How Meditation Works & Science-Based Effective Meditations
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and opened ology 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, they're sitting or lying down. If they're sitting, we might imagine them in the so called lowest position, you know, sitting with legs crossed very upright, with hands on the knees, or you crossed in our lab, or something of that sort. Typically, we think of somebody who was in a very calm state, eyes closed, focused on there's so called third eye center.

The third ee center is the area just behind one's forehead. There's no third eye there. At least there shouldn't be. But i'll tell you why it's called the third I center of 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 in compasses a huge variety of different practices.

Some of those practices indeed are done sitting or line down with ones eyes closed, focusing on the third I center. Others, those practices are focused on a body scan, you know, really focusing on one area of the body in 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 is 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'll talk about picking a meditation practice that isn't just feasible because you'll do IT but is actually directed at the goal specific to you and what you need most. So to give you some sense of the countour 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 the 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 counter intuitive, but in a positive way, what I mean by that is, for instance, a lot of people think that as you meditating, get Better meditating, you need to meditate more and more and more. So like if you get Better at running endurance races, that you need to keep running longer and longer, you know, first of five k than a ten k than a marathon, than ultras with meditation is actually quite the opposite.

The Better that you get at dropping into a particular brain state, and the more year, so called the traits of brain state shift, not just states, as there sometimes referred to, but trades. This is a theme that I picked up from a terrific book that i'll refer to later. But the more that you can get into specific neural circuits quickly, actually, the less you need to meditate in order to drive the benefits of meditation.

So that's a wonderful aspect of meditative practices that, unlike a lot of other forms of mental exercise and cognitive enhancing exercises, that will talk about all of that today. And I promise that by the end of today's episode, you will have a rich rave meditator 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 easier 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 former vital that can indeed reduce your need for sleep and still allow you to enhance your connection and physical abilities. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research.

Erles stanford IT is, however, part of my desired 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 element.

Element is an electoral like drink that has everything you need but nothing you don't. That means the electronic sodium, magnesium and patasse um all in the correct ratios but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for optimal brain and body function.

Even a slight degree of dehydration tion can diminish cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electricite the electorate. Sodium, magnesium and patashie are vital for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your nerves or your nerve cells. Drinking element dissolved in water makes IT extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrical lights.

To make sure that i'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electricity lights, I dissolve one packet of element in about sixteen to thirty two ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning, I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that i'm doing. They have a bunch of different great taste flavors element. They have watermelon sirs at a, Frankly, I love them all.

If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element dot com slash huberman la B2Claim a f re e ele ment sam ple pac k wit h the pur chase of any ele ment dri nk k m ix. Again, that drink element dot com slash huberman la B2Claim a f re e sam ple pac k. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja sessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states. And that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try. And I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times I have a longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

I also love that the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga media session, those you don't know. Yoga eza is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind is very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda and something similar to IT called non sleep depressed or nsd r can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy, even which is a short ten minute session.

If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slashed huberman to access a free thirty day trial. Let's talk about meditation.

As I mentioned earlier, we are going to talk about what areas of the brain and body are active during meditation and after meditation, and why they can be so beneficial. We also talk about win and how best to meditate. This is a topic i've long been interested in.

I was first given a book of meditation when I was in high school because, to make a long story short, I was a bit of a wild one early in my high school years. And as a consequence of a programme 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 john kob tz. zin. 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 nineteen eighties, and IT was really only until recently that there were very few studies of meditation, although those really picked up in the nineties. 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 late ninety eighties and in the early ninety eighties, 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 that really wasn't that much mechanistic understanding about how meditation work. But of course, there was a deep understanding from cultures outside the united states that meditation was extremely useful. As he just mentioned, as long as we're talking about the history of meditation, any discussion about meditation is going to be a discussion about states of mine.

And any discussion about states of mine invoiced the word consciousness, kind of a 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. That doesn't have one standard Operational definition, scientists call IT. However, discussions about consciousness are often part in partial with conversations about things like psychodeviant s and kind of alternative therapies.

And so in the ninety six years, and especially in the one thousand nine and seventies, meditation and psychodeviant s were actually close cousins in the conversation about consciousness and states of mind. That conversation started to split into two different divisions. And I explain why in a moment, 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 psychic licks and particular L D, I, surgeon acid diethyl de. And at that time, that was part of the whole counterculture movement that was considered very anti establishment. And they were really encouraging students at harvard to take SSD.

They were also very interested in meditation. But what ended up happening as they essentially got kicked out or fired from harvard. And there's a book that i'll referred you to in the shown note captions, if you're interested in and learning more about all this.

But they get kicked out and fired for their emphasis on psychiatrically. Now nowadays is a lot of interest in psychiatric ics. We've had episodes with doctor Matthew Johnson from johns hopkins university, whose running clinical trials on psychiatry ics like slice van and lt.

For the treatment of depression and ptsd. We've also had doctor nolan Williams on the podcast, my colleague stanford, who's doing incredible studies on some of those compounds as well. So nowadays the conversation about psychedelics is coming back, and it's somewhat divorced, ed, from the conversation about meditation. But in the one hundred and sixty in one thousand nine and seventies, the conversation about psychodeviant s and meditation was sort of one in the same.

That changed in the late one thousand eighties and early one thousand nineties when people like hn kobold ts and started writing books that were purely about meditation and suggesting that people explore meditative practices for the utility to bring commons at just stress, improve sleep at seta divorced from the conversation about psychic delicate. Now that's not to say that the scientific community immediately embrace 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 and funding studies of meditation, asking what sort 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 ninety eighties, and especially within the nineteen nineties, the advent of brain imaging technology like magnetic resonance imaging M R I, or functional magnetic resent imaging, was a way to look at the brain while IT was active, not just to get a an image of its structure, but also how it's functioning, the areas that so called light, when all of that technology became accessible and popular, will that allowed a large number of laboratories to start asking how specific patterns of thinking and breathing, maybe people sitting in the lowest position. But more often than that, that would be people inside of an M R I magnet, because ism 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 change. And to do that over time, when those studies were done, what was discovered was really quite maculate, really, and now we don't think of is 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 home or markers of inflation tion eta, a large list of information fell out of that, which revealed that, indeed, there are many a dozen 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 back that has a lot to do with the fact that many of the major tech companies in the bay area during the two thousands, such as google and apple, and any number of different social media companies and other companies and business ventures at set on investment firms all over the world, started hiring people to train meditation, or had online courses for meditation. So nowaday we think of meditation is this thing that almost everybody understand 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 wait training. IT can mean running IT can 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 specifics of what you actually do. So too, 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 I meditation where you close your eyes and focus on that spot ches 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 happening, not letting your mind wander or think yesterday or tomorrow what's happening next, but really focusing on the present. They're 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 pass each of these things, and we are going to ask 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 ten minutes or so talking about the neuroscience of meditation, and 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 you. In fact, I don't believe in throwing out a lot of Normal nature without also giving some mechanistic explanation as to what different brain areas do. And you could say, well, what good is that? Knowing what different brain areas do in 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 rain ers and turn down the activity in specific rain with specific elements of a meditation practice that's quite exciting and quite different really from other aspects of new roscius 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 onto of what am 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 the front bumper of your head just behind the bone.

Okay, that area just behind your forehead that we call the prefrontal 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 right 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 tal cortex, or if we we're gonna really specific, we say the left dorlan oral prefrontal cortex doral 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 tower, the sort of top your head a little bit.

So that's dorso. And then latter, once your hand is still on the side your head, you're in the left dorado al prefrontal cortex. Okay, so you get your hand probably right over your left dorsal to, or prefrontal cortex, that area of the brain.

We know from lesion studies where it's been damaged in animals or 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 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 referred to the left dorso atrial prefrontal cortex, but i'm 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 I say prefrontal cortex today, what I mean is left door salado prefrontal cortex stimulation of left door salado frontal cortex. Or I should say more appropriately, when your left door's atter or 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 dorso atal prefrontal cortex is in direct communication within, is directly connected to another brain area called the interior single late cortex, or ACC. Now i'm just going to refer to IT as the ACC OK. The A C, C is an area of your brain that is interpreting a lot of different things about bodily signals, foreign stance, how fast your breathing, whether not your heart is beating quickly or slowly, and more importantly, whether 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 is your even in great shape and your heart is beating very fast, it's unlikely that you 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 outside, your heart starts beating very quickly for no apparent reason. Well, then you are going to interpret that as either pathologic or uncomfortable, inappropriate for the context that you happen to be in the left dorso ado prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain that actually has some control over, and especially can interpret what's going on in this A C C region.

