transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How are we doing today? So much human suffering is caused by the fact that we are stuck in our heads, captured by our thoughts, suckered by our habitual rumination and ancient storylines. So today we're gonna talk about the science of getting out of your head, of escaping the brain's default mode network, which my guests today refer to as the house of habit. We of course need our default mode network, our capacity to behave habitually. We need it in order to survive and in order to brush our teeth and tie our shoes without undue cognitive demands. But if you are stuck in the default mode, you're missing out on quite a bit. And you're also susceptible to many, many flavors of unhappiness. My guests today are Dr. Zindel Segal and Professor Norman Farb. Together they wrote a book called Better In Every Sense. In it, they described something they call sense foraging, which is a simple but powerful practice where you use your senses to turn down the more noxious aspects of the aforementioned default mode network. In this conversation, we talk about what sense foraging is exactly and how it can help you go from languishing to flourishing, how shutting down your senses makes you more vulnerable to depression, the difference between sense foraging and mindfulness. Why, and this is counterintuitive, but why most of us could use a little bit more chaos in our lives, how radical acceptance can be a great starting point for sense foraging, and the nine simple rules for sense foraging. A little bit more about our guests before we dive in here. Dr. Zindel Segal is a distinguished professor of psychology in mood disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and he's also a co-founder of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Professor Norman Farb, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga where he directs the regulatory and effective dynamics laboratory. Two things to say before we jump in. First, this episode first aired back in June 2024, but we pulled it out of the archives because it's awesome. Second, if you are interested in meditation, I would love for you to check out my new meditation app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. As you know, I had a meditation app for many years, and then I went through a painful separation from that app. So I've now got this new thing, which I'm really excited about. Many of the same teachers from the old app are on the new app. People like Joseph Goldstein, Seven Ace Alasi, Jeff Warren and many more. What's different about this app is not only do we have amazing guided meditations from all those teachers, but we also are leaning into community. There's a ton of evidence that one of the best ways to support your practice is to do it in the carpool lane. So we have built in features that allow you to connect with me, the teachers, my team, and one another, crucially with one another. We also do weekly live events with guided meditations and questions and answers, and etc., etc. Head on over to danharris.com to get the app and join the party. The first two weeks are free and if you cannot afford it, just let us know and we will hook you up. Dr. Zindel Segal and Professor Norman Farb, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:
[03:34] Thanks Dan.

Speaker 3:
[03:35] Thanks for having us.

Speaker 1:
[03:37] Pleasure to have you. Zindel, let me start with you since you've been on the show before. Can you give me the origin story of how your friendship with Norman came about and how it led to this book?

Speaker 2:
[03:48] Sure. A lot of my interest in working with mindfulness meditation to help people dealing with depression found its way into neuroimaging because at that time there was a compelling story of antidepressants changing the brain and serotonin deficiencies being a kind of ironclad argument for antidepressants. The idea that somehow meditation could also help people was bolstered by the fact that the neuroimaging finding showed that people who practiced mindfulness, people who practiced meditation also had changes in brain regions that were important in affect emotion regulation. I didn't have the expertise to conduct those kinds of studies, but I was able to connect with a colleague at the University of Toronto. Adam Anderson and his star graduate student happened to be Norman Farb.

Speaker 3:
[04:45] I think his star graduate student went to work for Apple, but I was like, the backup star guy student.

Speaker 1:
[04:56] His less well-compensated graduate student is now your co-author. Got it. But maybe more psychologically stable.

Speaker 3:
[05:04] Well, it means to be seen. A lot of that deep psychopathology emerges late in life, so playing the long game.

Speaker 1:
[05:13] So, Norm, now that we're picking on you a little bit, what's your version of the story? How did this come about?

Speaker 3:
[05:19] Yeah. So I would say, like you, Dan, I was not a meditation guy at all. I really wanted to learn neuroimaging. I'd done like psychophysiology, like how the body responds to emotions from a master's degree, and functional neuroimaging or fMRI is really expensive. And I knew that Adam, my supervisor, had something cooking where he had a funded fMRI study, and I wanted to do neuroimaging and emotions for my PhD. And I was already the guy in the lab who did yoga, like on the weekends. So, you know, it was mostly initially, I would say like a marriage of convenience where there's going to be this big imaging opportunity is going to be something kind of new and out there, which appealed to me. And it was kind of scary meeting Zindel at the start. He's like a distinguished professor at the biggest like mental health institution, Center for Addiction to Mental Health in Toronto. So, and there was quite a big power imbalance, I think, when we first met, like a first or second year PhD student. So at the start, I was just like the person like grinding the scans and getting the analysis going. I think over the course of then starting to try to write grants together and just like, I don't know, thousands of meetings. I think I heard you swear for the first time, maybe five years into our relationship. I'm getting somewhere with this guy. Then Adam ended up leaving to Cornell. I ended up getting hired to stay on in Toronto as a professor, and so now we're a bit more equalized in our roles. We continue to meet and trade off clinical and neuroimaging expertise as we write papers. So it was really an organic relationship. I did start to sip and eventually bathe in the kool-aid of meditation over the two decades as well. So we kind of grew together.

Speaker 1:
[06:53] Well, let's start with a foundational idea for this book you've written. What is the default mode network?

Speaker 3:
[07:00] Yeah, I'll take that one, since it's kind of a brain-oriented one. The default mode network is a constellation or group of brain regions that are activated when you let someone ostensibly relax in the scanner. So they're doing arithmetic or some kind of mental rotation or memory task, and you say, hey, just for a couple of minutes, just relax, you don't have to do anything at all. And then all of these brain regions, especially in the midline of the brain, and then a couple little horns above the ears light up when you tell the person that you have nothing to do. And so this led to this characterization that this is what the brain does by default when you're not up to anything in particular. And ostensibly, because it does show up in earlier mammals and other species, this was originally a network that takes care of the interior state of the body. But more and more, we started to recognize that the default network can be activated intentionally, and it gets activated when you start thinking about whether things apply to you or not. So you see a word like honest, you think, oh, am I honest or am I not honest? And you have those kind of thoughts, you can voluntarily activate the default network, but that was discovered maybe four or five years after the first publication showing that there's this really consistent, very strong pattern of activity that turns on when you ask people just to do nothing.

