I'd rather be shocked than alone
Brain science tells you why
Here's an experiment.
I think everyone should know
This is Timothy Wilson from the University of Virginia.
Published in Science's top scientific journal in 2014
research
Researchers leave a group of subjects alone in a nearly empty space
In a simple room
Explicitly ask them to be alone and think
The time is 6 to 15 minutes
There was nothing in the room.
No magazines, no books.
And that's really what this is about.
In addition
Later in the experiment
The researchers also designed the electric shock process separately
They had experienced the shock beforehand.
I also confirm that I feel unpleasant
Then he was left alone in the room
Choose whether to self-shock
As a result, 67%
Of men and 25% of women
Rather shock yourself
I don't want to sit there quietly with my brain for a while
It's not that they don't know that electric shocks hurt
They just can't stand doing nothing.
What do you think that means?
Well, most people would say that.
This shows that modern people have poor attention
Can't sit still
But Professor Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison
One of the most important researchers in the field of meditation brain science for four decades
Gave a different interpretation
He was quoted in the Huberman Labs podcast
This experiment
So he says.
It's not that these people can't sit still
Once they start looking in
I was scared of myself
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
Who is Davidson?
He's taken meditation from the realm of mysticism into the modern age.
The first person in the neuroscience laboratory
More than forty years ago
The entire academic community still thinks that studying meditation is pseudoscience
He's already scanning meditators' brains with EEGs and MRIs.
Double professor of psychology and psychiatry
Founder of Healthy Mind Center
Worked with the Dalai Lama for decades
But it wasn't a religion.
It was a randomized controlled trial.
Davidson has a saying
And I think this is the key to understanding the whole science of meditation.
And then it's before the next one.
Sounds a bit convoluted
Let me translate it.
You do a five-minute meditation.
It changes your state
This altered state doesn't completely disappear.
It becomes the starting point for the next time you experience anything
Every brief state change
Are fine-tuning your baseline
Baseline fine-tuned
The next time the same stimulus comes
Your threshold is different.
That's how states become traits.
Anger is a state of being
But if you are angry frequently
The threshold of anger is getting lower and lower
And you end up being an irritable person.
That's the trait.
reverse
If you frequently enter into a state of awareness
An unresponsive, observational state
This state will gradually precipitate into characteristics
You don't spend five minutes a day being calm.
So you're doing five minutes of conditioning every day.
Rewrite your entire emotional baseline
But there's a huge cognitive barrier here.
Most people think that the goal of meditation is to feel calm while meditating
This is a catastrophic misunderstanding
And Davidson's team did a very fine-grained trace.
They got people who had never meditated to start practicing for five minutes a day.
And record their psychological indicators every day
The first week's data comes out
And everybody was shocked.
Anxiety levels have dropped
It's a statistically significant increase.
This is precisely the moment when most people give up meditation
I tried a few times in the first week
I feel more anxious the more I sit
The more you sit, the more irritable you become.
The noise in my head is louder than usual
So the conclusion
I'm not cut out for meditation.
This is making me more anxious.
But Davidson said
This just proves you're right.
You have this chaos in your brain all the time.
Fear, anxiety, rumination, self-doubt
It's just that you're too busy to see them
You are swiping your phone, replying to messages, catching up on projects, and watching short videos.
These external stimuli are not helping you relieve anxiety
They're just helping you not see anxiety
Meditation removes all these barriers
You're facing the reality of your own brain for the first time.
Of course you will be scared
And Davidson said something.
What I think is probably the most useful analogy in the field of meditation of the last decade.
So he says.
The anxiety of the first week of meditation
It's lactic acid for the brain.
You go to the gym and do squats
By the time I did the last few, my thighs were burning like hell
That burning sensation comes from lactic acid buildup
Does lactic acid make you miserable?
Certainly.
But everyone who has practiced for a few years knows that
That burning sensation is a signal that muscle is growing.
If you do a set of squats, you feel nothing.
It means the weight is too light.
Your muscles are simply not stimulated enough.
Anxiety in meditation
It's the exact same thing as lactic acid.
It's not a side effect.
It's the drug itself.
The discomfort your brain experiences in the face of internal chaos
It's a stimulus signal that triggers neural plasticity
If you sit down and feel calm and tranquil and fluttering
Then nothing is happening in your brain
Like lifting a dumbbell that's too light
What's really changing your brain?
It's those moments when you want to stand up and quit
Think about it.
This is exactly the same concept we talked about in the previous session on meditation
Right
That's the prediction error.
Anxiety is a huge signal of prediction error.
Your brain predicts that meditation should calm me down
The actual experience is that I'm more annoyed than usual
That gap creates an error signal.
And we talked about
Prediction errors are the only force driving the brain to update its internal models
No errors.
No update
No discomfort.
No growth
No pain.
