How to Break Out of the Spinning Stories in Your Head  | Zindel Segal & Norman Farb

Key Takeaway

When you shift your attention to sensations—sounds arriving, air on your skin, colors around you—you naturally quiet the ruminating mind. This isn't about emptying your thoughts or formal meditation. It's 'sense foraging': giving yourself permission to care about what's around and within you, right now, without needing a cushion or candles. Five seconds of genuine sensory attention can pull resources away from the default mode network's autopilot, creating space for surprise, change, and growth.

Episode Overview

Dr. Zindel Segal and Professor Norm Farb discuss their book on the default mode network (DMN)—the brain's 'house of habit' that keeps us efficient but trapped in mental routines. They introduce 'sense foraging,' a low-barrier practice of intentionally attending to sensory experiences to quiet rumination, escape languishing, and move toward flourishing through curiosity and receptivity rather than formal meditation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to Break Out of the Spinning Stories in Your Head  | Zindel Segal & Norman Farb from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Dr. Zindel Seagull and Professor Norm Farb. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having us. It's a pleasure to have you. Zindle, let me start with you since you've been on this show before. Can you give me the um origin story of how your friendship with Norm came about and and and and how it led to this book? Sure. Um, a lot of my interest in working with mindfulness meditation to help people dealing with depression um, found its way into neuroiming because at that time there was a compelling story of anti-depressants changing the brain and serotonin uh, deficiencies being a kind of ironclad argument for anti-depressants and the idea that somehow meditation could also help people um was bolstered by the fact that the neuroiming finding showed that people who practiced mindfulness, people who practiced meditation um also had changes in brain regions that um 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 uh at the University of Toronto uh Adam Anderson and his star graduate student happened to be Norman Farb. I think his star graduate student went to work for Apple, but I was like the backup star grad student. his his his less well compensated graduate student is now your co-author. Got it. Um but maybe more psychologically stable. psychologically stable. psychologically stable. Well, it remains to be seen. A lot of that deep psychopathology emerges late in life.

So, playing the long game. So, so Norm, now that we're picking on you a little bit, what's your version of the story? How did this how did this come about? come about? come about? Yeah, so I would say uh like you Dan, I was not a meditation guy at all. Um I was really wanted to learn neuro imaging. I'd done like psychophysiology like how the body responds to emotions for a master's degree and uh functional neuro imaging or fMRI. Um it's really expensive and uh I knew that uh Adam my supervisor had something cooking where he had a funded fMRI study.

I wanted to do neuro imaging and emotions for my PhD and I was already the guy in in the lab who did yoga like on the weekends. So, you know, it was mostly uh initially I would say like a marriage of convenience where there's going to be this big uh imaging opportunity to be something kind of new and out there which appealed to me. Um and it was uh kind of scary meeting Zindel at the start because he's like a distinguished professor at the biggest like mental health institution uh center for addiction and mental health in Toronto.

Um, so and there's quite a big power imbalance. I think 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 and getting the analysis going and 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 5 years into our relationship. I was like oh I'm getting somewhere with this guy.

And 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 and we continue to meet and trade off clinical and and neuro imaging expertise as we write papers. So it was really an organic uh relationship and and I did start to sip and eventually bathe in the coulative meditation over over those two decades as well. So we kind of grew together. together. together. Well, let's start with a foundational idea for this book you've written.

What is the default mode network? Um yeah, I'll take that one since it's kind of a brainoriented one. And 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 minutes just just relax. You don't have to do anything at all. And then all these uh brain regions especially on the midline of the brain and then a couple little horns above the ears light up when you tell the person they have nothing to do.

And so this led to this um characterization that this is what the brain does by default when you're not up to anything in particular and uh ostensibly you know because it does show up in in earlier mammals and other species. This was originally uh a network that kind of takes care of the interior state of the body but more and more um we started to recognize that the default network can be activated intentionally and it 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 when you have those kind of thoughts, you can voluntarily activate the default network. But that was discovered maybe four or five years after uh 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. Why do you call it the house of habit? Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. So, one thing you not that we noticed with the default network is whenever things kind of become business as usual um 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 to for left arrow and a different button for right arrow and they just started doing that task, it's the first time they've done it, they're a bit nervous about doing it right, you get all this other stuff happening in the top and the front of the brain so they can make sure they're they're getting uh the job done. But 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 but part of it is also that um 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. Um and so um what we've also started to seen is that people who have really deep self-evaluative habits like rumination, people have depression show exaggerated activity of this default network.

