Mind Over Matter with Dan Harris and Heather Berlin

What is the science behind meditation? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Marcia Belsky discuss mental health, meditation, and the theory of consciousness with former news anchor, Dan Harris and neuroscientist Heather Berlin, PhD.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to be talking about the science of meditation. Let me first introduce my co-host, Marcia Belsky. Not your first time with us. Welcome back, Marsha.

• 0:28Marcia Belsky?

  Thank you so much. So excited to be back. And I feel like our topic will be a little easier for me to understand than cryptocurrency.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's true. That was that last topic. We wanted you to stay with every bit of the quantum computation of that.

• 0:45Marcia Belsky?

  Yes. Start with PhD. Exactly.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a comedian and a musician. That's a potent combo. So I love your work. And, you know, presume this is not the last time you'll be on StarTalk. So let's introduce our guest for the day, and that's going to be Dan Harris. Many of you might recognize that name and his face. He's been a correspondent for ABC News like forever, and then he retired, retired, and then took up meditation. I think he'd been doing it for a while, but then made it full-time. Dan, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Thank you. You're making me feel old. I was a correspondent forever. It reminds me, I gave a speech once at Syracuse University, and a lot of the kids were coming up to me and saying, "I've been watching you my whole life."

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  And I was like, "Next, next."

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Since I was a child.

• 1:40Marcia Belsky?

  Since the Second World War.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Dan, just a little bit about your career. You weren't just sitting at the desk. I mean, you have Emmy awards for your reporting. So what do you think of the Netflix documentary, "Don't Look Up"? What do you think of that?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  For a minute, I didn't hear "documentary."

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the media is deeply implicated in that.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I have no, especially now that I'm not a part of the media. I'll, yeah, I'll start bashing and I won't get sensitive.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because you were at the Good Morning America desk for a while. And that's just the kind of programming they were sort of parodying there, so.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Yes, they were.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yep, I'm gonna bring that here. Whatever you ask me, I'm just gonna deny and make a joke that gets me out of it.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so tell me, you've got this app. And even before the app, or tell me about this 10% happier concept that you've been engaged in. Not only while you were correspondent, but even in retirement.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Yes, I'll try, I'll try to give you the super quick version. It all started because I had a panic attack on national television back in 2004. You can Google that if you want to see it.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was live?

• 3:00Marcia Belsky?

  Wow.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was live.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A live panic attack?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like a better version of Al Capone's vault. You know, when you, when Geraldo Rivera did that live show on prime time television and didn't find anything in Al Capone's vault. This was live and actually something happened. I lost my mind and there was an audience of 5.019 million people on a warm June morning in 2004. And the reason I had a panic attack, I found out later, is because I was doing some very dumb stuff in my personal life. I had spent a lot of time in war zones. That's not the dumb stuff. The war zones was part of my, that was part of my reporting job. But I came home from that, from those experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places and I got depressed.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  And I very unwisely self-medicated with recreational drugs. Even though I wasn't high on Good Morning America, my doctor later explained that it was in, my drug use was enough to change my brain chemistry and make it more likely for me to freak out. And so that experience kind of put me on this journey that ultimately landed me on meditation.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Marsha, as a comedian, you you experience exactly that same war zone thing, don't you?

• 4:13Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah. And it's like, I definitely am relating to it, though, because I think also, yeah, I started having really bad panic attacks and I don't like, you know, Xanax and things like that. I'll only take it when I really have to. So I have tried meditation, so I'm super interested to like, hear your journey, for sure.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And if a comedian has a panic attack, that's the, that's, that's, that's the end of the, that's the end, right?

• 4:38Marcia Belsky?

  It is, it's hard, too, because, yeah, like, I've only ever panicked on stage one time, and it was kind of weird, where I was just like silent for 20 seconds and then managed to kind of get them back. But it's, it's a freaky, because I can't imagine doing it on live TV. It's such a freaky experience. If, if you haven't had a panic attack, I mean, it literally feels like you can't breathe, it feels like you're having a heart attack, and you can't tell anything to your brain that's like, I'm not dying. Your brain is just like, this is it, this is it.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Dan, you're, you're implying that had you not had these, uh, uh, coexisting factors, you might not have gone through that episode, is that correct?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, I did have stage fright, you know, which, I made a joke in one of my books, that my career, up until that date, represented a triumph of narcissism over fear, because I would like to be on television, but I had stage fright. And so I was always kind of walking the line, but then you add in significant amounts of cocaine, and I crossed the line to freak out zone.

• 5:44Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah, coke doesn't help with anxiety. I've heard that. I've heard that.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you both have data on this, yes. So this is all very important feeder information, because when we go to our second and third segment, we'll be bringing on friend of StarTalk Heather Berlin, who's our sort of resident neuroscientist. And so all these factors will matter when we share what you're telling us with her. So, so tell us now, who, who got you started on meditation? Who, who thought, who figured that would work for you?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Well, it was multifactorial, but I think the most important variable was my wife. She gave me a gift of a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein, who is a psychiatrist based in New York City where we lived until recently. And he has written a beautiful series of books about the overlap between psychology and Buddhism. And I didn't actually know much about Buddhism, other than the fact that I had stolen a Buddha statue from a local gardening store when I was in high school, because I thought it would help me with the ladies.

• 6:44Marcia Belsky?

  Oh, high school, okay.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  And put it in my bedroom. Yeah, high school.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Chris, if you have a Buddha on your windowsill, you're hip.

• 6:52Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah, like we got the freaking British Museum over here.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  In the 80s. In the 80s. Anyway, the Statue of Limitation on that is passed, so I think I can talk about it. Anyway, I didn't know anything about Buddhism, but I read this book and I realized that there was so much in here that spoke to the way my mind works. The Buddha called it the monkey mind, this constantly active, leaping from one hit of pleasant experience, one promotion, one slice of cake, one latte to the next, and yet never fully satisfied.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the monkey mind minus throwing the poop, I'm guessing.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I don't know about your mind.

