Get FOCUSED, Increase Productivity & Concentrate On WHAT MATTERS | Amishi Jha

We're talking about the firing of a particular neural configuration. And if you've heard that phrase, neurons that fire together wire together. And it's this notion that out of all of our brain cells, there's some that are going to have sort of a synchronized activity, and through that the connections between them will grow and be privileged over other connections. And that is essentially the foundation for human memory. So that once a particular, let's say an episode has occurred, um when we go to recall it, if we hit one of the nodes in this neural network that represents the episode we experienced, all of the neurons that kind of fired together will become activated, and that'll bring up the richness of the actual episode itself in our memories. Amishi Jha, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. I'm very excited to have you. The brain is a weird and wonderful place, and you really dive into some of the more enjoyable parts of its weirdness. One of the things that I find really fascinating about your work as somebody who has a mind that wanders obsessively, I and I would say I have a bad memory, and for a long time I considered that to be the bane of my existence. And then I started asking the question, but from an evolutionary standpoint, is there an advantage? Like has some part of this been selected for? As you think about the context of attention and a wandering mind, has it been selected for, and if so, why? Oh, has mind wandering been selected for? Great question. Absolutely. The and this is sort of a puzzle that we're still figuring out. But if you just look at the prevalence of mind wandering, so 50% of our waking moments we're doing this, from a metabolic point of view that would be a really inefficient design. And every single thing the brain does, it really is trying to advantage it functioning well. So, for some reason we do this and it is on purpose, meaning designed for through the course of human evolution. And the mystery has been what is it? What is it that is actually supporting um what processes are being supported by the fact that we mind wander? And we have some clues. Let's hear it. But yeah, yeah. So, the first thing I'd say is let's just be clear on what I mean. So, the broadest category of which mind wandering is a subset is something called spontaneous thought. Essentially, something we get in touch with very, very quickly when we're meditating, practicing mindfulness meditation, for example. This sputtering out of mental content. Just boom, boom, boom. You could be doing anything. You could be going for a walk, you know, taking a shower. monkey mind. Exactly, the monkey mind, right? And most of the time when there is no other pressing requirement, it's like no problem. I mean, the mind does that. Other than it tends to go to negative things a lot of the time. Okay, right. That's a different thing. We should That is going to be definitely a bad thing. But for example, right before we started our conversation, I took the opportunity to uh look out at the beautiful view you have here in your home. And just taking it in, right? There was nothing really on my mind, just this expansive scene. And and little thought pop particles were popping up and like popcorn and I was just allowing them to be. And there was no cost associated with that. But when we use the term mind wandering, what we're really talking about and specifically the way I operationalize it is off-task thoughts during an ongoing task or activity. So, there is something we're trying to do. And so, if in this moment as we're having this conversation and there is a point to what I'm trying to say, if a random thought pulls me away, that could be problematic. I won't make sense anymore or I'll pause, or I'll stumble somehow. So, some of the ideas regarding spontaneous thought, which is this broader category of the thought pump or monkey mind, as you said, is that it supports our ability to remember. So, it's funny that you mentioned memory already. And one of the reasons we think this is the case is because memory requires this process called consolidation. So, I'm just going right into this now. I'm not Yeah, yeah, please. Memory formation is really interesting and weird. I'm assuming you're going to talk about this, but the the way that they're not sort of solid-state things, that we change them constantly. That's right. I mean, in some sense, they're solid in the sense that we're talking about the firing of a particular neural configuration. And if you've heard that phrase, neurons that fire together wire together. And it's this notion that out of all of our brain cells, there's some that are going to have sort of this synchronized activity, and through that, the connections between them will grow and be privileged over other connections. And that is essentially the foundation for human memory. So, that once a particular, let's say an episode has occurred, um when we go to recall it, if we hit one of the nodes in this neural network that represents the episode we experienced, all of the neurons that kind of fired together will become activated, and that'll bring up the richness of the actual episode itself in our memories. But how does that process of firing together to wire together occur? It goes back to this notion of spontaneous thought. In some sense, every time we experience anything, so even as we're talking to each other right now, or those at a later point they're listening to us, every time we experience anything, there's a neural activity pattern that occurs. And there's bits and pieces of it that may need to replay themselves over and over again for there to be a privileged co-occurrence of their firing. Privileged because in the repetition we've given a signal to the brain, this is important enough to myelinate essentially to make that more efficient. Um yeah, but we would even before we myelinate, even before we do anything to connect the two, just I had this experience and some replaying of it will begin almost immediately after you've had the experience. So and we know this, right? If you watch a TV show right before going to bed, almost as you're going to bed at night, you might have like episodes of it just pop up. You're not trying to make that happen. Or even a a conversation or a song, just random little bits and pieces. And what we think might be happening there is that it's essentially a replay function. So that when it replays over and over again, with every replaying there's some things that occur again and there's some things that may not because of chance. Well, what makes it privileged? Privileged is that the the thing that gets replayed over and over again consistently is the thing that becomes privileged. So while I'm replaying this conversation, another thought might pop up or another little thing may come up. But the thing that happens consistently after 10, 20, 50, 100, maybe a thousand times, we we have no idea how often this occurs, then those neurons are going to say, "These keep firing together. Now I want to actually have stronger connections between uh the neurons that represent So privilege is the result of a process and it has to do with an averaging that occurs. I mean that like I told you, we're getting into the geeky part of this, but No, I love it. It's an averaging that occurs and that will allow us to have memories. This is very common process during sleep, but now we think mind wandering and spontaneous thought may be something that is the beginnings of that that then continues in sleep. It's really interesting and I've heard explanations for why we dream when we sleep. Yeah. One of these, and I think this is a pretty early hypothesis. I don't think I I forget who uh posited this, but I even at the time they were saying it, I don't think they were trying to put forth it. No, this is like proven science, but it's a very interesting idea, and I've heard you talk about the fact that 50% of our brain is allocated to vision. Mhm. And there's a mechanism in the brain where if you're not using something, it will get reallocated really quickly. And they were positing that even the 8 hours that you're asleep may be a long enough period of time that if you're not using the vision the centers for vision in your brain, that they would start to get encroached on by other areas, and that one of the possible reasons that we dream is to use the visual areas of our brain even though our eyes are closed and not actually taking in any light, but you're using visual processing. And that keeps at bay the other areas of the brain from taking over, which Mhm. I found a certainly very interesting hypothesis, cuz it gets at this idea that the body isn't The body achieves harmony through battle, if that makes sense. That they're all wrestling for resources. Yeah, that's a great That's interesting hypothesis. I'd not heard that before. A more kind of common view of why dreaming may occur and we know this from studies in rodents, for example is for memory consolidation, so that you're replaying over and over again. But why is it so weird? up up Why Because like you replay it realistically. It's like all of the sudden my mom and I are literally I had this dream one time. My mom and I are in a dinghy in the middle of the ocean Yeah. and something happened. I don't remember what. She ends up falling overboard, and like the Terminator in Terminator 2, as she sank, and if I remember right, there was like a piano tied to her ankle and as she was sinking, she gave me thumbs up. Wow. was one of the most emotionally charged dream like to the point I that dream must have been 30 years ago. Oh, wow. after Terminator 2, so somebody can check that, but uh it was emotionally resonant. Yeah. But obviously my mom and I have never been in a dinghy in the middle of the ocean. My mom did not fall overboard with the piano tied to her ankle. Yeah. So the question becomes what? Like if that's memory consolidation, why is it so weird? Right. Well, first of all, if the elements that could be consolidated have nothing to do with how they're put together. Because for example, if you just think about the most simple thing. This is an amazing dream by the way, and I'm glad that you had that such a uh ability to remember it that it has an impact even today. It's rare that that can happen to us. the world's smallest handful of dreams, much to my dismay cuz I find them so interesting. Yeah. But let me just take a much more kind of simple view of of dreaming cuz you're right. And this is not my area, so I'm already speaking from a take you way out into the weird. Just hypothesis, guess But like if you take a very simple model of having a rat, some kind of rodent learn a maze. And you can actually go in because it's a rodent model. Know exactly what set of neurons, what population of cells are active as the rat pursues this maze as it's actually moving around through it. And the sequence of how these neurons actually activate. Like you know, let's say neurons 1 2 3 and then 4 5 6 for example as it turns left and right etc. So now the rat is in sleep. You're still you still have as the animal researcher, you still have those electrodes hooked up and now you're not um you're just observing what happens. And what you notice is that there is this replay function. Not only are those same set of neurons firing, but they're firing in the same sequence in that same coordinated fashion. And then the next day when the animal performs, the animal is much more efficient with those uh sets of activity profiles that were more reliable and clearer. And and across animals you notice this. Those that have really strong firing patterns that are cohesive and replicate the actual experience of walking through the maze do better than those that don't have strong patterns. All right, my friend, I have a big announcement. My incredible and talented wife, Lisa, is about to launch her new book, Radical Confidence. 