Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what does meditation mean? Do you? How does mad meditation
Speaker 1: manifest in your own life? Usually it manifests itself in
Speaker 1: the sense that I'll be in the middle of something
Speaker 1: and I'll think, oh, my god, if I could only
Speaker 1: meditate and meditate, well, this would probably be the time
Speaker 1: that I need to do it. Um. So Usually it
Speaker 1: comes up in the chaos of life and uh, and
Speaker 1: then I start to think about how horrible I am
Speaker 1: at it. So so you can't actually sit and and
Speaker 1: do like you or you don't normally sit around and
Speaker 1: do like, say two our meditation. No no, But I
Speaker 1: do it from time to time. And the reason is
Speaker 1: because if I can just get ten seconds, ten seconds,
Speaker 1: five seconds, doesn't matter of some sort of state in
Speaker 1: which my mind goes blank and doesn't you know, fill
Speaker 1: up with groceralists or goofy thoughts or you know, my
Speaker 1: back hurt or something like that, then I feel like
Speaker 1: that is is a huge wind um or at least,
Speaker 1: you know, I come away with feeling a little bit
Speaker 1: clearer and lighter. Yeah, well, for my own part, I'm
Speaker 1: also not uh seemingly capable of lengthy meditation. And uh
Speaker 1: and for for a while I was trying to do
Speaker 1: like a little meditation every morning, and then I kind
Speaker 1: of thought out of the habit of it. But that
Speaker 1: that was particularly nice, where you just sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: get up, I have my coffee and my smoothie, and
Speaker 1: then go into the sun room for you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes and just try and not think about
Speaker 1: anything and just sort of sit there and let this
Speaker 1: is gonna I mean, a lot of this is gonna
Speaker 1: sound kind of hippie did people were going to tie
Speaker 1: everything back in the science, but kind of let life
Speaker 1: sort of happen to you and and and sort of
Speaker 1: lessen your role as a participant in life for just
Speaker 1: a few minutes. And then, of course, and then I
Speaker 1: started thinking about, oh, well, you know, I'm recording a
Speaker 1: podcast this morning, or who what am I blogging about today?
Speaker 1: Or you know, what is the cat doing over there
Speaker 1: by the window? That kind of thing. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, hey, you're talking about you think
Speaker 1: about it during the chaos and it is kind of
Speaker 1: the idea of rising above the chaos in the same
Speaker 1: way that, uh, you could have a fierce storm on
Speaker 1: Earth and if you were in an airplane, you could
Speaker 1: fly above the cloud cover and everything would be clear.
Speaker 1: And the basic idea of meditation is that so much
Speaker 1: of our life is that storm, and we are always
Speaker 1: capable of rising above it, you know, and and experiencing
Speaker 1: life as it as it actually is without all these
Speaker 1: emotional storms. I think I always think about Unfortunately Kenna
Speaker 1: Reeves um, because he plays at Hearthor right, and there's
Speaker 1: just one scene in the movie. Yeah, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: familiar with this of adaptation. Um yeah, I'm like gonna,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm not not talking about the Matrix right now,
Speaker 1: although he did play I kind of said Hearthur and
Speaker 1: that right, Um, But he's in the middle of this maelstrom,
Speaker 1: like literally this storm that is blowing up around him,
Speaker 1: and he's meditating and he's you know, completely unflappable and
Speaker 1: has moved into some sort of trance like experience. And
Speaker 1: this one, you know, we know that, um that this
Speaker 1: sort of level of meditation is something called like Nirvana,
Speaker 1: right or somebody which is one of the It's the
Speaker 1: highest level that you could ever achieve. And that's what
Speaker 1: made him said, Arthur Right or Kiana Reeves either one. Um,
Speaker 1: but you know that the idea is that you can
Speaker 1: block out the world and just refresh. He plays it
Speaker 1: hard to got him the Buddha. Yes, Okay, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure it was Kiana Reeves, because I define it funny
Speaker 1: that he picks roles that don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: dialogue in them, and this was one of them. He
Speaker 1: just had to sort out there and look pretty and
Speaker 1: it's kind of yeah, he had to sit there with
Speaker 1: his eyes closed. Well, it's interesting that we ring up
Speaker 1: movies because I think before I actually tried meditation or
Speaker 1: even really had an idea of what it was, which
Speaker 1: was a long stretch of my life. Uh, so far,
