Mind Over Matter with Dan Harris and Heather Berlin

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

And today we’re going to be talking about the science of meditation.

Let me first introduce my co-host, Marcia Belsky.

Not your first time with us.

Welcome back, Marcia.

Thank you so much.

So excited to be back and I feel like our topic will be a little easier for me to understand than cryptocurrency.

Oh, that’s true.

That was that last topic.

We wanted you to stay with every bit of the quantum computations of that.

Exactly.

So you’re a comedian and a musician.

That’s a potent combo.

So I love your work and I presume this is not the last time you’ll be on StarTalk.

So let’s introduce our guest for the day and that’s going to be Dan Harris.

Many of you might recognize that name and his face.

He’s been a correspondent for ABC News like forever and then he retired, retired and then took up meditation.

I think he’s been doing it for a while but then made it full time.

Dan, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you.

You’re making me feel old.

I was a correspondent forever.

It reminds me, I gave a speech once at Syracuse University and a lot of the kids were coming up to me and saying, I’ve been watching you my whole life and I was like, next, next.

Since I was a child.

Since the second world war.

So Dan, just a little bit about your career.

You weren’t just sitting at the desk.

I mean, you have Emmy awards for your reporting.

So what do you think of the Netflix documentary, Don’t Look Up?

What do you think of that?

For a minute, I didn’t hear documentary and I…

Because the media is deeply implicated in that.

Yes, I have no…

especially now that I’m not part of the media, I’ll start bashing and I won’t get sensitive.

Yeah, because you were at the Good Morning America desk for a while.

And that’s just the kind of programming they were sort of parodying there.

Yes, yes, they were.

All right.

I’m going to bring that here.

Whatever you ask me, I’m just going to deny and make a joke that gets me out of it.

So tell me, you’ve got this app.

And even before the app, tell me about this 10% happier concept that you’ve been engaged in.

Not only while you were a correspondent, but even in retirement.

Yes, I’ll try to give you the super quick version.

It all started because I had a panic attack on national television back in 2004.

You can Google that if you want to see it.

So it was live.

Wow.

Yeah, it was live.

A live panic attack.

Yeah, it was like a better version of Al Capone’s vault.

You know, when you when Geraldo Rivera did that live show on prime time television and didn’t find anything in Al Capone’s vault.

This was live and actually something happened.

I lost my mind and there was an audience of 5.019 million people on a warm June morning in 2004.

And the reason I had a panic attack, I found out later, is because I was doing some very dumb stuff in my personal life.

I had spent a lot of time in war zones.

That’s not the dumb stuff.

The war zones was part of my that was part of my reporting job.

But I came home from that from those experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places.

And I got depressed and I very unwisely self Medicaid with recreational drugs.

Even though I wasn’t high on Good Morning America, my doctor later explained that it wasn’t my drug use was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to freak out.

And so that experience kind of put me on this journey that ultimately landed me on meditation.

So Marcia, as a comedian, you experience exactly that same war zone thing.

I definitely am relating to it, though, because I think also, yeah, I started having really bad panic attacks and I don’t like, you know, Xanax and things like that.

I’ll only take it when I really have to.

So I have tried meditation.

So I’m super interested to like hear your journey for sure.

If a comedian has a panic attack, that’s the end of it.

It is.

It’s hard to because yeah, like I’ve only ever panicked on stage one time and it was kind of weird where I was just like silent for 20 seconds and then managed to kind of get them back.

But it’s it’s a freaky.

I can’t imagine doing it on live TV.

It’s such a freaky experience.

If you haven’t had a panic attack, I mean, it literally feels like you can’t breathe.

It feels like you’re having a heart attack and you can’t tell anything to your brain that’s like I’m not dying.

Your brain is just like this is it.

This is it.

So Dan, you’re implying that had you not had these coexisting factors, you might not have gone through that episode.

Is that correct?

Yes.

I mean, I did have stage fright, you know, which I made a joke in one of my books that my career up until that date represented a triumph of narcissism over fear because I would like to be on television, but I had stage fright and so I was always kind of walking the line, but then you add in significant amounts of cocaine and I crossed the line to freak out zone.

Yeah, coke doesn’t help with anxiety.

So you both have data on this.

So this is all very important theater information because when we go to our second and third segment, we’ll be bringing on friend of StarTalk Heather Berlin, who’s our sort of resident neuroscientist.

And so all these factors will matter when we share what you’re telling us with her.

So tell us now, who got you started on meditation?

Who figured that would work for you?

Well, it was multifactorial, but I think the most important variable was my wife.

She gave me a gift of a book by a guy named Dr.

Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist based in New York City where we lived until recently.

And he has written a beautiful series of books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism.

And I didn’t actually know much about Buddhism other than the fact that I had stolen a Buddha statue from a local gardening store when I was in high school because I thought it would help me with the ladies and put it in my bedroom.

Yeah, high school.

Oh, Chris, if you have a Buddha on your window sill, you’re hip.

Yeah, like we got the freaking British Museum over here.

In the 80s.

Anyway, the statute of limitation on that has passed, so I think I can talk about it.

Anyway, I didn’t know anything about Buddhism, but I read this book and I realized that there was so much in here that spoke to the way my mind works.

The Buddha called it the monkey mind, this constantly active leaping from one hit of pleasant experience, one promotion, one slice of cake, one latte to the next, and yet never fully satisfied.