Now, most of you probably haven't heard of the A C. C. Most of you probably have heard of a brain area called the a mig allots and omand shape structure on the two sides of the brain.

People talk about the fear center, etta, but your ACC, the international ute cortex gets input from areas like the amiga, your threat detection centers, but IT also gets input from an enormous number of other areas of your brain body, including your heart, you're 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, I promise, is going to be the third structure in this triad. And then i'll stop listing off names.

So we have dorso, atter prefrontal cortex. Think of that is sort of the interpreter of what's going on inside of you. You have the ACC, or enter a singular 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 atrium, a quito byte on the surface of your body, your ACC would definitely register that. And then there's this other absolutely incredible brain structure, which is called the insula I S U L A insula. The insula has a bunch of different parts to IT, but the insula has another area that is interpreting signals of what's going on in your brain and body.

So the ACC in the install are working together, trying to figure out 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 increased that i'm experiencing your heavy breathing or burning in my lungs, this all makes sense. I don't have to be worried. I don't have to be scared. I might wanna slow down. But this makes sense.

President, for instance, in the example I previously gave, where if you're sitting in a room and everything is pretty calm and all a sudden you start feeling really uncomfortable, like your stomach, he doesn't feel right. Do you start breathing quickly? You start having a so called anxiety or panic attack in large for that, because the shift in your bodily sensations doesn't match or doesn't correspond to something in the outside.

So there's this incredible trial, which includes the left or salado preferences, cortex, the singular, or enter, a singular ate cortex in the. And those three are working together in a kind of conversation, is a neural conversation, but a conversation on the last, 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 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 sensations of pain or pleasure for that matter, whether or not that makes sense for the situation you're in and trying to determine whether 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 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 not that 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 seated at the dinner table, excuse me, and have a fought about something tomorrow, maybe at the exam, that stressing us out or something like that. And that will change our buttery state in a way that is not optimal 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 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 in dynamic, because what that 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 OK, 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? Well, 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 practices that are ideal for improving sleep, and meditation practices that believe they are not benefit all of those things in one fell swoop OK. 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 its different component parts and a 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 seventy five percent, 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 one's eyes during meditation, there are many forms of 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 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 exterior tion. What do I mean by extern tion? Well, very briefly, we are sending things on our body and everybody all the time.

We are also sensing things from outside of us all the time. So these can be sites or sounds touch on our body sensations with inside our body at seta. Now, sensation is distinct from what we call perception.

Perception is, put simply, 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, sitting areas there, pressure receptors on the bottom of your feet, sensing your shoes or your sandals of the floor at sea.

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 site, 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 there, what IT feels like if there's tingling or pressure, heat or cold at sea.

Or you can brought in that spot light to include both feet or 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 they're a 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, interfuse 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, ince a tree in the horizon, or a person on the street, or any number of different things outside of you, or you can brought in that spot light to include the entire scene that wants. 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 of proportion of your chest and something outside.

If you can split your attention between those two perceptual spotlights, it's very hard, although not impossible, to have three perceptual spotlight, but most people can split the two points of attention 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 you're paying attention to, whether not somebody y's walking in the door or not. So that's two.

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 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 are, using analogy, what I mean by that is your perception of what's happening within those pot lights 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 defused. 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 door salado prefrontal cortex, although there are others of your brain.

Involved as well your ability to direct your attention to specific 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 or ripple and change in sensation there, or took kind of associate, 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 dorso atal prefrontal cortex. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens.

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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, 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 bodies. And that informs us about something very important, which is that there are actually two axes, are two ends of a continuum of perception.

Until now i'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 into reception. Into reception, spelled with eye, is everything that we sent 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 hearts 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 terror action, in contrast that the other end of the continuum um is so called extern tion spelled with e extra reception is perception of everything that 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, told our so called third eye center, this area right behind our forehead, which not so incidentally, is the preference tal cortex, or in some cases, where people will focus on their breathing, so the movement of their stomach, or the movement of their die frame, or the lifting of their chest, or the extension their belly while they breathe. By doing that, we are taking what ordinary is, a perceptual state that split between the outside world, extra reception, and usually also told our inner state, 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 sandwiches p about to order a sandwich reading in the menu.

So that's exterior tion, right? The menu is outside the confines es of your skin. And little ideas, or maybe big ideas, come to mind about what the roast beef sandwiches, the vegetarian sandwich will taste like, what I will do for you, what what's in IT, what you like, what you don't like at seta.

That's splitting interaction tion. And next reception. But when we close our eyes, we stop, we slow down, we focus on our breathing. Or that third, I center, the majority of our perception then shifts to the reception. And when we shift down to that end of the continue of interaction tion, something very important happens.

What happens is that those two regions, the ACC, the entire single 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 pay attention to the various sensations of how full or empty your stomach feels, whether not the surface of your skin feels hot, cold and on and on. So by just sitting down or lying down and closing your eyes, your brain undergoes massive shift from exter reception to the reception.

Now that's not to say you can't be distracted by external events. In fact, many people are. But the early stages of transitioning into a meditator state involve this shift down the continuum, or, I should say, to one end of the continuum, because there's no downed up, there's just the continuum shift along the continuing to heighten levels of interaction tion.

Now I mentioned this briefly before, but many people are very interactively aware, 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 interaction, tive awareness or capability. That is, your ability to count your heart beats 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 heart beats simply by trying to feel your heart beat. Some people are very good, mean they're very accurate doing this.

Other people are not. IT does seem to be an ability that can be trained up quite a bit, and in fact, meditation practices will improve your interaction tive awareness. But, and this is a very important point, heighten levels of interaction tive awareness. While that might sound attractive, hope to 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 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, where as other people who are less aware of their bodily stayed, that can be beneficial, that can be adaptive or not, depending on the circumstances, is probably not adaptive. To be very, very aware of your internal state.

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 ign all those signals, those sensations now.

But for somebody who has no awareness of what's going on, very little interaction of awareness that can be problemati C2Because the se are the ver y peo ple who can ign ore the fac t tha t are hav ing a h ea rt att ack or can ign ore the fac t tha t the y hav e hig h blo od pre ssure and are car ing abo ut lif e, focused on everything external, with no awareness of their own body, the court out of touch with their body. So we want to be very careful about placing violence, which is a sort of value of good or bad, on interaction tive awareness. First is extra acceptive 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 for interaction tive 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 extraction tive 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 developed such a heightened state, or awareness of their interaction, tive 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, references from the skin inwards, or are you somebody who tends to be less in touch with or aware of your interaction tive state? There is no right or wrong answer.

You don't get an air, an effort, A D or sea, depending on your answer, is 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 not you're alone. But we are going to return to that answer.

So keep that in mind because I will become very beneficial in building an optimal meditation practice for you. But for now, just know there's this continuum of perception, interaction, tion, and next to reception, closing your eyes increases in the reception, opening your eyes dramatically increases extraction tion, just automatically, just automatic, because so much of your brain fact, forty percent or more, is dedicated to vision. And this, I should say, for those of you, there are no vision or no vision, and those 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 see, of course, people that can see closing the eyes doesn't have this huge shift towards in the reception. But there been a few studies, not as many as I would have like to find, but a few studies of for incense.

People who are blind or have low vision don't see very well. And when they close their ears and they can hear the external world where they put headphones on, our noise cancelling 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 not you are somebody who tends to be more interaction, timely, aware.

Or not more exercise vely 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 continue depending on the activities that you're doing. So you're probably the kind of person where somebody comes over to you and are 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 not you're flushing red and said or you're gonna 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 not their cheeks or flushing, or whether not they look writer, sound writer, or that they have something in their teeth. These are Normal responses, but they really speak to this issue of whether not you tend to shift more towards interactive t of awareness or extra accept of awareness. And of course, it's context dependent.

IT will depend on whether not your know out on a date with somebody that you know you would lose to find out later that you had food in your, in your teeth, or whether you would somebody you're more familiar with where that would not really matter much, or the other person will tell you this kind of thing. What does IT mean to be at one location or another location along this continue of interaction tion or extra reception? Well, we know that means nearly, right.

We know that if you are more interaction timely, aware your insulin ACC your active. But that's not very useful. 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 said 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, is 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 only called the default mode network. The defauts 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 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 past, surely, the present, definitely in 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, the past event, and I can think about the present. I can split my thinking in my memory. In that way, I can also think about the present in the future.

