Good morning. Good morning. Today is Sunday, September, 22 2024
I'm going to the title. I have a title for my talk. Doesn't always happen, but it is Mental Maps, and I'm going to be reading and commenting from a podcast
on the program Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam
of that title Mental Maps. And his guest is Norman Farb, who is a
neuro researcher, professor at the University of Toronto. I looked at his at his site there, and he says he's interested in why some people can shrug off stressful encounters and some people can't let them go, which I'm interested in too. So and problem. So we're going to join in with Shankar and Norman and see what we can what we can find. I came across this podcast, my wife and I, Chris and I were driving to Cleveland last weekend. There was a meditation intensive there, and on the way, she had mapped out a bunch of possible podcasts, and we selected this one, and I used a little bit of it in Cleveland too. I find it really, really fascinating.
So Shankar, the host, many people are familiar with him. If you listen to the podcast, of course you are begins by recounting a story about some German tourists who went to Australia, and they were trying to get somewhere, you know, out in the wilds of Australia, out in the outback, and there was a roadblock, apparently, and they were using Google Maps, and it showed them an alternative route. And they saw it well. Google Maps knows more than we do. Let's take it, and they did, and they made it about 40 miles into nowhere and got stuck in the sand and ended up having to walk out. Just took them three days. Rained on dealing with crocodiles and feral pigs and whatnot, but it's a good metaphor for something that happens to all of us, and that's why Shankar trotted it out at the beginning, when we think we know what's going on and we have brain patterns. Everybody probably has heard of the default mode network. We have patterns. We have habits. You don't need to know about brain networks to understand habits that make our lives possible, make things easy, but when they don't match reality, we get into trouble. And then the question is, how do we find our way out? How quickly do we understand that our map is incorrect, and when we do when we realize that? How it's basically when we have some sort of misattribution. I remember sometime, not so long ago, I was involved in a group text where somebody mistook one speaker, one participant, from another, and blasted someone who was not involved at all, and then later found their error. It's
it's embarrassing, isn't it, when you when you read someone the riot act, and you're completely off base. And it happens a lot. There's something that's called the fundamental attribution error, where we know the reasons why we do everything. You know, if I cut somebody off in traffic, I know why I did it, right? I was I didn't see him. He was in my blind spot. I had something that distracted me. I might feel like an idiot. I might think that was careless, but I don't think I'm a selfish jerk. But if somebody cuts me off, that's where I go first. I. You know, it's one of those idiot road rage, especially if he's driving a pickup truck. He has no chance whatsoever, because I've got a mental map, right? Yeah, fundamental attribution error. We give ourselves a break, and we think the worst of other people, and we don't understand why everyone doesn't agree with us, because we know we're speaking from truth, from our reality, in reality, in reality, everyone, everyone has reasons for what they do, even if they're a jerk, they have reasons why they're a jerk. People don't come out of the womb and start wreaking havoc. They may have some propensity because they have a set of their DNA is a little different from other people. Some people have a tendency to become narcissistic or some other psychological disability, but an awful lot of it is just the stress they encounter in their own lives, how they're raised by their parents, what their socioeconomic status was, what kind of neighborhood they lived in, what their peers were like, what they learned growing up. It's why people are the way they are. When you when you think ill of another person, you're probably overlooking the hard life that they lived. I heard it first from Bob Dylan, who was quoting his mother. So comes from a lot of different places. Everybody you meet is fighting a hard battle
and making mistakes and doing their best, in fact, until you learn to cut other people some slack, you're not going to be very good to yourself.
I like what the Dalai Lama says. Says my religion is kindness. I
so the Shankar begins things after he's given his little example of the poor tourists stuck in the sand. Says, norm. That's his his guest, Norman Farb, as I said before your maternal grandparents were born in Poland, they were Jewish. They experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. After surviving the concentration camps, they moved to Canada to start a new life. They knew what they wanted for their daughter. So Norman farm's mother was the daughter of two Holocaust survivors who had no family left whatsoever, and the way her life was set up for her was the parents had this obsession that she would find a safe life. And basically the message given to her from the very beginning was, if you're a good girl, do what you're told. Find a good man, you marry him, raise a family, everything will turn out fine. That's, that's, that's what your life is holding out for you. And she bought into it. She went in, all in on that, apparently, and of course, didn't work out like that. So about the time that Norman, Norman Farb was starting college, his parents bickering escalated, and they ended up separating, and by the time he graduated, his mother was divorced, living alone in an apartment, and absolutely devastated by the turn her life had taken. I
and he says she lapsed into a deep depression. She would tell me in these phone calls, i. He had phone calls once a week that she felt like it was just unbelievable that her life had turned out this way. We would talk on average once a week and go into these really deep, soul searching conversations where she tried to explain to me why she didn't deserve this. Someone was supposed to take care of her that was what was going to happen, what was going to happen to her now, often she'd be in tears, so really emotionally dysregulated and upset and sad. With that sadness was this urge to make sense of what had happened, that she had done her part, done her best, and it wasn't good enough. It was unfair and just really unreasonable. Now, Norman was studying psychology, and he had some insight into what she was doing to herself.
