This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, it's a great honor to be here, a great honor to be with you. We have had so many wonderful conversations. And also, I'm really happy because my mom is here, so we can thank her as well. Thank you, Mama. So... So just for context, we've had so many delicious conversations, if I may have the freedom to call them that, thinking, really trying to probe and what can science in general bring to contemplative practice? And there's huge interest in that, obviously. And that we really are, in our conversations, trying to dig into deep, deep into what are some of the core practices, sensibilities, mechanisms, understandings, misunderstandings, and then how can any science, be it behavioral, psychological, neural, shed light on what's happening?

[01:15]

And then also, you know, there's been a lot of movement from the contemplatives to help scientists figure out what to really focus on. And likewise... We're hoping that with time, as our tools become less blunt and more refined, and our thinking and our models, what can we contribute to contemplative training and to reducing suffering and confusion and misunderstandings? So I've prepared a few slides to show things, but also to kind of stimulate our thinking and our conversation. So should I, is that, go for it? Okay, here we go. All right. So there's obviously a lot that we can say, so this is just a little taster. But I always like to start with the motivation. So the motivation, if you look to the left, is our angst, our suffering, our confusion, our psychological, physical, and spiritual pain that everyone experiences, regardless if you have a clinical diagnosis or you're completely healthy.

[02:22]

And the question is, how do we get from this angst and confusion? distress to a mind that's more vivid, awake, curious, creative. And coming from a scientific perspective, one of the things that's been most exciting over the past 30, 40 years is really this notion of neuroplasticity. And very simply put, what we do every moment, the way we think, eat, love, hate, get out of bed, pay attention to our kids and our partners or not, is literally sculpting both the gray matter, the actual physical substance, the gray matter cells in our brain, and also the functional connectivity across different brain regions. So we are literally sculptors, which is why we really need guides, mentors, teachers to help us try to navigate the complexities of just being in this human body and mind.

[03:22]

So neuroplasticity suggests that we actually can sculpt our brains, that we can actually begin to influence the growth, the connectivity, the strength of how emotions are related to views of self and et cetera. So that's the overarching hope. And just in terms of quickly, just in terms of mental states, this is a fly that out of his or her grasping at sweetness and hunger and glucose and sugar goes to this beautiful little sticky flower and gets sticky. Stuck. Sound familiar? That's our mind. Hopefully not 24-7, but this stickiness of the mind, where we get stuck in automatic habits, long-grained automatic patterns that harm ourselves and others around us. So then the question is, how do we shift to this fluid stream in a mountain? What does that actually feel like in your research lab, your body-mind, to be fluid,

[04:24]

Spontaneous, present, curious. So I'm going to skip this. But simply put, we have about 9, 10, 11 different brain imaging tools. They all have pros and cons. You've probably heard of EEG, structural MRIs, functional MRIs, near-infrared, MEG. There's all these different tools. But the goal is, how can we go under the hood, so to speak, of the skull, and begin to directly probe the brain when people are doing different things? Thinking, feeling, sleeping, shifting. attention, emotion. So what I have here is just a few of the psychological functions that we're beginning to be able to tease out, test. For example, inhibitory control, right dorsolateral, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, super important views of self.

[05:29]

There is no self in the brain just from a neuroscientific perspective, but there are self-related processes that we can begin to probe. Salience. When we are really fully in the moment paying attention to something, there's a beautiful little network with three brain regions, anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate, always visualizing these brain regions in my brain, how that we actually get a fixed attention. So if you want to think about it, the word sati or smriti or what's mistranslated as mindfulness, that's a very poor translation. Salience is one aspect of that, the ability to say right this moment, boom, this is important. So there are brain networks that actually support that capacity. Language, how we talk to ourselves, we can actually see when people in silence are engaged in self-talk. There's a beautiful three-region brain network. Awareness of the body, reward circuitry, when we find something that's really attractive to us, there's a preserved circuit.

[06:31]

I'm going to show you that in a moment in more detail. That's what I'm going to focus on, this and emotions. and cognitive regulation. So when emotions occur, beautiful source of information, bottom-up signals that say, hey, trigger other brain networks to come online to enhance that emotion, increase its intensity or duration, or just the opposite, tamper that emotion down, shorten it, introduce a secondary emotion. So we can do that with attention regulation, where we place our attention. We can do it with cognitive control, or cognitive reappraisal, ways of thinking or using language and logic. And I'm going to show you a little bit of data on an acceptance, non-linguistic, non-logic-based approach to working with emotions that we just finished publishing a couple of papers on. So this is really simply to show that there are several different targets that are very common that we understand that make up our psychological inner life that we can begin to probe.

