Wisconsin Public Television University Place 2012 Wisconsin Science Festival  The Science and Art of Recovery Ben Sidran & Richard Davidson  Sept. 27, 2012 UP774  cc [applause] >> I now have the pleasure of introducing Richard Davidson and Ben Sidran. What a problem. [laughter] I understand that this evening's performance will pick up where these two left off at last year's Science Festival and is emblematic of the interdisciplinary, the boundarylessness of the out-of-box thinking that is part of the Year of Innovation. Richard Davidson is a William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UW-Madison. He is also the director of the Wiesman Brain Imagining Lab and the Lab for Affective Neuroscience, and is the founder and chair of the recently created Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. Can you think of anything better to look at than a healthy mind? It just resonates for me. He also has this odd relationship with somebody who I had the great privilege to give an honorary degree to, the Dalai Lama. He gives a sort of bonding with a different plane of understanding that comes from the Dalai Lama, and the plane of understanding comes from a very professional disciplinary sense of understanding the mind. Richard, your connection with him and what he has brought to the university has surely been a great privilege for all of us. He's been a UW-Madison since 1984, published numerous articles and reviews. 

And curiously, I don't know whether this is a great source of pleasure to him, Time Magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Now that's boundaryless. This is Richard. And that is an underestimate of his real impact. Ben Sidran has been a major force in modern day history of Jazz and Rock and Roll, having played keyboards with, or produced with, such artists as Steve Miller, Mose Allison, Diana Ross, Boz Scaggs, John Hendrix, Rickie Lee Jones and Van Morrison. Ben graduated from UW-Madison in 1966 and holds a Ph.d in American Studies from an odd place, Sussex University, right on the south coast of England. I didn't know they were interested in American studies but they did. He has generally avoided academic life. What a smart move. [laughter] Preferring instead his time performing, most recently in Europe and Asia, producing radio and records, and writing. 

Tonight, Ben and Richie combine their considerable talents, interests and spirit of adventure and experimentation, to bring us an original exploration into the interface of neuroscience and Jazz. The presentation centers around the phenomena of recovery. Please join me in welcoming Ben and Richie for their presentation. [applause]  >> Thank you all. It's really just a pleasure to be here today. Thank you for your very, very generous introduction, David. This is where the event for tonight really began. Miles Davis said this at one point in his career. "Do not fear mistakes. There are none." While I think that we need to be cautious in such a strong blanket statement, there is an element of important truth to this. 

Ben Sidran, who in addition of being a dear friend, also is a neighbor, a yoga partner and a partner in the quest to understand the meaning of things, taught me that Jazz is all about how you recover from mistakes. That insight, I think, is a very profound insight. It may have important barring on all sorts of domains that are about the mind. After all, Jazz really comes from the mind. So we think that this is really a wonderful topic for this synergistic interaction. Now it turns out that neuroscientists that myself who study emotion, and who are captured by a particular phenomenon in emotion that is so salient, that is that people differ in how they respond to life's slings and challenges. Life's slings and arrows. If you look around you, the same challenge, the same adversity, is responded to very differently by different people. We have three 'R's that we talk about when it comes to these variations in emotion. The three 'R's are reactivity, regulation and recovery. 

Recovery is really all about how you recover from your mistakes. In the game of life emotional mistakes are particularly important ones. How we recover from those kinds of challenges say a lot about who we are as individuals, the likelihood that we'll be resilient in the face of adversity and about the likelihood that we may be vulnerable. What I'm going to do is share with you a little bit about this work in the first part of my remarks. I want to just show you two hypothetical individuals. This is one person. Imagine that at some point at around the time mark three in this graph there is some stressful event that occurs. What we see depicted here is some physiological arousal that may occur in response to this event. We can contrast this person with another person who shows the same magnitude of response but who varies in the likelihood that he or she recovers, and the extent to which they recover. In the recent book that I wrote with Sharon Begley "The Emotional Life of Your Brain" I talk about six emotional styles. 

One emotional style is resilience. Resilience is defined as the rapidity at which you recover from adversity. We can measure this stuff neuroscientifically. Let me just give you one example of how we can measure it, and I'll talk about a few as I go along. The details of this are not important, but what we can do is show people emotional pictures and look physiologically and track the physiological response to these emotional pictures at particular points in time after an emotional stimulus goes off. We can look at this in relation to certain characteristics that a person describes about him or herself. One of them is quality of mindfulness and self-control. It's been described by scientists. One item on a questionnaire which measures this is this item here. "I like to stop and think things over before I do them." People who are high on this dimension of mindfulness or self-control turn out to recover more quickly. 

