Richard Davidson is an emotional neuroscientist and one of the people to whom we owe the discovery of neuroplasticity. In this interview, he talks about his new book “The Emotional Life of Your Brain” (in Russian translation “How Emotions Control the Brain”), how our emotional styles affect our lives and how this can be changed through meditation.
Could you summarize what you are currently doing?
I am doing research, the results of which I am summarizing in the book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, which focuses on the emotional styles of people: how they respond differently to emotional challenges. The fact is that already at a fairly early stage in my career, I made two observations that had a decisive influence on my work and formed the core of my future scientific interests.
The first observation was that the hallmark of all human emotions is how differently each person reacts to life's troubles. Each of us has a completely unique emotional structure, and this personality is responsible for the fact that some of us get upset easily, and some have great emotional flexibility, some feel great despite objective adversity, and some quickly falls into despair in response to the slightest trouble.
The second observation was that I was very lucky - at the very beginning of my career, I was lucky enough to work with several outstanding people. They were outstanding not because they had any academic degrees or achieved great professional success, but because they were distinguished by a very special emotional style, a special manner of behaving. They were extremely kind and generous people. They were very attentive, and when I was in their presence, I felt as if all their attention was completely and completely focused on me.
I wanted to spend as much time with these people as possible. And I found out that all these people had one thing in common - they meditated regularly. Then I began to ask them if they had always been like this, and they assured me that they had not - these traits of their character developed in them as a result of meditation practice.
It was only many years later that I faced the phenomenon of neuroplasticity and realized that it is the mechanisms of neuroplasticity that can explain how our emotional style is formed and how it can be changed.
Although the emotional style is fairly stable in most adults, it can be changed through systematic mental exercise. By transforming our minds we can change our brains in very explicit, concrete ways.
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And it is the emotional sphere that is most important in terms of these changes. Because it is our emotional styles that play an incredibly important, defining role when it comes to who will be more vulnerable to psychopathology and who will not. Emotional styles also have a critical impact on our physical health. Our mental and physical well-being are inextricably linked.
What is your new book about?
In my book, I describe six emotional styles that I have identified through neuroscience research.
These six styles are:
1. Flexibility: How quickly or slowly do you recover from adversity?
2. Attitude: How long do you experience positive emotions after a joyful event?
3. Social intuition: How accurately are you able to identify non-verbal social cues from other people?
4. Context: Do you relate your emotions to the context around you?
5. Self-awareness: How well are you aware of your own bodily signals that make up each emotion?
6. Attention: How focused or scattered is your attention?
And I didn't just sit down one day and figure out how many emotional styles there are and what styles make sense to people. Each of these styles has emerged as distinct from a significant amount of research that my colleagues and I have done over the past 30 years using rigorous neuroscientific techniques.
These styles do not seem obvious and cannot be clearly correlated with well-known typologies - for example, with the division into extroverts and introverts. But as I explain in my book, these styles can explain the constituents of common psychological types.
And the fact that these styles are inherently defined by our neural systems provides us with important clues for understanding how each of these styles affects our emotional behavior and how these styles affect the subordinate systems of the physical body that are important to our physical health. …
To what extent is the emotional style of a person recognized by him?
Many aspects of emotional style are unconscious. They make up our emotional habits, most of which develop in a lack of awareness. For example, most of us are completely unaware of how long after a difficult event we continue to experience negative emotions.
Self-awareness style emphasizes the fact that so many of our bodily processes that are involved in the formation of emotion are simply not conscious of us. I wanted people to become aware of the habits of their minds that were not previously conscious, and this is one of the reasons why I wrote this book.
My passion is to describe the nature of emotional styles and how they relate to the structure and functioning of the brain, to help others begin to recognize their emotional styles and patterns - and this awareness is always the first and often the most important step towards change.
Therefore, if you want to change any aspect of your emotional style, you first need to determine which components of your mind will be key to these changes
In my book, I offer simple questionnaire tests to determine the severity of each of the six emotional styles in you - so that you can sort out which of them are more or less expressed in you. And I also suggest simple strategies for changing your emotional styles - if you want to, friend. These strategies are derived from ancient meditation practices and are based on modern scientific research. And together they make up what I have called "neuron-inspired behavioral interventions."
These interventions were born out of some understanding of the brain, and use simple mental or behavioral techniques that can help you transform your mind and, as a result, change your brain. In the book, I also show that we can all take on much more responsibility for our own brains and deliberately shape it in a more positive way.
In my experience, the topic of meditation still generates a lot of skepticism among scientists and those who consider themselves atheists. Could you describe what you mean by "meditation" and also explain why you think this practice is so important to understanding the human brain?
One of the definitions of the word "meditation" in Sanskrit is "acquaintance". And with that in mind, the family of mental practices that make up meditation can be seen as a set of strategies for acquainting a person with his own mind. In this sense, meditation can help us clear our inner perception in a way that allows us to see our own mind with greater clarity.
For those who study the human mind, this practice can become extremely informative and provide an inner phenomenological view of our mind that is different from the objective view of scientific approaches.
In addition, meditation refers us to the mental practice of developing attention and emotional regulation. For example, some practices involve focusing attention on the breath and returning attention to the breath each time the person realizes that they are distracted and their mind wanders. This allows you to develop selective attention over time.
The term mindfulness meditation refers to a type of meditation in which practitioners learn to direct their attention intentionally and without judgment. And here "no judgment" is a very important part of the process - because learning not to judge gradually changes our emotional responses to stimuli: we learn to simply observe the activity of our mind and how it responds to stimuli that can cause negative or positive emotions, and these emotions do not consume us.
This does not mean that the intensity of our emotions decreases. It just means that our emotions are not repeated in response to certain stimuli, we have a choice. If we are faced with an unpleasant situation, we may still experience a short-term surge of negative emotions, but they quickly subside and do not torment us after this event is long in the past.
Scientific studies have found that certain forms of meditation do have a similar effect, and they highlight their importance for understanding the human mind. It turned out that the mind is more "plastic" than we assumed in our scientific research.
And by "plasticity" we mean the ability to transform. These findings show that many of the qualities that we thought were relatively unchanged - for example, the level of happiness and well-being of a particular person - are more appropriately seen as a consequence of the development of certain mental skills that can be developed through training.