Dr. Rick Hanson: Interview Archive

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman that gathers voices from self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. Erik opens by welcoming his guest, Dr. Rick Hanson, and walks through a quick sketch of his background.

Hanson started at UCLA when he was 16 and finished summa cum laude. From there he did statistical research and wrapped up the coursework for a Master's in Developmental Psychology at San Francisco State University, then went on to earn a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Wright Institute. Erik also points listeners toward The Foundations of Well-Being, a 12-part online program on well-being that Hanson offers through his site.

After the introductions, Erik asks him to describe his work and how it might help people. Hanson explains that he's a psychologist whose attention sits where three circles overlap: neuroscience, psychology, and contemplative wisdom. That overlap, he says, is a kind of sweet spot. It holds useful ideas about why we suffer and what makes us happy, and it comes loaded with practical tools you can actually use.

What pulls him in particular is the applied neuroscience of what he calls positive neuroplasticity. The question behind it: how do you steepen the learning curve of ordinary experiences so they leave a lasting mark? He's after durable change inside the mind. Resources for healing, for everyday steadiness and effectiveness, for self-actualization, for spiritual practice and the growth that follows from sustained interest in it.

He describes the present moment as an exciting one to be doing this. Recent findings from brain science are both current and strong, and they include a picture of how the brain has evolved. We're wired to learn quickly from the bad and poorly from the good. Understanding that imbalance, Hanson argues, is handing us more and more concrete things we can do to help ourselves from the inside out, and to do the same for the people we treat, teach, raise, or simply care about.