Science of Self-Reflection

Dharma Lab — Richie Davidson & Cortland Dahl

Introduction

Richie: This topic is really such an important one because it seems like humans have this capacity for self-reflection that is unparalleled. No other species has this capacity, and it's one of these things that affords so many advantages, and it also can get us into trouble. It can slip into what we might think of as rumination — and what we think happens in the brain is that when our self-reflection takes on these negative attributes, there are parts of the brain that are being recruited that are important for our emotional processing, and that can really get us into trouble. It can broaden this from not just thinking — it's a lot more than thinking — and it is recruiting this biology that in our evolutionary past was recruited in response to physical threats that were right in front of us, not some retrieved memory from our past or an anticipated threat in the future.

Cort: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dharma Lab. I am Cortland Dahl. This is the eminent neuroscientist Richie Davidson. We're delighted to have you back with us, Richie, as we dive in here. I wanted to maybe kick this off with just kind of the time of year we're at. We're recording this at the end of the year.

Some of you might be watching this right before we hit New Year's. Some of you might be watching it afterwards, but it sparked this realization that there are these natural periods in life where we spontaneously look back. Periods of self-reflection. So this can happen almost on a daily basis. You know, obviously the end of the day when we go to bed, it's a time where we naturally just reflect on the day, but it can happen after we complete a big project.

It can happen as it is right now, almost on a yearly basis, where we just have a natural transition point in our annual flow and calendar. But the reality is that self-reflection can really go horribly off the rails at times. A lot of times we just don't know how to do this in a way that feels healthy and balanced, and it can be mixed up with all sorts of self-judgment and negative memories and so on.

So we wanted just to talk about this. Richie, I really am curious to hear your thoughts on this. We've talked about this a lot in various forms, but maybe just to create an open discussion about self-reflection — how important it can be, how supportive of our wellbeing it can be, but also how we can ensure that it doesn't slide off the rails and become just a toxic cesspool of negative thinking about ourselves.

So why don't we just open this up, Richie. Maybe you can share any opening thoughts and then we can talk both about what self-reflection is, how we can do it in a conscious, intentional way, and then as we usually end, maybe a little bit of our own practical tips that we use in our lives to bring a little more self-reflection into our daily routine.

The Neuroscience of Self-Reflection

Richie: So thank you Cort, great to be back on Dharma Lab with you. And this topic is really such an important one because it seems like humans have this capacity for self-reflection that is unparalleled. No other species has this capacity, and it's one of these things that affords so many advantages and it also can get us into trouble.

And so first and foremost, just thinking about the neuroscience — one of the important developments in the human brain is this big chunk of real estate that we have in the front of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. And one of the major capacities or competencies that the prefrontal cortex enables is for what psychologists often call mental time travel.

Our ability to both reflect on the past and also to anticipate the future — and the prefrontal cortex is kind of the hub where this kind of activity gets coordinated. And the size of our prefrontal cortex is larger in relation to the rest of the brain mass compared to any other species. And this capacity for mental time travel is clearly more well developed in humans than it is in any other species.

And so the capacity to reflect on the past is advantageous for many obvious reasons, including our ability to learn from the experiences that we've had in the past. We can learn what may be beneficial for us so that we may want to repeat that, we can learn what may be harmful to us so we may want to avoid that — and that can be sharpened with this capacity for self-reflection.

Rumination and the Salience Network

Richie: Self-reflection can also be something that can really hijack us, as you are implying in the introduction. It can slip into what we might think of as rumination, where we are in a kind of perseverative loop, ruminating about the past. And what we think happens in the brain is that when our self-reflection takes on these negative attributes, there are parts of the brain that are being recruited that are important for our emotional processing — and this is the purview of what we often call the salience network.

And so the self-reflection is happening largely in the default mode. The salience network is what is attaching emotional significance to that. And when we ruminate, we really get hijacked by this negative thinking and the affective charge, if you will. The affective juice to the negative thinking is conferred by the salience network. And that can really get us into trouble and can broaden this from just thinking to actually activating all the circuitry in the brain and the body that is associated with, for example, threats.

Cort: Yeah. You're like reliving a stressful moment or something.

Richie: Exactly. So it's not just thinking — it's a lot more than thinking, and it is recruiting this biology that in our evolutionary past was recruited in response to physical threats that were right in front of us, not some retrieved memory from our past or an anticipated threat in the future.