Speaker 1:
[08:13] Why do you call it the House of Habit?

Speaker 3:
[08:15] So one thing that we noticed with the default network is whenever things kind of become business as usual and it feels as though the person is no longer putting in a lot of effort to manipulate things out in the world, the default network kind of takes over. So as an example, if you had someone pressing a button for left arrow and a different button for right arrow, and they just started doing that task, because the first time they'd done it, they're a bit nervous about doing it right, you get all this other stuff happening at the top and the front of the brain so they can make sure they're getting the job done. After about 20 to 30 seconds, they're like, oh, really, that's it? I'm just pressing arrows and that's all they're doing. A lot of that activation kind of quiets down and the default network kicks back in. And part of that might be because they're starting to mind wander a little. And part of it is also that they've automated their response to the world. They've created a model for the world that exactly fits what they need to do and no updating is needed. And that's like the default network's bread and butter. And so what we've also started to see is that people who have really deep self-evaluative habits, like rumination, people who have depression, show exaggerated activity of this default network. And so these different pieces of evidence come together, that it's on when we're not doing anything in particular, that what people report doing a lot of times when they're not doing anything in particular, is they think about themselves, like, what's for lunch? What am I doing in this scanner? And that sort of thing. That when they do explicitly think about themselves, the default network comes online. And then when they start to automate behaviors, the default network also comes online. And it converged to create this impression that what the default network is doing is instantiating and perpetuating our habits over time. And not only that, that our habits tend to be predominantly self-referential or self-evaluative. We're always worried about how things affect us in particular.

Speaker 1:
[09:54] So Zindel, would you say our default mode is a happy place or an unhappy place?

Speaker 2:
[09:59] I'd say it's an efficient place. I'd say it's a very self-focused place. And I think that if we ever need to step out of those habits, it becomes very hard because we've relied on them and very often we have very few ways of thinking differently outside of habit. That's a huge focus in our book, which is to suggest that there are ways of stepping out of habit that are actually quite close at hand. But it's almost like a failure of imagination to be able to conceive them in the moments when we need them.

Speaker 1:
[10:31] So is what you're saying that our default mode is adaptive and useful? And if we have no other option, it can turn into an unpleasant and even hellish way of being.

Speaker 2:
[10:46] Yeah. I mean, automatic pilot, all of these terms are very familiar to us because they've been used to help us understand how we can do a lot of things and not have to devote much attention to them. But when those things that we're doing roll into problem-solving emotional situations or complex interpersonal relationships, the habits themselves may not serve us any longer if we need to look at different options or consider other ways of responding that are different from ways that we've responded in the past. And I think that that's really where it starts to break down. In those moments, what do we reach for? Usually it's other habits. There are other things we can do, but those are the first things that pop into our minds.

Speaker 1:
[11:31] Let me quote you back to you. There's a quote in the book that struck me. The DMN, that's your shorthand for Default Mode Network, the DMN's mental routines evolved to help us survive long enough to reproduce, but they are agnostic when it comes to our individual well-being.

Speaker 3:
[11:50] Yeah, I think that's great. Hopefully that was us and not our editor. Yeah, I'll take credit for that one. The Default Mode Network, for sure. It's absolutely essential. I would say it's not voluntary that we have mental habits, that we have an internal narrative, that we have a sense of where we are in the world, and some personal sense of identity. The fact that regardless of your philosophy, identity occurs ubiquitously, shows that it probably has some necessary evolutionary and life preserving function. So it's absolutely essential that we have some sense of purpose and knowledge of what we're up to. You can see in disorders where that breaks down that it's catastrophic. Depersonalization or derealization disorders, a person really has no function, no relation. At the same time, the things that we've learned just to get by in life are totally agnostic. The system doesn't care at all about whether the model we have, it's as happy or content or fulfilled, related unless there's some threat to our ability to do those two main things that evolution wants us to do, which is stay alive or at least stay alive long enough to procreate and pass on our genes. So when we think there might be some threat to ourselves, the default network actually isn't agnostic. It will become even more active. It will tend to double down on the habits we already have. And if that leads us into a really dark place, so be it because survival trumps feeling good or connected or so on.

Speaker 1:
[13:11] Okay. So we've established the default mode network. Let's move on to another key pair of concepts. Because we're going to stay on the definitional tip for the beginning of this interview before we get into the practical parts. So as I said, we talked about the default mode network. You then talk about the difference between languishing and flourishing. So Zindel, why don't you pick up and describe what are these two states and what is the difference?

Speaker 2:
[13:38] Yeah, languishing is a term that actually was popularized during the COVID epidemic to suggest the state in which people are just getting by. Not a lot of satisfaction, not a lot of engagement with what they're doing, but surviving difficult circumstances, and often by retreating, avoiding, and living lives of quiet desperation. This is linked to people making decisions about work, choices that involved not willing to return to previous routines, something that was called the great resignation. But basically, it's a deficit of the reward system, the ability to feel motivated and incentivized by the same things that kept us moving. Could be a low-grade depressive reaction or a low-grade reaction of despair and hopelessness to circumstances, often external circumstances that keep people living in a way that's very constricted. So that's languishing. It's just day-to-day, not really going anywhere, waking up, the whole thing repeats again. It's in contrast to flourishing, which I think is also a bit of a new agey concept where people can be seen to maximize passion, maximize engagement, pursue important values and goals, and allow themselves to have a trajectory in their lives where they can see themselves optimizing values and living in ways where they're both enriching and expanding their sense of self and also contributing to those people around them. So they're sort of two contrasting views of lives lived through periods of time when conditions were very challenging.

Speaker 1:
[15:35] What is the connection between the Default Mode Network and languishing versus flourishing?