[07:31]

One of my favorite slides, one on body, this is a beautiful study done in Finland with a few thousand people, where what they did is they basically said over several days, I'm sorry, once, but with several thousand people, they said, hey, when you are in a state of anger, fear, disgust, happiness, where in the body do you sense it? Somatosensory... awareness, bodily sensations. And what's fascinating from this is that if you just look, for example, for a depression, blue, numb, happiness, a lot in the face and the heart, look at shame. You can really get the directly, just visually, you can understand that emotions as experienced in the body have a topography. And this is exquisitely designed through evolution in we human animals that this is information that we can experience from moment to moment to discern how am I feeling this moment?

[08:41]

How is this emotion different from the next emotion? Now, if you go even further than this and you get trained in empathy, loving, compassion, care, can I use this exquisite sensor of the body to develop the skill of and many psychotherapists and mothers and fathers already do this, how another person is feeling. This is one of the components that leads to the ability to step out of oneself and care for others as you become more and more refined in your awareness of the sensations and the feelings that other bodies are experiencing. In fact... some really cool research studies suggesting that there are specific areas of the brain, anterior insula, primary, secondary somatosensory cortex, the more that you can recruit bodily awareness of sensations, that's one of the building blocks for compassion. Boom.

[09:45]

Are there any people? I don't know if there are people who are new to meditation, but Dusana Dorje is a friend of mine, professor at... university in northern England. She put this together, and I just like putting this out just to help people make sure they understand that there are many misconceptions about meditation. Gom in Tibetan, Bhavna in Sanskrit. It literally means to cultivate seeds in the field of our mind to develop intimacy and understanding. And many of the misconceptions are that there's only one way to meditate, one type of meditation. It's all about being still and quiet. We know that's not true. You have to be able to empty the mind. Total misconception. Meditation will put you at ease from day one. Yeah, right. Good luck with that. But I'm saying this because I give many talks in many different areas, and people have completely distorted views of what this technology of training the mind is about. We know all there is to know about the benefits of all the different types of meditation.

[10:47]

No. Yeah, maybe there's like 5,000, 10,000 articles about mindfulness meditation, whatever that is, right? For people who know, what we call even mindfulness-based stress reduction is a complete hodgepodge, let alone different forms of compassion, different forms of non-dual, or even forms, many other more advanced visualizations. There's actually so much work to be done. And then it is only for reducing pain, stress, or anxiety. No. The other thing that we've talked a lot about is that in many of our conversations, is there a trajectory of learning, of development across the lifespan as you engage in contemplative training? We know that, just think about cognitive training or school, preschool all the way through high school, college, maybe graduate school. We know that there's very clear changes in the neurobiology and the chemistry of the brain that allows for increasing capacity to hold more abstract conceptual thought and to regulate your ideas and thoughts and emotions.

[11:56]

So here's just one very simple. That concentration, however you train that, is at the ground. And there's nothing necessarily spiritual about that, but the ability to engage in mental stabilization to make the brain, mind, body solid enough to be able to do more advanced practices. And there are many methods to do that. The next step is analytic language, logic, thinking. And I used to do this analytic debate at one of the monasteries where I studied for two years. And you really like think hard and really try to challenge and understand what are the words, the language, the concepts, and how do I define them? And that really supports the sharpness of the mind. to be able to penetrate through delusion, illusions, misconceptions. And that supports the practice. And all of this, I would suggest, is, again, just stepping stones to make the mind ready to do the actual work, the actual medicine.

[13:00]

And this is open to debate, which is really, for lack of a better word, we have many terms, non-duality, emptiness, shunyata, interconnectedness, but dissolving the distorted view of the nature of self. And that's something that we've talked about in many of our conversations. And this is a place where neuroscience, especially here, might be able to shed some light. More about that soon. So I already showed you, you already saw these beautiful images of the brain that were flashing across you. But just so that you understand what you are seeing. This image I selected because it won many awards for its real-time visualization of brain activity in a single person. So that's one of the cool things with computers, hard drives, is that we can begin to do these incredibly fast computations from EEG, MEG, two different brain imaging modalities, and visualize this activity.

