Steve Paulson: What a wonderful crowd.
I am the executive producer of It's great to see all of you. My name is Steve Paulson.
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
We're going to experience something that's never happened kick-asbefore in Madison,en and Leo Sidran and Billy Peterson.
A heady brew of neuroscience, guided meditation, yep, you're all going to be doing it. at least I don't think so.
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.
In fact, the idea might even go I know Bback some years.ve been thinking about this event for months.
Our session is called "The Present Moment: They've cooked up something quite extraordinary, I think.
We're going to explore some very big ideas, mindfulness and compassion, the evolutionary and Neuroscience."
of --, both in music origins of music, the meaning
in our brains and in our lives. That's just for starters. tLet me introduce our and how we create meaning
performers. Richard Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of distinguished speakers and
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
His work is wildly cited by other scholars, and it has brain during meditation.
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
envious, but we won't get into he's done, and maybe a tiny bit
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,
And by the way, he has a PhD Diana Ross, Mose Allison, and John Hendricks. He tours around the world.
in American Studies, and has written several books.
as well. Let me introduce our band,
who's also a composer Joiand producer. be He's played or recorded with a multi-instrumentalist,
including Phil Woods, Clark Terry, Frank Morgan, many Jazz luminaries,
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,
some of the great names in music, including Leo Kottke, B.B. King, Les Paul, Since then, he's played with
Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Carlos Santana, Neil Young,
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,
I have rattled on long enough, in the audience, so save your questions for near the end.
Richie Davidson: Thank you so let me welcome our first speaker, Richie Davidson. [applause]
all. This is going to be an evening
[light laughter] of improvisation, starting now.
that needs to be tasted. And "The Present Moment" is something that you really can't talk about, but it is something
What is mindfulness? We talk about mindfulness of the present moment.
We talk about paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment,
William James, in 1890, in what is an absolutely and nonjudgmentally.
said, "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back remara wandering attention,ook, "The Principles of Psychologies"
is the very root of judgment, character, and will. over and over again,
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
A student said to Master Ichu, that I'd like to read to you.
"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.
In frustration, the student demanded, "What does this word Attention."
attention mean?" Master Ichu replied,
"Attention means attention."
So what's so special about this present moment?
Just this moment. We spend a lot of time It's really all we have.
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
So I'd like you all, right now, to just in a relaxed way, sit up straight. moment.
may have a little difficulty, but just pay attention Those of you in the wings
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.
and keep the numbers in your Don't say them out loud, just pay attention to the numbers,
mind as I present these. Then I'll ask some questions
through this little demonstration. about what you saw after we go
So is everybody ready? [audience murmurs]
Okay. So just look at that cross. [light chuckles]
We'll do one more Pay attention to the cross. And just pay attention Okay, now the next number.
How many people saw a two? to the numbers.
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
The number seven is presented first.
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.
did not see the last number, The vast majority of you
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
It turns out that if you in psychology and neuroscience.
improvement in your capacity spend three months practicing mindfulness meditation, you actually show a dramatic
who have been meditating to pay attention in this way. So what this slide shows is a group of practitioners
for three months over here. This is the control. The light gray bars are when
they were presented with this task before they began
months of meditation. This is an improvement in the capacity to detect that second The black bar is after three
The controls, they did a little better, just because they practiced a little bit, but it's number.
But here, there's a big difference. So we can learn to pay not a reliable difference.
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
scientific journal. A wandering mind is an unhappy published in a very prestigious
needs a little bit of explanation. mind. Now, what's displayed here,
This metric on the bottom is happiness, the rating of
happiness.
And up here, what you see is different life activities.
scale denotes, on average, how Where these dots fall on this
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.
here is the amount of activity What's displayed on the bottom
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
Well, it turns out that they're not doing so well. are mind wandering?
Neutral mind wandering is people are relatively unhappy.
