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Podcast Chapter List

(00:00:00) – Dopamine is not something we can turn off

(00:03:46) – What is a neurotransmitter?

(00:06:04) – Dopamine as neurotransmitter and neuromodulator

(00:08:20) – Why the brain is too complex for simple chemical stories

(00:12:02) – The awe and mystery of the brain

(00:15:51) – Dopamine, motivation, and the myth of dopamine detox

(00:17:04) – Wanting vs. liking

(00:19:24) – Doom scrolling and the loop of seeking

(00:22:32) – Does dopamine explain why we keep scrolling?

(00:24:21) – Experiential fusion and mindless behavior

(00:25:42) – Why one molecule is never the whole story

(00:26:57) – Novelty and reward prediction error

(00:29:00) – The Easter egg example: seeking, finding, and disappointment

(00:30:23) – Dopamine in different brain circuits

(00:35:37) – What actually helps with compulsive loops?

(00:37:47) – Savoring as a way out of wanting

(00:39:24) – Meditation, breath, and the practice of savoring

(00:43:20) – Letting go of seeking

(00:43:56) – Gratitude, bodhicitta, and the sweetness of connection

(00:45:28) – Renunciation as reorientation

(00:48:00) – Closing

Related Topics From the Archives:

Written transcript for those who prefer to read

Lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Dopamine Is Not Something We Can Turn Off (00:00:00)

Richard Davidson:
Dopamine is essential for human life.

Cortland Dahl:
There’s no turning dopamine off.

Richard Davidson:
No turning dopamine off. And anyone who thinks they’re going on a dopamine detox and really banishing their brain of dopamine, I hate to burst the bubble, but that would not be compatible with life.

Dopamine is essential in motivation, desire, seeking, and anything that is goal-directed. It has been described by the neuroscientist Kent Berridge as central to “wanting,” which he contrasts with something that it is often confused with: “liking.”

Many times, we like the things we want. But not all the time. Sometimes we get caught up in a wanting cycle that is not necessarily leading to liking.

But dopamine also plays an incredibly positive and important role. When I spring out of bed in the morning, go down to have my cup of tea, and have the strong aspiration to meditate, that is inevitably relying on the dopamine system too.

Welcome to Dharma Lab (00:01:45)

Cortland Dahl:
Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with my dear friend Richie, Dr. Richard Davidson, who, as I’m sure most of you know, is one of the most eminent neuroscientists on the planet.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have him in discussion yet again, and for a topic that he is especially well suited to talk about, which is dopamine.

I never thought dopamine would be a hook for a conversation like this, but it has taken on almost mythic status in popular culture. It has almost become the bad boy of the brain, like the amygdala, which is one brain region that always gets a bad rap and is associated with all sorts of negative things.

These days, of course, we hear a lot about dopamine. You might have heard of things like a dopamine detox, which makes it sound like dopamine is some toxic thing in the brain that we want to get rid of or shut off or have less of in some way.

So we thought we could get into the science of neurotransmitters generally, and then specifically dopamine. What does the science really say? What function does dopamine actually play, not only in our brains but in our ability to thrive and flourish?

Richie, maybe we can start by zooming way out. I’m guessing people have heard the word dopamine. Some may have geeked out a little and learned more or even tried something like a dopamine detox. Other people may have heard about serotonin or other neurotransmitters, but my guess is that people’s understanding is still a little fuzzy.

Could we start with the idea of a neurotransmitter, and then zoom in and look at dopamine specifically?

What Is a Neurotransmitter? (00:03:46)

Richard Davidson:
Yes. Thank you so much. This is a juicy topic and very appropriate for Dharma Lab.

There is a constellation of molecules in the brain that play many different roles. One of those roles is what you mentioned: a neurotransmitter.

A neurotransmitter has a very specific role in mediating the interaction between two neurons. When one neuron fires, it sends an electric potential down the axon of that neuron. You can think of the axon as the wire extending from the cell body. The cell body is where the basic machinery is, and the axon extends from the neuron.

Those axons can be short, and they can also be very, very long. If I asked you right now to move the big toe in your right foot, all of you should be able to do that. That is actually a neuron that extends all the way from your brain to your big toe.

Cortland Dahl:
That’s a single neuron? That’s cool. I didn’t know that.

Richard Davidson:
Yes, it is a single neuron. Neurons have many different lengths.

At the end of the axon, there is machinery that releases a little packet of chemical. That packet binds to what is called a receptor on another neuron, and that initiates an electric change in the second neuron.

That is how communication works between two or more neurons. That is called a neurotransmitter.

Dopamine as Neurotransmitter and Neuromodulator (00:06:04)

There are also neurotransmitters and other molecules that act as neuromodulators. A neuromodulator is different from a neurotransmitter. Dopamine, which is the topic of our conversation today, can serve as both a neurotransmitter and a neuromodulator.

What is the difference?

A neuromodulator alters the threshold for the firing of a neuron. It is not directly involved in cell-to-cell communication in the same way. It is more like the molecular soup in which the neuron resides, and that changes the threshold for the firing of the subsequent neuron.

There are many molecules that serve as both neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, and dopamine is one of them.

I think most neuroscientists would agree that we have not yet discovered the full range of neuromodulators and neurotransmitters in the human brain. It is a vast number. In the popular press, we’ve heard about dopamine, serotonin, maybe norepinephrine, maybe GABA. But there are hundreds of these molecules playing complicated roles.

This is why, in general, it is extremely hazardous to pin a particular mental state on a single molecule. That is almost assuredly excessively simplistic and wrong.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no well-defined psychological state that can be pinned to one specific molecule. It is much more complex than that.

Why the Brain Is Too Complex for Simple Chemical Stories (00:08:20)

Cortland Dahl:
Just as a footnote, I think it’s mind-boggling when you hear how complex our brains are. Could you say a little about the estimates of how many neurons there are, and then beyond that, the connections between neurons?

Now we’re talking about neurons communicating with each other. It’s an order of magnitude we can’t even comprehend.

Richard Davidson:
The estimated number of neurons in the human brain is about 85 or 88 billion.

Cortland Dahl:
That’s a “b,” everyone.

Richard Davidson:
Yes, billion. And the estimated number of connections among those neurons is in the trillions.

Cortland Dahl:
That’s in your head, everyone. Trillions of interconnections, and all these little communications, neuromodulators and neurotransmitters. The number of times that is happening right now, as you’re listening, is beyond what we can actually think about.

Richard Davidson:
That’s very true. I often reflect on this as a humility induction, because it is so complicated and we really understand so little of it at this point in time.

If we pause to appreciate the complexity, and if we are honest with ourselves, it really is a humility induction.

It also exposes how gross our measures are. We’ve done a lot of research with EEG, including the first paper we published with long-term meditation practitioners. EEG involves putting electrodes on the scalp surface. We use it because it is non-invasive and has very fast time resolution.

But some people have likened EEG to taking a stethoscope, putting it on the hood of a car, and trying to understand how the car works by listening to the sounds from the stethoscope. That is what EEG is like.

Cortland Dahl:
So by “gross,” you mean it is such a coarse level of analysis for something that is so incredibly nuanced, beyond what our minds can comprehend. At some point in history, we’ll look back and it will seem like the Stone Age, the way we look at the brain now.

Richard Davidson:
Totally.

There is a whole class of research that goes on in animals, and there are serious ethical issues about this kind of research. That could be the subject of another Dharma Lab. We won’t talk about that right now.

Putting those ethical issues temporarily aside, those studies in animals are done because they use methods that cannot be used in humans. They are invasive methods that allow scientists to look at a much more granular level of analysis that cannot be examined with the methods we currently have in humans.

The Awe and Mystery of the Brain (00:12:02)

Cortland Dahl:
This was not where we were expecting to go, but I think this could be another episode too: the mystery of the brain.

You might come to somebody like Richie and think you’re going to get sophisticated knowledge, and in many ways you will. But in another way, you get a sense that even the world’s leading experts are barely knocking on the door of this universe that is so awe-inspiringly complex and nuanced.

It’s almost like looking up into the night sky and feeling the majesty of this incredible universe, and realizing that this is literally happening between our ears. It’s awe-inducing when you open up to that.

Richard Davidson:
It is. We are constantly forming new synapses, and even structural changes in the brain happen much more quickly than we ever thought they could.

One really interesting thing about the brain is that it has no receptors for feeling itself. When you touch your skin, you can feel that. If you put a vibrator on the skin, you would feel that. But if you opened the brain and put a little vibrator directly on the brain, you wouldn’t feel it.

There is probably an evolutionary reason for this. Our brains are active all the time. If we felt tingling every time our brains were active or new synapses were forming, it would disrupt our capacity to navigate everyday life. We wouldn’t be able to sleep. It would interfere with everything.

But I sometimes do a little practice where I envision all these changes occurring. It is majestic. It really is awe-inspiring. I’ve looked at enough images from studies that have taken samples of brain tissue, where you can see with an electron microscope at super-high resolution what we can’t see non-invasively. You see the extraordinary complexity and beauty that we simply do not have introspective access to.

Cortland Dahl:
Yet another topic to put a pin in for a future episode: the mystery of the brain, and beyond that the mystery of consciousness.

But let’s zoom back in to neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. One way to think about this is that neurotransmitters are how neurons are talking to each other, and neuromodulators influence the level of activity between neurons.

Dopamine is interesting because it has become so meme-worthy. What do we actually know about dopamine and the functions it serves in the brain?

Dopamine, Motivation, and the Myth of Dopamine Detox (00:15:51)

Richard Davidson:
Dopamine is essential for human life.

Cortland Dahl:
There’s no turning dopamine off.

Richard Davidson:
No turning dopamine off. Anyone who thinks they’re going on a dopamine detox and really banishing their brain of dopamine, I hate to burst the bubble, but that would not be compatible with life.

Dopamine is essential in what we can think of as motivation, desire, seeking, anything goal-directed where we have a plan. Even if it’s a pedestrian plan, like after this podcast we might go have dinner. It could be something as simple as that. There is an element of motivation involved in that, and it involves the dopamine systems in the brain.

Wanting vs. Liking (00:17:04)

Dopamine has been described by a very famous neuroscientist, Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan, who has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the dopamine system. He has labeled a key function of the dopamine system as “wanting,” and he contrasts that with something it is often confused with, which is “liking.”

Many times, we like the things we want. But not all the time.

For Dharma Lab viewers, who likely have some appreciation for how the mind works, I think we all have some insight into recognizing that sometimes we get caught up in a wanting cycle that is not necessarily leading to liking. It is a kind of perseverative loop of wanting.

This is part of the reason why there are popular stereotypes about dopamine.

But dopamine also plays an incredibly positive and important role. When I spring out of bed in the morning, go down to have my cup of tea, and then meditate, and have the strong aspiration to meditate, that is inevitably relying on the dopamine system too.

If dopamine were completely blunted, it would be very difficult to get out of bed and do anything. You can think of dopamine as part of an approach-oriented, energetic stance.

Anytime we have an aspiration to do something, that is going to rely, at least to some extent, on the dopamine system. So this is not a system we want to get rid of.

Doom Scrolling and the Loop of Seeking (00:19:24)

Cortland Dahl:
Let me give you a real-world experience, and I’d love to ask how dopamine does or does not play a role in it.

I am very rarely on social media. It’s not something I spend much time on. But the other night I had an experience that a lot of people probably have all the time. Somebody forwarded me a link from one of these apps where you end up scrolling forever.

It was a video that made me laugh hysterically out loud. I was sitting by myself in a room, and if someone had looked in the window, they would have thought I was nuts.

It was a video where two friends were looking at themselves on the screen, and one had put on a filter that made it look like a bug was crawling across the other person’s face. So the person sees what looks like a spider on their face and starts slapping themselves. It was hilarious.

I watched that and was literally laughing hysterically. And the algorithms of these apps know when you watch the whole thing twice. So then it shows you more of the thing you clearly liked.

