Richard Davidson: Stress and the Brain

It seems like we're all under more stress than ever before. This week Daniel Goleman and Richard  Davidson unpack Davidson's research about stress and the brain. They discuss our physiological reaction to stress and how meditation can help you develop lasting positive adaptations to these challenges.

Daniel Goleman talks about his Emotional Intelligence Courses, available at danielgolemanemotionalintelligence.com

Transcript

Daniel Goleman: 0:50

Hello everyone, I'm here with my dear old friend Richard Davidson. We all call him Richie. We've known each other since graduate school. Richie now is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, founder and chair of the Center for Healthy Minds, and have a related nonprofit called Healthy Minds innovations. I've known Ritchie and followed his research career for decades, he's tracked the study of emotions, he was one of the founders of the field of Affective Neuroscience, and AI, his work has gone from what upsets us to the positive range to compassion to well being. And it's that range I'd like to explore today with Richie, who have not only founded Affective Neuroscience, he's one of the first to study compassion from a neuroscience point of view. So Richie, I'm doing this in the context of emotional balance, which is one of the competencies or capabilities of emotional intelligence. That means keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check to some extent so that they don't interfere with what we're doing when we maintain our effectiveness under stress or even hostile conditions. You know, it's staying calm and clear. So, I'd like to start at the bottom of the spectrum, which is the state of frazzle. When people are, you know, I just gave a talk to people in Ukraine. And I can't even imagine the stress that they're under and threats, there are real you could die any minute from a cruise missile, you know, exploding where you are. And I can only imagine that people there must be living in a state of what neuro psychiatry has called frazzle. And could you tell us what's going on in the brain when we're absolutely at our worst from that point of view?

Richie Davidson: 2:55

Yeah, well, first, thank you for having me, Dan, it's always good to be with you. I share your just this sense of of the unimaginable with people in Ukraine and the depth of, of being frazzled and frazzled, may not be a sufficiently strong adjective to describe the challenges that they face. But what I would say from a neuroscientific perspective is a few things. First, is that the the amplitude, if you will, of the systems involved in responding to threat are extremely high,

Daniel Goleman: 3:48

just for us lay citizens at high amplitude means what the volume

Richie Davidson: 3:54

is turned all the way up. And so yeah, so So that's one element. But it's not the only element. A second element is that the systems that are normally in place to turn the volume down, once it's turned up, are impaired. And so from a neuroscientific perspective, we would say that there is some impairment in the capacity to regulate the emotion once it is activated. And so you have kind of the double whammy of having high volume and being unable to turn the volume down. And and so we know that one of the key brain regions for regulating emotion is the prefrontal cortex. And we know that stress impairs the functioning of the prefrontal cortex. And so it impairs that capacity to turn down the volume.

Daniel Goleman: 5:07

Well, which is sorry to interrupt, but while we're impaired, what does this do to our general mental capacity, our ability to think clearly our ability to make decisions, solve problems.

Richie Davidson: 5:20

So it will, yeah, it will impact all of those things because our resources are dedicated, if you will, to this stress to the challenge. And the difficulty that we have in turning down the volume is actually hogging a lot of resources. And there is going to be diminished capacity to process anything else. And so this will impact our decision making, it will impact our capacity to actually detect what's going on in the environment. One of the things that we often say is that fear and threat quite literally narrows the aperture of awareness, so that you are less attentive to the things that are in your immediate environment. And in some sense, it's adaptive, because all your energy is focused on the threat. But in certain cases, there is little and in some cases, nothing that we can do about the threat. It's outside of our control. And so the only thing that we have the possibility of controlling is our own mind. And if we can't turn down the volume, that is going to be a real challenge.

Daniel Goleman: 7:09

So you're saying that the brain is designed as it were, for us to pay attention to fixate on what we perceive as a threat, whether or not the threat is real. We keep thinking about it, or our mind goes there. Is that right?

Richie Davidson: 7:27

Yes, absolutely. And of course, you know, in the Ukraine, there are real physical threats in in other places that are safe. The most of the threats in modern society, come from our own mind, we create these threats.

Daniel Goleman: 7:51

So this is the thing that's always fascinated me is that the biological system that reacts to threat was designed for real physical threat, like in the Ukraine, you could be bombed. But it elicits the same biological response, we get flooded with stress hormones, cortisol, adrenaline, even if it's an imagined threat. And today, we live in such a complex social reality, I think, outside of a warzone, most of the friends react to might be imaginary.

