EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,360 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast.…
- AJAmishi Jha
(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)
- JRJoe Rogan
Hello.
- AJAmishi Jha
Hello.
- JRJoe Rogan
Thanks for doing this.
- AJAmishi Jha
Absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
Um, Peak Mind, huh?
- AJAmishi Jha
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. How long you been working on this?
- AJAmishi Jha
Um, my whole life. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Your whole life?
- AJAmishi Jha
But the actual book, couple years.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works, is this something that's always fascinated you?
- AJAmishi Jha
Absolutely.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah?
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah. The book isn't necessarily about all aspects, but a very important one that drives a lot of other aspects, which is the brain's attention system.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today, right? With phones and distractions and screens and nonsense.
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah. But it's always been a problem. So, meaning, you can look back to medieval monks, and they report, you know, "I abandoned my family. I've devoted my life to God, and I still keep thinking about lunch when I'm supposed to be praying." (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
So, this is not only a modern problem. It's actually a human problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
It, what, where does it come from? Is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think about in the world if you're trying to survive?
- AJAmishi Jha
What does, where does what come from?
- JRJoe Rogan
The, then, like-
- AJAmishi Jha
Distractibility?
- JRJoe Rogan
... distraction.
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, if you think about it, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you kind of have to multitask mentally, right? You, you can't just concentrate on picking these mushrooms. You also have to think, "Is that a sound of a branch snapping behind me? Is someone sneaking up on me?" Like, "What's that smell?" Like, you, you have to always be aware of so many different things, it's, it seems almost like a natural part of being a person to be distracted.
- AJAmishi Jha
Absolutely. Our brain is built for distractibility, exactly for the reasons that you said. It advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to, but scan as we're, as we're still engaged in a task. And it's, as we, as I just mentioned, it's not really only a modern problem, because oftentimes, even if we are abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction, and we're just by ourselves alone in a quiet room, we can still feel like it's hard to focus. So this capacity that drives kind of a shifting, moving attention, waxing and waning, is something that is built in, baked into the way that our brain functions. And I think that's often misunderstood as a problem. People think, "Oh, no, no, my brain's really busy. My brain gets really distracted," instead of understanding that's just the nature of the brain. If you are alive, awake, conscious, about half of your waking moments, your attention is not gonna be in the task at hand.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. That's something that people need to learn when they start meditating, that when you meditate, people think, "God, why do I keep getting distracted?" Like, that's just part of it.
- AJAmishi Jha
Exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're gonna, you're never gonna be, like, completely zen for long periods of time and just completely full of bliss and enlightenment.
- 15:00 – 30:00
And what kind of…
- AJAmishi Jha
how does it feel, and what gets in the way, and what distracts me. Some of that was covered in the kind of clinical realm, like, "Oh, yeah. You ruminate," or, "You've got a unfortunate psychological challenges. You're, you're depressed, that's why you're not able to focus." But these were not worlds that were merging, and a serious look at people training their own minds in this way to result in objective metrics that we could change was certainly not being done. Uh, which is why I couldn't find anything in the literature. So yes, the journey of, uh, the introduction of contemplative practice into science is very, very new. I mean, it had a little bit of a resurgence. Or not resurgence, but introduction in the '70s. Um, and then it really started again with the tools, with tools like brain imaging, where, you know, in some sense, you could be objective. You put somebody in the scanner and say, "Okay, Joe, I want you to, um, do a quick meditation practice for 10 minutes, and I'd look to see what your brain activity looked like."
- JRJoe Rogan
And what kind of scans are you using? Is it fMRI? Like, what-
- AJAmishi Jha
We use, yeah, we use a whole bunch of stuff in my lab. Most of the work that I've been doing over the last 10 years or so, because I'm going to military bases and various off-site locations, we don't bring a scanner with us. (laughs) We just have them do attention tasks to see if things like mindfulness training have an impact. So just to answer the question you asked, it was the case that my personal journey woke me up to a whole new scientific endeavor, which is wha- what made me want to bring it to the lab. And I happened to have all these tools, from sort of traditional psychology and cognitive neuroscience, to apply to this new space of mindfulness meditation.
