- [Anne] There's been a lot of research into positive psychology over the past few decades. Hardcore neuroscience has documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation, psychedelics are poised to become mainstream treatments for depression and PTSD, but what about on a larger scale, beyond individual human happiness? Could your or my personal wellbeing contribute to the greater good? I'm Anne Strainchamps, and that's our subject this week. Steve and I are headed back to the Island of Knowledge Think Tank in Tuscany. Keep listening.
- [Announcer] From WPR.
- [Anne] It's "To The Best of Our Knowledge," I'm Anne Strainchamps.
- And I'm Steve Paulson, and we're back in Italy for another meeting at the Island of Knowledge, the think tank in the hills of Tuscany.
- [Anne] The topic this time is human flourishing, and right now, we're watching people do exactly that.
- [Steve] It's a breezy Saturday morning in the Piazza del Campo, the medieval main square in Siena, and people are out, walking dogs having coffee. Parents are chatting as a dozen or so toddlers chase balloons and toss confetti at each other. Looks like a birthday party.
- [Anne] We can hear the sound of drumming in the distance, people practicing for the Palio, the huge pageant and horse race that takes place every year right here in the Campo.
- [Steve] But there's another more contemplative side to Siena, because this is also a city of pilgrims.
- [Anne] Home of St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th century mystic and ascetic.
- So it seemed amazing.
- And spiritual diplomat. She corresponded with popes and princes, and even negotiated peace treaties.
- [Guide] Spotlight through history. Trust me, she listens to any prayers.
- [Anne] If you're a St. Catherine fan, you wanna do what we did. Visit the church where her mummified head is enshrined.
- [Guide] And look carefully. So I shall leave you here in front of Catherine for reflection meditation.
- Okay. Dismembering saints is maybe not a spiritual practice we wanna go back to, but walking, going on pilgrimage definitely is.
- [Anne] There's an ancient route just a few miles from the Island of Knowledge Think Tank, where our host, the Dartmouth physicist, Marcelo Gleiser, took us.
- [Marcelo] So this is the Via Francigena, so it's a pilgrimage route that exists for at least 800 years, that starts in the Canterbury Cathedral in England, and it goes all the way to the Vatican. So the pilgrims would move from England into France, France to Italy, all the way down to the Vatican, you know, and along the way, they would stop and pray and rest.
- [Steve] So why do you think people would wanna do this?
- [Marcelo] For the love of God, for their faith, for self discovery, and you know, and it still happens today, I mean, especially in the summer, there are all sorts of pilgrims going through, people that just want to do the walk in order to search for themselves, I guess.
- [Anne] Ancient spiritual practices like these, prayer, meditation, pilgrimage, are techniques that were developed over centuries. Science is finally rediscovering them.
- [Steve] A few decades ago, when neuroscientists started putting Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns in fMRI machines, it opened up a whole new window into mental health and human flourishing, and prove that contemplative practices produce a cascade of very real benefits.
- [Anne] One of the speakers here this week is the neuroscientist who pioneered this work, Richie Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. His new mission is figuring out how to scale these practices to create a more flourishing society.
- [Steve] And this all goes back to a fateful meeting between Richie and the man who would become his friend and mentor, the Dalai Lama.
- [Richie] I met the Dalai Lama, this was in 1992, and he asked me very innocently, why we couldn't use the same tools of neuroscience that we were then using to mostly study depression and anxiety. And he said, "Why can't we use those same tools to study kindness and to study compassion?" And I didn't have a very good answer for him, but it was the kind of question that shook me to my core.
- [Steve] Why did it shake you to your core?
- [Richie] Because I didn't have a good answer, and I understood at that moment that this is where my life needed to be headed. There was another meeting that we had that was in 1995, 3 years later, and at that meeting, he was more explicit with me, and he grabbed me by the arm, and he said, "I want you to take the practices from my tradition, turn them into a form that is more secular, that would be comfortable for anybody to practice, evaluate them with the tools of neuroscience and modern science, and if you find them to be valuable, disseminate them widely," and that, I consider that to be my assignment for the remainder of my time on the planet.
- [Steve] So this is the mid-1990s, and I mean, today, 30 years later, we kind of take it for granted. Oh yeah, we knew about the benefits of meditation, and you know, there's been all of this science about it. That was not the case when you started.
- [Richie] Not the case at all, and you know, when I first started as a graduate student, there were three empirical papers published in the English language on the biological effects of meditation, three. They were from Japanese studies of Zen practitioners, and they had sample sizes of two or one. You know, it was a very different world at that time.
