quote unquote, heats up the body and
It raises body temperature, but the liberation of adrenaline does a number of things to shift the state of the brain and body that more or less is what Wim Hof breathing is, although Wim Hof breathing, or some people call it to mow breathing or cyclic hyperventilation is not a pattern of breathing typical of most meditations that have been discussed. At least not in the research literature. Now that's not to say that cyclic hyperventilation can't be incorporated into a meditation practice but Wim Hof, breathing AKA cyclic hyperventilation to
MO is typically considered its own practice, okay? Its own breath work. Practice divorced from meditation. It might have a meditative component, but it's not often discussed as meditation. Or as part of meditation more typically a meditation practice, involves slowing ones breathing. And this could be in the form of cyclic, breathing of inhale. Exhale, inhale, exhale, which is cyclic or in some cases doubling up on inhales and then exhaling, so, inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale.
Inhale, exhale or controlling the duration of inhale breath hold, exhale, breath old, repeat so-called box breathing, where the inhale, the hold, the excel in the hold, our of equivalent durations. Any number of different breathing patterns, slow cyclic breathing box. Breathing, a Cadence of three to six seconds in holding for two seconds and 7 Seconds out. Regardless of what Cadence of breathing, one uses there is a tendency during most
Most meditative practices to slow ones breathing and or control ones, breathing, and deliberate fashion. This is essential because when we default our breathing, that is, when we don't pay attention to how long we are inhaling relative to our exhales when we don't deliberately exhale, that is normally. We just passively exhale, but we actively in hell. I repeat that normally, when we're not thinking about breathing, we deliberately inhale, there's a
Our Command that sent to inflate the lungs and then we passively exhale, but in many breathwork practices or meditation practices, we actually actively exhale as well. Well, when we do that, a number of things happen, first of all, it forces us into interoception. Why? Because the diaphragm the muscle that helps in move the lungs essentially and create a specific Cadence of breathing or depth of breathing as one would with box breathing or deliberately
Slow breathing. Well that muscle resides inside of us. And so when we focus on our breathing more often than not, we aren't focused on the actual are leaving. Our nasal passages or mouth, maybe a little bit but more typically we are forced to focus or we just default to focusing on the movement of our diaphragm or of our belly or the rising and falling of our chest.
All of that is to say that by deliberately focusing on our breathing, we shift to interoception. So breathing, and specific patterns of breathing, sort of along for the ride in meditation. But the reverse can also be said that when we focus on our breathing, we shift to interoception and away from external events doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to external events. We can still extra cept but at least some portion of our perception of
Attention shifts to interoception. So we, of course, need to breathe to stay alive. We have to breathe at least every so often in order to stay alive. So, of course, breathing is part of any meditative practice. Just like it's part of any living activity, even sleep. But if the first component of meditation is to direct our perception in a deliberate way using that prefrontal cortex to a specific location either on the surface of or within, our
Body or external to our body or both but typically one or the other then we can say that the second element of a meditative practice is the pattern of breathing and we can ask ourselves. Can it, and should it be deliberate or not? In other words, we just default to however, we happen to be breathing. Or should it be deliberate? That is, should we be controlling the depth and the Cadence? And I do believe that based on what we know about the capacity for specific,
Terms
of breathing to shift our brain state, that controlling one's pattern of breathing during meditation can be enormously useful. And that is true regardless of whether or not, one is focusing on interoceptive perceptions within our body or extra receptive perceptions. So, that raises the question. How should we breathe during meditation? Well, there's again. No, simple, one-size-fits-all rule there, but there are some general rules of respiration.
Geology that can help us access and develop a meditation practice that is going to best serve our goals. And since this is not an episode all about respiration and we will do one but I simply want to give you the basics of what respiration can do to shift your brain and body State before. I do that, however, I want to give a very specific instruction, which is when you sit down to meditate or if you're going to do your meditation, walking that's fine, too. I should just say when you are a
Out to begin your meditative practice. You need to ask yourself a question.
Do you want to be more relaxed than you are at present or do you want to be more alert than you are at present when you exit the meditation practice? Do you want to calm down, or do you want to become more alert? Simple question. You can decide from session to session you can even switch within a session, but just as you need to assess, whether or not, you are leaning more interceptive, lie or extra receptively, you also need to ask yourself, do you need to calm down or want to come?
Owner. You want to be more alert at the end of your meditation session or maybe you want to go into a state of deep relaxation and then exit with more alertness. The way to do that is very simple, using breathwork and specific patterns of breathing. And here is the general rule that is supported by all the respiration physiology that I'm aware of I'm oversimplifying here but I'm oversimplifying intentionally, so you can simply apply the tool. And then as I mentioned before, we will do an episode all about respiration physiology.
In the future.
Essentially, if your inhales are longer and, or more vigorous than your exhales, then you will tend to be more alert where you shift your brain and body towards a state of more alertness. This is simply based on the way that the neural circuits like the pre boxing or nucleus and the pair of facial nucleus that govern respiration physiology and alertness simply the way they work. They communicate with brain areas. That release noradrenaline norepinephrine Etc.
In contrast, if you emphasize longer duration, end or more, vigorous exhales relative to your inhales, you will tend to relax more, you will tend to calm your nervous system. Now, you might be saying, okay, I understand what it is to make an inhale longer than my exhale, but how do I make it more vigorous? What simply means drawing more air into your lungs more quickly than you, allow yourself, to Exhale. That are so, an example of
Of inhale biased breathwork would be. So there's an active emphasis on the inhale and it's a little bit longer than the Excel which is passive. Conversely. If you want to relax, then you want to extend your exhales relative to your inhales and you can even make them active exhales. So it can be inhale, exhale.
