Dharma Lab

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How much of what we experience comes from the world itself, and how much comes from our expectations about it? In our latest AMA, Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl explore how the brain constructs perception, why the gap between reality and expectation can amplify suffering, and what changes when we begin to notice that process as it happens. We had a few moments of technical issues with frozen screens or background noise, but they don’t last long.
What’s inside
* Why your brain constructs reality the way it builds a dream
* Why controlling the mind backfires
* TMS: is it cheating?
* Why open awareness loosens pain
* The neuroscience of grief and regret
* A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Cort)
* A preview of our upcoming November summit
* The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid members
Companion Flashcards At Bottom
Your brain builds reality like a dream
A listener named Linda asked about acceptance, and about the idea, drawn from Anil Seth and Lisa Feldman Barrett, that reality is a construction of the mind. Cort answered first, and reframed where suffering actually comes from.
It’s actually the gap between reality and our expectations of what should be happening. However big that gap is, that’s like the size of suffering in that moment.
—Cortland Dahl

Cort was clear it is not erasing expectations. It is seeing that they are there and that they are out of step with what is happening, bringing them into the light of conscious experience rather than letting them run under the hood.
Then Richie discussed how the brain networks that build our beliefs and expectations are the very networks through which we perceive. He used the dream as proof.
Just as in a dream, we can feel those emotions in our body, and there are documented changes in our heart rate and breathing, and yet there’s nothing out there. It’s all in our mind. It turns out that’s actually the way it works with the real world. That’s how our brains construct reality.
—Richard Davidson

His image for the practice came from Mingyur Rinpoche: caught in the middle of a river, you are swept along by the turbulent flow. Become aware of the thoughts and expectations driving your perception, and it is more like sitting on the bank, watching the water move without being pulled in. Cort added a pointer for anyone who wants the science firsthand, calling Anil Seth’s TED talk one of the best he has seen.
The picnic and the four police officers
Victoria asked why open awareness loosens physical pain. Richie described what his lab calls “stickiness,” the attachment or aversion that makes an emotion reverberate long after the thing that caused it is gone. In open awareness, the reverberation drops away.
In some of our own research, the response in sensory regions is actually larger when you’re doing open awareness. It’s not diminished. But there’s no reverberation. It happens and comes back to baseline. We’re not creating emotional zombies.—Richard Davidson

That fast return to baseline, he said, is a neural signature of resilience. Cort then told a story from the Tibetan tradition that ties to this. Imagine you drive to a park for a picnic, thrilled to be there. Then four police officers walk up and tell you that you are ordered to stay in this park all day, that they will block you if you try to leave.
Even though you wanted to go there in the first place, suddenly everybody’s trying to think how they can get out. Life does not like to be constrained and controlled in any way.—Cortland Dahl

The mind works the same way. The harder we clamp down on a feeling, the more it strains to escape. Open awareness runs the other direction. Cort called it a practice of trust, close to the opposite of control.
FREE · 2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORT
2-minute practice:
Wherever you are, settle into a comfortable posture. Let your eyes stay gently open or close them. Take a few moments to simply feel the breath moving in and out of the body. Notice the sounds around you, or the silence. Then open the heart a little by bringing to mind the many challenges in the world right now, the suffering so many are carrying, and form a quiet intention: that whatever good comes from your practice might ripple outward and ease the suffering of others. Rest there for a few breaths, then carry that motivation into whatever comes next.

The full hour, mapped
Read the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.
03:46 — “Grandpa!” and the end of the sitting.
Twelve minutes into an early-morning practice, Richie’s two-and-a-half-year-old grandson opened the door. He let the formal session go and kept practicing as grandpa. Anywhere, anytime meditation; everywhere, all the time.
08:32 — Active practice is as powerful as the cushion.
The Healthy Minds research finds the benefit of active practices comparable to formal sitting. Cort put his son down for nearly every nap for three years and came to see those as the real practice.
09:59 — Acceptance and the gap.
Suffering tracks the gap between reality and our expectations. The shift is not dropping expectations but seeing them clearly.
13:54 — Your brain constructs reality like a dream.
Anil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the river metaphor. Perception is built by the same networks that build belief.
17:40 — So how do we share a reality at all?
Rob from Toronto asks about controlled hallucination and shared social realities. Richie on entrainment, cooperation, and why it remains “a shared illusion of a sort”.”
20:18 — Why open awareness loosens pain.
Stickiness, reverberation, and the larger-but-faster response that marks resilience. We are not creating emotional zombies.
27:00 — The picnic and the four police officers.
Why control backfires in a park, in a relationship, and in the mind. Open awareness as trust.
29:40 — TMS and the urge to hack the mind.
TMS stands for “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, and Richie explains that TMS belongs to a broader family of methods designed to modulate brain function relatively non-invasively. There is growing interest in whether these tools could affect meditation, but he emphasizes that we do not yet know whether they meaningfully support practice. The Center for Healthy Minds has also been exploring neuromodulation and meditation more broadly. Cort shares about neuromodulation as one more entry point into an interdependent system.
37:37 — Where does awareness live in the brain?
