Meditation Lab: Empathy and Energy

of meditation did you try? Oh? You know, it was one of these where I just kind of ran up to the buffet of meditation and tried what was you know, which steamer tray had been most recently filled and was available? So everything, Yeah, a little of everything. Because I've tried some closed eye meditation, some um, some open eye meditation.

I've some monterra Ronian cheese. Yeah, I mean I've well, I've tried stuff that's more on the secular side and stuff that's that has more of a spiritual connotation to it. And uh, it's one of those things where I feel like the first time you try it, especially if someone has convinced you that you need to try meditation or you need to try Look like, it's the same thing

with yoga. When you're when someone tells you you need to try this out, there's a strong chance you are you're not going to really get it the first time, that you might even dislike it the first time. But when you have time to reflect on what you experience and then you time to try it again, kind of at your own pace, then you can begin to see

the value in it. You know, something I've noticed in recent years about the role of yoga and meditation in Western culture is that it has gone from something that's widely considered a kind of uh, you know, esoteric practice to something that is almost kind of a I don't know what you'd call it. Like. Sometimes it seems weird to meet people who don't do yoga. I don't do yoga, um, but it seems like everybody I know it does yoga at least a little bit or or talks about the

benefits of meditation. And I wonder if this is just something that changed. I don't know, when I moved to a bigger city. When I you know, when I moved to Atlanta, I started noticing a lot more people were into meditation and yoga. But I don't know. Have you noticed this similar trend in the past five years or so. Yeah, well, I mean part of it is urban centers are going

to have more opportunities for this sort of thing. But there there has been a steady influx of meditative yogain I just kind in Eastern and New Age ideas in general. But it feels like these ideas have become mainstream in Western culture fairly recently. Like they you know, they were there as an esoteric practice in Western culture for some number of decades, maybe since the middle late twentieth century,

and then and now they're fully mainstream. You see yoga studios every where, their meditation apps that everybody's talking about there, they've all got on their phones biz bros or trying out meditation. I know you've seen this trend to right, All all the biz bro manager types are like, yeah, I use meditation to maximize my potential. You might not remember this, but we had a yoga teacher come to how Stuff works in recent years and he did a yoga class for the company, of which I was the

only person who attended. But this was years ago. You might not I don't know if you're even I don't think I was aware of this, but he had a full list of his offerings and it included like yoga for golf fires, yoga for CEOs, that sort of thing, you know, Um, yoga, yoga for how to fire people. I guess, yeah, how to detach and all. Um. Yeah,

it is. It is interesting because on one hand, it's easy to look at it and say, well, you're taking you're taking something that maybe has more cultural value or more religious or spiritual value, and then you're sort of boiling it down or you're you're stripping it apart and then selling those parts to people. Well, yeah, I mean, and whether you take a a spiritual or religious or a secular view of meditation, these are profound, meaningful cultural

practices that go back for thousands of years. Yeah. I mean, there are certainly cases with especially with yoga, where we don't we're not always aware of how recently they've been changed by by Western hands and Western minds. But um, I guess I was thinking specifically of meditation. Yeah. Well, I keep I keep coming back to this example when

it comes to things like this. So, uh, years ago, I was at like a dinner party or something, and I got to talking about I think I think I was talking about Buddhism or something with someone and Alan Watts came up. Familiar with that one Watts a little bit. Yeah, so uh. The other individuals said, well, you know Alan Watts, he's he's kind of the Walmart of Buddhism, isn't he. Uh? And I think she kind a minute as a as

as a put down of of Alan Watts. And and sometimes I think back to that and and if you if you look at it with the idea that the Buddhism in this case has a central truth to it, a truth that should be shared with the world, and or even you know, wants to be shared with the world, then don't you want it in Walmart? Like you need you need there to be a Walmart of Buddhism, you need there to be a Walmart of yoga and meditation if you would all believe in the values of these things. Yeah.

So that's um, that's sort of the question I was wondering about, Like, if you are somebody who participates in in this deep, long rooted, profound cultural tradition of meditation, so you're a you're a monk or something who does meditation as part of your spiritual practice. Are are you offended by yoga for golf? Are you offended by you know, the meditation app that will help you be a better business manager? Or is that or do you just say yeah,

that that's great. More more people are taking it up, more people are seeing the benefits, and it's going to more of the world. Yeah, I guess it's one of those things where it's the answer is going to vary from person to person and tradition to tradition. But uh, yeah, we obviously we'd love to hear back from listeners on that because I know we have a number of listeners who are involved in various UH yoga or meditation practices.

So when we're talking about meditative practices and meditation here, UH meditative practices date back at least as far as the second millennium BC and UH and this goes back to the Vedic traditions in India, and since that time, countless models have spread throughout human culture, weaving their way

through Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Secular approaches range from elementary school mindfulness instruction UH to meditation apps, which you mentioned already from the modern tech savvy human and styles of meditation also range from stationary to walking, closed eye to open eye, seeded to floating. Yeah, and there there are these major schools of meditation you've probably heard about, such as like the mindfulness meditation or the

transcendental meditation or compassion meditation. Right, and then of course there are different schools, transidental meditation being a major one. That's the one that goes to the Mahirishi Maheshioki, right, yes, correct, Now. I think it's worth noting though, that at the center of all of these practices, essentially as you have awareness, one of, if not the key attributes of human consciousness. We come back to that again and again on the show.