- [Steve] So you did this really groundbreaking study where you brought in some extremely experienced meditators to your lab at the University of Wisconsin, right?
- We did.
- I mean, these were, like, you know, monks who had meditated for literally tens of thousands of hours in some cases. What were the takeaway? What were the key findings there?
- [Richie] The key findings was that there was a there there. We elected to start with these long-term practitioners, because if we didn't see anything in these really long-term practitioners, the likelihood of seeing something in a novice practitioner was very low. And the findings were very exciting, because they showed that their brains were really different.
- What were the findings specifically?
- Well, there were a few. The first finding was that they had these gamma oscillations, which are oscillations that are very fast frequency, on average, 40 cycles per second. These are very unusual to see in the abundance that we saw them in these long-term practitioners. So you and I have gamma oscillations, but in most people, these gamma oscillations are really short. They're typically less than one second in duration, and they happen during these brief moments of clarity and insight, and maybe focused attention, but they're sporadic. And in these long-term practitioners, it was like, wildly obvious that they were showing something different.
- [Steve] And I know that it was not, I mean, this high gamma oscillation didn't just happen when these people were meditating, it happened at all other times of their daily life.
- [Richie] Yes, and that was something super important, because during the so-called baseline period, when they weren't doing formal meditation, they had dramatically higher gamma activity than controls during those periods. And then we subsequently, in a separate study, brought these practitioners into the sleep lab to sleep, and lo and behold, we saw gamma oscillations during sleep, during deep sleep, which was the first time anybody had ever aborted gamma oscillations during deep sleep.
- [Steve] Wow, soo you have gone on, you've pioneered this research, you and, you know, colleagues that you have worked with, not just to study the benefits of meditation, but what human flourishing is all about. I mean, there's a practice, a Buddhist practice of flourishing, but there's also science behind this. So what have you learned about what the keys to human flourishing are?
- [Richie] Well, I would say the most important thing we've learned, the single most important thing we've learned is that flourishing is a skill. It actually can be cultivated, and most people, particularly most scientists who study flourishing, don't think about it as a skill. They think about it as a fixed characteristic.
- [Steve] Well, 'cause I've heard that we have the set point of happiness, that everyone sort of has their own set point, and that's kind of, sort of what you're fated to live with throughout your life. You're saying that's not true?
- [Richie] It's not true, it's definitely not true, and if we practice at it, we will get better, just like learning to practice the violin or learning to play a complex sport. It's also the case that in order to continue to flourish, we need to have continued practice.
- [Steve] Do you need to meditate for 10,000 hours to develop this skill?
- [Richie] No, and that's the cool thing. It's easier than you think. You don't even have to meditate. You can simply bring this into your everyday life with micropractices that are really short, on the order of one or two minutes that you can sprinkle through your day.
- [Steve] one or two minutes? What can you do in one or two minutes?
- [Richie] So for example, we've done research with public school teachers, and public school teachers are a group that has been really stressed out over the last period of time. It's been exacerbated by COVID. Research shows that in the United States today, roughly 50% of public school teachers are showing clinically significant signs of depression and/or anxiety, so it's a crisis. So we have worked with teachers to help improve the skills of flourishing, and one of the things we do is to invite them to reflect on their purpose in becoming a teacher. We ask them to do this for a minute before they start work, and then we sprinkle it through the day just in one-minute periods. And teachers have reported that this is an elixir for their soul. It gives them vitality, it helps them navigate the adversities that they're confronting, but it only will work if you do it consistently. So you don't have to do a lot of it, but it's important to do it consistently, and what we've shown is if you do this for a month, for five minutes, between four and five minutes a day, it will have demonstrable impact on your flourishing.
- [Steve] So I know you've done some research already in the Louisville schools, can you talk about what you found there?
- [Richie] Yeah, so we did a project in the Jefferson County school system, which is the public school system in Louisville, Kentucky, and we opened it up to everyone. The majority were teachers, but we had people who worked in the school cafeteria, we had people who were bus drivers. It was open to any person who was paid 50% or more by the Jefferson County Public School District.
- [Steve] So how many people total were in this study there, just so I have a sense of scale here?
- [Richie] Approximately 850.
- [Steve] Okay, yeah, so that's a lot of people.
- [Richie] Yeah, a lot of people, and then the real kicker for this is by prior agreement with the school system, we obtained the records of students on their academic performance, and we were able to compare the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the flourishing intervention, and we compared them to students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. And of course, the students had no idea that there was a study happening.
- Right.
- They were just taking tests.
- [Steve] And it's not as if the teachers were, you know, preaching the virtues of, you know, contemplative practice. I mean, they were just doing their normal thing.
