Steve Paulson: What a wonderful crowd. It's great to see all of you. My name is Steve Paulson.
I am the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated show, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge,"
which is a program that celebrates intellectual curiosity and the cross fertilization of ideas
from various fields of inquiry about art and science. So, as you might imagine, I'm pretty excited about what's
going to happen in the next hour-and-a-half or two hours. Not only do we have two Madison icons with international
reputations, Richard Davidson and Ben Sidran, we also have a kick-ass Jazz band with Ben and Leo Sidran and Billy Peterson.
We're going to experience something that's never happened before in Madison, at least I don't think so.
A heady brew of neuroscience, guided meditation, yep, you're all going to be doing it. [laughter]
And a Jazz performance, so a mixture of talk, and music, and silence, and contemplation.
And frankly, we don't really know how it's going to go, because there is an improvisational element to this
whole thing. I know Ben and Richie have been thinking about this event for months.
In fact, the idea might even go back some years. They've cooked up something quite extraordinary, I think.
Our session is called "The Present Moment: Explorations from Music and Neuroscience."
We're going to explore some very big ideas, mindfulness and compassion, the evolutionary origins of music, the meaning
of --, both in music and the brain, what means to get in the groove, and how we create meaning
in our brains and in our lives. That's just for starters. Let me introduce our distinguished speakers and
performers. Richard Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry,
Director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Lab and the Lab for Effective Neuroscience, and founder and chair of the Center
for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's collaborated with the Dalai
Lama, a number of Buddhist Monks on some truly groundbreaking studies on what happens in the brain during meditation.
His work is wildly cited by other scholars, and it has become a basic reference point for anyone who wants to
understand the connection between the brain and contemplative experience. Ben Sidran has had a long and
very distinguished career. In some circles, he may be best known for writing Steve Miller's hit song "Space Cowboy."
But I have to tell you, as I was reading over Ben's biography, I was amazed at all he's done, and maybe a tiny bit
envious, but we won't get into that. He was the host of NPR's landmark Jazz series,
"Jazz Alive!" which received a Peabody Award, and the host of VH-1 TV's "New Visions."
A pianist, producer, singer and composer, Ben has recorded 25 solo albums, and he's produced recordings for such
noted artists as Van Morrison, Diana Ross, Mose Allison, and John Hendricks. He tours around the world.
And by the way, he has a PhD in American Studies, and has written several books. Let me introduce our band,
as well. Joining Ben will be his son Leo Sidran, a multi-instrumentalist,
who's also a composer and producer. He's played or recorded with many Jazz luminaries,
including Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Frank Morgan, Richie Cole, David Fathead Newman, and Richard Davis.
Leo also collaborated with Jorge Drexler on the music for the film, "The Motorcycle Diaries," and one of those songs went on
to win an Academy Award. Our bass player, Billy Peterson, who also has a very distinguished career,
going back to his teenage years, when he toured with the Righteous Brothers. Since then, he's played with
some of the great names in music, including Leo Kottke, B.B. King, Les Paul, Carlos Santana, Neil Young,
Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. His work is featured on more albums than I can even count. Now, just a quick word
about our format. What we're going to do this evening, Richie Davidson will start us off by talking about
the science of mindfulness. Then we'll bring in our band, and hear from Ben Sidran. Then we'll wrap things up
with a panel discussion and take questions from you, in the audience, so save your questions for near the end.
I have rattled on long enough, so let me welcome our first speaker, Richie Davidson. [applause]
Richie Davidson: Thank you all. This is going to be an evening of improvisation, starting now.
[light laughter] And "The Present Moment" is something that you really can't talk about, but it is something
that needs to be tasted. What is mindfulness? We talk about mindfulness of the present moment.
We talk about paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.
William James, in 1890, in what is an absolutely remarkable chapter in his book, "The Principles of Psychologies"
said, "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,
is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not.
An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.
But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about."
There's italics, by the way, in the original. There's an old Zen story that I'd like to read to you.
A student said to Master Ichu, "Please write for me something of great wisdom." Master Ichu picked up
his brush and wrote one word: "Attention." The student asked, "Is that all?"
The master wrote, "Attention. Attention." The student became irritable. "That doesn't seem profound
or subtle to me." In response, Master Ichu wrote, "Attention. Attention. Attention."
In frustration, the student demanded, "What does this word attention mean?" Master Ichu replied,
"Attention means attention." So what's so special about this present moment? It's really all we have.
Just this moment. We spend a lot of time elsewhere, when we could be in this moment.
And this evening will be an invitation to taste what it is to be in the room, which is to be in the present moment.
Now, we're all going to do a little experiment to see how good we are being in the present moment.
So I'd like you all, right now, to just in a relaxed way, sit up straight. Those of you in the wings
may have a little difficulty, but just pay attention to this cross. I'm going to flash some things
very rapidly. They're consistently letters and numbers. I want you to pay particular
attention to the numbers that are presented. Don't say them out loud, just pay attention to the numbers,
and keep the numbers in your mind as I present these. Then I'll ask some questions about what you saw after we go
through this little demonstration. So is everybody ready? [audience murmurs]
Okay. So just look at that cross. [light chuckles] Okay, now the next number.
We'll do one more Pay attention to the cross. And just pay attention to the numbers.
How many people saw a two? How many people saw a three? How many people saw a four? How many people saw a five?
A six? A seven? An eight? A nine?
Okay.
There are four numbers that were presented. The number three is presented first.
