Richie is a neuroscientist, speaker, meditator and author. He is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds. His work is focused on the neurobiology of emotion and the effects of meditation on the human brain. He has numerous publications in leading scientific journals and is also the author of many best-selling books including his latest, Altered Traits, which provides us with a fascinating view of our ability as humans to shape our brains.

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Richard Davidson

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 DR. RICHARD DAVIDSON
 is a prolific and well-known neuroscientist, speaker, meditator and
 author. In March 2021, Richie was interviewed by
 THANGAM VENKATESAN, Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and ANAGHA MATAPURKAR, Ph.D. MBA, about his life’s journey and latest initiatives to bring
 well-being to humanity.
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 AM: Hi Richie, it’s wonderful to meet you. I have been very inspired and
 fascinated by your journey as a meditator and author, and the astounding
 body of work that you have as a researcher.
 



 TV: I completely echo Anagha’s sentiments, and your book
 Altered Traits is the first book I have read twice! It is really
 amazing. So, Richie, can you share some key aspects of your journey?
 Something that I find particularly interesting is your interaction with the
 Dalai Lama. How did you first meet him? Can you describe that inflection
 point for you as a person, a meditator and a researcher?



 RD: Thank you
 for asking. I first met His Holiness in 1992 in India and he learned about my
 interest in meditation, and also that I was a neuroscientist. He was really
 interested in encouraging serious neuroscientific research on meditation,
 which at that time really didn’t exist. I met him at his residence in
 Dharamsala, and it was a pivotal meeting. Up until that point in my career, I
 had been doing a lot of research on the brain and emotions, and I was focusing
 mostly on the negative side of things. I studied the brain mechanisms
 underlying vulnerability to depression, anxiety and stress. His Holiness
 challenged me. He said, “Why can’t you use the same tools of neuroscience to
 study kindness and compassion?” I did not have a very good answer for him, and
 it was a turning point.



 At that time I had been a meditation practitioner for decades. I went on my
 first meditation retreat in 1974 with Goenka when I was a graduate student.
 That was my first visit to India. Most of my professional colleagues at that
 time did not know of my interest in meditation, as I really kept it under the
 radar. So when I met His Holiness in 1992, it was very clear to me that I
 needed to come out of the closet and be much more public about my own
 practice. It was a really pivotal time, yes.


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 TV: In the Gastroenterology Department they think I am a little cuckoo, as
 I am a meditator. They just kind of accept it.



 RD: Keep
 cuckoo, it’s good. It’s very healthy.



 TV: Yes. So, talking about positive emotions, I know you are the founder of
 the Center for Healthy Minds. Can you tell us a little bit about its overall
 mission? What are the services it offers?



 RD: The Center
 for Healthy Minds was founded and inaugurated by the Dalai Lama in 2010, so we
 have been in existence for a little more than ten years. The mission of our
 center is to cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific
 understanding of the mind. And our vision is a kinder, wiser and more
 compassionate world. It is primarily an interdisciplinary research center,
 with faculty from many different departments. Currently, we have around 75
 people working in the center in one capacity or another.



 About four years ago, I founded an affiliated non-profit company called
 Healthy Minds Innovations, with a mission to take the insights from the
 science and turn them into tools that can be used to cultivate and measure
 well-being. So, the non-profit is much more externally focused, and it is
 really to get the insights out into the world in one way or another. The
 non-profit is located in the same university building as the Center for
 Healthy Minds, Madison, Wisconsin. We have an agreement with the university,
 and there are about 20 people working for the non-profit.


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 TV: I did review your
 <a
 href="https://hminnovations.org/"
 target="_blank"
 rel="noreferrer noopener"
 >website </a
 >and there are some nice tools that people can use.



 RD: Yes, and
 we have an App that is freely available throughout the world, and it is based
 on our framework for cultivating well-being.



 TV: That’s great. I know we all talk about well-being, but we seem to live
 in a cocoon. When we look outside, we live in this highly polarized world.
 We seem to be caught up in these currents of social, cultural, and racial
 problems, the pandemic and so on. You have referred to innate human goodness
 several times. How do we cultivate this innate human goodness in people? How
 do we all come back together?



 RD: It’s a
 great question and I like the way you’re phrasing it. So, the scientific
 evidence really does show that we all come into the world with a propensity
 for goodness. Young infants exhibit that propensity, and more than 95% of
 six-month-old babies show prosocial orientation. So, it is very clear that
 this is how we come into the world.



 The fact today we see so much conflict, difficulties between in-groups and
 out-groups, and inequalities, is really a product of learning. This happens
 through forces in our culture, which, unfortunately, promote this kind of
 conflict, dichotomy, and suffering.


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 Our true nature is basic goodness, and when people resonate with
 that, when they get back in tune with that, they feel it. It’s
 palpable and it is recognizable.
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 The invitation in all this is that we can use the same mechanisms in our brain
 and our body, that have been hijacked by the media and the cultural artifacts
 around us, which promote these unfortunate views. We can train our mind to
 return to our true nature. Our true nature is basic goodness, and when people
 resonate with that, when they get back in tune with that, they feel it. It’s
 palpable and it is recognizable.



