Amishi Jha

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dak Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Mouse. Hello.

Hello, how are you? I'm good. We're in my apartment. I want to do a tease, because last time we did an episode, we talked about us going to Hudson's show, and we did, and then we deep dive on it in the fact chat.

We're going to give a full account of what happened at that show. Yeah. In a review and a declaration. That's right.

Okay. Today we have Dr. Amishi Jha. She is a neuroscientist and a professor of psychology at the University of Miami.

She's also the director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative, which she co-founded in 2010. Her work has been featured at NATO, the World Economic Forum, and the Pentagon. Most importantly, she is a spunky gal from Chicago. I got a bang out of her, and we had so much fun talking with her.

After we were done recording, she was telling us a couple stories, and she knows everyone. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's very connected. She's very dialed in.

She has a new book out called Peak Mind. Peak Mind teaches you how to train your brain to pay attention differently. So please enjoy Dr. Amishi Jha.

So you come in from Miami? You traveled to us. I did. Is this the first time I think I've traveled in two years?

You're not here. Wow. Does it feel awesome? It feels so weird.

It's so strange, yeah. Now, can we talk about you for a second? Please. Yeah.

So she teaches at the University of Miami. I mean, best 30 for 30 of all time is the U, part one and two, and now there's maybe even a three and a four. Have you watched that? I think I had to before we worked with the football team.

I would think that would be, because the culture of that football team is very, very specific. Yeah. And so interesting. There was a period there in the 90s where they were much more popular than the NFL team that was in town.

Oh, wow. What kind of parents do you have? Do you have first generation? They're both Indian.

Well, clearly. I was born in India. You were born in India. But I was one when I came here.

From your perspective, how was their transition from there to Chicago? Oh, you know, it's really hard to say, because I grew up with them, right? Right, right. But definitely the house was a different world.

Sure. I don't know if you had that experience. Yeah, a little different. My mom grew up in Georgia.

Oh, wow. So I was a little removed. Like your mother came at like three or six. Oh, wow.

Well, you're like, that's the first thing I realized. 34. That's still like under the beat. I'm 50, so.

Okay, I'm right there. If it makes you feel better, we were on a flight home from London last week, and the flight attendant came up, and she was calling me sweetheart. And I was like, oh, maybe she's just being, you know, nice. Well, they were English, let's add.

If you hear that in the South, that makes total sense. Yeah, but she was calling me sweetheart, and then she said something about your sisters and pointed to their children that are six. Which aren't as Arianne, but they're also about Dream. I mean, they're bright blonde hair and blue eyes, see-through skin.

Yeah, and I was like, oh, they're not my sisters. And then, yeah, then Lincoln said, I wish she was my sister, and then she got kind of caught up in that. And then when she came for the drink orders, I was like, I'm going to have a glass of wine. She was like, um, are you 18?

Are you 18? And I said, oh, yeah, I'm 34. And I've never seen her reaction. I mean, she was stunned to her core.

That's a 16-year under. That's pretty good. I mean, it doesn't really feel so fun right now, but. I know, but this has been going on my whole life, and I'm waiting for it to get fun, and so far, no.

Well, I'm going to tell you what, it's just about to get fun, because all of your peers are not going to get mistaken for being 17. Let's just say that. It's just a weird thing to have to tell someone. Like, you're really, really, really wrong about the thing you think about me.

I don't know, it's strange. Well, so in high school, I looked inordinately old. So the last time I thought I was 17 was when I was, like, 13. And then my girlfriend, Carrie, is like you, she looked really young.

And we were in a restaurant. We were sitting on the same side of the booth. And we were in high school, so we, like, kissed a little bit and everything. And the fucking waitress brought the crayons and the coloring mat for her.

Oh, my God. And then another time, we went to her. Oh, my God. Who cares for her?

But I was like, I said to the woman, do you think I'm in, like, a creep? Like, I'm kissing someone who should be coloring before the food arrives? And then the other time it happened was we went canoeing. And we're on this bus, and it was like a family reunion of mine.

And they make this announcement that everyone under 12 has to wear a life vest. Oh, no. And again, the person hands her a life vest, and she's like, I'm 19. And she goes, I'm sure you are.

Please wear the life vest. I totally dismiss it. They don't believe you. It's crazy.

That part's not fun. That happened also when I was in Santa Barbara. It's really bad when I'm with my parents, because they also look young, I think. So everything's just all askew.

Yeah, and we were in Santa Barbara, and we were at the bar. The three of us, my parents and me, and the waitress was like, I'm going to need to see your ID. And I was like, I'm with my parents. And you see that there?

And I was like, I'm 33. And she was like, yeah, but if you look younger than, what was the number she said? Like, 20? She said, if you look younger than 25, I have to card you.

And I was like, okay. And then I'd walk all the way back. I bet she got a patented Monica eye roll. Oh, for sure.

Now, Chicago, so if I can speak for Monica, her experience is kind of she wanted to distance herself a bit from the Indianness. So what was your experience? Did you embrace it, or was it something that terrified you? Oh, I mean, my husband's weight.

Okay. And that was a huge deal. I would say, even if it's interesting now, because we just had a number three, and the big Indian festivals, my son's the guest days away at school. And I'm like, you should go to these things.

He's like, why? I was like, that's true. I never wanted to go to the Indianness. But it's like, I'm defaulting to something.

And I was like, I never want to do any of that. Even in college, I tried my best. So I definitely had Indian friends. Yeah.

But it was always like, I never feel like I fit. Yeah, sure. And I probably didn't feel aligned. Like, I was just different.

I wanted to study the brain. I was interested in consciousness. I seriously thought, okay, I got a couple choices here. I can be a doctor.

I can be an accountant. I can probably use something in engineering. Like, that's what was available to me, given the kind of norms of the family environment. And so I'm like, okay, that's it.