Speaker 1: I just had meditation was the kind of thing like
Speaker 1: a shell in Monk might do in a movie before
Speaker 1: I started whipping people's butts. That you know that that
Speaker 1: was basically the only real idea that meditation was this
Speaker 1: cool Eastern thing that people in movies sometimes did, and
Speaker 1: they looked real serene and cool when they did it,
Speaker 1: and uh, and so I did have the right idea
Speaker 1: that it was somehow involved calmness and focusing the mind. Well, see,
Speaker 1: I think that's the interesting thing about meditation is it
Speaker 1: means something different to each person and there are a
Speaker 1: million different ways to meditate and techniques and ways to
Speaker 1: use it. But of course, when we see it in
Speaker 1: the purest sense in the East, you know from which
Speaker 1: it came, we see it as particularly like in Japanese
Speaker 1: and Buddhism, um um, there's really no goal of reaching
Speaker 1: this ultimate state of being or nirvana. It's just about sitting.
Speaker 1: For them, it's about sitting period, right, um. But we
Speaker 1: know here in the West that we've been using it
Speaker 1: as a fantasy at right, Like, okay, if you want
Speaker 1: to lower your stress, then you should meditate. If you
Speaker 1: wanna get rich, you should meditate. If you want to
Speaker 1: get skinny, get you know, the laundry list of this
Speaker 1: kind of a magical thing that can solve any problem,
Speaker 1: which it's not right And and of course there is
Speaker 1: this mystical aspect to it because when you do, when
Speaker 1: you can get instant some sort of state like that,
Speaker 1: and and your brain is engaged in that, it does
Speaker 1: feel like something that's special, special, and mystical um, an
Speaker 1: experience that only you are having right well, and it
Speaker 1: is tied into various religious traditions, um, even showing up
Speaker 1: in some Christian traditions. And like some there comes a
Speaker 1: point where prayer crosses over and really becomes more of meditation. Uh.
Speaker 1: And let me back up just a second to talk
Speaker 1: about two distinct types of meditation, just to give a
Speaker 1: deeper idea of what we're talking about. Um. There is
Speaker 1: uh concentrative meditation, and then there is mindful meditation. And
Speaker 1: the Now the analogy I like to think of is uh,
Speaker 1: think of a clear vortex, like a clear vortex of water, um,
Speaker 1: the kind that might exist in a in a soda
Speaker 1: container after you've put filled it with water and shook
Speaker 1: it up, you know, like a whirlpool, and it's clear,
Speaker 1: all right, No no bubbles that don't complicate the metaphor so. UM.
Speaker 1: Now imagine taking say a blue die and pouring that in,
Speaker 1: and that blue die represents um worrying about the future.
Speaker 1: And then let's say you put in a green die
Speaker 1: as well, and that die represents uh fretting about the
Speaker 1: past and so and then there are other dies as
Speaker 1: well having to do with other concerns and worries in
Speaker 1: your life, and the more you put in into it,
Speaker 1: that the vortex just becomes blacker and blacker and just
Speaker 1: you know, in this horrible brown color. And part of
Speaker 1: the idea of meditation is that is it so much
Speaker 1: of our life is like that. We're this vortex of
Speaker 1: thought with all these things wrapped up in it. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and those that's the and that's the guys, that's the
Speaker 1: lens through which we view the world. And so the
Speaker 1: goal of meditation is to simplify that vortex. And the
Speaker 1: concentrative approach is uh generally actually involved stuff like um,
Speaker 1: repeating mantras, uh, focusing on a single word. And it's
Speaker 1: the idea here is like, instead of putting all these
Speaker 1: different dyes into the vortex, I'm gonna put a single die.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put this single um, I don't know, uh,
Speaker 1: pick a color, pink, pink die. We're gonna put this
Speaker 1: single pink dye that is this mantra or this phrase
Speaker 1: or just this ome that that's going to replace the
Speaker 1: muddle of red and green and blue. So so the
Speaker 1: vortex cannot disappear. Because the vortexes are thought process the
Speaker 1: vortex is us and the vortex is the way we
Speaker 1: view the world. But if we can focus it on
Speaker 1: one thing, then it simplifies everything. Okay, So it's reductionism, yes,
Speaker 1: And then there's mindful meditation, and mindful meditation UM is
Speaker 1: about recognizing the flow of experience, the thoughts, the sites,
Speaker 1: the sounds. So in this one, it's not as much
Speaker 1: about focusing putting a different color into the vortex vortex,
Speaker 1: but focusing on the vortex itself really, So so that's okay.