This is actually data from a very recent study that we published, that was done by Kristin Javaras who was a graduate student in my lab. What is shows are three periods of time. This first one on the left is reactivity. That's when a stressful event occurs. The second point is a point early in recovery, a few seconds later. And the third is a few minutes later in recovery. What we see is that in this laboratory context these two individuals don't differ in their initial response, but differ dramatically... Actually these are not two people. These are the bottom and top thirds of this distribution. What we see are, the people who have more mindfulness, more reports of self-control, are the ones who are the dotted line. 

They recover more quickly. They are able to profit from their experience and show a more rapid return back to baseline. I want to show you that this is not something that we only see in the laboratory. Also, it is something that you can see starting early in life. What you see in this baby is the parent blows his nose very, very loudly. The baby startles in response to this and then starts laughing, comes right back to baseline very quickly. This is a very resilient infant. Let's see if this plays. Probably not.  No. 

Okay. I'm going to do this without these video excerpts. This was another example of recovery. What you can see in these examples is... I'll actually... These three examples are not going to play but we'll do a live demonstration of this which I think we'll all be... This will work I guarantee, and it should be helpful. That last video was a boy playing this game. The game was presented on a computer screen, and what you see on the screen is what the boy was doing. They way it works is that there's a curser and I'm pointing to this little blue dot. 

The goal of this game is to simply move this curser thought this maze. There are different levels. If the curser touches an edge, you have to start all over from the beginning. It gets challenging as you'll see. Here in level two you have two move it all around and have a very steady finger, and go all the way through. I won't go all the way through. In the third level you see that it can get pretty tricky up there. The boys and girls that were doing this are concentrating and they're going through this very, very carefully. They go through this carefully, concentrating, concentrating. Then they go to the next level and... 

[scream] [laughter] They have headphones on, and this just happens unexpectedly. What you see in this task is just an enormous diversity of response. Some kids just crack up and start laughing. Other children really get distressed by this. There's a lot of variation, and that variation is telling about how we can recover from adversity. I showed you earlier on that this dimension of mindfulness and self-control is related to recovery. I want to just underscore how important these characteristics are. This is a paper that was published about a year ago. It followed a group of 1,000 individuals, actually from birth, in a town in New Zealand. Dunedin, New Zealand. 

These kids were followed from the moment they were born and were measured every year on a number of different measures. At the time this article was written these individuals were ages 32 years. What was done in this paper was to examine the relation between these characteristics of mindfulness and self-control when they were youngsters, in the first four years of age, and their relation to some important outcomes when they're adults. What you see here are data from the study. It turns out that kids who were high in self-control and mindfulness had less substance abuse, not just their own reports, but informant-rated substance abuse. They also reported overall better health, and one the right-hand side of this slide, you see data on financial success. It turns out, the kids who at age four had higher levels of mindfulness and self-control, at age 32 had higher socioeconomic status. They displayed more financial planfulness. They actually had higher income. They had fewer financial struggles and fewer financial problems that were observed by an external observer. 

So on all these different measures the pattern the child displayed when she or he was quite young predicted these later adult outcomes. They also had measures of criminal conviction, and not surprisingly, this followed the same pattern. Those kids who, as four year olds, displayed these high levels of self-control, when they were aged 32 they had fewer adult criminal convictions. This really can make a huge difference in the economic costs associated with the lowest quintiles on this dimension are really astronomical in some of the work that this group is now doing are estimating the economic costs of that. In the abstract of this article, they say at the very end, "Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save tax-payer's money, and promote prosperity." What are those interventions? What can we do to promote these qualities which really is about promoting more resilient kind of recovery in response to mistakes. This is a quote from the Dalai Lama. I appreciate David's mentioning this at the beginning. This is an amazing book that he wrote. It's from an amazing book called "Ethics for a New Millennium" where he lays out the case for a secular universal ethics. He has a beautiful chapter in this book called The Ethic of Restraint. 

I want to read this to you, and underscore one thing. He said, "I have suggested that developing the compassion on which happiness depends demands a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we need to restrain those factors which inhibit compassion. On the other hand, we need to cultivate those which are conductive to it. As we have seen, what is conductive to compassion is love, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, and so on. What inhibits compassion is that lack of inner restraint which we have identified as the source of all unethical conduct. We find that by transforming our habits and dispositions, we can begin to perfect our overall state of heart and mind... that from which all our actions spring." So I want to just now show you, these are very recent findings that were published from a case study of a very unusual person named Mattieu Ricard. He'll actually be visiting Madison in two weeks. Mattieu is a French Buddhist monk. 

He's French by nationality. He's been a Buddhist monk since 1967. He also holds a Ph.d in molecular biology from the Pasteur Institute where he worked with Francois Jacob. One of the things that was done... This is a lab at UC Berkley in which this study was conducted. Mattieu was subjected to these kinds of startle noises of the sort that I played for you before. And different indices were measured. One of the things that is remarkable is that during the state of open presence, which is a kind of meditation state that I will invite you to taste in a little while. There is very little display of facial signs of startle, there's very little motor movement. There's a little bit of physiological change, but it's much, much less than the physiological changes that are seen during other control states. 