This line here is the average happiness across these many thousands of participants.
is to the unhappy side of this So just neutral mind wandering
average. Unpleasant mind wandering is
happy things that people do. about the most unpleasant, least
Notice the size of this dot. It's actually larger than many
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."
is not obligatory. Now, I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility that this state of affairs
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
Now, in what sense can that might arise from it.
equanimity arise from being in the present moment? I'd like to just very briefly
tell you about an experiment
This is a study where we brought that we recently did. This is very new findings from our laboratory.
in very long-term meditation practitioners.
Steve Paulson was referring to These are the kind of folks that
in his introduction. Some of them are Buddhist Monks,
But they've all had at least others are lay practitioners.
10,000 hours of formal meditation practice.
is about 34,000, so they can be considered real experts. And the average number of hours
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,
They're paying attention to whatever the dominant sense that where their awareness is in the moment.
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
in the brain are particularly apparent in specific regions the brain, and the differences
come. So the way we do it is that during this period that's alabeled A-1 here, we give thel
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
This is the anterior insular here. Different regions of the brain.
cortex that is labeled here, and another part of the brain, which
become tremendously active. That is associated with the experience of suffering, the is the cingulate cortex,
The long-term practitioners are quite flat until the actual pain experience of unpleasantness.
appropriately, and then they occurs. They respond to the pain very
in their suffering. They suffer less, and they don't baseline. This produces a dramatic change
mind. It's also about the body. showAfter just two months ofty. Now, it's not just about the
when you give a person a flu meditation, in turns out that
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,
comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd some mof sorrows,areness
who violently sweep your house
He may be clearing you out empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably.
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,
as a guide from beyond. And another little passage because each has been sent
And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. Rumi said, "Don't worry about saving these songs!
I'd like to invite all of you to please sit up straight now, where everything is music."
and close your eyes. plant your feet on the ground
Please pay attention, and pay attention to the sounds.
Soundsfor our attention.nchor
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
There are sounds back to the 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 y eyes.
When we talk about the
present moment, there's an interesting adjunct.
see the New York Times For those of you who didn't
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."
"Einstein himself said that that if you could send a message The quote continues,
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
the present moment, when are we talking about? continues throughout ] So when we talk 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.
Clock time. A mechanical subdivision For example, there's clock time.
We invented that. ofPeople invented that.s. 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, It's this.
It's not a mechanical subdivision.
It's the wind. It's the ebb and flow of the ocean.
Things have a natural rhythm to them.
against the clock. Billy, play a --
There you go. There's the whole business
The mechanical subdivision in a nutshell.
that never varies. And the human element that pushes and pulls
against the ideal.
also has to allow for the passing of natural events, Music is organized sound. But the organization
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.
We understand the concept of Swing is not just the mind, it's the mind and the heart together.
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
animal that responds to music as a group. Yes, birds sing. the human animal is the only
it could sound like music. And in the right context,
I have a friend who's a drummer. He learned to play drums by listening to the washing machine
when he was a kid.
But the human animal is the only In the right context, there are a lot of sources for music.
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.
We call that Swing. The interdependence between [awhat we think we know andm] 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 not experiencing we're experiencing time in a different way.
the clock. We don't even know
But we certainly feel time. Time is in the room. what time it is.
This collective entrainment is very old. Time is in every one of us.
and in fact... I'm sure it goes back thousands and thousands,
It may be what separated us from Neanderthals. In fact, it may be the elements that made us human.
This ability to experience collectively, on the pulse,
the push and the pull of experience against 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?
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 doesn't exist all by himself. He's there. But he's in context.
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
of that moment. Then you're listening like a musician. in the emotional soup
Time is the soup
of the emotions.
There must be a huge
the evolutionary advantage, evis it allows us for a moment. And when you think about it,
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.
You are my context. I am your context. We are always in context. Our context is social.
We are each other's context.
To sum it up, the groove, this collective entrainment,
what Richie referred to as the present moment. is a way of extending
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. but it's where we all live. Time may b n illusion,
That's where we live. Alone,
Together, in a context, we are music. we're like ingle note.
[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
is that entrainment and embodiment is about the expression in your body exof the physiologyis,
that is present in another person.
we share some common And when we have the experience of collective entrainment,
underlying physiological mechanism that we can actually
That all leads to compassion. Empathy is a prerequisite mefor compassion,ay.