Edith’s question. Visual cortex, anterior cingulate, and the honest answer: no single location, no single switch
40:24 — The unresponsive who were actually aware.
Melanie Boly’s work: patients thought to be vegetative held more awareness than we credited, unable to communicate it. A communication problem, not an awareness problem.
45:18 — The neuroscience of grief that doesn’t fade.
Amygdala and hippocampus jammed together, and reconsolidation: a memory is a reconstruction that changes each time it is recalled, not a photograph.
51:20 — When grief opened into gratitude.Cort on his father’s sudden death four years ago, holding the feeling fully in the body, and the sadness opening, unbidden, into gratitude.
57:38 — A free November summit.A free online gathering through ServiceSpace this November, with Sharon Salzberg, Jud Brewer, Robert Sapolsky, Martin Picard, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Laurie Santos.
November 2026 Free Online Summit with Legends of Neuroscience and Practice

Dharma Lab’s First Guided Meditation Hour
In Dharma Lab’s first guided practice hour, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richard Davidson took us from talking about wellbeing to actually practicing it. Drawing on the Healthy Minds framework of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, shaped through years of research and practice connected with the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Humin (formerly Healthy Minds Innovations), they led participants through four short practices designed to make each capacity directly experiential. The session explored a central idea running through their work: meditation is less about fixing ourselves than learning to recognize and cultivate qualities of wellbeing that are already present.
Keep Practicing — Upcoming Events
If you’d like to continue exploring these practices, the free Healthy Minds Program App offers guided practices and learning across awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, with Cortland Dahl, Richard Davidson, and other teachers.
Our next “Ask Me Anything”with Richie and Cort is live on Tuesday, August 25th, 8pm ET. Please send us questions in advance by replying to this email or dropping a comment.
We have an exciting lineup of guest speakers for a free online summit in November to explore the restless mind. More details to come, but check out initial info at the bottom of this email and registration details here. Please share widely!
Thank you for your support and we hope to see you at these future events.
—The Dharma Lab Team


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dharmalab.co/subscribe

In this episode of Dharma Lab, Dr. Cortland Dahl and Dr. Richard Davidson explore why attention feels harder to control than it used to, how modern technology exploits basic mechanisms in the brain, and what we can do to regain more choice over where our attention goes. They discuss why we may be more distracted than we were 50 years ago, how novelty and emotion capture attention, and why simple acts of intentionality can function like reps for the brain. Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.
Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Wed Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!
Companion Flashcards
In This Episode:
00:00 Taking Back Control of Attention
01:21 Why Focus Feels So Hard
02:51 Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?
05:15 Why the Brain Is Wired for Distraction
09:03 How Our Attention Gets Hijacked
13:20 Why Surprise Captures the Brain
16:35 The Reinforcement Loop Behind Endless Scrolling
17:44 How Emotion Disrupts Self-Control
21:24 Rebuilding Control Over Attention
25:53 Attention as a Practice of Intention
29:46 Digital Hygiene: Designing Your Environment for Focus
Written transcript for those who prefer to read:
00:00 — Taking Back Control of Attention
Richie: Now we have basically ceded control to the forces around us, and it has led to a kind of impairment, a collective impairment in prefrontal function that we’re all suffering from. There are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression.
Cort: I would say if there’s one word that captures the heart of this as a practice, I would say intention. And simply being intentional about what’s going on with my attention. Just choose. Before your mind gets pulled somewhere, I just got an alert. I’m going to choose to do that. And I noticed the pull, but I’m going to actually ask myself, do I want to check this message right now? Or I just heard a sound. I’m going to actually choose. Do I want to keep my attention with what I’m doing? Or do I want to You know, turn and look to see what was happening over there, like actually just making a choice. Like you were saying, the reps, you can do a thousand of those a day easily.
01:21 — Why Focus Feels So Hard
Cort: Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl, one of the co-hosts here, and of course I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson. Richie, to all of us who know him well, one of the preeminent neuroscientists on the planet. And today we’re gonna discuss one of the most common problems that probably every human faces, which is how incredibly hard it is just to stay focused. Now, I must admit, maybe this is an embarrassing admission, given that I’m supposedly one of the experts who’s talking about this stuff. But there’s a lot of days where I’m sitting, getting stuff done, answering emails or focused on some project. And it’s just really hard to not get pulled in to other things. You know, I’m answering emails and suddenly I’m shopping online or I’m working on a report and then I’m checking my emails. It’s just it feels like There are so many things in our life that are just pulling us in a million different directions. And I thought today we could just answer two very simple questions. One, why is it so incredibly hard to stay focused? And two, what can we do about it given this chaotic world we’re living in? So maybe we can just I can just turn this over to you, Richie, and you can kick this off however you want to. But I’d love to hear specifically from a neuroscientific point of view at some point. But yeah, what does this spark for you?
Richie: Yeah, well, first it sparks familiarity.
02:51 — Are We More Distracted Than 50 Years Ago?