The number seven was presented second. Then in the second sequence, the number five was presented,
and then the number nine. Now, there are some of you that may have seen all those numbers. The vast majority of you
did not see the last number, the number nine. And you exhibited what we call in the trade,
an attentional blink. Your attention blinked. You were not present in the moment sufficiently to capture
what was being displayed. This is a phenomenon that actually has been well studied in psychology and neuroscience.
It turns out that if you spend three months practicing mindfulness meditation, you actually show a dramatic
improvement in your capacity to pay attention in this way. So what this slide shows is a group of practitioners
who have been meditating for three months over here. This is the control. The light gray bars are when
they were presented with this task before they began meditating. The black bar is after three
months of meditation. This is an improvement in the capacity to detect that second number.
The controls, they did a little better, just because they practiced a little bit, but it's not a reliable difference.
But here, there's a big difference. So we can learn to pay attention.
We can educate our attention, being in the groove, being in the present moment. Now, here's another one.
I want you all to just focus on the color in which these words are displayed. I'm going to present a series of
words. I want you to all to call out just the color that you see. So please call out the color.
Red. >> Yellow. >> Green. >> Blue.
Red-- Green! [laughter] >> Pay attention. [laughter]
Okay, you've all gotten a little better. >> Blue. >> Green-- Yellow.
This is a little unfair!
So, what does this present moment got to do with qualities like happiness and equanimity? It turns out that from recent
research, this is from a group of psychologists, good friends of mine at Harvard, that was published in a very prestigious
scientific journal. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Now, what's displayed here,
needs a little bit of explanation. This metric on the bottom is happiness, the rating of
happiness. And up here, what you see is different life activities. Where these dots fall on this
scale denotes, on average, how much thousands of people report being happy when they're engaged in that activity.
So here is exercising. And I should say that the size of the dot indicates how much time they actually spend doing
that activity. [laughter] So, here's working. Here's resting and sleep.
Here's making love. Listening to music actually does pretty well. Praying, and worshiping, and
meditating, is over here, but it's a tiny speck, even smaller than this laser pointer. What's displayed on the bottom
here is the amount of activity people report when they're mind wandering. Now, when people are not
mind wandering, it turns out that the percentage of an average person's day that she or he reports
not mind wandering, is 53%. That means that on average, Americans are spending 47% of their daily life mind wandering,
that is they're not actually in the present moment. What happens when people are mind wandering?
Well, it turns out that they're not doing so well. Neutral mind wandering is people are relatively unhappy.
This line here is the average happiness across these many thousands of participants. So just neutral mind wandering
is to the unhappy side of this average. Unpleasant mind wandering is about the most unpleasant, least
happy things that people do. Notice the size of this dot. It's actually larger than many of these up here.
It means that on average, Americans are spending a lot of their time not in the present moment, and miserable
So, they wrote in their paper, "In conclusion," they said, "a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an
unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes
at an emotional cost." Now, I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility that this state of affairs
is not obligatory. We have a choice. We can actually modulate our mind wandering.
We can learn to pay attention. And we can actually enjoy some of the benefits and equanimity that might arise from it.
Now, in what sense can equanimity arise from being in the present moment? I'd like to just very briefly
tell you about an experiment that we recently did. This is very new findings from our laboratory.
This is a study where we brought in very long-term meditation practitioners. These are the kind of folks that
Steve Paulson was referring to in his introduction. Some of them are Buddhist Monks, others are lay practitioners.
But they've all had at least 10,000 hours of formal meditation practice. And the average number of hours
is about 34,000, so they can be considered real experts. What we did, is we subjected them to pain.
Physical pain is a really beautiful stimulus, because, you know, as my yoga teacher says when he puts us in very
difficult poses, this really helps reveal how you respond to stress in your daily life. So we really zap them with
thermal pain that's very realistic. What we have them do, is do a meditation practice where they
are-- That we'll do some of tonight, where their awareness is in the moment.
They're paying attention to whatever the dominant sense that they're experiencing is, whatever the dominant component
of consciousness. And what we see is that when they do that, they're ratings of unpleasantness in response to
this pain is dramatically attenuated compared to novices. And there is huge differences in the brain, and the differences
in the brain are particularly apparent in specific regions when the participants are anticipating that the pain will
come. So the way we do it is that during this period that's labeled A-1 here, we give the
participant a cue, and we say in ten seconds, after you get that cue, you are going to get a very painful stimulus.
What happens is that for untrained folks, when you give them that cue, they're not in the moment.
They're thinking about the pain that they're about to get ten seconds from now. And what happens is their brain
starts firing on the pain matrix, which is illustrated here. Different regions of the brain.
This is the anterior insular cortex that is labeled here, and another part of the brain, which is the cingulate cortex,
become tremendously active. That is associated with the experience of suffering, the experience of unpleasantness.
The long-term practitioners are quite flat until the actual pain occurs. They respond to the pain very
appropriately, and then they very rapidly go back to baseline. This produces a dramatic change
in their suffering. They suffer less, and they don't show that anticipatory anxiety. Now, it's not just about the
mind. It's also about the body. After just two months of meditation, in turns out that
when you give a person a flu shot, they respond much more dramatically to that flu shot compared to a matched group of
controls. So these circuits in the brain are connected to organ systems in the body that modulate
physiology peripherally that have impact on various functions that are health relevant. This is from a 13th century
Persian poet, Rumi. I'll read this to you, and then end with another little section from Rumi, which beautifully
will segue into the next section of our evening. "The Guest House." This being human
is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness
comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. And another little passage Rumi said, "Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music."