• 7:31Marcia Belsky?

  Also, latte is bad for anxiety as well. Cocaine and coffee, no wonder.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Correct. Correct. I agree with you, Marsha. I disagree with you, Neil, because I don't know about your mind, but my mind's throwing a lot of poop at other people.

• 7:43Marcia Belsky?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  And at myself.

• 7:45Marcia Belsky?

  You've got poopless minds? How nice would that be?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Omni-directional poop dispenser.

• 7:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man. Okay, so it's a figurative poop dispenser. There you go. All right. So, all right, so, and that sets you on your course. So, I'm guessing here, that, this is a very educated guess, that the meditation has...

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all about sort of introspection, as is so much of eastern philosophy. So the resonance there is kind of preordained, right?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not, the word introspection is interesting because it's not introspection in the way I think we in the West might think of it. Because you're not sitting there analyzing your thoughts the way you would in therapy. By the way, I'm pro-therapy. I go to therapists, et cetera, et cetera. So that's not a degradation of therapy. But this is more of a mental exercise, which I know you'll get at in your second and third segments with your neuroscientist friend.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heather Berlin.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, Heather can talk about this, but I'll just preview it by saying that, and I can describe what meditation is if you want, but it is essentially like a series of exercises for your brain and by extension, your mind. And you can see the changes on the brain scans. And that's really compelling. So it's not navel gazing in the way in which we in the West might consider it.

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. So it goes beyond woo-woo, right, as they say? Where if you have measurable data on changes in your brain scans, it means you're actually doing something. And it's not just talk at that point. Is that fair?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is fair. I mean, it's interesting, the more I've gotten into it, the more open I am to, at first, I was raised by academic physicians. I'm married to an academic physician. I was not smart enough to be a doctor, so I wear makeup and talk to television cameras for a living. The science is really what got me over the hump and allowed to, it allowed me to do this thing. But the more I get into it, the more, and this is probably an inhospitable place to say this, but the more open I am to things that I might have dismissed as woo-woo, which now I would just consider sort of other ways of knowing things. And that we just, and that we're always looking for scientific validation. But maybe, you know, I don't meditate now because I think it's going to change my brain.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  I meditate because I know it makes me less of an asshole to myself and others, and that's really helpful.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that anything that reduces the asaholicness in the world is a good thing.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter what the foundations are.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's go back to square one. What is meditation? Just give me your best sort of definition for it, so that we can start there.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I know you've done some meditation, Marcia. Do you remember what flavor you did?

• 10:29Marcia Belsky?

  For me, it's really hard for me to meditate. And what I noticed is, um, the more I would try and structure it, the less likely I was to actually just sit there and be present. Like, I would try and get, um, tapes and things like that. So, the times I've found I best meditate are after I do yoga. Whenever they have the like 10-down, lay-down period, those have been my most successful times. I think because my body has exercised and I can sort of meditate at that moment. And then, just truly laying in bed in the mornings. And for me, it's putting my phone in a different room and forcing myself not to like, go check

• 11:10Marcia Belsky?

  it for an hour, and then I can actually just sit there and think and not watch TV. And that's what I call meditating. I don't know if it actually is, but that's sort of what's helped me with my anxiety, especially over this last year, to try and stay present. And I do little things, like I'll tap, tap my heart, tap my head, and physical things like that, and point to the, like, I don't know if you've done this when you have panic attacks, but you point up and you say, "I see the ceiling, I see the door." You just start naming things around you to keep yourself present. So, that's the kind of meditation I've done.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He asked you what flavors, that sounds like vanilla.

• 11:46Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Marcia Belsky?

  That's the most vanilla, yeah. I'm entry-level meditation.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I'd be Rocky Road, maybe, if I...

• 11:55Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah, I want to get to mint-chocolate-chip level, if I could.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there you go, there you go. Okay, so what flavor, Dan, are you?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, maybe I can help disambiguate the flavors here. So, there, the word meditation is a little bit like the word sports. I mean, it describes a whole range of activities. Marcia hit on about 75 of them in her paragraph that she just uttered there.

• 12:15Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And, and that's all good. For me, I think that I usually start with a very basic form of meditation called mindfulness, which is derived from Buddhism, but has been thoroughly secularized and has now been studied in the labs extensively. And there are really three beginning steps for this. One is, sit comfortably.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  You can lie down if you want, or you can put yourself in the lotus position. I don't like to do that because I'm 50 years old and not very limber. But you just kind of sit comfortably, close your eyes. That's the first step. The second step is to bring your full attention to the feeling of one thing. Usually your breath coming in and going out. If you don't like focusing on your breath, some people find that sort of an anxiogenic and anxiety-producing thing. So you can just feel your full body sitting or lying down, just picking one thing to focus on. And then the third step is, as soon as you try to do this, you just try to feel your breath or feel your body sitting in a chair. Your mind's going to go bonkers. This is the monkey mind. And you'll see that you're start, you know, start planning a homicide, or you're wondering, you know, when's lunch, or whatever.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And the whole game is just to notice when you've become distracted and to start again and again and again. You're not trying to clear your mind. That's impossible unless you're enlightened or you've died. The whole game is just to notice when you've become distracted and start again and again and again. And the benefit is mindfulness, this kind of self-awareness that allows you to see the chaos and cacophony of your own mind without being owned by it.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so that's why the silence matters, because that could create an artificial distraction that is needless in your efforts to achieve your goals.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  You know, for some people meditate with music. I've never understood exactly how that works.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about those tones, you know, those bells that you hear sometimes?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That might resonate with some frequency within yourself.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  So there's sound baths, which, again, that's not something I really understand or have done much of. The bells often, in the flavor of meditation I come from, are used to start or end a session of meditation.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, gotcha, okay.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  So like I said, there are all kinds of meditation.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very Pavlovian, by the way.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 14:27Marcia Belsky?