- Exactly.
- They had this personal practice.
- Right, exactly. And we actually found that on standardized tests of language ability and of math ability, the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the flourishing intervention performed significantly better.
- Wow.
- This is the first time in our knowledge that this has ever been shown, and the sample size for the students is around 14,000. And so this is really been the kind of holy grail of this kind of work, and this ripple effect, we believe, is extraordinarily important.
- [Steve] So you've laid out these principles of flourishing, maybe we call it wellbeing? And I know one thing that's really important for you is not just to talk about how this can enhance personal wellbeing, I mean, an individual's emotional health or intellectual health, that there's a way to have a greater impact on the larger society, and to use these techniques that you've been describing to really make a difference that can change society.
- [Richie] Yeah, so it's predicated on the view that the polycrisis that we're living in right now, the utter total mess that we've made of the world today in every sphere, from the climate crisis to the financial crisis, to the massive income disparity that exists, all of those are basically a function of the failure to flourish, and the failure to cultivate these qualities that are part of our innate capacity.
- [Steve] So is this a matter of, like, just setting up lots of meditation centers, or are you talking about something else?
- [Richie] Talking about something else. We are interested in the microdosing of flourishing without pharmacy.
- [Steve] Without drugs, we're not talking psychedelics here. Yeah, this is all within our own innate capacity.
- Right.
- And so sprinkling these kinds of micro-supports or micro-interventions throughout a day, we think is a realistic possibility. It's never been tried at scale, but our vision is to bring this to different sectors of society, government, first responders, education, healthcare, communities of faith, and the workplace. In any major western city, roughly 70% of the working adult population belongs to one of those six sectors.
- [Steve] So I know that one of your big goals is to scale this up. I mean, you've already talked about, you know, going from sort of small groups to a whole public school system. Like, how much can you scale this up? I mean, this idea of sort of bringing this contemplative practice, but in a totally secular way that might have transformative effects for the society at large?
- [Richie] Well, our next step is a flourishing city, and so our dream is to work with a city of moderate size. We think an ideal size would be about a million, where we can work with all six sectors simultaneously. So for example, one of them is crime rate, another might be substance abuse. A third is healthcare costs that are aggregated across these sectors of the city. If we can find that we can actually move any of these metrics, even if it's just a few percentage points, the savings would be enormous.
- Yeah.
- And so that's, I think, the next step, and if we see any of the kinds of effects that we hypothesize we will see, I think it'll be a game-changer, because the savings, the return on investment, will be so profound that everybody will want it.
- [Steve] Do you have a city in mind?
- [Ritchie] We don't, so for those of you who are listening, we need support for this.
- [Steve] So you, I guess, I mean, you're talking a massive research project to really get good data here?
- [Richie] Yes, yeah.
- [Steve] I mean, what you're saying then is that we need to really think about human flourishing in a different way. I mean, you're talking about this, this is a public health necessity.
- [Richie] Yes, it's exactly the way we think of it. We think of it as an urgent public health need, and we know that flourishing is not just the subjective quality of our mind, but it's cellular. It gets underneath our skin and affects our biology in ways that are consequential for health, so it is really a public health issue.
- [Steve] What's your vision of, I mean, okay, you go ahead, you find you're a city of a million people, you, you know, do this study. You confirm your hypothesis, that this really does help in all these different sectors, what might a government or a city do?
- [Richie] Well, I think at that point, many different cities will want this, and we'll begin to see scaling occur in a very organic way. We think that this is something that can virally spread, and be one of those successful public health campaigns. You know, we know that public health campaigns have actually achieved remarkable success in the past, and for various things.
- [Steve] Right, stopping smoking, or, you know, things like that, yeah.
- Exactly.
- Yeah.
- [Richie] If people spent five minutes a day doing these kinds of things, this world would really be a different place, particularly around these just corrosive issues of polarization that we're facing today.
- [Steve] Do you ever get any pushback that, oh, the original ideas for these kinds of studies, you know, with meditation comes out of a spiritual tradition like Buddhism?
- [Richie] You know, amazingly, almost none at this point in time. You know, I gave a talk last year for the Wisconsin State Judiciary. They have this annual assembly with all the judges, and all levels in the Supreme Court justices were there, and Wisconsin, as you know, is very much a purple state, and the judges are very much divided. And I was determined in giving this talk about flourishing for it to be a talk that was not a political talk that would really appeal to everyone. I never mentioned meditation in the whole talk. I never mentioned Buddhism, we don't need to. Flourishing doesn't belong to any particular religion. It belongs to humans, and people want it, and so I think it's actually not that difficult to make this a universal issue.