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But what Lisa shows people in Radical Confidence is that the radical part is that you can accomplish extraordinary things even when you feel fear. That's what Radical Confidence is, being afraid and unsure and having a toolkit that allows you to still make massive progress. Pre-order your copy today because if you act now, you can claim the bonuses that Lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com. They're only available if you pre-order, so act now. Then, once you're done that, we'll get back to today's episode. All right, guys. Read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life. Peace out. Okay, now I'm going to just really go into a third waters here, but as you're saying that, A, my first question is, have they done that same study in humans? Because I'd be very curious to know if part of what we're consolidating, because as I replay that dream about my mom, which I haven't thought about in a long time, was there meaning that was being consolidated? Like the understanding how to process a sense of loss, like how would I deal with the loss of my mother, her trying to communicate that it would be okay, and that's my own subconscious trying to And it's possible that that dream was long enough ago that I had anxiety over the loss of my parents still, and so it's interesting if instead of consolidating the literal running of a maze, which there's no doubt, I mean, there's been enough studies that if you mess up people's sleep, they're not going to learn algebra and things like that. So, clearly there is some link to that. But if there's also another thing going on where our brain is dealing in a more abstract layer of meaning and emotional resonance where the literal firing of turn right, turn left, whatever, might not apply. Well, yeah. I mean, I think as we uh I mean, as species became more complex and could do more things, this same fundamental aspect is going to happen in various parts of the brain. And so, whether it happens in uh aspects that have to do with our meaning, our sense of purpose, our sense of value, emotionally salient things. It's possible in any of those kinds of processing modes that we can experience this. Um and has it been done with humans? I mean again, this is so outside my area. I'm sure aspects of this have been done with implanted electrodes, with EEG, for example. There's a lot known on on uh dreams than um than a lot more known than I know in this moment. But the way it connects to my work is that first of all, the things that tend to become salient parts of this mind wandering, this mental popcorn, spontaneous thought, really does at some level require some conscious input. We do have to pay attention or we have had paid attention at some moment to have it reappear over and over again to eventually become a memory, to eventually become this neurons that fire together wire together. Um so at some point if you've had that insight through the course of waking up from the dream, you probably had some aspects of those that that experience, that emotional quality, that conceptual realization at some other point. Um or right after you woke up, you put together the elements to make meaning. So the timing, I don't know. I don't know if in this particular instance when it could have occurred, but typically the elements have occurred somehow. Mhm. The applying meaning to it, the story that we tell ourselves, which is a big part of your work and how we get lost in those narratives and applying meaning to things is very interesting and I think profoundly impactful in people's lives. I want to go back to um what we were talking about a minute ago where so you've got these um memories that you're consolidating with the um oh god, what did you call it? The spontaneous Spontaneous thought. Thought, thank you. So the spontaneous thought it's popping up, it's a way for us to consolidate those memories. But the part of that that makes this really complicated is that I'm not I'm not making any attempt to faithfully rewrite it. If I understand this correctly and and hit me if I'm not, but my understanding of the way the memory works is that we pull it up into working memory and we will in some way manipulate it, massage it, like as we retell it we may be making it worse, darker, applying that story applying meaning to it that wasn't there before, making it better, whatever. And then as it gets re put into long-term memory as I changed it I'm now storing that slightly changed variation. And when I think about and we're bringing a lot of elements together, that's why I find your work so fascinating. There's other there is a hypothesis that when we sleep one of the things that we're doing is stripping the emotional intensity from a situation. And people with PTSD basically have constantly elevated cortisol levels, so even even as they sleep and they should be stripping that memory of its like emotional intensity, which is why technically time heals all wounds. It doesn't. It never gets stripped of the emotional intensity. If anything, the emotional intensity gets like hardwired because it's constantly there. So, I'm wondering if you've thought about like as we do this spontaneous thought and we're consolidating it in our waking hours and we're manipulating it if that manipulation was selected for in that what we're doing is essentially making that memory more usable and sort of damn the truth, just how do I make this memory more usable, which is why I mean they've done all kinds of studies about uh whether an eyewitness actually remembers things correctly and it's just absolute terrible. We don't remember things faithfully at all. Um do you think that plays into it at all? That there that the the brain as a product of evolution has found that actually changing this a bit is a good thing. So much richness in everything you just said. Um I don't know about good thing or bad thing, but it's definitely a thing. It's a thing that happens, right? And and you described it beautifully. So, a memory already exists. We're now going to recall it. So, even even something as innocuous as what I had for breakfast this morning, right? I want to, you know, I love the hotel I'm staying at. I'm having such a great experience. I recall this this breakfast I had and I like I have this sort of overlay of it was an overall great experience. So, even as I replay in my own mind the experience of tasting the food, I may infuse it with this layer of overall was such a great experience. Right? So, there again now, is that the truth of what occurred? What is the truth of what occurred, right? And and now when I store that memory again, it's going to have that aspect overlaid onto it and baked into now what gets pulled up the next time. Um and these things are constantly mutable. That's why we think of memory not as this solid thing, but this ever-changing thing. Which uh first of all should give us a lot of humility. Like what we remember, we should be we should really have like a a sense that, well, I think this is the case, but I don't really know. Doing the best I can. We're not We're not actually pressing record when we remember. Um it's constantly being updated. And this can be a very useful thing. Ah, don't blow past that. I've heard you talk about that, so I know where you're headed. But when you say that we don't press record when we remember something, what do you mean? Oh, it's not verbatim. It's not as it occurred. There is no objectivity in the way we remember. There's no point to that. The point of memory is to support our actions in the future. We're helping ourselves out. So, if you and I have an interaction and it's a pleasant one, uh the main thing I should take away that I should remember is that this is a person that I enjoy spending time around. This person is not a threat. This person is not going to harm me. Uh there's wellness associated with the experience itself. I'm not recording every single moment of what occurred kind of with a neutrality about it. It's always shaped and to remember through the course of human evolution that that shaping is really to privilege our maximum learning for the next episodes of our life. It's to fuel the future. It's to benefit the future. We don't actually record in quotes, we don't actually remember to savor the past but only so that we can use that information for the next action in our, you know, life. At the risk of really taking us off course, I do have to ask you just said something. We're not programmed to savor the past. In my mid-40s, I have now found myself with a a sudden wave of nostalgia is a really pleasurable thing. And I hunger for that feeling that nostalgia brings. And I've no idea why. I've never been a backwards-looking person. I've always looked forward in my life. And all almost all of a sudden, over the last couple of years, it's become this just incredibly potent, wonderful feeling. But it's not true. Like when I was a kid, I just wanted to be an adult. And so but now all of a sudden I find myself thinking about, "Oh my god, the way movies were when I was a kid. Like it was so amazing." And Yeah. what is that about? Like why if our So, I love the definition of the human brain as being a prediction machine. Yeah. And so everything it's optimized for is making really useful predictions about what the future is going to bring. So, why is nostalgia, like why would that feel good? Yeah, that's a I don't I don't have a great answer for you, but let me just say let me just re-say something I said a moment ago. Which is it's not built for savoring the past in a in the sense that it's some kind of objective recording. But it's capable of savoring. It's capable of nostalgia. And so are you asking me sort of what's the what's the benefit of nostalgia? if you if you had to guess, so we're this prediction machine. Yeah. We are trying to optimize in a way that allows us to not be eaten by a saber-tooth tiger hiding in the bush, to not get grabbed by a snake, to make sure that our kids make it to adulthood to find mates. All that stuff. Um but there is something incredibly potent about remembering something specifically from your childhood, and I don't understand why. What possible selection pressure is there for that? Is that around conservatism? I don't know, it's so weird. Well, I mean, I think that kind of more plainly it's just if you have