Intentionality — The Missing Ingredient

Cort: So a lot of this is bringing up maybe one of the very important points about self-reflection, which is that it's an umbrella term that covers a lot of different experiences that maybe have a shared thread, but can play out very differently. Certainly feel very differently when they're happening. So when I think about this from the point of view of Buddhist psychology, one of the benefits I think of the contemplative meditative perspective is there's a lot of attention paid to noticing the ingredients of different mental and emotional experiences, so you can see the different factors that are at play that shape them.

And so when I think about it from the point of view of Buddhist psychology — and you think about this big category that we call self-reflection — the thing that's consistent, whether you're having a very healthy, even inspiring moment of kind of reflecting on your life, to something like you're referring to where it feels toxic, it feels negative, it's depleting, it's triggering a stress response or a threat response — what all of those share is you're thinking about yourself and your life.

Like, that's maybe the family trait. What all of the forms of self-reflection share is you're thinking, and what are you thinking about? You're thinking about yourself. For better or worse, that's mostly what we think about. Rarely do we think about other things where it's not in reference to ourselves and how it's going to affect us. But beyond that — that's the part that's kind of shared, again, from a healthy to unhealthy to toxic spectrum — but then there's some other really interesting variables that we rarely think about, that are critically important.

And I would love to hear what you think — how you would tie this to the brain and what might be happening in the brain when this happens. So the first one is intentionality. Oftentimes, especially when it's say negative rumination, we're obviously not intending to do that.

We might just be sitting there and pretty soon we're lying in bed and our mind is just — maybe we remember something from our day and then we're stressing out about that. And pretty soon we're remembering something from a year ago or 10 years ago, and our mind is just spinning. And what happens there is the lack of intention and the lack of any kind of control. We're sort of out of it — it's sort of out of control, even if we wanted to stop it, which we often do. We want to go to sleep or we want to be thinking about something else, but we can't. So it's almost like an absence of intentionality, which I would assume is an inability of the prefrontal — these prefrontal nodes like the central executive network. It's just kind of offline.

So intention is a key piece, and because of that it's now activating emotional responses. It's triggering memories. And all of these things are kind of in a loop — it's like memory, emotion, the thought process itself — and they're all kind of in this self-reinforcing sort of downward spiral.

So that's one important variable, because that all hinges on the presence or absence of intention. And this is one point we can circle back to: the trainability of intention. The other one — and you and I actually, in the first paper you and I ever published together, the Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper, which is titled Reconstructing and Deconstructing the Self — we talked about self-inquiry specifically, and this gets at another of the key variables, which is the motivating propelling force. With healthy self-inquiry, you could say it is curiosity. And oftentimes when it's a fruitful line of thinking about ourselves and our lives, it's driven by curiosity and openness.

Whereas the unintentional propelling force when it's toxic and ruminative is more judgment. Oftentimes it's sort of an assumption of a critical, negative self-attitude. So those two pieces — the kind of motivating force of it, and the intentionality, the presence or absence of intentionality — from a meditative point of view, those are critical pieces. Because that's actually what you train. You kind of train those pieces and that's what keeps you in the healthy end and out of the toxic ruminative event. I'm curious how well that lines up with what we know scientifically.

Richie: Yeah. That's important. Regarding the intentionality piece — one of the things we know from lots of modern science is that stress impairs the prefrontal cortex. In some of our own early work, we've shown that really quite clearly and dramatically with induced stress in the laboratory. And so in the case we're talking about now with, for example, negative rumination, that is going to impair the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, which in turn is going to have an effect of diminishing the intentionality.

Cort: Kind of means that habits are running the show.

Richie: Exactly. Your mind is on automatic and there's no one steering the ship. It's kind of rudderless and it is just pushed around willy-nilly by the forces that are erupting.

Cort: Yeah. You give that great analogy of the sailboat. Maybe you wanna share that — it's such a good example of what it feels like in the moment.

Richie: Yeah. So the kind of metaphor is of a sailboat in a turbulent sea without a rudder. And it's just being pushed and pulled by the winds around us. And that's what it's like to have a mind that is on automatic — it's simply responding and reacting to both the internal and the external stimuli around us.

Cort: And so when you train it, you're basically training yourself to find the rudder, to put the rudder in and operate it. Whereas normally we're kind of oblivious to the possibility of that even happening most of the time.

Richie: Right. And you know, in the Buddhist view, I think we would say that the rudder is always there. We just don't recognize it.

Cort: Yeah, exactly.

Richie: And so the training is really about recognizing it and becoming more familiar with it so that we can get back to it more spontaneously.