More we dwell on our pain and resentment, the more we suffer. He understood this really the best thing she could do would be to let it go. Why dwell on what her husband did they say in AA, when you hold a resentment, you're letting someone live rent free in your head. Why would you want them there? And of course, the damage you're doing is damage to yourself. You know, the cortisol isn't flowing through their bloodstream, it's going through yours. Why do we do that? Now we're looking at that here.
He said, I would try to reason with her and say, okay, these things happen, but can we see that from a practical point of view, the more time you spend rehearsing all these hurts, these slings and arrows from the past, the more you end up suffering as though they are still happening. And this is where these conversations taking 3040, 50 minutes would go, there were times I really felt like, at an intellectual level, she's following me. She's a bright woman, and she'd be able to say, I see this. I see this. Maybe I should stop focusing so much on what your father did. And then there'd be a pause. And then, but you know what he did the other time. And so it almost didn't really matter if there was some sort of intellectual understanding, the rupture of her model of the world was so catastrophic that it had gravity of itself that just manded her attention. I
we all find this out for ourselves, no matter how much intellectual insight we have into our own psychology and to how things work, sometimes things have a gravity suck us in and people end up with insomnia up at night, going over and over in the same territory and unable to break free. And of course, they can go from there and spiral into depression. I
but there are actually two stories here, and the other one is Norman. And Shankar brings that out, asks him about what was going on with him.
And he says, Yeah, I think I moved from a position of, you know, benevolent intentions and a conviction that we're going to get through this together and we're going to figure out how to pick up the pieces to sort of to a new sort of frustration that, you know, the way out of this cell that you're in, like the door is open Here, just like the Rumi quote, the Persian poet, Sufi poet, the door to your cell is open. Why don't you go through and I remember just getting so frustrated thinking, we've been here before we've gone through this reasoning. You've recognized that what you're doing is harmful to yourself, perpetuating your suffering. You agree that it would be better to do something else, and then you persist up to this point where I really started to resent the interactions, and I just didn't want to have this role anymore of being her counselor, just parenthetically, being the counselor of someone you're intimately involved. Involved with rarely works out well, can't imagine how much worthless advice I've given my family. I
he began to realize that his relationship with his mother and even his own mental health was being compromised by being drawn into this rumination of hers. And Shankar points out, you both had maps, and both your maps weren't right. She had this map of being the perfect daughter and wife and mother and everything being taken care of for her, and he had this map of the dutiful, intelligent, helpful son who was going to save his mother. And they didn't work out.
And I would say probably Norman's bad map is probably more common than than the mothers. Aren't too many people these days who grow up thinking that everything is going to be perfect, if they're just good, although I'm sure there's some.
But he began to think about what he could do to get out of the trap he'd put himself in. And he started thinking about what it would be like to have a phone conversation with her and just stop the whole process break the script of trying to fix her. This was a radical way of being with her in the moment. You could either you could be with any you could be anyone today, and I'm going to let you be whoever you are today. I uh, such a effective way of stepping out of that trap. You know, you see that trap with a lot of caregivers. I've seen it from doctors that I know they have a patient who won't get better and they start to dislike the patients. I mean, it's quite obvious when they talk about them, and if you're unfortunate enough to have some sort of disease that can't be easily diagnosed or easily treated, you're likely to have to shop around quite a bit to find a doctor who will take you seriously so all kinds of examples of people with lethargy, no energy, no known cause. Kind of seen as malingerers until 1020, years down the road, we know what's actually going on with them. Maybe there's an autoimmune thing going on or whatever, and all of a sudden, at least their suffering is acknowledged. They're not written off as a malingerer doesn't mean, Of course, that a cure has been found. I
So once he changed his approach, he says, we're still he
he says, I wouldn't say that they were the funnest conversations that I ever had, but they became much less aversive. We would just kind of have small talk and chat and communicate still that we still felt connected and loved each other, and something totally unexpected happened, which was the conversations became shorter, and I felt like I could initiate contact with her more often. So as opposed to the whole narrative being like, if I can, if I can fix her, so I won't have to have these painful conversations all the time, I could just instead say it's Thursday, why don't I just call and check in with her? Because I knew it would only be like for five or 10 minutes now, and we ended up talking more days than not, but in much shorter, shorter and lighter, definitely less expectancy laden way, in some. Ways that really shifted the trajectory of our relationship, which, until that point, had been heading downhill. It's, it's, it's the it's when you're in the fix it mode. And it's good to understand that when we go into fix it mode, what we're trying to do is get this person not to bother us. Would you just get better so I won't be annoyed by all your suffering. That's kind of the way we go into a lot of our relationships. Somebody recounts something bad that happened, and we start offering suggestions, or maybe we mansplain exactly how they got into that mess. What's needed is for us to sit in their pain with them and to acknowledge it. And that's hard to do, because that means we're going to feel some of it. But if it's our mother and we can't just abandon her, we better find a way. And to Norman farb's credit, he did.