aspects of your past that have been um kind of short-handed as fun, beautiful, fulfilling, etc. Um you can call upon those uh to model what you might do in the future. That would be a very simple way to put it. Like when we gather together and there is real connection and a tradition, for example, it feels fulfilling. That's going to prompt you to probably try to replicate those circumstances in the future. So, I mean, I could go on and on about all the possibilities, but I think that I would probably say what's fascinating is that we are much more than this simple straightforward um product of wanting to have evolutionary advantage. Uh we've outgrown those sort of functions, and anything we say to ourselves that is simply for the purposes of survival is probably wrong, because that's in and of itself a story. Um and again, we have this problem as humans that we're only now retroactively looking at the evolutionary um uh nodes that have led us to what we are now. And that's true for everything. That's true for our understanding of memory, that's true for our understanding of why attention developed. It's it's true for our predictions regarding why it is that we may have spontaneous thought. We don't really know. What we know is that we are this right now, and these are our capabilities. And um we're doing the best we can as neuroscientists to even understand how it works. It's huge amounts of conjecture to say why it developed this way. I'm just going to put it out there. And also that that limited view that it's for our evolutionary survival, it doesn't hold anymore. It gets it's way more complex. In what way? Well, there's just everything we do is not that simply uh the notion even what family is, the notion of what mate is, the notion of what survival is. Um uh they're all different now. Do you think that that's a recent phenomenon or do you think that we will even that this was true 200 years ago? We just haven't yet had the tools to discover the truth of all this? Cuz I definitely until 90 seconds ago when you said that, just took it sort of as the default assumption that the right way to think about the brain is it's a product of evolution. Everything that it's designed for is does In fact, I've said this a gazillion times that your brain is designed to make sure that you have children that have children. And that's you're optimized for that. And so, as I think through all the weird things that our brain does, including going to negative things. Well, negative things were the things that were more high risk. So, of course, you had to pay more attention to that cuz that's how you avoided to get eaten. Um and of course, you wouldn't want to be ostracized by the group because that, you know, could lead to your death. And so, you're just optimized to be hyper paranoid about what other people think so that you can fit in. If that isn't the right sort of framing, what is? Oh, I don't mean that that's not a useful framing or that aspects of that probably aren't true. What I'm saying is moment by moment in the way that we use our minds now cannot simply be reduced to our evolutionary inheritance and the so the causes for that inheritance. Like right now, we don't do things simply for those same reasons is what I'm saying because we're not in the same circumstance. I mean, we're going to use our mind But are we dancing to that drum? I don't know if it if I care. Interesting. Do you not ever feel beholden to the way your mind works? Well, what I'm saying is um we have to really watch out for a very strong tendency of mind even as we're thinking about the mind. When you say tendency of mind, Yes, story making. Reducing mental phenomena in a way that would be able to be nicely packaged, recalled, used, and guide our comprehension of what's happening in the moment. That is such a strong need we have. That is our default. And it's a very efficient default. But just again, like I said, have humility about it. This is our story and science in some sense is is building complex stor- stories that are theories where we can predict things to actually see if we can reproduce certain kinds of phenomena. Um so, I don't know. I guess I'm just saying that the the complexity of the modern circumstance, the complexity of uh the use of our brain in novel ways that never existed for our ancestors till maybe even 15 years ago. We never had smartphones before. We didn't have social media. The nature of how the mind gets used in complex and new ways is ever unfolding. And I wouldn't want to I wouldn't say we have no idea, but I would say that I don't I would say we don't know yet how certain primitives, meaning certain kind of um inheritances that the mind has, um are now being utilized for the modern purpose. Right? I don't know. I think it's I think it's we don't know quite yet. Um but I don't think there's anything wrong with the way that you're operating. That it makes sense to me that the way that we are driven has some evolutionary basis. I don't think there's any problem with that, but I would just say yeah, put a little asterisk next to that that yeah, but it we still don't really understand cuz it's a work in progress and we as humans are trying to observe ourselves as this is all unfolding. I love that. So, I've heard you talk about this before, but I'd love it if you um would explain now what is the risk of having these stories? Does it blind us to something? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a very powerful thing. I mean, we've already been doing it even in our conversation, right? We have ideas, concepts. That's in some sense stories about the way things happen, occur. Very useful packaging of complex information with the chronology, with a narrative, with an an experiential or phenomenological perspective. I'm not knocking stories. Stories are great. But stories are constructed. Stories can, as we already discussed with regard to human memory, stories can be reconstructed. Uh stories can be altered as we're retelling them. Without us realizing. Without us realizing. And um you know, I'm a scientist. Stories are hypotheses and we should kind of keep that in mind. Uh even as we retell a story that we think is factually just by the book what happened. Uh maybe, maybe not. Our perspective is going to bias that. So, my caution regarding stories is in our drive, in our desire to make something have meaning and shorthand it in a way that I can efficiently carry it around, um I may lose some aspect of what is useful and what is true. So, in the book I give this example from um a dear colleague of mine, a military leader who had this occur to with his unit while they were on the side of a mountain mountain uh in Afghanistan. And you know, these are real consequences of stories. So, the the intel that they've been given I'm just going to retell it if No, the story is so good, please. Um This terrifies me, PS. Yeah, and and think about what's unfolding right now in our world, right? With regard to conflicts that are unfolding. Um so anyway, the story is that the story that that that that I'm reflecting on is um this colleague of mine who was then a colonel, Colonel Pyatt, he and he told it to me because it was to in his mind a reason uh that mindfulness was such a going to be such a valuable tool for soldiers, including those that he was leading. But what happened was that they were given intel and he was the leader of this this particular brigade at that point. Um or battalion, I can't remember what his particular leadership role was. But they were told that on the top of this mountain is an encampment and the encampment is Taliban. And all the signs are there, there's small groups, they're they're organized in this way, they've been roaming around, uh they just arrived, um they are the enemy and they need to be terminated. So, essentially he uh they had you know, planes flying above that were just on his command going to drop a bomb and that group of the enemy was going to be obliterate obliterated. Well, they all had that story in their mind and again, as they're approaching this encampment going up the mountain, literally him and his soldiers, um that story is is is fully present and was going to bias everything that they are seeing. Because if you are told that this is what you're seeing, there's going to be something called the confirmation bias where all the cues that are aligned with that story become more salient to you. You're checking boxes that say, "Yep, looks like that. Looks like that." Anyway, one of his soldiers, who was essentially a scout at the at the front of this unit walking up, um went all the way up where he could make he could see could get a visual confirmation regarding this group and and he's basically checking the list. Yes, I see young men. Um I see, you know, that they're they're roaming about. They're they're surveying something. And then he saw something that made this um then Colonel pause. He said, "There are no I see no weapons." And that was that was a weird because if this is truly a Taliban group, that would be very odd for them to be roaming around without weapons on them. So, essentially, he saw he noticed what he did not see, which was breaking out of that confirmation bias. And um and then he reports back, "I see no weapons." So, everybody sort of flagged at this point, "But that doesn't make sense. That's weird." Um but that alerted the uh Colonel to say, "Don't fire. Don't don't drop the bomb on these people. Let's check it out." And that scout went and actually just ran up and tackled these these guys that were sitting outside. All of a sudden, a group of people walked out of one of the um uh you know, dwellings and it was this robust woman who was like screaming at them, like, "Get off of my guys." This was not a Taliban encampment. This was a Bedouin tribe that had been going there for hundreds of years to let their animals roam uh and have food. And then eventually, the Colonel made it up there. They actually sat with the leadership of this tribe. And and you know, he recalled he I recall him telling me, you know, it was one guy that was not biased by his own story that is the reason these people are alive right now. Consequential. And the thing that he thought was key was that the soldier's ability to remove himself from the story and actually get the raw data of what was occurring is the thing that made him say, "No weapons." So, if we could get that skill to more people, it can be very powerful. Especially more soldiers in the context of his line of work, that could be very powerful because they would have more opportunities to break free of the constraints that stories put on us in our thinking and even in our perception um hopefully not just lives, but actually improve the fullness of what we experience. Mhm. Reminds me that famous quote, "It doesn't matter what you look at, it matters what you see." And I've seen this at play in business a lot where people they have an idea in their head and you don't realize how much that's like filling in the gaps, right? So, and I think most people don't understand you talk about this in the book if I remember correctly, that even your vision, like you're actually seeing clearly