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.
than to go back, actually, There's no better place to end this
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
for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to our personal desires and to affection
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,
I know you're friends. how far it goes back.
why come together? What did you want to bring to this collaboration? A scientist and a musician,
about living in Madison, >> Well, we've been talking about this for a long time. One of the wonderful things
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
meeting of two people on describes it, as the casual
Monroe Street, but in fact-- [laughter]
example of a neuroscientist. Richie is an extraordinary
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 a meditator because he's a human being. He's not a meditator because of science.
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
It's fascinating to think about the interplay between brain science and music. this.
as common languages, I'm wondering if you see these
Let me give you some examples, common frames of reference, or is something different going on there?
I think we've got some sense of for this.nce. You knowWhat does rhythmfulness mean to a musician?
Let me start with what mean to a neuroscientist?
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,
It's coming through you. if you're lucky, you land in this place where music is just happening.
You're not doing anything. You look down and your hands
Yes, you're participating in it, are doing 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.
And when it happens, the thing It's like the easiest state in the world to be in.
you say to yourself is "Ah-ha! Now, I understand.
because I understand." And now I can do this,
And as soon as you say that, it's gone.
And you want to be able to [laughter]
recapture that. >> But you've got to play for another six months, nine months.
>> 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
And when people slip into the groove, they don't have to be doing anything special. to They don't have to havety.
a particular religious
orientation. They don't have to belong to
It is really part of who we are. a particular political party.
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
Can you talk about that from a brain perspective? w>> We can, and there are somee 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
per second, but there are some adult human is about ten cycles
important harmonics. There is a particular rhythm
second, and other rhythms at different frequencies. When you are in the groove and that occurs at 40 cycles per
is a phenomenon that we neuroscientists call open to experience, what happens
phase locking. And phase locking is where the
external rhythm is actually entraining your cortical
the frequency of the external stimulus is actually driving oscillations. And so, what you see is that
That's something the frequency of the neural oscillation.
frequencies, and you look at the that you can measure. We do experiments where you present a strobe at different
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
they show that kind of practicing training their mind,
entrainment very dramatically, and quite spontaneously, so that
at certain frequencies, you get very dramatic entrainment. when we present the strobe
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,
effects, particularly outside the immediate area. It's kind of like our mind. yIf 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
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
for more entrainment. >> When I hear you say that, with stiller lakes in our mind, and have an opportunity
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 there you have it. But maybe so.
thing with Richie, is he's very But open to demystifying.hing is,I have devoted many yearst's so mto demystifying Jazz.rt of
A lot of people put Jazz
person and remove them from the body of people, in a way, you pull them out of the pool, Because once you take some
an immediate effect any more. By demystifying what Jazz is about, it's just a regular and they dthing.eally have
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.
You don't have to go I felt that before.
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
that's what that feeling is. feeling, you recognize, ah,
It's just part of life. >> And the recognition It doesn't have to be such a profound serious thing.
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
bit more familiar with it, we see it again, we are a little
enables us to get back to that place more easily.
those Necker Cube illusions, It's kind of like
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
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
has taught me is that Jazz is all about recovery. It's all about how you recover Another thing that Ben
[laughter] from your mistakes.
And that, to me, is a very profound teaching,
said, you know, none of us can because as the Einstein quote
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.
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.
when he said that the meaning of a word is its use. BThat 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
sound into meaning, before it got totally abstracted into --, and verbs, and nouns, theand everything, the whole of
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]
because you don't have proof. Do you think people sang >> I like asking you things,
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
There was call and response, intonation contouring in somebody else.
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
was a very primal source of it. >> One question, before this, tRichie you talked aboutn moempathy and compassion.ly
I'm wondering, Ben, as a musician, do those words have meaning to you?
Well, they're words. Empathy and compassion.
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,
it's like any technique. and why is that the case? I think, you know,
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
Actually, forgive me, expbut it's quite otherty from my betters and my peers. Really, it's remarkable.
which tends not to be-- [laughter] than what you normally find in the academic world,
Truly. [scattered applause]
Because when you're a musician, you're kind of out there. You're trying to get paid.