I can also think about the future in the past, although it's very difficult, although not impossible, to split one's thinking in memory into the past, 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. 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 mention before, is now a classic paper has a wonderful title, which is a wondering 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. Scientific publishing is competitive, but it's especially competitive to get manuscripts accepted into science, into nature and into the journal cell.

So represents kind of the one of the super bowl, A N B A championships and standing cup, if you will, the sports of the OS of scientific publishing. This is a paper from Matthew killings worth, and then gilbert IT was publishing two thousand ten, but is still considered a classic. And this paper, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, has a number of very important points going to paraphrase a certain elements of IT for you because they say essentially what I would like you to know far Better than I could um than I could say so first 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 happens 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 certainly my experience although I must say I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever ver that other animals don't do IT also so my apologies, killings worth and gilbert, but I be happy to go to to toe with you on that. I am not aware of any data that prove one where 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, a 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 happening on their own internally.

That's the default network. This study was important. In fact, he was a landmark study because they did IT right about the time that smart phones became a widely available in in use.

So again, twenty ten. So they basically pinked 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 was thirty four years, but there was a range, mean, of course, being average, but there were a range of, of, of different ages and so forth.

And at any moment they asked people, what are you feeling right now? And they also ask 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 century trying to probe what people were thinking about. And they also addressed that. And they came up with A, A kind of A A bubble chart, if you will, where the bigger the bubble, the more answers came back about one particular thing. And they assessed whether not people were happy you're not in that moment or sad or not, whether not they were focused on what they were doing or not. There are a lot of bubbles in this charts are 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 paraphrase, 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 away, far out on the horizon here, people claimed, and I am 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 pinned on their iphone. Now, why the iphone was there with them at that moment? I don't know that wasn't included in this description of the study, but all the other activities, glooming and self care, listening to the news, watching television, relaxing, working at, during all those activities, people claim that their mind wandered a lot.

And then they also assessed, of course, their mood and help 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 wonnerful 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 predict 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, oh, no, I mean, if you're working and you don't like you're work and you're 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 he 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 interactivity and having our mind elsewhere LED people to report themselves as feeling more unhappy in that moment. And when you total this 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 have been taught, which is, you know, think good thoughts, you know, trying to suppress bad thoughts, to have a good internal landscape and create a good narrative that is all true. But equally, if not more important, is to have the ability to be fully engaged in what you are doing at a given moment that is the strongest of being happy. And there were several other studies that followed up on this, but they're conclusion that they put in the final short paragraph of this pair, I think really captures IT beautifully.

They say in here, i'm coding 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 in a moment part is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

So I know i'm not alone in believing that this paper, a wondering mind, is an unhappy mind. We will provide a link to this paper in the showed captions is absolutely key in understanding why a meditation practice is so important, because of meditation practice is really about adJusting your place along that into acceptive extra acceptive, continuing to what you happen to be experiencing in that moment. And while most people think of a meditative practice as focusing on what's going on internally with your eyes close through the ice center, focusing on your breathing and set up for any number of minutes or.

Even an hour longer, there are other forms of meditation in which your extra reception dominate, 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 killings worth and gilbert, this a wondering ing mind is an unhappy mind seriously.

And I know a number of 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 divorce 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 not you tend to be interactive, timely, dominant, right, that you tend to pay more attention to your boys sensations or extra accept vely dominant. And again, if you don't know the answer to that question, there is 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 not your attention tends to fleet two things outside of you, right, cars honking or going by people in the room, or whether not you tend to be able to focus on your internal landscape to the exclusion of extra action 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 settle up, 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 somebody who is never meditated and you like to develop a meditation practice. I suggest that you do a test of whether or not you are more interaction, timely dominant, or extra accept, timely 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 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 not your attention in perception gets pulled to something external to exterior tion. And again, that will vary depending on circumstances 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 or internally.

Now I should say that there is no technology, at least not that i'm aware of absence of F R I machine, in which case you are inside an F R I machine, what you do this. But unless you are in that experiment, and most of us aren't, there is no technology that can tell you, for instance, whether not you are into accept vely dominant or extra accept vely dominant in whether not the ratio is no seventy five to twenty five or what have you at any given moment, you have to assess this objectively. However, if you sit down for instances and you notice that you can equally split your attention between internal sensations and external sensations, or whether not you find yourself pulled into external sensations when you're trying to focus in word, or you find yourself pulled inward when you're going 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 how you would do this. You would stop in some way. So set a light 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 I sent, 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 arise, should you mediate in a way to enhance that interaction t of 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're in like a tree, or or maybe you in I um you know an object or a plant or something else in your immediate environment to try and cultivate or enhance your extra accept of awareness? That's up to you, but my bias would be one in which you work against your default state. Again, the defauts mode network is where you land on this into acceptive extra acceptive continuum is going to lead to more mind wandering, whether when you encourage or we could even say, force yourself a little bit to anker 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 newer circuits. You are engaging so called neural plasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience. 一会 deliberately engaging a shift along that continuum to make this Crystal clear。

What I mean is this, let me give an example. I were to sit down, and I want to do some meditation. Let just say three minutes of meditation. There is good evidence that even three minutes of meditation can be beneficial for a variety of things, including enhanced focus and enhanced anxiety management. What's I sit down and I noticed that I can really focus in word 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 the state that i'm particularly good at that at that moment or maybe just a natural ability.

Well, then I would opt for three minute meditation practice in which I deliberately extern 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, to, whatever he 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 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 I could be longer where i'm deliberately trying to focus my perception on events at the level, the confines of my skin and internally. Why do I say this? Well, i'd love to use the phrase any time with kids when they say this is really hard or something sing's chAllenging, or adults will say, that's really tough.

Well, as my graduate advisor used to say, that means you're learning if something we're easy, if you can perform any activity or thought I said a well, then there is absolutely zero reason for your neural circuits to change. It's the friction. It's the feeling that something is hard, that turns on the enormous variety of mechanisms that the level cells that set a that allow you to potentially change 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 meditative practices that are not your default, okay, to essentially go against the grain of where your interaction tive bias or your extra acceptive 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 interaction tive biased meditation. And later in the day, you aren't. I actually believe, based on the data that i've covered, and we will get into a few more papers about this, and my lab is actively working on this as well, that a meditative practice can be made far more effective.

That is, I can invoke more neural plasticity, 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 and you're funding that, everything's very distracting.

Well, then that would be a great time to do some interactive, focused meditation where as if you are really in your head on your looping thoughts about the past and present, maybe you're even an obsessive thought. Well, that would be a terrific time, an ideal time, really to do a short meditation, focus on something external to you in both cases, whether not you will focus on interaction tive bias or extra acceptive 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, that is, you are 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 to suppress your bias toward being more interaction tive or extraction tive.

Now I think that's immensely beneficial both for the immediate changes that your 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 plastically, more changes in the brain circuits that under liar default de network and lead to what I called trade 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 golden and, uh, Richard Davidson. I've done a terrific work in many writings and many ted talks that said about meditation.

I would say that circa twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, this book really captured, would I believe, to be the 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, excuse me, since twenty seventeen. In fact, most of the papers that i'm going to talk about, our papers that were published after twenty seventeen.

But again, there's a wonderful book where they very clearly distinguish between state changes and trade changes. Trade changes being the more long lasting ones. My read of this book in the literature that follows is again that when you sit down to meditate, IT is going to be most effective.

To do that into acceptive extra acceptive bia successful, ask yourself whether 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 focus on what's going on around you, that pushes you more internally. Now I think most people are familiar with how to do an interaction tive biased meditation.

Again, that would be setting a timer, maybe don't have be, and set a timer. You just sider light 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 and often and discussed extra acceptive based meditations. You pick a focal point outside or beyond the confines of your skin.

So that could be for sin. 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 with fatigue a little bit when you concentrate your visual focus at that location.

I want to remind you that IT is perfectly OK, 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 is not just beaming, uh, a particular location in space and holding your islands open.

I've been accused many times of not blinking very often. That's for other reasons. It's part of the way access memory about what I want to say. 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 accept bias meditation, there is absolutely no reason why you wouldn't look away from that location every once in a while in the same way that if you've focused on internal fight with your eyes closed and focus on your breathing, everyone, and while your thoughts will skip away from that breathing or from your third, I center, in fact, and this is discussing the book, alter traits, but by many other people as well. One of the key elements of any meditative practice, whether not its interaction tiv focused or extra acceptably focused, is that it's really a refocusing practice. The more number of times that you have to yankee yourself back into attending or perceiving one specific things in other, is the more times your mind wonders and you bring IT back.