Richie Davidson: 8:23

Yeah. And, you know, one of the analogies that is often used is with dreaming, there is research that shows that if we have emotions in our dreams, let's say something fearful, there are real changes in the body, we can see changes in our autonomic nervous system, our heart rate, we increase our respiration gets faster. Stress hormones, as you were suggesting earlier, can get released. And yet, you know, in a dream, we know that it's all in our mind, so to speak. And the amazing thing that modern neuroscience teaches us is that what we think of as reality is also all in our mind, it's just like a dream, because we're creating this reality in our mind all the time, based on our own interpretation of the world. So it's the difference between waking and dreaming is actually not very great.

Daniel Goleman: 9:31

So tell me about the biological changes that occur when we have an imagined threat. Like, she didn't invite me to the party. And that means she doesn't like me, our friendship has ended and I that might, I'm gonna lose that whole circle of friends. You know? So maybe the invitation comes a day later, your mind doesn't treat it that way. It treats the imagined social exclusion as a real deal. And then what happens in the body when that goes on? What happens when we're under stress, essentially?

Richie Davidson: 10:05

Yeah. So when we have that kind of imagined situation, as you were suggesting earlier, the same biology that evolution provided us with to deal with physical threats is activated by our imagined threats. And so this is really one of the biggest problems in, in modern society. And, you know, humans have this amazing capacity to anticipate the future and to reflect on the past. And this confers enormous opportunity and advantage for us. But it also So is the source of a huge amount of suffering, because we can anticipate potential threats that we basically create in our mind. And we respond to them as if they're real. So whether

Daniel Goleman: 11:08

it's a real threat or imagine what's going on in the body and the cardiovascular system, the immune system, can you just run through that checklist for us?

Richie Davidson: 11:18

Yeah, so absolutely. So we see in the body and activation of the have branches of the autonomic nervous system, the autonomic nervous system is the system that controls our visceral organs like our heart, our lung, our the sweating on our skin, our breathing. And there are two major branches to the autonomic nervous system, there's the sympathetic branch, and the parasympathetic branch and the sympathetic branch is been called the flight or fight response, it is what is activated in under stress. And what happens is that our heart rate elevates, we secrete certain molecules that stimulate our heart rate that increase our respiration, that increase the blood flow to our peripheral muscles in case we need to act and run. They're also changes in our inflammatory response, there's an increase that we see in inflammation, we also see an increase in stress hormones like cortisol, which serve an important role in generally activating many different systems in the body. And so all of this is occurring, they're occurring on different timescales. But they all can have fairly quick responses, the changes that we see in the autonomic nervous system can be very quick, the changes that we see in these molecules may take a few minutes to unfold. But within five or 10 minutes, you can see these changes. And so all of this is happening, and can be happening as we were discussing, to a completely imagined threat. And in fact, there are things that we do in the laboratory that involve a, quote, social stress, that is a completely made up scenario. And everyone knows Amin, participants are told the truth that it's not real. You know, the way it's done is people are asked to give a little talk as if it were a job interview, and to talk about characteristics of themselves that are important for this hypothetical job. It's all completely fiction. And yet 90% of people show an elevation of cortisol, in response to this. And there is full disclosure to people that this is completely fictitious. It's not a real job interview. And yet, this is what happens because this kind of machinery is so hardwired, in our brain, because of the potential really deleterious and in certain cases, lethal consequences of real physical threat.

Daniel Goleman: 15:03

Well, I'm thinking now of someone who's under constant stress, you know, not in the Ukraine, where there are real threats to life and death, but rather, someone who works for a terrible boss, or who has someone in their family who is really abrasive and rude and difficult to get along with, or a nurse who works on a COVID unit, and is in constant fear even while treating patients of herself or himself bringing that home to their family. And you know what's going on when a person can't really recover when they're in constant sympathetic nervous system fight or flight arousal, day after day after day. A Yeah, so