There is no evolution.
But here's the thing.
Davidson emphasizes an extremely important distinction
Facing anxiety and being hijacked by anxiety
It's two different things.
The point of meditation training is not to sit there and suffer from anxiety.
It is to train a
The ability of meta-awareness
Know what your brain is doing
What is meta-awareness?
Davidson's definition is extremely precise
It's the ability to know what your mind is doing.
How many times have you read a book, several pages?
I suddenly find myself having absolutely no idea what I just read
Your eyes are scanning word by word
But your brain has already gone somewhere else
And at some point you wake up.
And so forth.
I was distracted.
The moment I woke up
Meta-awareness
It involves the prefrontal cortex.
Synergistic Network of Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Insulus
and
That's the key.
It can be trained.
Davidson says
Meta-awareness is a necessary prerequisite for all mental transformation
You have to change a habit
You've got to see it in action.
You have to regulate an emotion
You have to realize that this emotion is happening.
You mind-wander, and then you mind-wander into this cycle.
It's training this meta-awareness muscle over and over again
Every time my mind wandered and came back
It's like doing a dumbbell curl.
It's not that you succeed in staying focused
It's when your mind wandered and you came back that it's a training
OK
So that's the mechanics.
Look at the data
The Davidson team uses their developed Healthy Mind digital training tool
Focused on four core pillars
Awareness, connection, insight, purpose
Let the subjects practice for less than five minutes a day
Practice for 28 days
What do these four pillars mean?
Awareness is what we just called meta-awareness
Connectivity is about developing emotional bonds with others.
It involves a practice called compassion meditation.
You bless someone in your heart
Start with the person you love
Gradually expand to strangers or even people you don't like
Insight is the distance between you and your own inner script
Not kill that script
But to see that it's just a set of beliefs and expectations you made up
Not reality itself
The goal is to rediscover meaning in what you're already doing.
Not to find a grand mission
But in the most ordinary daily life
See why you are doing this
Four weeks later
Validated in multiple randomized controlled trials
Significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress indicators
Well-being and positive psychology measures of flourishing have risen significantly
But what really made me sit up straight was
Just this dose of practice
This led to a significant decrease in interleukin six (IL-6) levels
Interleukin 6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine
Is a core marker of chronic inflammation
What is chronic inflammation related to?
Depression, cardiovascular disease, weakened immune function, accelerated aging
Almost everything you don't want
Five minutes of meditation every day
In four weeks
Alters your body's inflammatory state at the molecular level
This is not a subjective questionnaire
This is from a blood test
And then the gamma wave story.
Davidson's team studied a group of people who meditated for an average of 34,000 hours over their lifetime.
Hour veteran practitioner
An extremely rare phenomenon appeared on the EEG of these people
High-amplitude, persistent gamma wave oscillations
Normal people also have gamma waves in the moment of a flash of inspiration
But it only lasts about 250 milliseconds.
The gamma waves of these practitioners lasted for several seconds
Even for several minutes
high amplitude
You can see it directly with the naked eye by looking at the original EEG
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004.
Later, it was repeatedly verified by multiple independent teams
And here's what's really amazing.
Gamma waves persist in deep sleep, these practitioners.
Superimposed on delta waves of slow-wave sleep
Their brains seem to enter a state of uninterrupted hyper-integration
Thirty-four thousand hours sounds out of reach.
But Davidson's attitude was
The value of these extreme cases lies in proving the upper limit
They tell you what the human brain can be trained to do.
And you don't have to be there to make a difference.
Five minutes, thirty days
It's already rewriting your inflammation levels
And here's the data that really blew my mind about the whole issue.
Davidson's team at public schools in Louisville, Kentucky
The system did a randomized controlled trial
832 middle school teachers were randomly divided into two groups
The experimental group practiced meditation for less than five minutes a day
Practiced for four weeks
Then they looked at the students' data.
13,000 middle school students
Students are completely unaware of any research going on.
The result is
Students assigned to the experimental group teacher's class
Standardized math test scores significantly higher than the control group
The same curriculum, the same textbooks, the same schools
The only variable is that the teacher practiced an extra five minutes every day
And let me explain.
This is the latest unpublished data from Davidson's team
Why math and not reading?
Because studies have shown that
In this age group
Math scores are more susceptible to stress than reading scores
Meditation-trained teachers may have created a calmer classroom atmosphere
Students are less nervous during exams
Their true abilities are brought into play
Rather than being suppressed by anxiety
Davidson summed it up in one sentence.
Flourishing is contagious.
You're in better shape.
And the people around you are better off.
Even if they have no idea what you've done
A calmer teacher doesn't have to teach meditation.
His very existence is changing the neurochemical environment of the classroom.
Speaking of connecting this pillar
And the Davidson team found something else that really impressed me.