Speaker 2:
[15:41] The Default Mode Network allows us to engage in routines that are working for us, that allow us to get through the day. But often they also keep us trapped in solutions to problems that we face that have been kind of tried and true. And so, it reduces novelty, it reduces curiosity, it reduces exploration, and it keeps us, in a sense, running off the same scripts. And I think as a result of that, the things that we're trying to put into the conversation involve much more of a commitment to curiosity, exploration and novelty as a way of trying to undo some of these tendencies that are over-rehearsed and often automatic.

Speaker 1:
[16:32] Okay, so, Norman, I think this brings us to the central thesis of the book. How do we move from languishing to flourishing? How do we escape the more noxious aspects of the default mode network?

Speaker 3:
[16:50] Yeah, I think it's useful, as Zindel already alluded to, to remember that the default mode network is absolutely essential. The habits and the ability to automate our experience is essential. But to think of it as one of two major psychological forces that are being perpetuated in our lives, which is a force towards stability. Right? So we're trying to find ways to have accurate models of the world. And in doing so, we want to discount things that are going to disrupt our models, right? And try to have a sense that, you know, we're in control, we know what's going on. And that can come at the expense of surprise, new connection and change in general. And for us to really flourish, one of the central sort of aspects of flourishing is this feeling that we're growing and developing, right? If we were to tell anyone, today is as good as it's ever going to get. Nothing's ever going to get better than it is now. You already know everything you're going to, you're going to know about the world. So, yep, good luck. You know, it probably wouldn't be the best day of that person's life, right? The best days of our lives are often days where we feel like we've expanded, grown, made a new connection, learned something. And so those are all aspects of change, which the default mode network is trying desperately to minimize, trying desperately to minimize how often we become surprised or have to update our own models or change ourselves to accommodate the world. So the thesis is that if we really want to have lives where we have flourishing, where we feel like we're growing and developing, we have to undercut the dominance, the default mode network can develop a skillfulness in toggling from a state of automaticity when it serves us into a state of exploration, where we're allowing the world to change us instead of always making the priority having the world fall into line with our expectations and our models. So we have to learn to step out of the house of habit. We have to learn to disengage from the default mode network as the dominant mode and find a way to balance that with another state which we think is fundamentally distinct from moving towards automaticity and preserving habit, which we call a state of sensation.

Speaker 1:
[18:58] Okay. So say more about that. What is a state of sensation?

Speaker 3:
[19:01] So if you think about the architecture of the brain being somewhat wiggly between people, there's still some very clearly delineated parts of the brain that are almost exactly the same for everyone, including where the default mode network is, and where the sensory cortices, where the parts of our brain that first put together sensory information from our sense organs like the eardrums, the retina of the eye, the surface of the skin, and the feelings within our body. These sensory neighborhoods are geographically distinct from the default mode network. So you can think of the brain as being this massive factory trying to send resources, number one resource being oxygen, to different parts of the factory depending on what it's trying to produce. And to the extent that we're putting a ton of resources into the default mode network, we're somewhat impoverishing our ability to accurately and dynamically represent sensory information. But the converse is also true. If there were a way for us to prioritize sensory input and integrating and exploring and expanding upon sensory information, we would be drawing resources away from the default mode network. But at a higher implicational level, that means we're also drawing resources away from the priority of stability towards the prioritization of change and growth. So the fortunate thing for pretty much every person on the planet is that we do have the ability to choose where these resources are allocated, and we call that ability attention. So if we pay attention to our senses in a way that is genuine, and we can see that the point of the exercise right now is actually to notice the contours of my hand right now as I look at it, the weight of my hand in the air, the colors, the different textures, and really that's the point of the exercise. I'm not trying to do anything, figure out what routine to activate with my hand at this point. Then what I'm doing in this very moment is changing the priorities for the brain to activate sensory cortices. By doing so, I'm necessarily pulling activity away from the Nafal mode network. When we say engage in sensation, we mean develop some basic skillfulness in intentionally attending to the senses.

Speaker 1:
[21:14] Aren't you just describing mindfulness and meditation?

Speaker 2:
[21:18] No. I think what we're describing, and this is potentially disruptive, are some of the fruits of mindfulness and meditation. But I would say that the bar for entry is much, much lower. I mean, some of the motivation for writing this book has come from a kind of public health realization, the success of your app and others notwithstanding, that many people, they don't sign up for meditation, or they try it, but they disengage pretty quickly. We're trying to find a way of providing them with some of the sensory saturated experiences that some people who practice meditation can get without the practice of meditation being required. Now, maybe that's a very short runway, and without a continuous practice of meditation, they won't get very much further down the road. But for the purposes of what we're trying to suggest, there is this natural quieting response that happens when sensation is amplified through attention, and the default mode or other parts of the brain that are much more thinking oriented, quiet down. To be able to provide that to a very large number of people might be an important starting point. It's like putting fluoride in the water. It's something that's going to touch very, very many mouths. It may not fully have the same impact as going to a dentist in terms of dealing with cavities and other sorts of things. But I think what's seductive to us is the reach, the possibility that people can very easily and without much infrastructure, have this experience of sensation in a way that opens them up to the qualities of exploration, curiosity, complexity, change that you can find in meditation. But that might help them to start to see things even differently on a moment by moment basis.

Speaker 1:
[23:20] Yeah, I'm intrigued by that as well. The meditation is a pain in the ass and a lot of, I mean, I do it regularly. A lot of people do it regularly, but it's hard to start a habit. It's hard to find the time. And even when you do start a habit, you can fall off the wagon. And so the fluoride analogy lands for me. Perhaps you could say a little bit more about what exactly is the difference between what you're proposing, the fluoride version, the widely accessible version. What's the difference between what you're proposing and what I think a lot of people listening to this show will recognize as meditation?

