Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris What Distraction Does to Your Brain—and How To Regain Cognitive Control | Adam Gazzaley About this episode Distraction is making you anxious and sleepless. Here's how to fix it.
Adam Gazzaley https://gazzaley.com/, M. D., Ph. D. is the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry, and Founder & Executive Director of Neuroscape https://neuroscape.ucsf.edu/ at UCSF. He co-authored the 2016 book "The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World https://www.amazon.com/Distracted-Mind-Ancient-Brains-High-Tech/dp/0262034948".
In this episode we talk about:
The impact of multitasking on our attention, relationships, emotions, anxiety, and memory The difference between top-down and bottom-up attention What it means to have cognitive control—and some practical tools for restoring your own cognitive control. Controversial technologies that could eventually help us have a stronger brain The impact of music and rhythm on the mind And how to use technology for your brain's benefit
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Transcript 13,079 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. One of the recurring themes on this show, and something I think about a lot personally, is that we have these ancient brains that are often ill-suited to our modern, high-tech environment. And this evolutionary mismatch can create anxiety, stress, depression, insomnia, and many other vexations. And one of the principal ways in which modern life can overtax our brains is distraction. You might be the type of person who likes to brag about how good you are at multitasking, but nobody is good at multitasking. Write that down. Put it up on the wall. Multitasking is a computer term. Our brains can only focus on
0:59 Dan Harris? one thing at a time. So multitasking is a neurological impossibility. In fact, one way to translate the word multitasking is doing several things at the same time poorly. And even if you're not the type to deliberately try to multitask, it's really easy to have your attention pulled away, even if you're monotasking, by the constant ringing and pinging of your phone. Which brings me to today's episode, where you're going to hear from one of the world's leading experts on the subject of distraction. His name is Adam Ghazali. He's the David Dolby Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Physiology, and Psychiatry at UCSF. He's also the co-author of a book called The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains
1:44 Dan Harris? in a High-Tech World. In this conversation, we talk about the impact of multitasking on your attention, your relationships, emotions, anxiety, and memory, the difference between top-down and bottom-up attention, what it means to have cognitive control, and some practical tools for restoring your own cognitive control. We talk about some controversial technologies that could eventually help us have a stronger brain, such as neurofeedback and neurostimulation, the impact of music and rhythm on the mind, and how to use technology to benefit your brain. Before we get into all of that, though, I just want to give you a heads up about a big project we're launching right here in June. As you may know, we run an occasional
2:26 Dan Harris? series on the pod called Get Fit Sanely. It's all about how to take care of your body without losing your mind. This is now our third year of producing this series, and this time in June, we're going to go bigger than we've ever gone before. We're spending a whole month on the topic, and we have a great lineup, including a Dharma teacher who's an ultra marathoner, a doctor who specializes in gut health without all the snake oil, and a science journalist who's become an expert on the subject of rest. We're going to cover everything from motivation and habit change to the connection between your muscles and your mental health. And we will have a special kickoff episode coming up at the end of the week, this Friday, May 30, and that will lead us into a full slate of programming during the month of June. And this is the extra cool part. For subscribers at danharris.com,
3:11 Dan Harris? every episode in the month of June will come with a companion guided meditation from the great Carl I, a meditation teacher who's a friend of the show and a friend of mine. You can get all the details on that over at danharris.com. All right, we'll get started with Adam Gazali right after this.
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4:30 Dan Harris? Adam Gazali, welcome to the show.
4:32 Speaker 03 Thanks so much. Glad to be here.
4:34 Dan Harris? Thanks for making time to do this. I appreciate it. You use a word in your book, cognitive control. What does that mean?
4:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, cognitive control, many people might just interpret it as attention. It's your ability to direct your limited resources where and when you want them. It's broader than attention through the eyes of a cognitive scientist because it would also include switching tasks, which is a type of attentional movement, and also internally-directed attention, what we call working memory, which is holding information in mind actively for short periods of time. So I think a simple way for most people to think about it is that cognitive control is attention, but it's a little broader than the way that most people think about attention to include all of the ways that you direct your mental resources.
5:26 Dan Harris? Got it. So it's attention plus, at the very least, plus working memory and the ability to switch from one task to another.
5:36 Speaker 03 Exactly, yep.
5:37 Dan Harris? Although, as you argue, switching too often, what we sometimes call multitasking, can be disastrous.
5:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, attention in general, across all the domains that we, or cognitive control in general, across all the domains that we just described, let's say, attention, selective and sustained attention is usually how people think about that, working memory, holding information in mind, and task switching are all fragile and vulnerable to interference and not perfect processes. So they all have their limitations. I'd say a lot of what I talk about in the first half of the book is those limitations.
6:15 Dan Harris? What are the limitations?
6:17 Speaker 03 They're broad. You know, we can only process a small amount of the information that we're exposed to in the world around us, as everyone could just experientially appreciate. And so we're selecting a very narrow segment for higher-order processing. That ability is not perfect. So I'm starting with attention first. So the act of focusing is equally balanced by the act of ignoring irrelevant information. So it's a spotlight, but it's not just that you put the spotlight and everything else goes dark. What we've shown in a lot of my research in my own lab...
6:54 Speaker 03 Is that the filtering is an active suppressive process and that could vary in its capability. So you may have great focus, you have a great spotlight, but the rest of the field is not being adequately suppressed and filtered. And so you have interference from that information. So that's one of the limitations of attention is that the selectivity is not perfect. Also, our ability to sustain attention is quite limited. So we have a goal that we're focusing on and our ability to hold that focus is limited. And so we constantly have this challenge in maintaining the sustainability to hold the area focus in our spotlight.
7:38 Speaker 03 We also have limitations in working memory. We can't hold a large capacity of information in our mind for long periods of time and it degrades in fidelity rather rapidly. And then, as you mentioned, when it comes to task switching or what we call multitasking, there's lots of limitations there. Not the least of which is when you multitask in your brain, you're not parallel processing as the term might imply. You're really moving between tasks and with each of these switches, there is a degradation of the quality of information that you are engaging in. So every switch involves a bit of a loss of fidelity. So yeah, cognitive control is limited in pretty much every way you can evaluate it.
8:20 Dan Harris? In the book, you talk about the kind of pernicious impact of multitasking on many aspects of our psychology, including our relationships, our ability to manage our emotion, our anxiety, our memory. Can you say a little bit more here?
8:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, the way I think about it is the first stop, the first cascade of negative consequences of multitasking on other aspects of cognition. So when you move rapidly between your goals, maybe you're listening to this podcast and driving a car or listening to it and trying to do emails. So there's different degrees of interference that multitasking can be associated with. But with each time that you Moving between those two goals because you really can't parallel process them perfectly. There is a degradation and so it affects pretty much everything. It could affect your safety if you're driving, but on the cognitive side, it could affect your memory, your perception, your decision making.