  I like some of those sounds. I like some of the om's and the like, the bells kind of clear out your head. It feels like mouthwash in your brain, some of the frequencies.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I like that analogy. But just to be clear, for those who don't otherwise know, these aren't like dinner bells or sleigh bells. They're tonal bells, right? They're like...

• 14:44Marcia Belsky?

  I can only meditate to sleigh bells, actually.

• 14:48Marcia Belsky?

  No whale noises, none of that.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I need more cowbell.

• 14:52Marcia Belsky?

  I need more cowbell and Santa screaming, yeah.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have, so you have an app called the 10% happier app. Well, I mean, the app is named for the, what you do. And, you know, I'm, I, I want to be 20% happier. Why are you holding me back to 10%? You know, what's, what's, what's the thinking behind that? Or did you borrow that from the business world where they say, I want you to give 110% today? And that's of course mathematically not real, but spiritually, emotionally, it might mean something. So where are you coming from when you get this 10% thing going?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  I got interested in meditation in 2008 or nine before it was cool. It was like the first time in my life I've ever been ahead of a trend and.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there was the entire 1960s and 70s with, you know, Maharaji.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I mean, so there was some meditation going on back then, just, but you, you were only just born. See, so for you to say, you're a 50 year old American saying, I was ahead of the game. I started meditation. No, what you might, maybe, okay, I'll, let me, let me offer you a way out of what you just said. Could it be that you started meditating early in the social media universe? How about that?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I appreciate you offering me the way out. I would say maybe I got interested in meditation before the second wave of cool happened. Because you're absolutely right. It was cool in the 60s and 70s.

• 16:25Marcia Belsky?

  George Harrison, Ben Yehuda.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  And the Maharaj, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, they were all doing it. So you're absolutely right. It was cool in the 60s and 70s. Then it went away and got kind of mocked as part of the. Sixties becoming a bit of a cultural caricature. And then, so I got interested in 2008, 2009. And a lot of my friends thought it was weird and were making fun of me. And one day, a friend of mine at work was saying, well, what's the matter with you? Like, why are you doing this thing? And I kind of, out of nowhere, said, yeah, because it makes me like 10% happier. And I could see the look on her face change from scorn to mild interest.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's clever. Okay, all right, you got me there. 10%, yeah, I can, let me go with the 10%. And that's a starter package, right?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. And since now I'm stuck with math questions and jokes for my whole life, I'll just double down on that to say that it's like any good investment. The 10% compounds annually. The radical good news of meditation is that, and this is what the science is showing us, is that happiness is not a factory setting that is unalterable. It's a skill you can practice. And this practice, the benefits compound over time. And that is incredibly compelling, hence 10%. And I wrote a book called 10% Happier, which I thought was going to be mildly embarrassing and go away. And then it kind of led to a podcast where I interview meditation experts. And then this meditation app, which has-

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's a very natural arc of an active person who's trying to get the job done. So congratulations on that. When did the book come out?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Almost eight years ago, 2014.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The 10% Happier book. And okay, we can look for that and maybe link to it. So, so you have, I noticed, I picked up a couple of your, the episodes, if I call them that. You have, you have a cadre of meditation experts that help the listener to the podcast get into different meditative states, right? And as I understand correctly, these different meditation experts are slightly differently tuned relative to what your needs might be if you then tune in. Is that, if you listen, is that correct?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think there are, there are different use cases for meditation. We have a lot of meditations that help you fall asleep. Some for a first thing in the morning. There are meditations that help you boost your self-awareness. This word mindfulness that gets tossed around a lot. Another skill that meditation has been shown through a lot of research to help you with is- Compassion, or you might just say friendliness, warmth, if you want to get grandiose about it, love even. And so that's a really compelling thing to think about as a skill. And as we look out at the, for me personally, as I look out at the world and how screwed up it is, the notion that we can boost our capacity and the capacity of other human beings to

• 19:27Speaker 02

  get out of their own heads and view the world empathetically through the eyes of others, that that is a skill, that's a very hopeful thing.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the difference between knowing your own mind better? And then being able to interact with other people better? So for example, is there a meditation course, let's call it that, for comedians where they can better get in the head of their audience? Because they want the audience to laugh, right? And if they don't laugh, they're not connecting in the way they need. So could you, in the limit of this, from what you're describing, have a meditation app for, a meditation course flavor for every need somebody has in society? So then you lift all boats.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than just the boats of the people who have emotional inner needs to, you know, to soften.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  I mean, we do courses on stress, anxiety, also relationships, productivity, having more self-awareness in your daily life. We, there, there is no aspect of your life that you can't make more awesome through intentionally turning it into a practice. And that's what the app and the podcast are about.

• 20:40Marcia Belsky?

  That's what the hardest part is, though. You start to realize like, oh, I could fix all my own life. It is all me. And then it's like, oh, no, so much work.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  You know what? I don't think you should, just to respond to you, Marsha, I don't think the goal is to try to fix, quote unquote, everything all at once. I think the goal is marginal improvement over time.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marsha, he said he's a 10% guy, so don't try to ask him for the 100% solution.

• 21:06Marcia Belsky?

  I like instant gratification. I don't have time for this marginal improvement over time, okay? Give me a quick fix, give me the cocaine, you know what?

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fix it now, fix it yesterday.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  I mean, you already said you didn't like Xanax. I mean, you're taking a big tool off the table.

• 21:24Marcia Belsky?

  Exactly.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Dan, let me, let me give a personal story here. It's not a story, but just, I'm like the opposite of anxious, okay? If I speak in a public setting, it is, I'm as calm as like I'm sitting in my living room and 3,000 people are just there and we're chilling in the living room. That's what it feels like to me. So I have no anxiety at all. I'm very comfortable in those settings. And I, there are other things that I know people reach for to compensate for what they might need. I don't, I have no relationship with caffeine at all. Okay, I'll have a hot chocolate once a week just because I like chocolate, not because I'm after the caffeine that's in it. So, and I can sleep like that.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can walk away from this camera, lay down on the carpet here and be asleep 10 minutes later.