It’s the monkey mind minus throwing the poop, I’m guessing.

Well, I mean, I don’t know about your mind.

Also, latte is bad for anxiety as well, cocaine and coffee, no wonder.

Correct.

I agree with you, Marcia.

I disagree with you, Neil, because I don’t know about your mind, but my mind is throwing a lot of poop at other people and at myself.

Well, it’s an omnidirectional poop dispenser.

Oh, man.

Okay, so it’s a figurative poop dispenser.

There you go.

All right.

So, all right, so, and that sets you on your course.

So, I’m guessing here that, this is a very educated guess, that the meditation is all about introspection, as is so much of Eastern philosophy.

So, the resonance there is kind of preordained, right?

I mean, it’s not, the word introspection is interesting because it’s not introspection in the way I think we in the West might think of it, because you’re not sitting there analyzing your thoughts the way you would in therapy.

By the way, I’m pro-therapy.

I go to therapists and et cetera, et cetera.

So, that’s not a degradation of therapy, but this is more of a mental exercise, which I know you’ll get at in your second and third segments with your neuroscientist friend.

Yeah, Heather Berlin.

Yeah, I mean, Heather can talk about this, but I’ll just preview it by saying that, and I can describe what meditation is if you want, but it is essentially like a series of exercises for your brain and by extension your mind, and you can see the changes on the brain scans, and that’s really compelling.

So, it’s not navel gazing in the way in which we in the West might consider it.

Got it.

So, it goes beyond woo-woo, right, as they say, where if you have measurable data on changes in your brain scans, it means you’re actually doing something, and it’s not just talk at that point.

Is that fair?

Yeah, I think it is fair.

I mean, it’s interesting.

The more I’ve gotten into it, the more open I am to…

At first, I was raised by academic physicians.

I’m married to an academic physician.

I was not smart enough to be a doctor, so I wear makeup and talk to television cameras for a living.

But the science is really what got me over the hump and allowed me to do this thing.

But the more I get into it, the more…

And this is probably an inhospitable place to say this, but the more open I am to things that I might have dismissed as woo-woo, which now I would just consider other ways of knowing things and that we’re always looking for scientific validation.

But maybe, you know, I don’t meditate now because I think it’s going to change my brain.

I meditate because I know it makes me less of an asshole to myself and others, and that’s really helpful.

OK, that anything that reduces the assoholicness in the world is a good thing no matter what the foundations are.

So let’s go back to square one.

What is meditation?

Just give me your best sort of definition for it so that we can start there.

I know you’ve done some meditation, Marcia.

Do you remember what flavor you did?

For me, it’s really hard for me to meditate, and what I noticed is the more I would try and structure it, the less likely I was to actually just sit there and be present.

Like, I would try and get tapes and things like that.

So the times I’ve found I best meditate are after I do yoga.

Whenever they have the, like, ten-down, lay-down period, those have been my most successful times.

I think because my body has exercised and I can sort of meditate at that moment.

And then just truly laying in bed in the mornings.

And for me, it’s putting my phone in a different room and forcing myself not to, like, go check it for an hour.

And then I can actually just sit there and think and not watch TV.

And that’s what I call meditating.

I don’t know if it actually is, but that’s sort of what’s helped me with my anxiety, especially over this last year, to try and stay present.

And I do little things like I’ll tap, tap my heart, tap my head, and physical things like that and point to the, like, I don’t know if you’ve done this when you have panic attacks, but you point up and you say, I see the ceiling, I see the door.

You just start naming things around you to keep yourself present.

So that’s the kind of meditation I’ve done.

He asked you what flavor, so that sounds like vanilla.

Yeah, I’m entry-level meditation.

I’d be Rocky Road, maybe.

Yeah, I want to get to mint chocolate chip level.

Yeah, there you go.

So what flavor, Dan, are you?

Well, yeah, maybe I can help disambiguate the flavors here.

So the word meditation is a little bit like the word sports.

I mean, it describes a whole range of activities.

Marcia hit on about 75 of them in her paragraph that she just uttered there.

And that’s all good.

For me, I think that I usually start with a very basic form of meditation called mindfulness, which is derived from Buddhism, but has been thoroughly secularized and has now been studied in the labs extensively.

And there are really three beginning steps for this.

One is sit comfortably.

You can lie down if you want, or you can put yourself in the lotus position.

I don’t like to do that because I’m 50 years old and not very limber.

But you just kind of sit comfortably, close your eyes.

That’s the first step.

The second step is to bring your full attention to the feeling of one thing, usually your breath coming in and going out.

If you don’t like focusing on your breath, some people find that sort of an anxiogenic and anxiety producing thing.

So you can just feel your full body sitting or lying down, just picking one thing to focus on.

And then the third step is, as soon as you try to do this, you just try to feel your breath or feel your body sitting in a chair, your mind’s going to go bonkers.

This is the monkey mind.

And you’ll see that you’re going to start planning a homicide or you’re wondering when’s lunch or whatever.

And the whole game is just to notice when you’ve become distracted and to start again and again and again.

You’re not trying to clear your mind.

That’s impossible unless you’re enlightened or you’ve died.

The whole game is just to notice when you’ve become distracted and start again and again and again.

And the benefit is mindfulness, this kind of self-awareness that allows you to see the chaos and cacophony of your own mind without being owned by it.