9:21 Speaker 03 And then that could cascade further into real life events like your relationships, your sleep, how you engage in your work or your school activities. And you know, I use that word cascading purposely because that's how I picture it in my mind, like a cascading waterfall. Like it starts with this activity that you're doing that you think maybe you're good at or hope to be good at. And you're not, uh, because inherently the brain's not good at that. And then it has this cascading set of consequences that could reach across your entire life.
9:54 Dan Harris? So let me just see if I can restate that to you. Multitasking is a computer term originally because a computer can do two things at once, but we neurologically cannot, we can only do one thing at a time. So when we're multitasking, we're just rapidly switching back and forth between or among different things.
10:11 Speaker 03 Exactly.
10:12 Dan Harris? Different areas of focus. And when you're doing that, it degrades your cognition, which can, as you say, have this cascade so that you're not sleeping as well, your anxiety goes up, your relationships suffer because you're not really paying attention. And maybe you're sleep deprived and anxious on and on. It's a pretty negative force in our culture right now.
10:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, you described that perfectly. That is exactly, I would say, the view that most neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have in relation to multitasking. And also most behavioral psychologists, you know, no matter what window you look at this through, whether you're looking at the brain under MRI scanner or you're looking at someone's behavior in the real world, you see all of the manifestations that you described. One caveat, just to be clear, is that a lot of this depends on what you're talking about tasking and multitasking. So we are capable of doing more than one thing at a time. As long as one of those things or more of those things become automatized and very sort of reflexive. So sure, you could walk and have a conversation and someone says,
11:17 Speaker 03 well, that's multitasking, but you've offloaded the walking process. Even there, it could sort of be challenging to walk and have a conversation. So even in the most low level things, but that's the only sort of caveat that it starts becoming possible. But the minute they are tasks that demand attention, then everything you said is true. And so sure, maybe you can wash the dishes and listen to a podcast because washing the dishes, you sort of put on an autopilot after so many years of doing it. But responding to emails and listening to a podcast simultaneously is truly impossible. You're just switching. If you pay attention, you know you're switching, especially once the tasks are high enough in attentional demand, you know you're switching.
12:01 Speaker 03 As a matter of fact, you might be writing an email and listening to the podcast and then not send the email to afterwards because you want to reread it, which is evidence to you that you did not invest your full attention in that at the same time. So I think that that one is very experiential for people to understand.
12:18 Dan Harris? Do you have a sense of what the mechanism, I think I can imagine it, but I'd be interested to hear from you. What is the mechanism by which switching in this way can lead to anxiety?
12:29 Speaker 03 Well, my view of it, I'm not an expert on anxiety, but it's really the sort of meta part of this, that you do have the ability to be introspective about the impact of your behavior on yourself and on your environment. And if you are at all introspective about what is happening to you when you multitask, I mean, how could you not be anxious? Like it's, it's really degrading most of the things that are important to you. So if you are, let's say, you know, using the word addicted is a complicated word, but addicted to multitasking, it's like a strong behavioral habit, let's just say, and you do it all the time. You do it when you drive, you do it when you're sitting around the table with your family at dinner, you do it when you're
13:12 Speaker 03 trying to sleep. If you have any degree of Awareness and introspection, you're gonna be aware and feel the consequences of that negatively. You're gonna feel maybe guilt that you're not giving your spouse or your children the attention they deserve. You're gonna know that you're having trouble getting to sleep. You're gonna be aware that your work is being disruptive and that's anxiety provoking, because how you're behaving is not in line with your understanding of what you need to do to be most effective and happy.
13:44 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. And if it's screwing up your sleep and your relationships, that will make you anxious too.
13:50 Speaker 03 Right. And then these things cascade. Once your sleep is screwed up, well, then that also aggravates your, you know, attentional capacity and your ability to be tolerant. And so it just keeps cycling these things.
14:03 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. My friend Evelyn Tribbley likes to talk about a toilet vortex, and this seems like a classic one. You use a phrase, the cognition crisis. What do you mean by that?
14:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, that is a phrase that I've started using since the book. The book was really focused, The Distracted Mind, on very, not narrow, because it's a broad topic, but very tuned in on attention and its vulnerabilities and the consequences of that. The cognition crisis is where I took a step back and said, okay, it's not just attention that's challenged in our daily lives and in our modern world. It's all of cognition. And some of it is because attention is challenged. Attention and cognitive control is foundational to all other aspects of cognition, right? If you're not paying attention, it's going to impact your decision making, it's going to impact your memory, it's going to impact
15:00 Speaker 03 your creativity. All these things, as we described, really blossomed from a challenge with attention. But there's more than that going on. And so the cognition crisis was my attempt to call our attention towards the fact that
15:18 Speaker 03 We, I would say as a species, this is not a US problem, it's a human problem. We are not doing well when it comes to our cognition. That's my view. And I'm defining cognition really broadly here. So attention, memory, perception, but also reasoning and decision making and imagination and creativity, emotional regulation and stress regulation, I would put in the domain of cognition. And then empathy and compassion and even like the highest level wisdom are all aspects of how I'm defining cognition when I talk about a cognition crisis. And I would say that we're sort of tragically lacking in not just in how we understand these things, which I think are pretty superficial, given how we could understand them and how
16:01 Speaker 03 most people understand them, but in terms of what we're doing to optimize them and to make them maximally effective and benefit our lives. And I think that we're paying a great price for that, both on the clinical side where I would say debilitating impairments in cognition, what we think of as mental health challenges and mental health conditions are enormous. Over half a billion people are suffering the debilitating impairments of cognition. But the reason why I don't call it a mental health crisis and I call it a cognition crisis is because mental health crisis has been pretty uniformly regarded as the clinical side of this. It's when you have like a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury, on and on. I'm saying that the cognition crisis touches everyone. Right.
16:46 Speaker 03 That we have limitations in long-term thinking and decision making and analytical thought, in empathic concern, and we're all subject to this and that it's in many ways, it's getting worse. And the last point I would say is that I've done a little bit of like online research and it seems maybe people even know about this, that societies in the past have prioritized this sort of elevation of the human mind. You know, ancient Japan and during the Renaissance and even many indigenous cultures sort of driving our connection with nature and other things that are core to cognition. But I just don't think this is one of those times right now where it's being prioritized.
17:27 Speaker 03 Like, we're just reducing all of the information flow to little soundbites and long-term thinking is just evaporated and empathy feels very thin right now. So that's sort of the message of the cognition crisis is why is this not being discussed as a grand challenge and being placed on par with all these other pressing global priorities, right? We can't address the other challenges and crises like climate change, for example. Climate change is not about a lack of information. We know exactly what's going on. It's about our minds. It is a product of the cognition crisis. And until we can think in that sustained manner and make future-oriented decisions and empathic decisions about other people,
18:12 Speaker 03 we'll never deal with climate change, no matter how much information we accumulate. It's not a process problem. It's not a technology problem. It is a mind's problem.