So this really, I think, is telling us something about emotional reactivity and recovery, which can be very dramatically influenced by the kinds of practices that the Dalai Lama was describing. Another way we can probe this in the laboratory is with long term meditators of the sort that I described, in response to pain. This is a slide from an experiment that we recently did where we brought these very long term practitioners into the lab and give them a heat stimulus. It is very painful but very safe. It's one of the safe ways in which we can induce a kind of stress in the laboratory. We looked at reactivity and recovery. What we see first of all is that on reports, we're comparing here novices who are just learning to meditate, and these very long term practitioners who have an average of 34,000 lifetime hours of practice. In response to the same level of heat they are reporting dramatically less unpleasantness, even though their reports of the intensity of the stimulus are roughly comparable. It turns out that the brain shows very different patterns of response. I don't want to go into all the details here, but there's a dramatic change in the recovery in certain regions of the brain. 

So that the red here are the meditators, the blue are the novices. Going below the line, negative, means that the signals are actually going down in a number of brain regions over time. This indicates a dramatic process of recovery that we can see at the level of the brain in response to a stimulus that typically is associated with very elevated levels of responding. So this is just an example of how we can use these strategies to influence the process of recovery. It's like to end my remarks here by just inviting you to taste what this actually might be. How we can actually use our own minds to facilitate a more skillful style of recovery, to help promote resilience in our everyday life when we encounter life's slings and arrows. If you'll permit me, we'll just do a little experiment by way of interrogating our own minds. We'll see how you respond to this. Let's first sit up with our spines erect.  Plant your feet on the floor, and sit and feel grounded. 

I invite you to close your eyes, just gently, and gently bring your awareness to your breathing. It might be sensations in your belly or around the tip of your nostril. [soft music begins] Just notice these sensations without trying to control them. There's no need to control them. Just gently observe.  Now, as we've talked about before, it's natural for the mind to get lost in thoughts and feeling. When you notice that you've been lost, you've arrived at an opportunity for awareness.  Just gently stay focused on your breathing, whatever sensations you feel, wherever you might feel them. Notice your breathing without having to change your breathing. Again, it's very natural for the mind to get lost in thoughts and feelings. 

That's okay. When you notice that you've been lost, you've arrived. You've arrived at an opportunity for awareness. Remember, this is all about how you recover. § §  [air horn blows weakly]  § §  >> If the sound had been the fifth in a series of noises, it probably wouldn't have been as disturbing. You would have expected it. Me too. I made that sound and I didn't like it at all. I knew it was coming, and as Dr. Davidson pointed out, it's all about our recovery time. Back to some kind of emotional baseline. 

§ §  But our emotional baseline is kind of a rolling horizon. Every moment of recovery moves it forward. We bring it along with us kind of like a snail brings his house on his back. We learn as we go. We are our own context. § § How do we learn?  By being surprised. It's the only way we can learn. You can't learn what you think you already know. You can only learn what you don't know.  So surprise triggers awareness. 

[off piano note]  And awareness rolls the rolling horizon along. But here's the question, can we learn how to be surprised? Can we court surprise? Can we bring it our way?  Absolutely. We can take an unintended act [off piano note] call it a mistake and incorporate it in a positive way... [note resolved] ...into our rolling horizon.  We call that an opportunity.  Change the context. This is improvisation. I don't actually know what I'm going to play next, but I'm going to play it. Music illuminates the mind, not just because it can show how your mind works, but because it only exists in your mind. It's not real in the sense that other things are real. 

Or better put, we make it real. Right now, music is originating in my mind and I'm expressing it through my body and through the keyboard. It's outputted as sound waves, particles, movement in the Higgs field, God knows. Until eventually it strikes your ear and then it becomes music once again. In between, it's not music. § §  I'm very interested in this idea of melody and how we chose the next note we play.  The idea of using melody is a gateway for understanding of how we perceive something as being either correct or incorrect.  It's part of the Jazz life, and as a player I'm constantly confronted with, what is the next note? § §  How do you play what you don't know? That's the question.  One answer is to shift the context. § §  Perception is learned behavior. 

If you want to change the way you look, you've got to look the other way.  No mistakes. Only opportunities.  Do something unexpected.  It's how you make the wrong note into the right note. § §  It's not how you fall, but how you pick yourself up. You move the baseline along. But to practice the art of recovery, first you need to put yourself at some risk of falling. A real risk. The idea of inventing failure, the idea of inviting failure, because you can't grow emotionally unless you do, is frightening. 