That's going to shift your nervous system in a direction of more. Calm. And of course, if you would like to stay at the level of alertness AKA calmness because those are two sides of the same seesaw or the same Continuum. If you'd like to be right where you're at at the end of your meditation as where you started at least in terms of levels of alertness and calmness. Well then you would just keep your inhales and your exhales relatively balanced in terms of duration. Now the introduction of
Like breath holds with box breathing or Wim Hof breathing. Typically it's 25 or 30 deep, inhale, exhale deep inhale exhales and then exhale, all your air. Hold your breath for 15 to 60 seconds and then repeat. And so on Sometimes, some inhales and holds. Well, that's a whole business into itself. But for sake of meditation, the key thing to understand is that, if you are going to do a complicated breathing practice, it will by design by necessity shift much of
Or attention to the breathing practice especially if it's not sick. Like if it's not inhales follow exhales cyclic. Breathing is where inhales always. Follow exhales. Follow inhales follow exhales actually. Relies on a specific brain Center called the pre brought singer complex, discover by Jack Feldman at UCLA. He was a guest on this podcast previously.
However, if you are doubling up on your inhale, so to inhales and then in Excel the pattern of breathing my laboratory has studied extensively. Well, then that relies on a different brain Center, the pair of facial nucleus. The point is that if you are engaging in non-cyclic breathing, or you are deliberately emphasizing inhales or exhales, or the Vigor of inhales and exhales Etc. Well then some portion of your attention will be devoted to making sure that you follow that.
Breathing practice, we are very good at going into cyclic breathing, practices by default and our attention can drift to other things, interoceptive or extra receptive doesn't matter. We can just drift into, you know, how our body feels or something, we see or hear in the room. Etc. When we are focused on our breathing and the breathing pattern is non-cyclic or complex, in some way in that it involves deliberate voluntary commands again from those so-called top-down mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex.
Tex well, that by Design requires some portion off in a significant portion of our attention to be devoted to the breathing practice itself. So, what does this mean? This means that breathwork itself can be a form of meditation and meditation can involve breath work, but one should know that the more deliberate and unnatural that pattern of breathing is the less you will be able to focus on other things.
Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, you can actually leverage this. So, for instance, if you're somebody who's very much caught in your own head, right? We talked about this earlier, you happen to be at, or you're in a moment, where you're really stuck in your head, you want to get out of your head. Well then, that meditation practice that you do really should be focused on extra receptive. Bias, you should really focus on something external to you and I would encourage you to use a natural cyclic pattern of breathing where inhales follow it exhales. Follow inhales follow exhales, if however you are finding that, you're sort of caught in the landscape of things.
Happening around you and you want to ground yourself as it's sometimes called. That's a loose language. Not a scientific language. I know there's this practice of grounding and that's a whole thing. People always writing to me, is grounding a real thing. Walking barefoot on the earth and magnetic fields. And, you know, and gravitational fields will gravity is real but, you know, grounding there's a lot of science for it to be. Frank does feel nice to walk on the ground however but if you are somebody who's in a feeling pulled out of yourself a lot or in a moment and you want to bring your
Awareness into your body and sort of calm down. Well, then I would encourage you to. Yes, use a deliberate somewhat unnatural, or non default pattern of breathing, which by definition, will force you to attend to, what's going on interoceptive Lee. And I'm not aware of any place that this has been discussed in detail. Such as this before, if there is a research literature on this, please let me know my laboratory has been working on this extensively. I'm always looking for new colleagues and collaborators.
Laters, we meaning dr. David Spiegel, who's an expert in hypnosis again, who's been a guest on the Hebron Lab podcast and my colleague at Stanford. Psychiatry back. He's our associate chair of Psychiatry World expert in hypnosis. He's been on this podcast before. We have an active research program focused on these issues. We are very much of the belief that a breath work. Practice itself can be meditative a meditation practice can include breathing, but the more that, that meditative practice focuses on the breathing itself, the more
Receptive biased, it will be. Now it's very important to understand that an intercept of biased. Breathwork practice will have a specific effect which is to make you more interceptive, Lee aware. And if you think back to the earlier in the episode for many people, that will be a wonderful thing and something that they are actively seeking or ought to seek because it can help people gain awareness for instance. If you know, if they're stressed and they're not realizing it till the end of the day, they're just exhausted more interest.
Depth of awareness throughout the day can be very beneficial if however, you are somebody who is overly focused on your bodily Sensations? Well then more extra receptive, awareness is important and this brings us to a yet larger theme, but a theme that I think really emphasizes what particular types of meditative practices are going to be best for certain people, especially people who are using meditation to combat certain challenges in particular, mood, based challenges or sleep, based challenges or Focus based challenges,
I haven't listed off all the positive benefits of meditation yet in this episode, but they are many. Many, many in fact, there are now tens of thousands of scientific studies showing. For instance, there are known benefits of doing meditation for enhancing sleep. There are known benefits of a regular meditation practice for enhancing Focus. There are known benefits of a regular meditation practice for reducing inflammatory. Cytokines even improving outcomes in cancer, reducing pain.
Improving mood reducing the symptoms of ADHD and clinically diagnosed HG and on and on and on. And again, rather than focus on all those beautiful studies today, which all basically point to the fact that some meditation practice done regularly, even if it's very brief has tremendous, even outsize benefits on our health, even relative to some drug treatments that's been shown rather than focus on all that. I've been more focused on what sorts of brain and body changes occur when we do a meditation practice and
More importantly, what really constitutes a meditation, practice. We have this thing about a Continuum of perception. We also now are talking about breathing. Well, there's another component that I'd like to raise now which we could say is the third major component of the first one that I raised was interoceptive versus extra receptive bias or Continuum second being breathing. Is it going to be default or deliberate breathing? Is, it can be natural Cadence or unnatural Cadence again? No, right or wrong. It just depends on what
Our goal is there's a third component and this is a component again that hasn't really been formalized in the literature but that dr. Spiegel and I are working hard to formalize through some research and through an upcoming review that we will provide links to once it's out and that's a separate Continuum, which is the Continuum between interoception and dissociation. So now all of you know what interoception is, but most people probably don't know or don't realize what dissociation is.