Actually, the more effective that practice is. Again, if you can just focus on one location with laser precision and your mind never darts away from that and you don't have to bring you 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 your mind just wonders. Just remember, every time you scruffy ourself and pull yourself back to focusing on some location externally or focus back on your breath through your third I 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 refocus, you're going up one more level, another stare, another stare, another stair. And I think that will move you away from the kind of judgmental process of thinking up like I can't focus on anything pretty soon.

Where 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 born out in the new imaging data. 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 over time.

There's a classic study about this in very experiences meditators that was done in japan where they had people with varying levels of meditation ability. So some were never meditated, others who were really expert meditations with many hundreds, if not thousands of hours of meditation under their built. And they had those people listen to twenty 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 twenty tones, where, as most people kind of attenuators what's called habitat to the tones that by the ten or eleven tone, 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 imaging studies have shown that they don't have Better focus such that they're staying in a very narrow trench. A focus what they are doing is they're exciting focus on 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 Better training you're getting.

So earlier, I mentioned doing this into acceptive biased or extra acceptive biased meditation for three minutes. Why did I say three minutes? Well, three minutes seems like a reasonable number for most people to do consistently, you know, once a day.

And in fact, there awesome studies of one minute meditations and three minute meditations and ten and sixty. My laboratories 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 starting to arrive. And so well, i'm not pointing in 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 your 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 taken this to the extreme to say that, you know, 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 I H I started using because my my dad is a big fan of IT, and he does now fairly long meditations. He's doing about ten or twenty minutes at least every other day, and often every day.

And he convinced me to check out the waking up APP that same Harris put out um I looked at IT I think some of IT sits behind a pay wall but you can access much of IT or least do a trial and try IT out without having to get behind that pays well. They're not a sponsor of this podcast I should mention, but I decided to use the waking up up 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 medications can be quite brief. Some of them are a minute long, two minutes long, summer are longer or even quite a bit longer. That APP, I think, includes a variety of meditations that really encompasses um the huge range of possibilities that are possible with and that, at least by my experience of the waking up up, has LED to my most consistent meditation practice.

And of course, I would love to get sam on the podcast as a guess that we could talk about the sort of underpinnings of the waking up up and his views on everything from meditation to I know he's big in the discussion about freewill and consciousness sum of the very deep and somewhat abstract discussions really hope to get same on the podcast at a time not too far from now. Meanwhile, we've never made in person, but I absolutely love the waking up up and and I know my father does as well. And I know many of you already use IT.

If you haven't try to already. I really do encourage to check IT out. I want to talk just briefly about this third I center business because IT turns how to be pretty interesting.

The third ee is actually a named has been given to another neural structure um where I should say structure because it's not strictly neural and that's the pioneer gland. This has an interesting history. I promise i'm not taking off on attention 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 mere symmetric representations of the same things. What do I mean by that? Well, you have a prefrontal cortex on the right of prefrontal cortex on the left, and they actually do slightly different things.

Language is sometimes later ized to one side. But in general, for every structure, the eve on one side of the brain, you have the same structures 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 melanthon in which, at night, when he gets dark secrets, melatonin. And that melatonin makes you sleepy. IT helps you fall lesly, but not stay asleep.

Decor right? The philosopher decor asserted that the panel was the seat of the soul, because I was the one structure in the brain that he saw was not on both sides of the brain, was only one of them. And in the middle, I don't know if it's the seed of the soul or not.

I'm not in a position to make assessments like that. But what do we know about the point? The panel, as I mention, involved in releasing milestones. IT does a few other things as well, but he is also considered the third I for a couple of reasons. One is that IT responds to light, although in humans, not directly.

So in birds and lizard and snakes, they actually either have a thin scholar, believe or not, two holes in the top of their school, they allow light to go directly in. If you look at the head of a snake, I can go directly into their brain through these holes and activate the panel el to suppress military and and and control their wakefulness sleep rythm. In birds, they don't have holes in their scope.

They have very thin skulls and believe they are not like to penetrate the thinness of those of the skull in many birds and communicate information about time of day, even time of year. And that's translate to hormonal signals such as militant, a release from the pioneer. And so the pony eels have been called the third eye because it's a light sensitive organ inside the brain.

In humans, the panel el sits deep, deep, deep to the surface. And light cannot get in there. In fact, of light can get into your brain unless you are a part of a specific experiment where that's the intention.

Or you're having A A surgery or something that sort, then you've got serious issues happening. That pony el sits deep, deep, deep near what's called the fourth venture go. And IT absolutely should not see light directly.

So the idea that the pioneer is the third ee and humans is not true. It's just isn't true. So anytime someone is o the pony les your third that's not the third eye center that people are referring to. When they talk about meditation, you'll see a number of different forms of art where somebody will um there will be a picture of a face and the eyes will be closed or sometimes open。 They'll be literally a third die like a psychology ye in the middle of forehead that has been proposed for many thousands of years to be quoted, quote, the seat of our consciousness.

Now that's interesting, because that real estate behind the forehead, as he turns out to be the prefrontal cortex, which we know from legion studies and stimulation studies, if you remove that brain area, people become very, they are not thinking intentionally. They don't become deliver, in fact. And this is kind of an era 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 out. 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 was a sensory motor 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 hard time suppressing behaviors at seta.

So the third center as the seed of consciousness in 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 panels, 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 touched the top of my hand, I can feel that if I want to, since my heart beat, if I work out IT, I can feel that if I want to sense how I feel internally at the level of my stomach, is that full as the empty and my hungry, as IT acido IT does IT acre, as I feel pleasant and said A, I can sense that. And that's because we have sensory neurons on our skin, in in our body, at that, we also sensory neurons in our 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 whose wide away can be poking around in there. And they don't need any anesthetic on the brain itself.

They need anesthetic for the on 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, exterior tion or internally interaction tion, touch eta.

But by focusing our perception or 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 attention, 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 and focusing on that coding, third I center 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 and perceiving our sensations because they are on there, our thoughts and our emotions and our memories are mushroom up. The more than I Better way to put IT would be that they guiza up and take on more prominence in our perception. What I mean by this is that Normally 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 going to fire the same. But more of my perception goes there. Similarly, i'm thinking things all the time. You are two, 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 prominent, in my awareness and in my perception. And so this is why when you sit down to a meditation practice, if it's a meditation practice where you close your eyes, or you focused on that third I center, where you're focused on your brain as opposed to your bodily surfaces, something external to you, the thought seemed to come by in waves. And they can almost be overwhelming, very hard to, as is often described, just sit back and watch your thoughts go bye, because there are so many of them.

Actually, the best way to stop thinking is to really focus on something external, where to focus on sensation. That's less thinking than IT is perceiving senses. okay? So I don't want this to get to abstract.

When people talk about the third eyes center, they're not talking about the pony Y O. They're talking about permanent cortex. And when you direct your own attention to the very area of your brain that direct attention, there's nothing to sense there.

The only things that will become present to you, or feelings, emotions, that is thoughts and memories, and they will often arrive in what seems to be a very disorganized fashion. And the reason they arrive 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, our 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 ask people what are you doing and what are you feeling and how happy or how unhappier 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 interaction tive bias. They are focused more on what's going on internally than they are focus 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 yawed around by all the stressors of life IT set, set up. 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, includes what other people are saying. And doing that also can really enhance our sense of welding 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 preferences, cortex ACC, the insula. We also talked about the difference between interaction tion and extra reception, and the importance of assessing where you are alone. That continuum, and I should mention, of course, that you can be right in the ddd of that continuum. You might sit down to do meditation and find that you are snacked up in the middle of being able to attend the things outside of you, but also attending the things inside of you. In which case, I suggest in your meditation, that is either extra acceptive biased or into acceptive biased.

But as I mentioned earlier, if you find that you are more critical in your head or in your body, will then focus on an extra, accept the biased meditation to build up that set of circuits where as if you are more extra cept vely focused at any given moment, well then I encourage you to do an interaction, timely focused meditation practice. And as I mentioned earlier, there's this issue of how long to do a practice there. A lot of different data on these.

But some of the practices we've covered on this podcast before we had guests, for instance, highlighted the thirteen minute meditation that doctor r wenna sz zuko from new york university is laboratory has popularized. And they are popular zed IT, because they have a wonderful paper that we will provide a link to, which shows that a daily thirteen minute meditation, which is of the traditional third ae, interactive, timely, biased, focus on breathing and focus on that location directly behind one's forehead, or both. That meditation done daily for about eight weeks, maybe 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 were looked at very specifically. So that's a terrific one. And you maybe asking yourself, you need to do the full thirteen minutes.