- JRJoe Rogan
So when you get to this book, Meditation for Beginners-
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... what are you doing? Like, what-
- AJAmishi Jha
Ah. Yeah. A lot of the same stuff that actually we continue to do with all these groups, including what, the kinds of practices that I give. These are not, these are not brand new practices. These are from the millennia-old wisdom traditions, right? In particular, with Jack, the Buddhist traditions. So a foundational practice that he offered was mindfulness of the breath. And he was very clear on what mindfulness, in that sense, meant. It's about taking the sort of present-centered, present-centered attention, without editorializing or, or reacting to it, kind of getting the raw data-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
... of the experience. And so he guided, uh, the participant. And it was actually a recording of a retreat he was leading, so it's just like he's talking to these people that are, who knows how long, maybe a month-long retreat. And he's like, "You're sitting quietly. You're focusing on, uh, just notice your body breathing, and notice what's prominent." So it might be coolness of air. Whatever it is for you, that's where you should be holding, uh, guiding your attention to stay there. And then the next aspect of the instruction was, "When you notice your mind wanders, wan- you know, wanders away from that, bring it back. Repeat." And, you know, he would use these phrases like, "As minds do. It'll wander away, as minds do." Or, "You may s- find yourself resisting," or, "You may s- find yourself in a fantasy." But the instruction was always the same. Regardless of where you were, gently bring your attention back. And so I started realizing, oh my goodness, he's giving us, like, this workout for attention. And given what I knew about the brain systems of attention, my strong hunch was, he's actually tapping into all the main brain systems of attention that exist...... and so now, I wanna check out, let's bring it to lab. Let's give it to people that aren't me, and let's see, does attention actually change with our objective measures of these systems?
- JRJoe Rogan
And what did you get out of it?
- AJAmishi Jha
That's the book. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) So, like, when you were in the lab, was there anything shocking that you learned from seeing how these practices and how, uh, mindfulness, uh, applied, like, what it did to the brain?
- AJAmishi Jha
So, yes. I mean, and, and I wanna go back to something you said that's tied to what shocked me, which is, is not something, uh, extraordinary. It's just the fact that there was any effect at all.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AJAmishi Jha
So, so you were asking me, does the field of psychology not care about changing the brain or training the brain? Absolutely, it cares, but the approaches taken were like brain-training games or stimulating the brain, or light and sound devices, or maybe put somebody in a good mood and that'll change their attention. So, we had tried all those in the lab.
- JRJoe Rogan
When, uh, when you say stimulating the brain, do you mean with, w-
- AJAmishi Jha
Transcranial magnetic stimulation?
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, that stuff's fascinating.
- AJAmishi Jha
It's, it's all fascinating, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I was listening to a Radiolab podcast where they were discussing this sniper training course. Have you... Do you know the, the, the course I'm talking about?
- AJAmishi Jha
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's, uh, it's like a video game where you are, uh, in sort of a virtual reality scenario, where you are, uh... If I'm remembering it correctly, there's, like, bad guys and hostages, and you're supposed to shoot the bad guys and not the hostages. And this woman went through this and was fairly slow, and the, the whole, the thing is, like, 20 minutes. And she did it, and it was like, she wasn't very good at it, and she screwed it up. And then they went through this, uh, transcranial, what is it, magnets that they're using? And it's some, some p- electrical. I think it's called nine-volt nirvana. I think that's the episode of the, um...
- AJAmishi Jha
Okay.
- JRJoe Rogan
There it is.
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Nine-volt nirvana. So she, they put these magnets on her.
- AJAmishi Jha
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And then she goes through it flawlessly. She does the whole thing, and she, it ends, and she's like, "I thought it was, like, five minutes." And it turns out it was 20 minutes. And she's like, "What the fuck?" Like, "What happened?" And then they look at her score, like, "Jesus Christ, you have a perfect score." Like, she went from being terrible at it to being, like, an expert with th- this brain stimulation. And the entire episode is about all these different people that have developed these, like, personal hacking devices-
- AJAmishi Jha
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... to, to do this transdermal, is it transdermal stimulation? That's what it's called?
- 30:00 – 45:00
What do you mean…
- AJAmishi Jha
people start falling apart even more. It's just ex-
- JRJoe Rogan
What do you mean by putting in, in there-
- AJAmishi Jha
So you're sitting there. You see number, number. You see a three, you're gonna screw up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
You're gonna press it often. And then, I just added this element of, I'm gonna put in negative or neutral images every now and then, pictures from the news. So all of a sudden, you're doing this task, and you see like some, some very disturbing image, and then, you gotta go back to going, you know, doing the numbers thing. Or you see a neutral image, complex scene. Just doing that small manipulation, adding those things in, s- performance got worse.... L- and so, we knew, we were starting to get this profile of attention is very powerful. It can really impact things. But things like negative images, negative mood, stressful circumstances, threatening circumstances further deplete attention. So, and I was experiencing that, right? I was like, I wasn't, I wasn't in a life or death threat situation, but I was ... I definitely looking back on it feeling a little overwhelmed with all that life required. So, I became very interested-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- AJAmishi Jha
... in like, uh, for me, it wasn't consequential, okay, so I didn't read the book to my kid. Nothing happened. Everybody was okay. For many groups, many professions, it's not just that their attention matters, it's that the circumstances that we ask them to perform at their best professionally are the ones that are gonna disadvantage and degrade their attention. And that, like, was a whole category of people. You know, s- military service members, emergency services professionals, first responders. Like, we can't, they can't l- attention is life or death. You can't lapse. You can't-
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- AJAmishi Jha
... you can't shoot when you shouldn't be shooting.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AJAmishi Jha
So, anyway, that's why I started working with this, these groups. So, you're asking me if people actually stay, anybody got better over time. For the most part, for the control group when we did nothing at all, over a four-to-eight-week interval, usually we picked these intervals that were just preparatory high-stress predeployment training, they're getting ready to go to be deployed, everybody as a group got worse. So, the baseline performance for the military folks and other high-stress groups enduring high-stress intervals was degradation. If you gave the same task to a civilian or even that same kind of person during normal life, they were stable. So, the baseline was degradation. When we gave them mindfulness training, the training group, they were stable over time. They did not degrade.