Then there was another one, and the next one was even funnier. It was wives playing a prank on their spouses, pretending to freak out like something was happening, just to see what the husband would do. And the husbands would start screaming and running around. Again, it was hilarious. I was laughing out loud.

But then I got into this loop where I was trying to find another one. It was so funny, and I had this little burst of joy. Then I literally wasted an hour of my time. After a few minutes I wasn’t laughing anymore. I was just scrolling mindlessly.

I wasn’t consciously thinking, “I have to find another funny video.” I was just in this inner loop, sucked into the endless scroll, until I finally thought, “I’ve got to go to bed.” Then I felt like, “What a waste of time.”

That first minute or two was actually funny. It was nice to laugh hysterically. And then it became a lot of mind-numbing scrolling that was utterly unsatisfying.

So let’s look at a moment like that from the perspective of what is going on in the brain, and specifically with dopamine. These are the moments where people demonize dopamine, as though that’s the thing that happened and we need to somehow extract it.

What would you say about that?

Does Dopamine Explain Why We Keep Scrolling? (00:22:32)

Richard Davidson:
Those are interesting experiences that I think all of us have occasionally.

I would say dopamine likely plays some role, at least in the initial entry into that scrolling perseveration. Whether it is sustaining that over the whole period of time, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question.

Part of it depends on the extent to which you feel a real strong urge to do it. If someone took away your phone at that point, how would you react? There are ways of probing whether the wanting cycle is really dominant.

There could be other reasons why people scroll. One of my theories is that people engage in this kind of behavior in part to block the default mode, because the scrolling is consuming.

I’m curious about your phenomenological report of when you are scrolling. But I think that at least in the initial stages of scrolling, when people are really into it, there is what we would call experiential fusion.

Experiential Fusion and Mindless Behavior (00:24:21)

Cortland Dahl:
For sure.

Richard Davidson:
Their whole awareness is fused with the activity they’re engaged in. There’s not a lot of meta-awareness. They’re just sucked in.

Cortland Dahl:
It’s almost like there’s no conscious doom scrolling, because if you were fully aware and conscious, you would just stop doing it.

I sometimes have the same experience drinking soda. You almost have to do it mindlessly, because if you really savor the taste, it’s actually kind of gross. I’ve noticed there are certain foods and certain things you consume that only work mindlessly.

Richard Davidson:
But that’s not true of French fries.

Cortland Dahl:
Richie, now you’re in sensitive territory. We’re not going to go there. I will concede soda. French fries, we’ll see. I’ll experiment with that.

But it’s true. Certain things only work mindlessly. When you consciously do them, you would not do them anymore because they don’t feel good. It’s interesting. It changes a lot.

Richard Davidson:
Exactly. That is in part what sustains that kind of behavior as well. And I don’t think that is primarily a dopaminergic process.

Viewers may ask, “Okay, then what molecule is responsible for that?” And I would say, likely 500 molecules. Don’t even try to think about it that way. It’s not the right level of analysis.

Novelty and Reward Prediction Error (00:25:42)

Cortland Dahl:
Going back to Berridge’s work, we have a whole episode on the distinction between liking and wanting, and there’s a great paper where he summarizes a lot of the research in this area.

If you look at the experience I was having, there was a moment of genuine liking. I was having fun. I was laughing hysterically. Then there was a moment of seeking. I was just looking.

There are all sorts of interesting things in the way algorithms work. There is something around duration. There is something around novelty. If you really pay attention, it’s not just that everything is the same. The algorithm gives you things that are different intentionally, and then you get something you like and it feels new again.

If you got the exact same thing 10 times in a row, even if you liked it at first, you would grow accustomed to it. It would lose the novelty factor. So there is something around duration, novelty, and emotion. There are all sorts of things mixed into it.

Richard Davidson:
The novelty piece you’re mentioning is really important. It is a very important aspect of dopamine function that has been studied.

There is this idea of a reward prediction error, as it is called in the technical scientific lingo.

What is a reward prediction error?

In this case, you have a certain class of video that you’re looking at. You saw one, so you have a mental model of what these videos are like.

Cortland Dahl:
So now that’s what I want. That’s the wanting. I’m looking for that.

Richard Davidson:
Exactly. You’re looking for that.

Let’s say the next video you encounter is even more hysterical. That is a reward prediction error. You would actually see a larger dopamine spike than you saw previously.

If you saw a video that was comparable to what you just saw, there wouldn’t be any change in the dopamine signal. If you saw a video that was much less interesting and less compelling, there would be a decline, a decrement in dopamine.

Dopamine signaling is very dynamic and responsive to the information to which you are being exposed. It plays an important role in certain aspects of learning, and it informs your future seeking.

The Easter Egg Example: Seeking, Finding, and Disappointment (00:29:00)

Cortland Dahl:
Let’s unpack that.

We just had Easter in the U.S., and I had this image of a little kid running around looking for an Easter egg. They have the model. They know what they want. They’re looking, they’re not finding, then they find something. Sometimes they find something beyond what they expected, maybe an extra big piece of candy or the basket with all the candy.

That seems like a good example because the seeking is very clear. The mental model is very clear. The not finding, and then the finding more, has all the dimensions you talked about.

But it’s interesting. You’re saying that when the kid is looking for the Easter egg and doesn’t find it, say they lift up the cushion of the couch and there’s nothing there, dopamine levels will actually drop in that moment?

Richard Davidson:
Yes.

Cortland Dahl:
Because if you forget about the neurotransmitters and just look at behavior, of course the seeking doesn’t stop. They immediately shift and think, “Where do I need to go next?”

So there’s something still driving the seeking. But if dopamine is dropping, and if dopamine is that motivational, goal-directed impulse in the brain, how does that work?

Dopamine in Different Brain Circuits (00:30:23)

Richard Davidson:
Those are excellent questions. It’s an opportunity to speak about another piece of complexity: dopamine is found in a number of different parts of the brain. It’s not just in one isolated location.

Its function in different parts of the brain is different. It is the same molecule, but the location is different, the receptors are different, the connections are different, and the function is different.

The dopamine that is part of the wanting circuit is found primarily in an area of the brain called the ventral striatum, a subcortical area that is rich in dopamine.

We know that if there is brain damage to that area, based mostly on animal studies, animals will not seek in the ways we’ve been talking about. But it doesn’t affect their enjoyment of a reward.

Let’s say bananas are their favorite food. They can smell the banana. They know it’s six feet away. If they walk, they can get the banana. But they will not go and get it, even though they can smell it.

But if you put the banana in their mouth, they will enjoy it. Scientists know they enjoy it because they make certain sounds and facial expressions when they are enjoying it. If you video them, you can see it.

There are other molecules that seem much more associated with pleasure. The two major classes of molecules associated with pleasure in the brain are endogenous opiates and endogenous cannabinoids. Endocannabinoids are related to the active ingredient in marijuana, and they are found endogenously in the human brain. Those molecules are active in response to pleasure.

The reward prediction error signaling I was talking about is mediated in a different but adjacent part of the brain that is also rich in dopamine. The caudate nucleus is critically important for prediction error signaling. There is also prediction error signaling in other areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex.

So these dopamine-related functions occur in different areas of the brain.

Cortland Dahl:
So going back to the Easter egg example, the child is looking for something, wanting something, and not finding it where they expect it to be. Is it in the caudate that the levels would drop, but in the ventral striatum they might still be high because the child is still seeking?

Richard Davidson:
I’m not sure what would happen in that specific case. If the child is still seeking, you would expect dopamine levels to be high in the ventral striatum.

The prediction error changes we’re talking about are phasic changes. They are extremely short-lived, very dynamic, up and down. They are like an evoked potential, an electrical signal that goes down and then up very quickly.

These are changes that we cannot see in the human brain because we do not have methods to look at changes on that time course non-invasively.

What Actually Helps with Compulsive Loops? (00:35:37)

Cortland Dahl:
Zooming out, with memes like dopamine detox, I think what people are trying to understand and intervene in are these cycles that are essentially unfulfilling but become almost compulsive behavior. Doom scrolling is maybe the classic example.

You’re doing something inherently unfulfilling, and yet you do it compulsively and for long periods of time.

One key takeaway is that this is likely much more complex than we normally think. Even with one chemical, one neurotransmitter or neuromodulator, it depends on which part of the brain you’re looking at, which network you’re looking at, and the time course from one moment to the next.

So you can’t just say, “That’s the thing we want to stop happening,” because it is way more complex than that.

But what could we say? In my mind, disentangling liking and wanting is one of the most helpful things for understanding how this is processed in the brain. What would you want people to know that could help them navigate some of these compulsive behaviors that we get stuck in?

Savoring as a Way Out of Wanting (00:37:47)

Richard Davidson:
The knowledge we’re providing in this discussion can be helpful as background. But locking onto it in an excessively concrete way may not be that helpful.

Getting stuck in doom scrolling may involve dopamine initially, but it has to be much more complicated than that. It clearly involves other things too.

I think the distinction between wanting and liking is very important. Creating the causes and conditions that help us appreciate the liking, and really tune in to the events or stimuli associated with liking, can be enormously helpful.

Some psychologists have called this savoring. We can really savor these positive moments, and that can help us get unstuck from the loop of wanting.

The dopamine story is interesting, and at a very high level there is truth to the fact that dopamine is primarily associated with wanting and seeking. To the extent that this kind of behavior is causing problems, we can do our best to change it.

But one of the best ways to change it may be simply to focus more on liking.

Meditation, Breath, and the Practice of Savoring (00:39:24)

Cortland Dahl:
That is such an important point, and it reminds me of key insights from meditation and my own practice.

Even with something like mindful breathing, which was the first practice I learned and one I still do, there are practices where the orientation is almost neutral. You step back and orient to awareness itself. You are not worrying so much about what is happening within the field of awareness. Whatever is happening is just a neutral phenomenon, and orienting to awareness itself is the focus.

But there is another kind of practice that is very different, and it is all about savoring.

You can practice breathing with awareness in many different ways. One way is where awareness is the main point and the breath is just a support or anchor. But another way is to breathe as a process of savoring. You really tune into the felt sense of the nourishing, even healing quality of the breath.

Because I’ve done both forms of practice, and a lot of the savoring aspect, even now as I do this I have goosebumps. I can feel this chemical reaction in my body. My whole body is feeling this just because the moment you remember it, it starts happening.

At the beginning, it uses the imagination. Then at a certain point, it elicits a visceral response. You feel this pleasant energy, and you immerse yourself in the healing energy of your own breath. It is there every moment.

That is different from stepping back and being aware. Both are helpful and profound, but they do different things.

The key is that you can do this with anything. Loving-kindness and compassion practices are like savoring connection. You first elicit the feeling of connectedness.

I can do this right now. We’re talking, and I can say, “This is Richie. I love Richie.” Immediately I feel that. I do love you. And then you can immerse yourself in that.

It is a skill to stay tuned in. It’s like finding the frequency. Habit energy pulls you off course, but you learn to keep it dialed in, and you can get good at it.

When you’re around the Dalai Lama, he is always in that frequency. He is never not in that frequency. You can feel it when you’re with him. He is radiating that because he is completely dialed into that frequency.

In a way, this quality of savoring is a skill you can learn and deploy in different ways. It could be eating an orange. It could be connecting with somebody else. It could be how you relate to your own breath.

There is no chasing in it. It is just tuning into something that is already there.

Letting Go of Seeking (00:43:20)

Richard Davidson:
Exactly. I love that description. You don’t need to seek it because it’s right there.

You can let go of seeking completely and tune right into the delicious nectar that is always there.

Cortland Dahl:
I feel like if people just knew this, it would change so much. There is so much chasing in our lives. Even meditation can become another place where we bring chasing energy and seeking energy, which almost never works out very well.

Maybe we can end here. Are there any practical things from your own practice that help you stay with the savoring side of things, and notice the pull toward chasing and seeking?