And we hear about dissociation, sometimes called disassociation some people pronounce it dissociation, guess what? Despite being corrected, many times for each of those pronunciations I checked with my colleagues who are experts in dissociation or disc Association and guess what? They're the same thing. Tomato tomahto potato potahto so I'm going to say dissociation. Some people will say dis Association like I disassociate other people say I dissociate. Okay, both of those.
Is refer to essentially the same thing. Dissociation is often talked about in the context of a negative event. And indeed, dissociation is unfortunately, or I should say, is adaptively associated with traumatic events in particular violent or sexual. Trauma, people report feeling out of body or out of the experience, during the experience. Ordering a recollection of the experience.
Dissociation has also been described in terms of people who are in a traumatic accident or they see someone killed right in front of them. First Responders will talk about dissociating when they arrive on a scene. I don't want to provide, you know, gruesome imagery here because I know people can be pretty sensitive to this. But, you know, showing up on the scene of a car crash and just seeing the Carnage or incredible damage to two bodies, or, you know, this sort of thing dissociation lies at the opposite end of a Continuum with interoception now
Earlier I said the interoception is on the opposite end of a Continuum with extra reception, but it also is on the opposite end of a Continuum with dissociation, we can provide some better definitions perhaps to make this crystal clear. And here I'm actually reading from an upcoming review. I feel comfortable reading from it because I'm an author on the review but nonetheless interoception refers to a process by which your nervous system, meaning your brain and connections with your body, senses interprets integrates and regulate signals originating from within the body. And
Thereby provides moment-to-moment mapping of your internal landscape at both a conscious and unconscious level. Okay, that's a lot of words to describe, basically, the process of perceiving what's happening at the level of the surface of your skin or inward.
Dissociation can be thought of as the opposite of interoception. It's a lack of bodily, awareness or a removal of one's conscious experience from one's bodily experience and awareness. Again, this is most often talked about in the context of something traumatic. But really, if we think about health and mental health and physical health, the optimal place to reside on the Continuum between interoception and dissociation is somewhere in the middle, we don't want to be dissociated.
I'm
life's experiences. But we also don't want everything that happens in the world to profoundly impact, our heart rate in our breathing, we'd be yanked around by every experience. There are instances in which being yanked around or pulled into an experience is something that we desire and want, like seeing a movie that we want to see, or for instance, clinical hypnosis or falling in love, wonderful experiences. And sometimes also sad experiences, right being able to feel one's feelings too.
Pending on life's events is important, but being too dissociated or being too feeling. That is feeling so much in response to everything that happens is also problematic. There are certain people for instance, that have challenges with what's called narrative distancing. That is, they see someone in a movie getting hit and they almost Flinch as if they are getting hit. They see someone who's scared or happy in a movie and they feel scared or happy in a way that seems like there.
Along for the ride a little bit too much. This is important because what it speaks to is the ability for that, remember way back to begin the episode that ACC that enters cingulate cortex and the insula, we've got a prefrontal cortex that can say, hey, let's be rational that movie that person who's happy or sad that person in your environment. Who's breaking down crying. Yes, they're sad. It's important to be sympathetic. Maybe even empathic towards them, but let's not get pulled into the experience so much.
Each that we lose ourselves. And then of course there are areas of your brain that are also leaning on and here I'm using metaphor but they're leaning on the insulin ACC and saying hey there's somebody that I care about that subset. I'm also going to be upset or somebody I care about is happy. I'm also going to be happy or they're scared. So I'm also going to be scared. So it's a push-pull between our recognition that we are each distinct entities and also of course the very healthy desire to be attached to others.
As and the experiences around us. So, why am I raising yet? Another Continuum, right, we already have the one Continuum of interoceptive extra acceptive, awareness. Well, if we want to think about how meditation can serve our mental health and our ability to focus, there's a very particular mental model that we can arrive at that incorporates, this interoceptive dissociative. Continuum again, if you are extremely interceptive, your
Seeing everything in your body and those feelings in your body nearly completely account for all of your experience, if you're that far into the Continuum and the dissociative end of things, you can see what's going on. You can react to what's going on but your bodily response to that is essentially shut down. You could either be paralyzed shut down. So in kind of no movement, or you could still be engaging in behaviors, but you're dissociated again. Sadly, this is often what victims of trauma.
That they are able to just go through the motions, but just shut off their emotions or their emotions, just shut off. They aren't feeling the elevated, heart rate or breathing, sometimes, they can even be quite scared, but they're not even perspiring or showing any signs of autonomic arousal that is Fright or stress or Panic. So let's talk about this model of interoception and dissociation and then a meditative practice that can be used to try and anchor us at the right location where the healthy location along that continuum.
Let's first, imagine the ideal mental, health State and here, I want to acknowledge nobody achieves or at least maintains this mental health State. Once you do, imagine that where you are along this interoceptive to dissociative, Continuum is like a ball bearing or you represent a sphere that can roll back and forth along the Continuum. At one end, you have pure interoception, you're just feeling everything at the other end, you're completely dissociated. Well, in this one version of the
Mental
health. We take that Continuum and we fold up the sides so that it looks like a V. Okay. On one end, you have interception on the other end, you have dissociation, I realize. The number of people are listening to this. Not watching this on YouTube so they can't see that. My hands are now the heel. My hands are together. My fingers are my hands are a part. So it looks like a V and you are like a ball bearing. Your state is like a ball. Bearing at the base of that you are in a trench of perfectly balanced, interoception and dissociation.