Speaker 1: So the Maelstrom is the Maelstrom, and it is what
Speaker 1: it is, yeah, and just realizing that the Maelstrom and
Speaker 1: like and realizing what's happening with So that's that's that's
Speaker 1: the way I kind of tend to view the two
Speaker 1: different different versions here. So those are essentially two different
Speaker 1: kinds of meditation, okay. And I think it's interesting too
Speaker 1: to look at this, like what's happening inside the actual brain? Um,
Speaker 1: just to give us an idea. We know that the
Speaker 1: brain always has some level of electrical activity going on,
Speaker 1: measurable electrical measurable right right, And the kny G can
Speaker 1: measure that activity, and so you have different types of
Speaker 1: brain waves UM from slow to fast. You have delta, theta, alpha,
Speaker 1: and bed beta, and we know that delta is associated
Speaker 1: with deep sleep, and on the other end of the spectrum,
Speaker 1: we know that beta is associated when UM, you're working
Speaker 1: on a goal oriented task. Right, So during meditation, what
Speaker 1: we do know is that Theta waves right there there,
Speaker 1: couched right there next to delta, those are the most
Speaker 1: common brain waves in the frontal and middle parts of
Speaker 1: the brain, which are responsible for monitoring other thought processes
Speaker 1: or mental processes. So in other words, this part of
Speaker 1: the brain is basically dialing down the awareness of the
Speaker 1: other brain UM. And of course we're seeing this not
Speaker 1: in just like a casual meditators. We're seeing this and
Speaker 1: people who are highly experienced meditators UM. And then we
Speaker 1: also see that alpha waves show up in the posterior
Speaker 1: parts of the brain and this indicates a wakeful rest UM.
Speaker 1: A study described in Science Daily brain Waves and Meditation
Speaker 1: makes the connection that the brain wave activity is much
Speaker 1: more changed in groups of meditators than groups who just
Speaker 1: relax UM. So the extrapolation is that the brain is
Speaker 1: able to relax and focus a lot more in this
Speaker 1: meditative state. So there's definitely a difference because some people think, well,
Speaker 1: can I just sit there and relax, I can watch TV,
Speaker 1: I can read a book, or I can just sit there,
Speaker 1: but not necessarily meditate. The fact is is that you
Speaker 1: still have your brain engaged different parts in in um thinking, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like people often talk about well, I'm just gonna go
Speaker 1: home and turn off my brain and by that and
Speaker 1: I mean watching TV. But yeah, it's it's different things
Speaker 1: are going on. So while if you're just trying your
Speaker 1: hand at meditation, or or certainly if you're inspired to
Speaker 1: give meditation to try after listening to this podcast, and
Speaker 1: by all means, do and write us and tell us
Speaker 1: what you think. Um, just you know, you may find
Speaker 1: yourself setting there going, well, I'm sitting here doing nothing.