Gratitude, Bodhicitta, and the Sweetness of Connection (00:43:56)

Richard Davidson:
For me, appreciation and gratitude are really important.

Also, the kind of practice that you and I do before each Dharma Lab episode, bodhicitta practice, is very important. Reflecting on how our actions can be of benefit to others has a sweetness associated with it.

Really leaning in and connecting to that sweet quality of connection is heart-opening for me. It naturally allows the wanting piece to subside on its own.

There is not an active pushing down of wanting. It is more about leaning into and connecting with this sweetness.

If you do find that wanting is rearing its head, then to use a strategy we’ve been taught by Mingyur Rinpoche, you can become aware of it. Really just be aware of your wanting. If you stay aware of it and do not get totally sucked into it, it will subside on its own.

Renunciation as Reorientation (00:45:28)

Cortland Dahl:
That’s beautiful. There are some helpful things here, especially if we zoom out to the detox idea.

A lot of the meme around dopamine detox is almost an abstinence mentality. You just need to stop all stimulation, anything that is creating problems. It can feel like a retreat-from-the-world mentality.

This reminds me of one of the most misunderstood words in Buddhist psychology and meditation practice. There is a Tibetan term, ngé jung, which we often translate as renunciation. But renunciation conjures up exactly the detox mentality, as though it is all about letting go, distancing yourself from the bad stuff or the things that create problems.

But what that term really means, and what I think is a more accurate and helpful translation, is reorientation.

It is more about what you are turning toward than what you are letting go of or turning away from. If you forget that, it is not sustainable. It is depleting. You have nothing bringing you joy or motivating you. You have taken something away, but there is nothing there to sustain you.

This is about orienting toward something nourishing, fulfilling, and wholesome. Then the letting go becomes natural, because you are tasting an alternative that is obviously superior to the thing you let go of.

Doom scrolling versus connecting with a friend, or savoring something meaningful. Of course that feels better. You have that contrast in your mind, rather than just saying, “I’m going to let go of that,” and then what?

So maybe it is not just about letting go of endless wanting and craving. It is perhaps even more about what you like, what you savor, and what you find fulfilling.

It feels like you are giving the brain analysis of that.

Richard Davidson:
That’s beautiful.

Closing (00:48:00)

Cortland Dahl:
We could clearly talk a lot more about this. It feels like we just scratched the surface. We introduced a whole cast of characters with other neurotransmitters and other things, so maybe we can do more of this in future episodes.

As always, thank you so much, Richie. I learned a lot. This is super interesting, and I’m sure everybody came away with something helpful in their lives.

Thank you for everything you shared.

Richard Davidson:
Thank you. Wonderful to be here.

Cortland Dahl:
Stay tuned. I’m sure we’ll have many more conversations like this. If you’re still with us, thank you for watching, and we’ll see you again soon. Take care.

During one experiment, we recorded brain activity using EEG while participants engaged in an open awareness meditation infused with compassion.

Then we looked at the raw data from one practitioner in particular: Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche.

As the signal streamed across the screen in the lab, something extraordinary appeared. Electrical traces from dozens of electrodes spread across the cortex suddenly rose and fell together in rapid synchrony.

For a moment we wondered if it was an artifact.

But it wasn’t.

We realized we were seeing something momentous—patterns of brain activity that had never been observed before.

The brain was generating extraordinarily strong gamma oscillations—fast neural rhythms around 30–80 Hz—synchronized across widely distributed regions of the cortex. Even more striking, this synchrony emerged almost immediately when Mingyur Rinpoche entered the meditative state.

Gamma synchrony has long been associated with moments when the brain integrates information across distributed neural systems—periods of perceptual binding, learning, and insight.

Seeing such powerful, large-scale synchrony suggested something profound: through training, the brain may become more capable of integrating information across neural networks. In other words, the capacity for insight itself may be trainable (Lutz et al., 2004).

Over the past two decades, neuroscience has begun to explore this possibility. A fascinating new study published recently in Nature Communications now provides fresh evidence about what happens in the brain during the moment of insight, revealing how sudden understanding reorganizes neural representations across the brain.

What the researchers discovered reinforces something contemplative traditions have suggested for centuries:

Insight is not merely intellectual.

It is a reorganization in how the mind represents reality.

When the Brain Reorganizes Perception

In the study, participants viewed ambiguous black-and-white images known as Mooney images. At first glance these pictures appear to be meaningless patterns of light and shadow.

The brain struggles to interpret them.

Then suddenly the image resolves.

A dog.

A face.

A spider.

What moments earlier looked like random shapes becomes instantly recognizable.

Using neuroimaging, the researchers observed a striking neural shift during this moment. Activity patterns in visual regions—particularly the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, which plays a key role in object recognition—reorganized dramatically.

Before insight, the brain encoded the image as disconnected fragments.

After insight, the same sensory input was represented as a coherent object.

The researchers describe this transformation as representational change.

What is especially cool about this experiment is that nothing about the external stimulus had changed.

But the brain had changed how it interpreted what it was seeing.

The world remained the same.

The mind reorganized.

The Emotional Spark of the “Aha”

Insight is not purely cognitive.

When participants experienced the sudden realization that revealed the hidden object, activity increased in the amygdala, which processes emotional salience, and the hippocampus, which detects novelty and supports memory formation.

This helps explain why insight feels so distinctive.

An “Aha!” moment carries a sense of surprise and emotional resonance. The brain registers that something important has happened.

And this matters for learning.

When participants were tested days later, problems solved through insight were far more likely to be remembered than those solved gradually.

Insight is therefore not simply a flash of understanding.

It is a powerful learning event.

The Brain as a Prediction Engine

To understand why insight can be transformative, it helps to recognize something fundamental about how the brain operates.

The brain is not a passive recorder of reality. Increasingly, neuroscience views perception as a process of prediction. The brain continuously generates models of the world and updates those models using incoming sensory information (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013).

Most of the time these predictive models allow us to navigate the world efficiently.

But they can also become rigid.

We interpret ambiguous situations through habitual narratives about ourselves or others. These interpretations can become so familiar that they feel like reality itself.

Insight occurs when these predictive models are suddenly updated or reorganized. The brain recognizes that its previous interpretation was incomplete. A new representation emerges. And the same situation now appears in a different light. In this sense, insight may represent a moment of rapid neuroplasticity—when the brain abruptly reorganizes its internal models and begins to perceive the same world in a fundamentally different way.

This capacity for cognitive reorganization may also play an important role in trauma recovery, where healing often involves loosening rigid threat predictions and restoring the brain’s flexibility to interpret experience in new ways.

This figure beautifully illustrates the central thesis of the essay: insight is literally a reorganization of how the brain represents reality.

Brain activity during the moment of insight. When participants suddenly recognized the hidden object in an ambiguous image, patterns of neural activity in visual cortex reorganized dramatically. The same stimulus remained unchanged—but the brain’s internal representation shifted.

Insight in Contemplative Practice

Contemplative traditions have long emphasized this process.

In Buddhist psychology, insight involves seeing clearly the mental processes that construct our experience.

Through careful observation of the mind, practitioners come to recognize that:

• thoughts are mental events rather than facts

• emotions are dynamic processes rather than fixed states

• the sense of self is a continually evolving construction

From a neuroscientific perspective, these realizations may reflect transformations in the brain’s predictive models of identity and experience.

The same principle that allows a Mooney image to suddenly resolve into a recognizable object may also allow our understanding of ourselves to shift.

When that shift occurs, patterns of suffering that once seemed inevitable can begin to loosen.

The brain is literally seeing differently.

Read more

See below for FLASHCARDS, Full Transcript Below

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FLASHCARDS / EPISODE COMPANION HERE

Podcast Chapter List

(00:00:00) – The brain is a storyteller

(00:01:03) – Welcome to Dharma Lab

(00:04:05) – Norman Geschwind and behavioral neurology

(00:06:31) – The thumbtack story: emotional memory without conscious memory

(00:12:12) – Language, the left hemisphere, and the corpus callosum

(00:19:04) – Brain asymmetry and emotion

(00:22:54) – Why emotion was so understudied

(00:29:26) – Brain asymmetry, attachment, and aversion

(00:31:19) – The prefrontal cortex and the old divide between thought and feeling

(00:37:07) – Studying emotion in newborn infants

(00:42:37) – Meditation, brain asymmetry, and the immune system

(00:47:04) – Why “it’s not so simple”

Written transcript for those who prefer to read

Lightly edited for clarity and readability.

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The Brain Is a Storyteller (00:00:00)

Cortland Dahl:
The example you gave earlier, with Broca’s area and the split-brain findings, points to something fascinating. Parts of the brain are not always talking to each other. One part of the brain clearly knows something, but the part that communicates doesn’t. And it doesn’t stay silent. It makes something up.

That’s the funny thing. In the absence of information, we don’t just stay silent. When we don’t know something, we are not comfortable with not knowing. Some instinctual part of us fills in the blanks almost all the time.

Richard Davidson:
Exactly. The human mind and brain is a storyteller. This is how we make sense of our world. We create these narratives.

Welcome to Dharma Lab (00:01:03)

Cortland Dahl:
Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson, who we all lovingly call Richie.

As many of you know, Richie is one of the most pioneering and widely studied neuroscientists on the planet. It’s a gift to be in conversation with him.

Today we’re going to have a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a long time. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin in 2012 to study with Richie, and over the years I’ve heard many conversations at the Center for Healthy Minds about neuroscience, meditation, and the mind. But one thing that has never really happened, even for those of us who work closely with Richie, is a kind of broad “download” from him about the amazing body of work he has contributed to over the decades.

Many people know Richie as a pioneer of contemplative science and contemplative neuroscience, the scientific study of how practices like meditation affect the mind, the brain, and our biology. But he is also a pioneer of affective neuroscience, which you might think of as the neuroscience of emotion.

To be a pioneer in one field is extraordinary. To be a pioneer in two is kind of mind-boggling.

So today I want to dig into some of those key insights, especially around neural asymmetry, which was a huge part of Richie’s early career and a central theme in affective neuroscience.

Norman Geschwind and Behavioral Neurology (00:04:05)

Richard Davidson:
This topic is near and dear to my heart. It still is something I’m extremely interested in. It really began when I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to study with Norman Geschwind at Harvard Medical School.

Geschwind was one of the great towering figures in what we now call behavioral neurology. I took a course with him on functional neuroanatomy, which is basically how different parts of the brain are connected to different behavioral functions.

He was a neurologist, so he looked at people’s behavior as an external reflection of what was going on in the brain. He was an extremely keen observer of behavior, and he was also very demanding. He was what we would now call a localizationist, someone who believed in the specific localization of different functions in different parts of the brain.

He used to say that if you don’t believe in localization, it’s because you don’t know neuroanatomy well enough. That pushed me to learn neuroanatomy deeply, including doing a human brain dissection.

I also went on rounds with him, where he would visit neurological patients in the hospital. He would do these bedside exams that were incredible, using clever ways of interacting with patients to reveal what might be different about their brains.

The Thumbtack Story: Emotional Memory Without Conscious Memory (00:06:31)

Richard Davidson:
One of the most famous demonstrations I saw involved a technique associated with Korsakoff, who described a syndrome of dementia related to alcoholism.

Korsakoff showed that there can be a separation between memory for declarative information and memory for emotional information.

A person with severe dementia might not recognize you if you came back the day after seeing them. They may have no conscious memory of who you are. But the question was whether the same was true for emotional information.

The demonstration was this: a doctor would put a thumbtack in his hand and shake the patient’s hand. The patient would feel the prick and withdraw. The next day, the doctor would return and ask, “Do you know who I am?” The patient would say no. The doctor would identify himself and offer his hand again.

But the patient refused to shake his hand.

When asked why, the patient confabulated. He said something like, “I think your hand is dirty, and I don’t want to shake your hand.”