- [Steve] Richie, thank you.
- Thank you.
- Richie Davidson is the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- [Steve] Coming up, we'll hear from the Palestinian neuroscientist and performing artist about another ancient spiritual technology, music. I'm Steve Paulson.
- [Anne] And I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To The Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve Paulson, and I wanna invite you to listen to "Luminous," our podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics. I've been covering this field for years, and it's remarkable what's happening now, on everything from new treatments for depression and addiction to mind-bending trips where people say they've encountered the divine. I have really deep conversations with my guests, and you'll find them all on our website at ttbook.org/luminous, and I hope you're subscribing to the "Luminous Podcast" feed. I think you'll like it.
- [Anne] Every wisdom tradition has its own set of practices, prayer, chanting, healing circles, meditation, all different spiritual technologies, I guess you could call them.
- [Steve] Like music, with certain kinds of melodies and rhythms, and the sound of the human voice.
- [Anne] One of the speakers at the Island of Knowledge session on human flourishing was Dalal Abu Amneh. She's a Palestinian singer and recording artist, and also a neuroscientist who believes that music can heal.
- [Steve] And that's saying a lot, considering her recent experience. Dalal is an Israeli citizen, born and raised in Nazareth, and she's also a pacifist and a Sufi. When the war in Gaza broke out, she was detained, and then released by the police, and then subject to death threats and nightly protests outside her house.
- [Anne] They went on for months, and yet she is still committed to the idea that music can bring people together.
- [Dalal] Actually, I was considered a classical singer until I discovered the power of the folk songs. They can be a common denominator between people from many different backgrounds, whether they were educated, not educated, you know, people that lived in the urban places or in cities. They all share this love for folk music, because it can connect us to the collective. I was raised in a city where folk songs are not very common there, but I was connected to Palestine, and I wanted to help myself and others to connect to this concept of Palestine. What is Palestine for you? So I saw Palestine as the beauty, as this beautiful music. That's why I moved from classical singing to folk singing, taking grandmothers with me.
- [Anne] Wait, you and literal grandmothers?
- [Dalal] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I started by a concert in Jerusalem, which I brought, I thought about, decided to revive how we used to sit, you know, as a family, singing together. So I brought old elderly women from the church, or from, you know, my mother, my auntie, my personal grandmother was also part of this band, and I thought it'll be for a one-time show. And now, you know, it was a huge success, because they saw these elderly women, these grandmoms, stepping on the stage and greeting the audience. The audience was, you know, shocked for seeing these beautifully dressed, you know, with Palestinian traditional dresses from different backgrounds, Christian woman with Muslims, with secular, with, you know, you can feel the mosaic, the mosaic, yeah.
- Mosaic, yes.
- [Dalal] Of the beauty of, you know, of Palestine in the eye of a woman in front of you on the stage, and they were singing in a very unprofessional way, but very authentic way. It turned out that this project, you know, I started with 12 grandmothers. Now, after 10 years, we have more than 3,000 from all over the world, even, you know, living in the US and Europe, grandmothers singing.
- [Anne] Okay, maybe because I'm in my early sixties myself, but it's the grandmother part of this that really gets me, so when Dalal and I talked, that's where we began. We both know as women get older, we become less visible, our status lowers.
- Right.
- [Anne] And so tell me what that means to you to bring grandmothers on stage.
- [Dalal] Wow, yeah, beautiful question. Actually, I will tell you that story of, you know, when these grandmothers started singing with me, in the beginning, they were embarrassed. They would talk about "We are not professional singers, and at this age, at age of 70?"
- Who wants to see us?
- [Dalal] Yeah, "Who wants to see? We are not..." And actually, we had this gathering together after 10 concerts. They shared with me how each one has her own experience of how this project healed her in a personal level.
- Really?
- [Dalal] For example, one of the grandmothers, she felt unseen for many years by her family, by her grandkids. She told me that "I've never thought to look at the mirror, because I'm not beautiful as I was." And she shared with me how she felt after a year of having a lot of concerts in Palestine, about singing with a lot of crowds, you know, sometimes thousands, and making them happy and dancing, you know, because it's very joyful music. And she told me, "Now, I'm looking with pride on the mirror, and I'm proud of myself, and now, my grandkids is asking me before coming to my house, 'Grandma, will you be at home during the weekend, or you will have your concerts now?'" So she's not available all the time, and that made her feel more wanted and more valued. You ask me about why grandmothers, so the grandmothers everywhere, it's not only relevant to the Arabic culture,
- Right.