- JRJoe Rogan
Even with the negative images and all the other things you were doing when
- NANarrator
Yeah.
- AJAmishi Jha
Well, now we didn't-
- JRJoe Rogan
... you gave them?
- AJAmishi Jha
... we didn't need to put negative images anymore, because the circumstances were simulate- I mean, they were descriptive of high stress, high threat, negative mood. That was their life, so we didn't have to experimentally look at that anymore. We gave very basic, just numbers, digits, and everybody got worse as a group. I mean, this is now, we're not just talking about military service members. We saw this with, um, football players during preseason training, undergrads. You know, if you probably, business people that are going through sales season. I mean, anything that is ... I mean, think of your own life. Like, anything that is high demand and long, it's gonna degrade your attention.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Yeah, there's things that we know. Like, I was thinking about this the other day 'cause I was counting some money, and I was thinking, and I was by myself, but I was thinking how frustrating it is when you're counting money if someone starts throwing numbers at you.
- AJAmishi Jha
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know why I was thinking that while I was counting money.
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Right? 'Cause I was just-
- AJAmishi Jha
That probably distracted you too. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
It kind of did a little bit, but I was thinking like, "God, how weird is it that it's so difficult to just simple numbers?" Like, if you've got $20 bills, two, four, six, eight, 10. Two, four, six, eight. You, you know, you're piling these $100 bills or $20 bills-
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... in the $100 stacks, but if someone comes along and goes, "50, 80, 90, 70," you know, fuck, man. Stop doing that. Like, that really works.
- AJAmishi Jha
It does.
- JRJoe Rogan
It works on everybody, but it's so strange. Like, that just, that little external just something that interferes with your rhythm of counting numbers.
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah. I mean, that's now you're tapping into like a classic working memory experiment.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause it's not stressful at all.
- AJAmishi Jha
It's not. It's-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Cool. …
- JRJoe Rogan
I chew it all day long.
- AJAmishi Jha
Cool.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AJAmishi Jha
Um, yeah. You know, I think that that's the kind of neat thing about where we're at right now in this moment, that there are, uh, just like you mentioned, like the, the transcranial magnetic stimulation-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
... and, and, uh, substances that we can take that'll enhance us, and it was so interesting. When we were doing, when I was, when I was just starting out this stuff, and I remember, uh, I was like really trying to figure out, not only for people that are, um, have attentional challenges because they're under a lot of stress, right? Are you gonna take some now?
- JRJoe Rogan
This is, this is Albert. Yeah, so-
- AJAmishi Jha
Oh, the quality of our conversation's just gonna, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it should.
- AJAmishi Jha
... even deepen.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm, I feel ki-... I feel dumb today. I had a-
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... I had a rigorous workout. Sometimes I come off of a hard workout, I feel dumb.
- AJAmishi Jha
Oh man, now I'm in for it. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
We'll see.
- AJAmishi Jha
But, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
I might stay dumb.
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs) Well, it's pretty good for dumb. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Well...
- AJAmishi Jha
You know, I think that, that's the kind of neat thing about where we're at right now in this moment, that there are, uh, just like you mentioned, like the, the transcranial magnetic stimulation-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
... and, and, uh, substances that we can take that'll enhance us, and it was so interesting. When we were doing, when I was, when I was just starting out this stuff, and I remember, uh, I was like really trying to figure out, not only for people that are, um, have attentional challenges because they're under a lot of stress, right? Are you gonna take some now?
- JRJoe Rogan
This is, this is Albert. Yeah, so-
- AJAmishi Jha
Oh, the quality of our conversation's just gonna, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think it should.
- AJAmishi Jha
... even deepen.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm, I feel ki-... I feel dumb today. I had a-
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... I had a rigorous workout. Sometimes I come off of a hard workout, I feel dumb.
- AJAmishi Jha
Oh man, now I'm in for it. (laughs)
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
(laughs) Oh, man. But…
- JRJoe Rogan
like if you say that, they'll get so offended with the gentle art of fly-fishing. Like, no, you're f- you're just fucking with fish.