Richie: So, you know, I think that it’s true. I often say we’re all participants in a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And that’s, of course, referring to the exposure that we all have to this extraordinary amount of information through Our online activities through social media, all of that. And that’s a huge source of distraction. And so, you know, I think that one, I certainly think that it’s inevitably true that one major reason why people experience more distraction perhaps today than they did And there are data to suggest that we are indeed more distracted today than we were 50 years ago. It’s not just a kind of subjective impression, but inevitably I think it’s at least in part true that it’s because of our exposure to this information that is so readily available. So we’re clearly not going to change that. We don’t have the power To influence the tech companies to do the kind of regulation that might be needed. So, you know, we’re left, I think, with the inevitable conclusion that really the only thing we can change is our own minds. And so that, I think, is an important opportunity. And so here’s another case where the kind of, quote, And us being so distracted can also be the opening for real change and transformation. And in the language that you and I have used, Cort, in our book, Born to Flourish, and at other times in Dharma Lab, we can think of distraction itself as an affordance, distraction itself as a moment of awakening, if you will, because the moment we recognize we’re distracted, That’s a moment of awakening and can really be helpful in the process of changing your mind.
05:15 — Why the Brain Is Wired for Distraction
Cort: I’m curious about the neural mechanisms for why we are so easily distracted. I think the experience is, it’s like our attention is like a restless puppy that just gets excited and is rushing off after any bright, shiny object. It sees a squirrel on a tree outside and it’s banging itself against the window and then hears something in the kitchen and goes racing off. And it feels like that sometimes. I mean, it feels like that, you know, even for me having 35 years of meditation under my belt and done all these long retreats where I’m very specifically training my attention. And I feel like in some respects have, you know, have developed A strong attentional skill set, so to speak. And yet I still feel that when I’m in a meeting like this, I could be talking to you and then I see a notification on my computer or something happens in my environment. It seems like the mind and brain are just... Really wired actually for that to happen. I mean, it clearly, you know, happened spontaneously and effortlessly countless times every single hour. So what’s going on in the brain? I mean, is it as it seems that this is sort of how we’re wired? I imagine there’s evolutionary reasons why this is this is likely to be the case.
Richie: I think it is in part how we’re wired. We are wired to detect surprise, to detect discrepancies, to detect rare events, because those often are events that have more salience. For example, our Sensitivity to danger and to cues that may signal danger. Those are the kinds of things that are relatively rare, but they’re super important. So we want to be primed, if you will, to notice those. And the problem is that that machinery that evolution has provided us with can be harnessed or hijacked by all these other things around us. But I think I can pretty much guarantee based on everything we know that if you receive the identical information, say something surprised you that drew your attention, if that thing were repeated 10 times, by the 10th time, you’re no longer going to pay attention to it. And that process habituation is something we know very well. And so the masters of technology have very much figured out how to capture our attention. By providing us with, in many cases, more and more extreme examples of things that are of interest to us. And the increased extremity has all kinds of, I think, really unfortunate consequences. But one of them is that it will capture our attention. But it can also serve to further reinforce and reify certain kinds of extreme beliefs that we might have, which can of course be a key driver of divisiveness.
09:03 — How Our Attention Gets Hijacked
Cort: I wonder if we translate this into a very practical tool. I could see this understanding of the way the brain works, and especially the things that tend to capture our attention, the things that can be easily hijacked, as you said, for people who want to... If the objective is to keep people in your app as long as possible, if you imagine a lot of social media platforms these days, that’s what they want. The product is actually not what we’re doing. Actually, we are the product. It’s our attention that’s being sold. And so in a way, what they want, you know, they’re harvesting our attention in a way is what’s going on. And so they’re designing for that. And it’s an interesting question, you know, in the, you know, the way you’re framing it, because it’s sort of the question is, What loopholes in our brains are they exploiting so they can get more of our attention? And for me, having studied this and explored this myself, I can see understanding that actually is very empowering because now I know the game. I can see what they’re doing. You know, for example, if I’m on social media, I can actually see the way the algorithms work like, oh, if I watch that video a little longer, and I swipe past this other one, I know in a few in a moment or two, two or three videos later, I’m going to see something So maybe we could just zero in on that for a moment because it is, as I said, quite empowering. What are some of the things that are exploited? If you could give a little mini class, what would you look for so you can be conscious of it versus unconsciously, unwittingly pulled in by it? What would you look for, like the things that are going to capture your attention?
Richie: Yeah, so you’re asking what would we look for in the brain itself? Yeah,
Cort: what are the brain mechanisms that are being hijacked and how might we be conscious of what’s happening versus it just happening to us and we’re unconscious of it?
Richie: Yeah, that’s super important. So the hijacking of attention can happen in a number of different ways. One of the most fundamental ways in which it happens Is that there’s an interaction between the brainstem and specifically a part of the brainstem that is rich in norepinephrine and it’s called the locus cerulein. And it has projections that are very widespread to many different regions of the cortex. And basically what happens is that when something captures our attention, as opposed to us directing our attention to it voluntarily, but being captured unwillingly, if you will, or unintentionally. It just grabs our attention whether we like it or not. Right. What’s happening is that there is a transient increase in activation the locus coeruleus, which is this site rich in norepinephrine. And then there are these very widespread projections to the entire cortex. And so there’s a transient increase in cortical arousal that’s pretty broad, even if the The event that occurred, the stimulus was, say, just the sound. It would be broader than just the auditory part of the brain, just broader than just the auditory cortex. It would really be all over the brain. And this is the kind of thing that would capture our attention. But if it’s repeated, if the identical event is repeated a few times, It would show what we call habituation, where you would not respond to that. And so, you know, that’s one of the most basic mechanisms for attention capture is this kind of rare or surprising event.