- Everywhere, they have a powerful position in the family. They can lead, they are leaders. I've seen that in many cultures, and actually, it was scientifically proved the effect of grandmothers.
- Really?
- They have, yeah. One study found that kids who were raised by their grandmothers as well as their mothers, they lived longer lives. They know their faced
- Oh wow.
- [Dalal] Less mortality, and many other studies that showed the importance of having a grandmother in the fabric of a family.
- [Anne] The other part of the project is the music itself.
- Yeah.
- And I wanna point out that you are a scientist.
- Yeah, yeah.
- A neuroscientist. I know that you think that music is a kind of mental technology.
- Yeah, okay.
- What do you think music does for and to us?
- [Dalal] We should ask, why we as humankind have created music from the very beginning? Music in the very beginning was our way to communicate. It was our way to communicate with others, to communicate our feelings when words fail, and to connect to something higher. It's actually started as an imitation and as a reverence to nature through Mother Earth. So we were imitating sounds of birds, yeah.
- The birds, the monkeys, and yeah, everything we hear.
- [Dalal] And it started like that, and a lot of research proves how music can help mental health issues like depression, like stress, like anxiety, so-
- [Anne] So why do you think music has that effect?
- [Dalal] Music transcend language. It engage the entire brain at once. We found that music can increase dopamine level, which, you know, actually related to motivation. It can increase serotonin level,
- Wow.
- Which is also related to tranquility.
- Calm. What about the effect of actually singing? You're a singer, you have the most beautiful voice.
- [Dalal] Thank you.
- [Anne] When we sing, you are hearing it outside, but you're feeling it, you're generating it with your body, so those tones are flowing, you know, through your throat, resonating through all of your sinus cavities in your head.
- Exactly, exactly.
- What's the effect of that?
- [Dalal] The human voice has a profound effect on our amygdala, actually, this part of, you know, that process emotions in our, because it was connected for the first time with our mother's voices when we were-
- [Anne] Which we heard in the womb?
- [Dalal] Yeah, in the womb, so human voice has huge representation in the brain, and it's actually has more profound effect than instrumental music, because it's more natural. Everyone can chant, anyone can chant, and chanting actually was, from the beginning of the humankind, was accompanied us in our ceremonies, in our shamanic, you know, tribal rituals. And in different cultures, in every culture, you can see the impact of the human voice on the collective. Actually, studies also showed that while listening to music has a profound impact on our hormonal system and our neurological system, doing music, chanting or playing an instrument, has a more significant effect on our, so we need to practice music,
- Right.
- [Dalal] Even if we are not talented musicians.
- We need to make music, not just listen to it, yeah.
- [Dalal] I can recall one study that showed that playing the piano for three months, only for three months, in adults, we're not talking about teenagers, adults after the age of 30, actually, they found that there was huge different in the white matter, which is actually
- Whoa.
- [Dalal] The myelin sheath, and it's actually the connectivity between our brain cells. They found that music playing only for three months,
- Three months?
- Can have a significant impact, and that has implications on our memory and our processing, so music is magic.
- Yeah, it's astonishing that this isn't better known. I mean, it seems like every day, there's another article about the importance of exercise for the brain.
- Exactly.
- To protect the brain. Why the hell am I not reading every day that we should all be playing a musical instrument, or singing, or something?
- [Dalal] Yeah, that's why we are creating at the Center for Healthy Mind in Madison. We see music as a contemplative practice, actually. We are also willing to create music that we believe can help people. That's what, actually, my aspiration as a singer and also as an activist, that, you know, my whole life, I was trying to build bridges between people. I was born into this reality of, you know, in the Middle East, where a lot of wars and many religions, many cultures are there, and I felt that it's not a luxury. You know, music is not a luxury, music is actually a survival need. We need music to survive, and to rebuild our collective consciousness as a human being on this earth as-
- [Anne] I have to ask about your own personal experience that, because in the last year, you've been at the painful center of Israeli-Palestinian debate. I should ask you just briefly to tell me what happened for you, but then what I really wanna ask is whether music has helped you through this period?
- [Dalal] Of course, you know, I was arrested for opposing the war-
- [Anne] Arrested by the Israeli government?
- [Dalal] Yeah, by the Israeli police. I myself, I'm Israeli citizen, and actually, it was a anti-democratic action that they did. And, you know, after this arrest, more than 100 protests and demonstrations were held in front of my house with a lot of aggression, and violence, and cursing, and-
- [Anne] You've had death threats, people cut off your water
- Threats and-
- [Anne] And electricity to your house.
- Exactly.
- You couldn't leave.
- Exactly.
- You and the children were harassed.