[14:10]

Now, what all of that means is is much more complex. I would suggest that in the same way that we had Einstein develop models and theories that helped explain the universe, that is exactly what we need now in brain science. We do not have a unified model to put together our understandings of how the brain works. The brain is beautifully complex, I would say, Beautifully complex, but we currently, even with our great scientists and tools, it's beyond our current ability to conceptualize. Little pieces, yes, but all integrated, like even just consciousness, right? We still don't even know how to begin to probe that in the brain. Maybe gamma fluctuations in the cortex. But really, there are so many things that we don't understand. And part of it is that we need better tools. but we also need better models, which is why I mentioned Einstein, because he helped revolutionize and drive the thinking of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientists.

[15:17]

We need the same thing in brain science. We have lots of data, lots of information, but we need more thinking about how to put that all together. Another friend of mine who published this review, this is just a tiny little piece towards just one thing, mindfulness practice, again, whatever that means. the notion that he tried to just say that, what are some of the effects that we've observed? When you do contemplative practice, mindfulness practice, and even, yeah, let's say mindfulness practice, that you begin to demonstrate or enhance the ability to use the muscles of attention in different ways. That's labeled attention control. But even the word attention refers to many different forms of attention. So that's one place. Another place is emotion regulation, the ability to experience emotions, extract the juiciness of them, the information about what's happening, to not be afraid to experience those emotions and what they bring, and then to be able to regulate them skillfully, to become a Jedi master.

[16:22]

For your own benefit and then for the benefit of others, right? Stating the obvious. The other part is self-awareness. Using contemplative techniques, technology, practice, to really begin to go internal, and to start to decompose or at least observe and experience this fluctuating sense of self as it changes from moment to moment, how it's embedded in first in a memory of a moment ago, 15 years ago, a feeling of pleasant, unpleasant, a view of self that's positive or negative or beyond positive or negative, or moments... which we have every single day but we're mostly not aware of, moments where there is no conceptual self. Using brain imaging, we can actually tease that out. People usually cannot self-report it because we're going so fast, and the neurons that are supporting, and the neural circuitry that's supporting a notion of Philippe is reverberating on millisecond level.

[17:26]

Our attention is usually on the order of seconds. So one of the things that happens in contemplative practice or meditation is slowing down enough to begin to taste how each moment of a thought, an emotion, a memory, a grasping itself, a letting go of self, has a contour. It actually has a contour. But when we're going, we don't see it. It's all blurred out. But when you slow down, oh, there's a thought. Oh, there's a sensation. Ooh, there's a memory. Ooh, there's an emotion. And you begin to actually see how these things are like this, not like that. But that's where you need a teacher, technique, and hopefully a sangha when those contours drive you nuts to help you out. And so this is just a tiny little model.

[18:29]

We can go way more complex. We talked about the three poisons, right? Well, in our conversations. As a ground, you know, as a basis. And so I just picked out one. So this is the boar, ignorance or delusion. And then we have this bird or cock or cockerel, which really represents this desire, greed. grasping, afflictive attachment. And then the snake, anger, aversion, hatred. So here I just wanted to focus on the bird. And you'll see why in a moment. Grasping at what is pleasurable. On a very gross level, and then even on a very subtle level. And here, this is one of the circuits that got me into brain imaging, literally as a graduate student. I read a paper about drug addiction. Brain imaging giving people cocaine in the scanner.

[19:30]

And I said, what? And they measured, oh, here's the little symbol, the cue. You're about to get cocaine shot into your arm. These are all cocaine addicts that volunteered for the study. And then you see parts of the brain like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. It's coming. I can't wait for that juicy experience of cocaine. And it's this preserved network from the ventral tegmental area deep in the brainstem, blue, to the red, the nucleus accumbens, a tiny little region. That one circuit is the basis for all cockerel, desire, grasping, addiction, be it cocaine, be it alcohol. be it your pet, chocolate, sex, meth, coke, heroin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This circuitry. So when I read that paper, I was like, why the heck did evolution allow that to exist?

[20:33]

Why wasn't it teased out? Because it drives our repetitive behaviors. Thank goodness. Affiliation, love, food. We need it. But it's like almost every brain circuit. There's a positive aspect that really is related to the survival of human animals, us, and then there's a dark side. Always. Every single brain circuit has that. That this circuit, which is driven by dopamine, we know that a rat, if you give them a little lever to press, every time they get that, they get a squirt of cocaine in their head, they will stop all... positive, adaptive, survival behaviors. Sex, really cute rat over there, food, water, tickling. They'll stop all of that and just press the lever again and again and again until they die. We know it's happening probably just two blocks from here too.