And so, you can feel things you can register, what's going on in the outside world. But your feelings are not overwhelmed or overtaken by what's happening in the outside world. You are in a perfect place of being able to make rational decisions and yet still feel your feelings. Wouldn't that be lovely when that be lovely if we could be like that whenever we want it to and frankly, nobody is like that all the time.
More typically the model of mental health and mood and well-being, and perception of self versus others and internal versus external States is one of more of a, you, a u shape. We're at one end, we have interoception. And at the other end, we have dissociation and it's kind of u-shaped and your state is more or less like a ball bearing at the base of that you that can, you know, it gets pushed from side to side, maybe your you know your heart race is a little bit because of
Bad or good and that ball bearing shifts towards interoception little bit more. And you notice that your heart is racing or perhaps at any given moment, you know, your mind drifts a little bit while watching a movie or while talking to your partner or while your child is complaining about something and you're thinking about something else and that ball bearing shifts towards the dissociative state of a little bit. That is a mild form of dissociation. And I think most people would agree that being mentally healthy would involve this kind of u-shaped model as well. Where
It's kind of can shift back and forth but it's not extreme. You're not going from interoceptive biased. All the way to the associated. In any kind of extreme way. The ball bearing stays down near the base of that.
You
then, of course, there are states that we all frankly go into from time to time where the Continuum of interoception and dissociation is essentially flat where you are a ball bearing at one location or another depending on whether or not you're watching a movie that you're very engrossed in or you're in a conversation with or
An
activity with your partner or friend, Etc, has you very engrossed. Maybe matching their state right there, a number of states, you can imagine, we're matching one, state is actually healthy and good. And then there are a number of conditions in life and situations in life where being matched to someone else's condition. Like you're getting yelled at and they're angry. So then you're getting angry and then pretty soon, you know, you're not in the best place along that Continuum. And I think that for many people they find themselves somewhere along that Continuum and a number of practices including meditation.
Including exercise, including getting a good night sleep, including therapy, including journaling, including just doing activities, like social engagement that you enjoy are designed to sort of bring up the edges of that flat Continuum into more of a, you or concave shape. So that that ball bearing, meaning your state of awareness, and your state of feeling your own feelings versus paying attention. To what is going on around. You is somewhere again, biased toward the middle by curling up the edges of that.
On either end, it biases that state toward the middle. And then, of course there's the extreme that I think almost everybody would agree is more less pathologic, which is one in, which that Continuum is no longer shaped like a deep trench like a V, it's not shaped like a you it's not flat with the edges curled up a little bit or even flat. It's actually now convex, it looks like a mountain shape a peak and that little ball bearing at the top can either drop all the way.
To one side of pure interoception, just feeling Beyond any ability to pay attention to anything else just feeling ones, feelings, being angry, being sad, being or even happy right? Being so extremely happy or manic that you can't pay attention to the fact that it's totally out of context, right, inappropriate for what's going on around you or dropping to the other side of the Continuum where you're so dissociated that you're not engaged with what's going around you, you're truly quote-unquote checked out.
That shape is one that I think almost all clinicians. If not all clinicians. And most people would say is pathologic because you are either completely checked out or you are completely absorbed in what's going on within you or around you, that mental model that I just created is a simple mental model. It Is by no means exhaustive, but it does incorporate a lot of what we think about when we think about mental health. And we talked about the
ability to be mentally stable to feel one's feelings. But to still be actively engaged with what's happening around us. And again, it's a Continuum that spans from interoceptive awareness to dissociation, where the extremes are pathologic.
And somewhere in the middle is healthier and then there are practices that by us us toward being in the middle by default. What are those practices? Well we know for sure that being sleep-deprived for instance, tends to take us away from that trench shape or u-shape, Continuum or even flat Continuum and starts to make that Continuum more convex, it tastes tends to make us either feel like we're completely checked out and exhausted or that we are completely.
Labile, we are yanked around by whatever experience is happening. We were just not able to manage so sleep is as I always say the fundamental or foundational layer of mental health, physical health, and performance, because it tends to put us in a healthier place. That is when we're getting enough quality sleep. Consistently, it tends to put us in the middle of that. Continuum sleep. Deprivation does exactly the opposite. It pulls us apart. When I say pulls us apart, that's not a real term. What it does is it tends to make that Continuum less concave?
Right, Let's bowl shaped, and more convex more Hill shaped if not a Peak Mountain shape, where drops us to one side or the other.
In addition a meditative practice done regularly because it can allow us to become more interceptive Lee aware, or it can allow us to become more extra receptively aware, which is really, just another form of dissociation. Again, dissociation isn't always bad provide. It's not at the extreme. A meditative practice can actually teach us to deliberately move along this continuum
So this is something again that hasn't been discussed a whole lot in the literature. It's been discussed, I should say in pieces in different literature's. If you look in the clinical Psychiatry literature, there's a wonderful collection of studies and reviews that will say that interoceptive awareness is terrific except for the person that is so aware of their internal functioning that they are not able to engage in the world. Similarly, you will find a beautiful literature research and clinical literature that will say that dissociation is terrible in the case.
Of trauma. In fact, it can put people in positions of repeating a behavior over and over, that's damaging to them. But because they can disengage or their dissociated from it that they continue the behavior or dissociation can be very adaptive and beneficial if it allows people to for instance, to create some narrative distancing. So they're not getting pulled into every argument or if someone screams at them. They don't necessarily think that it's their fault. They are able to say, hey wait, use their prefrontal cortex has anyway like just because
You're upset does not mean that I did something wrong. Let's look at the evidence rationally. Okay. So in thinking about the positive effects of meditation on mood, there are two aspects that are important. The first one we talked about earlier, which is being present to one's experience, correlates with increased
happiness,
having your mind wander, having your default mode Network. Be one of mine. Wandering actually is correlated with being more
Happy now is the earlier study that we talked about that studying published in science. Now, of course, meditation can make us more present. But if we do not pay attention to whether or not we are becoming more present to interoception or extra reception that is to interception or dissociation. And we don't pay attention to whether or not our bias is one of dissociation versus intersection. We don't know where we are in the Continuum, well, then the meditation actually can make things
Or Worse, not
better.
