Dr. Richard Davidson

We actually have really good data on this that at least for beginning meditators, if you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety and symptoms of stress.

We've shown that repeatedly in randomized controlled trials.

You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing and we can talk about what those actually

You can even see just with this amount of practice a reduction in IL-6.

IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine.

Thank you, Andrew.

I'm honored to be here.

So thank you first for having me, Andrew.

And I just want to say I've been a long-term fan of yours, so I'm really happy to be here.

In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset, it's really important that we

also remind listeners that there is a thing called traits too.

And so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits.

And we'll get to traits in a moment.

But I think with regard to states, we can think of them as organized patterns of activity in the brain that have corresponding organized mental activities.

correlates, if you will, or subjective correlates.

And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms.

And so most human beings will have states of wakefulness, of deep sleep, and of REM sleep every day.

and that is regulated by well-known kinds of biological rhythms.

And there are other kinds of states that are sometimes described that are states during what we normally think of as waking, although I think honestly the concept of state is often used loosely without rigorous...

boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state.