Wow, so that’s why the silence matters, because that could create an artificial distraction that is needless in your efforts to achieve your goals.

You know, some people meditate with music.

I’ve never understood exactly how that works.

How about those tones, you know, those bells that you hear sometimes that might resonate with some frequency within yourself?

So there’s sound baths, which again, that’s not something I really understand or have done much of.

The bells often in the flavor of meditation I come from are used to start or end a session of meditation.

Oh, gotcha, okay.

So like I said, there are all kinds of…

That’s very Pavlovian, by the way.

Yes, yes.

I like some of those sounds.

I like some of the ohms and the like.

The bells kind of clear out your head.

It feels like mouthwash in your brain, some of the frequencies.

Oh, I like that analogy.

But just to be clear for those who don’t otherwise know, these aren’t like dinner bells or sleigh bells.

They’re tonal bells, right?

I can only meditate to sleigh bells, actually.

No whale noises, none of that.

No, I need more cowbell.

I need more cowbell and Santa screaming, yeah.

So you have an app called the 10% Happier app.

Well, I mean, the app is named for what you do.

And I want to be 20% Happier.

Why are you holding me back to 10%?

What’s the thinking behind that?

Or did you borrow that from the business world where they say, I want you to give 110% today.

And that’s, of course, mathematically not real, but spiritually, emotionally, it might mean something.

So where are you coming from when you get this 10% thing going?

I got interested in meditation in 2008 or 2009 before it was cool.

It was like the first time in my life I’ve ever been ahead of a trend.

Well, there was the entire 1960s and 70s with Maharaj.

Yes.

So there was some meditation going on back then.

But you were only just born, see?

For you to say, you’re a 50-year-old American saying, I was ahead of the trend, I started meditation.

No, what you might, maybe, let me offer you a way out of what you just said.

Could it be that you started meditating early in the social media universe?

How about that?

I appreciate you offering me the way out.

I would say maybe I got interested in meditation before the second wave of coolness.

That will happen.

Because you’re absolutely right.

It was cool in the 60s and 70s.

George Harrison.

Exactly.

Paul McCartney, John Lennon, they were all doing it.

So you’re absolutely right.

It was cool in the 60s and 70s.

Then it went away and got kind of mocked as part of the 60s becoming a bit of a cultural caricature.

And then, so I got interested in 2008, 2009, and a lot of my friends thought it was weird and they were making fun of me.

And one day, a friend of mine at work was saying, well, what’s the matter with you?

Like, why are you doing this thing?

And I kind of out of nowhere said, yeah, because it makes me like 10% happier.

And I could see the look on her face change from scorn to mild interest.

Oh, that’s clever.

You got me there.

10%.

Yeah, I can.

Let me go with the 10%.

And that’s a starter package, right?

And since now I’m stuck with math questions and jokes for my whole life, I’ll just double down on that to say that it’s like any good investment, the 10% compounds annually.

The radical good news of meditation is that, and this is what the science is showing us, is that happiness is not a factory setting that is unalterable.

It’s a skill you can practice.

And this practice, the benefits compound over time, and that is incredibly compelling, hence 10%.

And I wrote a book called 10% Happier, which I thought was going to be mildly embarrassing and go away, and then it kind of led to a podcast where I interview meditation experts, and then this meditation app, which has…

Well, that’s a very natural arc of an active person who’s trying to get the job done, so congratulations on that.

When did the book come out?

Almost eight years ago, 2014.

Okay, the 10% Happier book.

And okay, we can look for that and maybe link to it.

So you have…

I noticed…

I picked up a couple of the episodes, if I call them that.

You have a cadre of meditation experts that help the listener to the podcast get into different meditative states, right?

And as I understand correctly, these different meditation experts are slightly differently tuned relative to what your needs might be if you then tune in, if you listen, is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, I think there are different use cases for meditation.

We have a lot of meditations that help you fall asleep.

Some for first thing in the morning.

There are meditations that help you boost your self-awareness, this word mindfulness that gets tossed around a lot.

Another skill that meditation has been shown through a lot of research to help you with is compassion, or you might just say friendliness, warmth, if you want to get grandiose about it, love even.

And so that’s a really compelling thing to think about as a skill.

And as we look out at, for me personally, as I look out at the world and how screwed up it is, the notion that we can boost our capacity and the capacity of other human beings to get out of their own heads and view the world empathetically through the eyes of others, that that is a skill, that’s a very hopeful thing.

So what’s the difference between knowing your own mind better and then being able to interact with other people better?

So for example, is there a meditation course, let’s call it that, for comedians where they can better get in the head of their audience?

Because they want the audience to laugh, right?

And if they don’t laugh, they’re not connecting in the way they need.

So could you, in the limit of this, from what you’re describing, have a meditation course, flavor, for every need somebody has in society, so then you lift all boats?

Rather than just the boats of the people who have emotional inner needs to soften?

I mean, we do courses on stress, anxiety, also relationships, productivity, having more self-awareness in your daily life.

There is no aspect of your life that you can’t make more awesome through intentionally turning it into a practice.

And that’s what the app and the podcast are about.

That’s what the hardest part is though.

You start to realize like, oh, I could fix all my own life.

It is all me.

And then it’s like, no, so much work.

You know what?

I don’t think you should, just to respond to you, Marcia, I don’t think the goal is to try to fix, quote unquote, everything all at once.