So meditation you could maybe think of as uh, first person experiments in attention something like that. Yeah, like I was, I was thinking about it recently. Like it seems like it's nothing short of the deliberate manipulation of the human experience itself. I am changing my awareness, or I'm refocusing my awareness, and in doing so, I'm kind of reshaping my world. I'm kind of reshaping my uh, my experience

of reality. At least in the short term. It's weird to think about how much of our lives we go through without intentionally controlling what we're paying attention to. We just pay attention to whatever it occurs to us in the moment to pay attention to, rather than making a

deliberate effort to concentrate our awareness in one way or another. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons I think everyone should try some sort of meditation or some sort of yoga at some point, like some sort of a mindfulness exercise, even if it ends up not being the thing for you. Uh it. At times it can kind of like, I feel like you can kind of wake you up, You can kind of force you to realize, um, you know, what kind of noise is going on in your head

at any given moment. One meditative thought that you introduced to me that I've never heard before, but you brought it up on the podcast one time was just sitting down and coming back to the thought repeatedly, I wonder what my next thought is going to be. Since you mentioned this, I've tried it and it's a really interesting experience. Cool. Yeah, that one, I believe that was an Eckhart tolle uh idea. I mean it's kind of a mantra, and in many respects,

but a very simplified, boiled down mantra. It's just kind of like sticking a sticking a little roadblock into your constant highway of mental traffic. Yeah. It has a way of calling attention to the fact that your mind is sort of this deep chasm through from which things emerge without really you having any control over. And usually this just happens to you and you don't notice. It is just like, yeah, I'm just thinking, but thinking about thinking

makes thinking become very mysterious. Yeah, it does. It. It forces you to to to reflect on your own cognitive processes and trying to figure out what's going on there. Now. Meditation, obviously is everyone can tell from the discussion thus far.

It touches on cognition, It touches on various aspects of of of human health, and therefore there have been a number of studies over the years that have looked into it's it's possible effectiveness on mental or physical health, looking at exactly what it does, like what is the meditative meditative state look like in the brain and uh, and you know, there have been some some key findings that have certainly made the rounds over the years and sort

of forced people to to to look more closely in meditation. Uh. One one study that they made a lot of headlines was the two thousand twelve study from the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention. They that found that African Americans with heart disease who practice transcendental meditation were less likely to experience a heart attack or stroke. Yeah, so I

want to come back to that claim in a minute. Uh. I've got complex feelings about the medical research on meditation, which we were talking about this off Mike before we came on. But um, I would not put them in exactly the same bucket with but sort of adjacent to the bucket of prayer studies, meaning that both, I guess both fit into a larger bucket in this world of buckets,

the Russian dolls of buckets that we live in. Um. So, when it when it comes to these types of research, I think some skeptics would look at prayer studies and meditation studies and say, why would you waste your time? You know what? Why what what can be gained from studying this? You can already be pretty sure it's a bunch of magical bs, and it's going to be conducted by believers who are going to cut corners and their methodology to make their worldview look good. And so there's

part of that I agree with. In part I don't agree with. I don't at all agree with the idea of why would you waste your time because I don't know. I think it makes more sense to be the kind of skeptic that says, well, bring it on, let's see, um if it gets good results, and if other people can replicate those results, especially hostile people who are you know, not part of this worldview, can replicate the same results, I think that's something we want to know about, and

certainly if it's something that can be scientifically studied. Yeah. Now, on the other hand, I do think there's some merit to the idea that things like prayer studies and meditation studies require some careful scrutiny before we accept their results, because there are some people who are convinced of the

results before they start looking for them. Now, that's definitely not true of all meditation researchers, I think, right, Yeah, I mean I mean for starters with prayer there, it seems like that's more likely a problem because there's not really much in the way of secular prayer out there. I feel like, for the most part, if you are praying to a deity or a group of deities, you have some level of belief where you usually you're taking

on some level of belief in those deities. Though, I think you could come up with secular explanations for the successive prayer. Like, certainly if you had prayer studies that worked, I think that wouldn't necessarily prove any kind of magical thing and would just say, well, prayer has some kind of benefits, and you could explain that in terms of

psychology of groups, social dynamics, all kinds of things. Yeah, but again to I mean, to your point, there are plenty of models of meditation that they don't involve belief in the deity or belief in some sort of you know, particular model of bodily energy or you know, some other kind of like New age mechanism. Yeah. Absolutely, And in a minute, we're actually going to air a an interview

Robert did with a local meditation researcher. What is this researcher's name, Rob This is Dr Jennifer and Mascara, and she's an assistant professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at Immer University here in Atlanta, and she investigates meditation from a secular scientific standpoint, So that can absolutely be done. But coming back to these medical effects that people claim are demonstrated by meditation, I don't want to rule them out, and I think research on this is valid and I

think we should pay attention to it. But I think it does deserve scrutiny because coming back to that one result you mentioned about heart disease and transcendental meditation, I found an American Heart Association scientific statement from seventeen. It was actually just released this year. So first, a general comment they make, quote, further research on meditation and cardiovascular

risk is warranted. Such studies, to the degree possible, should utilize randomized study design, be adequately powered to meet primary study outcome, strive to achieve low dropout rates, include long term follow up, and be performed by those without inherent bias in the outcome. So generally, they're saying that it does appear that there could be some some good places