I'll be a doctor. That sounds cool. And then in high school, starting to volunteer in the hospital. I hated it.

What aspect? Oh, the smell, the sights, the sick people. And I just was like, I don't want to treat people that are sick. Like, I'm not interested in that.

And I felt bad, because at that point, I did have a lot of Indian friends who were like, no, this is great. This is my passion. And I was like, no, not me. But it took me a while to even admit it.

Like, admit it to myself, admit it to my family. But I super lucked out, because one of the first places I got transferred to, after some of those original candy strike around the whole hospital kind of thing, was a brain injury unit. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is very interesting. So my job was pretty trivial.

Like, take the patients, take them outside. But I could see, especially there was a couple of cases where I'm like, I really remember this distinctly of, they came in, and they could look bad. I mean, usually some kind of motorcycle accident or something like that. So you got to be careful.

I've been in those. But then in particular, there's one guy, I remember, I thought he was a quadriplegic. My job was to actually take him outside for fresh air. So they put him in a wheelchair.

I'd push them. Or it'd be some kind of massive contraption, because there'd be... Can I ask you this during an exam or like a pre-op situation? They're there for the long haul.

It's a brain injury unit. Oh, unit? Okay. It's a brain injury unit.

So they're there for a while. And I'd see them multiple times. So I'd go week after week, they'd still be there. But at some point, the same guy who I thought was a quadriplegic, all of a sudden, he was in a different wheelchair, and he could move himself a little lever.

And I was like, this is wild. And then so he was just talking to me about what he was doing. He's like, yeah, I go to PT and all that training. But at night, I close my eyes, and I imagine myself moving the wheelchair with my finger.

And I was like, wow, he's changing his brain from the inside out. He's doing something on his own every day, privately, that is transforming his ability to function. And that was very exciting to me. I was like, oh, this is what I want to study.

So it's like a slight pivot, and I eased my family into it. I'll still be taking all the pre-med classes. I'm just going to focus on the neuroscience aspect. Yeah.

Was he a stroke survivor? No, he was a motorcycle. Oh, he was a motorcycle. So the thing is, though, is, am I right in that they do this with stroke patients that they almost relocate the motor control?

Or if that part of the brain has been damaged, you can come in and use another part of your brain to do motor control? Exactly. I mean, it kind of spreads into these other areas so that they take over. And that's what's so amazing.

I mean, this aspect of neuroplasticity is fascinating, that our brain can actually accommodate. But the key is that you have to exercise to actually engage those functions to have the brain start responding in a way that makes it more permanent. I was just reading a book. I can't remember which one, but it was really breaking down the complexity of you moving things.

And as someone who understands mechanics quite well, like, if we were a robot, to be able to do all these tiny little fine-tuned movements, you're talking about, like, millions of neurons firing, pulling on nine different tendons. Like, it is so complex to move the way we do, and you're not born knowing how to do much of that. And then your brain slowly through rote learns that, right? I find that insane when you really think about the complexity of it.

Well, I just had this thought last night, which is so funny, because I study attention, so everything I'm really focusing on is the explicit, the apparent to you, the voluntary, in some sense. And I was just, I had this thought, and I was just turning in the middle of the night. Like, what made me turn? I wasn't thinking, oh, I need to turn.

I just turn. And, like, we do that kind of stuff. All the time, even our little hand gestures, et cetera, we're not thinking about these aspects of our functioning. Well, and the turning over in the middle of the night, that fascinates me, too, in the same way that driving fascinates me.

Like, largely, they say your driving's happening in your subconscious. Like, you're not actively controlling the vehicle when you're driving on the highway. You'd be exhausted by the time you got there. Like, that's all happening on autopilot, while you think of whatever you want to think of.

Sometimes, but now think about, this is the tricky part about driving. There's so much of it that is something called procedural memory. Like, it's basically learned to the point where you don't need attention. And that's sort of the job of the brain.

Offload everything so you can actually keep this precious resource. Because it's limited. We don't have much of it. So let's keep that available.

So when you're starting to learn how to drive, and I know from my children learning more recently, oh, no, it's 100% attention. Yeah. And if you didn't have it, you won't learn. But then at some point, it gets offloaded to these other systems.

And just like if I tell you right now, if I ask you, you know, I'm like, can you just read off the keyboard right to left for me? It's like, can you do that? But then if I say, put your hands, and like, now, probably, you can do it. So it's there, but it's not explicit to us.

Yeah. Well, that makes me think of kind of the transition you make when you are into motorcycling on the track. When you're first there, it is like, it's so terrifying. And brake here and do this and turn and make sure you're angry.

But there becomes a point where I just think, faster into this, turn slower than faster out. And like, I feel it. Yeah, I'm not really aware of all the shifting, the braking, all this stuff. I'm now just experiencing what it's like to go around the track.

I don't know. Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. What a brake can kind of do in the background.

Flexibly. But that's the thing about driving. So if everything's cool, it's not too trafficking, nothing, no hailstorm. Yes, I think you can offload a lot of that to the default, already procedurally, well-honed machinery of the brain.

But as soon as you need to actually pay attention, then you've got to flip it back on. Right. And we do. And we can do this seamlessly, right?

Yeah. I don't know if you read this. There was some article about the Bay Bridge. I've been shut down for a while, and there was one line in particular.

A couple people drove off the Bay Bridge. It only happened in the morning. They were saying that in the morning, people are doing the most of that, right? Like, they're not paying attention at all in the morning on the commute to work.

They're out to lunch. Whereas maybe even when they get off, they're excited to go where they're going. They're a little more, I don't know. They have to deal with people in cars, but.

Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, boy, oh, boy. Okay, so that makes sense for how you got interested.