In other words if you're somebody who has a tremendous amount of intercept of awareness, well then meditating on your internal state may not be good and actually there's some evidence that it may actually be bad. I'll give you one little tiny example. I talked about this previously, the podcast, but in that very study from when he says sookie's lab showing that 13-minute a meditation is beneficial for Focus mood Etc. It's also very clear that for a number of people that do that typical third eye,
For 30 minutes a day. If they do that too close to sleep, or when they want to go to sleep, they have a hard time falling asleep, which makes perfect sense, because they are becoming more interceptive, Leah, where they are, ramping up their level of focus, a meditation practice. Typically is a focus and refocus, practice and falling asleep. Involves turning off your thoughts and your focus and focusing purely on sensation and then your thoughts kind of fragment and you drift off to sleep. This is why I'm a big fan of using non sleep, deep rest or Yoga Nidra. We will provide links.
X2 non-slip, deep breath in Yoga Nidra. Protocols, I've talked about them on the podcast before, but those Protocols are not meditation per se. They tend to to have people defocus, they are anti Focus practices whereas meditation tends to be a focusing practice along those lines. A meditation practice that is one that is extra receptively biased. Where you focus on things that are outside, your body can be wonderful for somebody who tends to focus too much on
Their inner landscape and their inner narrative, Etc, can help. Get them out of their head and body, which can be very beneficial. But for people, that are not in touch with their emotions, aren't in touch with how they feel. It actually can drive them down the exact path, that's wrong for them. So today's discussion is about meditation and we want to make sure that we are parsing meditation in a rational way that matches the neural circuitry involved and more importantly, for sake of practical purposes, that you are asking yourselves the right question. Are you
Interoceptive lie or extra receptively biased, do you tend to dissociate or do you tend to sort of feel everything in a big way, right? I've heard this term of, you know, hypersensitive people or things that sort and, you know, some of those are clinical terms, some of them are not but you need to assess this, and you also need to assess where you happen to be at on a given day, which will be dictated, of course by how? Well you slept life experience, Etc. So this interoceptive to dissociative, Continuum is one that you need to address prior to any meditative
And again, the solution or the answer of what to do in response to your answer of whether or not you are more inward focused or outward focused again is very simple. Just do the opposite of where your bias lies that is if you're tilted towards interoception, do an extra receptive. Focus practice. If you are more dissociative and your that sounds sort of pejorative, it sounds bad, right? But again to see if you are somebody who is more focused on events outside your body and you want to gain more
Or interoceptive awareness and feeling state if you will, well, then you want to do a practice that's Third Eye Center practice, or breathing focused. One of the reasons that many people meditate is that they've heard before, or they've experienced that meditation can replace sleep, or can reduce one's overall, sleep need. That's an interesting set of questions and it's one that I dove into the literature to pursue an answer to and I came up with an answer that was frankly a little bit
Located on the face of it, but boils down to some very simple protocols that I think any. And all of us can leverage in order to sleep better and maybe even reduce the total amount of sleep that we need something that I think most people would want. I, you know, I realized that we all probably should enjoy sleeping. I certainly do. But that it's hard to get enough sleep and wouldn't it be wonderful for instance, to be able to get by on a little less sleep, and still feel alert and rested.
First of all, I want to point to the recent study and again this is one that I've raised a few times and we will post a link to it. Entitled brief daily meditation, enhances attention memory mood and emotion regulation in non experienced meditators. This is the work again from when he says Sookie who was a guest on the huberman LA podcast, who is now the dean of arts and sciences at New York University and has run a laboratory focused on memory for a long time, as a terrific neuro scientist and researcher and teacher at
Era and was a terrific guest on the podcast, I keep returning to this paper because they used so many measures. They were very thorough and the results were really interesting. Again, this is the 13-minute a guided meditation session. I should just mention that the control group in this study. Listen to a podcast for 13 minutes, that did not improve attention memory, mood emotion regulation, Etc. As much as meditation did, which is not to say that podcasts aren't useful. I won't mention, which
Cast, they use. Fortunately, it was not the huberman Lab podcast, which I like to think at least increases understanding of certain key concepts of Science and science based tools. You're welcome to look at the paper and see which podcast they used. It's a quite a well-known podcast, which is an interesting podcast, but it didn't change the brain in any fundamental way in this 30 minute session, whereas 13 minutes of daily, meditation did. And again, something I mentioned earlier, but very important to re-emphasize. Now, is that they mention that if people
In the experiment meditated, too close to bedtime. They had trouble sleeping again, which makes sense, because meditation, at least in its most common form in the form. Used in this paper is a focusing and refocusing exercise. Falling asleep, involves focusing less, there are other studies, however, that have shown or that asserted, rather, that doing to 20-minute sessions per day of meditation, can reduce the need for Sleep. Those results are debated.
First of all understanding what sleep need is is very individual and determining what people can manage on meaning. Some people can manage to get by with six hours of sleep but would do better with ate some people would actually manage probably better in terms of focusing and alertness that they slept a little bit less because they might be waking up Midway through a sleep cycle. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out any one of three different episodes that we've done. One is Master your sleep. You can find that at humor
Dot-com, everything is time-stamped in that episode. The other is perfect your sleep. And then, of course, we've done episodes on sleep with expert, guest, like dr. Matthew Walker from UC Berkeley. All of those can be found at human lab.com and all formats. They're all time. Stamped with that said, this assertion that has been made many times over in certainly, in the popular press that regular meditation can reduce one's overall. Sleep, need is controversial. For the following reason, some groups, find that indeed that is the case and the interpretation is that
That the stress reduction that's brought about by regular meditative practice. And in this case, very regular tends to be one or more typically to 20 minute per day, meditation sessions, that's quite a lot. I think, for most people maybe think about 40 minutes is in that much time over all, but very few people will stick to that twice a day. 20 minute meditation practice very consistently.