Speaker 2:
[24:00] Yeah. I'll just take a crack at it. So I think there is a way in which we're not trying to distance ourselves from the meditation world. In fact, and I've heard this a lot, people often stop meditating because they have misconceptions of what meditation should be doing. So for example, people who start to meditate and find that they're not really good at emptying their minds. And so it turns them off and they stop. Or they're not very good at producing relaxation on command. Meditation is not doing that for them. So they stop. These are, I think, barriers for people to engage in meditation. And so for us, what I would say is meditation practices that emphasize the sensory elements of the practice, rather than the conceptual elements, are more likely to be tractable for people. Now, on the other end, the disruption that I think people are picking up from the book, is that what we're suggesting to people when they practice sense foraging is something akin to a shift of tension into the sensory world. But the barriers are very, very thin because senses are ubiquitous, sensory information and the possibility of immersion in any moment is right there, literally at our fingertips. So this shift can be made very easily, very quickly, very portably, without having paraphernalia of a cushion, and a this, and a that, and a place. Not that those are bad things, but that we can invite people into this theater to see maybe the first act of a play that they might want to continue to watch. But the price of admission is very, very low, and they get a lot back from it. They get the neural benefits of this natural quieting, and they just start to realize, I think, over time, that sensing is not thinking. Thinking is often the place where many of their problems are cooked up, and yet sensing might be the place where change is possible.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] Norm, he just used, Zindel did, a term that he just introduced it into the conversation for the first time, sense foraging. What does that mean?

Speaker 3:
[26:21] So sense foraging is going to sound a lot like the John Kavitson definition for mindfulness, but focusing specifically on sensation. So it's going to be paying attention on purpose. That probably sounds familiar.

Speaker 2:
[26:32] Stop right there.

Speaker 3:
[26:33] But to something sensory that you can notice right now. And to do it with, I would say, not an expectation, but with an intention to find something that is interesting, surprising, or unusual. So you can think of this as a refinement or a subsection of a broader mindfulness practice where we're really trying to only sense forage to say, I want to look for something that I can sense they would ordinarily ignore, that I would normally pass by. Not that we are physically blind or deaf to the world around us, but we are attentionally blind to most things just so we can get through life, so we can get things done. So sense foraging is saying, you know, right here around me, what is something that I would normally dismiss? And how do I explore that for a moment or two? And what we predict is what will happen is something surprising, and you'll have to step into kind of not knowing. If you really don't know when you look at something, that's when you're getting into sense foraging. And it's more than just confirming, oh, there's a table here, it might be, I hadn't noticed the grains on this table before, or I hadn't noticed how dirty it was, or I hadn't noticed that it has a smell to it. You know, whatever it is, you're waiting and trying to be receptive for what's showing up in response to allocating your sensory attention. But there is an expectation that it's going to be something surprising and probably something that might be of some use to you. Right? I think that's why we use the term foraging. You don't go foraging in the forest, you know, saying, oh, it's all the same to me if I find a chanterelle mushroom or a bare mulls. You go foraging thinking like, I'm hoping I find something useful. So, paying attention on purpose in the moment to our senses, but with the intention of finding something interesting, novel and potentially useful to us.

Speaker 1:
[28:15] Well, let's get a little bit more concrete. Can one of you just walk us through? I know the book is loaded, larded with these sense foraging exercises. Can you just give us a taste of what a sense foraging exercise would be like?

Speaker 3:
[28:32] I mean, I think one that I really like is first, take stock of how much you actually care about what the space around you is like. So, really just don't even start sense foraging or anything, but we're just trying to notice, how much do I care about what this room around me is like? Right now, we're in a studio space that we've never been in before. Tons of novelty. I'm really focused on this podcast. So, if I first check in, I don't care because I want to perform well in the podcast. So, I notice I don't give a shit. There's a lot of stuff to pick up right now, and that's what's true of me right now. The second step would be then to say, okay, I want to set this intention, then I'm going to give myself permission to go out of doing and performing mode and become receptive. So, I'm giving myself permission to care about what's around me. Then we can just take a few moments and actually look around the room. And like what it's like to let go of the task set and actually care about interesting accoutrements of this studio space, for instance. And so you can edit in or out as much time as you want. But I would say give it five or 10 seconds at least. And then you can come back and say, so, have I noticed anything different? So for me right now, I can notice actually feeling a bit more relaxed because I've put down the weight of to some degree, I've put down all the way of performing well in a podcast environment. And I realize I'm also kind of grounded in this space. And so it's not a completely new exercise. You can say, well, this sounds just like a grounding exercise that you might do if you have anxiety. And say, yeah, that's a sense foraging practice. So I think what we're trying to introduce here is not like no one's ever heard of this before. This isn't not never described in mindfulness, right? It's never been done in counseling and psychology or any other tradition. It's more like this cuts across all of these different wisdom traditions, modern and ancient. What we're trying to do is really to show that there's this one mechanism that's really important that I think is still vastly underappreciated, which is how quickly we lose our ability to care about the space around us and within us. And as Zindel was saying, how eminently available it is. And without a lot of preciousness or bowing and kowtowing to tradition or anything like that, it's available and there should be returns like immediately pretty much for most of us who are living kind of stressed, over-automated, over-narrated lives.

Speaker 1:
[30:57] Coming up, Zindel Segal and Norman Farb talk about how shutting down our senses, being stuck in the DMN can make us more vulnerable to depression, and what radical acceptance has to do with all of this. So let me just see if I can sum up where we are at this point in the interview. Zindel, I'll throw this at you. You acknowledge you're not saying something, that these exercises, these sense forging exercises, and we'll explore a few more of them as this interview continues. It's not something new in the universe per se, but you're trying to make a very urgent point that if we can get in the habit of dropping out of the spinning stories in our head, the spinning stories, the habitual thought patterns of the default mode network, if we can create a habit of, it doesn't involve a cushion, it doesn't involve candles, it doesn't involve an altar, it's just you can do it wherever you are at any time of dropping into your senses, and out of your thoughts, this can have many, many salutary psychological consequences. That as a rough summary, am I in the neighborhood?

Speaker 2:
[32:15] Absolutely. I mean, even the well-worn phrase just drop into your body is still a concept. So we're trying to take it a little bit further by saying that caring, as Norm talked about, is really attending, but caring enough to attend, I guess, to step out of what you're already attending to. But the body is a very big place and we're trying to increase the resolution of that sort of idea by saying when you shift your attention, shift it to sensations that are already present for you, that you can identify and that you can immerse yourself in, because those are real, those are present moment oriented, and those have this natural, you don't need to push it yourself, effect on the ruminating, overthinking, self-referencing parts of the brain that can quiet down, then you find yourself in a different space.