And so these different like 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 the scanner and that sort of thing that when they do explicitly think about themselves the default network comes online. uh and then when they start to automate behaviors, the default network also comes online kind of converge to create this impression that um 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-reerential or self-evaluative. We're always worried about how things affect us in particular. particular. particular. So, Zindel, would you say our default mode is a happy place or an unhappy place? place? place? Um [clears throat] 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 uh 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. 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. Yeah. I mean automatic pilot all of these terms are very familiar to us because um 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 uh roll into uh problem-solving emotional situations or complex interpersonal relationships, habits themselves may not serve us any longer if we need to um 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? Um usually it's other habits. There are other things we can do, but those are the first things that pop into our minds.

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. Um, yeah, I'll take credit for that one. Uh, the default mode network for sure. It 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 in the world and uh and some personal sense of identity.

The fact that, you know, regardless of your philosophy, identity uh occurs ubiquitously shows that it probably has some necessary evolutionary um and life preserving function. So, um it's absolutely essential that we have some some sense of purpose and and knowledge of what we're up to. And we can see in disorders where that breaks down that it's catastrophic. And depersonalization or deralization disorders person really has no function, no relation. And um at the same time, the things that we've learned just to get by in life uh are totally agnostic.

Like the system doesn't care at all about whether the model we have makes us happy or content or fulfilled related. um unless uh there's some sort of 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 to procreate and and pass on our genes. So, when we think there might be some threat to ourselves, the default mode network actually isn't agnostic, but we'll become even more active, we'll 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 uh feeling good or we're connected or so on. Okay, so we've established the default mode network. Let's move on to another key pair of concepts. Um, as you know, because we're we're going to stay on the definitional tip for the for the beginning of this interview before we get into the practical parts. Um, 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 you what are the diff what are these two states and what what is what is the difference? Yeah, languishing is a term that actually was popularized during the COVID um epidemic to suggest a state in which people are just getting by. not a lot of satisfaction, not a lot of um engagement with what they're doing, but um surviving difficult circumstances difficult circumstances difficult circumstances and often by um retreating, avoiding and living uh lives of sort of quiet desperation.

This is linked to people making decisions about work um choices that involved um not willing to return to previous routines. You know, something what was called the great resignation. But basically, it's a a kind of um deficit of the reward system, the ability to feel motivated and incentivized by the same things that kept us moving. It could be a low-grade depressive reaction or a low-grade reaction of despair and hopelessness to circumstances, often external circumstances that um keep people living in a way that's very constricted. So that's languishing.

It's kind of just daytoday not really going anywhere, waking up, the whole thing repeats again. Um, and it's in contrast to flourishing, which I think is also, you know, bit of a newagy concept where people can be seen to maximize passion, maximize engagement, pursue important values and goals and allow themselves to have um a trajectory in their lives where they can see themselves um optimizing optimizing optimizing uh values and um living in ways where they're both um enriching and expanding their sense of self and also uh contributing to those people around them.

So there's sort of two contrasting views of uh lives lived through periods of time when conditions were very challenging. challenging. challenging. And so what is your thesis about how we move from well actually let me let me go back for a second. What is the connection between the default mode network network network and languishing versus flourishing? The default mode network allows us to engage in routines that are working for us that allow us to get through the day. Um, but often they also keep us trapped in uh solutions to um 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. Um, and I think as a result of that, the things that we're trying to put into the uh, conversation involve much more of a commitment to curiosity, exploration, and novelty um, as a way of trying to undo some of these tendencies that are um, over rehearsed and often automatic. automatic. automatic. Okay, so Norm, I think this brings us to the central the central 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? Yeah, I think it's useful um as Zindel already alluded to to remember that the default mode network is absolutely essential. habits and the ability to automate our experiences is essential. But to think of it as one of two major psychological psychological psychological um forces that that are being perpetuated in our lives, which is a force towards stability, right? So, we're trying to um find ways to have accurate models of the world and in doing so uh we want to discount things that are going to disrupt our models, right?

And try to have the 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 and change in general. And for us to really flourish, uh, one of the central sort of aspects of flourishing is this feeling that we're we're growing and developing, right? If 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.