That’s a beautiful demonstration of the dissociation between declarative memory and emotional memory. The declarative memory was gone. The patient did not recognize the doctor’s face or name and had no conscious memory of having seen him. But the emotional memory remained.

Cortland Dahl:
That one point has huge implications for life. We often have an interpretation of something and we are completely convinced of it. It seems so real that it doesn’t occur to us that it’s an interpretation.

And yet the mind may have limited information, or may not be conscious of something, and it creates a whole story. In some cases, the story is flat-out wrong. But in the moment, it feels like reality.

Richard Davidson:
Exactly. And this is not just occurring in patients with frank brain damage. This is happening in all of us all the time. This is how our minds work. The mind creates a story about the world, and it’s from that story that we operate.

It is not from some veridical perception of things in the world. There is no such thing as that. Our minds are constantly creating these stories.

This relates directly to our insight pillar of well-being, which is about the narratives we are constantly creating about ourselves.

Language, the Left Hemisphere, and the Corpus Callosum (00:12:12)

Richard Davidson:
One of Geschwind’s great contributions was his work on language-related lateralization in the human brain.

In virtually all right-handed people, which is about 85 to 90 percent of the population, it is the left hemisphere that can speak, while the right hemisphere cannot.

There is a key region called Broca’s area, named after Paul Broca. Damage to this area, often through stroke, can impair a person’s ability to speak. What is interesting is that this is one of the most clearly lateralized functions in the human brain. If this area in the left hemisphere is damaged, the corresponding area in the right hemisphere does not simply take over.

The two hemispheres of the brain are very similar in many ways, but they have important differences. They are connected by the corpus callosum, a massive bundle of white matter that connects neurons in one hemisphere to corresponding neurons in the other. It is the largest pathway of connection in the human brain.

In the past, for some patients with severe epilepsy, surgeons would cut the corpus callosum to prevent seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the other. This left people with two disconnected hemispheres.

When that happens, you can demonstrate strange dissociations. For example, if a split-brain patient is blindfolded and holds a glass in the left hand, the sensory information goes to the right hemisphere. But because the right hemisphere cannot speak, and the information cannot cross to the left hemisphere, the person may not be able to verbally identify the object. If you give them multiple-choice pictures, though, they can point to the glass.

Cortland Dahl:
That’s the same basic finding. One part of the brain clearly knows something, but the part that communicates doesn’t. And it doesn’t stay silent. It makes something up.

Brain Asymmetry and Emotion (00:19:04)

Richard Davidson:
Most early research on brain asymmetry focused on the back of the brain, where language and some perceptual differences were located. The left hemisphere was specialized for speech and language. The right hemisphere seemed better at certain visual-spatial skills.

But another early observation was especially interesting: when patients had damage to the left hemisphere, especially including the left prefrontal region, they were more likely to show depression after the brain damage. Two people could have comparable amounts of damage, but if the damage was in different hemispheres, the emotional consequences could be different.

That led to the conjecture that the left hemisphere might play some role in emotions that are antithetical to depression. These patients often seemed anhedonic, meaning they were not experiencing much pleasure.

There were also clinical reports of patients with right-hemisphere damage, whose left hemisphere was intact, showing inappropriate laughter or joy in situations where that would not normally occur.

These were early clues that there might be interesting emotional differences between the hemispheres.

Why Emotion Was So Understudied (00:22:54)

Richard Davidson:
In those days, emotion was very understudied. Almost all the research on the brain and emotion was done in rats. It was focused mostly on the hypothalamus and basic drives like hunger and sex.

But these neurological patients were showing emotional changes from cortical damage, without frank damage to subcortical structures. That was fascinating to me.

I began thinking about ways to frame this theoretically. One important point is that asymmetries are not restricted to humans. You see asymmetries in other species. So maybe asymmetry is not fundamentally tied to language. Maybe language is one component of a deeper biological system.

There was a famous but obscure paper from 1959 by an ethologist, someone who studies animal behavior in natural environments. The paper traced approach and withdrawal behavior across the whole span of evolution, even in single-cell organisms.

The basic claim was that if an organism behaves at all, it will approach and withdraw. That is the fundamental behavioral decision an organism makes with respect to its environment.

In a moment of loose but creative insight, it occurred to me that asymmetry is a fundamental property of nervous systems, and approach and withdrawal are fundamental behavioral patterns. Maybe they are connected. Maybe the observations about depression and euphoria in brain-damaged patients had something to do with this.

Brain Asymmetry, Attachment, and Aversion (00:29:26)

Cortland Dahl:
That’s fascinating from a Buddhist perspective. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is not the same kind of biological mapping, but there is an incredibly sophisticated understanding of the mind, psychology, and what is called the subtle body. Asymmetry shows up all over the place. And while the terms approach and avoidance are not used in the same way, attachment and aversion are central terms. You can see the correlation.

Richard Davidson:
Yes. I’ve thought about that too. There are breathing practices, such as unilateral nostril breathing, that may differentially activate each hemisphere. There is research on that as well.

This was the beginning of my theory of brain asymmetry and its relation to approach and withdrawal, or perhaps attachment and aversion.

The Prefrontal Cortex and the Old Divide Between Thought and Feeling (00:31:19)

Richard Davidson:
This was happening in the late 1970s. I became especially interested in the prefrontal cortex.

Another major influence on me was Walle Nauta, one of the great neuroanatomists of the 20th century. He was at MIT, and I took his neuroanatomy course while I was a graduate student at Harvard. His area of focus was the prefrontal cortex.

He wrote a paper called “The Frontal Lobes and the Regulation of Mood.” It was the first time I had read someone speculating that the prefrontal cortex had something to do with emotion, not just cognition.

Historically, the prefrontal cortex was thought of as part of the brain’s cognitive machinery. Emotion and cognition were often seen as separate. This was really a byproduct of a philosophical dogma: rational thought on one side, emotion and feeling on the other, with the two considered independent and often at war.

The idea that thought and feeling could be working synergistically together was not in the lexicon or imagination of scientists in those days.

Studying Emotion in Newborn Infants (00:37:07)

Richard Davidson:
When we began, the only noninvasive way to study the human brain was EEG, which records electrical activity from the scalp. We began recording brain electrical activity in the prefrontal regions while trying to activate emotions associated with approach and withdrawal.

We thought that if these patterns were truly fundamental, they should appear very early in life. So we studied babies, including newborn infants.

How do you elicit emotional responses in newborns? It turns out to be pretty easy. We gave them a small squirt of sugar water, which they loved, and a small squirt of lemon juice, which produced a very different facial response.

Charles Darwin had written about facial expressions of emotion in humans and animals, and he claimed that expressions of pleasure and disgust were innate and present from birth. We tested this by recording the infants’ facial expressions and brain activity.

Even 72 hours after birth, you could clearly see different facial responses to sugar water and lemon juice. We also saw differences in brain asymmetry in the predicted direction.

There were big individual differences. People differ in their asymmetry at baseline, before you do anything.

People with greater left-sided prefrontal activation tend to be more approach-oriented. They tend to be more optimistic and ready to go when an opportunity presents itself. People with greater activation in the same regions of the right hemisphere tend to be more avoidant and shy.

Meditation, Brain Asymmetry, and the Immune System (00:42:37)

Cortland Dahl:
What are the takeaways from this research? Beyond just being interesting neuroscience, how does this help us understand our own minds and navigate our inner terrain?

Richard Davidson:
There are many things to say, but one concrete project led to my most highly cited scientific publication. It was published in 2003, and to the best of our knowledge, it was the first randomized controlled trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, that had ever been done.

MBSR was developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn as an eight-week intervention to give people initial training in awareness practices. We studied MBSR in a group of very stressed employees at a tech company in Madison, Wisconsin.

We brought participants into the lab before and after the eight-week program and measured asymmetry in their brain. We wondered whether beginning meditators might show a shift toward more left-sided activation, which we associated with a more optimistic, approach-oriented style.

The study also happened to end around Thanksgiving, which is when many people receive flu vaccines. We asked participants not to get a flu vaccine before the study ended. Instead, we gave them the flu vaccine ourselves and took blood samples before and after, which allowed us to measure antibody response.

We hypothesized that people who went through the meditation training might show a more robust response to the vaccine.

That is what we found. People showed a greater increase in left-sided activation over the course of training, and they also showed a more robust antibody response to the flu vaccine compared to untreated controls.

At the time, these were very novel findings. The study has limitations. It was not a large sample, and the methodology was not perfect. But it was the first study of its kind.

Why “It’s Not So Simple” (00:47:04)

Richard Davidson:
There is a lot more to say about asymmetry. I’ll conclude with a puzzle.

We measured brain electrical activity in very long-term practitioners who had been meditating for decades and had tens of thousands of hours of practice. They did not show extreme left prefrontal activation.

So it is not so simple.

That raised all kinds of questions about what this metric is actually reflecting. It is clearly reflecting something interesting, and it seems to be associated with early stages of meditation practice. But there may be an inverted U-shaped function, and the story is more complicated than we originally thought.

We originally thought about this in terms of approach and withdrawal, positive and negative emotion. But deeper reflection on Buddhist psychology suggests that the way we parse emotion may be imperfect.

There may be a better way to think about emotion: not simply positive versus negative, but virtuous or unvirtuous. In other words, some emotions lead us toward greater awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, while others detract from those qualities.

That gives the framework much more nuance and complexity. It became clear to us that this complexity had to be taken into account.

Closing (00:49:17)

Cortland Dahl:
I think we just mapped out about ten future Dharma Lab episodes. This was fantastic.

I’ve wanted to have this conversation for a long time, just to geek out on these questions and these lines of research, because they are so fascinating and have so many implications.

I have even more questions now than when we began. I especially want to talk about the 1990s, when asymmetry caught the popular imagination through ideas like “left brain” and “right brain.” As one of the pioneers of that field, I’d love to hear how you think about the ways it was popularized, simplified, and maybe misrepresented.

But that’s another conversation.

Thank you, Richie. And thank you everyone for listening. This will not be the last conversation of this kind. Take care, and see you soon.

But something else happened in that moment. As he flew through the air, before he knew whether he would live or die, his mind opened into a state of awareness unlike anything he had ever experienced. No pain. No fear. No past or future. Just a radiant clarity so complete and compelling, so foreign to anything in his life up to that point, that it completely reorganized his identity.

He couldn’t make sense of it afterward. He had no framework for what had happened. No spiritual vocabulary, no philosophical context. All he knew was that his understanding of his own mind, and of what was possible for a human being, had been permanently altered. And he had no idea where to look.

He spent more than three decades searching.

The Inner Sky

His search took him in many directions. Eventually it brought him to a meditation retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche, the Tibetan teacher that Richie and I have both studied with for many years. Sitting in that retreat, something clicked. He had finally found the language for what had happened to him on that battlefield.

The word in Tibetan is rigpa.

Translated literally, rigpa just means awareness. But this translation misses something. This is not ordinary awareness, the kind we operate from most of the time, which is filtered through layers of identity, habit, memory, assumption, and reaction. It isn’t the awareness shaped and narrowed by who we think we are, by our personal history, by the million small lenses we’ve accumulated over a lifetime without realizing it.

Rigpa is not that. It’s the nature of awareness itself. The open, knowing quality of mind that underlies all of our ordinary experiences of self, while being completely beyond them. The classic image is sky and weather. Clouds, storms, clear days, all of it arises within the sky and passes through it. The sky is never touched.

This is what my friend had glimpsed. The shock of being so suddenly at the precipice of death stripped away everything ordinary, and for a few seconds he saw what was underneath.

Mingyur Rinpoche calls rigpa our “inner sky.”