Speaker 1: I sure could whip out my smartphone and check my
Speaker 1: email as long as I'm setting here, or or I
Speaker 1: could start thinking about this or it wouldn't be better off,
Speaker 1: you know, catching up on the show. I just started
Speaker 1: watching an HBO or some thing. But but that's you're
Speaker 1: then you're engaging different parts of your brain, and you're
Speaker 1: you're bringing in a lot of mental activity that you're
Speaker 1: ideally trying to remove. From that vortex, right, because they're
Speaker 1: bombard at all the time. Right. And actually I think
Speaker 1: this is probably a good time to talk about memes, right. Yes, Um,
Speaker 1: we've talked about Susan Blackmore. She is m ameticist and um,
Speaker 1: she's built on Richard dawkins selfish gene premise that our
Speaker 1: genes carrying carry on only to perpetuate themselves sort of
Speaker 1: regardless of the Organismy hair too, she has multicolored hair.
Speaker 1: She's pretty wonderful. It's just from like a rock star
Speaker 1: of this area. Um. And Dawkins also said that we've
Speaker 1: created a cultural equivalent in something he calls memes. So
Speaker 1: this is the spread of ideas that compete to become
Speaker 1: part of our cultural fabric, and not even just our
Speaker 1: cultural fabric, but on an individual basis, the things that
Speaker 1: you hear, the words, the ideas that sort of uh
Speaker 1: come together in this mosaic for each person. Um, those
Speaker 1: are all competing things, right, and um, it's a it's
Speaker 1: the brain chatter really that we experienced on a day
Speaker 1: to day level. And it's the songs we hear, it's
Speaker 1: the conversation we pick up, it's the imagined dialogues in
Speaker 1: her head right, um, And it's the effort of the
Speaker 1: brain to to sort of, you know, steer the car
Speaker 1: left when you're actually reremembering a past event or a conversation.
Speaker 1: These are all the things that are crowding us up.
Speaker 1: And Susan Blackmore talks about memes extensively, and she actually
Speaker 1: talks about teams, to which she says, is technology just
Speaker 1: giving us iterations of memes? Which is for another day.
Speaker 1: But memes and meditation is something really important to her
Speaker 1: because not only she in a metasis, but she is
Speaker 1: she's like a zen meditation practitioner twenty five years now. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in John Horgan's book Rational Mysticism, he actually interviews
Speaker 1: her about her view on memes and meditation, and this
Speaker 1: is sort of him summarizing her thoughts on the topic.
Speaker 1: He says, we do not perceive the world directly as
Speaker 1: it truly is. We actively constructed. We construct ourselves to
Speaker 1: our ordinary waking self is as artificial, invented, and illusory
Speaker 1: as the ethereal double selves. We hallucinate in dreams and
Speaker 1: out of body experiences. Once we learn this fact and
Speaker 1: fully realize it in every moment of our lives, we
Speaker 1: can wait from the meme dream, and this is something
Speaker 1: she talks about all the time, the meme dream. All
Speaker 1: of this information that we're trying to um just percolate
Speaker 1: in our brains. Um. And and remember too, this is
Speaker 1: interesting when you think about the fact that of what
Speaker 1: we perceive when we enter a room isn't necessarily coming
Speaker 1: through our eyes. It's actually how we are interpreting and
Speaker 1: inferring the data that we see. So again we've we've
Speaker 1: got all this happening at once. So according to Blackmore,
Speaker 1: she says that mentation is not going to make you smarter, richer, healthier.