- [Dalal] I couldn't get out of my house for almost a year during certain hours, you know, the evening hours because of these demonstrations.
- [Anne] And when you went to the Israeli police?
- [Dalal] Unfortunately they came and sung the National Israeli Anthem with the crowds in front of my house, so.
- Oh, they joined the protest?
- [Dalal] Yeah, they joined the protest, and they told me that this is democracy, while no one was allowed to demonstrate in the first year of the war happening, you know, no Israelis were allowed to oppose the war. And they tried to silence me, but it actually helped me to feel more connected to my role as a musician.
- [Anne] Really?
- [Dalal] Because I felt how music actually has the ability to make a change to this world, and I felt that to use scientifically-backed musical pieces to help us feel more connected to ourselves and to others. If we make this music from the midst of the pain, you know, we have painful grandmothers, you know, suffering grandmothers from each side. If we bring grandmothers, you know, Israeli, and Jewish, and Palestinian grandmothers together to sing, please, we don't anyone to be killed from either side. We need both sides to live peacefully together, and actually, we have a lot in common. That's what I said also to the interrogator that interrogated me. I told them, "You are a Moroccan, and you know, you are arresting me for singing for Palestine. This is my culture. It's not anti-Israel, it's not anti your existence." We need to connect on that level. That's why I feel that the connection through music can help us build, transcend this materialistic, physical need for a ground, for this land, "This land is for me, this was from promised for me 3,000 years ago." We need to create this common denominator between both sides, and we can do that through music, and we can do that through grandmothers, grandmothers singing from both sides.
- [Anne] Dalal Abu Amneh is a Palestinian singer, producer, and neuroscientist. She's currently a visiting scientist and artist at the Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, Wisconsin.
- [Steve] I'm Steve Paulson.
- [Anne] And I'm Anne Strainchamps.
- [Steve] We'll be back with more about human flourishing.
- [Anne] On "To The Best of Our Knowledge" From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Human flourishing or wellbeing is a very trendy topic.
- [Steve] It's a growth industry for celebrities and influencers, fitness fanatics, pharmaceutical companies, you name it.
- [Anne] Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to good, old-fashioned talk therapy, just sitting in a room with a skilled therapist, talking your way to wholeness?
- [Steve] Well, there are also new directions in talk therapy, and one of the most promising is AEDP, short for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, therapy that can heal trauma and restore vitality in an incredibly short time.
- [Anne] The clinical psychologist who developed AEDP is Diana Fosha, and she was at the Island of Knowledge this week. I was kind of blown away watching her work. One of the things I love about AEDP, and I'm new to it, but the speed, and we watched a video of you meeting for the very first time with somebody, and over the course of 50 minutes, this guy named and owned a feeling that he was really repressing. And you can see the difference in the end of the 50 minutes, his face is, like, filled with relief. What is it that you do? What's the method?
- [Diana] It's a couple of things. I'll name...
- Sorry.
- I started to say, no, no, no, no, I wanted to say, "I'll name one," and then I said, "I have to name two," and then I said, "I have to name three," because they go together, but like, really, the first one is just having a deep, deep belief in the flourishing that exists side by side with whatever it is that ails the person, whatever their suffering is, their stuckness. At the very moment when they walk in, there's also resilience, seeds of flourishing. They're there. There's this beautiful phrase, it's not mine, surprisingly unconscious. So there's something about coming in, expecting to dive deep into things that hurt, or are humiliating, or feel like failures, and instead, like you saw with this gentleman that I saw, we just do a small thing. I say, "Wow, I'm so struck by how you know yourself," and he just lights up, right? We haven't done anything to address his stagnation, his depression, his anger that's there, and we have to work with it, but in this moment, all of a sudden, he sees himself through my eyes, somebody who really knows himself and has paid a lot of attention, and there's energy and positive affect that comes in it. So when we go back to what we need to work with, it's not in the same context of, like, total despair or stuckness.
- It's also, it's almost like, I wanna say, like, you've dropped a little seed or you know,
- Yeah.
- [Anne] A pin or something and said, you know, just this little thing, they're gonna wanna keep getting back to that, the thing that feels better, the surprising moment where you've shown them themselves through a different, better light, so I think that's really brilliant. And then you do this thing you call dropping down. You use that phrase a lot in sessions.
- Yes, I do.
- [Anne] Tell me about that.
- [Diana] So that's actually the other thing that I was going to say in addition to, like, really, really attending to the resilience or the flourishing within, is really having a sense that psychopathology or emotional suffering sort of grows in a Petri dish of aloneness. And that there's something about the therapeutic, and this is also counter to the neutrality and the holding back, and reflecting only, instead is of creating a connection. It's "I see you," but also, "I'm involved."