13:20 — Why Surprise Captures the Brain
Cort: And so is sorry, just to to pause for a second there. If I’m uh building some new product and I want to harvest people’s attention and I come to you as one of the world’s leading experts in this area and I just say okay richie I want I want to hijack this exact neural loop that you just talked about like what are the best strategies like what could I design like what could I build into this new app or this new product whatever it is what would be the most effective ways to hijack this system surprise you kind of mentioned one is surprise something that’s Shocking or surprising or unexpected.
Richie: That sounds like that’s one of the... Yeah, and so to create that kind of unexpected burst, if you will, the most effective way of doing it is presenting a set of events which are all repetitive and very similar and then follow it by something totally novel and surprising. It’s the oddball. Yeah. And so there’s a very famous experimental paradigm in neuroscience and psychology called the mismatch negativity, which is a version of this. And basically what a mismatch negativity is, is if I present a series of tones of a certain pitch, and then it’s followed by a tone of a different pitch. So if we do something like this, Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, boop, beep, beep. Your response to the boop would be totally, your brain would just automatically... Um, detect that and it would be, uh, and there’s a very well characterized signal in the brain that displays that. Um, and it’s, it’s very difficult, even I should say in long-term meditators, um, Although we do have some evidence to suggest that there are some alterations, but at least in moderate term meditators, this is so basic, it’s very hard to override. So it doesn’t change.
Cort: We still, no matter how much you’ve meditated, your mind still gets... Yeah, although there are,
Richie: you know, if I did it instead of with simple tones, if I did it with words, for example, where I presented words of a certain category like zebra, tiger, monkey, elephant, flower, rabbit. Where the discrepancy is semantic in that case and not the auditory features themselves, that’s much more likely to be something that can be overridden, if you will.
16:35 — The Reinforcement Loop Behind Endless Scrolling
Cort: So it seems like one of the takeaways, this is super interesting, and actually I can already see this in the endless swiping of social media, that if you’re advising, you would say, okay, what you don’t want to do is have too much repetition. You don’t want For example, if I watch a cat video and I watch the whole thing and the algorithm is like, okay, this guy clearly likes these cute cat videos. You don’t want to just show me 10 cat videos at that point because you’re just going to get habituation. What you want, and I think this is exactly what it does, is you want at random intervals, like maybe you have to swipe through five things to get a cat video and then you don’t see one for 10 videos and then it’s after two. It’s sort of unexpected and you get it, but you never know when you’re going to get it. Is that right? Like if you’re advising like that... I think this is actually how it is. If you pay attention, you’ll actually start seeing these patterns, especially in social media.
Richie: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, in the psychological literature, that’s called the variable interval reinforcement schedule. And, you know, that’s extremely addicting in terms of its attentional capture.
17:44 — How Emotion Disrupts Self-Control
Cort: And what about emotion? I mean, you talked about surprise, obviously. Another very interesting thing, again, I’m sort of fixating on social media here, but I think you could look at other forms of distraction as well. But it’s very interesting to look at What’s pulling attention in relationship to the emotions it provokes and the strength, both the kind of emotion and the valence, whether it feels more uplifting or a fear or more negative. What would you say about that? Again, if you’re our key neuroscientific wizard architecting how to distract us.
Richie: Yeah, I mean, certainly emotion and different kinds of emotion are going to be absolutely key in producing distraction. We know that emotion can disrupt the prefrontal cortex. And so the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is a key zone for the central executive network, for the network that is guiding behavior.
Cort: So it’s the opposite of the hijacked. It’s the part that’s saying, here’s where I want to go and I’m going there.
Richie: Right, self-control. And emotions will disrupt the prefrontal cortex. And so there’s a continuous dance between the emotional centers of the brain and the prefrontal cortex. And there’s bi-directional communication. So there is communication about emotion from subcortical regions up to the prefrontal cortex. There’s also... Top-down influences from the prefrontal cortex to these subcortical emotional regions that can help regulate them. But this is actually the role of the prefrontal cortex and all this is super important because, and this is speculative, but in our evolutionary past where we had many fewer Episodic, phasic influences on our behavior like we do today. The prefrontal cortex can put into operation a plan which then gets executed over some long period of time. Where there were many fewer at least external distractors. And I think that it’s, and here’s the speculative part. I think that the conditions of modern life today are such that we’re starting from a much lower baseline in terms of our prefrontal skills. In our evolutionary past with many fewer distractors Sort of external stimuli that were bombarding us. We relied on the prefrontal cortex more to guide our behavior. Now we have basically ceded control to the forces around us. And it has led to a kind of impairment, a collective impairment in prefrontal function that we’re all suffering from.