Meta-Awareness

Cort: So what is the starting point with intention? This maybe comes back to points we've discussed in previous episodes, but from the vantage point of the meditative perspective, it actually starts with meta-awareness. That's sort of like — forget about intention, anything else, like finding the rudder. It's like you need to suddenly realize, oh, I'm out of control here. And even before you could start looking for the rudder, you need to be aware that you're being pushed all over the place.

Richie: Yeah.

Cort: Most of the time we don't have that, right? We're just caught in the storm.

Richie: Yeah. And so meta-awareness — this idea of meta-awareness — we've talked about it in other episodes of Dharma Lab, but frankly, the more we talk about it, that's good because it's such an important concept.

Cort: Yeah. We should have an episode just on meta-awareness, actually. Because it's so important.

Richie: It's so important and it's basically the quality of knowing what our mind is doing — that's one way you can think about it. And to some viewers that may sound strange. Don't we always know what our mind is doing?

But I think most of us have periods of time where we recognize that we don't know what our minds are doing, and that's helpful. The one example that I often use — I'm sure I've used it in a previous episode of Dharma Lab — is reading a book where you're reading each word on a page and you may read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes you have no idea where your mind has been. You don't know what you've just read, but then you kind of wake up — and that moment of waking up is a moment of meta-awareness.

You know, another example is: if you drive a certain route all the time, let's say from your work back to your home, so the route that you take is extremely well routinized, and let's say you have to stop at a store on the way home. How many viewers have had the experience of continuing on their normal route and not going to the store — because they're on automatic, their minds are totally automatic. And that's an example of not having meta-awareness.

And one of the things that we've learned from our work is that meta-awareness can be trained, and there are people who are walking around who are meta-aware all the time. You and I know some of those people and their meta-awareness doesn't lapse — it's just continuous.

Cort: You can tell how helpful that is because there's a lightness. And almost an imperturbability — like no matter how much, it's like you're the eye of the storm. Like somehow things can be so stressful, everything moving around, and you can just sense that they're just able to kind of navigate that in a way that most of us get knocked off balance.

Richie: Right. Yeah.

Cort: You can feel that when you're around people like this.

Richie: Yeah, totally. And one word that I would use to characterize them is flexibility. Just very flexible, being able to make transitions very flexibly.

Cort: Yeah. Between different contexts and situations.

In terms of meta-awareness — it's a bit of a tangent but it's super important because it's the linchpin that will help inject intentionality back into the flow of self-reflection. And even right now, for somebody listening — the normal range of human experience is that we're normally shifting between two experiences. Either you have a moment of distraction where the sound is coming in but you're thinking about something else. And then there's times where you are there, present, watching and listening.

But there's a third thing, which is listening with meta-awareness — or paradoxically even being distracted with meta-awareness — which is to say that even right now, you can have a flash of meta-awareness by noticing the feelings in your body, like you can feel your feet on the floor, feel the movement of your breath. If you're listening with a little bit of meta-awareness, there'll be a little richness to the sound that you're tuning into. It's almost like just a heightened sense of presence.

And it goes back to the example you gave of reading, where when you have that moment of awareness, it's not just that you're attending to what's going on in the book, but you're aware of your own sense of self observing and feeling and being in that moment. So you can feel yourself lying on the couch, you can hear the sounds around you, you're paying attention to the book, you have this more panoramic awareness. You're just more attuned to a wider bandwidth of your experience in that moment.

Whereas even if you're paying attention in the prior moment, you're kind of absorbed in it — it's sort of like a narrowing of experience. Whereas here, this is like a widening of the aperture. In fact, that's the phrase we often use. Would you agree with that?

Richie: Yeah, totally. I was going to use the word aperture. I think that's so important — that this aperture of awareness is expanded. And you know, just as we were talking now, I drank a little sip of tea and I was noticing the sensations in my mouth and in my throat and settling in my body — but not distracted at all, just completely attentive, but having a wider aperture of awareness. Absolutely.

Cort: So maybe we can talk about why this is so critical specifically with self-reflection. I think it comes back to intentionality — because when you have that meta-awareness, and you're no longer caught in the flow but noticing the flow, that suddenly creates the space for intentionality.

Richie: Yeah, absolutely. And what we have said about this is that having this space of intentionality, and an expanded aperture of awareness, and this quality of knowing what our minds are doing, is really essential for any kind of transformation. We can't really change our mind unless we know what our mind is doing.