Could you get away with five minutes or three minutes with? My laboratory has shown benefits and stress reduction improvement and sleep at seta with a five minutes 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, 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 ten or fifteen minutes, maybe in thirty 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 ten or fifteen 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, ten minutes in the next and so on.

And so fourth, just like with exercise, the key component is consistency. And this is born out in all the data that's covered in alter 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 pass or find sliced the meditation practice.

And indeed, we've been doing that. We've talked about interaction tive versus extraction tive 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 breath work. Breath work has really grown in popularity in the last five, ten years, and there are many reasons for that. First of all, if we need to credit wim half, or can we call him, I think, appropriately, the great when?

Hf, you know, certainly there were people before wim who are doing deliberate breath work and talking about deliberate breath work, but IT was really about two thousand and fifteen or so that wim hf started to grow in recognition in popularity for a particular style of breathing, which in the laboratory we call sickly c hy ventilation. I know there are other names for the confirmation traditions he named IT or people named IT after him a one. Hf, um when half, 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 er icebergs long as period of time buried in ice up to his neck at sea but who's also expert in the use of breathing in particular ways in order to manage and maneuvre through those chAllenges.

And he started speaking about different patterns of breath work, in particular the use of single hyvert lation deep, deliberate breathing so big in sales excells big hand hells x sales in the laboratory. Again, we call that sick c hype of ventilation is very clear from studies both done on wim specifically, but on the general population as well by my lab and other labs, that that pattern of cyclical yp ventilation are deliberately breathing deeply and repetitively, typically in through the nose, out through the mount, generate a lot of a drennen, or causes a drennen released from the brain and body. IT coin could heats up the body.

Indeed, IT raises body temperature. But the liberation of a journal does a number of things to shift the state of the brain and body that more or less is what wim hop breathing is. Although we hop breathing, or some people call IT two more breathing, or cyclical ventilation, is not a pattern of breathing typical of most meditations that have been discussed, at least not in the research literature.

Now there's not to say that second cup of ventilation can be incorporated into meditation practice, but vim of breathing A K sick kype ventilation tumor 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 sync breathing of in hail x hail in hell excel, which is synthetic, or in some cases, doubling up on inhales, and then excelling. So in hill, in hill, XL in hell in L, X, L, or controlling the duration of in hill breath hold x sale, breath hold, repeat, so called box breathing, where the inhale hold, the excel in the hold are of equivalent durations. Any number of different breathing patterns, slow cyc breathing, box breathing, a kinds of three to six seconds in, holding for two seconds and seven seconds out.

Regardless of what kinds of breathing one uses, there is a tendency during most meditation practices to slow one's breathing and or control one's a breathing 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 relatives. Our x sales, when we don't deliberately excel, that is Normally we just passively excel, but we actively in hill, I repeat that Normally when we're not thinking about breathing, we deliberately inhale.

There's A A motor command that sent to inflict belongs and then we passively excel. But in many brethren, actual or meditation practices, we actually actively excel as well. When when we do that, a number of things happen.

First of all, IT forces us into into reception. why? Because the die frame, the muscle that helps in move longs, essentially encode a specific cadences of breathing or depth of breathing as one wood 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 air 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 dire frame, 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 the reception. So breathing and specific patterns of breathing of along for the ride in meditation. But the reverse can also be set that when we focus on our breathing, we shift to interruption and away from external events doesn't mean we can't still pay attention to the external events.

We can still extra accept. But at least some portion of our perception of our attention shifts to into reception. 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 meditation 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 preference tal cortex to a specific location, either on the surface of or within our body, or external to our body, or both, but typically wonder the other, than 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, is we just default to however we happen to be breathing? Or should I be deliberate? That is, should we be controlling the depth? And the? And I do believe that based on what we know about the capacity for specific patterns 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 not one is focusing on into acceptive perceptions within our body or extra acceptive perceptions. So that reasons the question, how should we breathe during meditation? Well, there is, again, no simple one size fits all rule there.

But there are some general rules of respiration physiology that can help us access and develop meditation practice that is going to best serve our goals. And since this is not an episode all about respiration, and we will do on, 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 construction, 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 about to begin your meditation 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 then 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 not you are leaning more interactive, timely or receptively, you also need to ask yourself, do you need to calm down or want to calm down, or do you want to be more alert at the end of your meditation session? Or maybe you want to go into a state of deeper relaxation and then exit with more alertness? The way to do that is very simple, using breath work and specific patterns of breathing.

And here is the general rule that is supported by all the aspiration 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 repeater physiology in the future.

Essentially, if your in hails are longer and or more vigorous than your x sales, then you will tend to be more alert, or you'll shift your brain body towards a state of more alert. This is simply based on the way that the neural circuits, like the preparing your nucleus and the paraphrase nucleus that govern respited physiology and alertness, simply the way they work. They communicate with brain areas that released, nor journal, nor happeneth IT sea.

In contrast, if you emphasize longer duration end or more vigorous x hails relative to an halos, you will tend to relaxed more. You will tend to calm your ervy system. Now, you might be saying, okay, I understand what IT is to make an in hae longer than my x sale, but how do I make IT more vigorous? What simply means drawing more arandia lungs more quickly? Then you allow yourself to explain that air.

So an example of inhale biased breath work would be. So there's an active emphasis on the in hill 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 x sales relative to your in hills and you can even make them active excells, so you can be in hill.

XL, that's going to shift your nervous system in the direction of more calm. And of course, if you would like to stay at the level of alertness, A K, A commons, because those are two sides of the same. See, saw the same continuum, if you 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 commons.

Well, then you would just keep your inhaling your excel relatively baLanced in terms of duration. Now the introduction of things like breathing holds with box breathing or width breathing, typically it's twenty five or thirty deep in hill excells deep in hill excels, and then excel all your air, hold your breath for fifteen to sixty 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 your attention to the breathing practice, especially if it's not sick. Ic, if it's not inhales follow excels sick breathing is where inhales always follow. X sales follow inhales follow.

X sales actually relies on a specific brain center called the prebrow singer complex discovered by jack filled minute USA. He was a guest on this podcast previously. However, if you are doubling up on your in hill, so two inhales, and then an X L, A pattern of breathing. My laboratory is studied extensively well, that that relies on a different brain center, the parthenon al nucleus.

The point is that if you are engaging in non specific breathing, or you are deliberately emphasizing inhales or x sales or the vigor of inhales and exes at seta, 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 specific breathing practices by default, and our attention can drift to other things into acceptive or extra acceptive doesn't matter. We can just draft into, you know, how our body feels or something we see.

Or here in the room at, said a, when we are focused on our breathing and the breathing pattern is non specific or complex in some way. And that IT involves deliberate, voluntary commands, again, from those so called top down mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. Well, that, by design, require some portion, often a significant a portion, of our attention to be devoted to the breathing practice itself.

So what does this mean? This means that breath work 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 us. So for instance, if you are somebody who's very much causing your own head, right, we talk about this earlier.

You have to be or you're in a moment we are 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 external bias.

You should really focus on something external to you. And I would encourage you in natural sync pattern of breathing where inhales follow excells follow inhales follow excells. If, however, you are funding that, you're ve caught in the landscape of things happening around you and you want to ground yourself as IT 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 is grounding a real thing? Walking barefoot on the earth and magnetic fields and, you know and gravitational fields with gravity real, but you know, grounding. There is a lot of a 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 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 whats going on interaction timely. Again, i'm not aware of any place that this has been discussed in detail, such as this before. If there is A A research literate on this, please let me know.

My laboratories has been working on this extensively. I'm always looking for new colleagues and collaborators we we meaning daughter David speel, who's an expert in his nosis again who's been A A guest on the people in the podcast. And my colleague is time for psychiatry faces are associated chair of psychiatry world expert in his nose.

He's been on this podcast before. We have active research program focused on these issues. We are very much of the belief that a breath work practice itself can be meditating.

A meditation practice can include breathing. But the more that that meditation practice focuses on the breathing itself, the more into accepted biased that will be. Now it's very important, understand that an interactive, tive biased breath work practice will have a specific effect, which is to make you more interaction, timely, aware.

And if you think back to 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 intensive, you know, if they're stressed and they're not realizing until the end of the day they're just exhausted. More into acceptive awareness throughout the day can be very beneficial if, however, you are somebody who is overly focused on your bodily sensations, well, then more extraction. Tive awareness is important.