this really tiny amount of your visual field, like 2% or whatever, is clear. Everything else is the brain filling it in. Like there is where the optic nerve actually connects to the eye as you well know, there's just a blank spot, but none of us perceive the blank spot. Your brain is drawing it in. It's crazy. It's crazy. It is. when I think about and you tell another story in the book that's only tangentially related, but I'll I'll bring them together, which was um the guy who called in the worst friendly fire um strike in US history or something. And it was because he changed the battery on his coordinate device and even though he knew that when you change the batteries, the it will like re-put your base coordinates or whatever. And he knew that, forgot, does it, calls in the strike on his own people because he forgot that it changed. And I just thought, "Oh my god, that's so your brain is like, oh cool, cool, I know where they are I've got the data it's right there cool it's all connected oh let me change the batteries and then yep okay it's connected I already ran through that so you have like it the story locked in your mind that I've already done it I've already checked I know this is good. And so now your brain just like paints it yep there's the coordinates we're all good drop the bomb and whoa like it is just really terrifying even to what you were saying earlier that part of why you're telling the story is to shrink the complexity into something that you can carry around but if you can't get outside of that it it is really distressing how I'm sure if you had like okay you guys are looking at the scene close your eyes don't look again what kind of weapons are they carrying well the one guy had an M60 or AK-47 whatever they would normally carry the Russian era weapons and then nope you actually didn't see anything cuz none of them have a weapon but your brain is so convinced that you saw it. So I teach a class for business leaders and one of the things is about this sort of contextualized differently but you have to have a story to move forward cuz you need something that's simplified enough to give you clarity that you can impart that clarity to other people so that you can create this forward momentum. And as the leader you need to intoxicate everyone with your certainty. But oh secretly you better go off into a corner and go is this really right because if you don't have the story you can't get people moving even yourself but if you get sucked in so deeply to the story that you forget it's a story then you won't actually check to see if it's working. And it's this really weird part of the human psyche. Yeah yeah and by the way I think that I love that you do that cuz I think that that's such a useful thing to tell leaders because and it's atypical most people aren't thinking that it might be have a better story or guide them in a way that makes them buy into your story more, but the fact that you should question and reacquaint yourself with the fact that you've constructed this story really gold information, I think, for leaders. But the thing to remember is that it's not like you can have a story or not have a story. You can go back and forth into the mode of being in the story mode. It's just that you have to be able to step outside of it to to even remember that it exists. And that aspect of our functioning, to step outside of a story, is very hard to do, and most of us don't even think that it is worthy of doing. And even if we want to do it, it's hard to do it. So, part of what I think the power of something like mindfulness meditation is, um just from an attentional point of view, is that it trains us to be able to get into that mode, that observational mode, which we can do at a distance to watch, but we can also do it while we're actually in it. Like, we can do it from the sort of more embodied perspective. Oh, this is what this story feels like. So, it can be both at a distance or within, um but it's taking an observational stance. And when we take an observational stance, we can actually see the structure of the story. And that is very powerful, cuz now we see the scaffolding that we've built. And we can make a choice. Like, does this scaffolding actually hold true or not? And we can do this moment by moment. And even as you're guiding people, if you realize, ah, this aspect of the story that I've constructed is actually not going to serve these people or is entirely incorrect, you can rebuild it. But if you don't know that you're in it and that it's driving everything you're doing, there's no chance you're going to even attempt to observe and then rebuild as needed. Facts. So, how do people develop meta-attention? Yeah, yeah. Um you know, I think the shorthand would be it's not just about reframing it, cuz sometimes people are like, I got to hone my story." It's about this other term I like to use, deframing it. It's like you just And part of deframing is acknowledging the framework itself. Um yeah, I mean meta-attention or what I would say meta-awareness. So, this is awareness of the ongoing contents and processes in your mind moment by moment. Very, very powerful thing. Just having that awareness. And I wish it was a quick fix to cultivate this, but it actually does train It does require training. I mean, but there are in-the-moment things you can do to to become meta-aware. But it's important for people to know it is possible. Like you actually can get better. Oh, you absolutely can better can get better. And even if you feel you've really cultivated, you can do it in the moment. So, you know, I'm just thinking back to the view outside of your um your your beautiful home. And also the uh title of my book, Peak Mind, right? So, in some sense, when you see the term peak mind, it's like the pinnacle of something. But what I I actually uh the the view outside actually reminded me of why I wrote the why I liked the title Peak Mind. Cuz in many ways uh a peak mind is a mind that has the point of view of the vista from the peak. Not just arriving somewhere, but actually seeing the landscape. Um which can be very powerful. So, the in-the-moment way to have meta-awareness would be essentially kind of getting a sense of what the landscape is. Um whether it's from a ridge above or, you know, I always think when I talk to my kids about this, it's like imagine you're like a traffic helicopter hovering above and you're reporting down on what's occurring. In moments where you feel locked in or you want to just check yourself of like, "Is this Is this correct what I'm actually experiencing?" Um you can take that that kind of distanced perspective. And that's all we're talking about right now, something called psychological distancing. Um and what you can do in that moment is kind of say, what are the facts right now? What am I witnessing right now? What is the landscape before me right now? And reporting that can kind of like you were saying before about memory, it can kind of reduce the emotional control or overlay that the circumstances can have, especially if there's a lot of reactivity. Because essentially now I'm not Amishi experiencing fear, confusion, rage, anger, whatever it is. I'm talking about this person, Amishi, who is experiencing those things. And that can be extremely powerful. So, you know, I I would say start by moments where you feel stuck to take that bird's-eye view or drone's view or traffic helicopter view. Can you give people an example? So, in the book you talk about somebody walking by you, they don't even look at you, and you relayed what that is when you strip story and emotion, and I was like, whoa, that it is a it is a startling level of difference that I think people, once you're not just overlaying a different story, you just no story. No story. What What does that sound like? just the facts. Just give me the facts. What occurred? Knowing with humility that like I'm not going to always be biased. I'm just going to accept that I'm going to be biased. But so, the the the very trivial example, but, you know, I'm sure at some point in our lives most of us have experienced something like this, where you're walking down the hall, and uh for whatever reason the person walking toward you, you know, you might even have uh like kind of a warmth toward the fact that somebody's passing you by and or passing by you, and you might even want to like smile or just say hello or something kind of neutral prosocial, uh and you notice that the person is kind of angrily averting their eyes, angrily already over didn't overlay. The person is averting their eyes and walking past you. And the thought that probably would emerge is why is this person being a jerk to me? Or did I do something to offend this person, or So, all this all these ideas start proliferating regarding why this occurred. And and then you might even go on to make a story about it. Oh, it's because probably I took that bagel at the last time we had breakfast, and he's still pissed at me that whatever the story is that you make up. You created a full-on uh story regarding why you've had this particular interaction. But now let's take this kind of this psychologically distanced perspective. And the first thing is the truth. You really have no idea. You really truly have no idea why this particular set of circumstances has occurred in this moment. There's no certainty. Everything that you think you're certain about you created in your own mind. And then relay what actually transpired. A human was walking in the direction opposite to the direction I was walking. Eye contact was not made. Uh facial expressions that were expected were not occurring. Uh expectations were not melt met, and uh this human mind created a whole bunch of proliferating concepts to make sense of this episode. That's what occurred. So, that just stating it that way, all of a sudden you realize, "Oh, there's a world of possibilities of why that could occurred." And and if we get better at this, we can actually become more observant as we're experiencing things like this. So, for example, you know, the next time you now are walking down the hall and something like that happens, you might actually try to observe more with that curiosity and openness and not framing anything. You might notice, "Oh my gosh, that person looks like they're actually bleeding. They cut themselves." Or whatever it is that could occur, you become more attuned to the novel features with the curiosity, and you're not so locked in to the particular set of things. That's such a trivial example, but I think that, you know, from from the kinds of groups that you speak to, too, from a leadership perspective, this is very, very powerful uh to be able to take that uh distance to you. No doubt. So important. I had a guy on the show named Donald Hoffman. He's got a whole hypothesis that not only is the world not real, meaning that it it isn't as you perceive it. It couldn't possibly be as you perceive it. And the he gave an example that hit me so hard and I have remembered it like like right at the forefront of my brain since he said it, which is reality is the number of photons falling on an object that you're looking at. And he was like, "But