I'd like to invite all of you to please sit up straight now, plant your feet on the ground
and close your eyes.
Please pay attention, and pay attention to the sounds. Sounds are a wonderful anchor
for our attention.
If your mind begins to wander, just gently bring it back to the sounds.
Just let the sounds fill your mind. There's no "you" there. Just let your mind become one
with the sound. Stay awake. Be attentive.
And gently bring your mind back to the sounds.
There are sounds that fill our world. All the time. You can use those sounds
to anchor our attention and be in the present moment.
You can now all please open your eyes.
When we talk about the present moment, there's an interesting adjunct. For those of you who didn't
see the New York Times today, I'll bring you up to speed. Jazz musicians always check the New York Times
Today on page four, September 23, 2011, the New York Times, and I quote.
"A group of European physicists is about to announce that it has clocked the burst of subatomic particles known as
neutrinos, breaking the cosmic speed limit, the speed of light, that was set by Einstein." The quote continues,
"Einstein himself said that that if you could send a message faster than light, you could send a telegram to the past."
If it's true, these super-fast neutrinos exist, "Then" says the New York Times, "we truly haven't understood
about anything." [ soft Jazz continues throughout ] So when we talk about
the present moment, when are we talking about? This moment? This moment?
And time itself, apparently, is an illusion. Well, time may be an illusion, but there's more than one
kind of time. Perhaps it's multiple illusion. It's many illusions. For example, there's clock time.
Clock time. A mechanical subdivision of the passing of events. [rhythmic ticking]
We invented that. People invented that. Very helpful, because we want
to meet at noon by the big tree in the town square. If we all agree when noon is, I'm not going to hang you up,
you're not going to hang me up. Clock time is important. There's another kind of time, though.
It's this.
It's not a mechanical subdivision. It's the ebb and flow of the ocean.
It's the wind. Things have a natural rhythm to them. Billy, play a --
against the clock.
There you go. There's the whole business in a nutshell.
The mechanical subdivision that never varies. And the human element that pushes and pulls
against the ideal. Music is organized sound. But the organization
also has to allow for the passing of natural events, some element of the unknown, or it doesn't feel like music.
It feels like a machine. There's a device that we could use, in a computer, to take
sound that's natural sound, and make it sound like the machine took over. It's called quantizing.
Quantizing sucks out all those little human imperfections, that Billy is playing, and lines everything up.
But see, chaos, or what we perceive as chaos, is a normal, natural part of our world. And the interdependence,
the interdependence between what we think we know, for example, the speed of light, and clearly what we don't know.
For instance, if that's the speed limit. In Jazz, we call that interdependence "Swing."
Swing. Swing is not just the mind, it's the mind and the heart together.
We understand the concept of the mechanical subdivision. It's there with us all the time, and it's relentless.
But it doesn't feel like anything, until it arrives on our pulse.
We call that Swing. Swing is the push and pull
of the human animal against the clock. The life of the mind and the life of the heart.
We call that Swing. And what's interesting is that the human animal is the only
animal that responds to music as a group. Yes, birds sing. And in the right context,
it could sound like music. I have a friend who's a drummer. He learned to play drums by listening to the washing machine
when he was a kid. In the right context, there are a lot of sources for music.
But the human animal is the only organism on the planet that experiences what we call collective entrainment.
You want to feel collective entrainment? Join me. The human is the only creature
on the planet that likes to clap on two and four. Check it out. [claps in rhythm]
Come on. [audience clapping in rhythm]
We call that Swing. The interdependence between what we think we know and what we do not know about Jazz,
we call that Swing. We call that Swing. The interdependence between
what we think we know and what we do not know about Jazz, we call that Swing. We call that Swing.
Now you notice, when we're in this moment, we're experiencing time in a different way.
We're not experiencing the clock. We don't even know what time it is.
But we certainly feel time. Time is in the room. Time is in every one of us.
This collective entrainment is very old. I'm sure it goes back thousands and thousands,
and in fact... In fact, it may be the elements that made us human.
It may be what separated us from Neanderthals. This ability to experience collectively, on the pulse,
the push and the pull of experience against the ideal. The ideal
as manifested in a clock. Only a few hundred years old. The idea of human perfection, thousands of years old.
Time may be an illusion, but it exists. This just in from
a very important philosopher. The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. There's nothing to it.
Anybody can do it. The thing about time is that time isn't really real.
It's all in your point of view. How does it feel to you? Alfred North Whitehead?
Nope. Bertrand Russell? Nope. Guitarist James Taylor?
Yes.
So I want to talk to you about how to listen like a musician. How to listen like a musician.
Pay attention to what the bass is saying behind me.
You got it. There he is. He's there. But he's in context.
He doesn't exist all by himself. He exists in context of the groove.
Of the drums. Of the keyboard.
Now, when you hear the bass, and everything he's saying to you, and you hear the drums,
and you hear the keyboard, and you hear them all at the same time without saying to yourself,
what am I hearing, why am I hearing it, then you're just there in the emotional soup
of that moment. Then you're listening like a musician.
Time is the soup of the emotions.
There must be a huge evolutionary advantage in this. And when you think about it,
the evolutionary advantage, is it allows us for a moment to not understand, but to know.
Your understanding is fallible. Your knowing can't be questioned. What do you know?
You know that feels good. Why does it feel good? 'Cause it's the push and the pull
of our everyday experience against a perceived ideal. Context. Context.
We are always in context. Our context is social.