I think the goal is marginal improvement over time.

Marcia, he said he’s a 10% guy.

I like instant gratification.

I don’t have time for this marginal improvement over time, okay?

Give me a quick, give me the cocaine.

You know what?

Fix it yesterday.

I mean, you already said you didn’t like Xanax, you’ve taken a big tool off the table.

Exactly.

So Dan, let me give a personal story here.

It’s not a story, but just, I’m like the opposite of anxious, okay?

If I speak in a public setting, I’m as calm as like I’m sitting in my living room and 3000 people are just there and we’re chilling in the living room.

That’s what it feels like to me.

So I have no anxiety at all.

I’m very comfortable in those settings.

And there are other things that I know people reach for to compensate for what they might need.

I have no relationship with caffeine at all, okay?

I’ll have a hot chocolate once a week, just because I like chocolate, not because I’m after the caffeine that’s in it.

And I can sleep like that.

I can walk away from this camera, lay down on the carpet here and be asleep 10 minutes later.

I’ve never been angrier at a person in my life.

This is crazy.

You’re just basically saying everything that’s haunting your whole life doesn’t really affect me, but it must be hard.

So what I’m saying is I tried a meditation app where it said sit down, focus on your breath.

I did a lot of the stuff you were describing, and I just went to sleep.

Because a soft voice begins to talk to you.

And I’m sorry, I just go to sleep.

And so maybe I’m meditation proof, okay?

Because I can’t, am I unreachable by meditation?

Because I don’t know.

I don’t believe anybody is.

Let me ask you this.

Let me reframe it because I love everything you just said and I want your mind on many levels.

Where in your life do you struggle?

So I don’t think about it that way.

I think about it like, okay, I’m struggling because I’m an academic, right?

And so I spent my whole life, there’s a book in front of me and I don’t know what’s in it.

I gotta study it.

And so then I work through it, you slog through it, the brush and bramble, you get a little bloody, maybe, if it’s a particularly difficult physics problem or something.

And then you get through it on the other side.

And the reward is that much sweeter for having struggled to get there.

So for me, a struggle is not something to bring angst within me.

I’m attracted to it.

I say, well, I don’t understand that.

Let me keep at it.

And that excites me.

And so I can’t think about it the way you ask me the question about it.

Well, if we talk to everybody in your life, off the record, would they say there are days where you have a bad day or relationships that are fraught?

Or is there no struggle in your life?

I can never be woke enough for my daughter, my 25-year-old daughter.

Oh, me and my dad fight constantly.

That’s what I’m saying.

As woke as I think I am, I will never be woken up.

So I learn a lot from her.

So we talk and there’s tension if I dig my heels in based on my own life experience.

But she’s a life experience that has vectors going forward, not looking backwards.

And so I’m intrigued by that, challenged by it and intrigued by it.

But for me, every challenge is an academic challenge.

Now, with regard to relationships, there’s other complexities there, right?

I’ve married 33 years.

And the big secret of marriage is that marriage is work.

Because in fairy tales, where do all the fairy tales end?

They end at the marriage, right?

So it’s advice for the courtship.

But they don’t tell you what to do after you get married.

They lived happily ever, ever.

Really?

Really?

Give me some stories on the other side of that trench, all right?

So I don’t know.

I think, sure, you can talk to my relatives and they’ll say, well, he does this and he does that and he does that.

But you’re telling me that meditation is much more for yourself and what you need and what you want.

And so that’s an interesting…

Wait, can I have a pitch?

Can I say a pitch?

Go for it.

To me, it sounds like you said you tackle everything like an academic challenge.

But what the challenge of meditation is, correct me if I’m wrong, is like you have to see your own brain as something that’s worthy of study and something that’s worthy of growth and understanding.

And so you’re like, I don’t have the typical struggles of somebody else, but meditation might be helpful for you to understand how your own mind works even more.

Dan, if Marcia is correct.

She is.

But she is for you.

Everybody’s got to have their way in.

I think she astutely identified one way in for a mind like yours that is really interested in science, really interested in the details, figuring things out.

Buddhism and meditation, I think, would have an enormous amount to offer you because the mind is massively complex and fascinating and, in many ways, lawful.

You can get interested in what makes it work.

Consciousness, for example.

You’re suggesting, because that’s not how you began.

You began by saying, I had this problem, that problem, that problem, and meditation solved it.

And if you have problems in your life, medication can help you overcome them, master them, and the like.

If you have no such litany of problems and you’re not on any kind of prescription drugs, you’re now saying that the meditation can enhance whatever it is you’re doing well and maybe even do it better.

They’ve shown that, yeah.

I think many things are true simultaneously, just as when we talk about astrophysics, where I know nothing.

But you can talk about one way in with meditation, which is I think the most common way in, which is suffering.

People have to deal with stress, anxiety, depression.

But for you, Neil, for you, I think that there’s a, there’s a, I think it’s phenomenal.

There’s an enormous amount of wisdom I hear coming through in your description of your own mind state, and that’s amazing.

I don’t think you have to meditate.

I’m not a meditation fundamentalist.

I think for you, the trick…

Meditation evangelical, evangelical fundamentalist meditator.

The trick, the interesting door for you might be just intellectual interest, because the mind is so vast and is so interesting, and I think there would be a lot there for you to play with.