Richie Davidson: 15:51

the cumulative impact is very significant and quite deleterious. So one of I mean, there are many different consequences. But one, for example, is that when cortisol is expressed chronically over time, at high levels, it actually has deleterious effects on the brain. And so cortisol is a molecule that crosses the blood brain barrier. It gets into the brain when it's released by the adrenal glands which sit over the kidney on each side, and then of course, is through the bloodstream. And it has effects on their muscles on our autonomic nervous system, it also has effects on the brain. And when in the immediate effects on the brain could be, if they were a real physical threat, it could be positive, because it can arouse certain systems in the brain make you more attentive to the threat, and help you deal with it. But if it's day in and day out in this chronic way, it's it can be actually toxic, because it leads to excited what we call excitotoxicity. And what excitotoxicity is, is stimulation of neurons in the brain brain cells that are stimulated constantly. And when they're stimulated constantly, it actually leads to a toxic response where the cells eventually die, because they have been stimulated excessively. And so this is a really profoundly important issue because it is one of the sources of early neuro degeneration among people who have been chronically stressed, we know, for example, that caregivers of patients, medical patients who often this has been studied in actually patients with dementia, because a caregiver who is caring for a patient with dementia family member, it's a very challenging kind of caregiving. And it's very stressful. And research has found that the cortisol levels are initially very high, and they give rise to changes in the brain that actually lead to volume shrinkage in certain critical areas of the brain, where there are receptors for the for cortisol.

Daniel Goleman: 18:48

So what is it doing to other parts of the body? I know there's a high relationship positive relationship between stress and heart disease, for example, between stress and inflammatory disorders generally, is something akin to what you described going on in the brain happening in other parts of the body and other systems.

Richie Davidson: 19:07

Yes, and it is, and one of the things that happens is that the receptors for cortisol, so they, these molecules have receptors, which you can think of it as a lock. And a key, the key is the cortisol. And the lock into which the key is inserted is a receptor. And that's how they actually communicate and do the work that they do. And the receptor becomes sensitized when it is chronically exposed to cortisol, and so it basically stops working after a while it becomes. And you can think of it in a way that is similar to other kinds of habituation, where if you have the same thing happening over and over again, you will be less responsive to it. And so you're less responsive to it. And that really messes up all the feedback loops that are so important in the regulation of cortisol. So, cortisol regulation becomes dysfunctional.

Daniel Goleman: 20:23

So how would that, for example, create high blood pressure or asthma or any of those? How would it feed into that process? Yeah,

Richie Davidson: 20:34

I mean, those are really complicated questions that don't have simple answers. You know, we know that it's not just cortisol. In those cases, it's many other facts. Doctors, but in any situation where and many chronic illnesses, in fact, most chronic diseases, physical diseases involve an inflammatory component where there is excess inflammation and in part, this is a consequence of a failure to regulate inflammation in an acute challenge may actually be very adaptive to have an inflammatory response. But if it's persisting over time, it can actually lead to all kinds of disorders and complications. And, and with asthma and certain kinds of cardiovascular disease, it's really the, in many ways, a failure of the feedback mechanisms that regulate the inflammation that have gone awry. And it's due to either all of these conditions have some genetic contribution, but they're also major environmental factors. And the environmental factors have to do with chronic stress. One of them that's actually being studied, more and more now is poverty. You know, poverty gets under the skin, and actually effects this whole stress neurobiology system to impact the these regulatory capacities. And it leads to this kind of chronic inflammation, which then has, in turn consequences for our physical health. And so it is a really pernicious negative feedback loop that is created,

Daniel Goleman: 22:50

I assume the same thing would happen with racial bias or ethnic bias of any kind. Or where there's one group is more powerful, and is prejudiced against another group, anywhere in the world.

Richie Davidson: 23:02

Yes, absolutely. We just today, we had our annual emotion symposium, and one of the speakers at this symposium was an African American psychiatrist from New York City, who works at Mount Sinai. And he and his family just recently moved and moved to a new place. And they were getting a bunch of packages, because they had just moved. And, and some of them were ordered from Amazon. And one day, he was looking at all the packages that had been delivered to this apartment building. And a lady comes up to him, who is a resident in the building? And she said, Show me your identification. Do you? Are you you're not a resident here. And, you know, she was just making the assumption, of course, that he was not a resident because he's black. And, you know, he gave that is an example of a kind of micro aggression. You know, he's a very prominent psychiatrist. And it's just the kind of thing that he experiences on, you know, a very frequent basis. And it's the kind of stuff that, you know, I don't think you and I experienced very often.

Daniel Goleman: 24:28

So in other words, if there's a constant source of stress, even micro aggressions, as this guy is talking about, I'm thinking of someone who works for a manager, say, who's subscribed to the school of thought that pressuring people with deadlines and threats, is the best way to get good work. What you're saying seems to imply that actually, Stress makes people stupid, not better and more productive.

