Interview With Dan Harris, Does Meditation Defy Science?

SAN DIEGO - March 13, 2015 - PRLog -- March 9, 2015 – DEL MAR, Calif. — Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Dan Harris, ABC news journalist and author of 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works-A True Story. Harris discusses his experiences with meditation and the scientific evidence suggesting it can enhance one’s happiness:

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, meditation works — thinking about thinking can change the physical structure of your brain. That’s what you’re reporting. But wait a minute–that’s a total game changer for science. I mean 20 years ago if you told scientists that immaterial thoughts — you know, this thinking stuff which isn’t supposed to do anything; which is just supposed to be just an epiphenomena of the brain — if you told them it can rewire your brain they would’ve laughed you out of the halls of academia. So the one thing that I guess did ping me as I was reading [10% Happier] was, haven’t we buried the lead here… this is really a game changer for science I think in a fundamental way that gets downplayed with, “oh it’s just meditation don’t worry about it.” Do you have any thoughts on that?

Dan Harris: Well, a couple things: one, science is an [experience] of discovery right? Where you’re wrong all the time; that you’re operating on a thesis that’s good enough and then somebody comes along and disproves it and you improve. And that’s just the way science works. And so yeah, for a long time there was the idea–it was received wisdom in medical and scientific circles that the brain stops changing after a certain age. I believe maybe in your early 20s? But now what the new mediation research has proved is that the brain is plastic and so there’s this new term neuroplasticity. That in fact the brain is changing all the time in response to experience. And it means that you can train the brain which is an enormously liberating idea because I think a lot of us assume either consciously or subconsciously that happiness is contingent solely upon exogenous factors, such as: the quality of our childhood; what’s happening at work; how are things going in our marriage…etc. Not to say that those things aren’t important. They are important. But in fact happiness can actually be a skill for which you train yourself just the way you train your body in the gym. That it is susceptible to training. And I just think that puts a lot of the responsibility on you but that it is liberating because it’s not all out of your control. That–what meditation teaches you to do is to–it’s not going to erase your problems, it just helps you see them and handle them differently. It puts you in a different relationship to those problems and that’s a huge value-added. But there’s just one little tweak in your question — this is going back several minutes now — it’s the term “thinking about thinking” but in fact it’s different, you’re not thinking about thinking, you’re being aware of thinking.

Additional excerpts from the interview are available and a complete audio version of the show is available at: http://www.skeptiko.com/268-dan-harris-does-meditation-de...

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