I just want to, before we go further, what's interesting, because we love identity on the show, had I not read your name, right? We just met somewhere. You're a straight Chicago. Like, I would be able to guess within 30 seconds that you're from Chicago, that you are a woman from Chicago.

Oh, cool. It's based on. I just know. You know, Robbie, I mean, you just, yeah.

Yeah, there's a toughness. There's a little bit of shortness. There's an accent. There's, yeah.

That's funny, because, yeah, I lived there for 18 years, but. Yeah, I guess I know. I lived there for 18 years, so go fuck yourself. I know, but it is on the spectrum.

It's further reliant on the spectrum than Minnesota is, let's say. That's right. And it's funny, because I do feel, like, a sense of familiarity with people, like, from the Midwest. Yeah, yeah.

Even Michigan is very similar. Yeah, I was like, you feel just like, oh, I get these people. Like, I did get a girl for nine years from Washington, a state, and I think on her first trip back to Michigan for, like, the summer, I was explaining to her, like, you know, you're going to see a lot of flights, like, at the bars and stuff. Like, it's different than California.

Like, I just need to warn you, it's a little hectic. You go drinking, generally, you're going to see a flight one night. She's like, that can't possibly be true. Sureness, first bar, take her to the Bachelor in Kego Harbor.

We're sitting there, and two women dressed to the fucking nines. I mean, their hair's up. They got earrings off. They put so much effort into the news here.

Fuck you, baby. And they run at each other. People are grabbing hair. And Brie goes, first of all, I didn't think you were even telling the truth.

Certainly, I didn't think you were probably in the bar. Nothing much I didn't have in mind. Okay, so, when you're going to college, and you're becoming a doctor, or you're earning your PhD, what do you think is going to be the application of this study? Like, do you already think it's going to be about attention?

Oh, in grad school, I knew I was going to study attention. So, the only thing I can tell you is that, in addition to this sort of fascination regarding the brain early on, I used to just read psychology textbooks. Sure. And this is another one of those things where I just didn't feel like a lot of my friends.

I was just like, no, I want to read philosophy. And that was my thing. And my dear mother, I remember when I was in 10th grade, I'm like, I want to take a moral psychology class at the University of Chicago, but you're going to take me every week. And she's like, all right, but it's high parts, and I can just let me walk around campus.

I should sit there for the, like, three-hour class just to let me take it. And I don't think I've learned much, and I didn't understand what was going on at the graduate level. How old were you? Probably sophomore, junior year.

You can do that? It's a continuing studies kind of thing. Yeah, like you're auditing almost? You're auditing.

But no, it's actually four people that are not active undergrads or professors. But just now, when I look back at it, I'm like, what a weird thing to do. But it all kind of culminated. And at that point, when I was an undergrad, I really felt like, okay, for sure, I want to study the brain.

I started doing research in the topic of attention. Mom and dad are probably the most beautiful people in the world. But we're not going to say one disparaging thing about them. But was either parent's attention a little hard to get?

Oh, well, my father passed away when I was quite young. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. But no, I wouldn't say no. But if you meet my husband, you'll be like, ah.

And we met during undergrad. And I don't know. It's funny, because for sure, he is my constant case study. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For sure. Yeah. It was funny. When I first started out, I was interested in researching this topic called theory of mind, which maybe you've talked about various experts have come through this.

The thing that, unfortunately, a lot of autistic people can't do, sort of understand what other people's minds are doing, et cetera. And so I was in this lab. And it was interesting. I thought it was very interesting.

But at one point, I go to talk to the professor about wanting to apply to grad school. And the first thing he says to me is, women in your culture don't typically go on to professional lives. Are you serious about this? Oh, wow.

And this is like, none of it's true. Oh, my God. That's in the 90s. Bye.

Yeah. It was really so true. But I was really fortunate, because that same semester, I was in this course on perception and attention. And I was already starting to really like it.

And it was really cool, because the professor was a total badass. And she was teaching, probably at that point. But at the end of the semester, she was fully nine months pregnant. Oh, wow.

I just read a highly offensive book that was literally in 2021 making some kind of gender claim that women, probably on their own, all things being equal, will not be drawn to those. And I'm like, how on earth are you undervaluing exactly what happens to nearly every woman in the night? They are so strongly urged not to pursue that. There's nobody that represents you teaching the class.

Like, oh, I found it so offensive. Yeah. And it's like what Monica was saying about people about age and stuff like that. It's the same thing.

It's like when somebody thinks of a professor, they don't think of somebody who looks like me. Right, right. And it's non-trivial. Like, even probably in my own mind.

I'm like, am I really a professor? I don't have the tweed jacket and the elbow things. It's a very interesting thing. Well, I don't know if the pictures they hang in the classroom.

Oh, yeah. You grow up looking at all these wonderful men. They're so good. They're so diverse.

Some are under 5'7", some are over 5'7". Okay, so your book is called Peak Mind. Find your focus, hone your attention, invest 12 minutes a day. First and foremost, I watched your TED Talk.

I could get on my knees and kiss your feet for dispelling this stupid fucking rumor that to me always read as bogus. And you heard it nonstop growing up. We only use 10% of our brains. I've heard that, yes.

Now, it did lead to one of the funniest lines in a comedy of all time in Wedding Crashers. Alan Wilson says, you know what I'm saying? I think we only use 10% of our brains, but I think we only use 10% of our hearts. So funny.

What a fucking line. Okay, but that's hogwash, right? Absolutely. Oh, thank God.