I just want to respond to one last thing, which as you said, meditation is all about your own mind, but what we know about the universe is that the line between self and other is porous and blurry.

And you can’t, if you close your eyes and look for the self for some little homunculus of Marcia or Neil or Dan in the mind, you cannot find it.

We can’t find the seat of consciousness in the brain.

And so we are interdependent with other people and with the universe writ large.

And so meditation by working on your own mind.

So the modern work for that in physics would be we are entangled.

Yes.

Yes.

It’s not so woo-woo.

Because of entanglement, working on your own mind is working for the greater good.

You can do both at the same time.

You can’t connect with others so you connect with yourself.

I have no rebuttal to that perspective.

Well, Daz, it’s a delight to have you.

And just congratulations on trying to, having improved yourself and now attempting to improve others because at the end of the day the world is better off for people like you having lived in it.

Thank you.

Imagine New York if we weren’t all just walking around having panic attacks all the time.

Excellent.

It’s great to meet you and thank you.

I’m a long time fan, so great to meet you, Neil and Marcia.

I’m a new fan and great to meet you as well.

Thank you.

It’s so nice to meet you.

So when we come back, we’re going to bring on StarTalk correspondent, can I use that word?

StarTalk brain correspondent, Heather Berlin, when StarTalk returns.

Hi, I’m Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

We’re back, StarTalk.

We’re talking about meditation.

Coming off our first segment, in a conversation with Dan Harris, ABC correspondent turned meditation guru.

Ooh, do I get to use that word, Marcia?

I think so, yeah.

Yeah, totally, we can totally do that.

Absolutely.

And as is the DNA of StarTalk, we bring in an academic expert on a subject matter that any of our pop culture representatives bring to the table.

And of course, we have our neuroscientist at large, Heather Berlin, welcome back, Heather.

Always a pleasure, always a pleasure.

Yeah, yeah, and you’re at the Icahn School of Medicine?

Yes, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Icahn, I-C-H-N at Mount Sinai.

And you specialize in figuring out what the brain is doing, whether or not people know it.

I think, that’s on your business card, isn’t it?

Yes, exactly, that’s my slogan.

So let me just bring up some broad questions here that arose from that first segment.

So many people who have mental challenges, right?

One of them, a big one, I’m told is anxiety, but Marcia reads the back on that one.

No, no, but there are others, there’s trauma in life, for example, possibly even PTSD.

You can think of things that, a problem that a person can’t shake.

And as a clinical person, is your first thought, yeah, there’s a drug for that.

Or at what point does someone say, there’s a drug for that?

And at what point does someone say, get to know your mind better?

Maybe you can have mind over matter, mind over a properly behaving mind over the mind that’s misfiring.

So how do you strike a balance between those two?

Yeah, I mean, often, you know, we start with the kinds of treatments that are non-medication based treatments.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And that would be, I mean, you know, forms, various forms of talk therapy, using techniques, yeah, of, you know, mindfulness based stress reduction or meditation as part, it’s integrated as part of therapy.

You know, because your thoughts, you know, can change your brain.

And that is a way to change your neurochemistry just via controlling your thoughts and your emotions and how you respond to them.

So we always do that first.

Now, if people’s neurochemical imbalance or neurosurgery is in such a way that that is not enough, then we can supplement or augment that with medication.

And then we find that there’s a synergistic effect so that the medication plus the mindfulness base or the talk therapies work together better than either one of them alone.

So it’s never just like, here’s a pill, now go off and you’ll be better.

It’s always going to be a bit of both, but we start always with non-medical treatments and then sort of move up the ladder.

Oh wait, isn’t a pill cheaper than therapy?

I’m just thinking, I’m just thinking.

It’s cheaper and faster than therapy.

If you know the neurochemistry, the electrochemistry of, let’s just, whoever defines it, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, of a normal brain.

Okay, this is a brain that doesn’t have neurological issues that we have identified in textbooks.

Is that the chemistry you’re going to try to recreate in the mind of someone who has mental challenges?

So, first of all, there’s no such thing, really, as a normal brain.

Every brain is different.

And now, when we’re talking about people at the extremes, yes, people with extreme neurochemical imbalances or problems in their neuroanatomy, but outside of those extremes, everybody has something, basically.

Everybody, we’re all wired differently, and so there’s no one ideal place that we’re trying to get a person to be at.

So that’s why psychiatry is an art more so even than a science.

It’s not like you have this bacteria, take this antibiotic.

It is try this SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and see if that has an effect.

And then we sort of measure, how is it affecting that person?

And if it works, great.

If not, okay, we’ll try this drug or we’ll try that.

So there’s no perfect-

And there’s also dosing, too.

The dosage, there’s no ideal state we’re trying to get.

It’s really individualized medicine.

What works for you based on your symptomology?

What kind of treatment do we think is gonna be best for you?

And so there’s no ideal state.

It’s just what’s good for you.

So if you’re a person who’s an over-thinker, you have a highly active prefrontal cortex and you’re ruminating and you can’t stop that inner voice, giving you techniques to how to quiet it down, how to focus your attention is one way.

If that doesn’t help you need something stronger, then we can help bring in certain drugs and see if that has an effect or not.

You know, there’s just no perfect answer.

They need help.

So, Heather, let me ask you an awkward philosophical question.

Mm-hmm.

All right?

And I come to you from the world of physics.

And in physics, physics has been around a long time.