It's real life, so there's a kind of compassion among musicians. You're trying to make a living.
[applause] [laughter]
>> Okay, well, let's go to the audience here.
the best way to do it. Raise your hand, that's probably
Why don't we go over here. Tina is wandering with a mic
and she will come to you. >> For most of the evening back there,
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.
Well, the only thing All the rest, they meant nothing. Say something about that.
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.
what we do when we do Jazz for But people have been doing
literally, thousands of years. This idea of improvisation, this
this idea of finding your own voice in a social situation, idea of collective entrainment,
of using the tradition the idea of pushing the perceived boundaries
this is what we call Jazz. that came before you, and embracing that, and still going forward,
And I think this has been around forever, we just called it Jazz.
word in the 1910s, 1912s, that they came up-- That's my sense of it. Actually, it was a sensational
I have a question about mind wandering and attention. My wife would probably say >> Okay, let's go over here.
90% of the time, you know, that my mind is wandering
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,
Is that attention? but something in your mind?
the mind wandering is planned >or not, is intentional or not. David, thank you for asking it. So I think the issue is whether
I sit down at my desk and I say, So there are certainly times, as a writer, and I do this, too.
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,
and you suddenly discover that you've turned three pages what we mean is if you are, for example, reading a book,
[laughter] and you have no friggin' idea what you just read.
That is task-unrelated thought. [laughter] Your mind is just somewhere
way off.
so much a part of our minds But in a creative way,ent than sitting down and using the free associations that is
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,
I would like to respectfully back there, yes.
disagree about entrainment and humans only having that.
do it, and that it's part of I would also say that birds
listen to my flock of parrots how they dtogether.the flock. EvBecause one starts a melody,y afternoon when I can go home and
and I can hear it as a melody. and the others,
The others chime in at just the right point. And they don't repeat
themselves. It's different. It's actually kind of like
then a different noise, then another noise. But it's always appropriate. Jazz, where it's a noise,
with everything else. I think it's that's how they're telling each other It's always congruent
Just to briefly respond, that they're part of a group.
I think our two cats then Ben can respond, I think you're pointing out something very important.
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
Absolutely. We've had these insects on one of our bushes for years. uReally, 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.
[laughter] But that's really not what I'm talking about.
>> 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.
other populations been examined to see where our brains Ispend most of their time?s >> Yeah, it's a wonderfule
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
simply because, I mean, it's very likely that in points lin our evolutionary past some cultural variation,
a lot harsher, and we actually when daily life was just
had to hunt and gather for food, that there really was much less mind wandering,
because the exigencies
it would probably not be of daily life were so demanding that it was really, if you began to mind wander,
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.
very little data on that. But it turns out this has become But again, we really have very,
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
You know, if you just pause, that they're doing a lot.
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]
person in and don't give them any instructions. >> I have a technical follow-up scanner wto that.ust put a
We saw your bass player,
Billy Peterson, hooked up. What did you do?
How did you do that? >> Yeah.
>> Well, Billy was wearing a belt that sort of looks like
that you might wear for exercise, except it had many a typical heart rate monitor
wirelessly. We use this in some of our other physiological measures, and we were recording it
We can extract all kinds of information from these signals. One of the things that we can pextract 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,
there is a parasympathetic everyone has it to some degree. It reflects the extent to which
influence on our heart. Your parasympathetic nervous system is the branch of the
autonomic nervous system
that is more of a restorative, quieting branch.
mental training, certain kinds There are certain kinds of
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.
Yes, I know that you're right, because several years ago >> Let's go way back there, the gentleman.
is simply paying attention." on NPR I heard Garrison Keillor say, "Half of intelligence
I wish I had heard that 40 years before I first heard it.
But what I want to ask you is, [laughter]
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,
You can not go back. happening in real time.
You can't fix something. If you attempted to do
a different way, you don't one thing, and it came out
have the option to go back and say wait a minute,
So, you pay a particular kind of what I meant was..., right?