21:24 — Rebuilding Control Over Attention
Cort: That’s a good segue. Maybe we could have our concluding part of this discussion to put our actual hats on. I guess we’ve been playing a role that we would never normally play because, of course, we want to do the opposite of hijacking attention. We want to do what you’re talking about now, which is how can we re-energize and build up the skill set with the prefrontal cortex. And our ability to manage and consciously be in the driver’s seat with our attention versus it being hijacked. So let’s kind of shift gears and now share some of the strategies that put us back in the driver’s seat. So what would you say there? We certainly can talk about our Experiences meditators, but from a brain and from a neuroscientific point of view, anything that you think is some key insights about the brain that would guide how we should view this and how we can do it in daily life?
Richie: Yeah, I mean, I think that some of this is both from knowledge of the brain, but also from kind of practical everyday experience. And that is that I think that just as we do physical exercise and benefit from reps, so to speak, we can benefit from reps with our mental health. And neural capacities. And so, you know, one way to do this is, and we’ve talked about this at various points in the past in different ways on Dharma Lab, but every time you feel an urge to take out your phone, instead of immediately taking out your phone and looking at it, simply be aware of the urge. And make a decision about whether this is actually a time when you need the phone and you should take it out, or whether it’s a time to simply acknowledge the urge and let it rise and fall away like the clouds in the sky. And so there actually is a choice that we can make at that point. But we need to be aware to begin with. That really is a necessary condition for this. If you’re not aware of the urge in the first place, it will immediately hijack your behavior and you’ll just automatically pull out your phone. That’s what we do most of the time. And the invitation in this path that we are talking about and promoting here on Dharma Lab is that there is another way to operate in the world And it’s a way that is infused with this gift of awareness that we all have. And so this is really a way to strengthen the capacity of the prefrontal cortex to self-regulate. Really simple. And we know from some really fantastic longitudinal research that learning to self-regulate early in life is a huge predictor of later adult life outcomes that are beneficial. And kids who have a hard time with self-control early on end up, if there’s no intervention, end up worse off than kids who are better at self-control.
Cort: And there’s, you know, that particular research is super interesting. And it’s also, there’s a whole body of research, which of course, Richie, you’re well aware, just to paint out kind of the other side of the picture, which is that if you’re the kind of person who—I would have been a kid for sure, you know, if we had had the marshmallow test, which is one of these classical tests, like, you know, you imagine putting a marshmallow in front of a kid and say, don’t eat it. For me, I would have, you know, two seconds, that marshmallow would have been down the hatch. I would have for sure been one of those kids. And yet, you know, I’ve spent a lot of my time developing that skill. And so there’s a lot of hope, even if even if we’re the kind of person who might be starting out more on the deficit side of things.
25:53 — Attention as a Practice of Intention
Cort: So I wonder if maybe we could talk about some of the practical things, because I when I think about my life and things I do, I would say if there’s one word that captures the heart of this as a practice, I would say intention. And simply being intentional about what’s going on with my attention. And it was funny because actually, as you were explaining this, I had a practical example of this. I’m, I’m actually sitting in the boundary waters of Northern Minnesota in an Incredibly remote location and there’s a lake very within, you know, basically I could throw a rock into the lake from where I am right now, but it’s very remote and there’s very few boats. There’s not many people. And a boat went by actually as we were, as you were speaking, Richie, and as I was listening to you and you were actively talking about, you know, like how attention gets pulled away and noticing that. And it was, that was like literally happening to me there. I could feel the pull to look at the boat. And it’s a rare occurrence and, you know, and there’s not many people, so I might know those people. But and then I was consciously aware of that, just like you were talking about the cell phone, like you’re aware of it before you follow the impulse. And so I could actually feel the impulse literally as you were talking about this and just choose exercise the intention muscle and just say, I’m going to resist that impulse or just stay with my focus here on what Richie is saying. Noticing the pull of distraction and releasing attention. We could have a whole episode just on releasing attention. That’s kind of its own thing. But just the directing of attention. Just choose. Before your mind gets pulled somewhere, I’m going to choose to bring my attention to my email inbox or I just got an alert. I’m going to choose to do that. And I notice the pull, but I’m going to actually ask myself, do I want to check this message right now? Or I just heard a sound. I’m going to actually choose. Do I want to keep my attention with what I’m doing? Or do I want to, you know, turn and look to see what was happening over there? Like actually just making a choice. Just that intentionality to me is kind of the heart of the practice. And you can just do that, like you were saying, the reps. You can do a thousand of those a day easily.
Richie: Yeah, I think that’s so important. And, you know, to our viewers, this is something that would be, I think, interesting and fun to tinker with in your own life. And one of the things that I often do is I have an Apple Watch. And so when I get certain kinds of messages, it will give me a haptic signal. And I’m very aware that in certain kinds of meetings, like if it happened right now, I would notice the haptic signal and I would not look at my watch. I would be focused on our conversation here. And there are many times in meetings where I will do the same thing. I feel the haptic signal, but I’m making a conscious choice to Keep my attention focused on the meeting. There are other times if I’m in something that’s not in a meeting or something really casual where it would be okay if I looked at it for some reason, if I was expecting something, I might look at it. But there is the distinct opportunity to see it as an opportunity to make a choice.