You are my context. I am your context. We are each other's context.
To sum it up, the groove, this collective entrainment, is a way of extending
what Richie referred to as the present moment. Extending it so that the now
is at the fulcrum of the past and the future. The now is not some arbitrary point
that we're hoping to hit, like a moving target. The now exists in context of the past and the future.
It embodies the past and the future. Time may be an illusion,
but it's where we all live.
That's where we live. Alone, we're like a single note.
Together, in a context, we are music.
[applause]
The present moment is a prerequisite for the entrainment that we all experienced. And entrainment is really about
the body. It's about living, embodying, realizing what you see, what you hear,
and what you feel.
And right now, this is Billy's embodiment that we're seeing in real time. We are recording wirelessly
through him now, his heart rate at the top, his respiration in the second channel.
The heart period is displayed in green. And the blue line at the bottom is actually measuring
his surface skin temperature. What we see when we do experiments like this,
is that entrainment and embodiment is about the expression in your body of the physiology
that is present in another person. And when we have the experience of collective entrainment,
we share some common underlying physiological mechanism that we can actually measure in this way.
That all leads to compassion. Empathy is a prerequisite for compassion,
which is not just the experience of what is around us, other people's feelings, but is also the impulse to act
on the basis of that, to help relieve suffering. There's no better place to end this
than to go back, actually, to Albert Einstein, apropos, today's New York Times. And Albert Einstein wrote
to a friend who asked him for some advice about difficulties he was having with his daughter, in a letter in 1921.
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited
in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated
from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection
for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature
in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving
for such achievement is itself a part of the liberation and a foundation
for inner security."
[applause]
I feel privileged to be here. And I'm curious about how you two cooked up this idea, how far it goes back.
I know you're friends. What did you want to bring to this collaboration? A scientist and a musician,
why come together? >> Well, we've been talking about this for a long time. One of the wonderful things
about living in Madison, I think, is the opportunity to interact in these kinds of ways with your neighbors.
I think Ben and I instantaneously sort of experienced a kind of entrainment between us, which
really, I think, gave birth to this as a possibility. This was a grand improvisation. And when the opportunity arose,
it seemed like the right thing to do, so here we are. >> I love the way Richie describes it, as the casual
meeting of two people on Monroe Street, but in fact-- [laughter] Richie is an extraordinary
example of a neuroscientist. Those who know him know he's not buried in jargon. He's not lost in the minutiae
of the experiments, although he knows very well the importance of them. He's also somebody who
understands feeling good, and why it's important to feel good. He's not a meditator because of science.
He's a meditator because he's a human being. I've always thought that the groove, what we call the groove,
collective entrainment, is something special. Obviously, only people do it. No other animals do it.
In talking to Richie about it, we came to this meeting point, where this idea of being in a group state was not dissimilar
from meditating. At one point, I said to Richie, you know, I'd really like to take some time off.
Really just take some time off and do some meditating. He said to me, you've been doing that for 30 years, 40 years.
You are changed by that. And that made me confident enough to come up here and try this.
It's fascinating to think about the interplay between brain science and music. I'm wondering if you see these
as common languages, common frames of reference, or is something different going on there?
Let me give you some examples, for instance. You know, what does mindfulness mean to a musician?
I think we've got some sense of this. What does rhythm mean to a neuroscientist?
Let me start with what mindfield-- uh, mind-field-ness [laughter] What "mindfieldness" means
to a musician. Or to a Freudian. [laughter] Yeah, I think actually,
that's good. We've got mindfulness and "mindfieldness." But two or three times a year
when you're playing music, and you can never say when it's going to happen, and you can't predict it.
Two or three times a year, if you're lucky, you land in this place where music is just happening.
It's coming through you. You're not doing anything. You look down and your hands are doing it.
Yes, you're participating in it, but you're not doing it. You have this sense that it's flowing through you.
Those moments, what they feel like, is absolutely nothing. It's like the easiest state in the world to be in.
And when it happens, the thing you say to yourself is "Ah-ha! Now, I understand. And now I can do this,
because I understand." And as soon as you say that, it's gone. [laughter]
And you want to be able to recapture that. >> But you've got to play for another six months, nine months.
[laughter] >> I think that, you know, for me, what Ben is talking about, is really, music gives
people a direct taste of what this is about, of the groove. It's a way to make it accessible to a large swath of humanity.
And when people slip into the groove, they don't have to be doing anything special. They don't have to have
a particular religious orientation. They don't have to belong to a particular political party.
It is really part of who we are. And when that resonance occurs, that's really what we're talking about.
I think that there is nothing special about meditation. These are a bunch of techniques that were discovered
2500 years ago that are said, I think, in my view, to bring people to the same place. But there are many different
ways to get there. I think music is a very universal language that allows people to taste these
experiences in a way which is free from a lot of the sort of cultural and religious dogma that often surrounds other
approaches. >> So just to probe a little bit deeper on the neuroscience end of things, does the groove,
or, I don't know if rhythm is another word for this, what does that mean when you're actually looking at the brain?
Can you talk about that from a brain perspective? >> We can, and there are some really cool things that you can
do. It turns out that if you put electrodes on the head, what you see are oscillating brain
rhythms that are oscillating at particular frequencies. The dominant frequency in an adult human is about ten cycles
per second, but there are some important harmonics. There is a particular rhythm that occurs at 40 cycles per
second, and other rhythms at different frequencies. When you are in the groove and open to experience, what happens
is a phenomenon that we neuroscientists call phase locking. And phase locking is where the
external rhythm is actually entraining your cortical oscillations. And so, what you see is that
the frequency of the external stimulus is actually driving the frequency of the neural oscillation.