you don't perceive it as there's this many are, you know, RGB. It's or CMYK. It's like this many in this color spectrum, this many in this." He was like, "You perceive it as blue, as black, as white, whatever." And he was like, "That is so abstracted from what is real. And once you realize you're layering meaning on top of meaning on top of meaning, like even just the the the experience of walking towards somebody, it's already layered with this abstractness of your brain only having eyes, nose, ears, touch, you know, pressure sensation, heat sensation, things like that. Uh which is a narrow narrow narrow like the amount of what we call visible light is only .0035% of the available electromagnetic spectrum. So, we're already in this just obscenely narrow band of what's happening. And then on top of that, you're layering all of this meaning. And you used the word simulation in the book. And I'm obsessed with that. Long time viewers of this show will know that I resonate I was like, "A simulation?" Indeed. Uh once people understand that you really are a brain in a vat, it's just that the vat happens to be your skull, then you begin to realize that whoa, like I am brick by brick constructing an artificial, I'll put that in quotes, but an artificial reality, and the ability to, as much as useful, like I don't often think about the world as photons falling on an object, but the more layers of abstraction that you can recognize you have added to this, the more likely you are to be open to what's actually happening and therefore can have a more useful response. Totally. And I love that. And yet Don Hoffman is a is a hero in, you know, his his Are you talking about the professor at UC Irvine? Uh I don't know if he's at UC Irvine. This is very probably. Yeah, well, anyway, this notion of reality is constructed and frankly a hallucination is sort of the these kinds of ideas that he's um talking about these days and coming up with the theorems that people have a hard time kind of arguing against. Um so I think it's very it's very interesting, but what you described I think is such a beautiful way to again have humility regarding everything we perceive, think, ways we behave, um that is uh a particular slice that is wholly constructed. And the thing that I'm interested in because yes, if we can accept that, uh we orient with a lot more curiosity, and uh awareness of our lack of knowing about a lot of things. But the reality is that sometimes we do get locked in, and sometimes we do ruminate, and sometimes the story feels so real or the memory so salient and damaging and harmful or problematic that it it paralyzes us. So on the one hand I'm all for kind of getting to the root of the constructed nature of reality, which it it is, and sometimes we get little glimmers of that um in very uh compelling ways like oh, this is totally made up. Or this doesn't have to be this way. It was constructed this way. Um though I think that that's an important thing to be in touch with. The other thing is we need just practical tools. So though it may be that the mind is constructing these things, there are ways in which the mind does has propensities towards certain kinds of mental processes that can really not serve us. And so if we can train our mind to not just become aware of what's going on but to have more control of our for example attentional capacity, something that I study in my lab, it can really serve us even if it is the case this is all ultimately a giant hallucination. Life is itself hallucination. Even so if I notice that I'm fearful of walking outside my home or of a crippling anxiety about something or a a memory that just flattens me. I have to live my life. And so it's almost like the absolute and the relative and we're constantly kind of going to have to go back and forth between them. And and the surprising thing I found is that the same things that help us deal with the challenges of our human ness actually lead us more and more to a fundamental understanding of the nature of things which more. Well, well because once we realize, you know, everything you've described with regard to the small sliver of reality that we actually have access to because of our our perceptual systems um and so we're limited in that way. But there's another thing that we haven't talked about yet which is that even the nature of brain processes um which you can say okay, my brain processes are limited because you know, my eyes can only see a certain amount of the visual spectra or I only have two hands. I don't have 10 hands or um you know, memories are going to be formed in this way, whatever. Um you know, in some sense the the the reality is um that we have to contend with time. Meaning, whatever brain process is happening in a moment, there's a contingent nature of what is hap- going to happen in the next moment just based on what occurred. So, we're limited and we're in some sense helpless even if our our notion of what free will is can become challenged because if what I do in the next moment is bound by what I just did, am I truly free ever? Um so, I'm now adding another layer of of of the limitations in our in our functioning uh and what we're going to be tied to just because the physics in some sense. So, we talk about this with regard to uh brain microstates. And we know that there's certain configurations in which the brain is for it let's say 40 milliseconds, 40,000th of a second that can predict its likely configuration in the next microstate. So, that that is going to be a problem as well. Um so, I don't I mean I didn't know where our conversation was going to go. I mean I I think this is fun, but to go back to what I was saying regarding the insights we can gain to help us in our in destructive and and difficult mind states uh through something like contemplative practice not only can help us deal with those destructive and problematic mind states, but they can start connecting us to the kind of fundamental nature of what reality is in its constraints, in its uh sort of impermanent nature, in its highly interconnected and dynamic nature, uh in its constructed nature, and they're related to each other. So, I don't know, is this making sense what I'm what I'm saying? Definitely. And I think that as we get into um the specifics of mindfulness. Yeah. One, why does it work? And as somebody who thankfully discovered this, I don't know how many years ago now, 8 years or something like that, it changed my life. Like it that's an easy one to draw a line in the sand and say, "Okay, before this and after this." Oh, really? But oh, yes. But one, I think it's worth talking about the flashlight to define attention and mindfulness and then understand, going back to the idea of meta-awareness, how we practice like at a mechanistic level, how do we practice the getting back up to the peak. Easy. Um but no, I think that that's great. I'm glad that you want to want to talk about this. And I'm so happy to hear that this is something that's touched your life uh personally as a tool for your own leadership and you know, sense of Profoundly. Um emotional well-being. That would be the right thing. I don't know how people, if they're pursuing something big, I don't know how you manage it unless you have meditation. I really don't. Like I would not have been able to um pursue the goals that I pursue without it. No way. It would have stopped being fun. I would have stopped, for sure. So, I know this is your show, but I want to ask you a question. Sure. What do you think it is that it gave you uh in practicing that allowed you to not stop and to keep going? The easy analogy is the brain and body function similarly to a car. And if you're stepping on the accelerator, it can be fine if you're already in fifth gear, but if you're in first gear and you stamp on the accelerator, you rev into the red, it breaks the engine and and you're done. And that's burnout. That's people just like they're constantly running the engine in the red and at the not at the risk I'm going to mix metaphors. I've always referred to this as background radiation. And what happens you just like I feel agitated. I don't I don't feel comfortable. I feel a sense of something's wrong or something's about to go wrong, but I don't know what it is. And that's stress. That's anxiety. That's like that I'm no longer even sure. I've just been running in the red so long that my body's just expecting a problem. Mhm. And with meditation what I found is it's shifting gears or it's letting off the accelerator maybe the better way to think about it. So Mhm. in my life I have been incredibly stressed. I've dealt with things where hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. And I have never once been more than 45 minutes away from total equanimity. Because I learned how to breathe from my diaphragm and it's purely mechanistic. Like I'm not thinking anything. I'm literally I mean it's exactly what you tell people to do in your book. So none of it will be surprising to you and it'll be good for you to walk people through it, but I am from by breathing from my diaphragm and just reminding myself every time I have a spontaneous thought just come back to the breath. Come back to the breath and there's no magic. It is to quote you there is no blissful state. There's just coming back to the breath. Mhm. And in doing that my background radiation just drops. And so it's taking your foot off the accelerator. It's shifting into the right gear. Whatever way you want to think about it. But if you don't do that what ends up happening is each day you're just pressing on the gas a little bit harder a little bit harder a little bit harder. And so you're revving farther and farther and farther and then all of the sudden you're just like I don't want to [ __ ] do this and you just like you you burn out. You quit your job. You're huddled in the corner crying. You're whatever. Like all the things that humans go through. But in your pocket at all times is the ability to let it go. And then you just decompress. It's It It is so basic and yet so profound. Oh, I love that you described all that. I mean, I think that it's very helpful for people to hear. Uh me saying as a scientist who studies in the lab is one thing, but you as somebody who not only has been practicing, but can show the actionable benefits. Yeah, but your teeth will numb. You've got some pretty like personal level insight. I do. I definitely do have uh personal level insights, but I'm just saying you made it come alive in such a tangible way. And I love the way you put it. 45 minutes from equanimity. I love that. Um and it kind of I will definitely talk about all the things you said, but I want to just touch on something that you said that I think uh connects to all the more esoteric topics we've been talking about already. Um so for example, you know, we talked about the constructed nature of reality. We talked about conceptual elaboration. We talked about story making and meaning making. All of those are what I would say is this revving up process. These are active, energetically costly things that we do by default. And um and that proliferate, not just construct and create, but proliferate our