What I mean by that is there are things we’ve actually understood about the universe over many, many centuries by the works, the hard work and brilliance of key people who have been in our field.

That is a much deeper history than psychiatry or psychology, right?

When you think of sort of modern psychology, is it much more than a century old, really?

I mean, maybe late 1800s.

Whereas physics, we have authentic physics going back 500 years, okay?

So my question is, could it be that neuroscience or couch, you know, couch therapy is something that needs breakthroughs of brilliant neuro people who haven’t been born yet, so that the day will come where you say, you’ll just analyze the neurochemistry, you say, here’s what’s wrong, fix it here, nip, tuck, do this, and you walk out the door and it’s one session in your office.

Okay, ready?

I love this question.

So first of all, I mean, psychology arose.

I need buy-in on this.

Marcia, are you with me on this?

I’m freaked out because to me it’s like, because it’s about the human brain, it can never be standardized in the way that physics is because humans, our consciousness, just like we were talking about in the first segment, it’s about our consciousness.

So I would never want to go into a doctor who can stand my brain.

I’d be terrified they’d use it for evil.

So, no, here’s what, okay.

There was a day we’d look up at the night sky.

Oh, the moon is doing this and that, and that’s different from what Mercury is doing, and that’s different.

And everybody’s doing their thing in the sky.

Yeah.

And no one really understands it.

Exactly.

And so we’re thinking, oh my gosh, well, we’ll never understand it because we are mortal and that’s the divine space of the heavens.

And how can we ever understand divine thinking?

Then single formulas come forth and it brings it all together under one coherent understanding.

So are we in this moment declaring the brain is just complex and we can never do it, or are you admitting ignorance about where we, relative to where we could be one day so that the person walks in, you put them in one of your machines that I know you got in the back room there in your home, and then it goes boop, and then everything is fixed, like I said, and it’s one stop shopping.

I’ll tackle this in two minutes or less.

Psychology arose out of philosophy.

Philosophy was the origins of psychology, but technically if you really, the science of the mind, maybe a century, a century and a half old, true.

The problem with the brain is subjectivity.

So I’ve always been interested in the brain because I want to understand the neural basis of consciousness.

How does this physical piece of matter create subjective states?

It’s the most subjective thing there is in the world.

Exactly.

So if I ask you, are you depressed?

I can look at how you’re acting, whatever, but I have to ask you on a scale of one to 10, how sad do you feel or how much pain are you in?

So until we can solve that problem of subjectivity, which is really what we want to work towards is having a unified theory of the neural basis of consciousness.

And we’re working on that right now.

Which you don’t have yet.

We do not have an agreed upon theory of consciousness.

And Marcia, you know the best evidence that they don’t have it is that if you go to the bookstore and you look for books on consciousness, there are shelf after shelf.

And not just one.

Not just one book.

There’s one book on gravity on the shelf and there’s 50 books on consciousness.

That means we know nothing about consciousness.

If you figure it out though, don’t tell anybody because I don’t want the clones.

I don’t want the, I don’t want it.

Well, this is the thing.

The thing about consciousness is it’s first person subjective experience.

So the only one that can ever experience your consciousness is you.

To know what it feels like to be you.

But there are a couple of main contenders of, like one is this integrated information theory of consciousness.

The other is a global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness.

Some talk about predictive processing and coding.

So there’s a bunch of theories out there floating around and we’re actually engaged in a large scale study right now across labs to test these different theories against each other experimentally, which is very difficult to do in and of itself because of the problem of subjectivity.

Also, could the concept of consciousness itself be malformed in how you even pose the question?

Well, yeah.

So I once actually debated Deepak Chopra on this topic because he is philosophizing that consciousness just exists in the universe.

It’s a fundamental property of the universe and we are just subjects of that.

It creates matter, right?

Where I say no matter or me and my fellow neuroscientists matter creates subjectivity, creates consciousness.

But there are some people with different philosophical views that say it exists in the universe and we’re just like the conduits of it.

This is further evidence that nobody really knows anything.

Well, but meditation has.

The universe gives it to you and the other person says that you give it to the universe.

If that’s what you’re arguing about, you don’t know anything.

But I do ultimately think that if we don’t kill ourselves first as a human species, over the course of time, theories will emerge and we will get closer.

But because each brain is slightly different, you would have to take each individual, map out their entire brain, understand their full history and also the brain isn’t static.

It’s constantly changing.

So where you were yesterday is different than where you are today.

So it’s a moving target.

So there’s so many variables involved, but it’s really hard to pinpoint and to change it in a way that’s going to change the person’s behavior.

However, the one thing we are getting closer with are neural implants where we can make a rat move left or right depending on how we direct it or make it eat or not eat.

And so we can start to control human behavior.

But if we can control how you feel and think, you know, I mean, we’ll eventually get there, I’m sure.

That’s a little scary.

I’m scared of that, Marcia.

She said, well, when neural implants to control your behavior.

Yes.

Now, every time I go left or right, I’m going to go, am I doing this?

Someone else making me.

You got a joystick that Heather’s got you going on that.

We got to take a quick break.

When we come back, Heather, I want to hear from you about the clinical studies and laboratory studies of what the brain is doing when it’s meditating or when it’s not meditating or just what going inside the brain tells us about what’s going on outside when StarTalk returns.

We’re back, StarTalk, segment three of Meditation.