to go with meditation and cardiovascular health. Research, but a lot of the studies that exist today have some of these problems with methodology that make them less robust or convincing than they could be. And referring to that twelve study about cardiovascular health and transcendental meditation, they say, quote the study though, was conducted in two phases after a one year hiatus, with fifty eight patients not participating in phase two of the study, and some concerns about analysis

of the data have been raised. So it sounds like that when you get this big claim like this, wow, you know, you get these amazing results from transcendental NEETs aitation, they're saying, Okay, we we might want to be cautious about over interpreting these study results because the methodology was less than perfect, right, and is consumers we have to be careful about sort of having the red wine or chocolate effect with studies like this, where we like red

wine or chocolate and then when a headline comes out that supports the thing we like, we just kind of we we kind of check it off in our mind and move on. Well. Yeah, and to be cautious about those studies is not to say that red wine and chocolate do not have their their wonderful benefits in terms of flavor and enjoyment, And the same thing could probably

be said about meditation. I would say, even if you don't find that meditation has any measurable cardiovascular benefits or anything like that, benefits on long term chronic health conditions, or pain reduction or anything like that, it's still obviously has this role in people's lives that you know, people get imans pleasure from it. They find that it changes the way they view the world. It it does do something, even if it does do everything people claim it does.

So Ultimately, I think meditation research is a highly valid field of study and I and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned up really effective results. But I also think it's a field where I would I would just tend to treat claimed results with special caution and scrutiny. Not a fault of meditation itself. Nothing wrong with the practice of meditation. But but but I but I always try to be cautious whenever I see a new claim

about meditation results. So I recently partnered with the videographer and audio producer Tyler clang Here at the Office on a couple of interviews for a meditation video project. Now, company priorities changed and that kind of left the project in limbo. But I didn't want to lose the great time content we'd already achieved, So we're gonna feature some interview content with every university meditation researcher Dr Jennifer Moscaro

and with a physician vedic meditation teacher, Jill Wiener. This will also enable us to to finish the video in some form and you can look for that in the near future. Obviously, we'll put that up on Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and and also on the social media platforms. So let's go ahead and introduce Dr Jennifer Mascaro here again. She's Assistant Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at Emory University here in Atlanta, where she's

also worked with the Department of Anthropology. She specializes in the variation in and plasticity of human social cognition and the biology of interconnectedness. She recently came into the studio and chatted with us about the current state of meditation research and her own fascinating contributions to the study of not only mindfulness meditation, but compassion meditation. Robert. I want to say I enjoyed this interview and I thought Dr

mscarro was great. Awesome. Well, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we will just jump right into the interview questions with Dr Muscarrow. Thank you, thank alright, we're back. Hi. Dr Mscaa, thank you for joining us here. So my first question is just broadly speaking, what's the current foe because of your research at Amory, Yeah, a lot of the research that we're doing is on different meditation practices that we think have the most evidence for

impacting people's well being UM. And so in particular, we're looking at two different types of meditation. So one is called mindfulness meditation, and that's actually what most people think of when they hear about meditation UM. But we're also doing a lot of research on a compassion meditation practice that comes from a very old Tibetan Buddhist tradition UM and is thought to cultivate feelings of connectedness with others, UM,

feelings of compassion and empathy for others. And and it turns out that that's really good for our well being. So what's your personal history with meditation? I started dabbling primarily with mindfulness meditation. Back when I was in high school, I was a really serious athlete, and um, it turns out that mindfulness meditation is really helpful for um mitigating

stress and anxiety, especially when you're performing. And so I used to do mindfulness practices when I was anxious about a big game or you know, in the aftermath if I felt like I didn't perform very well. It was really helpful for not ruminating. Um. And so I dabbled here and there. Um. But then uh, it really it um took a new direction when I started graduate school and I was interested in the plasticity of the brain.

And here, you know, we have these practices that have been um uh cultivated and perfected um over you know, many many hundreds of years that we think impact the brain and systems in the brain that I was really interested in studying. And so UM, I really turned from being a dabbling practitioner to really more of an at least hopefully objective scientist. So how do you go about

conducting hard scientific research on something like meditation. We try to do research on meditation similar to the way you would do research on, for example, a dru or any intervention So the gold standard is with a randomized clinical trial where you randomize some people to the meditation practice that you're interested in, and you have another group that's randomized some control group. UM, the ideal study design has

your compared meditation to an active control group. And the reason for that is because there are a lot of things about UH an intervention that could be helpful, could change people that aren't due to the meditation practice itself. You know, if it's a group practice, it may just be meeting with a group of people that you think are like minded. Maybe meeting with a teacher, like a meditation teacher is really helpful because you you have someone

to uh, you know, a role model. There could be non specific things that are kind of doing the work, so you really want to try to control for those types of things. So UM, one of the big ways that meditation is studies is with that sort of design. Another thing though, that people do is UM. They point out that that misses a lot of the cultural, um

and contextual factors that often accompany meditation. So some people UM and I think this is really important research to are doing research where they're really doing more qualitative research to try to dig in and understand what meditation means to people when they practice it. What are the fact the sort of contextual factors, the cultural factors that that might be UM at play. So you're talking about stripping away some of the ritualized cultural aspects to understand what's

actually taking place in the body and mind. But isn't the counter argument that you can't separate these two aspects of meditative practice exactly? And that's an issue that accompanies a lot of different scientific domains. UM. You know, when you try to take something and put it in a laboratory setting to study it, you necessarily strip it front of UM extraneous features that might be really important UM.