Well, the idea is that the stress reduction, which is clear and not debated brought about by that type of meditation. Practice is good at offsetting. Some of the cortisol increases associated with reduced, sleep and leading people to be able to function cognitively and physically better on reduce sleep than they would have a not been doing the meditation practice. So the simple way of putting this is that if people meditate regularly,
Early. That's reducing stress. The reduction in stress is reducing cortisol. Again, cortisol is healthy, but it should be restricted to early part of the day. You don't want too many peaks in cortisol, especially not late in the day.
By meditating, you get the healthy pattern of cortisol release you sort of inoculate yourself somewhat against the unhealthy pattern of cortisol release and as a consequence, either the sleep that people get is deeper and or the total amount of sleep that they need is reduced. Now, a lot of people took that result and interpreted as saying, well, if you can't sleep, then you can just meditate. So, one night, you don't sleep, or you have trouble sleeping, you just meditate the next day, and you'll be fine.
Well, certainly that is not supported by the literature. However, there is a practice and again, it's one that I've talked about on this podcast, many times before, but if you haven't heard me, talk about it. There's a practice called Yoga Nidra which literally means yoga sleep. It is a practice of doing, not so much, a focus meditation, but more of a body scan focusing on the sensation of the body and actually trying to turn off that prefrontal cortex or reduce its activity Yoga Nidra, scripts can be found on YouTube and elsewhere. They are paralleled by a similar practice that I've talked a lot about called, NSD are
Anon sleep deep rest. I put one out into the world, a short one, that's 10 minutes long. You can just simply go to YouTube and put in NSD are in my last name huberman, there's one there. Again, all of this is completely zero cost, Yoga Nidra and NSD are have been shown in a fair. Number of studies not as many as been done on traditional meditation or I should say third I centered meditation or mindfulness meditation but have been shown to replenish levels of certain neuromodulators like dopamine and reduce cortisol reduces stress.
Moan at least as much and by my reading of the literature significantly more than with traditional meditation. And there's a nice paper that we will provide a link to which is entitled Yoga Nidra. Practice shows Improvement in sleep, in patients, with chronic insomnia, a randomized control trial,
basically, the study looks at as the title suggests people with chronic insomnia, although the results certainly carry over or would carry over for people who don't have insomnia, the key result I believe in this paper,
Although there are many, is that quote salivary cortisol reduced to statistically significantly after Yoga Nidra. What do I mean by that? There was a statistically significant reduction in cortisol levels of the stress hormone, immediately after the Yoga Nidra practice that we believe would be paralleled by very similar. If not equivalent practice of ns, drmnsd are is a lot like, Yoga Nidra, but removes. A lot of the kind of, let's just call this or mystical language in the intentions. It focuses more.
On the physiology and the body scans there. You know, I want to acknowledge that Yoga Nidra has been around for thousands of years and was certainly there before NST R. I also want to acknowledge that and this was brought up also in Altered traits that sometimes language can be a barrier toward people. Embracing practices fact. This was recognized by Jon kabat-zinn when he created what he called mindfulness based stress reduction practices or mbsr which were simply mindfulness meditation.
Meditation to reduce stress, but he called it mbsr mindfulness-based stress reduction as a way to bring it into the clinics that would otherwise, perhaps, be averse to something called mindfulness meditation. Again this gets more to the sociology and the cultural aspects than it does, to any specific utility of one practice versus another. Here's the takeaway point, if you want to get better at falling and staying asleep or falling back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night or if you are generally challenged with sleep issues, an
Haverhill practice for which there are terrific data. Meaning data that show that a stress hormone, cortisol can be significantly reduced as well as certain neurotransmitters can be replenished as well as and this is key uncovered in this paper that I've mentioned a few moments ago on Yoga Nidra that the total amount of sleep that you need can be reduced at least somewhat, well, then Yoga Nidra or an NST. R practice done frankly. Any time of day is going to be beneficial
Shal. Whereas if your goal, I believe, is to increase your ability to focus to improve your mood. And perhaps most importantly, to be able to maneuver yourself in a deliberate way along that interoceptive extra receptive or interoceptive dissociative, Continuum that we've talked about so much and to really shift your default mode network from one of being a mind wander to somebody who can focus and who frankly is happier. Well, then a more traditional Third Eye, Center typed,
Asian or a more traditional extra receptive. Focused meditation would be beneficial again which one of those you choose, either focusing inward or focusing on a point outside of you again should be dictated by whether or not you tend to be interceptive Lee biased or extra receptively biased. But if you want to get better at sleeping, you want to get better at falling asleep and you want to replace sleep that you've lost. I put that in quotes. So that my colleagues like Matthew Walker, don't come after me with a. What would you come after me with my
Matt probably with an alarm clock and I don't know, blankets and a pillow or something of that sort in all seriousness.