• 22:15Marcia Belsky?

  I've never been angry at a person in my life. This is crazy. All of, like, you're just basically saying everything that's haunted you your whole life doesn't really affect me, but must be hard.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what I'm saying is I tried a meditation app, you know, where it said, "Sit down, focus on your breath." I did a lot of the stuff you were describing and I just went to sleep. I, because, you know, a soft voice talks, begins to talk to you. And, and I'm sorry, I just go to sleep. And so maybe I'm meditation-proof, okay? Because I can't, am I unreachable by meditation? Because I don't, I don't know.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  I don't believe anybody is. Let me ask you this, let me reframe it, because I love everything you just said and I want your mind.

• 23:00Marcia Belsky?

  Right.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  On many levels. Where in your life do you struggle?

• 23:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't think about it that way. I think about it like, okay, I'm struggling because I'm academic, right? And so I spent my whole life, there's a book in front of me and I don't know what's in it. I gotta study it. And so then I work through it, you slog through it, you, the brush and bramble, you get a little bloody, maybe, you know, if it's a particularly difficult physics problem or something. And then you get through it on the other side. And the, the, the reward is that much sweeter for having struggled to get there. So for me, a struggle is not something to bring, to bring angst within me. It, I'm attracted to it. I say, "Wow, I don't understand that. Let me keep at it." And that, that excites me.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I don't, so I don't, I can't think about it the way you asked me the question about it.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Well, if we talk to everybody in your life, off the record,

• 24:03Speaker 02

  would they say there are days where you have a bad day? Or relationships that are fraught? Or is there no struggle in your life?

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can never be woke enough for my daughter. My 25-year-old daughter.

• 24:17Marcia Belsky?

  Oh, me and my dad fight constantly.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying. As woke as I think I am, I will never be woke enough.

• 24:24Marcia Belsky?

  That's what she's like for. She keeps you young.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I learn a lot from her. So, you know, we talk and there's tension if I'm, if I dig my heels in based on my own life experience. But she's a life experience that has vectors going forward, not looking backwards. And so, I'm intrigued by that, challenged by it and intrigued by it. But for me, every challenge is an academic challenge. Now, with regard to relationships, there's other complexities there, right? I've married 33 years. And, you know, the big secret of marriage is that marriage is work, all right? Because in fairy tales, you know, where do all the fairy tales end? They end at the marriage, right? So, it's advice for the courtship. But they don't tell you what to do after you get married.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just say they lived happily ever ever. Really? Really? You know, give me some stories on the other side of that trench, all right? So, I don't know. I think, sure, you know, you can talk to my relatives and they'll say, well, he does this and he does that and he does that. But you're telling me that meditation is much more for yourself and what you need and what you want. And so, that's an interesting...

• 25:40Marcia Belsky?

  Wait, can I have a pitch? Can I say a pitch?

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it.

• 25:42Marcia Belsky?

  To me, it sounds like you said you tackle everything like an academic challenge. But what the challenge of meditation is, correct me if I'm wrong, is like you have to see your own brain as something that's worthy of study and something that's worthy of growth and understanding. And so, you're like, I don't have the typical struggles of somebody else, but meditation might be helpful for you to understand how your own mind works even more.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Dan, if that's, if Marcia's correct.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  She is.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  But she is for you. I mean, everybody's got to have their way in. I think she astutely identified one way in for a mind like yours that is really interested in science, really interested in the details, figuring things out. Buddhism and meditation, I think, would have an enormous amount to offer you because the mind is massively complex and fascinating, and in many ways lawful. And you can get interested in what makes it work.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're suggesting, because that's not how you began. You began by saying, I had this problem, that problem, that problem, and meditation solved it. And if you have problems in your life, medication, medication.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Medication's fine.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Medication works too. Meditation can help you overcome them, master them, and the like. If you have no such litany of problems, and you're not on any kind of prescription drugs, you're now saying that, I'm not challenging you, I'm just asking you, you're now saying that the meditation can enhance whatever it is you're doing well, and maybe even do it better.

• 27:25Marcia Belsky?

  They've shown that, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  I think many things are true simultaneously, just as when we talk about astrophysics, where I know nothing. But you can talk about one way in with meditation, which is, I think, the most common way in, which is suffering. People.

• 27:41Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah, most of us suffer, Neil, from anxiety.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but for you, Neil.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  For you, I think that there's a, there's a, I think it's phenomenal, the, there's an enormous amount of wisdom I hear coming through in your description of your own mind state, and that's amazing. I don't think you have to meditate. I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. I think for you, the.

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Meditation evangelical, evangelical fundamentalist meditator.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  The trick, the interesting door for you might be just intellectual interest because there's so, the mind is so vast and is so interesting, and I think there would be a lot there for you to play with. And I just want to respond to one last thing, which, as you said, meditation is all about your own mind. But what we know about the universe is that the line between self and other is porous and blurry.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  And you can't, if you look, close your eyes and look for the self, for some little homunculus of Marcia or Neil or Dan in the mind, you cannot find it. We can't find the seat of consciousness in the brain. And so we are interdependent with other people and with the universe writ large. And so meditation by working on your own mind-

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the modern work for that in physics would be we are entangled.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 28:59Marcia Belsky?

  It's not so woo woo.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Because of entanglement, working on your own mind is working for the greater good. The same, you can do both at the same time.

• 29:09Marcia Belsky?

  Can't connect with others, so you connect with yourself.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have no rebuttal to that perspective. Very good. Well, Dazman, delight to have you and just congratulations on trying to, having improved yourself and now attempting to improve others, because at the end of the day, the world is better off for people like you having lived in it, so.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 29:32Marcia Belsky?

  Imagine New York if we weren't all just walking around having panic attacks all the time. It'd be a different world. It'd be a different world.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, okay.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  It's great to meet you and thank, I'm a longtime fan, so great to meet you Neil and Marcia. I'm a new fan and great to meet you as well.

• 29:50Marcia Belsky?