That's something that you can measure. We do experiments where you present a strobe at different
frequencies, and you look at the extent to which an individual gets synchronized. It's really a direct measure
of entrainment, all right? It turns out that in individuals who have spent a lot of time practicing training their mind,
they show that kind of entrainment very dramatically, and quite spontaneously, so that when we present the strobe
at certain frequencies, you get very dramatic entrainment. A good metaphor for this is if a lake is very, very still, and
you throw a rock into the lake, you'll see the ripples from that rock on the other shore. But if the lake is turbulent, if
it's a very windy or turbulent day, and you throw the same rock in, you're not going to get, you're not going to see any
effects, particularly outside the immediate area. It's kind of like our mind. If the mind is very still,
like a very still lake, we're going to be, we're going to entrain to experiences, to events which are happening
on the outside. But if we have what some in the meditation world call "monkey mind," lots of
chatter and mind wandering, we're not going to be able to share that kind of entrainment. The invitation from this work
is that we all have the capacity to actually walk around with stiller lakes in our mind, and have an opportunity
for more entrainment. >> When I hear you say that, what I think is ah-ha, if the rhythm drives
certain brain functions and meaning, then in some ways, perhaps rhythm precedes meaning,
or makes possible meaning. >> You cannot have meaning without rhythm. >> Exactly.
[laughter] And of course, that means, to me, that everybody has natural rhythm.
There's no such thing as "I don't have rhythm." Everybody has rhythm. It's part of the human
condition. >> So do you feel when you're playing music, you are creating meaning?
Wow. I wouldn't say that. [laughter] But maybe so.
But there you have it. But you know, the other thing is, and one of the reasons it's so much fun to do this sort of
thing with Richie, is he's very open to demystifying. I have devoted many years to demystifying Jazz.
A lot of people put Jazz musicians up on a pedestal, and that's a problem. Because once you take some
person and remove them from the body of people, in a way, you pull them out of the pool, and they don't really have
an immediate effect any more. By demystifying what Jazz is about, it's just a regular thing.
It's a grammar. Jazz is a grammar, like any language. And Richie is doing the same
sort of thing with science. By demystifying it, he makes it available to all of us. Part of the hope tonight was
that the combination of the science and the experience would leave those of you who have joined us with a sense
of not only what this present moment feels like, so that hopefully, you're walking down the street tomorrow or the next
day, and you get this feeling, and you say wait a minute, I know that feeling. I felt that before.
You don't have to go any further than that, but that when you put on music, or when you look at your child,
or when you're walking down the street and the sun is bright, or something, you get that feeling, you recognize, ah,
that's what that feeling is. It's demystified. It doesn't have to be such a profound serious thing.
It's just part of life. >> And the recognition and the familiarity, I think is so important.
The word meditation in Sanskrit and Tibetan actually means familiarization. The idea that through
the musical experience, we can actually recognize a place in our mind so that when we see it again, we are a little
bit more familiar with it, enables us to get back to that place more easily. It's kind of like
those Necker Cube illusions, where you can-- The illusion is where you see it as, you might see--
There's an illusion with a vase in one orientation, or two profiles of faces in another orientation.
Some of you may have seen that. Most of you have seen each component, or each way of viewing it.
You are familiar with it. It is easier to actually get back to it. Another thing that Ben
has taught me is that Jazz is all about recovery. It's all about how you recover from your mistakes.
[laughter] And that, to me, is a very profound teaching, because as the Einstein quote
said, you know, none of us can really be there, but it's really all about how you recover from your mistakes.
That is something I think that we can learn from music, and learn from life in a very important way.
Ben, I wanted to follow up on something that you said. You had these tantalizing things that you said about the
evolution of music. And I know they are scientists who think that music came before speech.
What do you think the first kind of music was, that our ancient ancestors, that tens of thousands of years ago,
would've made? >> Well, I think the first music are the sounds you hear in the womb.
That's very rhythmical. And you come into consciousness with that. That's the first music.
Speech, of course, is a triumph of abstraction, really. I mean, I'm making these sounds and I'm shaping these sounds,
and we assume that the sounds have specific meaning. But linguists, for example, Wittgenstein, was very clear
when he said that the meaning of a word is its use. That a word doesn't carry meaning like a rail car carries
coal, all right? There's not specific meaning. But it's in the experience of making these utterances,
in the context of our mutual experience, that meaning is transferred. So, back to what is the first,
how does music relate to that? I think music probably, and this is my crazy belief, was one of the first organizing systems of
sound into meaning, before it got totally abstracted into --, and verbs, and nouns, and everything, the whole
abstraction of language. Sound, as we perceive it as music, which is organized sound, sound in context, is how we got
a group together. And when we got the group together, how we recognized one another as part of the group.
This is speculation. >> I don't have proof, you know. [laughter] >> I like asking you things,
because you don't have proof. Do you think people sang before they spoke? I mean, I'm sort of wondering,
how far back? What do you think that first kind of music might have been? Well, you know, when people
in the room today think about singing, we tend to thing about the American popular song form, like a Beatles song,
or something. No, they didn't sing Beatles-- They didn't sing a form. It wasn't a form.
But I bet there was repetition. I bet it was repetitive. I bet it was intonation contoured, right?
There was intonation contouring that was used to trigger intonation contouring in somebody else.