Um, so, yep, good luck. You know, it's 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. Um, 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 um where we feel like we're growing and developing, we have to undercut the dominance that default mode network and develop a skillfulness in toggling from a state of automaticity when it serves us into a state of of exploration where we're allowing the world to change us instead of always making the priority having the world fall into line with 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 default 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. of sensation. of sensation. Okay. So say more about that. What is a state of sensation? So if we 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 uh cortices were the parts of our brain that first put together sensory information from our sensory organs like the eardrums, the retina of the eye, the surface of the skin and the feelings within our body.

And these sensory neighborhoods are uh geographically distinct from the default mode network. So you can think of the brain as being this massive factory trying to uh send resources, number one resource being oxygen, uh 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 uh accurately and uh dynamically represent sensory information. But the converse is also true. If there were a way for us to prioritize sensory uh input and integrating and exploring and expanding upon sensory information, we would be drawing resources away from the default mode network.

uh but at a higher implicational level that means we're also drawing resources away from uh the priority of stability towards the prior prioritization of of change and growth. So uh the 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. Right? So if we pay attention to our senses in a way that is um genuine and we say that the point of the exercise right now is actually to notice things like to notice the contours of my hand right now as I look at it the weight of my hand in the air um you know the colors the different textures and really that's the point of the exercise I'm not trying to do anything figure out what 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 uh activate sensory cortices and by doing so I'm necessarily pulling activity away from the nefall mode network.

So when we say engage in sensation we mean develop some sort of basic skillfulness in intentionally attending to the senses. Aren't you just describing mindfulness in meditation? in meditation? in meditation? No. No. I think what we're describing um and this is potentially disruptive um are some of the fruits of mindfulness and meditation but I would say that um 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 you know the success of your app and others notwithstanding that many people um they don't sign up for meditation for meditation for meditation they um or they try it but they disengage pretty quickly and so we're trying to find a way of providing them with some of the um sensory saturated experiences that some people um 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 uh response that happens when sensation is amplified through attention and the default mode or uh other parts of the brain that are much more thinking oriented. Quiet down and to be able to provide that to a very large number of people might be an important starting point. It's kind of 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 the dentist in terms of dealing with cavities and other sorts of things. But I think what's seductive to us is the reach of the possibility that people can very easily and without much infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure have this experience of sensation in a way that opens them up to the qualities of exploration, curiosity, complexity, change. change. change. um that you can find in meditation, but that might help them to start to see things even differently on a momentby-moment basis.

momentby-moment basis. momentby-moment basis. Yeah, I'm I'm intrigued by that as well. The meditation is a pain in the ass. And a lot of I mean, I I do it regularly. A lot of people do 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 it so the 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.

Uh 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? meditation? meditation? Yeah, I'll just take a crack at it. So I 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's 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 um tractable for people. Now on the other end, the disruption um that I think people are picking up from the book is that what we're suggesting to people when they practice sense foraging foraging foraging is something akin to a shift of attention 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. And 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. And 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 are cooked cooked up and yet sensing might be the place where change is possible. Norm he just used Zindel did a term that is he just introduced it into the conversation for the first time sense foraging. What does that mean? So sense foraging is going to sound a lot like the the John Coviden definition for mindfulness u but focusing specifically on sensation.

So it's going to be um paying attention on purpose. That probably sounds familiar. Um, Um, Um, stop right there. Um, but to uh something sensory that you can you can notice right now. Um, and uh to do it with um I would say not an expectation but with an intention to to find something that is interesting, surprising um or um unusual. So, uh, you can think of this as a refinement or a subsection of a broader mindfulness practice where we're really trying to do when we sense forward is say, I want to look for something that I can sense that I would ordinarily ignore, right?

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 for a moment or two. Um, and what we predict is what will happen is uh something surprising and you and you'll have to step into kind of not knowing, right?

If you really don't know when you look at something, that's when you're getting into sense foraging and and it's more than just confirming, oh, there's a table here. It might be, oh, I hadn't noticed, you know, the grains on this table before or um I hadn't noticed how dirty it was or I hadn't noticed, you know, that it has a smell to it, you know, whatever it is. uh you're waiting and trying to be receptive for for what's showing up in response to allocating your sensory attention.

Um but there is an expectation that it's going to be something um surprising and probably something that 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 Shantron mushroom or a bear me. You go foraging thinking like I'm hoping I find something useful." So, um, so paying attention on purpose, uh, in the moment, uh, to our our senses, uh, but with the intention of of finding something interesting, uh, novel, and potentially useful to us.