  Thank you, it's so nice to meet you.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we come back, we're gonna bring on StarTalk correspondent, can I call, can I use that word? StarTalk brain correspondent Heather Berlin when StarTalk returns.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about meditation, coming off our first segment in a conversation with Dan Harris, ABC correspondent turned meditation guru. Do I get to use that word, Marsha? I think so, yeah. Yeah, totally. We can totally do that. Absolutely. And as is the DNA of StarTalk, we bring in an academic expert on a subject matter that any of our pop culture representatives bring to the table. And of course, we have our neuroscientist at large, Heather Berlin. Welcome back, Heather.

• 31:02Heather Berlin?

  Always a pleasure, always a pleasure.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And you're at the Icahn School of Medicine?

• 31:07Heather Berlin?

  Yes, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Icahn, Icahn, at Mount Sinai. And you specialize in figuring out what the brain is doing, whether or not people know it. That's on your business card, isn't it?

• 31:24Heather Berlin?

  Exactly. That's my slogan.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just bring up some broad questions here that arose from that first segment. So many people who have mental challenges, right? One of them, a big one, I'm told, is anxiety, but... Brag, brag, brag. No, no, I'm just saying. No, no, but there are others. There's trauma in life, for example, possibly even PTSD. You can think of things that... a problem that a person can't shake. And, you know, as a clinical person, is your first thought, yeah, there's a drug for that. Or at what point does someone say, there's a drug for that? And at what

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  point does someone say, get to know your mind better? Maybe you can have mind over matter. Mind over... a properly behaving mind over the mind that's misfiring. So how do you strike a balance between those two?

• 32:27Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, I mean, often, you know, we start with the kinds of treatments that are non-medication-based treatments.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do.

• 32:36Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that would be, I mean, you know, forms, various forms of talk therapy, using techniques.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, therapy, yes, of course.

• 32:45Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, you know, mindfulness-based, stress reduction, or meditation as part, as integrated as part of therapy. You know, because your thoughts, you know, can change your brain. And that is a way to change your neurochemistry, just via controlling your thoughts and your emotions and how you respond to them. So, we always, we always do that first. Now, if people's neurochemical imbalance or neurocircuitry is in such a way that that is not enough, then we can supplement or augment that with medication. And then we find that there's a synergistic effect, so that the medication plus the mindfulness base or the talk therapies work together better than either one of them alone.

• 33:30Heather Berlin?

  So it's never just like, here's a pill, now go off and, and, you know, you'll be better. It's, it's always gonna be a bit of both, but, but we start always with non-medical treatments and then sort of move up the ladder.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wait, isn't a pill cheaper than therapy?

• 33:44Marcia Belsky?

  So much. Although, it depends.

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking.

• 33:49Heather Berlin?

  It depends.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's cheaper and faster than therapy.

• 33:55Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but I...

• 33:56Heather Berlin?

  Depends on the therapist, yeah.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you know the neurochemistry, the electrochemistry of, let's just, whoever defines it, I don't care, it doesn't matter, of a normal brain, okay? This is a brain that doesn't have neurological issues that we have identified in textbooks. Is that the chemistry you're gonna try to recreate in the mind of someone who has mental challenges?

• 34:22Heather Berlin?

  So, first of all, there's no such thing really as a normal brain. Every brain is different. And now, when we're talking about people at the extremes, yes, you know, people with extreme...

• 34:34Heather Berlin?

  Neurochemical imbalances or problems in their neuroanatomy. But outside of those extremes, everybody is, has something, basically. Everybody, we're all wired differently. And so there's no one ideal place that we're trying to get a person to be at. So that's why psychiatry is, is an art more so even than a science.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 34:55Heather Berlin?

  You know, it's not like, we know, okay, it's not like you have this bacteria, take this antibiotic. You know, it is try this SSRI or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and see if that has an effect. And then we sort of measure, how is it affecting that person? And if it works, great. If not, okay, we'll try this drug or we'll try that. So there's no perfect.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's also dosing too.

• 35:14Heather Berlin?

  The dosage.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:16Heather Berlin?

  Yeah, there's no, there's no ideal state we're trying to get. It's just, it's really individualized medicine. What works for you, based on your symptomology? You know, what kind of treatment do we think is going to be best for you? And so there's no ideal state. It's just, it's just what's good for you. So if you're a person who's an over thinker, you have a highly active prefrontal cortex and you're ruminating and you can't stop that inner voice, you know, giving you techniques to how to quiet it down, how to focus your attention is one way. If that doesn't help, you need something stronger, then we can help bring in certain drugs and see if that has an effect or not. You know, there's just no.

• 35:50Marcia Belsky?

  And what drugs are those for these over thinker types?

• 35:56Marcia Belsky?

  That sounds horrible. They need help.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Heather, let me ask you a, an awkward philosophical question.

• 36:04Heather Berlin?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And I, I, I come to you from the world of physics. And in physics, we, we, physics has been around a long time. What I mean by that is there are things we've actually understood about the universe over many, many centuries by the works, the hard work and brilliance of key people who have been in our field. That is a much deeper history than psychiatry or psychology, right? When you think of sort of modern psychiatry, psychology, it's, is it much more than a century old, really? I mean, maybe late 1800s, whereas physics, we have authentic physics going back 500 years.

• 36:44Heather Berlin?

  Uh huh.

• 36:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 36:45Heather Berlin?

  Uh huh.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my, my question is, could it be that neuroscience or, or, or a couch, uh, you know, uh, couch therapy is something that needs breakthroughs of brilliant neuro people who haven't been born yet, so that the day will come, will you say, you'll just analyze the neurochemistry and say, here's what's wrong, fix it here, nip, tuck, do the tuck, boom.

• 37:11Heather Berlin?

  That sounds terrifying.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you walk out the door and it's one session in your office.

• 37:15Heather Berlin?

  Okay, okay, ready? This, I love this question. So first of all, I mean, psychology arose.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I need buy-in on this. Marsha, are you with me on this?