Thanks to God you're here to serve me. Tell us how much we use. all of it okay that makes sense because i've never met anyone that's using nine percent of their heart or eight percent of their liver why the fuck would we have an organ we're using 10 exactly everything that we are as a human system so energetically costly there's no way we're gonna not use it but this is what's interesting about the brain is that it's not that the whole thing is active in some sense meaning neurons aren't firing equally in every part of the brain but we really have to get out of this view that specific regions are doing anything like it really is the entirety of the brain and its configuration moment by moment that matters it works holistically dynamically yeah help us understand because we're getting closer and closer actually don't see what's going on i think we're approaching that phase but for so long we have such a limited access to the brain that what we're really studying is a lot of correlation and maybe not causality maybe not this right like so what is the evolution of how we're even knowing what the brain does first we just have this big bogus convoluted chunk of gray goo and we're like everything happens in here huh and then i guess a railroad spike through his forehead we find all the prefrontal cortex is the thing that predicts the future right like these little things what's his name phineas gauge phineas gauge wonderful but yes so like pure accident we're finding out oh i guess that thing is predicting the future or letting you model the future and so it's not been the easiest thing for us to study no but we have come a long way since then yeah so now we went to the point of yes we had to rely on accidents of nature whether they were physical injury or internal injury like stroke or tumor and that gave us a pretty good idea of basically how things are organized like oh okay back of the brain's vision inside probably memory and hearing front decision making etc and then somewhere deep inside something with emotions so yeah basic sense of the orientation and the structural assignments to these different regions but we didn't know a lot more than that yeah can i really quick before we move on when did we come up with the notion that oh the internal brain is more the primitive brain and basically the evolution of the brain or the development or adaptation is really kind of going outward like that's a weird concept for me to have figured out so yeah oh it's very cool yeah how did we i mean i think it's just looking at sort of the evolution of biology like looking at what structures were present in different kinds of organisms to see at what point things start proliferating and that's where a lot of misinformation happens to people like oh we're just like a lizard brain or you might hear a lot of your survival brain and your thinking brain monkey brain that's monkey brain is a different oh okay that's really that's more metaphorical like it jumps around stuff like that and we can definitely talk about that but really what i'm talking about is when people think that there's multiple brains in your brain and no it's not the way it works and we're not a lizard brain with a bunch of frontal lobes on top we're not right and the branching of the whole way brain development happened well the entirety started so even the more like instinctual areas of the brain that are fight or flight and all these things they evolved to a capacity far beyond that and then other things happen basically it's not like we got this little walnut in there that a lemur had and then we grew up everything on top of that okay you're not a lizard brain anyway that's so you're not a lizard brain okay so what i'm gonna say is then what happened is essentially we started being able to look at the brain in terms of its structure and function using different tools so you've probably heard of functional mri right so so fmri is great because you can put the person in the scanner you have to do various tasks and all of a sudden you can see various regions activated and the very first probably decade to tell you how new this thing is like when i was in grad school i remember i was one of the grad students that was voluntold to go check out the mri scanners get something there and i'm very claustrophobic because i discovered that yeah but what we were doing initially was just kind of this confirmatory stuff like oh yeah it is the case that the back of the brain is vision and the sides of the brain have these other functions and then the thing i do in my lab in addition to functional mri is eeg recording and that was great because how does that work eeg is looking at the direct electrical activity direct meaning it's actually neurons firing right so functional mri is measuring when groups of neurons fire together they're like a little battery in your head and then the voltage can propagate to the scalp and you can pick it up with electrons on the scalp yeah so it's very cool because it's like basically we're picking up the little batteries that are kind of coming on and off yes so and that gives you really great timing information like millisecond timing information a functional mri actually you need blood flow to be able to look at it's looking at blood oxygenation levels which is very slow like on the order of a second to three seconds okay and the reason blood flow matters is because when neurons are active they need more blood so there's like an overabundance of blood that goes there there's a difference in the ratio of oxygenated blood and then that tells you oh there must be neural activity and just to put that in layman's terms you're talking about like the difference between hydraulics and electricity so turn your hose on wait how long it comes up the hose or turn a light switch on it's instantaneous that's what you got it that's that's really good so anyways fast forward to where we're at now which i think is a just a much better place and i think you're right we are getting closer to knowing something about the brain yeah it was kind of funny my son asked me recently like do you think you're gonna understand the way the brain works in your lifetime and i was like well probably not and i think and he said do you think humanity will ever understand the way the brain works and then i was kind of like probably not i mean because we will be stuck with ourselves looking at ourselves yeah a computer might understand our brain at some point but i don't know that we will but of course his natural response because he's 19 was what am i bothering sure sure sure sure well that's like an astronomy question yeah he's a mathematician and computer science guy but anyway okay so now we're at the point where we know these different parts work together but this is the really cool part that we're at right now we're getting to the point of understanding that this is a very dynamic and interactive aspect of the way it works so now we see that oh actually there's a series of networks and the networks are nodes means chunks of neurons that are in different parts of the brain like a subway system and when one network is active all the neurons in that network are kind of humming together and they're actively suppressing the other networks and all consciousness or our experience may be is just which network is more prominent yeah so tell me this analogy holds up so like the system can run three light bulbs and there's a hundred in there so when it turns two or three on it's not going to give electricity to those other parts exactly it goes back to 10 percent things it's not that we only use 10 percent of our brains it's that there's an active war process to have any distinct experience in any moment is the inhibition of things that are not most prominent right now yeah when we move what's happening so if i move my hand up all the neurons and neural networks that are responsible for moving my hand down are actively getting suppressed like you're doing this don't do that and some disorders like parkinson's unfortunately that battle gets messed up and now all of a sudden you don't know which way to move it's firing both sides of it yeah stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare what's happening in a seizure because i have here we go i've had two and i was with epilepsy and i have a neurologist and i've never really thought to ask fully like what is actually happening in there yeah i mean essentially you know you've probably heard this term it's an electrical storm yeah it's like the electrical activity and remember how electricity works it proliferates yeah again these normal inhibitory things aren't happening so it gets overly activated and then because there's some epileptogenic tissue let's just put it that way essentially the things that should be suppressed aren't and that storm is kind of proliferating the body is not functioning properly just like violent movement etc and is it brought on because you're a bad older sister usually yeah when i was when i was in grad school we had the wildest case it was it was a woman that had epilepsy the hard part about epilepsy just like you were saying how does it actually work it's hard to know how it works yeah because you're going to capture people they're not going to have seizures on demand that's the whole thing because i was supposed to get an eeg and then eventually mine are all just like you know what we don't need to do that and mine happened at night and i've only had two and they were a year apart that we know so he was like the chances of us catching one are so low they've been waiting for a lightning storm in la exactly exactly there's just no point we'll just put you on a medication on those kind of yeah and sometimes intractable epilepsy was a really big person cannot function and they'll implant electrodes and you've got an entirely grid of electrodes that you can pick it up so i have an uncle who had epilepsy to the degree where it was it was unangible medication and they did the procedure where they cut a corridor in his brain so the two areas that kept misfiring couldn't communicate anymore wow you have a split brain uncle yes that's amazing that's a very unusual thing to have happen but yeah and i was going to write a script about it because one of the warnings that was given to he and his wife my aunt was he may experience a radical shift in personality after this procedure and i thought that is one of the most bizarre side effects anyone could ever be given and my idea for a movie was a guy stuck in his life and he gets that procedure and he doesn't actually have a radical shift in