It's very clear that replacing sleep that we've lost is an area of research that still active on ongoing, but NSD are in Yoga. Nidra are very promising. If not downright useful for replacing sleep that you've lost. Certainly the small amount of data that exist. Now point to the fact that they are not the least of, which is a beautiful study published out of skin, and a via showing that a 30 minute, Yoga Nidra. A knsd, our practice can replenish levels of dopamine which puts people in a position to
Be more action oriented and focused etcetera, when they come out of the Yoga Nidra. So, certainly, very useful practice, it's a form of meditation. We could call it meditation, ish, but Yoga Nidra and NST are not typically what people think about when we talk about meditation. Of course, this is an episode about meditation. The reason I bring up Yoga Nidra and strs that many people meditate to enhance their sleep ability to reduce their total amount of sleep. Need it appears that meditation is probably not ideal for that in comparison to Yoga Nidra. And then SDR, but meditation is
Silent if not superb, for adjusting the default mode Network toward more happiness by being more Mindful and present and for placing oneself in that healthy model of interoceptive dissociates of Continuum. So we've covered a lot of information and I like to think that I've given you some key decisions to make in developing a meditative practice the most important. One, of course, being what will you do regularly? And maybe you're somebody who just answers that question by saying, look, I'm not going to meditate regularly. I just want to do the thing that's going to allow me.
To feel rested when I'm tired and is going to allow me to adjust my state of mind when I'm not, where I want to be, for whatever reason to anxious or too exhausted etcetera. And for those people, I would say a practice, like NSD. Our Yoga Nidra will be immensely beneficial as will a more traditional form of meditation. I also want to just remind everybody that an app that guides meditation. Also, with some information and some intention setting such as the waking up app from Sam. Harris can be
Immensely beneficial. I've certainly found it to be beneficial. I know millions of other people have as well, so I encourage you to check that out.
We talked about determining where you are on these continuum's of interoception and extra reception. In order to dictate what particular type of meditation. Practice you should do in a given moment whether or not, you should focus your vision in Word with eyes, closed or Focus, your vision and your attention outward, being a key component, whether or not you should do cyclic breathing which will allow your focus to be off your breathing. Somewhat easier than if you do non-cyclic breathing, if you're doubling up on it and else or exhales, whether or not you're breathing is going to be natural.
Show or not and of course you need to determine whether or not. Your meditation practice is designed to enhance your level of focus or to relax you. I would say that if it's designed to enhance your level of focus, that doesn't necessarily mean that it won't be relaxing. You could do slow, cadence breathing third eye meditation can be very relaxing and yet it's a focus and refocus practice, whereas something like Yoga Nidra. And then SDR is going to be more along the lines of replenishing yourself replacing sleep that you've lost or maybe even
Reducing your sleep need on previous podcast. I've talked about hypnosis and particular the episode with dr. David Spiegel, our associate chair of Psychiatry, I don't want to get into hypnosis now, but just understand that hypnosis is distinct from breathwork, from Yoga, Nidra from NST, R and from meditation, even though it includes some of those components, like focusing your attention and involves actually directing your visual attention outward than inward to go into the hypnosis and involves some breathing of a particular kind involves a specific imagery, Etc. But
Gnosis is distinct because hypnosis is really designed to fix or address a specific problem. Whereas meditation and SDR Yoga Nidra, Etc. Typically are not they can help fix problems such as anxiety. Sleep issues, ETC, but they generally are not directed toward a particular line of thinking, they can be, but typically they are not, whereas hypnosis almost always, especially in the clinical context, not stage hypnosis, but the clinical context for which there's a lot of research
To show it. Can, for instance, help with quitting, smoking it literally a quadrupling of the effectiveness for smoking cessation with something like the reverie app. Then, if people, just try and go cold turkey or for reducing insomnia, or for reducing pain, or for any number of things, including trauma Etc. Hypnosis is really great at dealing with specific issues and problems. And tackling those meditation tends to be focused on other things, no pun intended, I'm guessing. Some of you are probably wondering where to start.
Or
if you're already an avid meditator where to go with all this information for that reason, I just wanted to offer you. A particular form of meditation that incorporates all of the features that I've talked about up until now in a single meditation practice, and it's a meditation practice that for lack of a better name. I called stb, or space-time bridging. And the time component has to do with a very simple fact, which is when we focus our attention.
Ooh, attention or otherwise on things. Close to her within our body. We tend to be fine slicing time. You can sort of think of your breath, as more or less, the second hands on your clock of existence. Whereas when we tend to focus on things far away from us, we tend to parse or carve up time within bigger bins. If you've ever seen a airplane flying at a distance, it looks like it's moving, very, very slowly. If you were right up next to that airplane, it's probably going five or six hundred miles an hour. It will go by very quickly. This is not
When students believe it or not, how you slice, the time domain of your life and your experience has everything to do with your vision and the closer things are, the more finely you slice up. Time, the more closely your attention is placed on yourself. The more closely use slice up time, if you focus your visual attention very far or you think about the other side of the world, for instance, in you envision, that will then yours actually slicing time more broadly. Hopefully, that makes sense. Find slicing would be like, slow motion.
Motion higher frame rate, looking in the distance, you're actually taking bigger time bin. So even though things look like, they're moving more slowly, it's because your Fidelity or Precision of measuring time is actually not as good as, as, if you're only, have the hours hand on the clock. So it seems like it moves very slowly. Hopefully, that makes sense to you. So there's a meditation practice that I call space-time bridging that incorporates, everything that I've talked about today. It balances, interoception and extra reception, it balances interoception and dissociation and it crosses
Is the various time, domains that the brain can Encompass using vision, and it's a very simple meditation. It's one that I've been doing for years and it's one that we're starting to do some research on. But I'm just going to share with you because I think it's actually quite fun and can be quite informative. In fact, people have told me that it can even lead to some interesting insights both during the meditation and be and outside the meditation. It's very simple. What you do. Ideally, you would do this outside or at a window, but what you do is you essentially close your eyes,
I can do this now I can close my eyes and do the meditation but I'll describe it. You close your eyes and you focus your attention. Either on your third eye center, your breathing, and you try and put 100% of your perceptual Awareness on to your breathing or your third eye center for the duration of three breaths. Okay. So you're 100% or trying to be 100% in interoception. Then you open your eyes, you focus on the surface of your body someplace. I find that holding out my hand at serve arms distance and focusing on the palm of my hand.