And so that is a debate that happens in a lot of domains of science, but it's particularly in portant with meditation because there are these UM sort of cultural embedded factors that might are likely very very important and

maybe the most important. So you are often the researchers you study meditation are often sort of straddling this difficult question of trying to UM to empirically study a practice in the best way they can, but all the while not removing and reducing it to something that is less than than what it really is. Now at least one of your studies, you even go so far as to avoid calling it meditation, right, So um Exactly, one of the challenges when you do meditation research is you don't

want to bias people um at the outset. Uh. You don't want to bring people in and and and uh sort of enhance the placebo effect essentially um uh. And so with a lot of our research, we really try to reduce some of the terms that we use that might convey a bias to our articipants um uh. And then the other thing is meditation, even though we talk about it here is being secularized and sort of stripped of its religious connotations. It's really impossible to to to

do that. And so um there are a lot of populations for whom that term um. You know, it comes with some baggage or some connotations that may dissuade them people from from practicing or change the way they um they sort of interpreted or or accepted. And so um we we try to minimize that the bias and our participants as much as we can. And so one of the ways we do that is to sometimes we don't

even call it meditation. Now on the other end of the spectrum, emory benefits from a partnership with Tibetan monks. How do you incorporate traditional meditation practitioners into the research. Yeah, that's crucial, and that's one of the really exciting things about this research is this sort of partnership between scholars of a lot of different areas that are really coming together to try to understand a rich tradition in uh

the richest way that they can. And so UM we have a sort of a constant dialogue with those contemplative practitioners to try to understand um, the historical tradition, the textual tradition, UH, and the monastic tradition. You know, UM, those are all those are three different things that have UM a real bearing on what we're studying, and and it's impossible for scientists and scholars to have expertise in all those domains, and so it's it's really kind of

a fun. Part of what we do is a dialogue with UM, the the Tibetan practitioners that we get to work with, whether dealing with a traditional Eastern model or a modern Western model. I think there's a tendency to see meditation as an exercise and shutting out the world. But as you already said, Uh, empathy plays an important role in many meditation traditions as well. Can you tell

us about the Tibetan practice of lo jan, right, yeah. So, so we look at a compassion meditation practice that emerges from the low Jong or mind training tradition UM, and that is a tradition that UM places a heavy emphasis on compassion. I mean that is Uh. One of the ultimate goals is to be a being of of compassion.

And so these are practices that are thought to help us feel compassion, not only to the people around us that UM we often feel compassion for, but um to others that we don't know, and to people that we often have difficult challenges with. And so UM, that's not one of the preconceived notions that we often have about meditation. Often when the word meditation comes up, it's about focus

and attention, and often it becomes a tool of achievement. UM. But this is a tradition where UM cultivating compassion for others was of of the most importance and UM. Within that monastic tradition, the practices were really UM done quite often to benefit others, not not to benefit oneself, not to reduce stress or anxiety in oneself, but to benefit others. What have you learned from your research thus far? Can

meditation actually rewire our neural circuitry for empathic behavior? Yeah, I mean I think it's um taking our research and coupling it with the incredible research that's coming out of other other universities. I think it's it's safe to say that these practices, compassion meditation practices, loving kindness meditation practices, and even mindfulness. There's evidence that mindfulness impacts are social

connections with others. Um and Uh. This research really suggests that, UM, that we can augment the systems in our brain that help us connect with others, that help us read others emotions. Um. And then when you do that, it's very clear that there are huge health benefits. So one of the emerging UM lines that is connecting a lot of domains of

health researches the incredible importance of our social relationships. UM. Our social relationships impact the way our immune system functions, the way our stress system functions, and so as soon as you are able to bolster a feeling of connectedness, a feeling of sort of interdependency with others. UM. You you really do change the way you respond to the world around you, and you it becomes less threatening, changes

our body and our brain. You also used f m RI I in this study were able to observe the effects of meditation in a subject's neural activity. We did so UM. There are two different ways that you can use functional MRI to study meditation. So you could have people actually meditate in the fm RI I scanner and see what their brain is doing while they meditate. UM.

But we did a slightly different thing. We had people practice meditation for several weeks and then we wanted to see how that changed the way their brain UH function when they did certain important cognitive tasks UM. And we found that UM, when people practice compassion meditation, they actually got more accurate when they read other people's facial expressions.

So what we did was we showed them photographs of the eye region of people's faces and we had them judge what they thought the person was thinking or feeling. And after the meditation training, they actually got more accurate. Their scores went up, and then the activity in the systems in the brain that are important for doing that UM for reading other people's facial expressions. The activity in

those regions actually increased as well. So do you think meditation in the form of cognitive based compassion training can be used to boost empathy and say an actual psychopath. Yeah, it's such an interesting question, and it's one we immediately thought about when we found, um, the results of our first study where we were seeing this effect on people's

ability to read facial expressions. You immediately think of populations of people that may benefit, so children, UM, or clinical populations that really seemed to struggle with these types of social interactions and social skills. Um, it's we we haven't done any studies with clinical populations in that way. UM,

so it's definitely too early to say. The other thing that I think is a really interesting and important UM direction for meditation research to go is really to try to understand whether there are differences in how amenable different

people are too actually practicing. And what I mean is, UM, there's a real likelihood that, UM, there's a bit of a catch twenty two where the people who might benefit most from something like cognitively based compassion training may actually really struggle to do it, or it may not resonate with them, they may not understand it, um. And so I think that's particularly important when we turn our attention