And this brings us to a yet larger theme, but a theme that I think really emphasizes what particular types of meditation practices are going to be best for certain people, especially people who are using meditation to combat certain chAllenges, in particular, mood base chAllenges or sleep base chAllenges or focus base chAllenges. I haven't listed off all the positive benefits of meditation yet in this episode, but there are many, many, many. In fact, there are now tens of thousands of scientific study 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, their known benefits of a regular meditation practice for reducing, inflaming sidelines, even improving outcomes in cancer, reducing pain, improving mood, reducing the symptoms of adhd and clinically diagnose H, E. And on and on and on and again, rather than focus on all those beautiful studies today, which are basically point to the fact that some meditation practice done regularly, even if its 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 body changes occur when we do a meditation practice, and perhaps more importantly, what really constitutes a meditation practice. We have this thing about a continuum of perception.

We also now talking about breathing. There's another component that i'd like to raise now, which we could say is the third major component if if the first one that I raised was interaction tive versus extra acceptive biased continuum. Second, being breathing is is going to be default or deliberate breathing is a coming natural cats or unnatural cats.

Again, no right or wrong. I just depends on what your goal is. There's a third component, and this is a component again that hasn't really been formalized in the literature.

But that doctor speaker nie working hard to formalize through some research and um 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 interaction, tion and association. So now all of you know what the reception is, but most people probably don't know or don't realize what association is.

Often we hear about association, sometimes called that this association. Some people pronounced association. Guess what, despite being corrected many times for each of those pronunciations, I checked with my colleagues or experts in association, or this association, and guess what, they're the same thing, tomato, tomato, potato, potato.

So i'm going to say, association. Some people say this association, like I disassociate. Other people say I associate.

okay? Both of those referred to essentially the same thing. Association is often talked about in the context of a negative event. And indeed, association is, unfortunately, or I should say, is adaptively associated with traumatic events, in particular violent or sexual trauma.

People were report feeling out of body or out of the experiences, during the experience or during a recollection of the experience. Association has also been described in terms of people who are in a traumatic accident. They see someone killed right in front of them. First responders will talk about associating when they arrive on a scene.

I don't want to provide resum imagery here because I know people can be pretty sensitive to this, but you know, showing up on A A the scene of a car crash and just seeing cards or incredible damage to to bodies or you know, this sort of thing. Association lies at the opposite end of a continuum with interactive tion. Now, earlier I said the interaction tion is on the opposite end of a continuum with extra action, but IT also is on the opposite end of a continuum with association.

We can provide some Better definition, perhaps, to make this cranston clear. And here i'm actually reading from an upcoming review. I feel comfortable reading from IT because on an author on the review, but nonetheless, into reception refers to a process by which your nervous system, meaning your brain and connections with your body senses, interprets, integrates and regulate signals, originate eating from within the body, and thereby provides a moment to moment mapping of your internal landscape at both a consciously 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 association can be thought of as the opposite of into reception. 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 resign on the continuing between interrex tion and association is somewhere in the middle. We don't want to be associated from life experiences, but we also don't want everything that happens in the world to profoundly impact our heart rate in our breathing.

We've yet 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, in clinical hip nosis or uh, falling in love, uh, wonderful experiences and sometimes also sad experience. Being able to feel one's s feelings depending on life's events is important, but being too associated, 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 the movie getting hit and they almost flinch as if they are getting hit. They see someone who scared or happy in a movie, and they feel scared or happy in a way that seems like they're along for the ride a little bit too much.

This is important because what IT speaks to is the ability for that member, way back to begin the epsom, that A C, C, that enter a singular cortex and the insula gonna put tal cortex. I 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, their sad is important to be sympathetic, maybe even empathetic towards them.

But let's not get pulled into the experience so much 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 they care about that upset.

I'm also going to be upset. Or somebody I care about is happy, i'm also going to be happy. Or they are scared, 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 experiences and the experiences around us. So why am I raising yet another continuum? right? We always have the one continuum of interaction tive extractive awareness.

Well, if we want to think about how meditation can serve our mental health in our ability to focus, there's a very particular mental model that we can arrive that that incorporates this interaction tive associative continuum. Again, if you are extremely interactive tive, if you're feeling 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 dissociate event of things, you can see what's going on.

You can react to what's going on, but you're 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 associated again, sadly, this is often what victims of trauma report 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 automated ic arsehole, that is, fight or stress or panic. So let's talk about this model of interaction tion in association, and then a meditative practice that can be used to try and anchor us at the right location, where the 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 when you do imagine that where you are along this interactive to dissociate continuum is like a ball bearing.

Or you you represent a swear that can roll back and forth along the continuum. At one end you have pure interaction tion, you're just feeling everything. At the other end, you're completely associated.

Well, in this one version of the of 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 into reception, the other end you have association. I realized the number people listening to this, not watching this on youtube, so they can see that my hands are now the heal of my hands are together. My fingers of my hands are apart.

So IT looks like a vee, and you are like a ball bearing. Your state is like a ball bering at the base of that, you in a trench of perfectly baLanced into reception and association, 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 the outside world. You are in a perfect place of being able to make irrational decisions, and yet still feel your feelings won't be lovely when that be lovely, if we could be like that whenever we wanted to.

And Frankly, nobody is like that all the time. More typically, the model of mental health, in mood, in well being, in perception of self verses, others and internal versus external states is one of more of A U, A U shape, where at one end we have into reception, and at the other end we have association. 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 IT gets pushed from side aside. Maybe, you know, your heart races a little bit because of something bad or good and that bothering shift towards in the reception a bit more.

You notice that your heart is racing or perhaps at any given moment, you know your mind drafts a little bit while watching a movie or while talking to your partner or, well, your child is complaining about something and you're thinking about something else. And that all baring shift towards the dissociation of state of lobby. That is a mild former association.

And I think most people agree that being mentally healthy would involve this kind of u shaped model as well, where it's kind can shift back and forth, but it's not extreme. You're not going from into receptive, biased all the way to associated in any kind of extreme way. The barbering stays down near the base of that.

You then, of course, their states that we all Frankly go into from time to time where the continuation of interaction tion and association is essentially flat, where you are, Barbara, at one location or another, depending on whether not you're watching a movie that you're very grow stand or you're in a conversation with or in an activity with your partner or friend. Is that at that you very improved th, maybe matching their state, right? There are a number of states you can image matching.

One status is actually healthy and good. And then there are a number of conditions in life. And situations in life were being matched as someone else is conditioning, like you're getting yelled out and they're angry.

So then you're getting angry and then pretty soon, you know you're not in the best place alone. That continuing. And I think that for many people, they find themselves somewhere along that continue. And a number of practices, including meditation, including exercise, including getting a good night sleep, including therapy, including journals, including just doing activities like social engagement that you enjoy, are designed to sort of bring up the edges of that flat, continuing into more of A U 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 it's going on around you, is somewhere again, biased towards middle by curling up the edges of that continuum on either end IT biases that state toward the middle.

And then, of course, there is the extreme that I think almost everybody would agree is more less pathologic, which is one in which that continuum is no longer shape like a deep trench, like a vee. It's not shape like A U. It's not flat with edges curled up a little bitter, even flat. It's actually now convex IT looks like a mountain shape, a peak, and that little ball bearing at the top can neither drop all the way to one side of pure water reception. Just feeling beyond any ability to pay attention to anything else, just feeling one's 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 add of context inappropriate for what's going on around you or dropping to the other side of the continuum where you're so associated that you're not engaged with what's going around you, you're truly got checked out. That shape is one that I think almost all clinicians, if not all clinicians and most people would is pathologic because you are either completely checked out or you are completely absorb and 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 doesn't incorporate a lot of what we think about, what we think about mental health. And we talk about the ability to be mentally stable, to feel one's feelings, but to still be actively engage what's happening around us. And again, it's a continuum that spends from interaction tive awareness to association, where the extremes are pathologic and somewhere in the middle is healthier.

And then there are practices that bias us tored being in the middle, by default, water. Those practices, well, we know for sure that being sleep deprived, for instance, tends to take us away from that trend shape or u shape continuum or even flat continuum, and starts to make that continuum more convex IT takes tends to make us either feel like we're completely checked out and exhausted, or that we are completely lay bio. We are yanked around by whatever experience is happening.

We are 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 healthiest place, that is when we're getting enough quality sleep consistently.

IT tends to put us in middle of that continuum. Sleep deprivation does exactly the opposite. IT pulls us apart. And when he pulls us apart, it's not a real term. What IT does is IT tends to make that continue less concave, right, less bull shaped and more confident, more hill shaped, if not a peak mountain shape where drops us to one side or the other.