Richie Davidson: 24:56

Yeah, I mean, if what they're experiencing is really stress, it will impair their capacity for effective regulation, I think it'll impair their ability to have cooperative interpersonal interactions kind of be a good team member because they won't be attentive to all of the cues of the team. And their cognitive resources will be harnessed to deal with this stress. And so they'll be less creative.

Daniel Goleman: 25:33

So they can't think as well or as nimbly, or as agilely, as they might otherwise. In fact, as their manager wants them to. It's a very self defeating approach. Richie, I should mention that the two of us Recently, co authored a book on the benefits of meditation called altered traits, how the mind changes your mind, brain and body. And we looked at a host of data, really now decades of data on the benefits of this one of them seems to be that meditation is one of many methods that will help people handle stress better. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the situation of someone who has a high stress life, where they're because of their work, or they're juggling kids and work or, you know, you're part of a group that is constantly experiencing bias, or you've got a terrible boss, whatever it may be? What are ways that people in these dire situations can help themselves? Deal with it better?

Richie Davidson: 26:51

Yeah, well, there is a growing corpus of evidence that suggests that simple forms of meditation and I should say that research indicates that it actually doesn't take much to begin to change, that these simple forms of practice can really make a difference, particularly if they are implemented on a regular basis. And so one of the things that we are excited about in our own work is this framework for understanding what we think of as the plasticity of well being that holds that there are four pillars of well being. And this framework is deeply informed by both modern science but also the meditation traditions. And we know that each of these pillars of well being which I'll name in just a moment, can be cultivated through training. So the first pillar we call awareness, which is where mindfulness would be, and it includes our capacity to regulate our attention to focus something.

Daniel Goleman: 28:10

Well, right there, if I could, that before you were talking about how stress fixates attention. So this implies a kind of stress free straight state, where we're much more in control of where our attention can go, is that right?

Richie Davidson: 28:25

Yes, and one of the kinds of meditation that has been studied, one that I know, you know, well, is the kind that can train a person to have a broad focus of attention. So not just really narrow, but to open up the attention to be more panoramic ly aware, if you will, because we know that stress, that fear really narrows the aperture of attention of awareness. And there are certain forms of meditation that really open it up. So that we can be, for example, we can be talking to a person, we can be understanding the content of what they're saying. But we can also be noticing their facial expressions, we can be attentive to their tone of voice, we can take in their posture, all of which are important channels of communication. And in order to pay attention to all those, we really have to open up this aperture of awareness, so that we can have a better likelihood of noticing all of these things. So that's the first pillar is awareness. And awareness, I should say also includes one other feature, which is super important and worth calling out. And that is a something that scientists call meta awareness. What is meta awareness, it's knowing what our minds are actually doing. And to some viewers, that may sound a little strange, don't we always know what our minds are doing. But one of the examples that I often give is, and it's really helps, because it's an example of not knowing what our mind is doing. And that is, I think many of us certainly I have had the experience of reading a book, where you might be reading each word on a page and you might go from one page to the next. And after a few minutes, you realize you have no idea what you've just read, your mind is somewhere else, you're lost. But the moment you recognize that that's a moment of mental awareness. And it turns out research shows that that can actually be trained and that is a pivotal competence, we believe for any kind of personal transformation, because if you're not aware of what your mind is doing, then it's it's very difficult to actually train the mind. And so this is really an important capacity. We all have it, but we have different degrees. And the good news is that we can improve it. So the second pillar is connection. And connection is about qualities that are important for healthy social relationships. Some of them are so simple, like appreciation. You know, one of the things that we often do, actually, we almost always do before an important meeting in our center, is we do a little practice. And it's often an appreciation practice where we're invited to bring to mind people we work with, and just, in our own minds, recognize something beneficial that they've recently done. And just, it's kind of an elixir for the soul, it warms the heart, and it can really change the tenor of a meeting. And it could be done for 30 seconds before a meeting. So that's connection. The third pillar of wellbeing we call insight. And insight is about a kind of curiosity driven self knowledge, and really knowledge of the self. So all of us have a narrative that we carry around the better selves. And this is what the human mind does. And we know that on one extreme end of a continuum, there are people walking around, who have a really negative narrative, they have negative self beliefs. And the unfortunate thing is that they actually believe those beliefs, they hold those beliefs to be a true description of who they are. And of course, that we know is a prescription for depression. And what is important for well being is not so much changing the narrative, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative, so that we can really see the narrative for what it is, which is, basically it's a bunch of thoughts. And that can give us some leverage, because we can really experientially appreciate how our narrative literally shapes the way we see the world. And we can even do a little, you know, we often do this to a little exercise, to imagine a different narrative. And imagine how we would approach a situation if we had a different narrative. And again, it's just substituting one set of thoughts for another set of thoughts. So in the final pillar of, of well being or flourishing, we call purpose. And purpose is about identifying our sort of sense of direction, in life, our true north. And here, again, it's not so much about changing what we do to do something, quote, more purposeful, but rather, how can we derive meaning and purpose in that which we are already doing, including from activities that many people might regard as pedestrian sort of daily routines? Can you envision that taking out the garbage is actually connected to your sense of purpose? And the answer is, yes, yes, you can you everything could be part of your sense of purpose.