Speaker 1:
[33:16] So you're saying there's a difference between sense foraging and quote unquote, dropping into the body generally?

Speaker 2:
[33:23] Dropping into the body is an invitation to potentially sense forage to look in the body, maybe you notice some pressure in your chest, maybe you notice that your temples are throbbing, maybe you notice something going on, but sense foraging can also be feeling some air conditioning breeze pass by through your hair, it can help you see colors that are more vivid, it can help you hear sounds that are unanticipated and localize them in space. It's all of the senses without any kind of, I guess, ulterior motive of looking for something that might connect to emotional state of mind or something that you're experiencing. It really is foraging through the sensory world, through the senses themselves, and being curious about that. I would say that the main shift is into a mode of receptiveness, allowing sounds to arrive, allowing sensations to be noticed, allowing images to be recognized. In receiving, we're not really sure what we're going to be receiving until we start to categorize them a little bit further down. But that in itself is a very big shift, as Norm said, out of a task set. What do we do with all this information? What do I do next to just letting it wash over me and placing myself already in a very different type of relationship to it?

Speaker 3:
[34:48] Yeah, I think it's definitely modeled in meditation and distractions. But I've personally, just from my own experience, I've done a body scan before where it's like a checklist. Toes, yep. Feet, yep. Ankles, yep. Very little of that time is actually me in contact with my body. So we have this idea like, oh, I'm doing a body scan. Of course, I'm sensory and I'm in the moment. I'm not just using concepts, but you can completely like reify a body scan and just walk through to be like, do I still have a knee? Got a knee. Okay, did my body scan? Like, I must be better person now, right? And so, in that way, all you're doing is model confirming. And of course, yeah, it's important to notice if there's something missing in your body or your expectations are wrong, but you could also do a body scan in a way that has very little receptivity. And of course, if you listen to like a really skilled meditation teacher, they will leave such big spaces that you're just like, Oh, why am I still on my toes? I already found the toes. And then like, exactly, you found the toes. So you conceptualize, oh, here's the toe, you got the thing, and now what? And then, and so what we're trying to do is give our own westernized, scientific-y, clinical psychology take on why this might be. And we have something I'd love to talk about if we have time, is a lot of evidence both that through mindfulness training, these capacities are developed, but also when these capacities atrophy, this is where we really see deep suffering, like specifically depression vulnerability.

Speaker 1:
[36:10] Say more about that.

Speaker 3:
[36:13] So I think one of the big themes we talk about in the book is how wrong we were about what mindfulness meditation was doing, and about what made people more vulnerable to depression. We were wrong in almost the exact same way. So we went into studying some of the very first neuroimaging trials of mindfulness-based stress reduction, this eight-week course popularized by John Kabat-Zinn, probably the cornerstone of the modern meditation science movement. I'm thinking that what we're really going to see is this very well-characterized self-referential network, the default mode network, was being turned off by meditation, and that's why people felt better, right? Because they're doing this Buddhist-derived practice, there's no self, so they're going to realize there's no self. When the self is out of the way, your problems go away. So cool. We're going to put them in the scanner, we know what the self region looks like, we know it's actually a specific part in the front of the brain of the default bone, or that's like some of the most involved in self judgment. And we should just see that turn right off. And then we scan people who, you know, done in BSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and we scan people who are waitlisted, so they're equally weird and wanting to do meditation, but they haven't done the training yet. And we didn't see any difference in the activity in the self-referential region. Even people without training could turn it down a little bit, but there is no training effect there. And by contrast, we finally stopped myopically, just focusing on this one self-referential region. We saw there were big training effects, and that they were not in the default mode network. We saw that the training effects were that when people were thinking about themselves, they were starting to include activation of sensory parts of the brain, especially parts of the brain that map out what happens on the surface of our bodies and inside of our bodies. And so the weakening of the dominance of the conceptual value of self did not come from destroying or undercutting the ability to have self-knowledge as we know it, but rather by increasing the scope of self-knowledge to include dynamic, momentary, sensory impressions of the body in the world at the same time concurrently with conceptual knowledge. So to extend slightly, I'll talk much more about this. As we started to look at what happened with negative emotions, specifically with inducing sadness in people, we found a very parallel story that it wasn't so much the fact that people started to conceptualize and judge when they were exposed to sadness that was predicting the magnitude of their sadness. And later in our larger studies, the likelihood of their relapse into depression, the biggest predictor of depression at the time that they're being the skin or future depression in our larger prospective studies was how much they were shutting down sensation of their bodies and to some extent even visual sensation of the film clips that they were viewing while they're in the skin or that was the real canary in the coal mine. But it wasn't something that the people were spontaneous reporting, spontaneously reporting this is an effect we saw in the brain. So it's the loss of this dynamic changing signal from the sensory courtesies that was actually the risk marker. Everyone ruminates a little bit when they get sad. And it turned out that trying to just get rid of rumination was to ignore the reason why rumination can be so destructive. It's the echo chamber of those thoughts that's actually destructive, the fact that we have those thoughts to begin with. So I know that was pretty dense, so we might want to unpack it a bit.

Speaker 2:
[39:26] No, that was great.

Speaker 1:
[39:27] Let me see if I can only just be the dummy here and see if I can restate it in ways that might approximate accuracy. I think what you're saying is that the problem comes when we are cut off from our body, from our senses. And the problem isn't having sad or depressive thoughts. It's that there's no release valve when we're completely disconnected from our senses.

Speaker 3:
[39:55] I think that's a great way to put it. Like if our senses are where change comes from, and our thoughts are stabilizing, crystallizing forces, and all we have are the crystallizing forces and they're negative, then we've condemned ourselves. Because I think, oh, I'm hopeless, I'm worthless, I'm screwed up. And then not receptive to new information. So the last thing that happened was this like, this fact. And if it was competing with like, oh, and there's a butterfly, and like, it's a really different place, then that's all I have is this thought, right? And of course, how are we going to react if that's all there is? Well, then more negative motion spells up, and then we turn even more away from it, and all we've done is confirm. We've checked if the toe is there. We checked, oh, yep, screw up, thought is still there. No competing information.