Speaker 1: It's really about pruning back those memes. Yeah. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's um again. It brings back down this idea of
Speaker 1: there's there's the world as it is, and then there
Speaker 1: is the world as we see it, and that the
Speaker 1: world as we see it is influenced by all these
Speaker 1: memes and all these thought processes and UH and meditation
Speaker 1: often comes back to the idea of turning a lot
Speaker 1: of this off and and seeing the room as the room. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And actually Blackmore has a bone to pick too with
Speaker 1: with meditators and um in meditating in general, which we
Speaker 1: will get to right after this quick break. This presentation
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Intel sponsors of tomorrow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually Blackmore can argue, shoot, and in fact will that
Speaker 1: it's nearly impossible to get consistent data to tell us
Speaker 1: a coherent story about the effects of meditation. And one
Speaker 1: part is, even though I swiftly divided meditation into two types,
Speaker 1: there are so many different styles of medica titation and
Speaker 1: methods of meditation. I mean, just think of it, you know,
Speaker 1: talking about reducing the vortex to one single color instead
Speaker 1: of a dozen at once. Well, they're just they're just
Speaker 1: imagine that there are any number of colors you could
Speaker 1: make that vortex b um and so so there there's
Speaker 1: If you start looking around for ways to meditate, you
Speaker 1: will find lots of examples, and you can't study all
Speaker 1: of them in a scientific study. You have to pick
Speaker 1: something and go with it, and so you inevitably do
Speaker 1: not have a complete picture of meditation as a global phenomena. Well,
Speaker 1: and her problem with it too is that once you
Speaker 1: try to quantitate results, you're trying to apply an agenda
Speaker 1: to something that doesn't necessarily have an agenda, right, because again,
Speaker 1: meditation is not it is not it should not be
Speaker 1: and it's more traditional forms. It should not be I
Speaker 1: will meditate now to try and make myself healthier. But
Speaker 1: it's not that kind of thing. And I don't know
Speaker 1: why someone would talk like a robot will meditation. Well,
Speaker 1: that's your meditation voice. I think we've heard your dolphin voice,
Speaker 1: your meditation voice. Um. So yeah, I mean that's why
Speaker 1: she says you get wildly different data of sometimes when
Speaker 1: you have two different groups. And part of that too,
Speaker 1: can be because the the actual sample group. Um. She
Speaker 1: tends to say that people who are seeking out meditators,
Speaker 1: they tend to be more anxious and neurotic than average,
Speaker 1: and I know, to report more problems in general, and
Speaker 1: to have taken twice as many drugs as non meditators.
Speaker 1: She's gonna say what kind of drugs or you know.
Speaker 1: But um, in other words, it's not necessarily the sample
Speaker 1: group that you want to test, uh, in order to
Speaker 1: get sort of like across the board, even reliable results.
Speaker 1: Now this is her talking about in her experience, right,
Speaker 1: Because you have to understand that she's going to workshops
Speaker 1: into very intense like weekend retreats and so on and
Speaker 1: so forth. She's probably dealing with a different animal and
Speaker 1: in terms to the people that she's come across as
Speaker 1: a scientist and hum a practitioner herself. Yeah, and these
Speaker 1: are and she's she's dealing in these cases not with
Speaker 1: casual meditators, That's right. These are people that maybe you
Speaker 1: have more intense personalities, who like her, you know, have
Speaker 1: been practicing this at this very high level for twenty
Speaker 1: five years or more. Um, so you know that's it's
Speaker 1: sort of a different animal. Well, then there's also the
Speaker 1: idea that, uh, did you point out that that people
Speaker 1: engaged in meditation are more often to be uh, they're
Speaker 1: more open to become immersed in an experience. Correct. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's another thing. And that sort of brought up the
Speaker 1: whole placebo effect which we've talked about before. If you
Speaker 1: have a group that is ready, willing and able to
Speaker 1: do something, then it may not bear out the same
Speaker 1: results as another group that is like, oh okay, I'll
Speaker 1: just try out this meditation thing and see what sort
Speaker 1: of results I get. Yeah, I mean just imagine the
Speaker 1: difference if you were to say, hey, guys, I need
Speaker 1: ten people like you advertising about I need ten people
Speaker 1: for a meditation study, and then so you get ten
Speaker 1: people are like, yeah, I totally will blow a Saturday
Speaker 1: on a meditation study versus if you just went out
Speaker 1: on the street and we're like, all right, you you
Speaker 1: you you, and you get here meditation study. Now, it's
Speaker 1: going to be a rather different results that imagine, right, right,
Speaker 1: they're already sort of doing up this idea that they're
Speaker 1: going to have some sort of benefit from this, and
Speaker 1: particularly in group meditation, you see this too, because it's
Speaker 1: sort of another issue of community and socialization. Um. She
Speaker 1: talks about the Maharishi effect. Yes, yeah, And we're not
Speaker 1: going to pick on transcendental meditation because actually, as a technique, um,
Speaker 1: it is supposedly very helpful. Um. But I think she
Speaker 1: is picking on Maharishi, referring to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, known
Speaker 1: as the Beatles Guru. I think, to most people, who
Speaker 1: is the founder of transcendental meditation? Yeah, I mean one
Speaker 1: of our problems here is that you have the Maryashi
Speaker 1: International University in Fairfield, Iowa, and they publish their own
Speaker 1: publications with different studies and regarding the effects of transcendental
Speaker 1: medica meditation. So yeah, I eat non peer reviews. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: So no no challenge here so yeah, look look for
Speaker 1: that as you're looking at different results, you know, in
Speaker 1: different website, which is for the positive effects of meditation.
