The Mystery Is the Point

With Cortland Dahl

This is a clip drawn from a recent conversation with Dr. Cortland Dahl on Awakin Calls.

The Conversation

Menka

You mentioned your PhD — when you came back from Tibet and moved to Madison, is that where you did it? The field of contemplative science was pretty nascent at that point. I read somewhere that the PhD you did didn't really exist before you did it — that you were making it up as you went along, shaping the whole space. Given that you already had a deep meditation practice and so many years of it, when you came to the science and the research, when you made discoveries or came across studies that confirmed what you'd experienced — how did you feel? Was it a case of ah, that all makes sense now — or was it just fascinating to understand the neuroscience of it? Did it somehow take away from the experiential side of meditation?

Cortland

I came to it with already a lot of understanding — but then looking at it through a completely different lens. That's a great question. What drove me — and in many ways still does — is actually not the insights and what we've figured out. It's the mystery. It's what we don't know, and the enormity of what we don't know. Richie and I were actually recording a conversation about this just yesterday.

We were talking about the awe of the brain. I was probing Richie, getting him to geek out a little — and he was talking about the complexity, how it's like a universe in your head. And then we were talking about something as apparently simple as dopamine. The key point is: we always want these simple narratives — dopamine equals this, and therefore bad. But actually it's an incredibly complex web of interdependence. It's awe-inspiring. And yet we want to collapse it into simple stories.

In those early years in Madison — the conversations I was having with Richie and with Antoine Lutz, another brilliant neuroscientist and dear friend — we were just excited about all the possibilities, all the questions we had, everything we didn't yet know. Research is so slow and incremental and narrow in a way that every time you learn one thing, you open up a hundred new questions. That's somehow how science works. It doesn't lead to certainty — to we've finally figured it all out. It somehow gets more mysterious the further you go. At least, that's been my experience.

It's interesting working somewhere that people regard as arguably one of the more well-known research centres on the planet doing this work. We know more than people who haven't studied it, certainly — maybe that's the worst advertisement ever for someone supposedly going to tell you about flourishing. But we have way more questions than answers.

There was a lot of research coming out about mindfulness at the time — this was right when mindfulness was exploding, on the covers of magazines, everywhere. We were interested in: what's the next chapter? Part of my work was trying to map the terrain — to create some common language and shared understanding so that scientists could think about what to study, how to study it, what hypotheses they might form about different forms of practice. But it was, and is, and probably always will be, the mystery for me.