And focusing their visually. So I'm splitting my attention now between my hand. And I'm also going to pay attention to my breath for the duration of three full inhales and exhales. While also focusing on my hand, so you're splitting interoception and XT reception as best, you can about 50/50, then you subsequently look at some location in your immediate environment, maybe 10 15 feet away and you focus your attention on that location. While also splitting your attention to
That you're still paying attention to your breathing. You do that for the duration of three breaths but now you are in extra reception and interoception, then you focus your attention at some distance further away, maybe the farthest distance you can see. Now, this is why it's useful to do out of a window or on a balcony where Outdoors you focus on the furthest point, maybe a horizon, some furthest point for the duration of three breaths. While also paying attention to your breathing and sort of Imagine a bridge between the two. If you if you find it to be challenging to focus on both.
And then and this is where it can be a little tricky. But then what you actually focus on is the fact and this is not an imaginary thing. This is a fact that you are a tiny Speck on this big ball that's floating out in space, right? The Earth that's floating out in space and you try and focus on your three rest. While also acknowledging that you are a small body literally, on this very seemingly large body the Earth, but that's floating in a much larger larger span Civ, place the universe and you do that.
For three breaths and then you close your eyes and you go right back into interception and you might want to and you do that for three breaths. You focus on your interception for three breaths and you might want to March through these different locations a few times or back and forth if you like but typically I will just do it for one segment at pure interoception. Palm of hand. Some distance in front of me Horizon whole globe, Universe thing back in the body Etc. Why is this useful? Why would this be useful?
Why is it at all interesting or is this just some crazy idea? Well, the reason it's useful, I believe is that it has you deliberately step your awareness, your perception through every position along that interoceptive extra receptive. Continuum now, I did say to remain connected to as they all say. In the yoga classes aware of, I guess, would be the more scientific way to State, it aware of one's breath. But if you wanted, you could actually try and put your
Awareness, completely outside yourself, but most people will find that challenging to do. If they're already paying attention to their breath, it's just hard to do. So I find it easier to split my awareness from interoception, text reception but by stepping through these different locations and then deliberately placing your perception your awareness back into pure. Interoception, what you do is you essentially are practicing or exercising this incredible ability that the human mind has to deliberately place your perception.
Look at specific locations. Along the interceptive XT receptive, Continuum and I think this is very useful because many of us, including myself tend to get locked at one location along that Continuum. For instance, if you are scrolling your phone for a long period of time, you may forget about your bodily Sensations but you generally forget about other things going on in the world. Or if you're very focused on things out in the world, you oftentimes can forget about your internal Sensations and what's going on internally and being functional in work and life in relationship and in
Aspects, including your ability to fall asleep, evolve stepping yourself along these different locations, which again are not just physical locations, of Third Eye Center, your breathing, or your hand or Horizon. Those are just stations within space. But remember each one of those just by way of how your visual system. And the time domain are interlocked with one another.
Sets your mind in a particular time domain and so much of what involves being a functional human. Being involves dynamically, adjusting our attention from what we are doing, on our computer to a question. Somebody asks, and then back again or from text messaging to listening to a lecture or a podcast or from listening to a lecture podcast and then going back into a mode of commuting, but making that commute either relaxing, or maybe do work on your computer, connect with family or friends Etc. So
Each of the fatigue of life. And the I should say that maladaptive behaviors and emotions that show up in life are really not about any set of behaviors or emotions being wrong or right. But rather inappropriately match to the space time domain that we're in which again is just fancy nerd, speak for saying being present and being mindful is a wonderful byproduct of a meditation practice, but it is. But one of those
Stations along that space-time Continuum the key element here is to step yourself through a practice deliberately, so that you are flexibly and dynamically able to engage in conversation, then disengage in Focus or focus. And then disengage from the work, you're focusing on and actually have a conversation or be in the world and move out of that interoceptive awareness to one in which you are dynamically engaged with the things around you. I realize this might sound a little bit vague for that reason. I encourage you not to
Think about it too much but rather to try the practice, see if it works for you. If it doesn't, that's fine. I think it is a good one. For people that find that a third eye center or breathing Focus. Interoceptive meditation might be enjoyable to them or very beneficial to them but they might want to try something new and other people who might find that that tends to put them too much in their own head. I think it also ought to be very useful for people that tend to be overly extra receptive more in the dissociative end of the Continuum and
need to bring in a bit more of interoceptive awareness, but either can't do that or uncomfortable doing that because they're simply not interested in or comfortable with feeling so much of their internal State because that can either be overwhelming or that's just simply not the way they want to feel. Now as we round up, I do want to acknowledge that there are an enormous number of rooms within the house or rather I should say within the castle that is meditation including for instance, intention, setting and mantras and an
It's number of different features of meditation practices that we simply did not have time to go into and or for which the research on is not completely ironed out yet for that reason in future episodes and not long from. Now, I'm going to be sitting down with experts in meditation that include neuroscientists and clinicians but other experts in meditation, that certainly are versed in those topics and where they can't point to specific research studies. Can certainly point us toward the utility of
Of things like mantras and intentions as they relate to getting the most out of a meditative practice. So I eagerly await those conversations and I hope you'll join me for those as well. If you're learning from enter enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us in addition, please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review if you have questions for us or comments or you'd like to suggest future guests for the human Lab podcast. Please put those in the comments.
Action on YouTube, we do read all the comments, please. Also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning of today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you're not already following me on Instagram Twitter or Facebook please do so it's huberman, lab on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and all three of those places. I cover science and science based tools. Some of which overlaps with the content of the huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast. Thanks again for joining me for today's discussion about the science and practice.
Actus of meditation and last but certainly not least, thank
you for your interest in science.