- [Anne] Yeah, "I care," as though you have a stake in this.
- [Diana] And I do, because I connect, right? It has to be genuine, it can't be put on, but it's a way of really just resonating into people's deep wish to connect. Yes, there's resistance. Yes, we're afraid, all those things apply, but I don't think we think enough in traditional psychotherapy, think enough, people are there because they want something, they want connection, they want healing, and that wanting is our ally in therapy, right? And then it's really a lot of what we've been talking about, which is bypassing the narrative. You know, like, "I am the third of seven children. I was born here, my mother this, my father this, when I was five, this happened to me," in this kind of rehearsed quality. They've said it a million times. And instead, I'm getting people to, like, focus on the emotion, or focus on the sensation as a feeling.
- Or even the feeling in the body, right?
- Or the feeling in the body.
- [Anne] I've seen people do that a lot.
- [Diana] A lot.
- [Anne] You'll say, "How does it feel?" And some people will say, "Ah, it feels heavy." You say, "Really, tell me, where is the heaviness? Where in your body is that?"
- Where is that heavy?
- [Anne] "Your chest, is it your head, is it your stomach?" Like, you get people into their bodies, wow.
- [Diana] Right, and just by resonating, you know, it's not like, "What do you think causes the heaviness? Or what do you think is the source of the heaviness?" That's not the question that I ask, but it's more like, "Oh, the heaviness, I feel the heaviness." "Where is it for you?"
- [Anne] What does that do?
- [Diana] It takes us out of this part of the brain, you know, that helps us function in the world, right? That makes decisions and planning, and all these things that we need, but it also is the part of the brain that sort of, like, takes over in a kind of logical, linear way. And it sort of puts that to the side, and it allows things that reside in the body, which are a different kind of knowing, and it's a knowing that's much closer to emotions, and it's much closer to older parts of the brain.
- [Anne] Oh, that makes sense.
- Right?
- Yeah.
- [Diana] Caregivers and babies that don't have language communicate through body, and rhythm, and gaze, and tone, and energy, and all those kinds of things, and it's a deep relatedness, and it has nothing to do with words, 'cause the babies aren't speaking yet.
- [Anne] It also seems like it has something to do with time. Like, when we are narrating our experience, we're always a little bit at a distance from it.
- Right?
- We're talking about something that was a little in the past,
- This happened, and-
- [Anne] It happened, or we're projecting into the future. The body, if you're talking about your immediate sensations, that's now.
- [Diana] It is now, and again, it's sort of like the person's discovering it as they're experiencing it, so again, it takes you out of your head and it allows access to feelings that can be very difficult, very overwhelming, which is why we try to dissociate them or get rid of them. And then I think there's this really extraordinary aspect of these kinds of processes that are wired into us. They invariably, if you support them, if they're supported, they go to an adaptive conclusion.
- [Anne] Wait, what do you mean? Like healing is hardwired?
- [Diana] Yes, yes.
- [Anne] That we already know how? We already have a mechanism inborn?
- Completely, completely. Completely, and this, we're now learning from neuroscience, from neurobiology, but also, Darwin knew it. Emotions, these basic emotions are wired into our bodies, because they lead to solutions.
- [Anne] And then why do we need to see therapists at all? Why don't we just heal ourselves?
- [Diana] Because the emotions are also very, very powerful, and very often, they're too big or too painful, or too overwhelming, and I think that's what happens in trauma. So just to take an aside for a moment, every single culture of the world has a mourning ritual where the person who has lost somebody is accompanied.
- [Anne] Yeah, yeah.
- [Diana] That's not psychotherapy. These are the rituals and the cultures of every single culture in the world that recognizes that the grief of loss is too big for the mourner to hold alone.
- [Anne] So the other thing about AEDP, you know, you've gotten somebody to drop down into their body, and it seems like the kind of magical thing is that if you can get them to have an experience in their body of changing those emotions,
- [Diana] Yes.
- [Anne] It seems like that's the thing. It's almost like bypassing the narrative part of the brain and going straight to the hardwiring, you know? Like, forget messing around with the software programming.
- [Diana] Nevermind that I thought you said heart-wiring, and I thought, "Yes, heart." Heart of the wiring.
- Heart, oh, that's good. Heart-wiring.
- I've never thought of that before.
- That's very good.
- That's a word we just made it up together, 'cause I heard you saying that, that we need to do
- Yeah, we need a lot more of that in the world,
- Heart-wiring.
- [Anne] Don't we, heart-wiring?