In addition, a meditation practice done regularly, because IT can allow us to become more interaction, timely aware, or IT can allow us to become more extra accept vely aware, which is really just another form of association. Again, association isn't always bad. Provide is not of 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 disgust, I should say, in pieces in different literature.

If you look in the clinical psychiatric literature, there's a wonderful collection of studies and reviews that will say that interaction of warehouse 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 say that association is terrible. In the case of trauma, in fact, I can put people in positions of repeating a behavior or over and over that's damaging to them.

But because they can disengage or they are associated from IT that they continue, the behaviour or association can be very adaptive and beneficial if IT allows people, for instance, to create some narrative distancing. So they're not getting pulled in 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, you know use the prefrontal cortex and hey, wait.

And just because you are upset. Does not mean that I did something wrong. Let's look at the 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 mind wandering, actually is correlated with being more unhappy. That was the earlier study that we talked about, that study published in science.

Now, of course, meditation can make us more present, but if we do not pay attention to whether not we are becoming more present to the reception or extra reception, that is, the interaction tion or association, and we don't pay attention to whether not our biases, one of association versus and interception. We don't know where we are in the continuum. Well, then the meditation actually can make things worse, not Better.

In other words, if you somebody who has a tremendous amount of interaction 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 talk about this previously the podcast, but in that very study from when he is zuker z lab showing that thirteen minute day meditation is beneficial for focus mood.

Etta, it's also very clear that for a number of people that do that, typical third I meditation for thirteen 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 a sleep, which makes perfect sense because they're becoming more interaction, timely, aware. They are wrapped up their level of focus. A meditation practice typically is a focus and refocus practice.

And falling asleep involves turning off your thoughts in your focus and focusing purely on sensation. And then your thoughts kind of fragment, and you drift off to sleep. This is why am a big fan of using non sleeped a breast or yoga nedra. We will provide links to non sixty breast in organ eda protocols have talked about the man on the podcast before, but those protocols are not meditation per say. They tend to to have people defocus.

They are anti focus practices where, as meditation can to be a focusing practice along those lines, a meditation practice that is one that is extra acceptably bias, 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 internal ative, IT said, I 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 out, they feel IT actually can drive them down. The exact path is wrong for them.

So today's discussion is about meditation, and we want to make sure that we are passing meditation in a rational way that matches the neurotic circuitry involved. And more importantly, for sake of practical purposes, that you are asking yourselves the right question, are you into accepting vely or extra accept vely biased? Do you tend to associate or do you tend to so feel everything in a big way, right? I've heard this term of you hypersensitive people or things that sort in, yeah, some of those are clinical terms, some of them or 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 dict, of course, by how well you slept t life experience at seta. So this interaction, ted to the city of continuum, is one that you need to address prior to any meditative practice. And again, the solution, or the answer of what to do in response to your answer of whether or not you are more in word focus or outward focus, again, is very simple.

Just do the opposite of where your bias lies. That is if you're tilted towards interactive tion, do an extra cept of focus. If you are more dissociative and you're uh that sounds sort of majority, that sounds bad, right? But again, if you are somebody who is more focus on events outside your body and you want to gain more intercept of awareness and feeling state, if you will, well then you want to do a practice, that third dic 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 in the answer that was Frankly a little bit complicated 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. No, I realized that that we all probably should enjoy sleeping.

I certainly do, but that is hard to get enough. Sleeping wouldn't be wonderful, for instance, to be able to get by on a little less sleep and still feel alert, arrested. First, 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 said zuck I, who was a guest on the hub roman 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 at terrific neuroscientist and researcher teacher at santa, and was a tourist guest on the podcast. I keep returning to this paper because they used so many measures and they were very throw and the results were really interesting. Again, this is the thirteen minutes a day guided meditation session.

I should just mention that the control group in the study listen to a podcast for thirteen minutes that did not um improve attention, memory, mood, emotion, regulation um IT set a as much as meditation did which is not to say that podcast aren't useful I won't mention which podcast 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 base tools were welcome to look at the paper and see which podcast they used is a quite a well known podcast um which is an interesting podcast but he didn't change the brain in any fundamental way in this third session where as thirty minutes of daily meditation did and again, something I mentioned earlier, but very important to reemphasize 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 in sleep involves focusing less.

There are other studies, however, that i've shown, or that asserted, rather, that doing two twenty 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 eight. Some people would actually manage probably Better in terms of focusing in alertness if 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 a huberman lab dot com. Everything is time stamping that episode other is perfect, your sleep. And then of course, we've done episodes on sleep with expert guess like doctor Matthew Walker from musee berkeley, all of those that can be found that you really lapped up common all formats through all time stamp.

With that said, this assertion that has been made many times over and certain ly in the popular press that regular meditation can produce ones overall sleep need is controversial. For the following reason, some groups find the indeed, that is the case. And the interpretation is that the stress reduction that's brought about by regular meditative practice, in this case very regular, tends to be one or more typically two twenty minute per day meditation sessions.

That's quite a lot, I think, for most people, if you think about forty minutes isn't that much time overall, but very few people will stick to that twice a day. Twenty minute meditation practice very consistently. Well, the idea is, 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 courtesy increases associated with reduced sleep and leading people to be able to function cognitive ly and physically Better on reduce sleep than they would they not been doing the meditation practice.

So that simple way of putting this is that if people meditate regularly, that's reducing stress. The reduction and stress is reducing cordian corzo healthy. But IT should be researched early, part of the, 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, sort of inoculate yourself somewhat against the unhealthy pattern, of course, all release. And as a consequence, either the sleep that people get is deeper, and or the total man are sleep that they need is reduced. Now a lot of people took that result and interpret IT is saying, well, if you can't sleep, then you can just meditate.

So one night you don't sleep where you have trouble sleep ing, 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, that is a practice called yoga nedra, which literally means the yoga sleep IT is a practice of doing not so much of focus meditation, but more of a body skin, focusing on the sensation of the body and actually trying to turn off that prefrontal cortex are reduce its activity. Yoga eja scripts can be found on youtube and elsewhere. They are paralleled by a similar practice that i've talked a lot about called n sdr.

Non sleep deep pressed. I put them out into the world, a short one that ten minutes long. You can just simply go to youtube and put in n sdr and my last name, he, there's one there. Again, all of this is completely zero cost yoga edra. N N sdr have been shown in a fair number of studies.

Not as many has been done on traditional meditation, or I should say, third entered meditation, our mindful this meditation, but have been shown to replenish levels of certain neuromodulators like doping and reduce cortile, reduce the stress warmond at least as much. And by my read of the literature, significantly more than with traditional meditation. And there is a nice paper that we will provide a link to.

Which is entitled the yoga eda practice shows improvement and sleep in patients with chronic insomnia, a analyzed 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 in somalia. The key result, I believe, in newspaper, although there are many, is that, quote, sliver court is all reduced statistically significantly after yoga edra.

What do I mean by that? There was a statistically significant reduction in cortisol l levels, the stress hormones, immediately after the yoga eda practice that we believe would be paralleled by a very similar, if not equivalent, practice of N S D R N. Sdr is a lot like organiser, but removes a lot of the kind of um which is called this or mystic language in the intentions that focuses more on the physiology and the body scans there.

You know, I want to acknowledge that yoga ea has been around for thousands of years and was certainly there before. N. S. T. R. I also want to acknowledge that and this was brought also in altered traits that sometimes language can be a barrier toward people embracing practices.

Fact, this was recognized by john cabot zin when he created what he called mindfulness based stress reduction practices, or M B S R, which were simply mindfulness meditation to reduce stress. But he called the M B S R mindfulness bed stress reduction as a way to bring IT into the clinics that would otherwise perhaps be averse to something called mindful, this meditation. Again, this gets more to the sociology and the cultural aspects, then IT does to any specific utility of one practice verses another. Here's to take a way 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 excEllent behavioral practice for which there are terrific data, meaning data that show that a stress form, moon quarters all can be significantly reduced as well as certain other transmittals can be replenished as well as and this is key and covered in this paper that i've mentioned A A few moments ago on that the total amount of sleep that you need can be reduced at least somewhat well. Then yoga ea or in n sdr. Practice done, Frankly, any time of day is going to be beneficial, whether if your goal, I believe, is to increase your ability to focus, to improve your mood, and perhaps most importantly, to be able to manuvre yourself in a deliberate way along the interaction tive extra acceptive or into acceptive associated continuum that we've talked about so much.