I admit it.  Here's a joke about a Jazz musician. A Jazz musician is in a hotel room with a friend of his, on the second floor. He's looking out the window. He says to his friend, "You know, I think I can fly."  He opens the window and stands on the ledge. He jumps out. He falls to his death. The police come and they interview his friend. They say, "Why didn't you stop him?" His friend say, "Stop him? I thought he was gonna make it."  To go out an open window with a possibility of going up instead of down. It's a joke, but risk, real risk, is a part of every opportunity. 

Learning requires risk. You can't learn what you think you already know. So in Jazz, what you stumble on... § § ...is invariably better than what you're looking for. Why? Because it's a fresh mistake. It's unintended.  It's a guaranteed opportunity. § §  Jazz drummer Art Blakey once said, "You make a mistake, you're supposed to be so professional, to know your instrument so well, that you go back and you make the same mistake again and make something out of it." See that's how Jazz was born, somebody goofed.  Is it a mistake because it's unintended? Just because it falls outside the realm of expectation? It is a mistake because it just happened? Or is it simply part of the rolling horizon of surprise? Shift the context.  For example, right now we're on a moving planet. 

We all know that. How fast are we moving?  Well, relative to the sun we're moving at 67,000 miles per hour. Right now, at this moment, all of us, you and me, 67,000 miles an hour. Yet it feels like we're sitting still. Yet we're moving at 67,000 miles an hour. I know! If I'm moving at 67,000 miles an hour, where's the breeze. That's what I keep asking myself. It's so difficult to set aside one's expectations. Every time I think of just how circumscribed my awareness is, it makes me realize just how hard we all have to try to hold it all together, and just how difficult it is to let it all fall apart. But that's the only way forward, to fall up. 

To fall and maybe go up instead of down. The wrong note becomes your new normal.  Our brains are always making predictions and sometimes they are just plain wrong. If you spend a lifetime blowing through a copper tube, that tube won't change, but you will. Music molds us. It can also show us that we don't just move through events. Events move through us. We can't control them, only how we respond to them. And that's how you play what you don't know.  >> We can't control them, only how we respond to them. 

So let's now spend a few minutes again practicing this, using the two pronged approach that the Dalai Lama recommended. I invite you all to sit up straight and to notice your mind. No expectations, only opportunities.  Just become aware. Aware of whatever is present. You can use your breathing as an anchor. This will really be a meditation. No more noises. So you can let go of that expectation.  In the case of your mind. 

there are no mistakes. There are only opportunities. It's all about how you recover. When our minds get lost, and recent research says that we spend 47% of our waking hours not paying attention to what we're actually doing, when we do have those moments of awareness after we've read through several pages and realize that we have no idea what we just read, or driving along and realize that we are going to a different place than we had planned. They're everyday moments of mindlessness. But each of those moments of mindlessness is accompanied by a moment of awareness. Those are wonderful opportunities. Let's just rest in this relaxed and calm state of awareness.  Bring to mind the idea that all of us have a desire to be happy, a desire to be free from suffering. I invite you, during this period of awareness, to think of a specific person, or if it's easier, an animal, and recognize that whoever you may be thinking of wants to be happy just like you. 

Then think that as I calm my mind in this way, and open my heart, maybe I can help this other person and all others that I come in contact with to discover lasting happiness and well being. Now as we rest with these reflections, again, it's very natural for the mind to get lost in thoughts and feelings. Sitting in this way is itself a very act of risk. Letting our minds be calm. And letting our minds be open to whatever arises is a radical act. When you notice that your mind has been lost, please just bring your awareness back to the present moment and remember, remember, that it's all about how you recover.  Thank you >> Thank you [applause]  Well, Richie, first of all I want to point out that our technology didn't go so well tonight. >> No, it didn't. >> This didn't really make the horrible noise it was intended to make. We went out last night to Dick's Sporting Goods and got the best air horn we could find. 

One of the PowerPoints was actually this guy running up to his roommate with an air horn just like this and freaking him out. We had it all planned, but the best plans... >> That's right. >> Are you recovering? >> Now we are recovering. [laughter]  >> Have you got a sense how Jazz has played into your research at all? >> Well, you know, my relationship with you has been really important in helping me to understand how Jazz and music more generally is both a product of our mind and can be instructive about our mind. When I first heard Ben say that it's all about how you recover from mistakes, it just... I mean that was such a profound insight. I just saw so many connections. The element that learning comes with surprise. That surprise really is a catalyst for learning is a very deep insight. 

I think it's one that you very beautifully illustrated through music. Also there's just a wealth of neuroscientific evidence that indicates that when we're surprised, and when we make mistakes, the brain actually... Scientists have called it an error signal. The brain actually shows a signal that is a signal from which we learn. These are error signals that are critical for learning. People often ask me why individuals like to do things that, for example, scare them. Why do people like to go to scary movies? I think they like to go to scary movies, they like to do bungee jumping, they like to do stuff like that because it provides an opportunity for recovery. It provides an opportunity for recovery in a safe context. So you can get scared in a movie theater and, in the process, you can actually learn skills of regulating your emotion, but do it in a context that's safe. I think that music probably serves the same function. 