They did a randomized controlled trial of compassion meditation.
It's the blessing exercise I was talking about.
Start with the person you love
I wish you happiness in my heart
May you be free from pain
Then gradually expand to strangers
Even people you don't like
Just two weeks of practice
A few hours in total
Generates a measurable pattern of activation of brain function on brain imaging
significant change
Two weeks.
This is fast
Very rare in neuroplasticity research
It means that the brain is very good at making emotional connections with other people
response speed
Faster than we thought
There was an old Jungian analyst named James Hollis.
And he said something that perfectly echoes what Davidson found.
He said that a good life has two equally important parts
Half of you are thrown into the world
Doing things, working, building relationships
The other half is that you set aside a small amount of time each day
Get out of the stimulus-response loop
Because it's only when you quit the stimulus-response
You get a chance to see yourself in action.
And only see the mode of operation
You can change it.
That's exactly what meditation does.
It's that little time each day that you give yourself to quit your stimulus-response.
It takes you out of being an automated reaction machine for those five minutes.
It's an observer who sees patterns in his own responses.
That's a small change.
But it's probably the most leveraged thing you can do for yourself
And it also leads me to the bigger picture.
There's a birth cohort study in New Zealand called Dunedin.
Two psychologists, Moffitt and Casby
Self-control was tracked from the age of three.
Followed until the age of thirty-two
Follow-up research has been going on for decades
They found that 3
Children with self-control in the top quintile by age 11
By the age of thirty-two
Substance abuse rates are significantly lower
The probability of legal action is significantly lower
Income is also significantly higher
And these differences after controlling for family socioeconomic status
It still stands.
Davidson says
Self-regulation is a trainable skill
And meta-awareness is the central engine of self-regulation.
The essence of meditation training is not to make you more zen
It's about developing your underlying ability to make better choices.
And I'll leave you with one final thought.
Davidson mentioned
In some Tibetan Buddhist traditions
There is a saying called undistracted non-meditation
It is regarded as the highest state of spiritual practice
You lose all skill, all control, all purpose
You are fully awake, fully aware.
But without any pretense, without any tension
That you are completely yourself
Davidson said he has seen this state in some people
Existence in the form of traits
He used a word to describe something that most people lack
sticky
emotional stickiness
The emotions you've accumulated from your last experience cling to you
Brought on to the next experience
I was scolded by the boss in the morning.
Talking to children in the afternoon with that anger
Last week's anxiety has infiltrated this week's decision-making
Your emotions don't just pop up and go away.
It sticks to you.
Contaminated everything behind
And those who are truly free don't have that stickiness
Every experience comes
Fully interact
And walked away clean.
Leave No Trace
Translate with our predictive coding framework
The accuracy of those highest-level prior beliefs is weighted down to a reasonable level
It's called non-attachment in Buddhism.
It's something called the default mode in Davidson's lab, deactivation of the Internet.
Different languages
The same phenomenon
Davison's 40 years of research condensed into three sentences
first
Flourishing is a skill
It's not about character.
It's not a genetic lottery.
You can get it through practice.
second
It's easier than you think.
Five minutes, thirty days
The threshold is so low that there is no excuse
third
It's contagious.
Your own change
In ways you can't even tell
It affects everyone around you
There is a paradox in our time
The average person opens their phone hundreds of times a day
Attention is fragmented
Davidson said something that made me stop for a long time
We are all participants in a huge experiment
But no one has ever signed the informed consent form
We don't know this level of attention fragmentation.
What are the long-term consequences for the human brain?
But we do know that meditation is reverse training.
It's not about escaping the world.
Instead, let you practice one piece of modern almost every day for five minutes
Incapacity that has been lost
Stay with yourself for a while
See the chaos inside
Don't run away
Don't shock yourself
Just watching
Then you will find
The chaos is not as scary as you think
When you are no longer afraid of your heart
Your world outside will be different
Not because the world has changed
It's because in that machine that makes up the world
Some gears are loose
Some parameters have been updated
Some of the old labels glued to them fell off.
But there was one question that stuck with me.
Davidson proves that change can be initiated in five minutes
Thirty-four thousand hours of meditation produce gamma waves that are visible to the naked eye.
So...
The curve from five minutes to 34,000 hours
What shape is it?
It's a linear gentle slope.
Or as we are
It's the same emergent phenomenon.
There's a tipping point.
After that, there will be qualitative change
If there is such a phase transition point
How many hours is it around?
This question
Davidson hasn't given an answer yet
But I think it's worth hanging here
Because it points to a deeper puzzle
plasticity of consciousness
Is there a ceiling?
If the content of this issue has touched you
Or do you have your own experience of insisting on meditation?
I want to share the story of giving up meditation
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area.
You are also welcome to tell me the direction you are most looking forward to in the next issue.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.