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
you're absolutely right, that it's a delicate dance. Too much effort,
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
into really, really, really long-term practitioners who've now, the long-term practitioners
kind of attentionally demanding task, what you see really had a lot of experience. When you give them a certain
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.
this is the neuro-echo It's as if, the way I think about it is
of effortless attention, completely effortless.
point, then it just comes very spontaneously. I think that's what Ben So onis describing whenrtain
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
Richie, do you think something that's magical, that might happen two or three times a year.
different would be happening in his brain? I mean, if you could hook him up
to the scanner
[laughter] during those moments--? >> He has a pacemaker, so we can't put him in the scanner!
We've gone through that. Yeah, I definitely think
in his brain, absolutely. And you know, I think we have some clues something would be different
I think it would be, as to what that might 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
see something comparable, let's say, if someone is having, during those moments. >> Do you think that, would you
I would, I would. I think that the way I think not a musical experience, but a meditative experience?
it can give them a taste about what music can do is, for the uninitiated,
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
absolutely mellifluous Jazz, amazing musicians who can play
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.
way of being, so that it's just happening spontaneously How do all the time?ate and tYou know, I've had the great
privilege and honor of spending a lot of time around the Dalai
of being in the groove, 24/7. So, I think it's possible. Lama, and he is someone who I think is a living embodiment
>> 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,
and by the 15th year, I was in the groove the minute or the other thing. I studied music for 20 years,
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
But it takes practice. >> One of typewriter or the computer.
my favorite New Yorker articles was an article a number
that profiled the lives of three of years ago
people, Yo Yo Ma, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player, and a guy
famous neurosurgeon in San Francisco. These are three people named Ed Wilson, who's a very
at what they do. who are the best in the world
The article asked, what do these three people have in common?
Well, and along with that, is after you've put in your 10,000 hours, or whatever the number Pis, and you get to the point
where the instrument becomes an extension of you and your voice,
how to go to the first thing. I mean, having that experience you still wake up some days and you can't figure out
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
they just don't know musically, where some days,
time, but that's no guarantee. days, it's the easiest thing. So, yeah, you need to put in the
>> Let's go over here, midway back.
I want to ask a question
about the state of compassion. I'm always intrigued that it
to take action. What is the cost shows a connection with wishing
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
I think a lot varies a few things about it.
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
despite the fact in motor regions of the brain,
They said that it makes that thecomplete sense.y still. This This is exactly--, and tWhat 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
I think that compassion is clearly something that anwe don't really understand. So you know, I don't know.
Research is really from a scientific perspective.
just beginning in this area. There are probably different
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,
entrainment of 80,000 people? Or a couple other examples, like say in a marathon will there be collective
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
to practice 10,000 hours 24 hours and meditate together. So, are these kind of some of the other side of needing
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
I think this also may be these methods of collective entrainment are always taught in an ethical context.
one issue that comes into play in the example that Ben gave
beautiful music, but who are not of musicians who can make
in addition to the entrainment. You can cultivate attention so It really has to do with ethical training
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
issues are considered center stage from the get-go. In traditional in a framework where the ethical
that is how they are taught. contemplative context,
>> 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
of hours they spend on buses, and talking to each other, and the hundreds and hundreds
an overall way of how one lives. raising each other as people, attempt to generate
Today, there are books written on how to be cool,
But all these are diversions. Basically, I think what we're talking about is or how to be hip.
We have time good old-fashioned ethics.
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,
to that state where we're not thinking in words in our mind? or milk, or whatever. Is meditating trying to get back
the Dalai Lama asks me almost every time I see him is he says, >> Well, it's a great question. One of the things that
before you have a concept?" [light laughter] "What is the mind-- What is the brain like
about that." And he said, "Tell me about some experiments that inform us
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,
to the word, and not pay attention
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
so that your immediate response to a word which is to form to get to a preconceptual stage
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
the way a pre-linguistic infant comes into the world. >> I have one final question that may be more similar to
This has been remarkable, I have to say, this evening. for the two of you.
And I just feel privileged to be part of this.
Will we see this again, between the two of you? [laughter]
[applause]