>> I know that my experience with this music is a little bit unlike other people's experience. Let me see is this will stop that hum.  In that, when I started to learn Jazz. I was 13 years old growing up in Racine, Wisconsin, and you couldn't study Jazz at that time. There were no coursesin it. Music schools only taught Western classical music. If you were interested in Jazz, it was kind of... I liken my experience to standing on one side of a tall brick wall, and on the other side people were speaking a language I didn't know. I loved the language, and I somehow had to figure out how to speak it. So I learned to speak it in a very quirky way, as did thousands of others who came before me. 

That's how Jazz was essentially taught for decades. Everybody who played Jazz up until maybe 40 years ago learned it on the pulse, learned it personally. The Jazz training became a very interesting kind of surrender of what you didn't know. You experienced this constant updating, this rolling horizon of the baseline, but it never ends and you never outgrow your need for that odd note that comes. That's how you play something new. It's a shock. One of the things that's going on now in Jazz, it's very interesting, is it's being taught. It's being taught at universities all over. So subsequently we're turning out hundreds, thousands of gifted young players who have access to the entire repertoire. I only learned what few things I loved, you know, the styles. 

But now when you study Jazz, you can learn everything from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane to Ornette Coleman to, it doesn't matter. You can learn it all. But the problem is that the students that we're turning out, who are fantastic musicians, tend not to have a distinctive style, a sound. Because they're learning the technique first. Their sound comes, more or less, from their technique, and then they have to go back and re-engineer their voice, who are they. It's a very difficult thing to do. It's easier, I suspect, to develop a voice and then further your technique, than it is to develop the technique and then discover your voice. The thing I like about Jazz is, even in today's world of advanced technology where, on my cell phone, for example, I have the music for 1,000 songs. So if I walked into a party and somebody says to me, do you know this song? And I go, absolutely. I take out my cell phone and I can play anything. 

Even in a world where technology is changed it so much, it's still critical to make your own mistake and recover from it. >> I think that's really the embodied quality of learning. That's how scientists talk about it these days. There's something about learning in this embodied way which I think is what you're describing of how you learned it. Learning that before you learn technique is something that really is advantageous to give a person his or her own voice. >> You've talked a lot about emotional memory verses episodic memory. Episodic memory being the details of our lives more of less as we remember them. Emotional memory being something that's deeper and not as defined, or articulated, perhaps. What I was referring to in my use of 'no mistakes, only opportunities,' is something that I think is inherent in music in that, we all associate emotional memories to pieces of music. Not all emotional memories have pieces of music associated, but I would think virtually every piece of music has a memory and an emotion attached. 

>> Yeah, I think that's really important. I think that the preferences that we have for music and preferences that are based upon our emotional reactions to them, I would think. >> Do you think it would be possible to talk about the qualities of a person by the music they listen to and the music they love? [laughter] >> I don't know. Apple seem to think that that's a valid way of classifying people.  What I wonder, and you and I have talked about this... One of the things that I'm really interested in is strategies that we can use that come from any tradition, Eastern, Western, music, any tradition, to help us to discover the true nature of our mind. And to cultivate healthier habits of mind. I think that there have been these wonderful insights that's you've helped me appreciate in the work that you do with Jazz. I always wonder why Jazz musicians aren't more enlightened beings. Why they live the kinds of lives they live. 

Why isn't there this transfer? >> That's a very good question. Because it true, you know, you hear a record and you hear a musician play like the voice of an angel, and reach into your heart and really help you through the day. Then you have the misfortune of meeting them and they're not nice people sometimes. Not all of them, but sometimes they're not nice people. You ask yourself, how is it possible that somebody who can play like this doesn't have a concomitant being. I think there's an extra thing that's missing. >> You should tell us your secret, because you've been able to do both. >> My secret is my wife, Judy, and the fact that I live in Madison. Somebody said to me as I walked in here today, it's so nice that you stay in Madison and you give the community so much. I said, no, you've got wrong. 

It's totally selfish. I'm taking from this community so much more than I could possibly give. This is a wonderful place to be. I guess part of it is, you come into the world with what you come into the world with. Your journey is to try to leave it in a better place than when you came in. Whatever that arch is for you. Jazz musician, you know, they really are flying in the face of adversity most of the time. I always say, if you want to see what it's really like to be a Jazz musician, watch them try to get paid at the end of a night. Just see what kind of a dance goes on, particularly at a club. Not at a concert, not Wynton Marsalis of course. 