He comments because she was so isolated, our social interactions really were contributing a huge amount of the interpersonal quality of her day. So if those interactions were stressful, her day was going to be stressful. And eventually she'd just be like, you'd just be like, how was your day? And it would be like, it was fine. We weren't rewarding attention into the story about the past, but we weren't trying to prevent it, and so we just started to get on with our lives together.
Said, in the end, it just feels like normal, which is something I was desperately trying to achieve, and sort of ironically failing to do so when I was trying to play therapist.
Kanji in that drawer next to you. There's a pair of glasses.
Good thing I remembered that I it.
So they move now. They move now to discussing the default mode network. And a lot of people know about that. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time with it, but basically it's, it's how we do almost every habitual thing. Good example is driving a car. We very quickly learn how to drive a car. We know what to do when a light turns red, we know our route to work. We know our route home, and we don't have to think about it. It just it just happens automatically, and we're set up to do that. If we weren't, life would be incredibly difficult. We know how to walk downstairs. We don't have to think about how to do it. The body just does it. So many things that go on automatic pilot, and that's a good thing. I
what Norman Farb says is one of the things that our brains have evolved to do is to take any sort of pattern in our reality and automate that process,
not just limited to physical navigation. Your first day at work is nothing like your 264th day at work maps. Our maps are not just about physical terrain. They're about what we do. The idea is that the brain is trying to set up a model of the world, and that lets it predict what's going to happen next. Apply that to all facets of life, from figuring out how to speak to someone who's a bit prickly at work to the most abstract things, even of what should we think about? What should we care about, what is worth devoting our emotional energy and attention? All these decisions become automated over. Time, and the evolutionary purpose of that is so that any leftover resources can be used to deal with the unexpected.
I think it's there's one difficulty talking about various networks of the brain, and this isn't the only one we're going to take a look at, which is that we talk about them as if they're a thing, and really what it is, for the most part, is just a pattern of firing that neurologists researchers can see when you're sitting in an MRI, sometimes part one part of the brain will light up, and sometimes another, and a lot has been discovered in that way, the default mode network is something that lights up. They got somebody in the MRI tunnel lying there on the on the plank, and they've been giving them various tasks and seeing what regions of the brain light up, you know, the visual areas and decision making and inhibitory functions and whatnot. And then when they say, okay, you can just relax, then this area lights up. And it happens every time. And it's the default mode network. It's where we go when we're not intentionally doing something. And if you think you can arrange your life so you're always being intentional, I just say good luck to you. Can certainly be more intentional. I
of course, the problem comes when we begin to think that our map of the world really is the world and
or, as shocker puts it, the autopilot simply starts flying the plane, and we forget that there is a pilot available to fly the plane as well. If anybody had this example that Norman Farr brings up walking into a room, start to do something and then realize it's not what you intended to do. Why did I come into this room? Can still remember my early days at the center, going down to the basement. We were doing construction after the fire, and I got down there and I had no idea what I wanted. And I usually, I would have that happen quite a bit. In fact, I I used to go back to where I was when I thought of it. And sometimes that would that would jar it. You can try that one cool trick if you have that same problem. But it goes beyond forgetting what to do. He says, I think we don't realize. What we don't often realize is that our habits are not just habits of behavior, they're also habits of perception. So where should I look when I walk into a room, who should I pay attention to? What sorts of things should I think about? What sort of plans should I consider? And by extension, we're filtering out many, many, many possibilities. One obvious area is when we deal with people that we know we've got a picture of them, we know what they're about, right? And so maybe we're not really paying much attention to them. They're just sort of let them run on autopilot, because I've heard everything he has to say, or I know what he's going to say about this, or do about this. It's, it's practice is about waking up to the possibility in everything that we do
can't always be with the one you love. Need to love the one you're with.
