Dr. Rick Hanson on Rewiring the Brain Through Everyday Experience
There's real reason for optimism. Where neuroscience and psychology meet, we now have practical things we can actually do. In my own work I like to add a bonus on top of that, which is drawing on the contemplative traditions. Those traditions looked very closely, and very deeply, into how the human mind works, and they arrived at methods that reduce suffering and build a kind of happiness that lasts and grows less dependent on outside conditions.
So yes, there is something to be done. Erik, I know you're covering a good deal of this across the summit, and I expect we'll get further into it together. If I had to compress the point into one line: your brain is being reshaped all day long by the ordinary experiences you move through. That happens continuously, over the whole course of a day, or at least several times a day. You, and the people you work with or teach, have a chance to deepen how much you actually take in from the small, beneficial moments. Do that and you slowly change your brain for the better, while making it sturdier, more resilient, harder to knock in a bad direction. That was a long one. Thanks for giving me the room.
Erik: Of course. It helps to walk through it from one end to the other. I'm thinking about people dealing with stress. Stress has lately been tied to the development of some cancers; there's work pointing to it as a causal factor. So how do we flip the setup? How do we stop being Teflon toward the good and Velcro toward the bad, and run it the other way?
Dr. Hanson: Right, that's the how question. And answering it pulls us into thousands of research papers on the basic neuropsychology of learning. Boil that whole body of work down and it comes to something simple. Learning, taken broadly, covers a lot: emotional learning and the growth of emotional intelligence, building secure attachment, developing executive functions, shifting your thinking away from the depressogenic, pathogenic, call them the miserable-o-genic beliefs and perspectives, toward views that are more accurate, more realistic, more hopeful. All of it is learned.
The real question, then, is how that kind of learning actually happens. It runs in two stages. Material sits first in short-term memory buffers as experience or information, and from there it gets carried over into long-term storage.