Hello. Good afternoon, my friends. My name is Ming. I'm the jolly good fellow who at

Google. And I'm jolly today because our honored guest, Rich Hanson, brought this book, right?

This book is about happiness, love and wisdom and it's about a new science of happiness,

love and wisdom and is called Buddha's Brain. It's like, it's all my favorite topics in

one convenient value sized packet.

And so what-what's there not to like about this book, right? That's why I'm happy today.

Dr. Rick Hanson, he's a neuropsychologist, author and teacher at the intersection of

psychology, neurology and contemplative practice. He co-founded the Wellspring Institute for

Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom and he's the author of the book called Mother

Nurture, which is one of very few books that I-I am aware of, maybe the only book, that

is about taking care of, about taking care of mothers. And he's also an-an authority

on how the arrival of children affect moms, fathers and marriages.

And Rick enjoys rock climbing, good conversations and good books and in his free time he tries

to save the world.

[laughter]

So with that let's welcome my friend, Dr. Rich Hanson.

>>Rick Hanson: Okay.

[applause]

>>Rick Hanson: Thank you, Ming, thank you.

Well, with Ming here, I'm in good company.

Can you hear me okay?

How's this sound?

It's okay, alright, great. And if it gets bad, please let me know.

I wanted to say first of all that I've never been to Google before. I use your products

many times a day of course, but one of the great things about being able to be here is

that gives me a little thing I can use to impress my kids. And that's very important

when you're a parent.

As you probably know or will discover, they are 22 and 19 and so this is one of the very

few things that actually made them pay attention to anything I had to say.

So, my intent here is to go through a number of topics, four in particular and to do it

fairly quickly.

So, my son to put be me at ease said, "Don't worry Dad, you're gonna be talking to some

of the smartest people on the planet."

[laughter]

And thanks Forrest. I'll, but in a way that's kind good because I do tend to zip along at

a fairly breakneck pace. And so my plan is to go through these topics kinda in four sections,

pause for breath at the end of each one, do some few questions or comments, and then keep

going, alright?

I'm gonna be working a lot within one of these three circles: Buddhism or really contemplative

practice generally, the one I'm trained the most in is Buddhism.

I'm not here to push Buddhism or any ism, but it's a source of great insight into actually

how the mind works, as well as psychology and neurology.

That said, I think it's humbling and appropriate to appreciate the fact that there's really,

literally, so little we actually know about the mind and the brain these days. It's a

nice quote here from Ani Tenzin Palmo here. Now, no one really still knows yet what a

thought actually is even though we're goin' to be talking about them a fair amount.

Okay, so prelims out of the way, let's get into your amazing brain.

First, some basic specs. It's kind of mind boggling for me endlessly to appreciate really

how complicated the brain is.

[laughter]

In particular, I wanna focus as an overarching theme on the fundamental idea of using the

mind to change the brain for the better, so that it benefits the mind and in widening

ripples, all beings.

So, to do that we wanna get, I wanna get first at some basic information about the brain

and about what I call self-directed neuroplasticity. The fundamental idea that mental activity

sculpts neural structure, which gives us opportunities increasingly to intervene actually inside

the black box of the brain.

That's important because there's a fundamental problem in that the brain through biological

evolution is highly inclined toward noting and responding to negative experiences, and

in particular has a kind of deeply engrained threat reactivity that's then increased by

personal history as well cultural and political factors that leads to what I call "Paper Tiger

Paranoia."

And so then last I'm gonna talk about what to do about that, with self-directed neuroplasticity

in terms of coming back to the natural state of the brain which is really the optimal brain.

So I thought, "This is my opportunity at Google, I'm gonna take a big swing and hopefully hit

the ball."

So, let's dive in.

And one way to think about this is purely abstractly, fine. But a more powerful way

to think about it is that what we're talking about is happening right here, right now,

right between your ears.

Okay. So here we go.

Back to where we were, the technical specs of the brain.

Kinda remarkable to realize that in roughly three pounds, about five cups worth of tissue,

are about one point one trillion cells, 100 billion neurons, a trillion support cells.

They're connected with each other in a variety of ways. A typical neuron connects with about

5,000 other neurons making about 500 trillion synapses.

Lots of information moves through the brain and the nervous system. The brain moves information

around like a heart moves blood around in effect.

A fair amount of, of the interaction between neurons is just noise. Noisy networks as you

all probably know are very, are the, are optimized for signal transmission, but that said, out

of all the noise there are so many signals going on in the brain that in the time it

takes roughly to take a single breath, roughly a quadrillion messages moved around inside

your head.

The brain is literally the most complex object yet known to science; more complex than an

exploding star; more complex even than the American economy.

[laughter]

So, here's a schematic neuron. You can see the receiving end at the le-at the left as

you face the screen. The output end is at the right hand s-side. It is like a little

on-off switch. Neurons are continually firing. A neuron that's not firing is a dead neuron.

And basically the summation moment to moment of roughly 5,000 inputs every few milliseconds

determines whether the neuron will fire.

[pause]

Okay? Great.

[pause]

So, I wanna talk now about two critical words that are really easy t-to lose. This is probably

the most intellectually danced slide I've got. I wanna talk about the mind and the brain.

I define the mind as the flows of information through the nervous system. The nervous system

has its headquarters in the brain. Information is represented by the nervous system much

like a computer hard drive represents information, or sound waves right now are representing

information; radio waves represent information. It's the classic and familiar distinction

between hardware and software.