Daniel Goleman: 34:29

Well, here, I wonder is there you know, when we talk about purpose, we tend to think of some big deal purpose. Is there an everyday is there big purpose and little purpose? Can we have multiple purposes?

Richie Davidson: 34:41

Yeah, I mean, you know, one purpose may be being kind to people being helpful to people. And, you know, and you can do that a person at any station, sort of in the social hierarchy can do that. And, and so it's really tapping into our core values, that is really important and connecting our values to the activities in which we engage you one of the things we did is do this kind of training during COVID, with different groups, and one of the groups we did it with is public school teachers, a group that has really been challenged during the pandemic. And this was done during the first year, the pandemic, before there was a vaccine. And when almost all public school teachers were required to teach online, and we're quite stressed. And one of the things that we did is did some simple practices to help connect these teachers to their The purpose in becoming teachers in the first place, and tissue reported that of all the things that we did that was the most meaningful, and they really just got so much vitality, from reconnecting to their sense of purpose.

Daniel Goleman: 36:10

So, Richie, in terms of that stress state we're talking about at the beginning of our conversation. And this sense of well being, it seems that we're tracking a spectrum of experience that goes from I'm really upset, I'm disturbed, I'm stressed out to feeling at your best, really, you're talking about some kind of optimal state with well being, you call it flourishing. I want to circle back to something that I know from your career that happened in between your early work on emotions and your work on well being. You did a book called The emotional life of the brain, I think, was that the right title? Yeah. Yeah. And you talked about several dimensions that would help people understand how stressed they are, how not stressed they are. One had to do with how often you triggered another was how intensely you felt being upset when you were upset. And the third was resilience was how quickly you recovered? Could you tell us about each of those?

Richie Davidson: 37:18

Yeah, so thank you for asking. In that book, I talked about six specific emotional styles, if you will. And one of them is you point out is resilience and resilience. We define from a scientific perspective, in a simple way, but one that can really be measured rigorously. And that is the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. And so a person who recovers quickly,

Daniel Goleman: 37:52

wait, wait, wait, let's adversity, you're measuring adversity in the body, you say can be measured very precisely. How do you track adversity? Like I could say, well, you know, and experience a lot of adversity. But how do you do it in the lab?

Richie Davidson: 38:09

Well, so that's a great question. And what we can do in the lab is we can ethically challenge a person. So you know, when you go to a cardiologist, you often will do a cardiac stress test, where you will challenge the heart. And in response to the challenge, the physician will be able to examine your cardiovascular function. And we want to do the same thing, we want to challenge the mind and the brain in order to probe for resilience. And so we can use safe, ethical, but challenging procedure. So one of them is one that I mentioned very briefly earlier, a giving a speech to an audience, that it where you're presumably being evaluated. For most people, that's a stressor, and how quickly you recover after that turns out to be incredibly meaningful. And so two people may show the same amplitude of response to the same, the volume is turned up to the same level, but they recover at very different rates. One person recovers immediately after the speech is over, the other person is still stressed an hour later. That's very different. And yet they both have the same volume.

Daniel Goleman: 39:41

What do you see in the brain of those two types of people, the recovery person in the slow recovery person.