personality but he decides to have a oh wow that's cool it'll do over that's amazing the one of the very first patients i ever worked with was a split brain patient yeah when the corpus callosum the bridge between the two hemispheres is cut and it's because the electrical storm you know unfortunately when it starts it can actually go over the bridge to my knowledge this is the most amazing story the incident that precluded the decision finally to go this way as he was in chicago on business and he was at the mcdonald's drive-thru and he looked at the woman to get the bag of food and she said oh my god are you okay and he said what do you mean and she said sir you're bleeding me look in the rear mirror he's bleeding the windshield's smashed he has rolled his car it landed on the wheels and then drove into mcdonald's and ordered had no clue any of this happened oh isn't that insane can you imagine that's like a movie to be like looking at a mcdonald's employee and then look at the rear mirror and see that you've been in a horrendous oh my goodness he didn't know because once you come to you do feel crazy i witnessed his amazingly at my birthday party at a japanese steakhouse and all the things are going off and everything and he was like grabbing his plate and then he had a seizure and then it kind of went everywhere and then he came out of it and you could see he had there was no he was not making any memories during that period so for him it was like he was watching and then he was watching all this other stuff that happened in between he was unaware of right wow so let me talk about this weird case yeah so that is the tricky part and we've learned a lot but it's usually through these implanted electrodes etc or you end up somehow you have a cap on the electrode cap and then you can pick it up so and then there are some like smaller ones where you might not see it it looks like a mess like a little storm is is brewing but this particular patient i don't know how they found her but she could have a seizure on command oh no and and this is the wild part the thing that drove her seizure was a particular part of like a led zeppelin song are you serious and at first you're just like what but they did the analysis of the frequency spectrum of the sounds then and that was the exact part of her what's called a tonitopic map the frequency right in your timbre lobe that was problematic she could never listen to a rock station while driving it would be too hard but this is a really interesting part right once they figured out what it was because this was functional in her eyes so great it's like it wasn't great that they could get her out of the seizure but as soon as they saw it they knew exactly what tissue to go in and remove right and do they cauterize it like do they make a note out of it what do they do do they oh yeah they just have to go in and take it out swoop it out like oh wow but yeah kind of when you can localize it then you have to do something as severe as what your uncle had to do yeah oh wow that's now i was aware of the visual component that like strobing lights often will induce an epileptic seizure i did not know it could be auditory it could be any part of the brain that has this sort of property of the like i said epileptogenic tissue yeah it's just something's kind of off with the coordination i like to open up your brain look around and see if i see anything visually that looks like it's so weird because it might happen at night no it's like what is happening at night that's for a lot right because your entire sleep cycle is a series of different frequencies yeah as you're going in and out of various frequencies it could be that there's a particular shift that might have kind of yeah he did say nocturnal seizures normally happen when you're coming in or out of to sleep i'd woken up and gone to the bathroom and then i had it pretty soon after that so i'm sure i was going back into sleep right so i know this is like so funny because it's not what i really study yeah those are the best interviews you get someone like as an expert on neurobiology and they tell you about diesel mechanics that's kind of like our sweet spot but yeah i wanted to say something because you brought up this thing that's kind of my pet peeve this 10 thing there's also this notion of like a modular brain and most people think when it comes to neuroscience that well most people can't understand it's probably really complicated and i'm like i don't think so i think we have responsibility to let people know like how this thing actually works just like everything you guys do on the show it's like up level people's understanding so just remind me of like i've been a professor for a long time at one point my then four or five year old came to the lab and i have a little plastic brain and she's like sitting on the ground and i'm doing something on my computer and she starts taking a little brain model apart so i can barely kind of see her because i'm at the desk and she like raises up a part and like what does this do and then i'm like yeah i helped you see what does this do and then she's like so we're kind of going through the pieces and i'm like this is terrible i'm doing the exact thing i don't want to do the brain functions together so i like get up sit on the ground i was like okay let's and i'm like why do i feel compelled to do this but i actually think it's probably a good thing and i think that actually is an indication of how anybody can understand things if we explain it in a way that i totally agree yeah friends are like well they understand like of course yeah so i said to her she's a gymnast she was at that point she was she was just getting into gymnastics but really nailing her cartwheels and stuff like that so it's like what parts of your body do you need to do a cartwheel and she said well right on your left hand and then she's showing me like well first you need this and then your hand and your arm and it has to move in the right way and if it doesn't move in the right timing then it's not gonna be a cartwheel and i was like that's how your brain works none of these pieces work alone right hand doesn't do a cartwheel they all have to work together the timing between how they talk to each other has to be just right or else you're not gonna get a cartwheel yeah and then she kind of got it that oh i mean who knows if that will make any big difference in her life but i think it's more the reality of how things happen well you can scale that up we have a predisposition to want to be modular to be categorical to make ourselves different from each other to make ourselves different from the planet all these things they're like yeah there's something weirdly innate and it's somehow simplifying it right in a way that makes sense but and when you say like oh functional brain dynamics people are like what are you talking about that's all we're talking about a series of networks that kind of coordinate their activity yeah okay so you do these neat studies where people are in the and you show people a photograph in the photograph is actually two photographs so there's a photograph of a woman's face and there's a photograph of the front of a victorian style house or colonial house old school house and at first glance you really can't tell what you're looking at they're on top of each other and they're fine right so both are semi-translucent so anyway explain then what happens yeah so the whole point of the study was to figure out what attention does to perception and the notion is that the point of attention is to privilege some information over other information that's why our brain developed and evolutionarily advantaged us to have it and that was because the brain's got a giant problem which is there's so much more out there than you can process there's that sub-sample bits and pieces so if that's the case wherever it's paying attention more information should come in so it was basically a test of that right can we give a concrete example so i'm looking at you within my periphery there's a refrigerator with all these drinks there's a million drinks on there i can look at those there's some panels around you there's a smell in the air there's a noise outside there's all this shit and i actually have to pick what thing i'm going to focus on that's my attention yeah yeah and whatever it is that you pay attention to you get privileged access to that information and the way i like to talk about it it's like if you are in a dark room or in an outside of this dark out and you've got a flashlight attention is like a flashlight at least this one system wherever it is that you direct it you're going to get information out of there and everything else is dark around it right so same idea and the reason you can say oh there's a refrigerator over here and you're sitting over here is because you know this room because you're sub-sampled parts of this room but in this moment really your perception at least i can see your eyes looking at me is on me and for you it's probably more distracting in this room than it is for me because i filed all this into white noise in my head i guess that's all novelty like you could be interested yeah i could get pulled around but i did that before you guys now i do think perception would be worth defining with some concrete examples well i think that the easiest way to perception is it's the ability to take an initial let's say envision visual information okay so it's not really about elaborating that or telling a story about or imagining it though imagining it actually activates the same very first stages of information processing the brain okay so light dark etc so this face house overlay right you've got that's what they're called just face scene overlay we take these two images and we use this very handy property of the brain which is that the brain happens to have we know this from other studies essentially a face detector in these early visual areas that happens about 170 milliseconds so that's 170 thousandths of a second after you see a face so every time we see a face that's the perceptual aspect very fast initial stages can i geek out that's a product of us being a highly social animal with like multi-member groups right i mean you're super advantaged right it's so important that's one of the main theories in anthropology of why we develop such great intelligence is just managing all these relationships and we all identify these different faces which are very hard to identify we don't think they are but they are yeah I mean, we have a hard time doing this with computer algorithms. Right.