The Most Direct Path

Within the Tibetan tradition, this recognition of rigpa is considered the most direct path to awakening. It doesn’t require a gradual transformation through meditation or a slow refinement of character. Rather, it’s a recognition, available right now, of something already present and already complete. The “fruitional approach,” as it’s sometimes called, begins from the premise that you are not a broken thing that needs to be fixed. You are already in this moment, as awake as you will ever be. The work is to see that clearly, to stop overlooking it.

But of course, that’s harder than it sounds.

Rigpa is so simple that we don’t believe it. It’s so close that we look right past it. Like the air you breathe, or, if you’re a fish, the water you swim in. The very immediacy of it makes it invisible.

Getting in touch with rigpa involves two parallel streams of practice.

One is the direct method: learning to glimpse this pure awareness, growing familiar with it through repeated recognition, until what was once a rare flash becomes something more continuous. In the Tibetan tradition, this typically happens through so-called “pointing out instructions.” These are experiential instructions given by deeply experienced teachers that guide students to explore different states of consciousness, and eventually helping them see beyond all these shifting states to the underlying “essence” of mind that has been there all along. This is described as “meeting your own mind face to face.” But you’re not meeting the busy, reactive mind crowded with thoughts and reactions and memories. It’s a direct encounter with the very nature of consciousness.

There are many ways to get a glimpse of awareness: Being in nature, moments of joy and celebration, experiences of awe and wonder. But most of these experiences come and go without us recognizing what just happened. They’re just memorable experiences that quickly pass by. To nurture them, we need to recognize what they are and learn how to find our way back to them. This is what “pointing out instructions” are for.

The other stream is slower and less glamorous. It works with everything that blocks this encounter from happening. It unearths our mental and emotional habits and loosens the rigidity of our unconscious beliefs. It illuminates the places where we’re stuck, the patterns we return to compulsively even knowing they don’t serve us. This stream of practice is known as “ngöndro” in Tibetan, which translates as “foundational practices.” This path includes a whole series of meditations and contemplations:

• Reflections on the unique opportunity we have as human beings

• Contemplations of the fragility of the circumstances we take for granted

• Meditations on how easily we get caught in cycles that don’t serve us

• Practices that reorient the heart toward compassion

• Imagination-based practices that help us to let go of old mental and emotional baggage

• Meditations on generosity and giving that upend the feeling of inner impoverishment that many of us carry through life

Most people spend years with these practices, doing the unglamorous work of loosening up the mind so that a glimpse of pure awareness becomes possible.

A New Frontier in Contemplative Science

Almost none of this has been studied.

Richie has spent decades studying some of the most advanced meditators alive, including Mingyur Rinpoche. He documented brain states that are genuinely extraordinary, both during meditation and at baseline. But that research captures the outcome of decades of training. It doesn’t show the before and after, or what happens to an ordinary person when they have their first glimpse of pure awareness.

There are so many interesting questions we have yet to explore: What actually happens in the mind and brain when someone recognizes pure awareness for the first time? What do the foundational practices do as they slowly loosen the hardened layers of self? What shifts in someone who has been caught in cycles of suffering and begins, for the first time, to see through them?

We don’t know. We haven’t looked.

The process of recognizing and growing familiar with rigpa reflects the far reaches of human potential, an area of inner exploration almost entirely unmapped by modern research. Richie and I talk about this often. There’s an unwritten assumption running through most of the scientific literature on mental health that simply being free from psychological disorders is the best we can reasonably hope for. That being “okay” is as good as it gets.

These teachings point in a completely different direction. They describe a dimension of the human mind that isn’t damaged or in need of repair. A source of clarity, care, and creativity that isn’t something you build toward but something that’s already here, already whole. Many wisdom traditions point to this same territory. The Tibetan tradition does it with particular precision and depth, but it isn’t alone. The mountain has more than one path, and people have been finding their way up it for a long time.

Finding Your Way Home

My friend’s story from Vietnam has stayed with me since he shared it so many years ago. He didn’t arrive at an experience of pure awareness after decades of meditation practice. He stumbled into it in the worst possible circumstances, and had spent thirty years trying to understand what it was. He wasn’t looking and searching simply to understand what he’d experienced. He was lost and he wanted to find his way back home. He just needed a map.

Most of us are not going to have a dramatic beginning to our journey like my friend did. There are many ways to get a glimpse of pure awareness. But his story captures something important about the human condition: We spend much of our lives looking and searching. We don’t always know what we’re looking for, but there’s a vague sense that something more is possible than whatever it is we’ve got going right now. But we’re looking outside ourselves. It usually never occurs to us that what we’re looking for might already be here, and that the place to find it is not outside, but within.

My friend found that out on a battlefield in Vietnam. He spent thirty years finding his way back. But the path doesn’t have to take that long, and it doesn’t have to start with a mortar shell. It is right here, waiting to be recognized.

Warmly,

Cort

Podcast Chapter List

0:00 Relationships are rough: using partnership as a spiritual path
1:11 Introducing Devin and Nico Hase and This Messy, Gorgeous Love
5:36 What can a monastic tradition teach us about relationships?
7:05 Devin on translating Buddhist teachings into modern lay life
9:53 Nico on bringing Dharma into the gritty reality of family and partnership
11:29 Richie on family, feedback, and why Dharma must matter in real life
15:23 Retreat, relationship, and why we can’t hide from ourselves
18:04 Partners as teachers: what relationships reveal about us
19:34 Nico on monastic ideals, friction, and freedom
21:29 Richie on being exposed, seen, and changed by relationship
22:16 Self-knowledge, co-regulation, and the dance of partnership
23:36 Writing the book together and relationship as mirror
25:07 Cort on intimacy, fear, and what love uncovered
28:40 Relationships are rough: the myth of smooth sailing
30:04 Vulnerability, exposure, and becoming resilient together
31:21 Dukkha and the “bumpy ride” of partnership
34:24 Appreciation, gratitude, and learning to see the good
42:42 Conflict styles: volcanoes, diplomats, and dodgers
52:19 The trance of nice: kindness, emotion, and authenticity
55:12 Practical takeaways: check-ins, fun, and daily connection
57:43 Final reflections on relationships, friendship, and the book’s wider relevance

Some of you may have caught the live session we did shortly after we got back. If not, here’s a bit of context.

We traveled with a small group of scientists and friends—including our colleagues Sona Dimidjian, Elena Antonova, Nirosha Murugan and Martin Picard (whose Substack we highly recommend), along with Adam Weissman and Christina Glavas.

The purpose of the trip was to meet an eminent Tibetan lama, Khandro Tseringma Rinpoche.

Khandro-la, as she is often called, is one of the great living exemplars of the Tibetan tradition. And she is completely unique.

Why We Went

We were there for dialogue, but more than anything, we were there to listen.

The central theme of our time together was the possibility of enduring well-being—a kind of inner flourishing that isn’t fragile or dependent on circumstances, and doesn’t rise and fall with the constant movement of thoughts and emotions.

From a scientific perspective, this is almost unexplored territory. We have a growing body of research on happiness, stress, resilience, and even meaning and purpose. But the idea that well-being could be stable and enduring—that it could remain even as conditions change—is barely on the map.

So we went in with a very simple intention: to learn from her experience. Not to translate it too quickly into scientific frameworks, but to really listen, and see whether her perspective might help us begin asking better questions. Questions that could eventually shape research, but also speak more directly to the human condition—how we live, how we suffer, and what might actually be possible for us.

A Rare Opportunity

We had two full days with Khandro-la.

Our group of scientists was joined by an extraordinary group of Tibetan teachers, including Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, along with scholars and a global audience of several hundred people who were simply there to observe.

And for those two days, we did something that is almost never done.

We listened to Khandro-la speak openly about her inner experience.

In the Tibetan tradition, especially among accomplished meditation masters, there is a strong norm, almost a prohibition, against sharing personal realizations in public. Typically, these kinds of experiences are only discussed with one’s teacher, or with a very small circle of close practitioners.

In fact, when someone speaks openly about their realization, it’s often taken as a sign that something is off.

But this was different.

At the direct request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (who personally trained her), she agreed to share her experience openly.

That made this an incredibly rare opportunity: a chance to hear, firsthand, how a deeply realized practitioner understands her own mind.

A Childhood Unlike Any Other

Khandro-la was born in an extremely remote region of eastern Tibet.

To get a sense of what that means, imagine the most remote place you’ve ever visited—and then multiply that by a thousand. Tibet is remote to begin with, and this was an especially isolated area.

She grew up in a nomadic family. She had no formal education and no access to healthcare. None of the basic structures most of us rely on.

And yet, despite what might have looked like an impoverished upbringing, from a very early age her inner life was incredibly rich.

On the first morning, we asked her to describe her childhood, especially her inner experience.

She spoke for nearly three hours, covering the period from around age two or three up to seven.

What struck me immediately was the level of detail. The specificity of her memory was astonishing. It felt less like someone recalling early childhood and more like someone describing what they had done the previous day.

I could barely believe what I was hearing. I can hardly remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, let alone what I was doing at age three.

A Child Exploring Consciousness

But that wasn’t even the most striking part. What stood out most wasn’t the visionary or mystical content—though there was plenty of that. It was her curiosity. She came into this world with an intense, almost relentless interest in consciousness itself.

As a small child, she was already noticing things most adults overlook entirely. She was fascinated by how consciousness changes across the day—waking, falling asleep, dreaming, deep sleep—and she wanted to understand what was actually happening. For example, she wondered: what happens to visual consciousness when we fall asleep? Does it stop? Or is it still functioning in some way?

And she didn’t leave it at that. She ran experiments. At one point, she described sneaking up to her sleeping parents and holding a needle in front of their eyes, thinking that if visual consciousness were still active, they would react. We all had a good laugh imagining how badly that could have gone.

When nothing happened, she refined her thinking. Maybe visual consciousness is still present, but dormant behind closed eyelids. So she found someone who slept with their eyes slightly open and tried again. Still no reaction. From that, she concluded that visual consciousness doesn’t function at all during sleep, even if the eyes are open.

It’s both hilarious and kind of remarkable. A small child in a nomadic tent, running controlled experiments on consciousness.

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Turning the Experiment Inward

But what came next was even more remarkable.

She shifted from observing others to observing her own mind.

Instead of testing what was happening in other people, she began closely tracking her own experience as she fell asleep.

This is not easy to do. Even experienced meditators often struggle to maintain awareness through that transition.

But she described it in detail.

She could see the gradual shutting down of the senses. The fading of sensory input. Then the emergence of more subtle mental activity—images, thoughts, dreamlike fragments.

And then, eventually, the disappearance of even those.

What remained was what she described as a kind of bare awareness—knowing, but without any object.

No sights. No sounds. No thoughts. Just awareness itself.

In the Tibetan tradition, this is often referred to as luminosity—pure awareness, or the most fundamental level of mind.

This is something that, in traditional settings, people spend years training to recognize, often in strict retreat.

And here she was, around six years old, accessing it directly, without any formal training or conceptual framework.

Just curiosity.

What This Points To

For us as scientists, this raises some important questions.

If this account is even partially accurate, it suggests that there may be aspects of consciousness—and potentially well-being—that are far more accessible than we tend to assume.

It also suggests that what we think of as well-being might be limited. We tend to define it in terms of emotional states—feeling good, reducing stress, increasing positive affect.

But what she was pointing to is something much deeper.

A form of well-being that isn’t dependent on emotional states at all.

Something stable. Something that doesn’t come and go.

And just as important was the method.

She didn’t arrive there through theory or belief.

She got there by looking.

Two Takeaways

If I had to distill this down, two things stand out.

1. The Far Reaches of Flourishing

Most of us are looking in the wrong place for well-being.

We spend our lives chasing experiences, trying to hold onto the good ones and avoid the difficult ones.

Even when we start meditating or engaging in some kind of spiritual practice, that pattern often continues. We just shift to chasing more refined or subtle experiences.

But it’s still chasing.

We’re still oriented toward something that isn’t here yet.

What Khandro-la was pointing to is a very different approach.