to clinical populations. It may be that the populations that would really benefit the most, or could really stand to benefit from something like compassion meditation or mindfulness meditation, they actually may have a real difficulty with with doing it. So some brains are going to be a little more susceptible to meditation than others. Well that's the hypothesis. Um,

there is a little bit of evidence. Now, UM we did, uh, we have one study where we found that UM, people's brain activity that related to empathy actually predicted how much they would engage with the training. In other words, people who had a brain that seemed to be more empathic at the outset actually practiced more UM. And that does suggest to us that there may be some populations of people that take to meditation more that may find it

easier or it may resonate with them. And conversely, there may be populations of people where for whom it's really a struggle, they may not understand or may um not resonate with them as much. Exactly. So, what does cognitive based compassion training look like and what does it feel like. Yeah, that's a great question. So UM, it's it's quite different actually than the mindfulness meditation and practices that are often talked about in popular media. UM. But it actually does

start with a little bit of mindfulness practices. So the first segment of of CBCT actually is the goal is to entrain attention um. And so there it begins with some mindfulness to the body, mindfulness to the breath, and then mindfulness to sort of everything, all the thoughts and sensations that stream throughout our our mind constantly UM. But put pretty quickly, you know, the goal there is to to just sort of cultivate this awareness so that we

can move on to the compassion components. And UM. What it does from there is it begins with um uh an appreciation for our um, our ability to be more compassionate, our ability to um cultivate the positive mental skills that we have, and and a compassion for ourselves as humans that these things are difficult um. And then it moves from there to discussions of and and deep contemplation of

our interconnectedness with others. So um, you might think deeply about people in your life and how much we rely on them, even people that we don't think of very often as being very important to us UM when we really get down to it, we rely on so many people in our lives for essentially everything, UM. And then we move on to an awareness that UM, all of those people that were interconnected with interconnected with UM, they

are at base so similar to us. UM. We are also similar in UM wanting well being for ourselves and for our loved ones, and really wanting to be free of distress and suffering. And UM. Those recognitions are quite powerful, the recognition that we are so connected with one another and that we are at base so similar to one another. UM. The thought is that from there emerges a natural compassion

empathy for for those around us. Broadly speaking, what sort of rides have been made in meditation research over the past twenty five years. Meditation research has UM come a long way. So when it started UM years ago, it was not in the mainstream. It was really the pioneers of meditation research really had to do a lot of it kind of in the back room, on the hush hush. It was not considered rigorous science or or rigorous health. UM. Uh,

you know, a rigorous subject of to study UM. But UH, since then those pioneers have really demonstrated, especially in the case of mindfulness meditation, how powerful Uh some of these practices can be how UM for a lot of different domains, both for UM reducing suffering, so reducing depression and anxiety, but also for enhancing the positive things like resilience. UM. And as soon as some of that research started to get out and started to be conducted really rigorously, UM,

it started to be taken more seriously. And so when it is taken more seriously, doors open up, so more research funding goes into you know, big studies with lots of people, and all of that has a snowballing effect because we're able to ask UM more nuanced and better questions. We moved from just UM really clunky questions like is meditation good for us, to you know, better questions like what is it good for UM? And are there potentially negative effects? You know, could it be that there are

some situations in which meditation is harmful? We start to get a a better tool for for really studying these things in a better way. So that's kind of how I see it is UM evolving over the last twenty five years. In the paper the neural mediators of kindness based meditation a theoretical model. You mentioned that two factors are necessary for empathic response, a shared effective experience iriant and a cognitive understanding. How did these come together in

empathy and what happens if either component is missing? The idea is out there from the amazing social cognitive neuroscientists that have moved this field forward, that there are these UM that when you look at empathy as we define it, UM as as scientists define it, it does seem to have a few different components. And so in particular, those do seem to be UM sort of a shared resonance

and ability to essentially try on someone else's emotions. But at the same time there has to be some sort of cognitive awareness that those emotions are you're feeling them because someone else is feeling them. They're not necessarily just your own emotions, but UM, you are recognizing them and someone else UM. And so uh, how that plays out is I think the million dollar question, because those seem

to be really UM dynamic processing UM. They're talked about as different systems in the brain that allow us to do those different things, and it's quite likely that UM those UH skills sort of interact where you know, sometimes you may very cognitively attend to someone and then the emotions follow, or quite often it's probably the reverse. So there's probably a very dynamic um complex interplay going on

to UH that that probably differs in every experience. You know, every we think of the times we empathize with someone, it's it's not the same every time, you know, UM, And so I think there's a really dynamic process going on there. But one of the um to your second question, one of the pieces of evidence that scientists look at to suggest that they are there, that there are these different components is that it does appear that there are clinical UM cases in which one is missing but not

the other. And so this is not cut and dry. But UM, you mentioned psychopaths, and there is a large bit of agreement that psychopaths tend to UM really be missing more the affective sort of resonance component of empathy. UM, they often do okay on the more cognitive um UH aspects of empathy, and and that the deficits really seem to be in their ability to to mirror someone's um