• 37:21Marcia Belsky?

  I'm freaked out because to me, it's like, because it's about the human brain, it can never be standardized in the way that physics is because humans are consciousness, just like we were talking about in the first segment, it's about our consciousness. So I would never want to go into

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you why.

• 37:35Marcia Belsky?

  A doctor who can scan my brain.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna be devil's advocate.

• 37:38Marcia Belsky?

  I'd be terrified they'd use it for evil.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna, so, no, here's what, okay, there was a day, we'd look up at the night sky, oh, the moon is doing this and that, and that's different from what mercury is doing, and that's different for, and everybody's doing their thing in the sky.

• 37:56Marcia Belsky?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no one really understands it.

• 37:59Marcia Belsky?

  Exactly.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we're thinking, oh my gosh, well, we'll never understand it because we are mortal and that's the divine space of the heavens, and how could we ever understand divine thinking?

• 38:07Marcia Belsky?

  I see what you're saying, yes, where we still have a lot of, yeah.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, then, single formulas come forth and it brings it all together under one coherent understanding. So are we in this moment declaring the brain is just complex and we can never do it, or are you admitting ignorance about where we, relative to where we could be one day, so that the person walks in, you put him in one of your machines that I know you got in the back room there in your home, and then goes boop, and then everything is fixed, like I said, and it's one-stop shopping?

• 38:40Heather Berlin?

  Okay.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 38:42Heather Berlin?

  Oh, I'll tackle this in two minutes or less. Psychology arose out of philosophy. Philosophy was the origins of psychology. But technically, if you really, you know, the, the, the, the science of the mind, you know, maybe a century, a century and a half old, true. The, the problem with the brain is subjectivity. So I've always been interested in the brain because I want to understand the neural basis of consciousness. How does this physical piece of matter create subjective states? If I ask you-

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the most subjective thing there is in the world.

• 39:08Heather Berlin?

  Exactly. So if I ask you, are you depressed? You know, I can look at how you're acting, whatever, but I have to ask you, on a scale of one to 10, how sad do you feel? Or how much pain are you in? Right? So until we can solve that problem of subjectivity, which is really what we want to work towards is having a unified theory of the neural basis of consciousness. And, and we're working on that right now.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which you don't have yet.

• 39:28Heather Berlin?

  We do not have that. We do not have an agreed upon theory of, of consciousness.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Marsha, you know, the best evidence that they don't have it is that if you go to the, the bookstore and you look for books on consciousness, there are shelf after shelf.

• 39:42Marcia Belsky?

  And not just one.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just one book.

• 39:44Marcia Belsky?

  We figured it out.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just one book on gravity on the shelf and there's 50 books on consciousness. That means we know nothing about consciousness.

• 39:51Marcia Belsky?

  Whoever figures out how to-

• 39:52Heather Berlin?

  But we're narrating it now.

• 39:53Marcia Belsky?

  So if you, but if you figure it out, though, don't tell anybody because I don't want the clones. I don't want the, I don't want it. I don't want it.

• 40:02Heather Berlin?

  Well, this is the thing. The thing about consciousness is this first person's subjective experience. So the only one that can ever experience your consciousness is you, to know what it feels like to be you. But there are a couple of main contenders of, like, one is this integrated information theory of consciousness. The other is the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness. Some talk about predictive processing and coding. So there's a bunch of theories out there floating around and we're actually engaged in a large scale study right now across labs to test these different theories against each other experimentally, which is very difficult to do in and of itself because of the problem of subjectivity.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also, could the concept of consciousness itself be malformed in how you even posed the question?

• 40:42Heather Berlin?

  Well, yeah. So I once actually debated Deepak Chopra on this topic because he is, he is philosophizing that consciousness just exists in the universe. It's a fundamental property of the universe and we are just subjects of that. We, it creates matter, right? Where I say, no matter, or me and my fellow neuroscientists, matter creates subjectivity, creates consciousness. But there are some- People with different philosophical views that say it exists in the universe and we're just like the conduits of it.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is further evidence that nobody really knows anything.

• 41:10Heather Berlin?

  Well.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But meditation helps. The universe gives it to you and the other person says that you give it to the universe.

• 41:19Heather Berlin?

  Right.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If that's what you're arguing about, you don't know anything.

• 41:22Heather Berlin?

  We're far from it. But I do ultimately think that in the, if we don't kill ourselves first as a human species, and over the course of time, you know, theories will emerge and, and we will get closer, but because each brain is slightly different, you would have to take each individual, map out their entire brain, understand their full history, and also the brain isn't static, it's constantly changing. So where you were yesterday is different than where you are today.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it's a moving target.

• 41:47Heather Berlin?

  So with so many variables involved, but it's really hard, yeah, to pinpoint and to change it in a way that's gonna suit, it's gonna change the person's behavior. However, the one thing we are getting closer with are neural implants where we can, you know, make a rat move left or right, depending on how we direct it, or make it eat or not eat. And so we can start to control human behavior, but if we can control how you feel and think, you know, I mean, we'll eventually get there, I'm sure.

• 42:11Marcia Belsky?

  That's so scary.

• 42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a little scary. I'm scared of that, Marsha. She said, neural implants to control your behavior? Yes.

• 42:20Marcia Belsky?

  Now every time I go left or right, I'm gonna go, am I doing this? Someone else making me?

• 42:26Heather Berlin?

  See, we have these little remote controls at home, you know, and that's how we...

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. You're a joystick that Heather's got you going on that. We gotta take a quick break. When we come back, Heather, I want to hear from you about the clinical studies and laboratory studies of what the brain is doing when it's meditating, or when it's not meditating, or, or just what, what, what going inside the brain tells us about what's going on outside when StarTalk returns.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back, Startalk, segment three of meditation. And we began with Dan Harris, who set us on this path. He's got a meditation app called 10% Smarter, is it, Marcia?

• 43:20Marcia Belsky?