Richie Davidson: 39:49

So the circuitry for regulation is very different in those two groups of people. The fast recovery people who we consider to be resilient are people that have a an intact regulatory system. And Of particular note here is connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and other limbic areas that are important for emotion. And that connection, both the functional connection and even the structural connection, which you can measure through modern imaging methods differs in people who are resilient compared to those who are not. And so this is really an important issue. And and those are the ways that I was alluding To earlier that we can measure that really precisely in the brain and in the body. So we can measure how long it takes for cortisol to come back to baseline, we can also measure how long it takes the amygdala to recover from a period of activation.

Daniel Goleman: 41:06

As I recall, at least you want to told me that people who recover quickly compared to those who recover very slowly have about 30 times more activity insert circuitry, I think, on the left side of the prefrontal cortex versus the right, is that held up? Or did I get that right?

Richie Davidson: 41:24

Well, the I don't know. But the 30 times the the, the work on ladder morality, and the motion is work that I devoted my career to, for many years, using EEG methods to look at the the activation of the left and right prefrontal areas of the brain. And one of the ways that we did that, the principal way we did that is to measure this activity, while a person is not given any specific task, just while they're, quote, resting kind of their default, if you will. And it turns out that using all kinds of rigorous procedures, we established that this is actually quite consistent in people so that if a person if I brought a person in today, in the laboratory, and then I brought them in a month from now, and I measured these parameters of pre frontal brain activity, they wouldn't be very similar. I mean, unless something, you know, major happened in the interim, but assuming that their life was essentially going on, as they usually, as it usually happens, the measurement a month from now will be very similar to the measurement that we got today. So it's a very stable characteristic. And it turns out that people who have more left prefrontal activation have a more resilient profile. Now, you know, the, the magnitude of it depends on the extremity of the prefrontal activation. And so there are a lot of variables in here. So I think it's important that we not get stuck on a soundbite of how, you know, many times more a person is resilient to is showing this pattern, because people can vary in the degree to which they show this. But

Daniel Goleman: 43:23

can people go through a training to get better at this to be quickly recovered from stress?

Richie Davidson: 43:31

Yeah, absolutely, they can. And it turns out that we've shown that simple forms of mindfulness or awareness, meditation can improve a person's ability to recover more quickly. And so this is something that research shows can occur. And there the data also suggests that there are the least to some extent, this scales with practice time. So the more practice you have, the better you get at this.

Daniel Goleman: 44:11

Are there other things that can do this? Is there like a quick way to to shift to get out of being all stressed out and activated?

Richie Davidson: 44:22

There might be and so I think there are a number of things that are really are promising. So there are certain kinds of interventions that we think of as micro interventions. And a micro intervention is kind of what it sounds like, it's really short. And one of the things that we know is that a person's mind set is a really important determinant of how resilient they are people who believe that their minds are fixed and can't be changed. And to have a profile of low resilience are going to it's going to be very difficult to move them. But if a person who has low resilience but is induced in some way to have a more what we say a growth mindset. A person who is receives training to change their beliefs about the extent to which their mind is malleable. That can have an it doesn't take much that can have a potentially really powerful effect. And research shows enduring impact of those kinds of mindset shifts.

Daniel Goleman: 45:50

So the change in mindset might be from I'm always going to be like this, too. I can I can get better, I can recover more quickly. Is it something like that?

Richie Davidson: 46:02

Yeah. And often it's just the taste of an alternative way of being to convince a person that Yeah, wow, it actually is possible for me to relax a little bit more. And, you know, I just did it. And it doesn't take that much. And so it's giving them that experiential glimpse

Daniel Goleman: 46:25

is the same true of those other two indicators I've mentioned of stress reactivity, one being that you get triggered a lot. And the other that when you are triggered, you feel it really intensely? Can those shifts to being less triggered and feeling it less intensely?

Richie Davidson: 46:43

Yes, I believe they can. But I also hasten to add that there's a lot that we don't know about how much it would take and what the optimal training might be. And one of the things I often say, which I'm more and more convinced is true, is that one size does not fit all. And what works best for one person may not be what's optimal for another person. And this is an area where modern research can play a really important role and be pragmatically very helpful

Daniel Goleman: 47:24

in finding what works for what kind of person

Richie Davidson: 47:27

exactly what works best for whom and when. Those are the big questions. And the you know, the most honest answers to those questions are we don't know, but they are empirically tractable. That is it's possible to get the answers.

Daniel Goleman: 47:43

On that note, I want to thank you, Richie for joining us. And I look forward to further findings in the field. It sounds like there's lots of questions and also some answers so far. Thanks again.