Just recently, can we have face configuration, and they fail when we put on a mask? Yeah, yeah. Right? So anyway, so we knew that we could put a face on somebody in the screen when somebody has a spring cap on, and we could pick up this N170.

So that we knew. Our question was, if you show somebody a face and something else at the same time, and you tell them what to pay attention to, could you move around the amplitude of that component? So I'll just tell you what we found. So what we did is we showed you a series of these overlay images, face, scene, and then we'd ask them on certain trials, pay attention to the face, and tell them something about the face.

Is it male, female, happy, whatever? So that way, when they responded, we'd know they're paying attention to the right thing. Right. And then other blocks of trials, we'd say, look at the other image, the scene.

Tell us, is it indoor or outdoor? Right. So this is the front of the house. This is the front of the house.

Okay, it's outdoor. Yeah. So that way, we know that they're doing what we said. We can confirm that.

And now we look at the brain, and we say, what happens to that N170 when they are paying attention to the face versus paying attention to the scene? Because what's hitting the retina is the same. Right. Right.

That thing's static. The only thing that's changing is how you're directing your attention to it. And you can't even say how you're focusing, because that's not true either. Your focus, it's not like you're changing your focus, per se.

I mean, we can discuss what focus means at that point, but it's really, I would say, if you want to say focus is attention, then they're focusing on the house. I guess, I mean, if you had two objects that were staggered in distance, you would actually have to have a mechanical process at some point. You'd have to dilate a pupil or something, right? To actually focus on the other object that was in a different plane.

So that mechanical process would take some amount of time. You mean like moving your eyes? Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. But these things are in the same plane. Exactly. They're the same physical location on the screen.

Their eyes are steady. The only thing that's changing is what they're paying attention to. And we've checked for eye movements. For a long time, we're like, oh, they're moving their eyes slightly.

No, no. We had electrodes around their eyes. We know they weren't moving their eyes. The only thing that's changing was what they paid attention to.

And what we found was that the N170 was larger when you paid attention to the face versus when you paid attention to the house. So that gap, that increase in amplitude is the power of attention on perception. The power of what you're deciding to look at and then what you see. And that's why we say things like, I was saying a moment ago, it's like a flashlight in a darkened room.

It is crisper. It's clearer. You get more information out of it. Right.

And now that process we can see in any modality. It doesn't have to be visual. It could be auditory. It could be conceptual.

It could be memory. But it was a hard test to see. Is it the case that this higher level thing, we say pay attention, is changing these very initial aspects of our basic perception? Is this different from like the famous silhouette of two candle stands?

Yeah. Like are we doing the same thing in that moment? Like we're either going to decide to see a face or two candlesticks. You know that famous?