And we began with Dan Harris, who set us on this path.

He’s got a meditation app called 10% Smarter, is it, Marcia?

10% Happier.

Happier, 10% Happier.

No, we really want one that makes us all 10% Smarter.

All right, we gotta work on that one.

And we brought in Heather Berlin, our neuroscientist at large, to help make sense of all of this, or neurological sense.

Heather, all this talk about changes in people’s behavior, for whatever reason, be it meditation or drugs, do you see that in brain scans or neural implants or whatever it is you do behind a curtain when nobody’s looking?

Do we see changes in the brain after meditation?

Yeah, and amazingly so.

So all these studies have been done.

They have people who never meditated before, and then they have them meditate for eight weeks and then look at their brains before and after.

And they also look at long-term meditators.

People have been practicing their whole life.

And you actually see an increase in gray matter.

So normally the brain is aging over time, and we’re having a little bit of atrophy of gray matter.

And they found that meditators, long-term meditators, a 50-year-old brain looks like what a 25-year-old brain would look like.

Remind me what gray matter does for us.

Gray matter is involved in all of our thinking, our cognition, planning, organizing.

It’s particularly in the prefrontal cortex they see these changes.

So, what’s the point of the rest of your brain?

You just listen to everything I want my brain for.

So, what good is the rest of the brain?

Well, sensory, it’s all your sensory information.

The subcortical areas are more of the emotional parts of your brain, your drives, your motivation, but they actually see changes in those areas too.

So, they have the amygdala involved in a fear response, your kind of fight or flight response, actually were smaller.

And in the short-term meditators, the people who just did it for eight weeks, they looked at their amygdala activation in response to emotional pictures before meditating and then after.

And they had less amygdala activation to pictures after they had meditated.

So, they have more emotional control.

So, increases in prefrontal cortex, the gray matter means that they can, you can regulate yourself.

You can have more impulse control, control over emotions.

And it actually, you see these decreases in these subcortical areas.

So, it’s both, you get these activation changes and you get really structural changes in the brain with meditation over time.

Okay, so you have value judged in what you just said, you value judge those changes.

Well, but the amygdala is a huge part of anxiety, right?

Because that’s basically like your fight or flight is triggered, but there’s nothing to run from.

So, like your outside’s not matching your inside.

And I’ve heard that meditation, yeah, like, that’s interesting, because I’ve heard that meditation just helps calm that fight or flight.

Oh, interesting Marcia.

So, you’re saying that sometimes we’re reacting in a way that would have been sensible if T-Rex were chasing us.

Exactly.

Except that is not the threat.

And that’s why trauma anxiety, like, you see that a lot.

I had a job where I worked with Holocaust survivors and their kids had even worse anxiety than them because they grow up with all this physical anxiety, but their experience outwardly is very safe.

So, it doesn’t make sense.

And then they’ve now done studies about that, that kids of trauma and things like the Holocaust have these experiences with their brain chemistry.

And it’s just interesting hearing the science behind it because I’ve heard about the amygdala and stuff.

All right, so, I’ll give you that, but how about any activity that someone does intensely for eight weeks?

If I take up chess and I get really into chess or some, I don’t know, martial arts.

Does that change the brain?

Yeah, something that takes a lot of focus and intensity.

So, is meditation unique in this regard or is it just anything you do with focus and intensity will also trigger or instill permanent changes in the brain?

Absolutely, but it’s the skillset that you’re training because your brain habituates, it learns anything.

So, if you’re doing something bad, like things that are related to addiction, you get into negative changes in the brain.

But in this case, what you’re learning with meditation is you’re increasing activation in parts of the brain that have to do with what they call it, quieting your monkey mind, that inner chatter, that self-critic.

Back to the monkey mind.

The inner voice, the inner critic that’s telling you you’re not doing well or all the negative thinking.

And you’re gaining more control over those negative thoughts, you’re getting more control over…

I mean, emotions are good to have, but not when they’re being triggered for the wrong reasons, right?

So, what happens if you have a fast track to emotion where the amygdala gets activated, but then the prefrontal cortex says, oh, wait, there’s nothing dangerous in this situation.

You can calm down now.

But if you don’t have the right regulation to do that…

Oh, then you’re a victim of your own neurochemistry.

Exactly, but this way you’re taking control, in a way, over your brain.

It’s like the brain controlling itself.

So, with meditation, you’re becoming more aware of what’s happening internally in your own mind, and you’re gaining more control so that you can enhance your positive experiences and help down regulate the negative ones and the thoughts as well.

You know what I did once, Heather?

I was 17, and there was a friend of our family, a friend of my mother’s who had a son who was also 17, but we played together when we were like three, but I didn’t know him, and he died of brain cancer.

Very tragic, and there was a funeral in the chapel at Riverside Church, and it was during a school day, and he went to school in Westchester, but they took a bus of kids, brought them into Manhattan, and there’s a picture of him on the casket, and the organ is doing its organ thing, funeral organ thing.

Everybody’s crying, and I’m saying to myself, I swear this is what I said to myself.

I said, I do not know this person.

Yet every force operating in the air right now wants me to cry over his death.

The 15, 16-year-old kids helping each other walk down the aisle, and there’s a handsome kid, so there’s this handsome photo of him, and I said, and tears started welling up in my eyes, and I said, I’m only crying because everybody else is crying.

I don’t actually feel this.

