DL Ep. 31: Your Brain Is a Storyteller

In this episode, Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl deeply explore the science of the emotional brain: why the mind is a storyteller, what split-brain research reveals about consciousness, how brain asymmetry shapes emotion, why some people approach opportunity with optimism while others withdraw, and what meditation may do to the brain and immune system. Enjoy! See below for FLASHCARDS, Full Transcript BelowWatch on Youtube; Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.FLASHCARDS / EPISODE COMPANION HEREPodcast Chapter List(00:00:00) – The brain is a storyteller(00:01:03) – Welcome to Dharma Lab(00:04:05) – Norman Geschwind and behavioral neurology(00:06:31) – The thumbtack story: emotional memory without conscious memory(00:12:12) – Language, the left hemisphere, and the corpus callosum(00:19:04) – Brain asymmetry and emotion(00:22:54) – Why emotion was so understudied(00:29:26) – Brain asymmetry, attachment, and aversion(00:31:19) – The prefrontal cortex and the old divide between thought and feeling(00:37:07) – Studying emotion in newborn infants(00:42:37) – Meditation, brain asymmetry, and the immune system(00:47:04) – Why “it’s not so simple”Written transcript for those who prefer to readLightly edited for clarity and readability.The Brain Is a Storyteller (00:00:00)Cortland Dahl:The example you gave earlier, with Broca’s area and the split-brain findings, points to something fascinating. Parts of the brain are not always talking to each other. One part of the brain clearly knows something, but the part that communicates doesn’t. And it doesn’t stay silent. It makes something up.That’s the funny thing. In the absence of information, we don’t just stay silent. When we don’t know something, we are not comfortable with not knowing. Some instinctual part of us fills in the blanks almost all the time.Richard Davidson:Exactly. The human mind and brain is a storyteller. This is how we make sense of our world. We create these narratives.Welcome to Dharma Lab (00:01:03)Cortland Dahl:Welcome everyone to another episode of Dharma Lab. I’m Cortland Dahl, and I’m here with Dr. Richard Davidson, who we all lovingly call Richie.As many of you know, Richie is one of the most pioneering and widely studied neuroscientists on the planet. It’s a gift to be in conversation with him.Today we’re going to have a conversation I’ve wanted to have for a long time. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin in 2012 to study with Richie, and over the years I’ve heard many conversations at the Center for Healthy Minds about neuroscience, meditation, and the mind. But one thing that has never really happened, even for those of us who work closely with Richie, is a kind of broad “download” from him about the amazing body of work he has contributed to over the decades.Many people know Richie as a pioneer of contemplative science and contemplative neuroscience, the scientific study of how practices like meditation affect the mind, the brain, and our biology. But he is also a pioneer of affective neuroscience, which you might think of as the neuroscience of emotion.To be a pioneer in one field is extraordinary. To be a pioneer in two is kind of mind-boggling.So today I want to dig into some of those key insights, especially around neural asymmetry, which was a huge part of Richie’s early career and a central theme in affective neuroscience.Norman Geschwind and Behavioral Neurology (00:04:05)Richard Davidson:This topic is near and dear to my heart. It still is something I’m extremely interested in. It really began when I was a graduate student and had the opportunity to study with Norman Geschwind at Harvard Medical School.Geschwind was one of the great towering figures in what we now call behavioral neurology. I took a course with him on functional neuroanatomy, which is basically how different parts of the brain are connected to different behavioral functions.He was a neurologist, so he looked at people’s behavior as an external reflection of what was going on in the brain. He was an extremely keen observer of behavior, and he was also very demanding. He was what we would now call a localizationist, someone who believed in the specific localization of different functions in different parts of the brain.He used to say that if you don’t believe in localization, it’s because you don’t know neuroanatomy well enough.