Wait, magic guys? Or like have you seen like the duck rabbit illusion? It's like this weird looking image. And if you focus on some parts, you can see it's a duck.

In other parts, it's a rabbit. These are visual illusions, but it's cool. But the very famous one is like, it's a candle stick. You put candles in.

You can see it if you want. Or you can quite clearly see it's a man and a woman's face. The silhouette of it is. And I'm just wondering if that's similar.

It's very similar. Now you're doing it based on not what I'm telling you to pay attention to, but some representation you have of what silhouettes are. That you're holding in your mind and that pops out to you more. Yeah.

Right? So the kind of point of why I even described it in that TED Talk was because I wanted to make the point of how powerful this is. It's starting from this very, very early process as soon as I show you something. But now let's extrapolate that.

Like how does it have to do with, did you find it? Yeah. This one? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Or something you would drink, the Holy Grail, maybe the Holy Grail.

Oh boy. Oh, I see it again. Okay. We're back.

We're back. So sorry. Talk about your topic right now, attention and perception. Seriously.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to describe that study was because it can extrapolate to so many aspects of our lives. And the work that I do now with high stress groups like soldiers and firefighters and elite athletes, like this aspect of their attentional ability is such a, it could be life or death for many. Yeah. So I think what you found in this, right, is that 50% of the time people's brains are off gallivanting around or they're just wandering.

All of us, like half of our attention is sometimes wandering. Is that? Yeah. So this goes to actual connected back to perception in a second.

So the statistic is, yeah, about 50% of our waking moments, our attention is not in the task at hand. Like, how do we know that? Well, you recruit a bunch of people, you say, at any time a day, I'm going to ping you on your cell phone and ask you a couple of questions. Will you do it?

Sure. You ask them questions like, what are you doing right now? And they can even choose, like, I'm reading a book or I'm having a conversation. Second question, where is your attention right now?

Only half the time would they say their attention is actually in that. Right. So then we went from like, okay, that's real world. That's fine.

Maybe you're distractible in the real world. And I'll bring people in the laboratory and have them pay attention to a task in the lab. That's all they're doing. Probe them every now and then.

Where was your attention right before I asked you this question? Half the time. They're not there. Yeah.

And you pay them. Like, I'm going to pay you to stay on task. Still can't do it. And even one of them, right, I believe, was you're going to hit a button every time you see a face.

Don't hit the button when the face is upside down. And it's such a boring experiment that the face goes upside down, people just hit the button. Like, they're now out of the line. They have enough committed to notice something happened.

That's not it. Yeah. But they're out of the other thing. And we did that on purpose because it was a tricky space.

Like, how do you have people come to the lab and make them mind wander? Yeah. And we were like, oh, I have to just bore people. Yeah.

People will mind wander happily if you bore them. So, yes, that's what I'm saying. I already showed them Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'm so sorry, Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Uh-oh. Just a lot of cap. All right. Or at least...

So that is what we formally call mind wandering. Yeah. And it's having these off-task thoughts. And the question is, for the kind of groups that we're working with, what are the consequences of doing that?

And so if you do the same sort of thing, actually, that experiment you were just describing, what we did is we put the cap on it. We looked at the N170 again. And we said, okay, sit here. Every time you see a face, press the button unless it's upside down.

And those upside down faces happen only 5% of the time. So people just press. They default. They're now making their grocery list or whatever.

Yeah. And then we wanted to see what happens to the N170 when they say they were off-task. And what we find is that just like that attention bumped it up when we paid attention to the face versus the scene, if you are distracted, mind-wandering, the N170 goes down. So, again, it's hitting the ad balls.

It's perceived. But that perception is biased by your attention. Right. And so I would imagine it's slowing that down, like your reaction time, is it?

It's definitely slowing down your reaction time. It's definitely making you worse. Your performance is worse. But your perceptual inputs are dull.

It's like you're not seeing as crisply. Right. It's almost like the flashlight isn't really on, right? Right.

It's like you're missing it. The point is wherever your attention goes is what you're privileging. And, you know, in this book, I actually try to get people to understand that that means that whatever you pay attention to is your life. That is your life.

That is what you're experiencing moment by moment. And so it's probably pretty important to try to understand where you're paying attention moment by moment. Okay, great. So I only have like a couple of thoughts throughout all this that I maybe wanted to challenge or I'm not sure how I feel about.

And one is the kind of pattern. I'm going to make a really bold tie in here, but this notion that you've observed it and that somehow in the observation of it, we've detected a pathology as opposed to like, yeah, that's how brains work. No reason to now feel guilty that you're doing it wrong or you could be doing it better. And I think that is part of our innate evolutionary pull towards religion.

We accept this notion of original sin. We feel guilty. We have this bizarre notion that we're always doing everything wrong. We could be doing it better.

We suck, blah, blah, blah. So it's like we observe half the time you guys are out to lunch. Then the next thought is like, we got to correct that. I don't know about that.

I would agree with you. The only reason I'm bringing this up is it's happening. So be aware that's happening. Sure.

The next piece is under certain circumstances, threatening, fear inducing, negative mood, that number goes up. And if you've got this number going up and you're in a consequential situation, it doesn't have to be life or death in a war zone. You're looking at your kid and you're actually trying to see the expression on his or her face. That's consequential if you missed that.

Yeah. So that's my point. Like maybe pick the moments where you decided these are high value moments and those are moments I want to be able to control my attention. Here's the problem.

Most of us, we don't by default have a lot of capacity to know where our attention is moment by moment. So most of the times when people say, yeah, I'm not here. The next question we ask is, how are you of where your attention is? No idea.

Correct. You're just kind of blowing around motion and now I'm back and reading this sentence and now I'm back over here. And if you think about, you know, in our own lives, like usually if we are lost in thought, it takes somebody a few times. Are you listening?