18:21 Dan Harris? That's really well said and very compelling. And I often talk about the mental health crisis, and it's real. As you said, we have, since we've started keeping records, we've never seen this level of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness. And calling that out is insufficient because there are people who don't have a clinical diagnosis. I'm not even talking about the undiagnosed. I'm talking about people who don't qualify for one of these diagnoses, but their cognition is impaired by dint of being alive right now.
18:50 Speaker 03 100%. That is exactly what I mean by the cognition crisis. And that's why I use that term, rather than the mental health crisis, to expand it outside of the clinical domain, which is real, but not everything.
19:02 Dan Harris? This question that I'm going to ask you may be overly narrow, and it may be ill-informed. I don't know. But did you read this article in The New Yorker recently by Daniel Immerwarr?
19:13 Speaker 03 I don't think so, no.
19:14 Dan Harris? Okay. This guy's a history professor at Northwestern. And he has been reading a bunch of these books about the attention crisis. So this is a little bit more narrow than cognition, per se. But he's talking about how many writers have talked about how we have like a cultural ADD. And I just want to read you some of what he said because he has a critique of that. I read it and I wanted to get your view. Are you open to that?
19:45 Speaker 03 Sounds good. Yep.
19:46 Dan Harris? Okay. So I'm going to read quite a bit, a couple of paragraphs.
19:49 Speaker 03 Okay.
19:49 Dan Harris? Okay, so he starts off referencing this spate of books that decry our decline in attention, which is largely blamed on technology. Read one of these books and you're unnerved, but read two more and the skeptical imp within you awakens. Haven't critics freaked out about the brain scrambling power of everything from piano fortes to brightly colored posters? Isn't there in fact a long section in Plato's Fedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people's memories? I'm particularly fond of a hand wringing essay by Nathaniel Hawthorne from 1843. Hawthorne warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation.
20:34 Dan Harris? They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophecies. Their discussions will devolve into acrid debates and all mortal intercourse will be chilled with a fatal frost. Hawthorne's worry, there are placement of the open fireplace by the iron stove. The writer goes on to say, what's awkward about this whole debate is that though we speak freely of attention spans, they are not the sort of thing that psychologists can measure independent of context across time. And studies of the ostensible harm that carrying smartphones does to cognitive abilities have been contradictory and inconclusive. ADHD diagnoses abound, but is that because the condition is growing more prevalent or the diagnosis is? U.S. labor productivity and the percentage of the population with four years or more
21:18 Dan Harris? of college have risen throughout the internet era. He goes on to argue that book sales have held strong, that- That movies and TVs are longer and have more Baroque storylines than they've ever had. That video games are getting incredibly complex and time consuming. That meditation and bird watching and vinyl records have all come back. He closes by saying, yes, there are problems with technology, including, you know, lack of empathy. The things that you've already talked about, but he closes by saying, our relationships to our smartphones are far from healthy. The media scape is becoming a stormy sea of anxiety, envy, delusion and rage. Our attention is being redirected in surprising and often worrying ways. The overheating of discourse, the rise of conspiratorial thinking, the hollowing out of shared truths.
22:03 Dan Harris? All these trends are real and deserve careful thought. The panic over lost attention is, however, a distraction. What say you?
22:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, I don't agree with that. I agree with some of it. I agree that there's a lot of techno fear out there that may be overhyped a bit. But my view, certainly when we're researching the view, my co-author and I. My domain of research is not directly looking at the impact of technology on attention. I look at how attention works in the brain and how it is susceptible to effects from interference by distraction and multitasking. And there I feel the data is completely compelling that we have these limitations. And when our attention is fragmented, we don't perform as well. And I don't think that is in question.
22:50 Speaker 03 Now, the other part of the book was really largely led by my co-author Larry Rosen is more of a field psychologist. And he's looking at, well, what's the real world manifestation of this? And how has technology contributed? And in reviewing all that literature with him, to me, it seemed clear that there is a real world impact of the increasingly fragmented attention that we have. And are there exceptions? Sure. And is the data complicated? Sure. And can you find counter examples? Yes, but I believe that if you look across the full breadth of data on how people interact with each other, with themselves and with content.
23:33 Speaker 03 It is more fragmented than it has been, and there's a price to pay for that. All that being said, I also think that. Technology is a sword that cuts both ways. And as much as I believe that how we use our technology is not ideal for deep thinking and for empathy and for critical decision making. I believe that there is a different future that's accessible to us, even with some of the same technologies we have. I always say, you know, technology has always had this challenge, as this author really eloquently describes. And my example is fire can burn your house down or cook your food, right?
24:18 Speaker 03 And a molecule can be medicine or poison, just depending on the dose. And nuclear is obviously energy or bombs. Technology and video games and social media and the internet and smartphones are equally susceptible to both positive and negative forces. And I think it's appropriate to look at what has occurred with technology and the way we used it and how poorly we were intentional in its design and how almost criminally we have not monitored the effects. We're sort of just discovering, wow, teenage girls and young women are really struggling by this device, this platform telling them what everyone else is doing right now when they're not doing that.
25:01 Speaker 03 I feel like we've sort of buried our heads in the sand and didn't monitor appropriately. So I think it's appropriate to not be running around with a torch trying to burn down the village because all of this technology is inherently evil and we have no cognition right now that's functioning at a high level. But on the flip side, we should be really, really honest with ourselves that there is a disruption here that has occurred. I think the data speaks to it. People are aware of it. Most people don't fight this topic. They're like, yeah, I see it. I see it in my kids. I see it in myself. And we should just address it and figure out how to do better.
25:42 Speaker 03 And this is a critical time to have this conversation because our way of interacting with our devices is shifting. We now have virtual reality and augmented reality and we have AI. Generative AI and that is going to continue to increasingly complicate our interactions with technology. So if we don't start approaching it honestly and transparently, not as like this evil villain on a hill, but just as something that's nuanced and double sided, we're just going to get in more trouble going forward.
26:16 Dan Harris? You talked about having a positive relationship with technology and I do want to flag that we will come back to that. But in the meantime, I'd love to have you teach us a little bit about the brains that evolution has bequeathed us and how how attention and focus and cognition work in the brain. You use this theory in the book, optimal foraging theory. Maybe that's a good place to start.
26:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, one of the challenges that I had in writing a book on this topic was trying to go beyond the neuroscience, which I believe is quite convincing as we described all the interference effects that fragmenting your attention, either through being distracted or through multitasking, has on processing and functioning other information. I wanted to go beyond that and understand how is this manifesting in our lives and if we can not just go with our gut instincts about it, but really try to have sort of an evolutionary perspective on it, we might be able to come up with solutions that are a little more grounded in a conceptual framework,
27:22 Speaker 03 rather than just trying intuitively come up with solutions. And so I was inspired by a other field, what's known as optimal foraging theorems, and a particular on the marginal value theorem. And these are essentially mathematical approaches to model how animals forage for food in the world. And there's all sorts of different patterns, you know, this predator prey relationships, but there's also a another approach to to eating and surviving, which is foraging. Obvious examples of squirrels and bears and berries. And I was really interested in the mathematical models that have been developed to describe, for example, how a squirrel forages
28:06 Speaker 03 for nuts in a tree. And what the models have been successful in showing that it really replicates the real world behavior in laboratory studies as well, more controlled studies, is that there are two main forces that determine how long a squirrel stays in a tree foraging for nuts. One is the availability of nuts in the tree, and the other is how close it is to the next tree. So they will switch out of that tree more rapidly, even before depleting all the nuts, if there's another tree full of nuts that's just like a short jump away. But if the other tree is not close, then they will continue to draw on the resources
28:51 Speaker 03 of the tree they're in. And so essentially, what this model does, it predicts even mathematically how long an animal will forage in a patch of food before switching to a new patch. And I thought, wow, this is very similar to what we do with information. So if you place food with information, or you place squirrel with us, I would say that we forage for information in a very similar way to other animals foraging for food, or even how we forage for food. And this has been actually described also in primates, that we are rewarded with information in a very similar way to the way that we're rewarded for food. And so if you picture a human being foraging in an information patch, let's say it's a
29:35 Speaker 03 website, you could propose that how long you stay in that patch is dependent not just on the content there, whether or not you finished the article, but how accessible other information sources are, which now are just so accessible, right? It's just a click away, or you know, it's a link, or it's having multiple screens up, or it's having your phone on your lap, or having your phone even ping you and say, hey, there's one right here that you're really interested in. And so we're forcing ourselves to switch more rapidly than ideal, not really getting all the benefits of the content exists in any information patch because of the system we created to be drawn by the other sources that are so readily accessible. And then there are other...
30:18 Speaker 03 Other very human things like our declining desire to remain in a patch is not just how close another patch is, but also now anxiety on not being in that other source, or even boredom of being in this source. So that's what I sort of describe in the book is how can we use this model to help elucidate why we behave in this way, many times even when we don't want to. What hasn't been done is putting all the experimentation and the mathematics behind this. So it was sort of like a hypothesis that these models, which describe optimal animal foraging for food, can be related to humans foraging for information. And once you establish
31:01 Speaker 03 that, then it offers a host of solutions that you can take to better guide your behavior by sort of pushing and pulling on the elements of the model.
31:11 Dan Harris? Okay, so I want to talk about ways to better guide our behavior. But before we dive into that, is there anything else that we should know that a layperson should know about what distraction and task switching do to the brain?
31:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I define them differently. When I started doing research in this over 20 years ago, they're often used, not quite synonymously, but often used in the same context and not well defined necessarily. So distraction, I describe, and I have several papers on this, including some brain imaging studies that support it, is really the presence of irrelevant information in your environment that you are choosing to ignore in favor of your goal, but it creates an interference anyway. It sort of seeps in. So you can imagine having a conversation with someone that you really desperately want to interact with at a high level, but you're in a noisy restaurant. And so
32:08 Speaker 03 that information is irrelevant to you. You're trying to shut it out, but your filter is not perfect. And so that creates interference. That is distraction. The other way that interference occurs is through multitasking. So now you're making a conscious decision to have a conversation that, let's say, I'm going to give that same restaurant example, but Also keep your filter low so you can follow along with a conversation that's interesting to you at the next table. Or hear what the waiter is describing as the specials at the next table. Now you're consciously deciding to take in more than one stream of information. And what we found in our work is that the presence of distraction is so powerful
32:49 Speaker 03 that it degrades pretty much everything that we've studied and many other people have studied. So for example, here's just a salient example from our research. If you see a picture and you're trying to remember it, you perform better just by closing your eyes when you remember it as opposed to keeping your eyes open while you're trying to hold it in mind. So even just having your eyes open degrades that information, just that distraction, even though you don't have another goal. And we also showed that even just having that chatter around you while you're trying to take in information, even though it's irrelevant, also degrades the ability for you to remember the relevant information. So we are exquisitely sensitive to this interference effects.
33:35 Speaker 03 But the interference effects are even greater if you choose to engage in another stream of information. And that's sort of the multitasking phenomenon or the task switching. So it has all these very well documented acute effects on how our brain processes information and how it then degrades performance. It's the chronic effects that are a little less clear. So if you do this over long periods of time, you certainly, it certainly can become a habit. And I think many people would self identify as having a lot of these habits. Does it irrevocably harm your brain? I would say probably not. You know, our brains are remarkably plastic. And if you expose it to a new way of interacting with the world and new behaviors and new habits,
34:20 Speaker 03 it will adapt to it. So I tend to really focus on the acute consequences of this, both on Cognitive processing and how you engage in the world rather than some long-term chronic impact that's not going to be reversible.
34:37 Dan Harris? So if I understand the difference between and relationship between distraction and multitasking, distraction is, I guess, external or exogenous in that it's we live in an environment where things are constantly popping up to grab our attention. Meanwhile, if you are making the affirmative decision to switch back and forth rapidly between things, that makes you increasingly susceptible to distraction. Both of these things degrade your cognition. Am I in the zone here?
35:11 Speaker 03 Yes. Yeah, it basically comes down to goals. So do you have one goal or two goals? If you have one goal and there's irrelevant information that's unwilling, despite your best intentions is pulling your attention away from your focus, that's distraction. If your attention is being pulled away from your focus because you have the goal of focusing on more than one thing at a time, that would be multitasking.
35:33 Dan Harris? Got it.
35:33 Speaker 03 One other thing that you sort of hinted at, but I just want to draw attention to is that those irrelevant pieces of information that pull your attention do so through another evolutionarily relevant process. So we didn't really break this down, but attention I view in two different types. One is called top-down and one is called bottom-up. Everything we've really been focusing on now is top-down attention, and that's goal-directed attention. In some ways, I think it's the pinnacle of what human beings do is you make decision and you focus on something based upon that. You have a goal, even if it might not be the most salient or even relevant thing in your environment, that is what you're focusing on.
36:18 Speaker 03 Bottom-up is the more evolutionarily ancient aspect of attention. It's what drives most of the behaviors of other animals. And that's where your attention is directed to things in your environment that are either very important or very novel. That is a strong force. We still have that force, which is why we're distracted. You alluded to that. I just wanted to, you know, sort of give a little bit more of the dichotomy between bottom-up and top-down attention. But that bottom-up attention is often A vehicle, a tool that technology companies might use in order to pull your attention away from where you want it to be to where they want it to be. And that's often described as sort of this attention economy that it is a lever that
37:02 Speaker 03 is used to compete for your attention, independent of your goals.