But your average, you know, the bottom 99% of Jazz musicians. See what they have to go through at the end of the night. At the end of a night, you know, I can't tell you how many times I sat there and these wet pieces of paper are handed over a bar to me. I look at these things, and they have nothing to do with the experience I've just gone through. They're really not connected at all. I've always found that kind of charming, in a way. Maybe in a perverse way. I'm not tied to that being an essential part of the transaction. I think that's part of the reason I can sit here and enjoy myself, and love to hear what you have to say and want to be part of this discussion, as opposed to so many musicians who are very frustrated at the limited number of these wet rags that are made available to them.  Should we take some questions? >> Sure. 

Let's do it. Questions! >> There's a roving microphone somewhere out there. If you have a question... There's the roving microphone. We have some over here. >> There's a mic. >> There's a microphone there, yeah. >> I'll try to speak loudly, if we're on. If we're getting into the ability to...  >> Technology is not with us tonight. 

>> The ability to self regulate and what that means. How do you that to, I guess, as we get into brain function, into executive function, i.e. ADHD and what that means in terms of, do we have the ability to self-regulate the rest of our ability. Do we have that critical function to be able to do so? >> Do you want to take that question? >> Thank you! [laughter] >> Well, it has a lot to do with those things. I don't know if people heard the question. Let me repeat it briefly. The question is about whether this concept of self-control has to do with executive function, which I'll explain in a moment. Also ADHD, and how much can we affect in these areas. Executive function is a term that psychologists use to describe a whole set of psychological characteristics that are united in being mediated, at least in part, by the pre-frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex is this big hunk of real estate that is the part of the brain that has charged the most over the course of -- There are sectors of the pre-frontal cortex which are larger in humans than in any other species. It has to do with qualities like planning, anticipating the future, being able to inhibit distraction. 

Kids with ADHD have problems in executive function, as well as adults with ADHD. There are some scientific finding which indicate that the sort of practices which we were all tasting are the kinds of things that actually can help to improve objective measures of attention. Where the qualities are not measured by people's reports of how well they attend, but really hard-nosed measures, and also measures of the brain. At the same time, in studies that were don't with children, the scientists were able to show that the kids were able to reduce their intake of stimulant medication while actually, not just preserving, but enhancing their attentional function. Now, I don't be any means believe that these methods are going to be a panacea. I don't think they're going to be good for everyone. And I think that there are certainly limits to how much change can be exerted. But there are a few things that I am pretty confident in. One is that the brain is more plastic earlier in life. If we teach these healthier habits of mind in younger children, we'll have more opportunity for success over the course of development. 

The second thing is that change is possible in virtually everyone. Change is possible at any age. We know that there are mechanisms of neuroplasticity that operate throughout life. So I think that we just haven't tried enough. We know that physical exercise today is something that is very much in the culture. The majority of middle class people in Western democracies exercise, or at least believe in the value of exercise. Many have incorporated it into their weekly routine. If you go back to 1950 and look at the data a much smaller fraction of society engaged in the regular practice of physical exercise. Largely, I think, the change has been produced through scientific evidence that has clearly established the benefit of this kind of exercise. I believe that it will be the case for the kinds of mental exercises that I'm describing that in less than 50 years the evidence will be in hand that these things are really good for you. 

I think that we'll see a much more wide spread incorporation of these methods in a secular way in at least two major institutions in our culture. One is education, an the other is health care. In health care I actually think that it's going to make a difference in the bottom line. That is, there's a little bit of evidence to suggest that people who engage in these practices actually utilize health care less. So if health care utilization actually declines, if prescription drug use declines, it's going to make a difference big time in the bottom line, and every insurance company and HMO is going to want to jump on the bandwagon. I think this is how the change is going to happen.  Back there.  >> Thanks to both of you. Richie, I was having, kind of, a hard time getting my mind around you use of the word control. It was especially hard for me as I was listening to Ben, because he was talking about letting go, about taking risks, sort of, letting the wind take you where it may. 

It occurs to me that the control comes in after you fall. It's in that recovery moment that you can't control the event but you can control what happens later. As a former classical musician and a parent of a daughter who is a Jazz improviser, I remember that as a classical musician I was called upon to look at control in a very different way. It was my job to control what happened next. I needed to know every gesture, every note. The terror of a classical musician is the memory slip where you really don't know what you're going to do next and you're afraid you can't recover. I've asked my daughter, the improviser, why she is afraid of memory slips in classical playing because, I said, you could just make something up. She say, it's not as easy as it sounds. She says, I think I'm in a different place in my mind when I play Jazz than when I play classical music, and it's hard to go from one place to the other. I'm just wondering if you would comment about the specifics of different kinds of control and how they may be needed by different kinds of musicians. 