The Benefits of Healthy Self-Reflection

Cort: Exactly. So if you assume that we can be more intentional — maybe that's just a very simple take-home from part of this — we can be more intentional about the self-reflection that happens spontaneously, and how to ensure that that's going to be healthy and balanced and hopefully inspiring rather than toxic and reinforcing some negative patterns. And that intentionality is the key piece to that. What do we know about the benefits of healthy self-reflection?

Richie: Yeah, well, self-reflection — in one way or another, it may be called something slightly different in different specific research areas — but it's an essential ingredient of most forms of psychotherapy. So the capacity for change and for therapeutic benefit in a psychotherapy relationship is dependent upon a person's ability to engage in self-reflection. So I think this is something really important.

And then there's also a literature — much less well developed — around creativity and insight that also is, at least in part, dependent on our capacity for self-reflection. And in both the meditative traditions as well as how it may be applied to modern challenges, one of the advantages of self-reflection is the ability to understand that when we are perceiving things in the world, we're perceiving it from our own perspective. And different people have different perspectives, and that simple insight is valuable in understanding why someone may respond to a situation in a way that's very different than you would respond. It is a very helpful ingredient in developing empathy.

Empathy and Perspective-Taking

Cort: Yeah, actually that is such an important point and it highlights how powerful self-reflection can be if you can do it with intention. Because the mind doesn't automatically do that. In fact in most cases, we're usually kind of locked into our own perspective and we have to consciously and intentionally extract ourselves from that.

But there was a — this reminds me of a practice I did a long, long time ago. I did a five-month retreat where I was meditating 14 or 15 hours a day for five months. I was in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was this incredibly intensive experience. Most of that meditation time was reflection — a lot of it was various kinds of reflection.

And one of the periods of reflection that I did is what are called the ngöndro, or preliminary practices, that you know very well, Richie. This is kind of a common set of practices in Tibetan Buddhism — without going down the rabbit hole of what all the different things are involved — part of this was imagining different forms of life and actually trying to see things from their perspective.

So you would actually think of different animals, for example — it sounds very weird to do this, but it's basically exactly what you said. You're learning a few really important skills. You're learning, first and foremost, just how to be intentional, to be in the driver's seat of the thought process versus it being automatic and habitual and conditioned. But then you're doing exactly what you just said — you're learning to step outside of your perspective and try to look back at a situation or an experience from a totally different vantage point.

And it led to so much empathy and so much compassion, actually — just from seeing the challenges. And of course, like who knows what life is like as a dog or a cow or any other form of life or another person. But just seeing the challenges that they likely face and kind of imagining what that might be like.

It was incredibly illuminating. And actually, the thing I remember most of this part was not just different kinds of beings, but just different human experiences. And at the time — I might cry even saying this, because it was so powerful — it was in the middle of this horrible, horrific civil war in the Sudan. And there were these stories in the news of these marauding bands that would just sweep into villages — kids being killed in front of their parents, and women and daughters being raped in front of their fathers.

And I remember it was really trying to get in touch with some of the suffering that humanity and other beings face. So I was thinking about this and I was imagining being that father or being the mother — and I mean, I would just be weeping. It was so powerful. It was so profound to even just imagine the horror of what that might be like. And it's just — I'll never forget that.

And it just gave me a skill — the ability, like when listening to the news where it's so easy to just be hardened to it, but now, just because I did that training, I can sort of shift out of that and try to let it in a little bit. And it's powerful. In a world where we're so apathetic and we're barraged with this information all the time — anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but it kind of shows some of the power of doing that and the kind of empathy and compassion that it can arouse.

Richie: Yeah, no, I think that that's so important and so vitally necessary in today's world where we often become numb to these sort of things because of how frequently we see them in the media, online. And being able to really take another's perspective in this way is really crucial.

Cort: And you can imagine — with all the social division we have these days, you just think of the political stuff here in the US. It's like a societal inability to see things from other people's perspective, on all sides. It's pretty much equally prevalent all around. But just imagine if we could get better at this as a species, in our societies. I mean, we're kind of desperately in need of it.

Richie: Yes. And one of the themes we've come back to on numerous occasions in Dharma Lab is that it's easier than you think, because these are really qualities which are built into all of us. We just need to find them and nurture them, but they're not foreign to us. We're not creating anything wholly out of nothing. We're building on our innate capacity.