There was call and response, which is one of the most basic aspects of religious music, Gospel music, call and response.
I say this, you say it back to me. I do this, you do it back to me.
I'm sure that was all part of it. These are the basic constituent elements of music.
And they're also the basic constituent elements of speech. >> I think that the saying and responding back also is really
intimately part of the mother-infant experience. In fact, some of the earliest, serious scientific research
on entrainment has been done in looking at interaction between mother and infant. There are important sources
of entrainment in intonation contours, so in sound, as well as in movement. And I think that in terms
of using sound in that kind of entrainment way, I think that the communication between mother and infant, probably
was a very primal source of it. >> One question, before this, Richie you talked about empathy and compassion.
I'm wondering, Ben, as a musician, do those words have meaning to you? Empathy and compassion.
Well, they're words. They have meaning to me when they're feeling. I trust my feeling
more than I trust my words. One of the mysteries of music to me is how some musicians who play like angels
can be unpleasant people. [laughter] How can an unpleasant person make such wonderful,
soothing music? What's the disconnect, and why is that the case? I think, you know,
it's like any technique. Technique is a stick, but it doesn't tell you what to do with the stick, right?
So, I know some wonderfully compassionate musicians, along the way that for 40 years, that I've been a professional
musician, I've had so many experiences of generosity from my betters and my peers. Really, it's remarkable.
Actually, forgive me, but it's quite other than what you normally find in the academic world,
which tends not to be-- [laughter] Truly. [scattered applause]
Because when you're a musician, you're kind of out there. You're trying to get paid. You're trying to make a living.
It's real life, so there's a kind of compassion among musicians. [laughter]
[applause] >> Okay, well, let's go to the audience here. Raise your hand, that's probably
the best way to do it. Why don't we go over here. Tina is wandering with a mic back there,
and she will come to you. >> For most of the evening I thought, you're not talking about music,
you're talking about Jazz. Then very late on, you brought in heart beats. But it isn't only humans
that felt heart beats. All the rest, they meant nothing. Say something about that.
Well, the only thing I would say is that Jazz is not a kind of music. It's an approach to life.
I think what we call Jazz today, we just called it Jazz for a hundred years or so. But people have been doing
what we do when we do Jazz for literally, thousands of years. This idea of improvisation, this idea of collective entrainment,
this idea of finding your own voice in a social situation, the idea of pushing the perceived boundaries
of using the tradition that came before you, and embracing that, and still going forward,
this is what we call Jazz. And I think this has been around forever, we just called it Jazz. Actually, it was a sensational
word in the 1910s, 1912s, that they came up-- That's my sense of it. >> Okay, let's go over here.
I have a question about mind wandering and attention. My wife would probably say that my mind is wandering
90% of the time, you know, not paying attention. But maybe I'm conceiving some, I'm a writer, and maybe
I'm thinking about my writing during that time. So, what actually is mind wandering in that sense?
Can you be focused on something other than what's immediately in front of you, but something in your mind?
Is that attention? >> Sure, it's a great question, David, thank you for asking it. So I think the issue is whether
the mind wandering is planned or not, is intentional or not. So there are certainly times, as a writer, and I do this, too.
I sit down at my desk and I say, you know, for the next hour, I'm just going to let my mind go wherever it goes.
But that's a planned process. That's what I'm actually doing. The way psychologists have defined mind wandering
is as task-unrelated thought. And by task-unrelated thought, what we mean is if you are, for example, reading a book,
and you suddenly discover that you've turned three pages and you have no friggin' idea what you just read.
[laughter] That is task-unrelated thought. [laughter] Your mind is just somewhere
way off. But that's very different than sitting down and using the free associations that is
so much a part of our minds in a creative way, in a very intentional way. So I think it really has to do
with whether it is intended or not. >> Let's go over here, back there, yes.
I would like to respectfully disagree about entrainment and humans only having that. I would also say that birds
do it, and that it's part of how they determine the flock. Every week, I wait until Sunday afternoon when I can go home and
listen to my flock of parrots together. Because one starts a melody, and the others,
and I can hear it as a melody. The others chime in at just the right point. And they don't repeat
themselves. It's different. It's actually kind of like Jazz, where it's a noise,
then a different noise, then another noise. But it's always appropriate. It's always congruent
with everything else. I think it's that's how they're telling each other that they're part of a group.
Just to briefly respond, then Ben can respond, I think you're pointing out something very important.
I think our two cats often become entrained. I think the difference is, and I think what Ben was
referring to, is that there's a quality of awareness of that entrainment, which I do think
is probably uniquely human. But the actual capacity to be entrained may be a much more universal phenomenon.
Absolutely. We've had these insects on one of our bushes for years. Really, these larvae
on a yew tree. And every spring they would show up and they would do this together.
I don't know if you've seen these larvae, these little worms. There's like hundreds of them,
and they all go boom, you know. [laughter] No stimulus. We couldn't figure out what was
up. They were clearly entrained. But that's really not what I'm talking about.
[laughter] >> Let's come up, there's a lady just the third row back who has a question.
Yeah, I was just wondering on the slide where you showed where our minds spend most of our time.