>> Maybe you answer first and then I'll... >> You know, that's very a interesting question, because I had the exact same question when Richie and I started this. What do you mean by control? What do you mean by awareness? What do you mean by recovery? What do I mean by those same things? What I was pointing out by playing that odd note and then re-contextualizing it, is something I think, that has a direct parallel in what Richie refers to in the meditation studies, and how you respond to something you perceive as wrong. In Jazz, what's happening is happening in real time. You can't go back. Of course, all of us are trained that there are erasers on pencils so that we can go back. That's how we are educated. But it's impossible because time doesn't go back. So one of the things you... and it take a long time sometimes to get comfortable with this idea of what I refer to as re-contextualize. If the paradigm you've got doesn't apply to the situation at hand, you have to change the paradigm. 

Because that's the situation at hand. That is underlying the Jazz experience, constantly, constantly, constantly. We try, we fight it, by trying to play from our habits, because we're all terrified at being found out. Even the greatest Jazz musicians, when you go up to them you say, man, that was fantastic! They go, oh, please, I'm just trying. Nobody thinks that they are where they need to be with this. So what we're referring to as a letting go is also a very interesting kind of control, because what you're controlling is your fear response, or your paradigm, your respond to a paradigm that you have that there's an eraser on the pencil and we have to fix things. In Jazz there's no time to fix things. But you can re-contextualize them so you and your compatriots are suddenly in a place you hadn't expected. That can be an inspiration. >> Let me first respond by saying it's a wonderful question. 

It's really just cuts to the heart of a lot of this work. It's actually an issue that we think a lot about and struggle with, and talk to both scientists as well as contemplatives about. Here are some reflections,very much echoing some of the things that Ben said, also your own intuitions. When the mind gets lost and you notice it, at the moment that you notice that your mind is elsewhere, that's an act of control of a sort. Gently bringing your mind back to whatever it is that you where doing. When I mentioned earlier that 47% of the time we are not attending to what we are doing, it's actually based on real data. This is a study that was published in Science, which is a very prestigious journal, with a sample of over 2,000 individuals in America using some very clever methods. We don't have to go into the methods now, but the finding is that 47% of the time, if you ask people in the moment, what you're doing and what you're thinking about, people report that they're not focused on what they're doing. But when you do have that moment of awareness, it is an act of control, where you gently bring the mind back. Now, being able to let go of fear in the way Ben was describing is something that resonates very profoundly with the contemplative traditions that I've been exploring. 

I think that there is some element that we would call, in the language of neuroscience or psychology, control. Even in this state of letting go. The Dalai Lama has talked about this extensively. He argues very strongly that we need control. We need to exert effort. We need to actually intentionally bring our mind to these places, and we can't be lazy about it. If you read his chapter, The Ethics of Restraint, in his book on the Ethics for a New Millennium, he talks about this. I've heard him in stadiums with 25,000 people extolling everyone, and saying, prayer is not enough. You're not going to change your mind through prayer. It required discipline, effort. 

One of the things we found in our research, if you look longitudinally over time with when you initially do expend that effort, there will come a time when it's completely spontaneous, when it arises without effort. But I think that there is a developmental coarse to this where some effort, in the sense that I'm using it, is going to be required. If you look at activity in the pre-frontal cortex, which is this area important for "control" one of the things you see is that in these very long term practitioners, the pre-frontal engagement begins to go off-line. They no longer need their pre-frontal cortex to bring their mind back. They're already there. It arises spontaneously. They don't need that kind of effort. But for most of us, there is still some effort that may be required. So it's a delicate dance. It's a great question. 

 Whoever gets the mic to... Okay. >> This question is actually really more for Ben. I assume that with many years of playing, you get many fewer of the, shall we call it, the opportunities that you have to recover from that lead to creativity. I'm wondering if you find that as a result of that, it's more difficult to play creatively after many years. >> Quite the contrary. As you go along you get more, rather than less, of these opportunities. Because of actually, just the sort of thing that Richie was just talking about. As you're younger and you're coming up, what happens, you get to these moments and there's this mistake and your reaction to it is kind of a panic. You fall back on some habit that you have that you hope will get you through it. 

You know, you're just hanging on for dear life. But as you go along and you gradually face them one at a time, let me put it that way. You come to it, and instead of going to that habit that you know is there, you just, as he's talking about, bring it back and see, well, there's another way. Then it gets more interesting. It gets more exciting. It turns out that the further ahead you are, the more of these there are, not the fewer. It's way I think it's universally true for improvising musicians. I don't know about classical musicians. But practicing becomes more fun as you get older, not less fun.  >> Could you talk about rhythms in the brain, and synchronizing and perhaps the importance of staying on the beat? >> We've talked about the interaction between brain rhythms and the importance of rhythm in music in terms of, in training. 