Well, let's get a little bit more concrete. Can one of you just walk us through I I know the book is loaded, larded with these a sense foraging exercises. Can you just give us a taste of what one of these exercise and me taste obviously is a kind of a loaded word because that is a sense but give us a a taste of what a sense forging exercise would be like. Yeah. I mean I I think one that I really like is u borrows from the the 3minut breathing space actually um but does a really sensory focus here which is um first take stock of like how much you actually care about what the space around you is like.

So really just don't you don't have to start sense foraging or anything, but we're just trying to notice like, you know, how much do I care about what this room around me is like? Like right now we're in a a studio space that we've never been in before. It's tons of novelty, but I'm really focused on this podcast. So if I first check in, I would say like I don't care, right? Cuz I want to perform well in the podcast. So I noticed like, yeah, I don't I don't give a right?

Like there's a lot of stuff to pick up right now. And that's sort of what's true of me right now. The the second step would be then to say, okay, I want to set this intention that I'm going to give myself permission to go out of doing and performing mode and become receptive. So I'm I'm giving myself permission to care about what's around me and then I 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, you know, care about like the interesting accutal of this uh studio space for instance.

And so you can edit in or out as much dead time as as you want, but I would say give it, you know, five or 10 seconds at least. Um, and then you come back and say, so you know, have I noticed anything different? So for for me right now, I can notice actually feeling a bit more relaxed because I've put down the weight of to some degree, you know, varotics. I don't have to put it down all the way of performing well in a podcast environment.

And I've realized I'm also kind of grounded in this space. And and so it's not a completely new exercise. is you can say well this sounds just like a grounding exercise that you might do if you have anxiety and say yeah that's sense that's a sense foring practice right so I think what we're trying to introduce here is not like no one's ever heard of this before right this isn't never described in mindfulness right it's never been done in in counseling and psychology or any other tradition like this cuts across all of these different um wisdom traditions modern and and ancient and what we're trying to do is really to just show that there's this one mechanism that's 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 Indel was saying how imminently available it is um and without a lot of preciousness or um you know bowing and cowtoing to to tradition or anything like that it's 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 lives lives 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. Um, you you acknowledge you're not saying something that these exercises, these sense forging exercises, and we'll we'll we'll explore a few more of them as this interview continues. It's it's not, you know, something new in the universe per se, but you're trying to make a a very um uh 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 uh um uh thought patterns of the default mode network.

If we can create a habit of vi 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. Is that a as a rough summary? Am I am I in the neighborhood? neighborhood? neighborhood? Absolutely. I mean, even the well-worn um phrase just drop into your body is still a concept. And so, we're trying to take it a little bit further by saying that um caring, as Norm talked about, is really attending, but attending caring enough to attend, I guess, to step out of what you're already attending to.

But the the 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 um effect on the ruminating overthinking self-referencing parts of the brain that can can quiet down and then you find yourself in a different space.

So you're saying there's a difference between sense foraging and quote unquote dropping into the body. Generally dropping into the body is [clears throat] an invitation to to potentially sense forge 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 um air conditioning breeze pass by um through your hair. It can see 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 um uh I guess ulterior motive of um looking for something that might connect to emotional state of mind or something that you're experiencing. It really is foraging through the sensory um sensory um sensory um uh world through the senses themselves and being curious about that. And I would say that the main shift is into a mode of receptiveness, allowing sounds to arrive, allowing sensations sensations sensations to be noticed, allowing um images to be recognized. And 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 I 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. Yeah, I think it's it's definitely modeled, you know, in meditation instructions, but I I've personally just being from my own experience, you know, I've done a body scan before where it's like a checklist like toes, yep, feet, yep, ankles, yep, and like very little of that time is actually me in contact with my body.

So, we have this idea like if I'm doing a body scan, of course I'm sensory. I'm in the moment. And I'm not just using concepts, but you can completely like raify 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 personnel, right? And so and and and that way all you're doing is is model confirming. And of course, yeah, it's important to notice if there's something a missing in your body or your your expectations are wrong.