- AJAmishi Jha
(laughs) Oh, man. But it's the same thing. Let's go back. Let's use fishing for just to go-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- AJAmishi Jha
... connect it back to you in the classroom. You're at some place and you're going back to our ancestors, just like you said. You're fishing. You've got to catch the food. Your life depends on it. You don't catch any fish there. What's gonna happen? You're gonna move on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AJAmishi Jha
You're gonna be like... You're gonna probably start having not the thrill of the catch, but the boredom and irritation of nothing happening that's of interest.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
So I see boredom as a really important feedback system. Boredom isn't the cause. Boredom is the result of basically the attention system saying...... opportunity cost. I'm missing out, go somewhere else.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AJAmishi Jha
And so boredom is such a good signal, because what it means is, uh, go do something else. It's guiding action. And so often, it's not like you can't focus, it's that, for whatever complex set of reasons, your brain biology is saying, "Try something else, because probably you'll get more reward out of that." And now, that's actually the reason why people missed the three, back on that-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AJAmishi Jha
... experiment. You're sitting there, it's like nothing's going on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AJAmishi Jha
And I always think of this every time I walk through security at the airport. The chances of finding a grenade or a bomb in that image, very, very low. But if they screw up, devastating consequences.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AJAmishi Jha
And that's the thing to remember. The, the, um, the reason oftentimes we can't stay on task is because the urge to mind wander away because the reward, the intrinsic reward of the situation is low. But sometimes we still have to stay on it. Like, you don't want a police officer or a soldier on patrol to be like, "This is so freaking boring. I'd rather do something else." They need to be there. You know, oftentimes I'll, I'll ask my military colleagues, "You're standing at attention. Where's your attention?" "I don't know."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AJAmishi Jha
Well, let's get our minds at attention, because that's what we need. We, you cannot screw up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- AJAmishi Jha
Because even if the chances of something bad happening are low, if they happen and you miss it, it's on you.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, when people are bored, it's essentially the mind telling you that you're wasting time here and that you need to find... Like, if it, if you go back to, like, the evolutionary roots of the way-
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... we've hyper-focused on, like, a fish that you're trying to catch, if you're bored, that discomfort is essentially your mind saying, "This is not productive, and this is not helping us survive."
- AJAmishi Jha
Yeah. It's basically, let's make it even more gr- basic than that. It's saying the reward you're getting here is not com- com- enough to keep you here.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- AJAmishi Jha
But it starts with something even more basic. The mind starts wandering. You know, like, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- AJAmishi Jha
... I- and we did this. Like, if you look over time in this simple task, 10 minutes, people are worse at the end of the task than at the beginning of the task.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
And if you ask them, if you stop the experiment every now and then and say, "Where was your attention right now? Was it on the task or was it off-task?" The rates of people saying they were off-task gr- go up. So, they're saying they're more and more off-task, their performance is getting worse, they're more variable, and then if you ask them subjectively, "How did it feel to do this task?" "It was so boring."
- 1:15:00 – 1:16:44
What's the distinction? …
- AJAmishi Jha
- JRJoe Rogan
What's the distinction?
- AJAmishi Jha
Concentrating is a tricky term. It could be, I'm thinking about the fact that I'm breathing. Isn't it so interesting that I have a diaphragm within my, this part of my body that does these muscle movements that allow this breathing to... Thought, thought, thought, thought, thought.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
It's coolness, tingliness, tension. It's like you're literally staying at the like, the most granular raw data of what's happening, and with that awareness of this is happening right now, you're in that meta-aware mode. And it, and I'm not, by the way, manipulating your breath and controlling it and having a particular box breathing or whatever.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
Fantastic thing to do.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you done it?
- AJAmishi Jha
Pranayama, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- AJAmishi Jha
These breath manipulation techniques that can induce all kinds of very interesting states. Um, so for example, breath work, right? Where you're actually getting these kind of very cool experiences, very cool thing to do. But that's not what we're going for with mindfulness. With mindfulness, we're using the breath simply as one of many different things we could focus on. Like, you know, the other night I couldn't fall asleep, I'm using, in my hotel room, mindfulness of the air conditioner. Like, just noticing s- moment to moment the sensations of the sound shifting, just to have a target, 'cause the, the instruction is essentially pay attention to breath s- related sensations, like I said. Be specific. So you're using that flashlight and you're shining it somewhere. You got a target now. And then, you wait. Pretty soon, you're not there. Notice that the mind has wandered away from breath-related sensations. Bring it back. So you're holding the flashlight. You got the flashlight going, you got the floodlight engaged, and the juggler's always keeping you on track, executive control. That's what I meant by it's engaging all three of the systems of attention as a push-up.
Episode duration: 2:22:08
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