So much that can be revealed when you begin to do that, begin to open up to what's there, and the key to opening up is you're not trying to fix anything. There's that teacher in Los Angeles, former teacher, he's died. Maizumi Roshi wrote a book called enjoy your practice, or enjoy your life. I can't remember which, but either way, it's the same thing. When you when you are not worried about how you're doing, you're not focusing on how well am I performing, and you're not trying to get a result, then you become open. Then available, and then things start to change. It's hard to do because we're programmed to care a lot about ourselves and care about results. Really have to step out of our normal ways of doing things you
It's hard not to be sucked into habits. Norman farm says it's like a groove or a channel. It's just easier for our thoughts to flow that way, in the way of the default mode network. We know that we have certain mental habits that we would like to change. So at the times that we are effortfully concentrating, we're using our attention to choose differently. We have this sense of agency, but our attention is a very fragile thing, and as soon as we're no longer paying attention, we become distracted, or especially if we're stressed and fixated on something else, then what's filling in all the background of what to do, what to think about and what to recall, is the default mode network. So I know I shouldn't think about this negative event, because I'll become upset and just momentarily, and just the momentary instruction of like, well, this really isn't skillful right now. Has very little power compared to all this machinery saying you should think about it more. It's about you. And we know from other research that thinking about this the highest priority over any kind of other thinking, because those are the types of thoughts that are by definition relevant for our survival. Of course, we're set up by evolution to survive and pass our DNA on to people who will do the same thing. I
i like to comment here, though, that as difficult as it is to sustain attention, we can also cultivate just an attitude of interest and an attitude of openness. It's not quite so effortful, if you just begin to enjoy the little things of life,
little sense pleasures, breeze on your neck, sun on your back, you uh, seeing a child laugh so many things that if you're not fixated on whatever it is you want to get out of whatever's going on, you're open to them. You're surprised by them. Christian writer CS Lewis wrote a book called surprised by joy. Really, once we begin to integrate this kind of practice into our lives, things move very quickly. Things open up. Intellectual understanding just doesn't get it done, and willpower alone doesn't get it done.
Has to be a really strong element of relaxation, taking our hands off the wheel. Still know what's going on, but we're not trying to micromanage. We
Norman Farb says it's so much more effortful to go in assuming you know nothing about a person and be open to this flood of information and not knowing what to pay attention to, and not knowing who this person is, and starting from the beginning each time is hugely effortful and also kind of scary. It's kind of a scary process, like there's a safety in knowing who people are and what they're up to and what they might say or do to you, and to entertain the possibility that anything could happen kind of makes you vulnerable, right? And what if that means you could have, you could have to respond in different ways, right? There might be almost a fearfulness in letting someone just show up totally differently, because we want to assume that we're going to be the same person tomorrow and the other people are going to be consistent. What. If they're not,
that's our default. But the other side to it is, what if they show me something new? What if there's something here I haven't seen? What would happen? You know, one of the one of the stories I love about Roshi kapleau is, when he was young, lived in an apartment building, I think, in New York City, somewhere or other, and he invited all the dogs in the building up to his apartment just to see what would happen. Do.