But you could also do a body scan in a way that has very little uh receptivity, right? And of course, if you listen to like a a a really skilled meditation teacher, they will leave such big spaces that you're just like, "Come on, why am I still on my toes? I already found the toes." And they're like, "Exactly, you found the toes." So you you conceptualize, "Oh, here's the toe. You got the thing. And now what?" Right? And then and so what we're trying to do is give our own our own, you know, westernized scientificy clinical psychology take on 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 uh specifically depression vulnerability. Say more about that. So um I think one of the the big themes you talk about in the book is how how wrong we were about what mindfulness meditation was doing and about what uh made people more vulnerable to depression. And we were wrong in almost the exact same way.

So we went into uh studying one some of the very first um neuro imaging um uh trials of mindfulness based stress reduction. This 8week course popularized by John Kabetzen, probably the the cornerstone of the modern u meditation science movement. um thinking that what we're really going to see is this very well-ch characterized self-referential network, the default mode network was uh being turned off by meditation and that's why people felt better, right? Because you know like oh they're doing this you know Buddhist drive practice there's no self so they're going to realize there's no self and when the self is out of the way your problems go away.

So cool like we're going to put them in the scanner and 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 mode network 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 MBSR mindful space based stress reduction and we scan people who are weight listed so they're equally weird and wanting to do meditation but they hadn't done the training yet and we didn't see any difference uh in the activity in in the self-referential region even people without training could turn it down a little bit um but there was no training effect there And [clears throat] [clears throat] [clears throat] uh by contrast we finally sort of like stopped myopically just focusing on this one selfential region.

We saw there were big training effects and that they were uh 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 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 um the weakening of the the dominance of the conceptual evaluative self did not come from destroying or undercutting the ability to have self-nowledge as we know it but rather by increasing the scope of self-nowledge to include dynamic momentary sensory impressions of the body in the world at the same time concurrently with conceptual knowledge.

Um and uh sorry to extend slightly but go we can I will 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 the biggest predictor of depression at the time that they're being in the scan or future depression in our larger uh 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 um while they're in the scanner.

That was the real canary in the coal mine. Um but it wasn't something that the people were spontaneous reported spontaneously reporting this is an effect we saw in the brain. So it's a loss of this dynamic changing signal from the sensory cortices 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 the echo chamber of those thoughts that's actually destructive, not the fact that we have those thoughts to begin with.

So I know that that was pretty dead, so we might want to unpack it a bit. No, it was great. Let me let me see if I can can can only let me just be the dummy here and see if I can restate it in ways that might approximate accuracy. I I think what you're saying is that the problem comes when we are cut off from our body, from our senses. And it's 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.

senses. senses. 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 it's we've we've condemned ourselves right because I think oh I'm I'm hopeless I'm worthless I'm a screw- up and then we're not we're not receptive to new information. So the last thing that happened was this like this fact and if it was competing with like oh there's a butterfly right like it's a really different place then 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 emotion spills up and then we turn them 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 information information so one of the one of your part of your thesis here is that there's I think you Paul sensation the chaotic counterbalance or counterweight to the the the certainty the habitual um judgments of the default mode network and chaos doesn't necessarily carry a positive connotation but you you really mean it in a positive way here that you said something quite poetic earlier Norm that 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, you know, our inner Yeah. So I feel like I should you should go just to finish thought. Yeah. Like if you take it too far, right? And this this is stuff that I'm not sure we've had on on the show. uh Willoughby Britain and and Jared Lindell have studied if you take it too far and you go completely sensory and you 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-nowledge 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 model to be surprised there's no model of of behavior at all right as as Willoughby would often say, um, you know, you someone would see a red light and 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 that's not good. [snorts] Um, but I think our 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 way. And so for for the majority of us uh if we had to just g 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 and don't worry like you're still going to remember to be the the selfish you know jerk that you are. Uh that that'll 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. Zindel, we haven't heard from you a minute in a minute. What's what's going on in your head?

You know, I think that there are a lot of ways in which we're trying to suggest to people that um 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 very close at hand. But the um intention when we meet sensation is really one of being receptive. I think being receptive is an important um 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 taskoriented. Um, 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 ritually rewarded because there's so much that can come at us. And then u, as Norm said, you know, 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 um we're conceiving that moment.

And and very often when we start to move into sensory um enriched experiences, that's sort of what comes up like, "Oh, I didn't expect that to be there." Or, "Wow, that's really vibrant." Or, "This is really strong." Or, "That's very faint." And so now we're preoccupied with something else. And we're expanding a 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 that 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. differently. differently. you you talk about radical acceptance or accepting turmoil. Uh can you describe what you mean by that and how it's relevant to everything we've been discussing up until this point? Um you know the radical acceptance um phrase comes from the dialectical behavior therapy tradition in which um one of the ways of helping people who have um highintensity impulsive behaviors um and acting out and often associated with borderline personality disorder.