Instead of trying to improve our experience, we can examine the mind itself.

We can look directly at consciousness—at the process through which all experiences arise.

At a deeper level, there may already be a kind of stability and well-being that isn’t dependent on anything else.

The traditions talk about this—especially in practices like Mahamudra and Dzogchen—but what struck me here was how direct it was. How little it depended on elaborate methods.

2. Curiosity as a Practice

The second takeaway is more practical.

Curiosity, not as an abstract quality, but as a way of engaging experience, may be one of the key ingredients.

This isn’t curiosity in the sense of collecting information or developing theories.

It’s curiosity as direct observation.

Looking at experience as it unfolds:

• Noticing how the mind shifts in different contexts

• Paying attention to transitions—falling asleep, waking up, shifting between activities

• Observing thoughts and emotions as they arise and dissolve

In that sense, we become investigators of our own experience.

Not in a detached, analytical way, but in a very immediate, experiential way.

Over time, this kind of observation can start to reveal layers of experience that we usually miss entirely.

A Personal Reflection

After that first day, something shifted for me.

Even after years of practice, I felt a renewed sense of interest.

There’s something surprisingly compelling about just watching the mind:

How different it feels in a social setting versus being alone.
How it changes when focused versus relaxed.
What happens in those in-between moments—falling asleep, waking up, switching contexts.

It’s all there, constantly changing, constantly revealing something—if you pay attention.

An Invitation

We can all explore our own minds in this way.

And this kind of exploration isn’t just interesting. It may actually change how we relate to our experience. It may help loosen some of the patterns that drive stress and dissatisfaction. And it may point us toward a deeper kind of well-being, something that isn’t dependent on getting the right conditions in place.

It’s only been a few weeks since we returned from Kathmandu, and I imagine I’ll be reflecting on this experience for a long time.

But I wanted to write some of this down while it’s still fresh, partly for myself, and partly in case something here resonates with you.

With appreciation,

Cort

P.s. If you’d like to read another account about our trip, check out this post by Martin and Nirosha, who accompanied us on the journey.

Thanks to those who attended the AMA Tuesday night, and if you missed it we are sharing the recording here. We covered a lot of ground, from the science of what keeps the brain changing across a lifetime, to what appears to happen in the bodies of advanced practitioners after clinical death. And don’t miss the 2 minute micro-pra…

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Years ago, when Fortnite went viral, my son was obsessed. Like most kids his age, he was glued to his computer. I hated it. I remembered my own childhood, roaming the neighborhood until dark. It felt wrong to watch him spend hour after hour indoors.

So I used the one leverage point I had. When he got into trouble, I took away Fortnite.

It seemed like the perfect solution. No game meant he would go outside and do what kids are supposed to do, right?

Wrong.

One afternoon I looked out the window after sending him out to play. He was riding his bike in circles. Alone. There were no other kids. They were all inside, on their own screens.

That was the moment it hit me. I wasn’t teaching him anything. I was trying to recreate a world that no longer existed.

My son is now twenty. He attends the same university I did. Many of the same buildings are still there. He’s taking some of the same courses. On the surface, he’s going through the same transition that I did when I was his age.

But psychologically, he’s living in a different world.

When I stepped onto campus as a freshman, I was paralyzed by social anxiety. Public speaking terrified me. I felt exposed and unsure of myself. But my insecurity lived mostly in my own mind.

Today’s young adults live inside systems that amplify insecurity and monetize attention. They wake up and fall asleep in a web of social comparison. Identity is curated. Attention is harvested. They are always visible, always being evaluated, or always wondering why no one is paying attention.

Even after thirty years of meditation, I still feel the reflex to grab my phone when I have a free moment. I feel the pull of the endless scroll. If we struggle with these forces as adults, imagine encountering them at twelve. Or ten. Or six.

And now we are entering something even more destabilizing with the rise of AI.

A college student today can generate an essay in seconds. They can brainstorm ideas, write code, summarize research, draft emotional messages, even simulate therapeutic conversations. The friction that once forced struggle, confusion, and original thought is quietly dissolving.

I do not say this as a critic of innovation. These tools are extraordinary.

But development matters.

Frustration tolerance matters.

Wrestling with a blank page matters.

Sitting with frustration…with boredom…with loneliness. It all matters.

When we have infinite intelligence at our fingertips, what happens to authorship? When answers arrive instantly, what happens to inquiry? When artificial systems can mirror empathy, what happens to the slow, messy work of learning how to sit with another human being’s pain?

We do not know.

The pace of technological change is far outstripping the pace of research. As Richie — my co-conspirator here on Dharma Lab — often says, we are all unwitting participants in a massive experiment for which none of us has given informed consent.

So what am I supposed to tell my son?

He is headstrong, as I was. He is navigating forces I did not face. And he needs to find his own path.

There are days when I feel powerless to help him.

Yesterday was one of those days.

I woke before dawn to catch up on email and Slack. Meetings ran back to back. By evening, my body was tight and buzzing. I was drained.

My son was having a rough day too. I wanted so badly to talk to him and comfort him, knowing full well that my attempts to express my care usually come out as a clueless parental lecture. He just needed space.

So I went upstairs, lay down, and did something very simple. I brought awareness into my body. I wasn’t trying to fix anything. I just noticed the tightness in my chest, the residue of a dozen conversations still echoing in my nervous system. I didn’t try to release it or change it. I just held space for it, the way you might sit with a friend who needed to be heard.

Within a few minutes, something shifted. Not because I figured anything out. Because I stopped trying to figure anything out. I was being, amidst all the doing.

For me, time like this is no longer optional. It is oxygen. It is water. It feels as vital to me as air.

But it does not appear on its own. I have to make time for it. If I don’t, it disappears.

This is where I return to a simple idea from Buddhist psychology: We are not reducible to our roles, our achievements, our online identities, or even to our memories and personal histories. All of those shape us. But none of them define the deepest layer of who we are.

Beneath the noise, there are currents moving through our inner landscape that are always present. Awareness. The capacity to know experience. Compassion. The capacity to care. Wisdom. The capacity to discern what leads to suffering and what leads to freedom.

These are not beliefs. They are capacities. And they strengthen with practice.

I still think about that image of my son riding in circles. It was horrifying and sad at the same time. But looking back, I can see that the loneliness I was witnessing wasn’t just his. It was mine too. I was alone in my confusion, my fear, my sense that the world had shifted beneath my feet and I had no idea how to respond.

Meditation hasn’t given me a map. But it has given me ground to stand on. And from that ground, I can be present with my son even when I can’t guide him. I can be present with my own uncertainty instead of running from it. I can keep returning to those deeper currents that don’t depend on having everything figured out.

We cannot control the world our children are growing up in. We cannot shield them from forces we barely understand ourselves. But we can practice being here. We can keep showing up. We can offer something that algorithms and platforms will never provide.

The sidewalk may be empty. But we don’t have to be.

Warmly,

Cort

Reminders:

• Our week-long pod on the science and practice of flourishing with our friends at ServiceSpace starts this Sunday, in addition to an Awakin call with Cort today at 10am ET. We hope to see you there!

• Our next live Ask Me Anything with Richie and Cort is on April 14th at 8pm ET (for paid subscribers). Please send us your questions in advance via chat, email, or in comments!

The Dalai Lama has told Richie Davidson on several occasions that when he sits down to meditate, he thinks about his brain changing. Based on decades of interaction with Richie’s research, he finds it inspiring to know that his practice is altering the structure of his brain.

When Mingyur Rinpoche is asked by beginners what the essence of meditation is, he gives a disarmingly simple answer:

“The essence of meditation is awareness.” — Mingyur Rinpoche

It sounds straightforward. But as discussed on Dharma Lab, this single quality opens the door to a vast inner universe. In a landmark paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cort, Antoine Lutz, and Richie mapped the terrain of contemplative practice, categorizing the full range of meditation into three families based on their cognitive mechanisms. The goal was to give scientists a common language and a deeper understanding of the biology behind these practices. To move beyond the general term “mindfulness” and understand the full range of contemplative tools available to us.

The practices fall into three families: Attentional, Constructive, and Deconstructive. The categories are not hard and fast. Most practices have attentional elements. But the primary emphasis of each offers a fundamentally different path to well-being, and they activate entirely different networks in the brain.

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The Attentional Family: The Foundation

The attentional family is the fundamental family. It is about training your capacity to pay attention. As Richie puts it:

“We all have this quality of awareness. And what we do in the attentional family of meditation is we connect to that quality.” — Richie Davidson

You can connect to awareness through sound, bodily feelings, thoughts, or emotions. You can recognize awareness itself. You can recognize the spacious qualities of awareness. And you can recognize something Richie calls the “aperture” of awareness: the narrowness or wideness of what you are attending to.

As discussed on Dharma Lab, there are two key elements of any attentional practice. The first and most fundamental is presence itself: learning to be more fully tuned in to what is happening versus being on autopilot, absorbed, or distracted. The second is the attentional component: the aperture, meaning how wide, how narrow, and where you are shining the spotlight of attention.

Cort describes this spectrum from direct experience. During a month-long retreat in Myanmar, Cort spent weeks doing body scan practice and found he could get his attentional focus down to an almost atomic level, a high-powered laser beam of concentration. On the other end of the spectrum are practices where you widen focus until it is all-encompassing, almost without boundary. Effortless and expansive versus narrowly focused and fine-tuned. Different practices on the same attentional spectrum, all doing different things in the mind.

“It’s kind of like being an explorer out in the world, exploring new terrain that nobody’s been to. We’re doing the same thing. We’re just exploring the inner universe of our own minds.” — Cortland Dahl

Cort also spent years delivering pizzas in college, using those drives to practice awareness. Everywhere, all the time. He found that moments that would normally be filled with boredom or autopilot became moments of practice. What was once dead time became alive. This is what Mingyur Rinpoche built an entire program around, called Anywhere, Anytime Meditation: the idea that we can harness this quality of awareness anywhere, anytime.

47%

The typical person is not paying attention to what they are doing for nearly half of their waking life. (As discussed on Dharma Lab HERE referencing the 2010 Killingsworth Study)

By strengthening our capacity to connect with awareness, it becomes more spontaneously available in daily life. Standing in an airport security line, you might notice the sounds of the x-ray machines, the sensations in your body, the people around you. Not because you forced yourself to pay attention, but because awareness showed up on its own.

That is what practice does. It makes awareness available anywhere, anytime.

The Constructive Family: Nurturing What Is Already There

While attentional practices are about observing, constructive practices are about generating. Compassion, loving-kindness, gratitude. We call them “constructive” because we are strengthening, developing, or nurturing qualities that we believe are innate. In Born to Flourish, we detail the research showing that kindness and prosocial behavior are built into our biology.

This family also includes practices centered on devotion, like the Tibetan practice of Guru Yoga, where the emphasis is on constructing a specific state of mind through relationship and imagination. And it includes reappraisal: changing the story you tell yourself about an experience. From the constructive view, reappraisal shifts your interpretation from anxiety to compassion. From the insight view, it is less about changing the story and more about seeing it clearly.

The Deconstructive Family: Who Is Asking the Question?

The third family is deconstructive. This focuses on a curiosity-driven interrogation of the narratives we carry about ourselves. This is the kind of practice the Dalai Lama primarily engages in. He really doesn’t do much in terms of traditional mindfulness practice as we think about it in the West. A major portion of his practice is focused on this kind of investigation.

When we say “I am anxious,” who is this “I”? Is it all of me? Is there any part of me that is not anxious? Who is the “I” that is asking this question?

“It’s really investigating what we mean when we use a term like ‘I’ or ‘me.’” — Richie Davidson

By probing these questions, we deconstruct the rigid sense of self that often causes suffering. These practices fall under the “Insight” pillar of our framework (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose) and are essential for understanding the very nature of reality and consciousness.

Seeing clearly is the key mechanism. Not trying to stop or change or alter. Just seeing.