  10% Happier.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Happier, 10% Happier. Yeah, no, we really want one that makes us all 10% smarter. All right, we gotta work on that one. And we brought in Heather Berlin, our neuroscientist-at-large, to help make sense of all of this, neurological sense. Heather, all this talk about changes in people's behavior, for whatever reason, be it meditation or drugs, do you see that in brain scans, or neural implants, or whatever it is you do behind a curtain when nobody's looking?

• 43:51Heather Berlin?

  Do we see changes in the brain after meditation? Yeah, and amazingly so. So, all these studies have been done, you know, they have people who never meditated before, and then they have them meditate for eight weeks, and then look at their brains, you know, before and after. And they also look at long-term meditators, you know, people who've been practicing their whole life. And you actually see an increase in gray matter. So, normally, the brain is aging, right, over time, and we're having this sort of a little bit of atrophy of gray matter. And they found that meditators, long-term meditators, a 50-year-old brain looks like what a 25-year-old brain would look like.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Remind me what gray matter does for us?

• 44:25Heather Berlin?

  Gray matter is involved in all of our thinking, our cognition, planning, organizing. It's particularly in the prefrontal cortex, they see these changes.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what's the point of the rest of your brain? You just listen to everything I want my brain for. So, what good is the rest of the brain?

• 44:40Heather Berlin?

  Well, sensory, it's all your sensory information. The subcortical areas are more the emotional parts of your brain, your drives, motivation. But they actually see changes in those areas, too. So, they had the amygdala involved in a fear response, your kind of fight-or-flight response, actually were smaller. And in the short-term meditators, the people who just did it for eight weeks... They looked at their amygdala activation in response to emotional pictures before meditating and then after, and they had less amygdala activation to pictures after they had meditated. So they had more emotional control. So increases in prefrontal cortex gray matter means that they can, you can regulate yourself. You can have more impulse control, control over emotions.

• 45:22Heather Berlin?

  And it actually, you see these decreases in the subcortical areas. So it's both you get these, these activation changes and you get really structural changes in the brain with meditation over time.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you have value judged in what you just said, you value judge those changes.

• 45:37Marcia Belsky?

  Well, but the amygdala is a huge part of anxiety, right? Because that's basically like your fight or flight is triggered, but there's nothing to run from. So like your outside's not matching your inside. And I've heard that meditation, yeah, like that's interesting because I've heard that meditation just helps calm that fight or flight.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, interesting, Marsha. So you're saying that sometimes we're reacting in a way that would have been sensible if T-Rex were chasing us.

• 46:04Marcia Belsky?

  Exactly.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except that is not the threat.

• 46:08Marcia Belsky?

  You see that a lot. I'd had a job where I worked with Holocaust survivors and their kids had even worse anxiety than them because they grow up with all this physical anxiety, but their experience outwardly is very safe. So it doesn't make sense. And then they've now done studies about that, that kids of trauma and things like the Holocaust have these experiences with their brain chemistry. And it's just interesting hearing the science behind it because I've heard about the amygdala and stuff.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, but Heather, all right, so I'll, I'll give you that, but how about any activity that someone does intensely for eight weeks? If I, if I take up chess and I get really into chess or some, or some, I don't know, martial arts.

• 46:49Marcia Belsky?

  Does that change the brain?

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, something that takes a lot of focus and intensity. So is, is, is meditation unique in this regard? Or is it just anything you do with focus and intensity will also trigger or instill change, permanent changes in the brain?

• 47:05Heather Berlin?

  Absolutely. But it's the, it's the skill set that you're training because your brain habituates. It learns anything. So if you're doing something bad, like things that are related to addiction, you get into a negative, negative changes in the brain. But in this case, what you're learning with meditation is you're increasing activation in parts of the brain that have to do with. Your sort of, what do they call it, quieting your, your sort of monkey mind. That inner chatter, that self-critic.

• 47:30Marcia Belsky?

  Back to the monkey mind.

• 47:31Heather Berlin?

  The, you know, the kind of inner voice, that's the inner critic that's telling you you're not doing well, or all the negative thinking, and you're gaining more control over those negative thoughts. You're getting more control over, I mean, emotions are good to have, but not when they're being triggered for the wrong reasons, right? So what happens, you have a fast track to emotion where the amygdala gets activated, but then the prefrontal cortex says, oh, wait, you know, this, there's nothing dangerous in this situation. You can calm down now. But if you don't have the right regulation to do that.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then you're a victim of your own neurochemistry.

• 48:01Heather Berlin?

  Exactly, but this way you're taking control in a way over your, your brain. It's like the brain controlling itself. So with meditation, you're, you're becoming more aware of what's happening internally in your own mind, and you're gaining more control so that you can enhance your positive experiences and help down-regulate the negative ones and the thoughts as well.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what I did once, Heather? I was seventeen and there was a, a friend of our family, a friend of my mother's who had a son who was also seventeen, but I'd never, we played together when we were like three, but I didn't know him. And he died of brain cancer. Very tragic. And there was a funeral in Riverside, the chapel at Riverside Church. And they, it was during a school day. And he, he went to school in Westchester, but they took a bus of kids, brought them into Manhattan, and that, and there's a picture of him on the casket. And, and the organ is doing its organ thing, funeral organ thing. Everybody's crying.

• 49:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm saying to myself.

• 49:04Heather Berlin?

  Uh-oh.

• 49:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I swear.

• 49:05Heather Berlin?

  Were you not crying? Uh-oh.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I swear, this is my, this is my, this is what I said to myself. I said, I do not know this person.

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet every force operating in the air right now wants me to cry over his death. The, the, you know, fifteen, sixteen year old kids helping each other walk down the aisle. And he was a handsome kid, so there's this handsome photo of him. And I said, and, and tears started welling up in my eyes and I said, I'm only crying because everybody else is crying. I don't actually feel this at all. I said this to myself. And then I said, why don't I cry every day? Because thousands of people die every day in New York City for all kinds of reasons. I'm not crying then, so why should I cry now? So suck those tears back up.