29:46 — Digital Hygiene: Designing Your Environment for Focus
Cort: And that, and to me, it seems like the intention, intentional aspect, and these are great example of the kinds of things that pull our attention away so many times. One of the areas I would say, which is just a very rich area to practice because it’s happening all the time is like what happens when the distractor is happening, like the haptic signal happens or the sound happens, or in my case, you see something unexpected, it’s happening. And then there’s kind of what you do in that space and being intentional. In some cases, you can choose to go with it. Or in many cases, it’s just noticing that your mind is pulled elsewhere and you just choose to stay with whatever you’re doing, which I think is in most cases that kind of the healthier thing to do. But I think there’s another realm of intentionality, which is actually preemptive. And you can be intentional about what’s going on in your environment so less of those things are happening. I mean, to some degree you can’t control these things, but sometimes you can. I mean, we all have phones, or almost everybody does. I, for example, have just deleted apps from my phone. There’s certain apps that I just felt like these are just not I don’t ever feel good coming away from using this app. And I just remove the app. In some cases, I actually change the settings. So I have no notifications like my phone. As much as it annoys all my family members and anybody tries to contact me, my phone is always muted. My phone is almost never on. And so I check my messages and I have the notifications off on almost every single app. So I go check the things when I want to check them, not because it grabbed my attention. So in that case, it’s almost preemptive. Like I know the things that can and have in the past pulled my attention. And I’m almost architecting my life. So I’m just not going to be, you know, as exposed to those. So it seems like we could almost we can both when it happens, what do we do, but also preemptively, you know, build your life to the degree that you can so that you’re not just constantly exposed to these things, which which just simply can be overwhelming at times.
Richie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that all fits in a category that I would call digital hygiene. And I’ve been an advocate for creating a curriculum for digital hygiene that would include contemplative practices to help us actually regulate our attention and have that curriculum start with kids. I think it’s really important.
Cort: Yeah, I 100% agree. Well, this has been a great conversation, Richie. I think we would love to hear, for those of you watching this in the comments, we’d love to hear what you do. What are the things that you find distracting? What are the strategies and the methods you found that help you find a little more balance? And maybe we can have a little dialogue offline as you reflect on your own life. But in any case, thank you, Richie, for sharing your insights as always and for you for listening. We hope to see you soon for another episode of Dharma Lab. Take care.
Richie: Thank you so much.


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(The full AMA recording plays in the video pane above, for Dharma Lab members.)
In our 11th AMA, Kim read your questions while Cort made his way back from a retreat with Mingyur Rinpoche. Richie spoke to a study where strangers could tell who the meditators were, from a photo alone.
What’s inside
* Full recording and transcript for paid members
* The photo study: what strangers saw in the faces of long-term meditators
* You are not your beliefs: a simple two-step practice to see them clearly
* A 2-minute guided practice (free, led by Dr. Richie Davidson)
* The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording
Strangers could tell who the meditators were
This came up during a question about moods. Richie’s point was that one consequence of long-term practice is that people generally end up in a more positive mood. To show it, he described a study his lab published.
Whenever they studied long-term meditators, they routinely took a picture of everyone, both the meditators and age- and gender-matched controls, without telling them what it was for. Then they gave all the pictures to random people who had no idea where they came from, and asked them to rate each face: how friendly the person is, how much you trust them, how happy they are.
The long-term meditators were judged, in Richie’s words, “whoppingly more positively” than the controls. The raters had no idea where the pictures came from. He called it a powerful, unobtrusive measure that there is something about an enduring mood that gets expressed on the face and that people pick up on.
The study: Goldberg, Hirshberg, Tello, Weng, Flook, Davidson (2019), “Still facial photographs of long-term meditators are perceived by naïve observers as less neurotic, more conscientious and more mindful.”
You are not your beliefs
Another listener asked about the difference between a belief and an ordinary thought. Cort put it this way: thoughts are the words and images moving through the mind, the inner commentary, and they are an expression of deeper beliefs about the world that are often not conscious.
Richie added the distinction he and Cort work with: when we hold beliefs, especially about ourselves, we misconstrue them as a description of who we actually are. He calls it experiential fusion. Most of the time we are not even aware we hold the belief; it just feels like the narrative of our self. Meta-awareness, or metacognition, is having an awareness that we have these beliefs, which lets us recognize we are not necessarily the same as them.
Cort framed the aim in the Tibetan approach he practices: we are not trying to fix ourselves, but to get in touch with the parts that were never broken. Then he gave a two-step practice. First, simply observe your thoughts, like watching a wild animal in its natural habitat, from behind a tree, just watching what it does. Then pause and ask what assumptions, beliefs, and expectations underlie the thought. The point is not to change anything, just to bring the unconscious up to the conscious level.
“We’re not trying to fix ourselves. We’re really trying to get in touch with the parts that were never broken.” — Cortland Dahl
Try this 2-minute practice from the AMA (free, led by Richie)
Prefer to read it? Bring awareness into your body. Then bring to mind one person who first introduced you to practice, who opened this door and shined a light where you had not looked before. Hold them in your heart and let appreciation, gratitude, even love bubble up. Carry that glow into whatever comes next.