Things You Can Do

The best practice is the one you actually do. We encourage you to experiment in a playful way. Here are three starting points.

The “Airport Security” Practice

Next time you are in a mundane situation, a waiting room, a grocery line, a red light, tune in. Notice the sounds. The sights. The sensations in your body. See what it feels like to let awareness find you rather than forcing your attention somewhere.

Explore Your Aperture

Spend one minute with a narrow focus, like your breath, then one minute with a wide focus: all sounds in the room, all sensations at once. Notice the difference. Notice how each feels in the body. This is the attentional spectrum Cort and Richie describe, from atom-level to all-encompassing.

Ask “Who Am I?”

When a strong emotion arises, gently ask yourself who is experiencing it. Not to answer the question, but to notice what happens when you ask. Can you find the “I” that is doing the asking? This is deconstructive practice in its simplest form.

Final Thoughts

Our purpose at Dharma Lab is to give you insight into the real science coming out of the Center for Healthy Minds. As an interdisciplinary research center that has been at this since 2010, when the Dalai Lama inaugurated the center, we are in a unique position to share not just the findings, but the backstory. The seminal papers. The behind-the-scenes conversations.

The three families framework maps the full terrain of contemplative practice. Different brain networks. Different paths to well-being. One shared quality at the foundation of all of it: awareness.

We hope this framework helps you understand not just how to practice, but why it works. And we hope you will bring that understanding into your own life, everywhere, all the time.

This is the first in a series where we will go deeper into the science behind these practices. Was this helpful? Is there anything you would like us to explore further? Let us know in the comments or reply to this email. We read every response.

Key Quotes

On the Essence of Meditation: “The essence of meditation is awareness.” — Mingyur Rinpoche

On Neuroplasticity and the Dalai Lama: “He actually thinks about his brain changing based on the interactions he’s had with us. And he said he’s really inspired by that, inspired to know that the practices that he’s doing are actually changing his brain.” — Richie Davidson

On Compassion vs. Empathy: “Empathy is really about feeling the emotions of another person, whereas compassion is more about preparing to relieve the suffering of another person.” — Richie Davidson

On Exploring the Inner Universe: “It’s kind of like being an explorer out in the world, exploring new terrain. We’re doing the same thing. We’re just exploring the inner universe of our own minds.” — Cortland Dahl

On Deconstructive Practice: “It’s really investigating what we mean when we use a term like ‘I’ or ‘me.’” — Richie Davidson

Key Stat: 47% of our waking lives, the typical person is not paying attention to what they are doing.

Show Notes and Resources

Papers Cited

• Dahl, C.J., Lutz, A., & Davidson, R.J. (2015). “Reconstructing and deconstructing the self: cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(9), 515–523.

• Killingsworth, M.A. & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.” Science, 330(6006), 932.

Book

• Born to Flourish by Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl. Explores the four pillars of well-being: Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose.

Apps and Programs

• Center for Healthy Minds

• Healthy Minds Program (free app)

• Joy of Living program with Mingyur Rinpoche

Community

• Free week-long learning experience with Service Space (starting 4/12)

Related Dharma Lab Posts

• Previous post: Summary of the three families framework from the TICS paper

• Mingyur Rinpoche on awareness (link to tagged post)

• Dharma Lab Meditation Library

Join us for Live with Richie & Cort AMA #8 on April 14 at 8pm ET HERE

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We’re hosting a week-long pod on the science and practice of flourishing, starting April 12th, in collaboration with our friends at ServiceSpace. It’s 100% free.

What it is: seven days, each with a few short readings from Born to Flourish, a brief meditation, and one practical experiment for your day. A small peer group moves through it with you. There’s a live call at the beginning and end. The whole thing takes a few minutes a day.

What it covers: the neuroscience behind the four skills — Awareness, Connection, Insight, Purpose — and how to actually build them into daily life rather than just knowing about them.

What it costs: nothing!

If you’ve been curious about the book, this is a good on-ramp. If you’ve already read it, this gives you a structure for putting it into practice with other people.

We hope you can join us!

Click the image below to be taken to the registration page: Note you are also invited to an informal “Awakin Call” on April 10th, covering Cort’s journey from anxious college student to Himalayan retreat caves to neuroscience laboratories.

— Richie and Cort

REMINDER: We are going LIVE later this morning at 10am CT, and will discuss this ServiceSpace Born To Flourish Pod opportunity in more detail.

P.s. If you haven’t checked out the new book yet, you can learn more and get a copy at flourishingbook.com.

We start with two papers that, taken together, gave the entire field of contemplative science a common language.

Back in 2011, Richie and I sat down for lunch with our colleague Antoine Lutz at La Brioche, a small French cafe that’s just down the street from the Waisman Center for Brain Imaging in Madison, Wisconsin, where Richie’s lab was based at the time. I was about to move to Madison to begin my PhD. Richie and I had been talking for a while about what that collaboration might look like, and Antoine, our dear friend and a brilliant neuroscientist who had worked closely with Richie for years, was part of that early conversation.

At the time, mindfulness was beginning to take off in a serious way, both in scientific research and in popular culture. The word was appearing all over the place, from corporate wellness programs to the pages of mainstream magazines. A lot of that momentum traced back, in no small part, to the pioneering work Richie and Antoine had done together a decade earlier. Their research helped establish meditation as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. And now the field was growing fast.

Over lunch, we started asking, “What’s next?” This question spurred a dialogue that lasted years and catalyzed some of our most important work together.

As we discussed where the field might go next, Richie mentioned something the Dalai Lama had said to him years earlier, a challenge that had stayed with him ever since. His Holiness had urged Richie to study not just the negative states that meditation might reduce, but the positive qualities it could cultivate. Compassion. Wisdom. Deep states of concentration. Forms of practice that didn’t map neatly onto the mindfulness label that researchers had been using. In particular, he mentioned a very specific form of meditation from the Tibetan tradition known as “analytical meditation.” This was nowhere on the map of scientific research at the time.

That’s when the problem became clear. The scientific field had been studying “meditation” as though it were a single thing. But anyone who had spent time in a traditional contemplative setting knew better. Focused concentration practice is not the same as open awareness. Loving-kindness meditation works very differently from analytical inquiry into the nature of the self. The Tibetan tradition alone contains hundreds of distinct practices, each with its own method, aims, and distinct benefits.

Scientists had no framework for making sense of this diversity. And without a framework, progress would be slow and confused. Researchers would keep comparing apples to oranges, using the word “meditation” to refer to practices with fundamentally different mechanisms and goals.

By the end of that lunch, we knew one of the first things we needed to do was create a map for the vast terrain of contemplative practices.

Paper One: Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation (Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, and Davidson, 2008)

Our work built upon an important paper from four years earlier, back in 2008. Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences and authored by Antoine Lutz, Heleen Slagter, philosopher and eminent Buddhist scholar John Dunne, and Richie. This was the first paper to introduce a distinction that has since become standard in the field: the difference between Focused Attention meditation (FA) and Open Monitoring meditation (OM).

These aren’t arbitrary categories. They reflect a genuine difference in what the practitioner is actually doing, and therefore in what the brain is likely doing as well.

In Focused Attention practice, you select an object, typically the sensations of breathing, and place your attention there. When the mind wanders, you notice, release the distraction, and bring it back. Over time, attention stabilizes. If you stick with the practice long enough, amazing things happen. Advanced stages of concentration that are unimaginable until you’ve experienced them. Profound states of inner stillness that are at once both healing and nourishing. States of bliss and ecstasy that you can access at will. Attention so fine-tuned that you can tune in to the most subtle sensations in your body, and the most subtle aspects of your mind. Simple in description, yet genuinely demanding in practice. The paper mapped the cognitive cycle that every meditator knows from the inside: sustaining focus, detecting distraction, disengaging, redirecting. Each of those steps corresponds to identifiable neural systems, and training them systematically is what FA practice does.

What the research showed was that this isn’t a matter of willpower. It’s skill acquisition. fMRI studies of long-term practitioners found that brain regions associated with attention monitoring and engagement were activated during FA practice. But they also found something unexpected: an inverted-U-shaped curve. Meditators with moderate experience showed more activation in these regions than novices. Highly experienced meditators showed less. The same pattern you see in any domain of expertise, whether language learning or playing an instrument. Effort decreases as skill consolidates. What begins as effortful concentration eventually becomes what the paper calls “effortless concentration.” The tradition had described this for centuries. Here was a neural signature for it.

Open Monitoring (OM) is a whole different animal. Rather than anchoring attention to a single object, the practitioner allows awareness to remain open to whatever arises – including thoughts, sensations, sounds, emotions – without selecting any of it as a primary focus. As Richie and I often say, “open the aperture of awareness.” You just open the mind as wide as it will go and rest in a state of relaxed, effortless presence. The monitoring faculty itself becomes the practice. What you’re training is the capacity to observe the stream of experience without getting swept into it.

The neural predictions follow from this. OM practice shouldn’t rely heavily on the systems that sustain and engage attention toward a specific object. It should rely more on the systems involved in monitoring, vigilance, and the ability to disengage from whatever captures attention. Studies bore this out. OM practitioners showed stronger performance on tasks requiring sustained, distributed attention and enhanced capacity to avoid getting “stuck” on any single stimulus, a phenomenon called attentional blink, which intensive OM practice was shown to reduce. There are all sorts of real-world applications of this skill, situations where being hyper-focused, or distracted, is counter-productive. This includes everything from driving to work to hanging out with friends. Most of our life calls for this kind of open, relaxed awareness.

The paper also documented something that practitioners often report but that science had rarely confirmed: changes in the baseline state of the brain. Long-term meditators showed elevated gamma-band activity (high-frequency brain oscillations linked to creativity and bursts of insight). And they showed this activity not just during meditation, but before it. The practice had altered the baseline activity of the brain itself. This was one of the earliest pieces of evidence that meditation doesn’t just produce temporary states. With sufficient practice, it produces traits.

Paper Two: Reconstructing and Deconstructing the Self: Cognitive Mechanisms in Meditation Practice (Dahl, Lutz, and Davidson, 2015)

The 2008 paper had given the field an important tool and it had an enormous impact. The FA/OM categorization is widely used in scientific papers to this day, and this paper is one of the most highly cited papers in the entire field of contemplative science.

The FA/OM distinction was an important step, but it still covered only part of the terrain. FA and OM, both forms of attentional training, represented two ends of a spectrum found in one broad category of contemplative practice. But there was more. A lot more. There were other practices that had entirely different methods and objectives, a vast range of meditation practices designed not just to stabilize attention but to actively reshape how we understand ourselves and relate to others. These were not yet on the map.

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Fifty years later, there are thousands of papers a year on contemplative science. In this conversation, Dan, Richie, and Cort trace that entire arc — from Harvard renegades to the 2004 brain scan that changed neuroscience, to the Dalai Lama’s assignment that Richie says defines the rest of his life.

They also land on a deceptively simple question: how do you handle yourself when life gets hard? Goleman’s answer is worth the listen (practice).

