Richard Davidson, PhD (#04)

The Shannon Harvey Podcast

This conversation is another extended interview from my film My Year Of Living Mindfully. This time it is with Professor Richard Davidson, the Director of the Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Maddison. Richie is a trailblazing scientist who’s published hundreds of scientific papers on the neural bases of emotion. His dedication to human well-being and relieving suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind would have made him a worthy interviewee in his own right and in this interview you'll hear about a pretty big breakthrough in the acceptance of using mindfulness in mainstream medicine. But I admit that I had a very specific reason for wanting to chat with Richie. He pioneered the neuro-scientific study of Olympic-level meditators – people with over 10,000 hours of meditation practice under their belt. At a time when meditation was considered Californian hippie ju ju, this was important because if there was something different about the brains of meditators, it meant there was a ‘there' there, to be studied and picked apart. But what had caught my attention was that one of his early subjects was none other than the French cellular geneticist-turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who I had met a few months before. When I chatted with Matthieu he was at the end of a gruelling four-day speaking tour of Australia. Despite his jet lag and 16-hour workday, his clear blue eyes twinkled with alertness and interest. I struck by how this 71-year old monk, whose busy schedule was a mix of regular international speaking tours, writing deadlines, and overseeing 200 humanitarian projects, could possibly juggle everything and still seem so… well… happy. In fact, Matthieu has earned a place in popular media as the ‘happiest man on earth’ after neuroscientists published a series of seminal experiments involving his brain. When I met him in person, I didn’t need to see the brain scans to know that there was a certain something about him. I drove home from that interview thinking, "Was it possible for me, a stressed-out mother of two young kids, struggling with an autoimmune disease and insomnia to get even a fraction of that kind of ever-present joy by simply learning to train my mind?" Fast forward a few months and there I was sitting across from Richie Davidson – one of the neuroscientists who had done those seminal brain scans on Matthieu. I finally had a chance to get an answer to my question.