Speaker 1:
[40:40] So one of the one of your part of your thesis here is that there's, I think you call sensation, the chaotic counterbalance or counterweight to the certainty, the habitual judgments of the default mode network. And chaos doesn't necessarily carry a positive connotation, but you really mean it in a positive way here that you said something poetic earlier, Norm, that in the default mode network, it's kind of us as an isolated ego trying to control the world. In the sensory mode, we're letting the world change us. And so that is this kind of beneficent chaos that you're trying to get us to open up to because then we're not so stuck in our inner asshole.

Speaker 3:
[41:32] But yeah, like if you take it too far, right? And this is stuff that I'm not sure you had around on the show, Will It Be Britain and Jared Lindell have studied. If you take it too far and you go completely sensory and you come and you find a way to completely undercut the default mode network, you also get pathology, right? If you're like, I'm going to become an agent of chaos and I will lose my ability to return to conceptual self-knowledge, then what you get is depersonalization and derealization disorder. The world isn't real and I'm not real. And there's no room for motivation because there's no models to be surprised. There's no model of behavior at all. Will it be what often say, someone would see a red light when they're driving and it wouldn't occur to them that the red light meant they should do anything with their foot, just keep driving. So that's not good. But I think our thesis is that most of us aren't too close to the depersonalization, derealization edge. The problem is that most of us are really, really steeped in self-concept and knowledge about the world really is a certain thing. And so for the majority of us, if you had to just guess from base rates, which way would you want to move first to feel a bit more balanced between order and chaos, which is like a fundamental tension. Most of us could use a little bit more chaos in our lives. And don't worry, like you're still going to remember to be the selfish jerk that you are. That will come back from us. We're not going to just like lose track of that and be like, oh no, no, I didn't realize that was at stake. Even though in rare cases it can happen.

Speaker 1:
[42:59] Zindel, what's going on in your head?

Speaker 2:
[43:02] You know, I think that there are a lot of ways in which we're trying to suggest to people that moving into uncertainty, giving up the sense of knowing what's coming next, categorization, labeling, all of these things are very helpful until they're not. But when people start to see that they're not, what's their next step? Where do they go? And sensation is very close at hand. But the intention when we meet sensation is really one of being receptive. I think being receptive is an important way of helping people understand what it is that we're asking for. We're not asking for results, we're not asking for outcome because that's still very task-oriented. We're asking people to see what the next moment brings when they're able to pay attention to sensation and very often we're richly rewarded because there's so much that can come at us. Then as Norm said, you're sitting there, you're castigating yourself, something didn't go right, this went wrong and then it's like, wow, a butterfly. If you can notice that and pay attention to it, there can be an interesting shift in loosening the grip of the certainty and absolutism of a lot of the ways that we're conceiving that moment. Very often when we start to move into sensory enriched experiences, that's what comes up like, well, I didn't expect that to be there or wow, that's really vibrant or this is really strong or that's very faint. Now we're preoccupied with something else and we're expanding the space in which our problems and our views of self can sit alongside the possibility that the world is changing and moving at its own pace, and it isn't necessarily coordinated with the way things are in our heads. Sometimes that can leave a little bit of space for people to start to see things or experience or think things through differently.

Speaker 1:
[44:58] You talk about radical acceptance or accepting turmoil. Can you describe what you mean by that and how it's relevant to everything we've been discussing up until this point?

Speaker 2:
[45:09] The radical acceptance phrase comes from the dialectical behavior therapy tradition in which one of the ways of helping people who have high intensity, impulsive behaviors and acting out and often associated with borderline personality disorder. There's a way in which radical acceptance tries to build the tolerance for distress in people where circumstances cannot change, they can't be forced, things can't be undone, people can't go back into the past and change things that have happened to them. So the radical acceptance is a starting point that allows people to maybe let go of some of those efforts and to start to script a different way of relating to those problems when they come up in their minds. And I think the radical acceptance that we're talking about isn't limited to those more clinical situations. I think what we're talking about is this letting go of expectation and being willing to explore situations from the perspective of not having an answer at first, but making a move into sensation at first as a place in which to stand. Even if some of those sensations may be difficult to bear, even if those sensations can be challenging, the radical acceptance is a way of moving into that receptivity. And seeing that sometimes putting a pause on answering, figuring out, generating outcomes, can itself be an important step or an important strategy.

Speaker 1:
[46:47] And does radical acceptance happen in sense foraging?