You said that was the American population. Is this really where humans spend their minds, or have
other populations been examined to see where our brains spend most of their time? >> Yeah, it's a wonderful
question, and we do not know the answer to that. So that particular study was done with several thousand
American participants. But there has not been, to the best of my knowledge, any large-scale cross national,
cross cultural comparisons. You know, I think that it is likely that there will be some cultural variation,
simply because, I mean, it's very likely that in points in our evolutionary past when daily life was just
a lot harsher, and we actually had to hunt and gather for food, that there really was much less mind wandering,
because the exigencies of daily life were so demanding that it was really, if you began to mind wander,
it would probably not be particularly good for your survival. So I think that there's probably
been a growth in the percentage in the time when people are mind wandering in our culture. But again, we really have very,
very little data on that. But it turns out this has become a very hot area of neuroscience, because when you put a person
in an MRI scanner, and you look at their brain when they're not doing anything, it turns out that they're doing a lot.
You know, if you just pause, for even 30 seconds, quietly, and inspect your own mind, there's a lot going on, and it's
"chit, chit, chit, chit..." [light laughter] That's what we see in the scanner when we just put a
person in and don't give them any instructions. >> I have a technical follow-up to that.
We saw your bass player, Billy Peterson, hooked up. What did you do? >> Yeah.
How did you do that? >> Well, Billy was wearing a belt that sort of looks like a typical heart rate monitor
that you might wear for exercise, except it had many other physiological measures, and we were recording it
wirelessly. We use this in some of our research to wirelessly record people in real life settings.
We can extract all kinds of information from these signals. One of the things that we can extract from the heart rate
signal is the extent to which the heart rate is varying with respiration. This is called the
respiratory sinus arrhythmia. It's not an abnormal arrhythmia, everyone has it to some degree. It reflects the extent to which
there is a parasympathetic influence on our heart. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the branch of the
autonomic nervous system that is more of a restorative, quieting branch. There are certain kinds of
mental training, certain kinds of meditation, which will increase the parasympathetic influence, and certain kinds
of yoga poses, for example. We actually used this belt on our local yoga teacher, who was in our lab a few weeks ago,
and it turns out that there are dramatic differences that you can record as a consequence of different yoga postures.
So that's something that we're exploring. There's all kinds of wonderful information
that could be gleaned. >> Let's go way back there, the gentleman.
Yes, I know that you're right, because several years ago on NPR I heard Garrison Keillor say, "Half of intelligence
is simply paying attention." I wish I had heard that 40 years before I first heard it. [laughter]
But what I want to ask you is, paying attention, paying really good attention takes concentration.
It takes paying attention. Attention, attention. It's really intense. So, you know,
everything in moderation. You might wear yourself out. So are you saying the best thing would be paying attention
or meditating, rather than something non-productive, like mind wandering? >> I just want to respond really
briefly to that, in that when we're playing, and Richie mentioned the idea of how you recover from your perceived
mistakes is very important in Jazz. Jazz is improvisation, happening in real time.
You can not go back. You can't fix something. If you attempted to do one thing, and it came out
a different way, you don't have the option to go back and say wait a minute, what I meant was..., right?
So, you pay a particular kind of attention when you're playing this music that allows you to, as the great drummer Art Blakey
says, if you make a mistake, you go back and you do it again and you make something out of that mistake.
That's how Jazz was born, somebody goofed. [laughter] So how you recover from
a perceived mistake, I think depends on the quality of the attention you're paying. I'm listening to Billy
constantly. I'm listening to Leo constantly. I'm listening to what I'm doing. And at the same time,
I'm not listening at all. >> You know, I would say that it's a delicate dance. Too much effort,
you're absolutely right, is counterproductive and can be really exhausting. One of the things that we see
in the studies that we've done with really long-term meditation practitioners, and we've divided now, the long-term practitioners
into really, really, really long-term practitioners who've really had a lot of experience. When you give them a certain
kind of attentionally demanding task, what you see in those individuals is really interesting.
You see a transient increase in activation in the prefrontal cortex, which sort of gets their system going, and then it comes
right back down to baseline within less than a second. It's as if, the way I think about it is
this is the neuro-echo of effortless attention, completely effortless. So once you get to a certain
point, then it just comes very spontaneously. I think that's what Ben is describing when
you're in the groove in Jazz, it just happens spontaneously. >> Let me, I want to follow up on something that Ben said,
sort of that moment you have that's magical, that might happen two or three times a year.
Richie, do you think something different would be happening in his brain? I mean, if you could hook him up
to the scanner during those moments--? >> He has a pacemaker, so we can't put him in the scanner!
[laughter] We've gone through that. Yeah, I definitely think something would be different
in his brain, absolutely. And you know, I think we have some clues as to what that might be.
I think it would be, I've talked about phase locking, and that kind of capacity for the brain to be entrained.
And I think we would see that in a very dramatic way during those moments. >> Do you think that, would you
see something comparable, let's say, if someone is having, not a musical experience, but a meditative experience?
I would, I would. I think that the way I think about what music can do is, for the uninitiated,
it can give them a taste of this kind of experience without any prior training. It just puts you right in there.
Ben, I think, is appropriately thinking about the issue of how is it that there are some amazing musicians who can play
absolutely mellifluous Jazz, and who are not so nice people. You know, for me, one of the issues is how we can turn
what we're talking about now, which we're talking about these momentary states. And what I'm particularly
interested in is how you make a state a trait. How do you take a state and transform it into an enduring
way of being, so that it's just happening spontaneously all the time? You know, I've had the great
privilege and honor of spending a lot of time around the Dalai Lama, and he is someone who I think is a living embodiment
of being in the groove, 24/7. So, I think it's possible. >> The great saxophone player, Cannonball Adderley, once said,
"Hipness is not a state of mind, it's a fact of life." [laughter] >> Let's go over here.