UH emotions, especially negative emotions. UM, they really seem to not resonate with others anxiety and fear and suffering the way we do. UM. And then there are other clinical domains autism is often brought up where there's a different picture of what's going on. There may be more of the sort of cognitive piece that is that is problematic there, and they may actually um do quite well at at

taking on other's emotions, maybe even too well. UM. So there's it's not a cut and dry sort of situation, but it does look like UM, there are different clinical domains in which one or the other is more problematic, and that tells us that these are um at least

just slightly discrete systems that are not completely synonymous. Now when you explain it like that, I can't help but wonder how it all shakes out in my own head, like how much of how much of it is call um A, how much of it is call them B? And how does it come together? Right? Yeah? And then there are there's a new movement of thought out there

that um. There there are some scholars that are arguing that we should put us push aside empathy altogether, because what really translates into compassionate behavior is not those things, but um, our morals and our ethical code and uh and some of those types of things, and that's a

whole other domain completely, um. But there is some uh dynamic interaction that occurs between those components that allow us to to empathize and then are are deep seated sort of ethical, moral and cultural codes that help us translate that into action. So tell me this, do you think the world would be a better place if everyone practiced meditation? Most of the things that we do in meditation, so

whether that's mindfulness or compassion meditation. Um. I think the reason that they're so impactful is they're very different from the things that we generally get sucked into doing in our day to day life and um so um uh it's especially in our you know, fragmented, incredibly busy lifestyle here in the sort of modern West. Um, we are often disconnected from that interdependency and notions of interdependency that are quite obvious when we're able to take some time

and look each other in the eye. Um. And so taking the time to to reconnect with those sorts of feelings and thoughts I think would be very powerful and

very powerful for everyone. Um Uh. There are a lot of different meditation practices out there, and so I think the next the way that this field is going, the next step for the field of meditation research is really to try to understand which practices benefit whom and for what and um, so that will better help us answer the question of should everyone do mindfulness meditation, should everyone do compassion meditation? Or is it that some people could

benefit more from one or the other. Um, we're all busy people and we don't have time to do everything. Um. But but anything that can help us feel more connected and look at one another in the eye and um and notice our shared humanity, I think that would benefit all of us. For your own part, what is the meditative state like and what do you feel you gain from it personally? Yeah? Um, so you know, I grapple with a lot of this stuff, you know, from the day to day, and so I noticed that it casually

impacts me all the time, you know. Um, well, I shouldn't say all the time. Maybe not as much as it it should. But there are many times where you know, I'm in traffic and someone cuts me off, and I behave differently than than I might have if I if I wasn't thinking of these things quite often, but there's a deeper, richer personal experience that comes, for example, UM, when I am lucky enough to go on a meditation retreat or have UM you know, longer periods of time

in more contemplative states and UM. That always strikes me as a very interesting phenomenon of UM, this incredible emotional richness that sort of bubbles to the surface UM and UH in both positive and negative ways. UM. You know, sadness and happiness are closer to the surface. UM. But even when the sadness is close over the surface, UM,

it's it's often uh feels like a really powerful positive thing. UM. And so those deep moments of extended contemplation UM really just feel like to me like an opening up of this emotional life that often is numbed UM when when we're busy and not attending to it. What are your thoughts on the implementation of mindfulness in grade school. Yeah, so there's a big movement to UM to implement especially

mindfulness in UM in in the K through twelve curriculum. UM. And there is some good research indicating that it is helpful, especially with emotion regulation UM social interactions for young children. UM. And so I think that has a lot of potential UM. And then we are looking at the possibility of incorporating UM some compassion for because practices in K through twelve, and it's striking how quickly children pick up on it UM,

even faster often than adults do. UM. A lot of the examples and exercises that come with cognitively based compassion training,

kids pick up on it right away. And so I think it has a real powerful potential for helping kids remain connected with one another UM, and remain connected not with just with their close friends, but maybe with UM others that they may have trouble with, others that they may not see as one of them, all of a sudden become you know, a shared human human, you know, with the the shared childhood experience that they're going through UM. And so I think there is a lot of potential.

Do you know if there are any cultures out there that that introduced children to meditation at at at a really young age. Monastic traditions are so rich and so different from one another, but there are a lot of monastic traditions where children UM go away quite young and and begin a monastic lifestyle. I'm a little hesitant because there are a lot of monastic traditions that UM, you know,

don't practice a lot of meditation. So there's a lot of diversity in terms of what UM goes on in different monastic traditions, but certainly UM, there are a lot of traditions in which the training starts quite early. All right, Well, once again I want to thank Dr ms Garrow for setting down and chatting with me about her meditation research and just meditation research in general. I thought one thing that was really interesting was the sort of the two

factor empathy model she talked about. What are your thoughts about that, Robert, Does that ring true to you in in your life? Like the idea that there is a cognitive component to empathy and then the affective mirroring component of empathy. Yeah, Like I say, it really made me tease apart my own experience with meditation, but also my own experience with things like empathy, Like you know, just how much of it, how much of all may how much a column B? How is this coming together in

my mind state? And how might it be coming together differently or not at all in other mind states? You know, because because it's so easy to fall into the trap to think that we all have essentially the same hardware and software firing up every time we're engaging with the world. Do you ever think that if you are, if you happen to be in euro atypical person, that like you can catch yourself having failings of empathy and that's you're sometimes failing in one column and sometimes failing in the

other column. Yeah. Yeah, I think so, because I guess I'm paranoid enough that occasionally I'll I'll think back on my day and I'll particularly I'll think about conversations and I wonder who did was I? And was that? Did I have enough empathy in that particular conversation? Did I? Did I talk too much about my own stuff that? Did I? Did I ask enough about someone else's stuff? Uh? You know you can drive yourself nuts with those questions. Yeah,