And to really shift your default mode network from one of being a mind wonder to somebody who can focus and who, Frankly, is happier, well, then a more traditional third die center type meditation, or a more traditional extra cept of focus meditation would be beneficial. Again, which one of those you choose, either focusing in order or focusing on a point outside of you, again, should be dictated by whether not you tend to be into accept vely biased or extra receptively biased. If you want to get Better at sleeping, you want to get Better falling a sleep, and you want to replace sleep that you've lost, and put that in quotes so that my colleagues like Matthew Walker don't come after me with, what would you come after me with math? Probably with an alarm clock, and I don't know, blankets in a pillow for something that sort.

In all seriousness, it's very clear that replacing sleep that we've lost is an area of research, the seal active on ongoing. But N S D R N organ edia are very promising, if not downright useful, for replacing sleep that you've lost. Certainly, the small amount of data that exists now point to the fact that they are not, the least of which is a beautiful study published out of skin and avia showing that a thirty minute yoga eja A K N S D R practice can replenish levels of doping, which puts people on a position to be more action oriented in focus that that are when they come out of the yogi re.

So certainly very useful practice is a form of meditation. We could call a meditation ish. But yoga ea and n sdr, not typically what people think about when we talk about meditation.

Of course, this is an episode about meditation. The reason I bring up the nsd rs. That many people meditate to enhance their sleeping body, to reduce their total amount of sleep need.

IT appears that meditations probably not ideal for that in comparison, the yoga eja N N sdr. But meditation is excEllent, if not superb, for adJusting the default on network tored more happiness by being more mindful in present and for placing oneself in that healthy model of interaction. Tive association continue.

So we covered a lot of information, and I like to think that i've given you some key decisions to make in developing a meditator 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.

It's going to allow me to feel arrested 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, too anxious or too exhausted at at a and for those people, I would say a practice like N S D R yoga edge will be immensely beneficial, as will more traditional form of meditation. I also wanted to just remind everybody that an APP that guides meditation also with some information and some intention setting, such as the waking up up from sam Harris, can be immensely beneficial. I've certainly founded to be beneficial.

I know millions of other people have as well, so encourage you to check that out. We talked about determining where you are on these continues of into reception. Next reception, order to dictate what particular type of meditation practice you should do in a given moment, whether not you should focus your vision in word with ice cloth or focus your vision in your attention, outward being a key component.

Whether not you should do clic breathing, which will allow your focus to be off your breathing somewhat easier than if do non specific breathing, if you're double up on in and hills or x cells, whether not your breathing is getting natural or not. And of course, you need to determine whether 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 enhancer level of focus, that doesn't necessarily mean that IT won't be relaxing.

You could do locate in breathing. Third, I meditation can be very relaxing, and yet it's a focus and refocus practice recently like yoga, edra and n sdr is going to be more along the lines of replication ing yourself, replacing sleep that you've lost or maybe even reducing your sleep need. On previous podcast, I talked about hip nosis, in particular the episode doctor David speer, associate chair of psychiatry.

I don't want to get into hip nosis now, but just understand that hypnosis is distinct from breath work, from yoga edra, from N S D R N, from meditation, even though IT includes some of those components, like focusing your attention, IT involves actually directing your visual attention outward and inward. To go into the hip nosis and involves some breathing of a particular kini involves a specific image, etta. But hypnosis is distinct because hy nosis is really designed to fix or address a specific problem, whether meditation in sdr, yogananda IT said, are typically or not, they can help fix problem such as anxiety, sleep issues that that, but they generally are not directed towards particular line of thinking.

They can be, but typically they are not. Whether hypnosis, almost always, especially in the clinical context, not stage ship nosis, but the clinical context for which there's a lot of research to show. You can, for instance, help with quitting smoking and literally a quite grouping of the effectiveness for smoking sensation with something like the revery 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, sa pnoc is is really great at dealing with specific issues and problems. And tackling those meditation tends to be focused on other things. No pon intended.

I'm using 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 want to offer you a particular form of meditation that incorporate 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 S T B, or space time bridging.

And the time component has to do with a very simple fact, which is when we focus our attention, visual tension or otherwise, on things close to our within our body, we tend to be fine sicking time. You can sort of think of your breath as more less the second hands on your clock of existence, where as when we tend to focus on things far away from us, we tend to parse or carve up time with in bigger bins. 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, the airplane is probably going five or six hundred miles an hour will go by very quickly. This is not a coincidence, 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 finally you slice up time, the more closely your attention is placed on yourself, the more closely you 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 within you actually slicing time more broadly, hopefully that makes sense. Fine slicing would be like slow motion, higher frame rate, looking in the distance you're actually taking bigger time being. So even though things look like they're movie more slowly, it's because your fidelity, your precision of measuring time is actually not as good as as if you only have the other hand on the clock.

So IT seems like IT moves very slowly hopely that makes sense to you. So there's a meditation practice that I call space time bridge in that incorporate everything that i've talked about today, IT baLances into reception and extra option, IT baLances into reception and association. And IT crosses 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 trying 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 had told me that I 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, and I can do this now, and I can close eyes and do the meditation, but i'll describe IT.

You close your eyes and you focus your attention either on your third, I center your breathing, and you try put one hundred percent of your perceptual awareness on to your breathing, or your third, I center for the duration of three breaths OK. So you're one hundred percent, or trying to be one hundred percent in the reception. Then you open your eyes, you focus on the surface of your body.

Some place I I find that i'm holding out my hand out of arm's 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 x sales while also focusing on my hands. Or you're splitting into reception next to reception as best you can, about fifty, fifty.

Then you subsequently look at some location in your immediate environment, maybe ten, fifteen feet away, and you focus your attention on that location while also splitting your attention so that you're still paying attention. You're breathing. You do that for the duration of three, but now you are in extra reception and interaction tion.

Then you focus your attention at some distance further way me with the further distance you can see. Now this is why it's useful to do out of a window or on a balcony or outdoors. You focus on the further point, maybe your horizon, some furthest point for the duration of three breast, well, 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 I 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 loading out in space. And you try and focus on that, your three breast, 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, pensive place, the universe.

And you do that for three breath, and then you close your eyes, and you go right back into into reception, and you might want to. And you do that for three breath, you focus your interaction tion for three breath, and you might want to march through these different locations a few times are back and fourth, if you like. But typically I will just do IT for one segment at purity reception, palm of hand, some distance in front of my horizon, whole globe universe thing back in the body, at at a.

Why is this useful? Why would this be useful? Why is IT IT all interesting? Or is this just some crazy idea? Well, the reason is useful, I believe, is that IT.

Has you deliberately step your awareness, your perception, through every position along their interaction? Tive extra acceptive continuing? Now, I did say to remain connected to, as theyll say, in the yoga classes, aware of, I guess we 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 is just hard to do. So I find the easier to just split my awareness from interruption to exter reception.

But by stepping through these different locations, and then deliberately placing your perception, your wearing, as back into purr interrex tion, what you do is you essentially are practicing or exercising this incredible ability that the human mind has to deliberately place your perception at specific locations along the interaction of extraction tive continuing. And I think this is a very useful because many of us, including myself, tend to get locked at one location along that continue. 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 are very focused on things out in the world, you often times can forget about your internal sensations and what's going on internally and being functional in work and life and relationship and in all aspects, including your ability to fall asleep, invoke, stepping yourself along these different locations, which again, are not just physical locations of third I center or 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 lecture or a podcast, or from listening to a lecture or podcast, and then going back into a mode of commuting, but making that commute either relaxing or maybe to work on your computer, connect with family, your friends at sea.

So much 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, just fancy nerd speak for saying being present and being mindful is a wonderful by product 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 in conversation and this, engage 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 interaction of awareness to one in which you are dynamically engaged with the things around you.

I realized 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 that works for you. If IT doesn't, that's fine.

I think that is a good one for people that find that a third eye center or breathing focus on interaction, tive 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 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 acceptive more in the dissociative end of the continuum and need to bring in a bit more of interceptor 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, and that's just simply not the way they want to feel. Now as we round up, do you 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 months and an enormous number of different features of meditation practices that we simply do not have time to go into and or for which the research on is not completely earned out yet for that reason, in future episodes.

And not long from now, i'm going to be sitting down with experts and meditation that include neuroscientists and clinicians, but other experts and meditation that certainly are versed in those topics and where they can point to specific research studies can certainly point us toward the utility of things like monstrous and intention as they relate to getting the most out of a meditative practice. So I usually await those conversations, and I hope you'll join me for those as well. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel.

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I cover science and science space tools, some of which overlapped with the content of the huberman in lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the human lap podcast. Thanks again for joining me for today's discussion about the science and practice of meditation. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.