37:10 Dan Harris? Coming up, Adam talks about some practical tools for restoring your own cognitive control and some controversial technologies that could eventually help you have a stronger brain.
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38:24 Dan Harris? Okay, so how does one boost one's cognitive control? You list a lot of levers that we can pull because this podcast is what it is. Let me start with meditation. What have you learned about how meditation is helpful in this regard?
38:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, that is a great place to start, not the least of which because I know it's a big interest of yours and of your listeners, but because there is so much data that has accumulated through different types of studies about the benefits of meditation on sort of what I would describe as taking back control. How do you get cognitive control under your command and not be pulled and pushed by the ebbs and flows of the technology around you? Meditation is a complex topic, not the least of which because it's been around for thousands of years and has many different versions and many different uses depending on the culture and even how it's been adapted in our Western culture.
39:24 Speaker 03 But at its core, it is an attention practice. I don't think anyone denies that. And there are different types of attention practices, whether it's concentrative or open meditation. We don't have to really necessarily tease all this apart, but if we just take concentrated focused meditation, which I think, you know, a lot of people would think of immediately when you think of meditation, breath focused meditation. This practice of holding your attention to a rather subtle stimuli like your breath or a body part or a mantra, phrase, is an exercise that the data supports can improve
40:06 Speaker 03 your ability to control your attention and has other benefits as well. And, you know, many other people are experts in its benefits on stress and empathy and other aspects that are important to us. But just from the attention perspective, there's lots of different research on real world practices of meditation. And in my own laboratory, we have created a digitally delivered
40:30 Speaker 03 Concentrated meditation practice that we call Metatrain, very similar to the approach to real world, the sort of Vipassana style meditation of focusing on your breath, holding your attention there, not judgmentally. And if your attention moves from there, just bringing it back. And we've described the outcomes of that process on attention through brain imaging and cognitive testing, and showing that even six weeks of relatively modest exposure, engagement in that, five days a week, 30 minutes a day for six weeks, we see across multiple populations improvement in attention processes that switch domains.
41:15 Speaker 03 So even like high speed visual attention is a benefit from eyes closed, slow internally focused attention. And in our world, we call that transfer of benefits. It's like sort of the hardest thing to show with any practice, but it's remarkable. And we've shown neuroly what's happening related to that. And we show that it occurs in older adults and younger adults. And now we've shown that that benefit extends beyond attention to stress response improvement. We even have a study now that we're submitting for publication showing that it changes the length of telomeres in older adults, which is a cellular marker of aging. So there's lots of benefits of that practice
41:59 Speaker 03 of holding your attention to this subtle stimuli of your breath in terms of your ability to control your attention and to sustain it in other contexts.
42:09 Dan Harris? You indicated before that maybe it doesn't make sense to get overly talmudic about the different types of meditation, sustained attention, your concentration meditation, as it's classically referred to, where you pick a quote unquote "object of focus," like your breath, and try to shine your attention on it. And then every time you get distracted, you start again. There are, as you referenced, types of meditation that are more like open awareness, where you settle back and try to just be mindful of whatever comes up in the mind, physical sensations, psychological phenomena, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just curious, is there any difference in terms of the benefits vis a vis cognitive control?
42:51 Speaker 03 All my work, my personal research, my team's research has been on concentration meditation, concentrated focus meditation. So that's all that I could speak of from my own efforts. There's much larger body of literature in general on that type of meditation, but there is literature that exists on open awareness meditation and including things like Metta and loving kindness meditation, but much more limited. I would hypothesize that the practice of keeping an open awareness and allowing things to enter your consciousness and then quickly move out would have very, very different benefits on cognition than what we have described with concentrated meditation. Maybe having benefits in more
43:30 Speaker 03 of the alerting and the sensitivity to bottom up stimuli would be a benefit, maybe even some type of outcomes related to your ability to hold things more lightly and to even switch from things more readily rather than the stickiness that could come with holding a focus. But I have not compared those directly. But I would think they would be quite different because they're distinct in engaging your attentional system.
43:59 Dan Harris? It's fun to hear you hypothesize. Okay, so the list is pretty long of, and this is good news, of things we can do to regain cognitive control. I'm going to just jump around the list a little bit, but one prominent entry, and I know this is another area where you personally have done quite a bit of research, is access to nature.
44:18 Speaker 03 Hmm. That might be my favorite. It's hard to pick your favorite because I know the list you're looking at and they're all great things, but nature's been the one that has personally been the most beneficial in terms of my own relationship with cognitive control. So I could speak to it as a researcher, but also as a human being seeking to improve their own function because I'm not immune from any of these influences and negative consequences of technology myself. And so For the last 25 years, I've been a pretty active nature photographer. It's complicated because it's not the same as just going out and enjoying nature. So that's another thing that we don't have to unpack right now.
45:00 Speaker 03 But one advantage of being a nature photographer is that you get into nature a lot. And being in nature has been incredibly restorative to me in terms of my own cognitive fatigue that accumulates over time. And there's a literature that suggests that's true and even pointing to some of the mechanisms by which that's true. So, you know, there's a whole host of data out there showing the benefits of nature exposure on attention. And maybe I will double tap on this a little bit because it relates to what we talk about bottom up and top down attention. It's the fatiguing of the top down attention that is quite noticeable to people that really degrades your cognitive control.
45:40 Speaker 03 So you might start not great in the first place, but as time goes on and as your brain essentially just becomes tired, your cognitive control becomes worse and worse. And so the idea that you need to restore it is a pretty logical one. And an easy analogy would be to make, you know, compared to our physical fatigue. And there's no athletic trainer or athlete alive that does not have a full respect for restoration or recovery. And that's built into all training programs and to everything related to sports and high performance athletics. But when it comes to our minds, somehow we've made ourselves believe, or many employers
46:23 Speaker 03 have made themselves believe that you don't need a break. You know, you could pump through an entire four hour process, maybe take a quick lunch break and then get back at it. But our brains and cognition fatigue as well. And so how do you restore cognitive control on the time scale of a day? And maybe even the accumulating effects of the fatigue. And that's where I think nature has a really powerful role. And the mechanism that's been proposed is that walking in nature, let's just picture yourself on a beautiful hike and you're in the mountains, you're surrounded by trees and waterfalls and you're walking along. Your attention system is engaged, but in a very different way than it was when you were doing your emails or writing an article.
47:07 Speaker 03 And it's much more bottom up, right? This is the land where bottom up arose, right? This is the, the natural world that we needed to be sensitive to our environment to survive, to find threats and to find food. And so we are just incredibly sensitive to bottom up influences in nature, which is great. It's what makes it so much fun to take a hike, one of the reasons. And the theory goes that because of the strong bottom up influences, it really allows you to relax your top down. You know, it's not always easy to relax your top down. You might take a break and move over from your work and say, okay, I'm going to relax my top down. But you just keep thinking and you're going through your to do list and it's not very relaxing at all.