Speaker 3:
[46:53] I think it's a skill that can build up. I think accepting the physical or sensory world is, it is a radical act in the sense that you're moving out of business as usual and narrating and judging. But it's not, it's probably relatively achievable, right? Like I can accept that I have a feeling in my body in this moment. I can accept that I see something around me in this moment and I can question like, you know, what else am I ignoring? I think where it really gets radical in the sense of like, like out there is when we think about where this becomes, not just a butterfly, but you know, I'm seeing the hurt in my partner, co-workers face and I didn't notice it before, right? Or like I'm willing to start looking at the fact that I have misgivings about something that I'm doing or I feel that I don't have integrity in a certain part of my life. These are places that are, it would be more of a radical act to accept because it would be threatening to the idea that like everything's fine, like let's just keep going, right? Which is sort of the default old network process. So we're modeling a behavior and or scaffolding a process of receptivity in a place where probably it's going to start off at the level of like look a butterfly. And that's why people can dismiss it for that reason and say, well, okay, so I'm just distracting myself. Like whatever, what's the difference between this and potato chips? And if you're really foraging into the savory, fatty, salty goodness of potato chips, like that can be a sense foraging practice. What we're also doing is creating a space where we can notice the kind of things that we deep down habitually have learned to navigate around. So that maybe I'm harming someone else with the way I'm used to being in this situation. It may be the things I'm doing to get, be successful or get things done in the world are actually really causing problems for me at a level that I'm putting off, that I don't want to acknowledge. And so to start to acknowledge those things is the same act of foraging, just that what we've seen from the neuroscience side is as soon as this negative information comes in, many of us have a deep-seated habit of closing those gates to sensation and immediately trying to fix the thinnest wedge of the thing that we saw. Right, so what I talk about from my personal experience sometimes is that having developed some arthritis in my hip after doing too much like alternate frisbee and taekwondo and stuff like that and realizing I couldn't do those sports anymore and even yoga now has gotten kind of compromised and the initial thing is like, well, how am I going to fix this? Right, like do I need to do surgery? You know, physio probably isn't totally going to fix it. Do I have to take painkillers? How am I going to fix the fact that I have this sensation that's not supposed to be there? And every time I come into contact with it, like I don't like it and I need to find a way to fix it. This is what we call kind of an active inference. Like I'm supposed to change the world because my model of my body is a model where, you know, I feel fine. I don't have pain. You know, it's like we, a lot of us have the model of our bodies like, like we're 18, right? And we're just trying to keep that model going by any means necessary. And so where acceptance comes in is saying like, you know, I'm actually suffering in some way, or at least tiring myself. It's exhausting getting upset and angry and frustrated and avoiding all the fact that my hip doesn't work the same as it did, you know, even 10 years ago and that it may never be fixable in the way that, you know, I'd ideally aspire to. What if my model was that now this hip doesn't turn as much and it kind of gives me twinges during the day and that was really like who I was and I was really okay with the fact that's how I was. Like not that I would like a twinge of pain or wouldn't be annoyed sometimes with a loss of mobility, but I was really okay with that's my that's now my model. I've accepted that's the model of my body. So now all of this like wearying, how am I going to fix this hip? It's not necessary. Like maybe at some point it wouldn't, I will need to have a hip replacement, but I don't have to stress over it every single time it shows up. So like, oh, I have to deal with this problem all over again. It's not a problem anymore. And so I'm talking about a physical like a example here because I think, you know, all of us who as we get older, realize that there's this sort of ill kept secret that like things don't feel great all the time as you get older. And this is a major place where culturally we don't have the ability to we don't have a skill set for approaching these changes in a way that gives us eventually a place of satisfaction and peace. And we argue that this act of sense foraging and learning to be receptive to the way things are is the beginning of letting ourselves change in the sense that our models of the world, including the models of our own bodies and ourselves and our behavior, get updated by the things that we really let ourselves notice.

Speaker 1:
[51:21] But it sounds like your argument for sense foraging is, at least in part, it can start as a way to help you press eject from the less helpful parts of the default mode network. And then, but over time, it can morph into really changing the way you handle a world that is constantly in flux, often in ways that might produce discomfort.

Speaker 2:
[51:50] Yeah, I think that the shift out of certainty and control is a tough one. I think that certainty and control and our models of the world being a certain way, we have a huge investment in keeping them going. And then the models themselves get invested because in terms of forward feedback loops, we're often getting confirmatory information that says, yeah, this is the way things are working. Then things break down, things change, things shift, and that kind of straight jacket strategy really isn't very effective. So when we let in new information, we let in the possibility of updating our models so that there is some room for breakdown, there is some room for getting older, there is some room for the inevitable kind of impermanence of life that starts to seep in. And with it, the possibility that our struggle against these things can be tempered, because we don't see them as an absolute challenge to our models. We see them as something which we have to negotiate with, we have to come to terms with and find a way of living with some of that in a way that's a little bit less contentious.

Speaker 1:
[53:09] Coming up, Zindel and Norm talk about the nine simple rules for sense foraging and what toggling is. Let's talk a little bit more in our remaining time about how to do this sense foraging that's at the heart of your book. You've got these nine simple rules. I'm gonna list them, and then maybe you guys can jump in and unpack whatever you think might be, might require some more explanation. So here are the nine rules. One, you can't force it. Two, you can choose it. Three, ubiquity. Four, completeness. Five, concreteness. Six, immersion. Seven, safety. Eight, you own it. Nine, it's awesome. Say more about these if you don't mind.

Speaker 2:
[54:02] So I'll take a crack at this. So you're going shopping at the local grocery store. You've got to be somewhere afterwards. You've got a shopping list. You've done this a thousand times. And you've read the book and it's like, oh, so they're just saying, go for a walk, that sense foraging. And I think it's easy to dismiss or to see something about the book suggesting that. But the possibility even in a kind of mundane and frequent setting like a grocery store still allows us to meet, I think, all of these principles. So for example, ubiquity, it's right there. Look at the color of every pepper that's on display and try to define, sorry, try to label three of them to yourself. Try to look at the texture of the skin of some of the fruit on display. Those are ways of trying to leverage what's available in front of us for the purposes of sense foraging. So that's ubiquity. Immersion, instead of the shopping list and what you've got to put into your shopping cart, allow yourself to see that you're in this highly stimulating environment with all of these things around you. You can't force it, meaning don't expect to get something out of this, but allow yourself to fall into it and see what comes at you. Once again, the receptive mode. Safety, going to be pretty safe in a grocery store, but if you're doing this with psychedelics or something like that, make sure that you know what you're doing. At times, it can be awesome. All of these things and these kinds of settings, I think, are available and because they are, that's what I meant earlier when I said the bar to entry is quite low because you can pretty much find it anywhere.

Speaker 1:
[55:51] Norm, anything else you want to say about the list of nine?