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I, I still felt the moment, but I did not let the moment override emotions that I felt were artificially implanted in me. I did that when I was seventeen. I don't know if I should be proud of that moment.

• 50:11Marcia Belsky?

  I cry at State Farm commercials. Are you serious?

• 50:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you cry at the commercial where the woman sings with the, the dogs.

• 50:22Marcia Belsky?

  Oh, the most manipulative, bring grandma in and you haven't seen her in twenty years. I'll be sobbing. I'm like.

• 50:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of these, they're trying to manipulate me. And so Heather, I, if, are you saying that I did something good? Or did I do something, um?

• 50:36Marcia Belsky?

  There's, yeah, there's no good or bad.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Misanthropic.

• 50:39Heather Berlin?

  There's two, there's, it's interesting. So there's what we put a value judgment. You know, one of, of which is if you can have the right kinds of emotional control, you know, be able to express your emotions at the appropriate time, but not express them when you're being manipulated to do so and whatnot. So in that sense, yes.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll tell you, that organ was all in.

• 50:59Marcia Belsky?

  You're supposed to cry at a funeral because there's a collective release with ritual, even if like it's not, it's like, I feel like our culture is so shied away from death that that's why you're supposed to cry. But I also went to some funerals where some people, I'm like, you're doing this for attention, which is wrong, but.

• 51:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 51:15Heather Berlin?

  So I think the emotional control can be a good thing. Again, over controlled, like, you know, if you didn't cry, if it was the funeral of someone you did know and had a connection to, that'd be a little different. But the other aspect is, and what meditation also helps increase the brain areas involved in, is empathy. So you can have an empathetic response. You can, like, the boundary between self and other, it can dissolve and you can feel more connected with people. So you're gonna increase empathy, but at the same time, have enough cognitive control to control your emotions in the appropriate way, right?

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I drew my line between tears dropping down my cheek. I felt it, it was a very sad day, and so, it's not that I didn't feel the sadness, but I just could not, and, you know, I've been to some New Orleans funerals, right? Where there is a jazz band, and there's a celebration. So I don't think it's writ in the sky that one must cry at a funeral. You can use that time to celebrate the person's life, however brief they were on earth.

• 52:16Heather Berlin?

  But you know what you were exhibiting, which is really, at that young age, was this sort of meta-awareness, you know? You were making a decision about how you were gonna choose to respond.

• 52:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was a geek kid, I was a complete geek kid.

• 52:28Heather Berlin?

  So there was this whole, like, parts of the brain modulating other parts of the brain, and that's what meditators do. I once did this experiment with this Shaolin monk, who could withstand an enormous amount of pain. And so we put him in the scanner, and we put these heaters on his wrists, and we would just keep increasing the heat, to the point that he had burn marks on it. And he was just saying, "I feel the pain, I feel the pain," and you look at his brain...

• 52:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marsha, this is the stuff Heather does.

• 52:50Marcia Belsky?

  Right.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You thought I was joking? The stuff going on behind that curtain?

• 52:56Marcia Belsky?

  And where are your offices located? I have a couple friends.

• 53:00Heather Berlin?

  This was in the UK, this was in the UK, totally different rules there.

• 53:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Different legislative rules, yeah.

• 53:06Heather Berlin?

  But when he was controlling this pain, you saw one part of his brain controlling the pain network in the brain. So he was literally using one part of his brain, his executive control, to down-regulate the pain network. Because pain doesn't happen in your arm. It happens in your brain. So if you can control one part of your brain with the other, you cannot experience pain. There are people who go through surgery without anesthesia by going into a meditative state. So it's just amazing how much, when I talk about this meta-awareness, how much control we can really have beyond what we even think is physiologically possible. We can control our own physiology.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hate to confess then, I used to do that. Well, I used to wrestle and wrestle, there's a lot of things that are painful when you're wrestling. And I would say to myself, well, is the skin broken and am I bleeding? No, therefore ignore it and keep going.

• 53:53Marcia Belsky?

  They've shown athletes, that's like, there was a really fascinating like sports science thing where about how athletes can play through a broken leg just by pure pain control and adrenaline and like the chemicals that come up where you can have a super bad injury and finish the game and then not feel the pain until afterwards, essentially. But then sometimes the pain is excruciating once they finally do feel it. But they'll say, I played for two hours on a broken leg, didn't feel a thing. As soon as the game was over, I, you know, collapsed. Like, it's just amazing.

• 54:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so but in my case, I would make the judgment whether it was just pain, that pain sensors were sending to my brain or whether there's an actual physiological break that needed attention, right? Medical attention. I'd make that distinction. And if it was just simply pain, no matter how severe, I would just ignore it and keep going. And so I hope, Heather, that that doesn't mean I can't feel for people, right? Is that what you're telling me? That I'm just hard-hearted?

• 54:54Heather Berlin?

  I think there are two different systems that are going on. One is this capacity to feel empathy, right? Which is a whole neural network in and of itself, which you can very well have. I don't know, I may have to run some tests on you, but you know. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.

• 55:10Heather Berlin?

  So that's one thing. So it doesn't necessarily correlate with how much cognitive control or, you know, control you have over your thoughts and over pain. So you can have a ton of cognitive or control or emotional regulation, and that doesn't necessarily relate to how empathetic or not you are. You know, the reason they get sort of pushed together is because psychopaths tend to have an enormous amount of control and also don't have empathy. But in And you know, non-psychopathic humans, they don't have to be correlated.

• 55:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just used my name in the same sentence with the word psychopath. Just let the record show.

• 55:42Marcia Belsky?

  You're the one talking about being at funerals, looking at everybody cry.

• 55:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, we've got to land this plane, but this has been highly enlightening and introspective, uncommon for what we normally do for StarTalk. So I'm glad to have you contribute to this, Heather.

• 55:58Heather Berlin?

  Thank you.

• 55:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been a StarTalk, an episode on meditation and mindfulness. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking out.