experience of stress. And so by what you considered the uh you know, in some sense I would say simple, but not always easy and very elegant act of focus back on the breath. What you allowed yourself to do in that moment is take a break from that constructing and proliferating and story making. And the nature of the mind with something called working memory is that unless we are actively keeping the contents of our conscious experience uh refreshed and rewritten moment by moment, they will fade away. Oh my god. No one's I've never heard anybody say that before. That's so true. And uh I think you You tapped into that the power of that. That if I'm not feeding this, it and I'm focusing on the breath instead. Now what the only thing on my mental whiteboard as I like to call working memory, it's going to be that. It's not going to be the the the whole castle or doomsday scenario that I've built up in my mind. And and the reason I love the 45 minutes idea and I would say even 45 seconds probably for you at this point. When you feel an edge, you might be able to kind of it takes time. Right. But you could probably say I have that tool. Even if you're not going to be able to use that tool in that moment cuz you're pretty spun up, you know you've got that tool. There is that place and that place is right here, right now. That's the kind of irony of it. There's nowhere to go. You're actually not going anywhere. That's the place. You are meeting the moment right now. And when you actually get in touch with this moment, things do fall away. The constructed nature of reality and those doomsday ideas that are pumping cortisol through your body can take a little bit of a break. Mhm. Um so then, you know, back to your question of like, well, how do you do that? Um you've obviously been doing it so you you know how to do it, but I'll just describe from sort of the attentional mechanistic point of view of how to do that cuz in some sense um showing up to the present moment is this weird journey. Because the reality is that's all we have. All we have is right now. Our entire lives are just right now. And now right now. But because we have this very powerful simulation machine that we carry around between our ears, um we can hijack ourselves away in time, in place, so something called mental time travel and we can hijack ourselves away from even my own mind. So it's not just time travel, it's mind travel. And both of those together are the best ways to simulate reality. Um uh mind travel would be me, for example, right now being in your mind and saying, "What is he's thinking about the way that I'm phrasing this sentence? Does he Does he understanding it?" So, I'm it's it's a way to change perspectives so that you're actually seeing the world through somebody else's eyes. And often times that can be very, very powerful and socially and emotionally intelligent like perspective taking. But can also be very damaging when you uh layer into the notion of judgement or um other bad things that other people can do to you. But now they haven't done it, but you've you've kind of put yourself in their mind so that you're experiencing it from that perspective. Um so anyway, I think that that's just something to really remember that all we have is right now. And anytime we're not feeling right now, it's because the simulation that we've generated our own mind has taken us away. From my point of view, mindfulness is not really have has nothing to do. Mindfulness of breathing has nothing to do with manipulation of the breath, having a different CO2 to O2 level. No, it's nothing about that. It's the way that you're going to make your attention, which is present centered and narrowed with this particular breath related sensation as the anchor. And so you're taking that flashlight of attention, you've decided that I'm going to have the goal right now of focusing on breath related sensations, and then you're just going to observe what is occurring within the sensory phenomena that arise tied to the breath. So, very, very simple instructions. Pay attention to breath related sensations. But because of everything we've talked about Yeah, everything we've talked about. 50% of our waking moments, our mind wanders, spontaneous thought is the nature of the mind. We have a strong propensity for story making, editorializing, emotionally reacting. So, there's a second thing we have to do. You know, it's like we can't just say focus on the breath and then we're done. Because within nanoseconds of deciding to focus on the breath, thought pops up. You know, you got an itch, you got something that's not breath-related sensations, which should be where I'm pointing that flashlight, will arise. And it is likely that that will pull my attention away. The flashlight will no longer be focused on breath-related sensations, but it's yanked away by something else. So, the second instruction is notice. Notice what is unfolding, and that's that meta-awareness piece that you were talking about. Become meta-aware of your moment-to-moment experience. So, you have a goal, and you know what you're supposed to do in the service of that goal, but notice what is actually transpiring. And then, so it's focus, notice. And the third step is essentially redirect. If there's a mismatch between your goal of focusing your attention on the breath, and your attention's off somewhere else, redirect it back. And through that simple act of focus, notice, redirect, and I think you beautifully described it with your what you do when when you feel that that teetering toward burnout, when the accelerator and um is really just going to go when you're in the wrong gear. Um is it it provides a safe, stable, present-centered way of making the mind which gives it a break from all that elaborating and editorializing that we do. And that's pretty much all we need. And if we could do it for for my our research, 12 minutes a day, it's a great way to kind of reset our mind. Yeah, it is it is profoundly transformational, and you said in words something that is just fundamentally true, but I've never heard anybody articulate it, I never thought about it before, but if you don't feed the process of like worrying and catastrophizing and projecting all this negative stuff back at yourself from the other person's perspective, it goes away. Like by default, it just all you have to do is not feed it. Yes. But often what we do instead of disengaging from that momentum is we'll do some other kind of conceptual process. I'll push it away. I'll think about it differently. I'll I'll not think about it. So, don't think about that troubling thought. Don't think about that troubling thought. Guess what's most prominent on your mental whiteboard? The troubling thought. Because you have to keep in mind not to think about the thing, and that's the thing. So, it seems like a straightforward thing. And I'm I love that you appreciate that point that essentially just allowing the mind to be in its in its kind of natural state, that those conceptual processes, which are effortful and require cognitive fuel to produce, will fall away. They may arise again. But they can they they Well, they will arise again. I was going to say, "Woo!" But at least they can they can um pass away without you having to push away or shove it in a corner or scold yourself for the fact that they've arisen. Um and we need to practice being able to let it pass away without messing with it, without going in there and tinkering with it. Just really like foot off the pedal in some sense and let it just fade. Uh it gives us a lot more freedom in the next moment of what we do. Yeah, it's it is utterly fascinating to me how one, how well it works just to breathe from your diaphragm, but two, that people have been saying this for thousands of years and trying to get people to understand a thing that I call frame of reference. And have you heard David David Foster Wallace's talk This Is Water? Mhm. Oh, you're in for a treat. It is so good. Now, the very sad punchline is that he ends up committing suicide, but his the talk is about how your mind is constructing a reality. It is so ever-present that there's there's nothing to peel at. There's no way to get underneath it. There's no way to see that it's a construct. That all of the feelings and everything that you have, like it's it's what water is to a fish. Mhm. And water is so taken for granted by the fish that they don't they don't have a perception of water not water. They're just it just is. And once people realize, wait a second, this milieu that I live in that seems to be the truth, it's just time they're just facts. I'm just recognizing the truth of the world. That no, no, it's all a construct. All of it. Everything. Every bit. It's all fake. I'll put that in quotes. Because it, you know, we're all experiencing it and that experience is in and of itself real, but it's all a construct. And that if you just stop feeding it, you will slide back to neutral. And because and this is the same reason that people pursue money and fame. Money's amazing. It's more powerful than people think, but it's not what they've been told. And so they're going to get it and they're going to be very confused that it does not make them feel better about themselves because that's not what money does. But because money is useful, people keep pursuing it cuz it actually does have utility. Same with fame. Fame has utility. It's not going to change how you feel about yourself, which of course is the only thing that ultimately matters in life, but because it has utility and people will pursue it. But it will be very confusing when they get it because they were pursuing it for utility that it cannot provide. And once you understand that all of the construct that your brain is coughing up, all of the spontaneous thought, all of the worry, all of the fear, all of the projection, all of it, it has utility. And so, you in some ways you need to do it, but you have to recognize, oh, this is a tool. And right now this tool, I'm hitting myself in the face with this hammer, and while the tool remains useful, smashing myself in the face is counterproductive. And so, we get to the point where you know, to a hammer every problem looks like a nail. And so, we just we worry, we catastrophize, we do all of this stuff, and because it has utility, we keep doing it, but we don't understand that we're now using it in ways that are just wildly self-destructive. And to stick with the hammer metaphor, you you can actually set the hammer down. Mhm. And that the way you set the hammer down is so simple that it was already written about 3,000 years ago or whatever, and people still have to like re-encounter it from a thousand different angles because it is so hard. It's hard. Just uh if I know that my brain, to quote your long meditating friend, is going to monkey mind every 7 seconds, no matter how long I do this, it's hard. Yeah, absolutely. But I think that um a lot of things are hard and worth pursuing. And uh thankfully, we don't have to figure out strategies completely uh on our own to figure out how to do it. That's where the traditions can be helpful as well. Because things like focusing on the breath is one