And now he gets to what I really think is one of the real great things from this, this interview, which is,
see Shankar introduces it by saying you've conducted a number of neuroimaging studies of people who have experienced or are currently experiencing depression. You put them in an fMRI scanner in your lab so you can see what's going on in their brains. In one study, you put people in this brain scanner and you ask them to watch very sad film clips. What were these clips and what did you find norm? And he says, yes, in order to be a good prediction machine, the name of the game for the brain is to associate whatever is happening in your momentary experience with other past events so that you can contextualize and interpret those events. This is why we think we see the default mode network activating lighting up in the scanner when people are exposed to sadness, we show them themes of loss. We show clips from Terms of Endearment. The mother's saying goodbye to her kids because she has terminal cancer. For instance, the brain is sort of saying, Okay, I'm getting this interpersonal interaction happening. What's happening here? Or a mother is sick and she's having to say goodbye to her kids, and we immediately relate that to our own experiences of loss, of having to say goodbye to loved ones, of the fragility of life, of our own severed relationships. This helps us go from just seeing pixels moving around on a screen to really feeling like immersed in a story. That's why we enjoy stories so much, because they aren't just about the protagonist in the story, they're about us. Of course, everything's about us, and that's the default mode. And so they looked, just to summarize a little bit here, they looked for maybe people prone to depression have a bigger activation of the default mode network, but they didn't. There wasn't any difference whether they were prone to depression or not. So he had the bright idea to look elsewhere, and he saw, he said, where we actually saw less activity during sad films compared to neutral films, we saw that it was parts of our brain that represent what's happening in our bodies that tended to be turning off. So there are parts of the brain that we know across almost every person represents what's happening on the surface of your body. There's a circuit for that, the region for that. And we know there are parts of the brain that represent the internal feelings state of the body. It's all these different feeling states, and it was these regions that were deactivating response to the sad film clips. And what really convinced me there was a story here, because this is not how I think even the general scientific community would think of depression, vulnerability still thought of as being the triggering of threat signals that then trigger you into your defensive habits. So what really convinced me that this was important was when we looked at what parts of the brain had activity that correlated with or helped us predict whether someone was depressed or not, and it was this pattern of deactivation in body representation regions that was significantly associated with whether people depressed or not, and it did not seem diagnostic, diagnostic To look at differences in how much people were activating the default mode network. It just seemed that what might be pathological or harmful is doing this, that it activating that network thinking about things related to yourself, to the exclusion of continuing to. Process and update yourself with information about how your body is feeling. You see this so often with people who are depressed, don't you? Where good news just doesn't penetrate, the story has become so consuming that they've cut off input. It happens to all of us to one degree or another. You lose touch with everything that's going on. We're just lost in our anger, our grief, our despair. It's easy to see with anger, almost everybody gets angry, right? You definitely shut down when you're in the midst of justified rage, and yet, at that point, there's all sorts of things to pay attention to, aren't there? Your heart is thumping, face is flushed, feel prickly. It's it's, it's, it changes things. When your default to one extent or another is to feel that, to know that, begin to look for that, sometimes there are things that we dread that we don't want to do. Feel that pain in the pit of your stomach, feel your heart beating a little too hard, and usually our response is to run away, get out of that situation. Think about something else. What happens when we actually tune in and see what's going on? Want to read something that Pema Chodron wrote. She's a Vajrayana teacher. It's a monastery in Nova Scotia.
She had a transformative experience while she was on a small, close quarter retreat with a woman who was extremely angry with her, yet refused to discuss the situation. And Pema says it brought up feelings of Me, in Me of not being okay. It just triggered the whole thing, and I tried all the meditation techniques I had been teaching for years. I tried everything, and nothing really got at it. So one night, because I couldn't sleep, I went up to the meditation hall, and I sat all night long, and I wasn't even really meditating. I was just sitting in this raw pain with almost no thoughts about it like on fire, practically. And then something happened, I guess I was involuntarily just staying because it was so painful I couldn't move. And something happened, transformative, which is that I just had this completely clear insight that my whole personality, what we would call ego structure was based on not wanting to go to that place, that everything I did, the way I smiled, the way I talked to people, the way I tried to please everybody was all to avoid going to that place. But I now feel that learning to stay we do reach that place, the place that nobody wants to go. And our whole facade and our whole little song and dance that we do, our whole superficial shtick is based on not wanting to go to that place, and once you've touched it, basically you get pretty fearless, because then there's nothing to hide, and you're no longer invested in the ignorant dance of trying to move away from it constantly all the time. It's a pretty dramatic example, but so much is possible when we're just tuned in to what's going on, and we're not snapping into our habitual aversion or snapping into trying to fix it. Roshi kapleau used to say, everything is grist for the mill, and even our painful interactions with people, our failures are valuable. Takes faith to believe that, but it's a faith that grows when we try it out. Takes faith to believe that just being aware of the body will change the whole tenor of our life. But it's true, and you can test it out.
Takes faith to do this experiment looking into the mind. It's extremely I find it exciting that neurology science is coming across so many of the things that have been taught in Buddhism for 1000s of years. There's another book that's probably too technical to inflict on the Sangha entitled The ego tunnel by a German philosopher named Thomas Metzinger. That's just mind blowing. I spent a lot of time the last few months, reading Thomas Metzinger and Robert Sapolsky and other neurologists and primatologists, and it's just, we're so amazing, and there's so much that is understood now about how human beings work, and all of it, I think, is consistent with Dharma, With the Buddhist teaching. You know, the Dalai Lama said another great thing. He said, If science has discovered anything that contradicts Buddhist teaching, then we need to change Buddhist teaching. This is not a religion based on blind faith. This is a practice based on experience and discovery requires just as much effort faith, but it's reasonable from beginning to end.
Think our time is up. We'll stop now and recite the four vows i.