Speaker 1: Now the Mariachi Mariachi effect, that would be something entirely different.
Speaker 1: The my mind still wants to say Mariachi Maharishi. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Maharishi effect. Um. This comes down to the most
Speaker 1: in its most phenomenal example would be that one percent
Speaker 1: of the population gets together, meditates and changes the world.
Speaker 1: This is a claim, right, that that there's less crime
Speaker 1: as a result of meditation. That's one claim, one percent
Speaker 1: less because these all the people okating can no longer
Speaker 1: be you know, only if you picked hard in criminals.
Speaker 1: It seems like with that statistically match up. Okay, And
Speaker 1: of course the people have tried to run this through
Speaker 1: mathematical models and it's not burying out. That's not a surprise,
Speaker 1: right for for a number of reasons. Um. And then
Speaker 1: another claim is that they could influence the weather. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the last they could levitate. Yeah. Well, if you
Speaker 1: know enough about the weather, then the weather claim is
Speaker 1: just as ridiculous as as levitation, because the weather, whether
Speaker 1: it's such a complex system based on global phenomena and
Speaker 1: it's just really complicated. And I mean the idea that
Speaker 1: you can influence that with your thought, that's and and
Speaker 1: influence that with meditation is rather far fetched. As far
Speaker 1: fetched I think as one individual rising above um the
Speaker 1: ground on like a I don't know, a cushion of
Speaker 1: pure thought. Yeah, And that's what black MOR's beef is, right.
Speaker 1: I mean she's basically saying, I am a practitioner. I
Speaker 1: do this. I think that it has its benefits. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, you've got this other group that I
Speaker 1: was making sort of wild claims and detracting from from
Speaker 1: what actually is a helpful and useful practice. I mean.
Speaker 1: The good news, though, I mean, okay, bad news is
Speaker 1: not You're probably not going to float into the air, right,
Speaker 1: You're probably not going to reach a sort of uh
Speaker 1: nervonic state which you're just gliding around on your own
Speaker 1: magic carpet. Right. Yes, that's bad news. The good news
Speaker 1: is that we already know about neuroplasticity, right. We know
Speaker 1: that we can change our minds to the degree that
Speaker 1: we can exercise so to speak, the muscles again, so
Speaker 1: to speak, in our brain. And we've seen this when
Speaker 1: we talked about music in the mind and how in musicians,
Speaker 1: there are particular areas of mind that are much more
Speaker 1: developed than in other non musicians. You see the same
Speaker 1: thing with people who are highly competent meditators, that they
Speaker 1: are parts of their brain that can actually expand and um.