Analytical Meditation and the Dalai Lama

Cort: Yeah. And when it comes to viewing this maybe as a skill — the point that we come back to many times is that it's so much easier. It's actually little moments of this more than like, you're going to move to the Himalayas and do a five-month retreat. I mean, I'm glad I did that and it was very powerful for me. But more importantly, it's like keeping that going in daily life. And having little moments where I'm listening to the news or I'm just having a conversation with somebody and just being able to shift out of my own locked perspective and just think, oh yeah — like what's contributing to the way they see this?

Richie: Yeah.

Cort: So the Dalai Lama — I mean, you've of course had this decades-long close relationship and friendship with His Holiness. And I remember actually one of the first things that you ever told me — it was one of the first conversations we ever had when I moved here. In fact, I still remember you and our dear friend Antoine Lutz and I were at — what's that restaurant on University Avenue, that French restaurant?

Richie: Lari.

Cort: That's it — Lari. We were at Lari sitting outside. I totally remember this. I actually hadn't even moved here yet. And we were sitting there talking about what we might study together, and it all centered around analytical meditation, which is what you shared then and have shared many times since. His Holiness the Dalai Lama had actually asked you to study — and you might think of it as the meditative practice of intentional self-reflection. That's maybe a way to think about analytical meditation. But most people don't even know that word. They think of meditation as paying attention to your breath or just being aware of whatever arises in experience. Anything you want to say about that?

Richie: Sadly there still has been preciously little — virtually nothing — on analytic meditation. But yeah, it's true. And this is a practice that the Dalai Lama does every day. It is really his principal practice, and yet most people in the West are thoroughly unfamiliar with it. And it underscores on one level just how early on we still are in the scientific research on meditation.

Cort: Doesn't he get up at like 3:00 AM and meditate for like five hours every morning before he starts his day?

Richie: Yeah. About 3, 3:30. And he's been doing this for 60 plus years, every single day.

Cort: That's crazy. Wow.

Richie: Yeah, it's extremely inspiring.

Cort: Yeah. So I mean, this is one of the cool frontiers of our research. The Healthy Minds program — we have a whole section that involves elements of analytical meditation. We haven't yet been able to do our study where we can extract that and kind of study it on its own, but part of our inspiration of course was that we could build the program in such a way that we can start studying these other forms of meditation.

What we have done is we've studied it in combination with other forms of practice, and I think we have all sorts of cool data on that. But yeah, I know for you — certainly for me — the combination of mindful awareness, or meta-awareness as we discussed earlier, with this creative, thinking, reflecting part of the mind: when you can bring those two together, you don't lose the awareness, but you allow the mind to be creative and to explore and to analyze and reflect. It's kind of magical and it's such a helpful thing that gets you something quite different than just being mindful of your breath. There are obvious benefits to that as well, but it's just different. It's a different muscle you're kind of flexing, and it's profoundly helpful in daily life.

Practical Takeaways

Cort: So any final thoughts? Maybe we can bring this one to a close and invite some healthy self-reflection for the year that has gone by, for those of you who are watching at the end of the year.

I think it goes back to these key ingredients of healthy self-reflection, which is being intentional about it — to treat it as a practice that you do in short moments throughout your day. And if you have time to do it as a formal meditation, even better. And then to really nurture curiosity as the driving force behind that — which is really just to get curious about your own mind and notice how your thoughts are operating, notice how they shape your experience. Notice how when you think differently about something, like you intentionally take another perspective. Just notice what happens. Get curious about that. It becomes actually quite fascinating when you become a student of your own mind in that way.

Richie: Yeah. And when you can really lean into that curiosity, it almost becomes something that is playful. You can approach it with a lightness that is very helpful.

Richie: No, I think we had a great conversation and I look forward to hearing from all of you about your experiences with tinkering around with this process of healthy self-reflection.

Cort: Yeah. Likewise. Maybe that can be our parting thought for those of you who watch this — especially if you're watching on our Substack, or if you're watching on YouTube, you can maybe even share in the comments. But I think this is a time where we can look back and just kind of ask one simple question: what have I learned this year? How have I grown this year? And to look back and reflect on the experiences you've had from the vantage point of that question, and just see the different ways you've learned and grown, the insights you've had and so on.

So maybe we could all just experiment with this, and we'd love to hear from you. Share a little bit in the comment sections in the chat and whatnot — it would be very inspiring for us to hear from you. So we hope it goes well and we'll be very much curious to hear what comes of the conversation. Thank you all for joining us.

Richie: Thank you.

Cort: Take care.