approach, but there's a whole bunch of tools we can lean on of how to ones? Well, for example, uh you First of all, you can pick some other object. You can focus on the sensations of walking. You can focus on uh the way that you taste food. You can embody the moment from multiple in multiple ways. You can also train the mind to take this observational stance with practices like open monitoring practice or in the book I call it the the river of thought where you're taking really a steady a steady seat. You're steadying yourself. Usually it requires having built these concentrative practices. It's concentrative capacities first and then just allowing observing practicing observing the mind without engaging with it. you get that distance? Again, I think it is practice. Um it and is that distance cultivated by returning to the feel of walking or the breath? Same thing? No, no, no. It's a very different function. So the two kind of broad categories of So so far remember in the in the way that I talked about mindfulness of breathing, I talked about essentially this focus notice redirect. In that mode of of practicing something called concentrative mindfulness practice, there is a target object and there things that are non-targets. Basically the thing you should not be focusing on. And what we do when we practice that kind of breath focused or whatever walking focused practice is there's what we call signal and noise, right? So the signal is the target, the thing that you should be focusing on. Everything else is noise. And when I'm on the wrong target, I'm on the non-target, it's I'm in the noise. I want to get back to the signal. So that's why we focus on the thing that's the signal. We notice when we're off target and we come back. That still requires sort of this conflict experience of like I'm not on the target right now. I'm doing something like I'm it's wrong what I'm feeling. And that's a very potent thing that we experience thousands of times in our day when there's a goal we're not on it or uh happens not in the way we expect or want. Um and then we course correct. We either change the goal or we correct our behavior so that aligns with the goal. But all of that requires a a level of engagement with the mental processes that are occurring because we're going to muck with them. If we're on something else, we're going to do something about it to get back. This So, that's all what we'd call concentrated practices. What you're What we're talking about now is an is tapping into a whole other mode of practicing called open monitoring practices. And this one essentially um we're dialing down the signal-to-noise ratio. There is nothing that is signal and there's nothing that is noise. You know, in the in the concentrated practices, when we mind wander, that's noise. I'm making an error in focusing on the mind-wandering content. I need to get back to signal. So, here even mind wandering is not a problem because what we're doing is because there are is no signal and no no noise, what I'm doing is taking an observational stance to whatever arises without grabbing at it, without mucking with it, without doing anything about it, or even evaluating its nature, just acknowledging its presence. So, sometimes people talk about this as, you know, if you think about the way we make the mind uh like a vast open sky. Thoughts, feelings, sensations are like clouds passing. You know, that's one kind of metaphor. Or or I like to think of it as sort of like you're sitting sitting at a a strong giant boulder on the river on a riverbank and you're just sitting there and all the occurrences in your mind, all the contents of your phenomenology, are just passing away in the river. They're They're They're faint, then they become prominent, and then they can become faint again. We're not chasing a fish. We're not splashing in the water. We're not grabbing onto leaves. Um we're not trying to move around the boulders so the water flows differently. We are just sitting and observing. And this is a very We can do this, but it's a very unnatural meaning it doesn't feel like the the typical thing we've trained throughout our course the course of our life to do. Most of that time when we notice a thought, we do something with it. We have another thought and then another thought or we act differently based on the thought. Instead, we're just noticing the arising of it. Not participating. And letting it fade off that whiteboard. So that's the way hard. I'm not going to lie. I feel like I'm good at the come back to the breath, yeah, but to just be like, oh, there's a panic striking thought, but I'm not going to grab it. It's like it hits me so viscerally. Often times I will feel it even before the thought forms into something useful. I'll just be like, oh, that's a massive burst of anxiety. What Okay, that's why I just felt that. I I completely appreciate what you're saying that it's hard. It it is hard. It is hard. It's is going against the grain of the way that most of our cognitive functions have been kind of honed throughout our lives. And and and like you were saying before, the hammer is a useful tool. But you can let go of it. That's essential what we're doing is we're saying let's let go of it. So the next time even the thought that this is hard notice that that too is a thought. The evaluation of the experience is part of it. So it's it's just practicing it. And it we usually want to have this occur after we've steadied ourselves. When we when we have practiced the breath related focused or concentrated approaches because it can get very unstable. You're like, where am I? What is going on? And if you feel like you can't you either feel like a instability or you're definitely grabbed onto something, you can always go back to the breath and kind of re-stabilize and then open back up again. So you know, if it if it feels like it's hard, but you've been practicing concentrated practices for a long time, um do it just out of curiosity. And when you notice that something has gripped you, ah, there I am being gripped. Let go of the hammer. Just sitting right here. And when you get like it it you it leans on everything we've cultivated through the concentrated practice, but it would be really useful to see how it impacts you. Um because it gives you a whole other tool, and you don't have to journey into the space for long. Even, you know, micro seconds of just letting go can let those conceptual structures kind of fall away, and you can rebuild again as you want to. But it's like you were saying before, uh it gives you a chance to know you are a fish in water, uh and that there's something besides the water in which you are surrounded. Yes. Why doesn't positivity work? Why can't I just And this is one thing it's never worked for me, and your explanation may be the reason why, but people will be like, "Okay, you're about to do something that's really anxiety-provoking, but there's really no difference between the physiological response to something that is provoking anxiety and something that you're excited about. And so it's heart racing, um you're feeling flush, you're there's butterflies in your stomach." And I'm like, "Uh." So, they're like, "Just tell yourself it's exciting." And I'm like, "Man, anxiety does not feel the same to me, but okay, I'm going to try it." And I tried it, and I tried it, and I'm like, "This doesn't work." Like, I I can build the facade up for a minute, and then it just comes back at me again that no, this actually I'm really nervous about this. Uh you talk about why that doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Um there's so many reasons that that can be challenging. Um but I'm I'm curious, even the way that you just described it, right? That it's like you want to reframe the experience from a different point of view. No, this isn't actually uh anxiety in a bad way. This is like you're about to go down the steep part of the roller coaster. It's fun. And you're like, "Uh no, it's not fun because I'm not going down the steep part of the roller coaster. I'm in this very massive you know, this very difficult situation." And like you can't kind of override that, right? Because you know what the reality is of the the of the experiences you're perceiving it in the moment. Um but I will say that you know, there is evidence that positive psychology and positive cultivation of positive emotion can be beneficial. There are ways in which we can uh focus on the good, focus on aspects of our experience. Focus on I'm with you 1,000%. I'm talking about the trying to make-believe that something that is scary and actually conse- consequential is like, "Oh no, it's all good. This is just excitement." Right. So, the whole it's all good it's like you feel like you're lying to yourself. Like, "No, it's not all good." Um anyway, so the perspective that I can talk about it from I just want to mention that you know, I'm not saying that all cultivation of positive emotion is a is a fruitless thing. There are many ways in which it can be fruitful, especially if it's an under-emphasized aspect of our experience. So, if we tend to like you already were talking about gravitate toward the negative because we've been I don't know, there's a a strong evolutionary advantage to doing that, so we kind of tend to do that. Um to remind ourselves that we have that propensity and then focus on the thing we don't tend to focus on, which is the good, right? So, there are benefits to doing that. What we're talking about I don't think is that. It's not that there are aspects of the experience that we're disregarding. This is really that the framing we're using, we're saying use a different frame and figure out a way to be okay with that new framing and and reinterpret your physiological sensations from that new frame. First of all, it is a very energetically costly thing to do that. It takes so much attentional so many attentional resources uh and a massive amount of cognitive control to hold that view in your mind. Um because there's another view, so you've got to override that. And you've got to hold all the detail of this new view to try to interpret your uh current present moment experience from that lens. So, if you are depleted in any way, and we haven't talked about this, but just to say, when we are under high stress circumstances, demanding circumstances, for some protracted period of time, this very limited precious brain resource of attention that fuels our ability to do all of these things, thinking, feeling, connecting, uh you know, conceptually elaborating, making stories, predictions, to making decisions, the fuel that allows us to do all that stuff is reduced. And with less attentional control available, things are going to start getting messed up. So, um that's just sort of the the steady state. If you if you are under high demand for multiple weeks, you have less attentional capacity available to you. You're going to default to problematic approaches. Now, in the face of that, which is usually what uh um corresponds with our experience of stress. It's like, something's going on. There is an experience of stress because of the nature of the demands and their protracted presence. Like, it's