Um 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. They can't things can't be undone. Um 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 um 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 uh 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 uh 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.

And does radical acceptance happen in sense foraging? sense foraging? sense foraging? Um I think it's a skill that can build up. I think I think accepting the 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 um achievable right like I can accept that I have a feeling in my body in this moment I can accept that I I see something around me in this moment and I can question like you know what else am I ignoring um I think where it really gets radical in the sense of like like out there is when we think about um where this becomes not just oh a butterfly but you know I'm seeing the the hurt in my partner or co-worker's face and I I didn't notice it before um right or like I'm I'm willing to start looking at the fact that I have misgivings about something that I'm doing or I feel that I I don't have integrity in a certain part of my life.

Um these are places that are it would be more of a radical act to accept because it would be threatening to 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 whole network process. So we're modeling a behavior in or scaffolding um 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 and 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 you know if you're really foraging into the the savory fatty salty goodness of potato chips like that can be a sense foraging practice but we're also doing is is creating a space where we can notice the kind of things that we deep down habitually have learned to navigate around um so that you know maybe I'm harming someone else with the way I'm used to being in the situation, right?

Maybe um the the things I'm doing to get be successful or or get things done in the world are actually really um causing problems for me at a level that I 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. It's just that what we've seen from the the neuroscience side is as soon as this negative information comes in, many of us have a deep-seated habit of of closing those gates to sensation and immediately trying to fix the thinnest wedge of the thing that we saw.

Right? So, um, what I talk about from my personal experience sometimes is having developed some arthritis in my my hip after doing too much like alternate frisbee and taekwond do 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? going to 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 the sensation that's not supposed to be there? And every time I come into contact with it, like, I don't like it. 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. Um, 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 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 f 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 in the way that, you know, I 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 and I was really okay with the fact that that's who how I was like not that I would like a twinge of pain or wouldn't be annoyed sometimes with the loss of mobility but I was really okay with that's my that's now my model.

I accepted that's the model of my body. So now all of this like wearing you know how am I going to fix this hip? It's it's it's not necessary. like maybe at some point I 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 as though like oh I have to deal with this problem all over again. It's not a a problem anymore. And so I'm talking about a physical like 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 uh eventually a place of satisfaction and peace. And we argue and and maybe think this is as a stretch but we argue that this act of sense foraging and learning to be receptive to 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.

And after a while, I just think, oh, like that's that's the hip. Yeah, of course it's there because it was there yesterday and it's probably going to be there tomorrow. And now I have room to negotiate like, okay, so you know, on to the next thing. Um, and I would argue this also applies interpersonally and relationally, but maybe maybe that's enough of me for this one one bit of the response. Sure. 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 the the less helpful parts of parts of parts of um the default mode network and then it but 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.

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, uh, 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." But 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 uh because we don't see them as uh 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 of of living with some of that um in a way that's a little bit less contentious.

Let's talk a little bit more in our remaining time about how to do this sense foraging that's at the heart of of your book. Uh you've got these nine simple rules. I'm going to 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. don't mind. don't mind. So, um, I'll just I'll I'll take a crack at this. So, you're going shopping at the 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 um, you know, 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 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. Um those are ways of trying to uh leverage what's in 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. Um allow yourself to see that you're in this highly stimulating environment with all of these uh 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. Um, 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. Um, at times it can be awesome. Um, all of these things in these kinds of settings, I think, are are kind of available and because they are, that's sort of what I meant earlier when I said the the bar to entry is quite low because you can pretty much find it anywhere.

Norm, anything else you want to say about the list of nine? There may have been some that I didn't Whats do we miss? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Um, Um, yeah. I think the 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 it's not a transaction, right? Like I'm looking at peppers, so give me happiness, right? It's more that uh it's a commitment to understanding that like I am always always kind of 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 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 like know thinking about um my relationship with my students let's say to like the textures of the oranges um then all of a sudden uh things can kind of pop up like I'm just I'm 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 you know my relationship with my grad student or something like that.