Speaker 1: And they've actually seen this in studies about compassion before,
Speaker 1: the ability to become more compassionate. Well, and that's like
Speaker 1: you you look at the at the Buddhist teachings and
Speaker 1: I mean that's one of the core reasons for meditation,
Speaker 1: is the idea that compassion arises from all of this
Speaker 1: and that's world changing, right. I mean, you don't have
Speaker 1: to levitate to change the world. Yeah, yeah, that Yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea is that we we we erased this idea
Speaker 1: of self, the ego that steers this wrong sort of
Speaker 1: goes away, and then we're able to experience compassions. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it just made me remember to um, this this
Speaker 1: idea of compassion and oneness, right, because this is the
Speaker 1: sort of feeling and you've talked about before. They can
Speaker 1: religion and chanting again, this is in music too. These
Speaker 1: are these are all sort of things that help erase
Speaker 1: the ego and make you feel like you're something part
Speaker 1: of part of something that's bigger than yourself, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I've often heard like ego described as I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we've discussed in the past about like traumatic
Speaker 1: experiences arising. Um, you experience something traumatic and then the
Speaker 1: memories really begin to take hold as you form a
Speaker 1: story about it, which is to say, I don't know. Like,
Speaker 1: let's say, um, uh, you know, somebody cuts you off
Speaker 1: while you're trying to drive to work, and that may
Speaker 1: be kind of you might have a like a reaction
Speaker 1: the vote, Well, that's irritating. But then if you were
Speaker 1: to continue to continue to stew over it, and you
Speaker 1: create the story where it's like, I somebody cutting me off.
Speaker 1: You know this happened to me. I was in this
Speaker 1: situation where I was wrong. We create a story at
Speaker 1: which we're the center because we're the ego and uh
Speaker 1: and and our egos are almost all out of control
Speaker 1: and uh and and so we we end up caught
Speaker 1: up in that story. Right, Yeah, you're caught up in
Speaker 1: the story you have these emotions. Uh And In fact,
Speaker 1: there's another piece of information from Rational Mysticism by John Horny.
Speaker 1: He talks to a guy named James Austin. He's a
Speaker 1: neural biologist, and he himself a Zen Buddhist, and he's
Speaker 1: the author of Zen in the Brain. And he talks
Speaker 1: about those events that you described um as a neural
Speaker 1: pruning if you can get rid of that experience through
Speaker 1: meditation um. This is from the book in Rational Mysticism
Speaker 1: Mysticism quote. He compares meditation to sculpture or etching, which
Speaker 1: also yates by taking away. He means this analogy literally.
Speaker 1: He cites evidence from animal studies that neurochemicals such as
Speaker 1: L glutamate, aspirate, and nitric oxide can act as excito
Speaker 1: toxins which destroy specific types of neurons and specific regions
Speaker 1: of the brain by over stimulating them. Released by mystical
Speaker 1: experiences such as meditating. Right, um, excitic ns can be
Speaker 1: potent agents Austin rights prompting and kind of highly localized
Speaker 1: etching away within certain vital regions of our brain. Right. So, basically,
Speaker 1: as we lose neurons, we also shed beliefs, obsessions, and
Speaker 1: emotions that distort our view of reality. Says John Horgan.
Speaker 1: This is a very fascinating book, by the way, for
Speaker 1: anybody who's interested and um science and mysticism. It's called
Speaker 1: rational mysticism. But again, here's this idea, and it's sort
Speaker 1: of extrapolating on what Susan Blackmore said, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: you take all of these memes, you call them down
Speaker 1: and and here here on a you know, a logical level,
Speaker 1: it's being done. These excytotoxins are releasing this experience for you.
Speaker 1: Another example that comes to mind as a study we
Speaker 1: were looking at two thousand seven U c L a
Speaker 1: study from psychologist Matthew Lieberman and uh and in this
Speaker 1: study suggests that that when you name emotions, you contame them.
Speaker 1: You can. It's it's kind of the idea, the idea
Speaker 1: of a lot of meditation again comes down to recognizing
Speaker 1: what's going on in your own thought processes and realizing, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm being an egotistical jerk about this. I shouldn't do that,
Speaker 1: as opposed to just being an egotistical jerk and not
Speaker 1: realizing it, which is, you know what most people do?
Speaker 1: Um and, well, what everybody does at some point. And
Speaker 1: this is the mindfulness perspect right, that you're being mindful
Speaker 1: of what's going on in your thought process right, So
Speaker 1: how do you study this? Right? Well? Uh, lie Reman
Speaker 1: took in his college. That colleagues, they took about thirty
Speaker 1: people and they hooked him up to F M R.
