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Basically, you can think of these circuits in the brain in ways that are really analogous to the way we think about muscles.

And so if you're not using circuits very often, they will atrophy, just like a muscle will atrophy.

Hello, welcome to the Vox Media Podcast Network. My guest today is Dr. Richie Davidson.

He's the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He's done groundbreaking remarkable work, studying not just emotion and the brain, but meditation and attention and the brain.

He's been a pioneer in the studies that have brought in master meditators, regular level meditators, and tried to understand where and when and how their brains differ.

And what they're actually his to this kind of attentional training.

And his work has been renowned. He was named one of times 100 most influential people in the world.

He's a friend and the confident of the Dalai Lama, which we talk about in this.

He's a co-author of a great book called Alter Traits, which I think is the single best book, so I'm going to that I've read on the actual science of meditation, what we know about it, what we know it does, what we don't know that it does, how to actually study it.

So this is a conversation about all of that. It's a conversation about what we can train our minds to do.

It's also a conversation about what our minds are being trained to do.

I love his idea here, which comes up very early in the conversation of stimulus driven attention.

And towards the end, we talk about something that I think is important, which is not severing these practices from the ethical structures in which they emerged.

I think there is something to the way we are trying to decontextualize meditation as simply a life hack, a productivity tool.

That is deeply impoverishing of it and impoverishing of us, or maybe to put it more in these terms.

I think one part about optimizing your life is thinking ethically and making sure that if you are using tools that are also meant to let you see the world more clearly, and it's in justice is more clearly that you haven't lost that part of those tools in an effort to just make yourself a better worker or a little bit less stressed out or whatever it might be.

As always, my email is reclineshowadvox.com. Again, as reclineshowadvox.com. Here is Richie Davidson.

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