The full hour AMA, mapped
Read the gist, then drop into the recording.
04:39 — Is it only meditation that slows brain aging? Compared to athletes or chess players, we don’t yet know. But Richie’s informed conjecture: an altruistic motivation may add a biological benefit over and above the activity itself.
09:12 — What childhood trauma does to the brain. The well-replicated finding of reduced hippocampal volume, and the honest unknown of how far practice can reverse it. Cort on memory reconsolidation.
13:55 — Can practice move your brain’s asymmetry? Functional asymmetry can shift (the first randomized trial of MBSR, 2003), but temperament tends to persist. The masters keep their color; they are not emotional zombies.
20:27 — Belief vs. thought, and how to loosen a harmful one. Experiential fusion vs. meta-awareness, Mingyur Rinpoche’s burnt-rope image, and the two-step practice of watching thoughts and inquiring into the belief beneath.
30:59 — Moods, and the photo study. Why moods differ from emotions, why long-term practitioners carry a positive baseline, and the study where strangers read it off their faces.
38:33 — A stroke, and the beauty in the pauses. For a listener living with brain injury and stroke: being over doing, the sky that stays when the clouds go, and Ram Dass, whose long word-finding pauses Richie found beautiful.
47:28 — After an awakening, why the crash? The four families of retreat experience (body and energy, emotional upheaval, perception, sensing energy), and why to treat them all as passing clouds, not permanent, not the point.
56:16 — What happens in the brain at death. The flatline, why biology is analog and not digital, and the early reports of gamma oscillations near death, the same signature seen in long-term meditators. Plus how the traditions prepare.
Upcoming Events
Save the date: a free practice and meditation hour with Richie and Cort on August 19th at 7pm Central. Register free.
events.dharmalab.co
Episode Companion Flashcards:

For years, headlines claimed that meditation could actually grow parts of the brain. But what if that’s not the most interesting question?
As the science has evolved, researchers have shifted their focus. What changes in the brain? Which changes matter most? And why might some structural changes grow, then recede, as expertise develops?
In this conversation, Richie and Cort explore what decades of neuroscience have taught us, what scientists have gotten right, what they’ve gotten wrong, and where the research is heading.
Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If these conversations are useful, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel.
Reminder: We have a FREE 1-hour live practice session on Aug 19th, 7pm CT with Richie and Cort discussing how different meditation practices map to the four pillars of well-being (Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose). More details and register here!
Episode Companion Flashcards!
In This Episode:
00:00 Does Meditation Really Change the Brain?
03:16 Brain Function vs. Brain Structure
05:41 The Gray Matter Studies That Started It All
11:45 Why the Gray Matter Evidence Changed
15:20 White Matter and Brain Connectivity
18:01 What the Research Actually Means
21:40 Brain Health, Neuroplasticity, and Human Potential
Transcript for those who prefer to read:
Richie Davidson:
There’s no question that meditation changes the brain.
We’re talking here about both the function and the structure of the brain. There’s no question that meditation changes the brain, and there is overwhelming evidence for that.
Structural changes, like increases in gray matter in specific regions of the brain after short amounts of meditation, however, are a different story. The evidence for those findings has really not held up.
Even more interesting, some of the effects that have been reported are actually the opposite of what we might expect.
Cortland Dahl:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with Richie Davidson, one of the pioneering neuroscientists who has helped us understand the relationship between the mind, the brain, emotions, and how we can train ourselves to flourish.
Today we’re diving into one of the biggest scientific questions in meditation research: does meditation actually change the brain?
When I think about my own life, I can point to experiences that feel like a clear before and after.
When I started meditating more than thirty years ago, I had a genuine phobia of public speaking. It wasn’t just that I got nervous. I had a severe fear of speaking in front of people.
Years later, not only do I no longer get anxious, I actually enjoy it.
I’ve even measured my physiology with devices like my Oura Ring. My heart rate and other biometrics actually shift into a deeply relaxed state when I’m speaking in front of a crowd, something that would have been unimaginable twenty or thirty years ago.
Whether or not my brain changed, it seems difficult to imagine that such a profound transformation could happen without the brain changing in some way.
At the same time, we often see confusing headlines.
One day the headline says, “Meditation changes your brain.”
The next day another study appears suggesting the opposite.
Even the phrase “changes your brain” can mean different things. Are we talking about how the brain functions? Are we talking about the physical wiring of the brain? Are we talking about changes in structure?
Richie, you’ve done some of the most important work in this area, and I think this is one of those topics where the headlines often miss the nuance.
How should we think about it?
Richie Davidson:
You set this up beautifully by distinguishing between functional changes in the brain and structural changes.
Functional changes refer to differences in how the brain is operating. We can measure those by looking at patterns of activity in different brain regions.
Structural changes are different. They refer to the physical characteristics of the brain itself.
That includes gray matter, which consists of the cell bodies of neurons, and white matter, which consists of the axons that connect one region of the brain to another.