Yeah, but aren't you forgetting something? What Dr. Davdison started with was a chart that showed after
three months of meditation, people could do this, or that, or the other thing. I studied music for 20 years,
and by the 15th year, I was in the groove the minute I sat down at the piano. I wrote for 40 years,
and by the 15th year, my juices turned on and I started writing the minute I sat down at the typewriter or the computer.
But it takes practice. >> One of my favorite New Yorker articles was an article a number of years ago
that profiled the lives of three people, Yo Yo Ma, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player, and a guy named Ed Wilson, who's a very
famous neurosurgeon in San Francisco. These are three people who are the best in the world
at what they do. The article asked, what do these three people have in common? Practice, practice, practice.
Well, and along with that, is after you've put in your 10,000 hours, or whatever the number is, and you get to the point
where the instrument becomes an extension of you and your voice, you still wake up some days and you can't figure out
how to go to the first thing. I mean, having that experience doesn't guarantee that tomorrow, you won't feel like
you'll never play again. And everybody I've talked to goes through these moments musically, where some days,
they just don't know how they can do it, and other days, it's the easiest thing. So, yeah, you need to put in the
time, but that's no guarantee. >> Let's go over here, midway back.
I want to ask a question about the state of compassion. I'm always intrigued that it shows a connection with wishing
to take action. What is the cost of not being able to take action when you feel compassion?
Or what is that impulse converted to? >> It's a great question. And I think that, you know,
part of me doesn't know the answer to it. But I'll try to just say a few things about it.
I think a lot varies with the context. So, there are certainly contexts where it's just not clear
what action would be appropriate to take, and so action may not be taken in those contexts. One of the things that we saw
early on in our studies with these long-term practitioners which surprised us when we first saw it, is that when they
were meditating on compassion, lying very still in the scanner, we saw a dramatic activation in motor regions of the brain,
despite the fact that they were perfectly still. This really puzzled us, and then we talked to them about it.
They said that it makes complete sense. This is exactly-- What we are doing is preparing
ourselves to act. This is the ultimate in action preparation. So as soon as suffering
is encountered, there would be a spontaneous and immediate impulse to act. So you know, I don't know.
I think that compassion is clearly something that we don't really understand from a scientific perspective.
Research is really just beginning in this area. There are probably different forms of compassion, some of
which are more action oriented. I also think that there is an important element to practice here, too, and that with more
practice, it may be that there would be an increased propensity to act.
Let's go right up in the front row. >> Tomorrow at Camp Randall, will there be collective
entrainment of 80,000 people? Or a couple other examples, like say in a marathon or the Iron Man,
is that one of the things that brings people there? Or a third example, in a couple weeks, many Jews
will get together and fast for 24 hours and meditate together. So, are these kind of some of the other side of needing
to practice 10,000 hours to become an expert in it? Are these some methods that we as a species, exercise this,
or get access to this meditative state? >> I think it's a great question, and I would say that
yes, there are many examples of collective entrainment. You know, living in a Big Ten town, you certainly get to
experience that on a regular basis. One of the things that is interesting about the
contemplative traditions is that these methods of collective entrainment are always taught in an ethical context.
I think this also may be one issue that comes into play in the example that Ben gave of musicians who can make
beautiful music, but who are not necessarily beautiful people. It really has to do with ethical training
in addition to the entrainment. You can cultivate attention so that you become a better killer. And in fact, the military
is quite interested in that. But you also can teach these kinds of practices in a framework where the ethical
issues are considered center stage from the get-go. In traditional contemplative context,
that is how they are taught. >> Just in terms of Jazz, there's a long tradition among American Jazz musicians
of a kind of, not just an esprit de corps, but an ethical basis of how you treat each other.
These norms are very much outside the normal social norms. But as I say, it becomes clear that Jazz is not just a kind of
music, or a way to approach a harmonic question. But it's a way of approaching life.
I think the Jazz training gives you that. The musicians attempt it through the hundreds and hundreds
of hours they spend on buses, and talking to each other, and raising each other as people, attempt to generate
an overall way of how one lives. Today, there are books written on how to be cool, or how to be hip.
But all these are diversions. Basically, I think what we're talking about is good old-fashioned ethics.
We have time for one last question. Let's go to the gentleman back there.
You mentioned the origins of language, and we talked about infants. Babies don't have language,
so they don't think of words. They don't think of water, or milk, or whatever. Is meditating trying to get back
to that state where we're not thinking in words in our mind? >> Well, it's a great question. One of the things that
the Dalai Lama asks me almost every time I see him is he says, "What is the mind-- What is the brain like
before you have a concept?" [light laughter] And he said, "Tell me about some experiments that inform us
about that." It's a very deep problem and question. Words are so much a part
of our consciousness, and you all got to experience that. You know, it's very difficult to pay attention to the color
in which the word "green" is written, if that color happens to be red, and not pay attention
to the word, because we are such creatures of our linguistic community. There are some experiments,
however, that do suggest that certain kinds of meditation practices do allow you to get to a preconceptual stage
so that your immediate response to a word which is to form the meaning and the concept that is represented by that word,
that that automatic reaction is actually broken, intentionally. Now, that's something that is a very rarified skill.
But there's a little bit of evidence to suggest that it's possible, and that that may be more similar to
the way a pre-linguistic infant comes into the world. >> I have one final question for the two of you.
This has been remarkable, I have to say, this evening. And I just feel privileged to be part of this.
Will we see this again, between the two of you? [laughter] [applause]