At all.

I said this to myself, and then I said, why don’t I cry every day because thousands of people die every day in New York City for all kinds of reasons.

I’m not crying then, so why should I cry now?

Suck those tears back up, and I still felt the moment, but I did not let the moment override emotions that I felt were artificially implanted in me.

I did that when I was 17.

I don’t know if I should be proud of that moment.

I cry at state farm commercials, are you serious?

I’m like, this is how different…

You cry at the commercial where the woman sings with the dogs?

Oh, the most manipulative, bring grandma in, and you haven’t seen her in 20 years, I’ll be sobbing.

All of these songs, they’re trying to manipulate me.

And so Heather, are you saying that I did something good, or did I do something misanthropic?

There’s two, it’s interesting.

So there’s what we put a value judgment, one of which is if you can have the right kinds of emotional control, be able to express your emotions at the appropriate time, but not express them when you’re being manipulated to do so and whatnot.

So in that sense, yes.

I’m going to tell you that organ was all in.

You’re supposed to cry at a funeral because there’s a collective release with ritual, even if like it’s not, it’s like, I feel like our culture is so shied away from death that that’s why you’re supposed to cry.

But I also went to some funerals where some people, I’m like, you’re doing this for attention, which is wrong, but.

I think the emotional control can be a good thing.

Again, over controlled, like, you know, if you didn’t cry, if it was the funeral of someone you did know and had a connection to, that’d be a little different.

But the other aspect is, and what meditation also helps increase the brain areas involved in, is empathy.

So you can have an empathetic response.

You can, like the boundary between self and other, it can dissolve and you can feel more connected with people.

So you’re going to increase empathy, but at the same time have enough cognitive control to control your emotions in the appropriate way, right?

So I drew my line between tears dropping down my cheek.

I felt it, it was a very sad day.

And so it’s not that I didn’t feel the sadness, but I just could not.

And I’ve been to some New Orleans funerals, right?

Where there is a jazz band and there’s a celebration.

So I don’t think it’s writ in the sky that one must cry at a funeral.

You can use that time to celebrate the person’s life, however brief they were on earth.

But you know what you were exhibiting, which is really at that young age, was this sort of meta awareness.

You were making a decision about how you were going to choose to respond.

I was a geek kid.

I was a complete geek kid.

So there was this whole parts of the brain, modulating other parts of the brain.

And that’s what meditators do.

I once did this experiment with this Shaolin monk who could withstand an enormous amount of pain.

And so we put him in the scanner and we put these heaters on his wrist, and we would just keep increasing the heat, to the point that he had burn marks on it.

And he was just saying, I feel the pain, I feel the pain.

And we look at his brain.

Marcia, this is the stuff Heather does.

The stuff going on behind that curtain?

And where are your offices located?

This was in the UK.

This was in the UK.

Totally different rules there.

But when he was controlling this pain, you saw one part of his brain controlling the pain network in the brain.

So he was literally using one part of his brain, this executive control, to down regulate the pain network.

Because pain doesn’t happen in your arm.

It happens in your brain.

So if you can control one part of your brain with the other, you can not experience pain.

There are people who go through surgery without anesthesia by going into a meditative state.

So it’s just amazing how much, when I talk about this meta awareness, how much control we can really have beyond what we even think is physiologically possible.

We can control our own physiology.

I hate to confess then, I used to do that.

Well, I used to wrestle and wrestle, there’s a lot of things that are painful when you’re wrestling.

And I would say to myself, well, is the skin broken and am I bleeding?

No.

Therefore, ignore it and keep going.

They’ve shown athletes, that’s like there was a really fascinating like sports science thing where about how athletes can play through a broken leg just by pure pain control and adrenaline and like the chemicals that come up where you can have a super bad injury and finish the game and then not feel the pain until afterwards essentially.

But then sometimes the pain is excruciating once they finally do feel it.

But they’ll say I played for two hours on a broken leg, didn’t feel a thing as soon as the game was over, I, you know, collapsed.

Like, it’s just amazing.

Yeah, so, but in my case, I would make the judgment whether it was just pain, that pain sensors were sending to my brain or whether there’s an actual physiological break that needed attention, right, medical attention.

I’d make that distinction.

And if it was just simply pain, no matter how severe, I would just ignore it and keep going.

And so I hope, Heather, that doesn’t mean I can’t feel for people, right?

Is that what you’re telling me, that I’m just hard-hearted?

I think there are two different systems that are going on.

One is this capacity to feel empathy, right, which is a whole neural network in and of itself, which you can very well have.

I don’t know, I may have to run some tests on you, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.

So that’s one thing.

So it doesn’t necessarily correlate with how much cognitive control you have over your thoughts and over pain.

So you can have a ton of cognitive control or emotional regulation, and that doesn’t necessarily relate to how empathetic or not you are.

The reason they get pushed together is because psychopaths tend to have an enormous amount of control and also don’t have empathy.

But in non-psychopathic humans, they don’t have to be correlated.

You just used my name in the same sentence with the word psychopath.

Just let the record show.

You’re the one talking about being at funerals, looking at everybody cry.

Guys, we got to land this plane, but this has been highly enlightening and introspective, uncommon for what we normally do for StarTalk.

So I’m glad to have you contribute to this, Heather.

Thank you.

This has been a StarTalk, an episode on meditation and mindfulness.

I’m your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.