Are you there? To like clue us into like, oh, wow, I'm not here. I have a few of those in my life. You're just staring.

You're like, you're not. I can see you're not taking any of this on. Can I just ask one question because we were already on the topic? Because I guess my pushback for it was a little bit of, I think what we're generally doing in those moments is we're modeling out the future.

We're going, oh, we're going to go to the grocery store, but I was going to pick up my medicine. So I should probably stop there first because it would be inefficient for me to drive there back, there back. I'll go in a circle, right? We're generally kind of modeling out the next step in our life, which I think is probably a good thing quite often, right?

Very good thing. Okay, okay. And yeah, that is what we formally call it. We call it mental time travel.

Right. They call it future surfing. Future surfing. Yeah.

I mean, this is the thing, right? So it's so productive and it's so good for our humanness. Like we need to be able to plan for the future. We fast forward all the time.

We can also reverse, reflect on the past, learn from it. So let's just be clear about what rumination is. And do you think, both of you, you both said that you ruminated, do you think that it's helpful when you return? No, no.

While it's happening, I'm smart enough to go, you are in a vortex. This is not helpful. I know this is unproductive. And yet it is impossible to step off the ride.

So this is where my work actually enters the scene. The first thing is to recognize, oh, when I'm ruminating, my attention isn't here. For sure. And that flashlight, we talked about the flashlight being able to be directed.

The flashlight is yanked. The same system gets pulled. And the kind of content that pulls you is this type of content. Preoccupations, worries, regrets, et cetera.

So one thing you could do is say, why the heck do I keep ruminating? And that's not going to get you very far. So what I'm interested in is, if we know we have these tendencies under certain circumstances more, and it's not productive for us. In fact, we know it drives down mood.

It makes us make a lot more errors. Our decision making is worse. Our relationships can get impacted. All of these are the consequences of having an attention that is displaced in time more often than we want it to be.

How can we train for that? Yeah, the one that breaks my heart is I'll be in a family moment that is special and should be memorable. And I'm talking to everyone. I'm looking at them.

I'm opening the door. I'm putting the kid's jacket on. But I am fucking, 99% of my brain is ruminating on this one thing. And those are the times I certainly feel guilty about it.

Yeah. All right. So I have some practices I've stumbled across. So one is my breathing.

I start getting really crazy focused on my breathing. And I make a noise. I go, hmm. And I do that over and over and over again.

And then that gets distracting enough that I kind of start feeling. I'm focusing on other input other than my brain. I go work out like I don't want to, but I force myself to go work out. I do something very physical in hopes of not getting a long walk.

That sometimes helps. Are any of these practices included under the umbrella of mindfulness? Not really. But I think this is where we can talk about mindfulness because you're doing the last stuff.

You're putting energy into solving a problem that you think is a real problem. And I think it's worth at least adding to your menu of options. So if I could say a teeny bit more about attention. Please do.

So we already talked about it. And I'm so glad you got to watch the TED Talk because you can see where it's the starting point. It's like, oh, attention impacts perception. That means wherever I direct it, there's going to be some real consequences to that.

But that's still this notion of focusing, narrowing, privileging some information over other information. But that's not the whole story with regard to attention. There's two other systems of attention that are really important to think about. The second one, and it relates to what the solutions I'm going to offer, the second one is actually almost the exact opposite.

You know, this notion of focusing technically would be called having a high signal to noise ratio. A high signal to noise. So the signal, like you're right now in Monica's face, is the signal. That's what's important.

Everything else is noise. So the signal's got to be bumped up, and all the noise has to be disregarded. Privileging of some information, really not privileging, actively inhibiting other information. Right.

That's what we call focus. Right. So Einstein did it when he was thinking about a problem space. Athletes do this when they're like focused on whatever athletic performance they've got to do.

So this next system is the opposite of that. And it's the metaphor I like to use is a floodlight. So like you've got a floodlight above a garage door maybe, right? So it's like broad, receptive, and pays attention to what's going on right now.

That's the only privilege we can assume is like this moment. That we call formally the alerting system. Okay. If you're driving down the road and you see a flashing yellow light, not a traffic light, just usually by construction settings, it's like, what is your mind doing in that moment?

Usually like pay attention. It's like broadly you're saying that to yourself, but you're not using the flashlight there. Right. You're receptive.

You're kind of waiting for something that might require action. You're taking all the info at that point. And so that would be a very low signal to noise ratio. Okay.

Because there's no privileging of some information over the other. Yeah. Okay. But the other key part about that is you're receptive.

You're present for whatever it is. You don't have to do anything about it. You're just present for whatever it is. Yeah.

So I hope that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The third system is actually something that will also sound familiar.

It's normally called executive control, which you've probably heard about, right? So this is where we use our frontal lobes more. We use the frontal lobes for all of these, by the way, because it's a network. But the executive system, the metaphor I like to use is like a juggler.

So just like the executive company, this system's job is to ensure that our behavior and our goals align moment to moment. And so you have to know what the goal is. That's part of the job. Hold the goal in mind.

But you're also shifting based on the goals changing. You're updating. If there's new information, you're inhibiting. You're doing the wrong thing.

All of that's executive control. And I call it a juggler because you really are. You've got to keep all the balls in the air. There's a coordination aspect to it.

And this system controls the other two. It's like, right now, I'm in the middle of this interview. I shouldn't probably look at my shoe or check my phone. The juggler would say, get back and do the thing you're supposed to do.

So anyway, the reason I'm mentioning all three of these is because it ends up that attention can go awry in all three of these. And people with certain kinds of attention deficit can be problematic in any of these. The thing that may surprise you is that these are also systems that relate to our mental health and our psychological well-being. So oftentimes, when we think of the depression, for example, we think of it as a mood issue.