We've talked about that. >> Yeah. I can say a few things about it. We're beginning to learn a lot about the role of brain rhythms in relation to being in synchrony with one's environment. In the context of Jazz, I think it plays out in being really attuned, having musicians really attuned to where each other is at, in real time, as it all unfolds. One of the metaphors that I sometimes use is this. If you go to a lake that is very, very still and you toss in a rock, you'll be able to clearly see the ripples across the entire lake, even see them on the opposite shore. If the lake is turbulent, you won't see the ripples that any individual rock makes. Now, in the case of brain rhythms, one of the things that you see is that when the mind is quiet, these long-term meditation practitioners who report themselves to have not very much noise going on in the background, when we present an external stimulus, there is what we call phase locking. The external stimulus gets locked to the phase of the ongoing cortical oscillations. 

We can actually rigorously show that mathematically. In a mind which has a lot of noise, which is turbulent, you don't see that. That is associated with how closely you are attending to what is there in front of you. It's kind of like the contrast between really being fully present with whatever it is that's in front of you, verses sharing that with stuff that's going on in your mind. So when there's not much background going on and you're really in sync with your environment and others around you, there is this quality of phase locking that can actually be rigorously demonstrated. Your brain rhythms are actually synchronized with the occurrence of external events in one's environment. That's one of the insights that we've gleaned from this work. I think it really has something to do with being in sync with others. It also has to do with empathic communication, where we are really in tune with others. >> My take on the question is that, when you're playing with a group of musicians, it's not so much about meter but about rhythm. 

The distinction is, meter is a mechanical subdivision of passing events, like a clock. Rhythm is like the beating of a heart, or the coming and going of waves, or something. Rhythm doesn't parse well if you apply a strict, metrical framework for it. You have to relax into the rhythm. When people are playing together, the first thing that they try to do is to relax into that experience, and find where their place is in it. You know, some people experience time a little on top of where that pulse is, some behind. The first thing that happens, before you play a note, before you do anything, you're trying to get up there and look around and just kind of sort out the environment. Every group, even this group I'm sure, has a rhythm. There's a rhythm going on here. Not just the rhythm of my speech, but there's a pulse in the room. 

I think it's ongoing, and I think it drives music. I always like to say that the human animal is the only animal that can clap on two and four. Right? Other animals can be entrained, flocks of birds and fish can go together and you can't imagine how they can do it. But only humans can come up with an idea where two and four are... come up with a similar idea, and all find it together. When everybody does it, I won't take our time now to do it, but when everybody does it, it feels really good. It feels really good. >> I think the reason it feels good is because the mind is completely attentive at that moment. It's a moment of flow. Moments of flow, where there's no background chatter are intrinsically pleasurable. 

 >> Maybe one more? What do you think? >> Sure. >> One more.  >> My question is about your research with the recovery, because it sounds like you're working more in acute period of time. I'm interested to know what you've done with regret. Because, you know, regret is over a long term. In the United States we have this aging population and there's this contemplation about life. It was interesting to hear what Ben had to say about re-contextualizing in the term of music, but I'd be interested to hear if you've done anything with that in terms of looking at regret. >> It's a wonderful question. The honest answer is, we really haven't. Although we do do a lot of work where we look at the relation between these shorter-term measures of recovery that we can get in a laboratory, and longer-term measures that we get in real life, in certain populations. 

There is some correspondence between these different time scales. That is, if you recover skillfully on a short time scale, you tend to be the kind of person who also does well on the longer time scale. Regret is part of being caught in a kind of ruminative loop, where you recycle certain kinds of thoughts. They take on a life of their own. This kind of rumination is something that is very closely associated with regret. These intrusive thought that recycle. You know, I think that being able to be in the present moment in the sort of way that we've described, and to be able to not have the emotional effect. Ben talked earlier about the distinction between episodic and emotional memory. I think regret is fed by emotional memory which just keeps going. So the kind of methods that I've described are methods that really help us, I think, have a little bit more equanimity. 

They may help to diminish the emotional charge which can then potentially help with these kinds of processes like regret. But that's just speculation. It really needs to be looked at more carefully. >> One thing I'd like to say, as it applies to music, and that is, of course, as you're playing and you stumble, you experience regret. I could have. I should have. Why didn't I? I knew better. But part of the training of improvisation is that it's in real-time and yes, you experience it, but you don't have hold on to it. You keep going forward. Particularly with the technology today, where you're able to correct every note, just like you can correct and any letter with a word processor. 

We can do that now with the digital recording process. When this first came on board, everybody was fixing everything, because they could. Gradually, it dawned on us, that just because you can fix something doesn't mean should fix something. When you do go back and correct the things that you regretted doing, something bad happens as well. You start to suck the life out of whatever it is.  When you have something that you consider perfect in front of you it doesn't feel like anything. Gradually now, people are coming back to really, kind of, honoring the roughness that's part of the real experience. That is the real experience. Life is not perfect. You know, you play a solo and, you know, that was that solo. 

That was that. That was that. Let's say hello to it and then let's say goodbye. Regret is definitely a part of that learning process. And maybe a very important part.  Thank you, Richie. >> Thank you, Ben. [applause]