It’s entirely possible for the brain to change functionally without changing structurally.
If structural changes occur, they almost always imply changes in function as well.
One of the reasons this field became so exciting was that, about twenty years ago, several early studies suggested that people who completed an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course showed increases in gray matter in regions such as the prefrontal cortex.
Those findings generated enormous excitement and headlines claiming that meditation could literally grow your prefrontal cortex.
Cortland Dahl:
Before we go further, why would someone even want a larger prefrontal cortex?
Richie Davidson:
The prefrontal cortex is central to what we call the executive network.
It’s involved in planning, goal-directed behavior, regulating attention, forming healthy habits, and inhibiting behaviors we want to change.
If you’re making a grocery list, planning your route to the store, or intentionally directing your attention toward something important, the prefrontal cortex plays a major role.
It also allows us to think about the future and reflect on the past.
That’s incredibly useful, but it’s also one of the reasons humans worry so much.
As Robert Sapolsky famously described in his book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, zebras don’t spend time worrying about tomorrow. Humans do, largely because we have this remarkable prefrontal cortex.
So it’s an extraordinary gift, but it can also contribute to suffering.
Returning to the research, those early studies suggested that relatively short periods of meditation increased gray matter in regions like the prefrontal cortex.
Many additional studies followed.
Then, in 2023, a meta-analysis concluded that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction produced structural brain changes.
However, the story didn’t end there.
The journal later retracted that meta-analysis because important data had been omitted. When those missing data were included, the reported effects disappeared.
Around the same time, our own research published in Science Advances found no structural gray matter differences between people who completed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and carefully designed control groups.
So when it comes to gray matter increases after relatively short periods of meditation, the evidence has simply not held up.
There’s another finding that’s particularly intriguing.
Some studies have examined whether people with more meditation experience show greater structural changes.
Interestingly, the relationship appears to go in the opposite direction.
The more meditation people have practiced, the smaller the structural differences often become.
When you think about expertise, that actually makes sense.
If gray matter simply kept increasing forever, eventually we’d have bumps sticking out of our heads.
That’s obviously not how biology works.
Instead, expertise in many domains appears to involve temporary structural changes that later become more efficient as skills mature.
There may be a period where gray matter increases, but as expertise develops, those changes may naturally recede.
Cortland Dahl:
So the story is much more nuanced than simply saying meditation makes your brain bigger.
Richie Davidson:
Exactly.
And that’s where white matter becomes especially interesting.
White matter reflects the connections between different regions of the brain.
Across many different kinds of learning, white matter appears to be much more responsive to experience than gray matter.
For example, beginning jugglers can show measurable white matter changes after only about an hour and a half of training.
Those changes are dynamic.
If you stop practicing, they may recede.
We’ve found similar results with meditation.
In the same study where we found no gray matter changes, we did observe white matter changes in pathways related to self-regulation after roughly twenty to thirty hours of meditation practice.
We also have new research, not yet published, suggesting that about five minutes of daily practice for a month is associated with white matter changes.
These findings suggest that changes in brain connectivity may occur very early in meditation training and may be especially important.
Cortland Dahl:
One thing I’m hearing is that we often oversimplify what it means for the brain to change.
We hear phrases like “meditation grows your brain,” but perhaps that’s not even the right way to think about it.
If we compare meditation to physical exercise, we might expect some increase in muscle mass when someone first begins training.
But muscles don’t simply continue getting larger forever.
Nor would we necessarily want them to.
Much of what matters is how efficiently the body functions.
It sounds like the brain may be similar.
The important changes may involve relationships between different brain regions, increased efficiency, and improved coordination rather than simply greater volume.
Richie Davidson:
That’s a very good way of putting it.
There’s another aspect of brain health that’s becoming increasingly important, and that’s inflammation.
We know that many forms of meditation reduce inflammation throughout the body.
Evidence is beginning to suggest that meditation may also reduce inflammation within the brain itself.
That’s especially important because neuroinflammation appears to contribute to neurodegeneration and forms of dementia.
Researchers are only beginning to develop reliable ways to measure neuroinflammation using MRI, so this is likely to become an exciting area of research over the next several years.
Stepping back, though, the most important point remains simple.
There’s no question that meditation changes the brain.
Whether those changes are functional, structural, or both is still being actively explored, but the overall conclusion is remarkably clear.
Many years ago, the Dalai Lama told me that he sometimes reflects during meditation on the fact that his own brain is changing because of his practice.
I think that’s a beautiful reflection.
The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that our brains can change through intentional mental training.
That means we have tremendous potential for transformation.
In fact, humans may have a greater capacity to intentionally reshape the brain than any other species.
That’s an extraordinary gift.
The invitation is to use that gift wisely.
Cortland Dahl:
What a hopeful message.
For many years, people thought the brain was essentially fixed.
Now we understand that change and transformation are built into our biology.
As the science continues to evolve, we’ll undoubtedly return to this topic with new discoveries.
Richie, thank you for another fascinating conversation, and thank you for all the pioneering research you’ve contributed to this field.
And thank you to everyone for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Dharma Lab.


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