Speaker 3:
[55:55] Yeah, I think the part I'd like to pick up on is just this idea of you can't force it, but you can't choose it. It's not that like, it's not a transaction. I'm looking at peppers, so give me happiness. It's more that it's a commitment to understanding that I am always, always committed to a certain perspective that is largely invisible to me and I only really notice it when I make space for another way of being or way of relating to my experience to creep in. So I can't force my perspective to change because all of my motivation comes from the perspective I'm stuck in, but at the same time, if I choose to take in other information, like I move from thinking about my relationship with my students, let's say, to the textures of the oranges, then all of a sudden, things can kind of pop up. I'm just not in this problem-solving mode. My emotions shift, my thoughts shift. I might end up having other insights I come back to, the next time I come back to thinking about my relationship with my grad student or something like that, but I've created a space, like I've given myself permission to shift. And I think that's where things can kind of get awesome. I just, I often think, how much of my time when I'm upset about something, is there nothing about that upset anywhere around me, except for the fact that I'm holding onto it in my head? Like there are times that someone is physically like in your face and is causing harm. And some of us are privileged to not have that as much as often as other people. But I dare say that for many of us, most of the time, like you have a bad weekend, you're sitting around on the couch or something, and you're holding onto something, you're carrying it with you, and you have permission to choose to do something else. Like as opposed to just saying, no, like I'm bad for doing this. And then you're repeating the thing you're bad for also, so you're rehearsing it. Like I can choose to just let myself relate to life as it unfolds in a way that's offered to me by the world around me. So when we say it's awesome, it's like when you get that something you can do, like that you can put yourself into a space to receive change from the world, it's like a superpower in the same way that realizing that you can actually plan your day and not completely screw it up with the superpower. It's like, you can also unplanned your mind in a way. Even if it doesn't always feel good, it's awesome that you have this capacity just to unlock your mind. I really think it is a skill that we could co-develop along with all the analytic and confirmatory and model building skills that we already venerate in our current culture.

Speaker 2:
[58:27] There's a poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. I don't know it by heart, but there's a great line in it that I think tries to capture exactly what we're saying, which is, I think it starts like you don't have to be good, you don't have to crawl through the desert on your knees repenting. Tell me about loss, I'll tell you about mine. And then there's this awesome line, meanwhile, the world goes on. And it's like all of these gears can be rotating in your head, all of these things, loss, and I'm good, I'm no good, and you're underneath. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Like all of these sensory things are going on regardless of what you're doing in your own mind and they're also available for you to plug into. And that sometimes can actually pull you out of that.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] You list a bunch of access points for this sensory mode. You list them and then you conclude with a great line. Some of the access points are nature, exercise, art, travel, meditation, psychedelics. These are places where these are target-rich environments for the senses, for sense foraging. And then you say, then you admit, this may sound a little obvious. And here's the great line. It's not rocket science, but it is neuroscience. And I'm going to steal that and use it all the time.

Speaker 3:
[59:47] Perfect. Yeah, as long as there's some takeaway, right?

Speaker 1:
[59:51] I mean, it's like Bill Hader, the comedian, was on this podcast a couple of months ago. And he said this really funny thing, which was, he's started meditating. He's pretty committed to it. And one of his big and yoga and being in nature, all these other things that he's doing to work on his anxiety. And he said the worst part of is just admitting that the hippies were right.

Speaker 3:
[60:16] Yeah, I think there's something to that. I think part of even talking about access points was like, you don't have to give your fealty to any one guru or someone like that. Like if you have a really, you know, divergent personality and you're in your, you're just like, I don't want to subscribe to someone else's stuff, man. Like that kind of, that kind of attitude. It's just like, if once you understand the principle, you might grudgingly accept like, oh, you know, this is what they were talking about. But at the same time, you can still like flex your individualism and be like, and here's the way I sense for it, right? Like, and it can be something totally weird. Cause once you understand that it really is like a deep, the entrenched human principle that we can toggle between these modes of moving towards automaticity, moving towards receptivity and change. And yeah, like the hippies were right. And at the same time, like you get to make up your own weird way of doing it. That works for you as long as it's kind of safe, you're not hurting yourself for someone else and you kind of get it, then no more power to you, right? And yeah, I guess that's kind of the idea. Everyone gets to have their own brand of sense foraging. No one gets to put the trademark on it.

Speaker 1:
[61:19] Norm, you just used a word, a key word, and I want to close on this word. And Zindel, maybe I'll let you talk about it. Toggling. Toward the end of the book, you say, toggling is at the heart of it all. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2:
[61:33] You know, in the meditation world, there's often description of being and doing. The idea that there are two modes available to us, almost like two gears. Most people function in their lives on one gear. The revelation in meditation can be that there is the second gear, there is this other mode, this is this other way of being, and it has characteristics fundamentally different than our habitual modes. And also it can be a mode in which there is less suffering because the principles of, say, impermanence, unsatisfactory, and selflessness are more available to us in that mode. So I think this is a kind of nod to the notion of two different modes, sense foraging versus house of habit. But the notion of toggling is that there is a vehicle that can transport us between these two modes, and the fare is not very high. The fare is essentially paying the price of a ticket via attention and via intention to carry enough to recognize that at our fingertips, there are lots of sensations that we can plug into, that we can start to receive in addition to that, to receive the messages that may be coming through with them, that can give us a moment of respite. Norman said earlier that we don't want to leave ourselves there, bathing in sensation, but really not knowing whether up is up and down is down. We want to have a way to go back, change, enhance perhaps, touched in some ways, to the world that we've chosen to create and live in. So the notion of toggling is once again, two modes, an availability and the capacity to transfer knowledge from one to the other.

Speaker 1:
[63:17] Is there some place either of you was hoping we would get to that we didn't get to?

Speaker 2:
[63:26] Not for me.

Speaker 1:
[63:27] Norman, let me just ask the last question for you, which is can you just remind everybody of the name of the book and whatever website you've made or other resources that are out there that people can go check out?

Speaker 3:
[63:38] Certainly, yeah. The book is called Better In Every Sense and the website is www.betterineverysense.com and the book is available everywhere. You can search for it and order it online. It's in a lot of bookstores also. Hopefully, you can check it out. We have lots of little essays popping up in different media outlets and we'll try to make sure those are all linked to on the book website as well.

Speaker 1:
[64:02] Excellent. Norman Zindel, thank you very much for coming on.

Speaker 2:
[64:06] Thanks for having us, Dan. Take care.

Speaker 3:
[64:07] Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 1:
[64:10] Thank you to Zindel Segal and Norman Farb. Awesome to talk to them. If you want to hear Zindel's previous appearance on the show, I will drop a link to that in the show notes. The title of that episode is Depression and Anxiety, Your Old Enemies, Your Best Friends. Don't forget to check out my newish meditation app over at danharris.com. There's a 14-day free trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.