not that I'm just it's not acute stress, it's really chronic stress. So, already the attentional gas tank is on empty. And then we're going to actually burn more fuel by trying to create this whole other structure, and we're going to find that it just keeps crumbling. Like, we can't hold it up because we don't have enough uh capacity to actually build it. And it's in those circumstances that we find that it's actually more problematic to try to do that thing of of uh generate positive emotion than do something else like take a mindful a present-centered accepting stance toward what's occurring when difficult situations are transpiring. So, we know this from a study that we did with actually active duty service members where um over the course of a long pre-deployment training interval um where we knew cuz we had tracked it before their attention is depleted if we do nothing at all over about 4 to 8 weeks when we evaluate their attention by having them do simple attention tasks, their performance is worse after 4 to 8 weeks um than at the beginning. And um think about that. That's like pre-deployment. Now they got to go be deployed. So, anyway, we wanted to see what we could do to help with this. And one approach that the army was using is positive psychology. So, um to protect soldiers' well-being, have them cultivate positive emotion. Have them think about um positive memories. Have them uh actively create more positivity in their moment-to-moment experience. And a whole bunch of tools to be able to do that. Now, when you're not under a high stress period of time, there are ways in which this can be very helpful to do cuz you can actually do it. But under high stress, what we found was um that the group that got the positivity training looked no different than the control group. In fact, they looked a little bit worse. Not only did they decline, they looked uh they they they declined a little bit more than the control group. We had another condition which was a training in mindfulness. So, we had essentially three groups: no training, positivity, and mindfulness. So, the no training and mind positivity looked very similar, both degradation over time. The mindfulness group did not degrade. They stayed stable over time. So, at the end of that 4 to 8-week interval, their attention was unchanged. Which to us was a win because if we do nothing at all or given these alternate approaches, they are depleted. Um so, that would that's where I I come to this understanding that, you know, if you're going to cultivate positive emotion, just check in to make sure you've got the attentional resources to do it. And if you And if you feel like you're working against yourself in trying to create these images or or feelings, don't do it. You know, at least try something else. Take an accepting stance, meaning not like I'm all good with this or I'm even okay with this, but it is what it is. It is this These are the circumstances that I'm in right now. A neutrality in some sense, a non-judgmental present-centered orientation toward experience. All right. So, all of this is incredibly powerful, transformational. There's a way to sort of supercharge this, which is something I haven't done too much, but every time it comes up, I find myself fascinated, which is loving-kindness. Yeah. Talk to me about that. It's really interesting. So, you've not practiced loving-kindness. I've done little smidgens of it, and I'm always surprised how much better it feels, but I don't spend a lot of time on it, if I'm completely honest. Just curious, like what what makes you not want to spend time on it? Oh, it's not that I don't want to spend time on it. It's that I have programmed my life to be very goal-oriented. And so, in I don't find myself needing that to want to do things for other people, but I do find that when you get into that zone, it's close to sort of a blissful state. Like, if I were really in need, uh, if I were in an emotionally dark place, I would do it all day. And the irony that And I know that you say to also do it to yourself, but the irony for me that focusing on other people is the thing that's going to make me feel better. Like, wanting good things for them and like really thinking about amazing things, like lifts me up and makes me feel better. So, if I were ever down, my thing is stress more than like feeling low or depressed or anything like that. But, if I were, boom, I would go hard on loving-kindness. Um Yeah, I I appreciate you saying that. I am curious to see do an experiment, try it for a week, uh 2 weeks, see what happens because um in some sense, it is meeting a pain point that we might not even know is part of our experience of stress. Um but but let me just back up to just say what it is cuz we've kind of been talking about it without really getting into it. So, first of all, I don't usually use the term loving-kindness. I think that it's the traditions will talk about it or um it's often the the the term would be metta, m e t t a, uh as a Buddhist term for this. Um essentially, that practice is a different category. It's not concentrative, it's not open monitoring or what we call receptive practice. Um this is kind of a third category, but it leans on a lot of the receptive prac- concentrative prac- practices because when we um do this practice, we are in that mode of there is something specific we're trying to do and we're going to ensure that that's the thing we're doing, not going off and some some other thing is not going to happen. So, um the intention uh behind loving prac- loving-kindness practice or what we call connection practice in our work with special forces and first responders and people like that is to have an orientation of well-wishing. So, this is not manifesting, this is not prescribing, but it's that that sense of connecting with what we most wish for ourselves, for other people, for our world. And to hold that very clearly as uh something we're going to actively do. We're going to wish well. And there are many ways we can do this. The the formal practice actually uh encourages us to use phrases uh that kind of use a word that describes the nature of the well wish. So, for example, um I'll just give you some that uh I often use and that are part of some of the trainings that we do. So, it would be something like and we start with our our we can start with ourselves as the target for the well wish. Um but we can move away from ourselves. So, we start with ourselves, then we go to a close other. Somebody where it's very easy, somebody a bene- a benefactor, somebody that we have no trouble wishing them well. Um then we go to a neutral person, somebody we might not even know. You know, maybe for me it would be like the the Uber driver that brought me home. I don't I don't know him, but neutral. Um and then a slightly difficult person. There's somebody that that you have friction with. You're going to wish them these these well wishes. And then kind of expand not just in terms of distance in terms of your affiliative aspects, but broadening out to you know, everybody in this house right now, everybody that's in this neighborhood, everybody that's in this town, and then kind of eventually to all beings everywhere. So, we're going to we're going to expand outward in that way. Um and we're going to do it by, like I said, a series of phrases that we're going to repeat over and over again. So, um but to know that we're not trying to make up whole stories here, it's just getting to the essence of that well wish. So, some of the phrases would be um may I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. So, we can just shorthand that as safe, happy, healthy, ease. And you can pick whatever words you want, but it should be kind of at the essence of something that uh captures something a lot broader. And that when you say them, you're actually there's an aspect of feeling that thing, that feeling that well-wishing. In the same way you might say, you know, have a great day or happy birthday. Like there's a a sincerity to it. You're not just saying this mindlessly. Um and to repeat it. Like, you know, when when I when we uh when I do this practice, it would be some days I'll just do 12 minutes just for myself. I'm going to repeat these phrases just for me. And you'd be surprised, you know, when you say that when you feel stre- the stress can be problematic. Um to me what I found kind of interesting about doing this practice for myself is that it reminds me that out of all the things that are happening in my life, all the things I'm striving for that are important to me that I'm working for, most fundamentally, this is what I want for myself. This is what I want for myself. And it doesn't have to look a particular way. It's that reminding of the well wishes that I have for myself. Or in the context of relationships, you know, doing it for that uh neutral person, for example, or even the slightly difficult person, when those friction moments happen in our lives, remember, even for this person who I'm finding difficult, my wish for this person is that they're happy, healthy, safe, and they live with ease. And there's a wisdom to that because we know if everybody that we found to be difficult had that had those qualities in their life, the chances of them behaving in ways that are problematic, that impinge on us, may be less. Um it's also the case that it promotes sort of de-escalation. So, if you're in a very confrontational mode, and you kind of hold this as what you are wishing for the person even that you are having this uh challenge with, um and I'm talking now, let's just talk about personal lives. Like a spouse. Like for me, often times the person that is the person easiest to generate these things for, cuz sometimes I also become the difficult person. And whether it's your children or your spouse or or people, you know, friends, family, whatever it is. But to hold that to spend some time where I practice this and wish that for another person, when that challenge moment occurs, and I could be a very uh confrontational or reactive, it's like a reminder, like I could really scream right now, but what do I really wish for this person? And how am I going to get to a point where both of us feel like we can maneuver through this difficulty with that that those wishes held uh instead of me acting against what I truly want for another human being uh or truly want for myself, ultimately. I love that. Amishi, this has been wonderful. Where can people follow you, read the book, all that good stuff? Um, thanks for asking. They can find me if they remember my first name, Amishi, a m i s h i.com. And the book is Peak Mind and available everywhere books are sold. Love it. Are you on social media? I am. Yeah, so on Instagram, Amishi P. Jha. Uh Twitter, Amishi Jha. Love it. It's amazing. So glad that uh you wrote the book and then we got a chance to talk. This really was fantastic. Boys and girls, um man, let me tell you, this is something that has completely changed my life. I hope that you guys will give mindfulness uh it's due. It is really a game changer. And speaking of things that are a game changer, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.