In essence, therefore, apart from hypothetical transcendental factors, the mind is what the

brain does. No brain, no mind.

Now, I say the brain is the necessary condition for the mind; it's also a proximally sufficient

condition. It's only proximally sufficient because the brain is embedded in our nervous

system, embedded in a body, embedded, whoops, and embedded in culture and both here and

now and across time.

So, to talk about the brain as the, the brain as the local, the locally, it's the necessary

condition and it's the locally sufficient condition for the mind. And as we'll see,

the brain also depends on the mind.

Now the way to understand the brain is really in a context of biological evolution. The

nervous system is about 600 million years old. As you know life came on the planet about

three and half billion years ago. Multi-celled creatures arose around 650 million years ago

and they were complicated enough to need some method of communication between their sensing

organs and their motor systems around 600 million years ago, thus the beginning of the

brain.

In terms of vertebrates it essentially evolved more or less in the way you see. This is kind

of a schematic picture. The inner reptile brain and there's the squirrel monkey brain

and there's the early stone tool making hominid brain, the cave man brain and the modern brain.

The modern brain is essentially identical with the cave man brain.

How many of you by the way have blue eyes or green eyes? Okay. You are mutants. In other

words, until about 5,000 years ago nobody had blue eyes. I mean biological evolution

is continuing. The first blue eyed person was identified probably about 5,000 years

ago; probably around Denmark and then blue eyes have proliferated around the world for

various reasons.

But evolution is continuing.

So, in terms of that evolution the brain developed three fundamental goal-directed systems. You

could say they're motivational systems; this why we do stuff.

The first system was the avoid system: withdraw from threats; freeze; back up; get away. On

top of that then with roughly invertebrates, crustaceans, lizards and so forth, and fish

in the sea, a more sophisticated approaching system developed to pursue opportunities.

And then with birds and mammals and then primates and particularly humans, the attach system

developed. That's the social system in the brain that forms connections and bonds with

us and seeks proximity, closeness, intimacy, love, and belonging.

Although the vagus nerve as it evolved loosely matched to these three systems, they're anatomically

blurred in their distinctions in the brain and they intertwine with each other and any

single system can use two others for its ends.

This typology by the way: approach, avoid, attach or avoid, approach, attach is one we'll

be returning to again and again. And it's a really useful way to think about how people

are motivated and also think about how suffering and dysfunction and harm arise in terms of

each one of those three systems.

And also, on the other hand, how happiness, benevolence, and helpfulness arise in a different

mode of action in each one of those three systems.

So, love and the brain. It's interesting to realize and this is what's called the social

brain theory, that probably the primary driver of evolution of the brain in the last hundred

million years has been social capabilities or love broadly defined.

For example, reptiles and fish approach and avoid, they don't attach, right? They have

their babies, they swim away, if the babies are still there a few hours later they'll

eat them, mos, in most species. Whereas birds and mammals do raise their young and often

form para-bonds at least temporarily.

It's interesting that the brain developed in three major stages driven really by the

reproductive advantages, which is the engine of biological evolution of social skills,

if you will.

The first stage was with birds and mammals. They've got bigger brains per body weight

than reptiles and fish do because the quote unquote "computational requirements" of raising

young and picking a partner require a bigger brain.

Similarly, at the next stage of development, there is a correlation between the size and

complexity of the social group of a primate species and the size of the cerebral cortex

in proportion to body weight.

In other words, the grooming, the hierarchies, who's up, who's down, who's alpha, who's beta,

how can I still get some if I'm beta, the coalitions and all the rest of that. Right?

You've gotta have a pretty big brain.

And then last, since the first hominids began making stone tools around two and a half million

years ago, the brain has tripled in size.

They were smart enough to make stone tools. How many here can make a stone tool? I can't

make a stone tool. I don't know, but they could do. Ah, you maybe could? That's good.

Most people don't raise their hand when I ask them that question. That's a good one.

Yet the build out of the brain has been primarily devoted to social capacities: language, cooperative

planning, empa-empathy, the presentation of self, both authentically and with artful deception

and all the rest of that has been much of what the volume of the brain, that's as I

said tripled, the other two-thirds is devoted to.

Interestingly, for babies or humans to have a bigger brain there's a kinda physical limit

on how big the brain can be in a newborn and still enable its mother to walk upright. And

so you start hitting a limit there.

Most species, primate species, there's basically a two-to-one ratio between the volume of the

brain at birth and how big it eventually gets. The human brain it's probably about a four-fold

maybe even a five-fold increase; to do that we needed a longer childhood.

To have a longer childhood with a very vulnerable infant you needed to develop bonds between

mothers and infants and also bring fathers into the mix. And also the band itself because

it quote unquote "takes a village to raise a child."

And those requirements helped drive the evolution of the social capabilities and inclinations

that would enable that to occur, which then enabled bigger brains. And the advantages

of those bigger brains drove them increasing social capacities and here we are today.

So, three facts about the brain in terms of self-directed neuroplasticity.

So, first fact about the brain: as the brain changes, the mind changes; in good ways and

bad. The left is a good slide hopefully, caffeine, sugar, pleasure; right slide, a concussion.

The second fact about the brain is that as the mind changes, the brain changes. This

is a critically important fact. In other words, immaterial mental activity, the movement of

information through this hardware substrate maps to material neural activity that produces

temporary changes as well as lasting ones.

Temporary changes include alterations in brain waves, increased consumption of supplies like

oxygen and glucose, ebbs and flows of neurochemicals like serotonin, dopamine, other neurotransmitters