- But I do have to say that that, I think, is a very clear, and specific, and unique contributions of AEDP so I can sort of, by focusing on the experience of change, you started out stagnant or tense, or this, and now, you're feeling relieved or excited, or have a sense of purpose. What's that like? It's the same process with as much curiosity. Okay, we're in this good realm now, what's that like? And you know, I think the stereotype is, "Oh, you're just going to the easy stuff," but actually, there's so much in our culture that has taught us that we can't focus on ourselves, and we can't, you know, like, you have to be humble, and you know, there's a kind of moralistic overtone that people feel uncomfortable staying with the good, but if you do and you help them, then it is magic. It is magic. These spirals where you go from relief to full of light, to breathing air, to wanting to jump up and down, they're these spirals that just get bigger.
- [Anne] And by focusing on that physical shift and on what feels good, it seems to me that what you're really doing is saying, pleasure matters.
- [Diana] Exactly.
- [Anne] Feeling good matters. This is not a bad thing. You should feel like this.
- [Diana] Exactly, exactly, because it brings all these other aspects of yourself that maybe are not online when you're focusing on this fight you had with your child or with your partner. And then from that perspective, things come to you, right?
- [Anne] Yeah.
- But I wanna just stay with your smile, 'cause like, people are not seeing your smile, or not seeing my smile. They might hear it in our voices, though, but just, I almost wanna say, what about it has, like, touched you, or you know, more than struck you?
- [Anne] It's that vision that you don't win points for struggling.
- [Diana] Yeah.
- [Anne] You don't have to work so hard, and it doesn't have to be so hard. In fact, it's not supposed to be so hard.
- [Diana] Exactly.
- [Announcer] That message to me, it's like, you know, taking the hood off.
- [Diana] I love that, I love that.
- [Anne] So that was what I was gonna ask. If you find that in some ways, once you introduce this to people, or once they have a little, like, "Oh wow, I forgot what it was like to feel joy like that," I would imagine that might be destabilizing in a way, that people might wind up thinking, "I don't feel good a lot of the time, like, more than I realized."
- [Diana] I think what's really important is that the painful feeling and the good feelings are sort of part and parcel of the same process. I think these experiences are destabilizing. You know, I wanna reference the other tape that I showed, where this woman is dealing with an awful trauma that happened to her at age seven, and somehow with support, with a lot of support, she sort of gets to the other side. What I mean by the other side is, like, grief. You know, we sort of drop into grief, and the wave is over, and there's, like, a feeling of relief. And then she kept saying, "Diana, it's good, but it's weird. It's good, but it's weird. I don't feel tension. I've been feeling tension in my shoulders for 30 years. I don't feel tension in my shoulders, what is this? It's good but weird," which she says about 20 times. Right? We get used to our depression and our anxiety, and it's not pleasant, but it's so known.
- Yeah.
- It's so known. You just know how it goes, and all of a sudden, you are, like, in this new, unscripted territory, and it's uncomfortable.
- [Anne] Yeah.
- [Diana] You know, we have this thing in AEDP called mourning for the self, which is that when you start to experience healing, which feels great, then it also puts you in touch with what you haven't had all of this time, and that's what you're talking about, you know? And there's also a pain that comes with "Now that I know what it feels like," let's say, "not to feel tension in my shoulders, to let go of something, oh my God, it's been decades of my life like this."
- Right?
- [Diana] It's painful, right? So there is that grieving process for what hasn't been in the past, but it's from, you know,
- Right.
- [Diana] But it is from a place of current goodness, a current healing.
- [Anne] Thank you.
- [Diana] Thank you so much.
- [Anne] Diana Fosha is a clinical psychologist and the founder and director of the AEDP Institute.
- [Steve] This was the third meeting at the Island of Knowledge where scientists, philosophers, and activists gather in the old chapel in the hills of Tuscany.
- [Anne] We wanna thank everyone at the Human Flourishing Symposium, Marcelo and Kari Glieser, Bill Egginton, Flavia Maia, Everard Findlay.
- [Steve] Stathis Gourgouris, Richie Davidson, Dalal Abu Amneh, and Diana Fosha.
- [Anne] "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced by Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, and Charles Monroe-Kane.
- [Steve] Our technical director and sound designer is Tom Blaine.
- [Anne] Additional music for today's show is from the Diablo String Orchestra, "Laya We Laya," and Noisy Oyster.
- [Steve] Support for the Island of Knowledge and this series comes from the John Templeton Foundation and Dartmouth College. I'm Steve Paulson.
- [Anne] And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks to you for listening.
- [Announcer] PRX.