Um, but I've created a a space like I've given myself permission to to shift, right? And I think that's where things can kind of get awesome. Like how I just I often think like how much of my time when I'm I'm upset about something, is there nothing about that upset anywhere around me except for the fact that I'm holding on to it in my head, right? Like there there are times that someone is physically like in your face and is is causing harm. And some of us are are privileged to not have it as much of as often as other people.

But I dare say that for 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 you're holding on to something. You're 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 as 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.

Right? And that so when we say it's it's awesome. It's like when you when you get that that's 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 you know your day and not completely screw it up is a superpower. It's like you can also unplan your mind in a way. Um, and so even if it doesn't always feel good, it's like awesome that you have this this capacity just to to unlock your mind.

And I really think it is a a skill that we could co-develop along with all the analytic and confirmatory and model building skills that we already uh venerate um in our in our current culture. culture. culture. You know, Dan, there's a there's a poem, sorry, if I can just add one thing, Dan. Uh there's a poem by Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. Um, 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, um, 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. in your own and 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 sometimes can actually pull you out of that.

of that. of that. You list a bunch of access points for for this sensory mode. You list them and then you 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, you know, this may sound a little obvious, and here's the great line. It's not rocket science, but it is neuroscience. And I am going to steal that and use it all the time.

Perfect. Yeah. As long as there's some takeaway, right? takeaway, right? takeaway, right? I mean, it's like Bill her, the comedian, was on this podcast a couple months ago and he said this really funny thing, which was, you know, he's he's started meditating. He's pretty committed to it. And one of his big and 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 just admitting that the hippies were right. right. right. Yeah.

I think there's something to that. I think part of you even talking about access points was like you don't have to give your feelalty to any any one guru or someone like that like if you have a really you know uh divergent personality um and you're and you're you're just like I don't want to subscribe to someone else's stuff man like that kind of attitude it's just like of that kind of attitude it's just like if once you understand the principle you might grudgingly accept like oh I 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 something totally weird because once you understand that it really is like a a deeply entrenched human principle that we can toggle between these modes of moving towards automaticity and moving towards receptivity and change.

Um then yeah, like the hippies were right. And at the same time, like you get to make up your own weird way of doing it. Uh that that works for you. As long as it it's kind of safe, not hurting yourself for someone else and you kind of get it, then you know, more power to you, right? And and um yeah, I guess that's kind of the the idea. Everyone gets to have their own brand of sense foraging. No one gets to put the the trademark on it.

Norm, you just used a word um a key word and I want to close on on this 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 what do you mean by that? that? that? You know in the meditation [clears throat] world there's often description of being and doing. Um 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 this 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 uh suffering because the principles of say impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, 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. Um 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 the fair is not very high. The fair is essentially paying the price of a ticket via attention and via intention to care enough to recognize that at our fingertips there are lots of sensations that we can plug into and that we can start to receive in in addition to that receive the messages that may be coming through with them that can give us a moment of restbite.

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 changed enhanced perhaps touched in some ways to the world that we've chosen to create and live in. And so the notion of toggling is once again two modes an availability and the capacity to transfer knowledge from one to the other. other. other. Is there some place either of you was hoping we would get to that we that we didn't get to.

Not for me. Uh we didn't go into a lot a lot of depth about the depression relapse stuff cuz I sort of spouted it all out at once, but if you think it was succinct and clear enough, I'm happy with that. Um that's what we spend most of our days focusing focusing on. I think we're good where with with what you we have. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think it the depression stuff is almost like the proving ground for these larger larger principles. Um, I think I think they do extend beyond depression to this bigger point that we're trying to make.

Um, you know, we didn't touch too much on like the the brain and predictive coding and and active and perceptual inference, but I think we did apply it and imply it in a lot of what we said around the shift into receptivity and and changing um when we when we have contact with sensation. So, I think we did cover a lot of ground. Um, yeah. A, is there anything that we said that was like somewhat incoherent and you're just like, uh, okay, let's moving on. Is there anything you want us to try to clear up or No, we're good.

It's coming across. Okay. Norm, let me ask a last question. Norm, let me just ask the last 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? Certainly. Yeah. The the book is called Better in Every Sense and uh the website is www.etinversense.com and the book's available kind of kind of everywhere. You can search for it and order it online and it's in a lot of bookstores also.

So yeah, 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. well. well. Excellent. Norman Zindel, thank you very much for coming on. Thanks for having us, Dan. Take care. Thanks so much for your time. Bye.