 It is something that is enjoyable, and they can sense that it is a very
 authentic way to be. And so, one of the things that we are trying to do is to
 promote strategies to cultivate these qualities in different sectors of
 society, in the education sector at many different levels, in the workplace,
 in the healthcare sector. All of these different sectors are ripe for this
 kind of training, and I think that one of the things the pandemic has done is
 – it has exposed this in a stark way, the fact that the trajectory that we
 were on is not a particularly healthier, sustainable one. And so, we need to
 come back to our senses, we need to come back to our nature and so we’re doing
 everything we possibly can to get this out into different sectors in the
 world.



 TV: That’s great. And then, alter traits, right?



 RD: Exactly,
 alter traits. Through that we can change the world.



 TV: That’s fantastic.



 AM: So building on this, I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the
 power of the collective efforts of various meditation practices coming
 together for a common cause. Have you studied or plan to study this in the
 future?



 RD: I think a
 lot depends on exactly what you are referring to with collective efforts.
 Certainly, I think that there is power in the collective. There’s power in
 groups of people engaging in these practices. Doing it with others can be
 enormously helpful in supporting our practice. In the Buddhist view, we have
 the sangha, which is the community, and it is the group that supports
 us in the practice. And so, to the extent that we can encourage groups to take
 this on, I think it can be enormously valuable.



 We are trying to do that in the systems we work with. For example, we are
 doing a lot of work in the Madison public school system, as well as in other
 school systems including those outside the USA. And when more and more people
 are committed to doing these practices, it then takes on a sense of the
 collective and the entire organization really begins to embody this change. It
 can be very, very helpful.


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 AM: You refer to the deep and wide paths in your book,
 Altered Traits, and it seems like only a small minority, who are
 already invested in some form of self-improvement or self-transformation,
 seek such practices. And well-being is a skill as you say. So how do you
 propose to encourage contemplative practices in a real-world setting, like
 you just talked about?



 RD: That’s a
 really important question. The way we promote it, first of all, is by
 encouraging people to take small realistic steps to do this. The second thing
 is in our App – you can engage in practices that are not formal meditation,
 but that are done during the activities of daily living. You don’t have to be
 sitting still. You can be walking, you can be commuting, you can be washing
 the dishes, or you can be doing your laundry. You can be engaged in any of
 these activities of daily living and also engage in practice in the
 background. We find this very, very valuable, and we have demonstrated that it
 doesn’t take much to begin to change.



 You can start with just five minutes a day, and that can actually produce
 discernible, measurable change after just one week. That’s a little more than
 30 minutes of practice a week. It is through this gradual step-by-step
 approach that I think people can incorporate this into their life.



 One of the things I frequently remind people is that when human beings first
 evolved none of us were brushing our teeth. Yet, today, virtually everyone on
 the planet brushes their teeth. When you reflect on that, it’s not part of our
 genome. It’s something we’ve all learned to do, because it is good for our
 physical hygiene. I think most people would agree that our minds are even more
 important than our teeth, yet most people don’t even take the small amount of
 time they spend brushing their teeth to nurture their minds. This is really a
 message that we want to convey to the world.


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 I think that there is power in the collective. There’s power in
 groups of people engaging in these practices. Doing it with
 others can be enormously helpful in supporting our practice.
</h5>

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 AM: Commuting and meditating is certainly something I can relate to,
 because I live in the city and have to take the subway. That’s how I cope
 with the commuting – by meditating.



 Our last question is regarding your personal journey and research, which we
 find remarkable to say the least. What do you envision next?



 RD: Well,
 whenever we are with the Dalai Lama, he reminds us that there are seven
 billion people, and we need to do everything we can to figure out strategies
 to scale these practices to nurture the minds and hearts of everyone. This is
 one of the reasons we developed the App, and we’re making it freely available
 to remove any kind of financial barrier so that anyone, anywhere, can use it.
 We are developing different versions of this App for different communities;
 more specialized content for college students, teachers, for example.



 Second, along with this, we need to develop better measures of well-being. You
 can’t really change something unless you can measure the change that you are
 promoting and measure sensitively. And we don’t have great measures that we
 can deploy on a large scale. This is something we are working on intensively.



 Then, we’re doing a lot of work internationally. We have a large collaborative
 effort in Mexico, where we are training a group of schoolteachers and
 principals, and examining the impact of training the staff on the students. We
 have recently worked with 1100 principals and teachers in elementary schools,
 who are responsible for teaching around 250,000 students, and we’re seeing the
 benefits to the students. So, this is a very strategic and cost-efficient way
 to benefit large numbers of students without having to work with each
 individual student. This is something we are exploring in different parts of
 the world.



 AM: That’s wonderful.



 TV: Thank you again for chatting with us. It was really a pleasure. We will
 send you our research on the effects of Heartfulness, and we hope to meet
 you in person soon.



 RD: That would
 be great. I’d be happy to. As soon as we can easily travel again, we’d love to
 have you visit our center.


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 Interviewed by THANGAM VENKATESAN and ANAGHA MATAPURKAR
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