47:47 Speaker 03 But having another source of attention, sort of steal it in a positive way in this case, does seemingly give that opportunity to restore your cognitive control.
47:58 Dan Harris? Okay. So I'm going to ask a selfish question and unfortunately I suspect I know the answer. I have heard all this evidence about the power of exposure to nature. And also I've heard simultaneously all this evidence around the power of walking. So one of the things I've done is that I take meetings, phone meetings outside, we live in the suburbs, you know, it's a lot of nature around here. So I'll take a walk through nature locally, but I'm on the phone. Am I blocking myself from the maximal benefits?
48:33 Speaker 03 Well, maybe from the maximal benefits, but I still think that there is a benefit to do what you're doing. As a matter of fact, I do the same thing. I even hold actual walking meetings with other people and prefer to do that than over a zoom call or sitting in my office. And like you said, you get the dual benefit of some physical exercise and also. Being in the natural world. And so I think there is a benefit to that in lots of ways and stress reduction and other things that are true influences of that activity. But it's different than just allowing yourself to completely go offline in terms of your top
49:13 Speaker 03 down goals and just really allowing yourself to relax and to be in nature. So they're different. I think that it is a great activity. I support it. I do it. But I think that there's also a lot to be said by not listening to a podcast or taking a meeting on your walks in nature and just being in nature and just observe the natural world.
49:36 Dan Harris? So yes, and?
49:37 Speaker 03 Yes, and?
49:37 Dan Harris? You, in a very recent answer, you know, again, we're in this part of the conversation. We're talking about how to regain cognitive control. And the good news is that there are lots of ways to do that. In discussing nature, you talked a little bit about the importance of taking breaks. And that actually is a whole category outside of just nature that you discuss in the book as a, you know, a way to regain cognitive control, taking breaks, not pushing bulldozer style through work all day long. And within that, you talk about naps, reading, socializing with other actual human beings. Can you hold forth a little bit on all of this?
50:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. So when you're engaged in a very high intensity, top down activity, like going through your email list, your work list, and anything else that's really pushing your high cognitive load, you need to take a break. And where that is and when that is depends on the person and how you've trained yourself to be able to do a high cognitive load for a long time, not dissimilar to a runner, someone that doesn't run, a high load might be a block, a runner might be a mile. So I do think that you can train yourself to take on a higher load for a longer period of time. But everyone, whether it's running or working on something that's cognitively demanding, will fatigue and will have a decrement in performance because
51:00 Speaker 03 of it. So taking a break is key. I think the nature of the break really Matters. And this is an incredibly unstudied area. So this is where I'm always very clear that hypothesis generating and speculating to some degree, I always try to be clear about what I'm basing on research, especially my own research and what isn't. There is some work on this, but not as advanced as it could be. And so what are the best breaks? Well, one thing that I think is just incredibly obvious, like a break from writing an article is not checking your email. That's just switching to another stress inducing, high intensity, high cognitive load task. And you don't get any real restoration from that type of switch. So what are the better switches?
51:45 Speaker 03 Well, the things that we've talked about are meditation, even relaxation, as much as you're capable of relaxing without another task, physical fitness, physical exercise, whether it's in a walk or doing pushups or something of that quality. And then nature exposure, which we mentioned now, but not getting into these iterative sinkholes that just pull you away from your goals or create other fatigue. So again, another problem with the break being social media, which is a very common break for people, is maybe it does have less of a cognitive load, but it also has this really powerful capacity to take you away from your original goal and make your break much longer than it needs to be, in addition to all the other negative aspects of
52:28 Speaker 03 anxiety producing and misinformation, all the other things that can happen during that break. So I like to think of meditation, relaxation, physical exercise, nature exposure, even, you know, having a conversation as long as it's well contained within the timeframe as breaks that then allow you to get back to the activity that you are trying to focus on, you know, in a reasonable amount of time.
52:54 Dan Harris? Continuing with my marching through this list of ways to regain control. There are a couple of entries here that are compelling, but I don't actually know what it involves. One of them is neurofeedback, the other is brain stimulation.
53:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, so this is a little bit of a switch that we should pause on that when I talk about how do you regain cognitive control, I divide it into two big categories, one of which is behavioral change and modification. And that's everything we've been talking about. So everyone has a sort of style, a pattern by which they're engaging with the world around them. And that might be well thought out and well controlled, or it might not be. It might be dictated by just the forces that pull and push you, which is less than ideal. What we've been discussing are ways that you could take control of your own cognition and where your attention is and
53:49 Speaker 03 make decisions and say, I am going to focus for 20 minutes and then I am going to take a 10 minute break and this is what that break is going to be. You can also decide that I'm going to multitask for the next hour. And there's nothing evil about multitasking. It just means that there's going to be a degradation of performance if the tasks are attention demanding. But you might say, I'm going to do low level things. I'm going to put the music on. I'm going to distract myself with social media and I'm going to go through this whole thing, this whole box that I need to clean up or closet need to clean up. And so you make decisions about how you engage in the world. We should make decisions. And this, I would argue, is a healthier way to interact with the world and our technology. And so that's what we've been describing. What are
54:31 Speaker 03 the things you can do to restore cognitive control through behavioral modification in your decisions? And that's, I'm going to take a break and I'm going to walk in nature. I'm going to take a break and I'm going to do some meditation. The other way that you can improve cognitive control, and this is more related to the work that I actually do at UCSF, is how do we leverage tools, technological and non-technological, to actually improve the capacity of our brain to have high level cognitive control? Like all things, body and brain, there is the opportunity to harness the plasticity that these systems have to optimize themselves. And so can you not
55:14 Speaker 03 just make better decisions, which you should, and engage in healthier type of habits and But can you have a stronger brain? I'm very interested in other approaches that might give that edge. And maybe it should be more applied to people that have actually clinical deficits in cognitive control, but maybe not. And those approaches include things like neurofeedback, brain stimulation. What we do a lot of is what we call closed loop video games, which is really just a way of giving very targeted cognitive challenges to an individual to optimize their performance by harnessing the plasticity of the brain to improve its function. I put all these things in like in a different category of just trying to have a stronger
55:56 Speaker 03 brain, like an athlete might be making appropriate decisions about how do they recover and restore? And how do they train? But they also are doing activities themselves that make them stronger.
56:11 Dan Harris? Yeah, I really appreciate that clarification as well explained. Can you tell us a little bit more about what neurofeedback and brain stimulation are?
56:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, so they're they're different. In our hands, we actually combine them in interesting ways. But in general, when these terms are used, which is more helpful to people than sort of the idiosyncratic ways that we try to study them in our lab, is that neurofeedback is an approach by which activity in your brain is being recorded, usually through electrodes that we call EEG, that record electrical activity in the brain. And then you are trying to do something, usually unbeknownst to you how you're doing it, to move these levels of activity, sort of like, okay, you're going to focus on this balloon and make it go up. And if it goes up, that's corresponding to a frequency of activity in your brain, let's say alpha frequency.