[21:35]

It's the same brain circuit. Why was that preserved by evolution in our human brains and what can we do about it? And I would suggest... Part of the Buddhist training or mental training is to learn techniques to be able to modulate that reward circuit to make sure that we're using it in an adaptive way, not a self or other harmful way. But that circuit, you smoke crack, and literally within seconds, you are tuning the dopaminergic bursts through that one brain circuit. to potentially become addicted and to potentially engage in behaviors that are going to become so powerful that you're going to die and you're going to harm others. So that's what got me into neuroscience, fat circuit. And just to be clear, it's dopaminergic. But note, it's not just from the brainstem to the nucleus accumbens.

[22:38]

That dopamine is also going to many areas of the prefrontal cortex. Very important clue here. This is where all the training is having its effect initially. The primary effect of all of our school, education, modeling good parents, friends, mentors, meditation, insight, is hopefully touching this. You'll see it very clearly in the next slides. Dopaminergic, but it also goes up to these... brain regions of the prefrontal cortex, and this is the gateway through glutamate, a different neurochemical, that then modulates the activity of this circuit. This is the brain clue of all the positive training that we have done or tried to do, tried to develop to modulate our behavior, to modulate our reward circuitry, to modulate our addictive patterns. And I say, let's forget about all the crack, coke, meth, alcohol, chocolate. How about the Overlearned addictive patterns of thinking that I have.

[23:42]

So the hope, that's like, ugh, yuck. This is, there's hope. There's hope. There's a way to train. Remember, I'm back to neuroplasticity. This is our hope. To skillfully become a Jedi master. So let's go to the next slide. So this is a very simple model. to suggest that we have exquisitely tuned sets of brain regions, red, that are related to the ability to experience emotions. We experience emotions in the order of milliseconds, and they begin to drive our attention and even our behavior, even before we are consciously aware that I'm experiencing bliss, anger, jealousy, fear, craving. But then this sends a bottom-up signal to other parts of the brain to say, hey, cognitive and attention regulation, please come online to exert top-down influencing of that emotion state.

[24:47]

And in other non-human animals, they don't have the yellow and the green, but we human animals do, which is that we have views of self that influence the types of emotions that we experience and our ability to do top-down regulation. And then language, language network, influences how we talk to ourselves, think about ourselves. So from the inner critic, I suck, I'm not cool enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We all have these. Or the inverse of that. I'm going to be okay. I can handle this. I got this. The way that we talk to ourselves can literally influence the communication. So when this is run amok, not functioning well, We know that mood disorders, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, emotion reactivity without regulation. On the other hand, as you become a mature, fully developed human being, top down is that we have cognitive control, and then we can become more comfortable experiencing any and all emotions.

[25:53]

So I would suggest as you develop further, you actually experience more emotions, not less. Because each of those emotions are a free source of information. powerful source of information about what's happening from moment to moment to moment. And there we go. That's what we want to be, a Jedi master of how your mind, body, brain works. So when I work with my students, the graduate students, I always say, this is the research lab. You don't have to write a grant. It's free. It's always available. It's, in fact, always with you. And if you listen carefully, slowly, you can begin to hear the symphony of information that's coming from the body from moment to moment, from the mind, from moment to moment, and become more and more skillful at doing very small modulations. A couple more slides, is that all right? Sure. All right. So ready?

[26:54]

Let's do just a thought experiment. You're going to collect data on yourself right this moment. Lean back in your chair, your seat. You can have your eyes open or closed, but what I want you to notice is what's happening in your body, what's happening in your mind, and I'm going to guide you in a very, very short contemplation, and then I promise I will give you at least two antidotes. Don't be afraid. Notice how these statements reverberate in your research lab, your body-mind. I'm not okay the way I am. I'm not enough. Something is wrong with me. People can see that I'm anxious, fearful.

[28:06]

I'm fundamentally flawed. Notice any tightness in the chest. Notice your pattern of breathing. And now, notice your activity to I'm fine the way I am. I'm lovable. I'm worthy of respect. I like myself. I'm going to be OK. to deep, deep breaths and open your eyes. So imagine this, given that I was also trained as a clinical psychologist and did a lot of psychotherapy, I'm not doing it now, there are some people who the moment they are in bed, imagine this, in bed, before you even open your eyes, there's a waterfall of negative self-beliefs.