For detailed conversation notes, key ideas, key quotes, books, references & resources, please visit here (paid):

Chapter Summary:

00:05:51 — Dan Goleman returns from India and meets Richie Davidson at Harvard
00:06:38 — Studying meditation in academia when the field dismissed it
00:07:11 — Their careers diverge: journalism at the New York Times and neuroscience research
00:08:08 — The Mind & Life Institute and first meetings with the Dalai Lama
00:09:20 — Paul Ekman’s surprising transformation after meeting the Dalai Lama
00:12:03 — Richie’s quiet strategy: exposing scientists to contemplative practice
00:13:09 — The birth of a new generation of contemplative scientists
00:14:37 — Cort Dahl discovers meditation research in graduate school
00:16:10 — Jon Kabat-Zinn teaching yoga in a Harvard Square basement
00:17:35 — “The after is the before for the next during” — meditation changes baseline states
00:18:43 — The breakthrough 2004 meditation brain study
00:20:26 — The Dalai Lama’s lifelong assignment to study and share these practices
00:21:47 — Shifting psychology from pathology to human flourishing
00:26:09 — Emotional intelligence as a path to well-being
00:31:16 — Why practice—not theory—is what actually changes people
00:32:37 — Cort Dahl’s experience with social crisis and emotional complexity
00:35:31 — The Dalai Lama’s advice on skillfully working with anger
00:38:28 — Two contemplative approaches to difficult emotions
00:45:24 — “Feel what you are feeling” — a simple practice that changes awareness
00:46:11 — Dan Goleman on Vipassana meditation
00:47:10 — Scaling well-being beyond formal meditation practice
00:50:04 — Mingyur Rinpoche after retreat: “the same, only more so”

Episode summary

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and co-author of Altered Traits with Richie Davidson, joins Richie and Cort for a conversation that traces the arc of contemplative science from Harvard in 1972 to today. They cover how they met as renegades studying meditation when nobody cared, the 2004 brain scan paper that changed neuroscience, the Dalai Lama’s influence on an entire generation of scientists, and a simple answer to one of the hardest questions: how do you handle yourself when life gets hard?

Dr. Richie Davidson, Dr. Cortland Dahl, Dan Goleman

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Goleman’s answer: you practiced before.

Two meditative renegades in the ‘70s

Goleman and Davidson first met at Harvard around 1972. Dan had just come back from fifteen months in India studying with meditation masters. Richie walked up to him in a psychophysiology course and said, “Are you Dan Goleman?” He’d read an obscure paper Dan had written about consciousness.

They became co-conspirators. Their faculty had, in Dan’s words, “about zero interest in meditation as a topic.” They did their dissertations on it anyway. At the time, there were about three papers in the scientific literature on meditation. As Dan put it, “They weren’t very scientific either.”

Their first paper together introduced a concept they kept coming back to for the rest of their careers:

The after is the before for the next during.

As Richie explained:

“Transforming the baseline state so that the baseline you begin with the next time you meditate will be at least slightly different from the baseline that you started with initially. And that’s the incremental change toward an altered trait.”

— Richie Davidson

They called their later book Altered Traits, a play on altered states. The distinction matters. States are temporary. Traits are who you become when you’re not meditating.

“We’re really interested in how these practices can transform every nook and cranny of our lives, not the experience we may have when we’re meditating, but rather how it transforms our lives in general, all the time.”

— Dan Goleman

Dan Goleman

The meditation paper that changed neuroscience

In 2004, Richie’s lab published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They brought some of the most accomplished meditators on the planet into the lab: Mathieu Ricard and Mingyur Rinpoche, people who had spent years of their lives in formal practice. The findings showed gamma oscillations at levels never previously recorded. Gamma waves are the brain’s way of coordinating activity across different regions at the same time. In simple terms, these meditators’ brains were working together in ways that the researchers had not seen before. And these differences showed up even at rest, before they started meditating.

“We studied them to see if their brains were different. Because if their brains were not different on the measures that we had, there would be no point in studying more novice meditators. But in fact, we found that their brains were dramatically different.”

— Richie Davidson

Dr. Richie Davidson with Matthieu Ricard

It was the first paper on meditation in the journal’s more than hundred-year history. Richie described it as “a real turning point that illustrated, particularly to hard-nosed mainstream neuroscience, that there really was a there there.”

Today there are hundreds if not thousands of papers published every year on these topics. When Dan and Richie were doing their dissertations, there were three.

The Dalai Lama’s advice on anger

Then the conversation turned personal. Cort shared what happened when he landed in Minneapolis earlier in the month, a city in crisis. He grew up there. His son is at the University of Minnesota. He’s worked in the immigrant communities there his whole adult life. And when he arrived, everything hit at once: fear, anger, anxiety, love, care, clear seeing.

He asked the question: what do you do with all of that?

Goleman went to the Dalai Lama’s advice on anger:

“It’s extremely useful. But to be skillful with anger, you need to put aside the hostility, the us and them, and preserve the focus it gives you, the motivation it gives you, the persistence it gives you, and apply that to find a skillful way to intervene in this situation.”

— Daniel Goleman, recounting the Dalai Lama

Then Cort asked the follow-up: how do you actually do that when you’re in the middle of it?

Goleman:

“The answer is you practiced before. It’s not the first time you got angry. You get angry. We get angry at this and that in life. I get angry on hold. Telephone trees make me angry. But what those are, are opportunities to rehearse.”

— Daniel Goleman

And:

“You could try tobogganing, but you wouldn’t expect to go to the Olympics as a tobogganer. You need to practice, and it’s true of any skill, including the skills for self-management, for self-awareness, for empathy.”

— Daniel Goleman

Our favorite takeaway from this conversation: you practiced before. Every moment you noticed your breath. Every time you caught a reaction before it ran you. Every time you observed an angry thought instead of acting on it. Those were training runs. And that is the whole point. We should always be practicing, so that when the moment comes, we are ready.

The full conversation is linked here.

— Dharma Lab

We’re not going to summarize the whole thing chronologically. Instead, here are the findings, quotes, and protocols that matter most — organized by in a way we hope is helpful.

States, Traits, and the Line That Started It All

Richie and Daniel Goleman wrote a line in a paper 20 years before their book Altered Traits:

“The after is the before for the next during.”

How you are after a meditation becomes the baseline for how you enter the next experience. States, repeated, become traits.

In the domain of emotion, frequent bouts of anger — a state — can lead to the trait of irritability. The same mechanism works in reverse. Repeated states of calm, connection, and awareness reshape your default settings.

This is the foundational argument of Richie’s career: wellbeing is not a fixed trait. It is a skill. And skills are trainable.

This is the central thesis of Born to Flourish, out March 24 from Simon & Schuster. flourishingbook.com

Richie’s Five: The 5-Minute Protocol

The headline finding from Richie’s lab:

“If you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We’ve shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You’ll see an increase on measures of wellbeing or flourishing. You can even see just with this amount of practice a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine.”

Huberman named it on the spot: “Richie’s Five.”

The protocol is simple. Five minutes a day. Eyes open or closed. Sitting, walking, or commuting. The practice is not about clearing your mind. It’s not about feeling peaceful. It’s about noticing what’s happening — thoughts, sensations, planning, ruminating — without trying to change it.

As Richie put it: the invitation is “not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but to simply be aware.”

His lab measured what happens in the brain after 30 days of this. The biggest changes were in structural connectivity — specifically in the white matter pathway connecting the prefrontal cortex to the parietal regions. That’s the highway between your executive control network and your default mode network. Five minutes a day changed the physical wiring.

Dr. Richie Davidson on Huberman Lab

Flourishing Is Contagious: The 13,000-Student Study

This is unpublished data that Richie shared publicly.

Teachers were randomly assigned to a wellbeing training. The study then linked to student-level data in the school system. Sample size: approximately 13,000 middle school students.

The students taught by teachers in the wellbeing training group scored significantly higher on standardized math tests — compared to students taught by teachers in the control group. Same curriculum. Same schools. The students had no idea any research was happening.

Why math specifically? Because math performance is degraded by stress more than reading in this age group. The trained teachers were likely calmer, more regulated — and that inner state changed how their students performed.

Richie’s word for it: “Flourishing is contagious.”

Parenting: Don’t Make Your Kid Meditate

“One of the best things a parent can do for a kid is not to have the kid meditate — but meditate yourself and just be with the child and be fully present. You will osmotically transmit these qualities to the child in a completely implicit way.”

Richie’s lab also developed a mindfulness-based kindness curriculum for preschoolers. In one exercise, they ring a bell and ask three-year-olds to raise their hand when they can no longer hear the sound. Twenty-five kids sitting perfectly still for ten seconds. As Richie put it — “they could taste it.”

The curriculum is free, available in English and Spanish.

Gamma Oscillations: Visible to the Naked Eye

Long-term meditators show gamma oscillations so powerful they are visible to the naked eye on raw EEG. Richie first reported this in 2004, published in PNAS. Average lifetime practice of the group: 34,000 hours.

Most people produce a burst of gamma lasting about 250 milliseconds. These practitioners sustained it for seconds and minutes. The finding has been replicated multiple times — including during slow-wave sleep.

Self-Control at Four Predicts Outcomes at Thirty-Two

Richie discussed data from the birth cohort study in New Zealand — a longitudinal study tracking the same individuals from birth. Self-control measured at age four predicted outcomes at thirty-two: less drug abuse, fewer court proceedings, and approximately $6,000 more in annual earnings — matched on socioeconomic status at birth.

The implication: the skills that determine life outcomes are trainable, and they can be trained early.

Pre-Sleep Meditation and Deep Sleep

Richie’s lab is running a new study on pre-sleep meditation. The design: on some nights, participants do a five-minute meditation just before sleep. On other nights, they do not. The study is measuring the impact on slow-wave sleep and next-day mood.

A separate published paper has already shown that pre-sleep meditation boosts growth hormone without altering other features of sleep.

The Notepad by the Cushion

A personal detail from Richie’s own practice:

“When I meditate every morning I actually have a little notepad by my cushion. And occasionally — I don’t do this every session but maybe twice a week — I’ll actually write down something during the meditation. One or two words just to remind me. Because something comes up in my practice, maybe an idea. And I know also that I won’t remember it in the same richness.”

The mind surfaces ideas during stillness. If you don’t capture them, they fade.

The Four Pillars of Flourishing

Richie’s framework — and the structure of Born to Flourish — is built on four pillars: Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose. Each is grounded in neuroscience and practiced experientially.

A critical distinction: human flourishing requires both declarative learning (learning about something) and procedural learning (learning through practice). Most education privileges the first over the second.

The four pillars are the framework of Born to Flourish by Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl — out March 24 from Simon & Schuster. Pre-order at flourishingbook.com

Digital Hygiene

Huberman raised the idea that discipline is not just about what you do — it’s about what you don’t do. Richie agreed. The conversation touched on phone use, social media, and the neurological cost of constant connectivity.

Where to Go Deeper

This conversation covered decades of research in under three hours. If it resonated, here’s where to keep going:

Dharma Lab Podcast — Every week, Richie and Dr. Cortland Dahl go deeper on the science of wellbeing, meditation, and the brain. With personal stories and actionable practice. Subscribe: dharmalabco.substack.com

Subscribe now

Born to Flourish — Richie and Cort’s new book. The four pillars of flourishing, the research behind them, and a practical path to thriving. Simon & Schuster. Out March 24, 2026. Pre-order at flourishingbook.com

Watch the full conversation:

Dr. Richard Davidson sat down (for 3 hours!) with for a wide-ranging conversation covering brain oscillations during meditation, the neuroscience of states versus traits, gamma activity in long-term meditators, how meditation changes the brain’s response to physical pain, pre-sleep meditation and deep sleep, psychedelics, self-control data from a 60-year longitudinal cohort, digital hygiene, meditation for children, and the four pillars of human flourishing.

On the power of a short daily practice:

“If you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We’ve shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials.”

Richie’s lab has also shown that this amount of practice produces increases in measures of wellbeing and measurable decreases in IL-6, a pro-inflammatory cytokine. Huberman referred to a short practice as “Richie’s Five” (minutes).

On parenting, Richie said something that stopped the conversation:

“One of the best things a parent can do for a kid is not to have the kid meditate — but meditate yourself and just be with the child and be fully present.”

They also discussed new unpublished data on 13,000 students: when teachers received wellbeing training, their students’ standardized math scores improved. Same curriculum. The only variable was the inner state of the teacher.

Subscribe now

Richie and Cort’s new book Born to Flourish comes out March 24 from Simon & Schuster. Huberman gave it a shout-out on the episode.

Watch or listen to the entire thing - Dharma Lab will be breaking this down more so stay tuned but wanted to get this out to you.

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