57:05 Speaker 03 And so you focus on it and by accident it happens. You figure out, oh, this is sort of how I focus. You do it again. It happens again. And this can act to potentiate certain brain patterns, even though you might not understand how it's happening. It's that the ability of that to lead to actual benefits in attention and other aspects of cognition and real world benefits is still quite controversial. I bring it up because it exists and people know about it. And there is some data out there that I think is encouraging, but a lot of the really convincing type of experimental methodology, like randomized controlled trials and large populations is still lacking a bit there.
57:46 Speaker 03 But that's what neurofeedback is. And so it's an approach to biofeedback in general, that by understanding your breath or your heart rate, or having access to it in real time, you could learn to control it. That's what neurofeedback is. Neurostimulation is applying either electrical currents or magnetic fields. We call that transcranial electrical stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, or ultrasound fields, or transcranial ultrasound stimulation to the brain to stimulate or modulate neural processes with external forces. This is usually done non-invasively through CAPS, but there's a whole other field of research of this being done invasively through approaches called like deep brain stimulation,
58:29 Speaker 03 and other, obviously, more serious approaches to modulating brain activity. And the goal here is that we can, through the external application of influences that change how your brain functions, we could strengthen certain aspects of it, or change certain aspects of it. And there is a literature to suggest that this application of electrical fields and even magnetic fields might stimulate the plasticity of the brain. So that is another field of research that has clear examples that it does alter brain activity, and is still lacking a bit in what, what's the big deal? Like, how does this really change people's lives? And, you know, in all fairness, there is some convincing aspects of this. Like,
59:11 Speaker 03 for example, the literature showing that TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, with different protocols of application, could have benefits in depressive disorder, and some work on bipolar disorder, and even FDA approval in that area. So that's what neurostimulation is. That's what neurofeedback is.
59:29 Dan Harris? Thank you. I appreciate that.
59:34 Dan Harris? Coming up, Adam talks about the impact of music and rhythm on the mind. I found that especially interesting. And we talk about how you can actually use some technology to the benefit of your brain.
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1:01:51 Dan Harris? You mentioned earlier that it is possible to have a more positive relationship with technology. We don't need to flush all these devices down the toilet. What does that look like?
1:02:01 Speaker 03 Well, this goes back to the what can we do to engage with technology in a healthier way? And I always say the first aspect of it is meta-awareness, to wrap your head around your own behaviors and how it's influencing your life. I think that's really important. And if you take another example of behaviors that we've engaged in in the past at an incredible rate that have now sort of shifted. So let's say smoking cigarettes, or even eating foods that might be considered unhealthy. It's hard to stop these processes once you engage in them and they become habits. But one of the important steps is awareness, is to understand
1:02:43 Speaker 03 that these are having a negative impact on you. And that is not enough to change. But that is certainly a great starting point, because that could help give it more sustainability over time when the temptation to revert exists. I often think about consumption of information very much like the consumption of food, not just in terms of what we already discussed with the optimal foraging theories, but just that all information is not created equal, like all food is not created equal. And so there's sort of like a cognitive nutritional index that you might be able to apply to things that you engage in, you know, the very high quality cognitive information that comes from talking at dinner with a loved one, and the lower level ones that might
1:03:26 Speaker 03 come from just doom scrolling through the news each day. You can make decisions, just like how you make decisions about what you eat, that you just don't take necessarily everything that's in front of you at all times, but you have rules, you have decisions, you form new habits about how you engage with the ecosystem of your food. You could do the same things for information. And information, here using largely synonymous with technology, but that's not certainly the only source of information, but it certainly is a powerful one.
1:03:56 Dan Harris? Given how powerful our relationships are with these devices, and especially how powerful supercomputers and the super intelligent humans who've designed the applications that live on our phones and other devices, how much personal responsibility can we really take?
1:04:20 Speaker 03 It's such a good question, and this is one of the age-old questions. And we've had a powerful relationship with tobacco. And we've had a powerful relationship with sun exposure that we've shifted both of those things dramatically. So we have examples of how through information and processes and helpers and therapists, we've been able to take control of really powerful influences that we've just deemed negative to us, certainly in excess. And so I feel like we have to take some responsibility. If we hand over the keys and say, "Technology is too powerful, and we're just gonna let it control us, and if it's really tasty information that it's presenting, I'm gonna
1:05:05 Speaker 03 gobble it up." I think we're doomed. We have to have responsibility and control here. And it's hard, and you're not gonna win all the time. And I think saying, "I just don't use tech anymore," is ridiculous and not appropriate for 99% of the people, because we need it, and we're gonna need it more and more. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have control over our decisions about how we use it. I'll give you one example. I have two very young daughters now, kids late in life, and that is when the rubber really hits the road for technology. Like, I wrote this book and did a lot of work on this topic before having kids. And now I'm like, "Oh, I can see why so many parents care about this so deeply," because
1:05:46 Speaker 03 you're rediscovering it through the eyes of a sort of naive player that doesn't have the exposure yet. So there's a lot of level-one decisions that maybe you made and forgot about or never made that now you have to make again. And not just in terms of your kid's exposure to technology, which is immensely complicated, but your own exposure to technology around them. And that's one that I really took to heart. So the example I wanna give is... Being in my daughter's room with my cellphone. I cannot sit there for too long, especially if they just start playing on their own without looking at it. It's just like I have a lot going on.
1:06:28 Speaker 03 I'm like, I have a constant email treadmill that I live on and I don't want to do that. I don't want them to see me doing it. I don't want to distract my attention from where it should be, which is them, even if I'm just observing them and appreciating them. And so I just don't bring my phone in their room. I won't do it. You know, I put it down outside when I go in, you know, if I'm going to be spending an hour with them in the morning. And that's a behavioral change that I made that has been incredibly rewarding to me that I stand by and I was able to do. So that's just one example, but I think there are many of these that people can sort of tackle one at a time based upon their own awareness of what's really diminishing the quality of their experience.
1:07:12 Dan Harris? Yeah, I've had some success with that too, just having a policy about, okay, at dinnertime, my phone is not to be found when I'm having family dinner. Similarly, I put my phone away at seven or eight o'clock at night and I don't check it until the next morning. And actually, along those lines, in the morning, I don't check it first thing. I actually go out and get a little sunlight and do a little deep focus work before I get to my phone most days. And having policies, guardrails like this in place can really, I think for me, I feel a boost in my cognitive control as a result.