Speaker 1: Eyes and he showed them photos of men and women's
Speaker 1: emotional expressions. All right, And when the and and they
Speaker 1: would they would choose labels for these emotions that they
Speaker 1: saw in the picture, They're like, oh, well, that guy's matt,
Speaker 1: that guy's constipated, et cetera. I don't think constipation was
Speaker 1: one of them. I don't know. Maybe it is an emotion.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But well, we've discussed before the digestion
Speaker 1: is is strongly linked to our mind, is your second brain.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so there, UM, when the participants would would
Speaker 1: choose labels for negative emotions, um, it would it would
Speaker 1: stir activity in the right ventralateral prefrontal cortex region. This
Speaker 1: is the area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences,
Speaker 1: so naming them, whereas activity in the amygdala, the brain
Speaker 1: region involved in emotional processing, uh, stuff there would calm down.
Speaker 1: So it's it's the direct correlation there is like I'm
Speaker 1: I'm realizing this is anger, and then I'm experiencing anger
Speaker 1: less for realizing It's like I'm stepping outside of it
Speaker 1: and looking at it, and then I'm giving just a
Speaker 1: little bit of of of distance from it. You know. Well,
Speaker 1: that's interesting too, because if you've gone through meditation practice
Speaker 1: before a lot of times, um, you'll be advised to
Speaker 1: name something and let it go right. Um, Like a
Speaker 1: thought comes into your head, you say, okay, the color
Speaker 1: blue goes away, or something, some sort of remembrance of
Speaker 1: something that happened today, I was angry about something. It's
Speaker 1: sort of the same thing, right, because that's on the
Speaker 1: on the road to meditation. You have to sort of
Speaker 1: name all these things and and let them float away
Speaker 1: from you in order to get in this I guess,
Speaker 1: cleaner space in your head. So it's interesting that once
Speaker 1: you do that, the amygdala kind of goes Okay, we're
Speaker 1: just gonna be calm here because we've done the job
Speaker 1: here of of tagging what we need to. Well, there
Speaker 1: you go, meditation. Now for the next two hours of
Speaker 1: this podcast, we're going to do a guide. Admit. Oh
Speaker 1: wait now, very signaling me that that's out. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: were going to chant and everything. You're out of time
Speaker 1: for that, man, No real love, no, no, we're not
Speaker 1: doing it. It's gone canceled. Shut it down, all right,
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, we can't do that. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: And since we've gone a little long, I'm actually going
Speaker 1: to skip the listener mail as well, but we'll come
Speaker 1: back to that in future episodes of course. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you have any tidbits about meditation, um,
Speaker 1: you can come check out our Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Speaker 1: We are blow the mind on both of those and
Speaker 1: we would really love to hear from any We'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from from people who are just trying meditation
Speaker 1: for the first time and their own experiences with what
Speaker 1: it's like. We'd also love to hear from people who
Speaker 1: have been meditating for ages, you know, people who feel
Speaker 1: like they're they're experts at it or or at least
Speaker 1: are well versed in it, and to hear what you
Speaker 1: have to say about this podcast. Yeah. Absolutely, And we
Speaker 1: also have a great article too about the Maharishi, the
Speaker 1: Beatles and what they all have to do with bringing
Speaker 1: yoga to the West. So just make sure that you
Speaker 1: pop it in our handy search bar any of those
Speaker 1: terms Beetles, Yoga, Maharishi. Yeah, and if you're wondering about
Speaker 1: meditation in pain, we have an article called meditating before
Speaker 1: or during surgery Decrease your Pain by Julia Layton Um.
Speaker 1: You'll find that on the homepage as well. Yep, and
Speaker 1: please do drop us a line, and you can do
Speaker 1: so at Below the Mind at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
Speaker 1: click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
Speaker 1: of our homepage. The how stuff Works iPhone app has
Speaker 1: a RYE. Download it today on iTunes.