[29:22]

And it doesn't stop all day long. You open your eyes and... All day long you move through this self-inner critic coursing through your consciousness. There's some people that that is what they experience. That is a hell realm. I hope that we are not in that state. But there are people, that's their living consciousness all day long. So this notion of how do you shift from negative self-beliefs that are so corrosive and damaging to at least some semblance of acceptance. let alone a vivid, clear, lucid mind. Well, here's two different strategies. There are many different methods, but these are things that I've studied a lot using brain imaging, with people with depression, anxiety, chronic pain, healthy adults. Cognitive reappraisal, the ability to use the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to take a perspective, to use the self-talk...

[30:24]

language network, linguistic network, to begin to either make it quieter or to shift it, to take that view of self, these three mid-brain regions, and begin to modify the view of self to make it at least less toxic and perhaps more positive, or even further, let it completely go. That's way more advanced. So the ability to shift your perspective, to use language, logic, reasoning, to make something less toxic. That's one method. cognitive restructuring. Another method, decentering, or acceptance, or radical acceptance. The ability to go like this, and we've done this in the MRI scanner with all kinds of people, to go, no matter, even in the presence of my negative self-beliefs, can I just be present, not change, not take a different perspective, not control, not modulate, just notice any sensations, thoughts, memories as they arise, without having to do anything.

[31:29]

And by itself, the reactivity to any negative stimulus, be it pain, physical pain, emotional pain, begins to have contour, shift, change, impermanence, radical acceptance. So we've actually looked at this in the brain. So here... What you see in orange are regions of the brain that are very active when people are spinning, ruminating on their own negative self-beliefs about themselves in difficult social situations. So this is a very clear repetition of hundreds or thousands of studies of brain regions that are related to view of self, negative emotion. Very clear. But the question is, Can you do anything about that? So this is this reappraisal, this cognitive perspective taking. And we have these classic brain regions in orange that are part of the neural architecture of the ability to do cognitive control, language, and shifting perspective.

[32:40]

And then over here, we have this observe acceptance strategy. And what you see, there's some overlap, but there's also less brain activity. Punchline. When you compare these two directly, here's the takeaway message. Acceptance and reappraisal both bring down negative reactivity to your own negative self-beliefs via self-report, via physiology, but compared to cognitive control, acceptance requires a lot less brain activity. Point being, for the same ability to down-regulate negative reactivity, negative emotions, reactivity, except in strategy, when you get good at it, it becomes more fluid, easier to implement, and it takes a lot less glucose in the brain. But it's not usually taught.

[33:41]

So this was in 35 Healthy Adults, and I'm just publishing a paper, sending a paper out, where we train these strategies in people with anxiety disorders. pre-post cognitive behavioral therapy, pre-post mindfulness meditation, pre-post no training at all in adults. Those are three-month programs. And what we're finding is that people can actually develop these skills and we can see the gaining mastery of those skills not only by self-report but also in their brain activity. And they are overlapping. They are overlapping. It's not that they're completely distinct. But one of the notions is that the acceptance strategy, once you get good at it, it's easier to implement. In fact, we know from lots of research, reappraisal really, really works. But most of the time, people don't choose to do it. The number one and two forms of emotion regulation, distraction and avoidance. That's it. That's like what most people, self-included, do most of the time.

[34:44]

Reappraisal is great. And it's used... when the negative stimulus, when the stimulus is pretty low in intensity. As it becomes more intense, people don't use this. They use distraction and avoidance. So one of the tests that we can do is, can we slow down and begin to notice what we're doing from moment to moment? How much distraction? How much avoidance? How much cognitive reappraisal? How much acceptance? And are there ways to train my psychology, brain, mind, to at least have the full panoply of emotional regulation skills present, so then I can choose more readily. So I think that's where I'm going to stop. And then we can pause here.

[35:45]

OK. OK. So I am not even going to attempt to... Although as I was listening, I was thinking, hmm, that's a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. And the Zen perspective is somewhat different. This very mind is Buddha. So ingrained in the initiation of the practice is the cultivating the consciousness the confidence to address what is arising in the moment. But we'll talk more about that in the Q&A, guided by your questions. And then in the afternoon, what we'll do is we'll take these concepts and we'll unpack them with exercises. And then a kind of a reporting back on what did that exercise teach you about these concepts.

[36:50]

But for now, we'll take a break. Well, actually, I assume we're going to have announcements. Yes. We're going to have a few announcements from the activities of the center, and then we'll take a short break, and then we'll come in, and we're going to start quite quickly, but you can start there longer if you wish. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:39]

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