I know what you mean. Um. Yeah. And so now we have a whole other way to to dive into that paranoid self criticism exactly. All right, Well, I think we should do a quick break and then when we come back from that break, we can talk about your conversation with Dr Jill Weener. So when working on the meditation video, I also interview Jill Weener, physician specializing in Vedic meditation for wellness and stress management, and she is

also based here in Atlanta. She came in and she had a lot to share about the particular strategies of vedic meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and the use of mantras. Uh. But but probably most importantly for our discussion here, she had a lot to say about stress. So she is is an instructor of what she calls vedic meditation, which from what I could tell, is very similar to or

maybe the same thing as transcendental meditation. Yeah, it seems to it seems to be very too closely related fields of meditation, Like it involves using mantras to achieve this state of trends. And yeah, I think that that that sums it up. So we're not gonna, you know, the entire interview here with with Jill, but I wanted to to just are a portion of it because it sets sets us up for a nice discussion about one particular quality of both veting meditation and the general science of stress.

I think it's I think it's mandatory. I think that stress is probably the biggest epidemic we've ever faced. Um It underlies everything, and it underlies immune dysfunction, digestive digestive issues, pain regulation, all these medical issues that we see as physicians and as as patients that we experience, and if we don't have a meditation practice to help us regulate the way our bodies process stress, we it's like you're

not you can't ever catch up to it. The stress keeps accumulating and accumulating and making you sicker and soer. So for me as a health care provider helping me be able to care for people, that having the meditation is that personal practice for me was hugely important. But also as a human being who has stress and stress related symptoms and illness, um it also helps with that

quite a bit. So Adaptation energy we like to think of it like your bank account of patients, your ability to adapt and what typically gives you adaptation energy is sleep, eating, well, exercise, anything you find to be restorative, like working on cars or gardening or knitting or walking your dog. When life throws you a little curveball, um, it takes away a little bit of adaptation energy. And if you have enough adaptation energy, you can handle anything that comes at you.

What happens is we only have a certain amount typically, and as it starts to run out, your patient runs a little thin, and you feel a little a little thready, and then one little thing happens it doesn't seem like that big a deal, and you lose it and you snap and have a full stress fight or flight reaction. So Vata meditation and lots of other forms of meditation give you rest as well. So one of the key ideas that the Jail mentions here and references a lot

is that of adaptation energy. This concept that you have a personal depletable energy reserve for dealing with stress, a reserve that can be replenished as well as diminished. And you see it referenced in meditation, and I think it's easy to simply dismiss something like that is just a meditation buzzword or something. But when I started looking into it, like what what is adaptation energy? Does it? Does it exist outside of the terminology of a particular school of meditation,

it really gets quite fascinating. So the term originates with Austrian indocrinologist Hans Celier, which I imagine a number of people may be familiar with that name because he is he is a huge name in the science of stress, just the understanding of stress, the the cultural use of the word stress today. He's sort of I mean, I imagine that stress was just a concept that had always been around, but he pretty much introduced the modern medical

concept of stress. Right. Yeah, it's hard to it's hard to imagine that right now, to to think back, you know, you think back on even ancient figures. You can imagine Odysseus saying, oh man, this is such a stressful voyage home. I'm just so stressed out. I can't wait to get get home and just relax. So they talked about like wearisomeness and anguish, but they didn't talk about stress. That's true. So yeah. In in nineteen thirty five, he identified stress

as a syndrome occurring in laboratory rats. In night, he defined general adaptation drum, which is also known as is G a S or gas. I've seen some commentators say that this is, you know, rather unfortunate, that that that's what what one can refer to it as. But he signaled this out as a three stage biological response to stress. So the the three stages are as follows. First alarm,

This occurs when you encounter stress. The also known as the alarm reaction stage the a R stage, and includes the arousal of your fight or flight response to a stressor, and all of your internal alarms are activated and you prepare to face danger or runaway. And then he lays out the second stage, the resistant stage, the stage of resistance or SR. And in this UH the human response to dangers in full swing, So your pupils dialate, your heart rate and respiration go up, and your muscles contract.

And then where you really get into the general adaptation syndrome here is a third stage of exhaustion. This is when your body stays in an excited state for prolonged perioded inner of the final state of of the gas UH the state of exhaustion or SC and This this occurs when in response to a stressor that has gone

on too long. In the state of hyper arousal, the body's immune system begins to wear down and as a result, the person will become more susceptible to infections and other illnesses as the body's defenses have been spent on dealing with the stresser. So one interesting way I read to think about stress is that you think about a disease

or an injury or something like that causing symptoms. You know, there there are symptoms that result from some type of damage to or pressure upon the body, but there are also these general symptoms that seem to happen basically no matter what you're doing to the body, as long as

it's having some kind of cumulative negative effect. So like whether it's some whether you're tired and deprived of sleep, or infected by a disease, or you have gotten a bodily injury, or you know, any number of things that could happen, do you they all seem to sort of lead to this similar cluster of symptoms, And so you could think one way to think about stress is the body's general response to negativity. Yeah, and I mean, and

I guess the other side of it too. To consider with stress is that a lot of like the basic evolved biological adaptations, you know, we weren't we were we evolved to deal with tigers essentially, but not paper tigers so much. And that's one of the problems with the modern world, right, is that we we we get so stressed out over things that are not actual mediate threats, but they never go away. Yeah, they never go away.