1:07:47 Speaker 03 100%. Those are great examples. I'm also on the same page with you about those particular ones and other people have different ones. I can't drive with my phone. It has to go in my trunk because I just can't not look at it all the time and it's just too dangerous. So that's a decision and you set up the safeguards and the structure of your environment to do that. You know, and then you could think of other things like I'm not going to open multiple tabs or I'm not going to put my phone on the table at dinner when I'm out or I'm not going to even put it there when I'm at work because I keep checking. Instagram when I should be doing this article. So, you know, a lot of what we have to do is actually modify our environment. You know, if you go back to the marginal
1:08:31 Speaker 03 value theorem, we're sort of pulling on the lever of accessibility that is so high right now and makes switching so easy. If that theorem can be applied, that's exactly why a squirrel will jump from tree to tree to tree because they eat a little bit and they're like, there's another tree right there that's has more stuff on it. So if we could move those trees further away, then by definition, we become more sustained in that patch that we're in. That patch might be interacting with your loved one. That patch might be working on an article.
1:09:05 Dan Harris? We've got just a few minutes left. I want to ask you about something fun that I think might be relevant, but it has to do with some work that you've done around music and rhythm in the impact of music and specifically rhythm as a part of music on the brain. And some of this work was done in conjunction with Mickey Hart, who aging people like me will remember as the percussionist for the Grateful Dead. Can you just tell us a little bit about that specifically with an emphasis on how we might operationalize these insights in our own lives?
1:09:36 Speaker 03 Sure. So it's complicated because for me to answer that question because A, I believe that the real world instantiation of so many experiences that we engage in are beneficial, such as walking in nature, meditation, rhythm, music, dance, physical fitness, on and on. Many people do research on that and show the benefits of them in sort of a real world context. And I do them in the real world. I encourage them being done in the real world. But in my day job at UCSF and in companies that I've started and founded and also advise for, I'm really interested in how we can take elements of
1:10:17 Speaker 03 real world experiences that have these benefits and use technology for good. So that's sort of the flip side, you know, the double sided sword, the fire analogy of saying, okay, we just spent hours talking about the challenges. How do we extract benefit that actually elevates us as humans and don't diminish us? Right? That's real interest of mine. And so can you take? Elements of meditation, of physical fitness, of nature exposure, of music and dance, for example, I'll start with those four. Use technology to deliver them in a way that's adaptive to the person so that it's very personalized. So you don't need to necessarily have a high level meditation instructor with you all the time, or a music teacher.
1:11:02 Speaker 03 So it's more deliverable, it's more accessible to people because everyone has devices. It's adaptable, so it can be very personalized, so you can get very high level exposure. And which we don't have to talk about now, but it can actually be delivered quite reproducibly and even tested in randomized trials in an easier way than the real world version of those experiences, which is something that we've leveraged for FDA approval of this type of, this type of experience. So what I've done with rhythm and music is very much what we've done with meditation and what we've done with physical fitness and other aspects of real world experiences. Take them into a format that we could deliver them reproducibly and adaptively on a device
1:11:45 Speaker 03 so that people can do meditation in a way that might not be accessible to them in the real world, or engage in rhythmic challenges. And that's the project that we do with Mickey Hart and Rob Garz and other musicians to really create a high level adaptive music and largely rhythm training experience. And then determine the influences of that on aspects of cognition through randomized control trial. And that's basically what I do with my, all my time during the day is figure out ways to extract these elements, not to say don't do them in the real world, but how can we determine the digitally delivered benefits of them?
1:12:29 Speaker 03 And then quantify them in a research lab to determine their ability to improve cognitive control and other aspects of, of thinking. To conclude this, to get back to the rhythm and music specifically, there is a large literature on the benefits of music, similar to the large literature on the benefits of real world meditation. There may be many. Factors of music, just like of meditation that induce benefits. But one area that we really focused on is the rhythmic aspects. And our brains are really rhythmic machines. That's, that's how they function at every level. There are rhythmic properties that are involved in neuronal communication and coherence and synchrony across brain areas is associated with many aspects of neural processing.
1:13:14 Speaker 03 And so the hypothesis is that by becoming more rhythmic, it would be essentially like a fine tuning of your brain. And you'd see its benefits across multiple aspects of cognition. We started showing that we showed that becoming more rhythmic using our game coherence in older adults leads to an improvement in, in working memory for faces. So like a really interesting transfer benefits. And in children in their reading fluency. So sort of starting to validate that hypothesis that just by becoming more rhythmic, you're seeing these benefits outside of things that are inherently rhythmic in nature.
1:13:51 Dan Harris? I've heard it explained to me that in the womb, we're exposed to the rhythm of our mother's heartbeat. And so rhythm can be powerfully healing for things like trauma. You know, it is really elemental for us.
1:14:06 Speaker 03 There's so much there, you know, I'm excited about just that domain of our research. And, you know, we have 40 people in our center. So there's many, many different projects going in parallel. But the work on rhythm and music is so rich. You know, to pause on, on the point that you're making and just to really drive it home. We've done a lot of research on actively engaging in rhythmic experiences where you're reproducing them. You're memorizing them and, you know, not just reproducing them in the moment, but after time. And what does that do? And what are the benefits of that? Almost essentially like music and rhythm training. But there's also the passive experience of music exposure, both rhythmic and other aspects of it.
1:14:50 Speaker 03 And we're studying that now as well. What does it mean to just be appreciating and enjoying rhythm without trying to become more rhythmic? And, you know, starting at the womb and throughout our lives, that also has positive implications that we're studying.
1:15:06 Dan Harris? I love it, especially as a drummer myself. I love it.
1:15:09 Speaker 03 There you go.
1:15:09 Dan Harris? I'm no Mickey Hart. Before I let you go, you've made a few nods to the incredible work you're doing in your lab. What else would you have us know about work you've put out into the world in terms of books, or studies, or a website you maintain? Or if we want to learn more about you, where and how can we do that?
1:15:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, so a couple of different platforms. I have like my personal website, gazali.com, where there are links to my labs and my nature photography and my writings, both published and sort of white paper perspectives on there. So hopefully that's a one stop shop for all the things I do. That's what I tried to create there. And then for the deeper dive into my research, Neuroscape, which is the name of our center at UCSF, neuroscape.ucsf.edu is really a great way to learn about the work that we're doing in more detail. It has copies of all of our publications and all of our technologies and our research
1:16:08 Speaker 03 studies. So people that want to really get under the hood of what we're doing in the academic domain to really understand the brain and improve cognition, that's a great place to go.
1:16:19 Dan Harris? Great. We'll put links to both of those in the show notes. In the meantime, Adam Gazali, great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.
1:16:27 Speaker 03 Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
1:16:32 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Adam. Awesome to talk to him. Don't forget, coming up in June, we've got this huge Get Fit Sanely series we're launching. And if you're a subscriber over at danharris.com, you will get guided meditations tailored to each of the episodes. You can get much more information on that over at danharris.com. Before I let you go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vassili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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Previous A Simple Guided Meditation from Dan | Live from the Renegade Sangha Next Sebene Selassie & Jeff Warren On: How Friendship Helps Your Meditation; Vulnerability vs Oversharing; And Advice for People Pleasers Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
