Once upon a time, we had the nature versus nurture debate, and we assumed that the brain stops developing at some finite point when we're young.

With recent science, things have gotten more interesting than that and more hopeful.

The neuroscientist Richard Davidson has helped to reveal a surprising give and take between emotion, behavior, and biology at every age.

He made his discoveries by studying the brains of meditating Buddhist monks.

Now he's testing new approaches to autism and ADHD, even to nurturing kindness and self-reflection in children and adolescents.

Richard Davidson and others are shifting the psychological paradigm that focuses on fixing what is wrong.

This is about practicing life enriching behaviors, and in so doing, rewiring our minds.

Based upon everything we know about the brain and neuroscience, the change is not only possible, but change is actually the rule rather than the exception.

And it's really just a question of which influences we're going to choose for our brain.

Investigating healthy minds. I'm Krista Tippett. This is on being from APM American Public Media.

Richard Davidson founded the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

He's a professor there of psychology and psychiatry, and he's director of the Wasteman Laboratory for Brain, Imaging, and Behavior.

I interviewed him in 2011.

I've read several accounts where you've talked about or written about how you've had this lifelong conviction that went back to your teenage years,

and the mind, here's one way you said it, underlies all that is important for flourishing and happiness.

Where did that interest in the mind come from? Do you know?

Well, I actually don't know exactly, although it just seemed to make a lot of sense to me early on in my life that our minds were really crucial to our how we related to everything around us.

That we actually had an opportunity by altering our minds to alter our realities and the world in which we lived.

I know it sounds a little trite, but that conviction was present really from high school on, and it's something that certainly motivated me in college and subsequently.

But it's interesting to me that you also always were interested in thinking about it also in terms of science, right?

In terms of biology somehow.

It was. I had a passion for science since I was a kid, and I was involved in lots of science-related activities.

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