They're constantly coming at you. Uh. So you can definitely see the modern application of this, this idea, the general adaptation syndrome, and the idea that you would have only so much like bodily and mentally mental energy to deal with a barrage of stressors. Yeah, and Celia, he did sort of have an idea that there were this was

a modern problem in a way, right. Yeah, Like so you could imagine maybe our ancestors living living on a savannah somewhere would have a fight or flight response if, like, you know, a large leopard comes near them or something. You know, you that's like an immediate stress point that

you've got to deal with. But what if it's like you have put yourself into a state of being where you're almost never facing actual acute danger, but your entire life, there's a leopard over there on the horizon and it never gets too close to you, but it also never goes away. Yeah, it's always potentially in your email folder. It's always potentially in your mailbox or on your doorstep. I mean it's yeah, it's uh, this is this is the paper tiger that we've we've grown accustomed to, or

haven't grown accustomed to if you rather so. One of the interesting things about Celia's work is is that the modern use of the word stress stems from his work UH, and interestingly enough, his findings that were rejected by physiologists until the nineteen seventies. As Russell Winer put put it in his h his paper Putting Stress in Life hand Celier in the making of Stress Theory UH, Celia used stress to describe an organism's adaptation response to the environment

quote that is, the state manifested by the gas. In this reconceptualization of stress, Celier believed himself to have discovered a universal truth regarding the relationships of organisms with their environment. And he also pointed out that Celier had some pretty lofty ideas about his stress theory UH, that civilization was disordered on two vital levels. The quote diseases of civilization, such as cardiovascular diseases. These were caused by poor adaptation

to modern industrial life. And on another level, entirely he saw that Western civilization bore the cracks of intense social instability, and stress theory, he argued, could save us from both of these. So he was he was not shy about championing stress theory. According to Viner, the US military were among the first to really embrace his ideas on stress and operational efficiency in the post war period, and they somehow doesn't surprise me. Yeah, they jumped right in there.

It fall does fall in line with a lot of the recent topics we've covered, uh, related to Cold War research, Like mid century military research went into a lot of fringe territory, though I guess this is one that eventually became mainstream science. Yeah, because on one hand, there's you want to know how your troops are going to behave in a stressful situation, but they also considered stress a useful weapon in potential psychological warfare based on his work

and the work of others. Uh. In fact, Viner says, quote, the military's fascination with stress became such that by nine seventy six, over one third of prominent researchers in the stress area were based in US military institutions. So it's it's no surprise then. I suppose that one of the papers that I found on adaptation energy came from a two thousand nine issue of the FBI Law Enforcement bulletin title Alarmingly enough, on the Edge colon Uh, integrating spirituality

into law enforcement. Did you read it? I mean, what kind of a read is this? Um? It was an interesting read. I just basically just made me just kept coming back and saying, wait, is this the real FBI Bulton? Is this something else? Does FBI stand for something other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, because it's certainly it's certainly interesting to see this article in an FBI publication after watching um My Hunters, which of course displays a

sort of the old school FBI the Netflix series Mind. Yes, the old school FBI of the sixties and seventies, like entering into a new um a new age that is open to psychological science. And you can find that arcase everyone wants to read it for them stuff. You can find that online. It's by in Knees Tuck. But the concept of of of adaptation, energy and stress. Uh. This

was also embraced by transcendental meditation. To bring us back to meditation, and Celier himself became interested in the use of transcendental meditation as a stress management method after meeting with the Maharishi mahash Yogi, the founder of the transcendental meditation movement in the nineties seventies, something that he discussed in later interviews. Interesting. Now, adaptation energy itself remains hypothetical, but many scientific studies surrounding meditation uh relate to the

physiological effects of stress. Yeah. I was thinking when listening to uh Dr Weener's interview that even if the adaptation energy theory is not um but if it's not literally correct in that you have some kind of fixed number of reserves that are depleted, I think it could be could be very easily an analogy for something that is very true of the body, which is that there is

such a thing as cumulative stress. You might not have a number that could be measured and that can be built up and stuff like that, but there are cumulative effects of stress, and it can behave sort of analogously to what she describes. Yeah, I mean, you can think of it just like, how many times would you need to be, say, reminded of something stressful in your life?

How many times would you or you would you need to have someone jump out at you and scare you before it would begin to wear you down, you know, just in the course of a day. And therefore it might be useful to find a room where nobody jumped stout at you, or nobody shouts something stressful at you,

And of course for the most part, we don't. We don't even have to rely on someone else to jump out or someone else to yell something stressful, because we have the this wonderful dialogue that's going on in our minds most of the time, the email leopard and the email leopard as well. But yeah, we have the default mode network in our mind, constantly fretting over past in future. It's it's shutting off that voice. It's finding a room where that voice cannot reaches, that that has value. And

that's where meditation comes in. Yeah, and I can certainly believe also that meditative practices could increase one's resistance to uh to to these stressors as they come at you, even after you've stopped practicing it for the moment. Indeed. Now for this episode, thanks as always to Alexander Williams for running the boards on this one, and thanks to Tyler Clang and Tari Harrison, who also came up with a couple of the questions that we used in the

interview with Mascarrow. Thanks of course to Dr Jennifer Mascarrow for talking with us and to Dr Jill Weener. And by the way, if you want to check out Dr Joel Weiner's work, you can head on over to Jill Weener dot com. That's w E N E R. And if you want to check out our work here's Stuff to Blow your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we'll find all the episodes, as well as links out to our various

social media accounts. And if you want to get in touch with us directly, as always, you can email us at blow them Minto's how stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff Works dot com by No Mo