Dr. Richard Davidson

When humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth.

And somehow a very large swath of humanity has learned to brush their teeth every day.

It's not part of our genome.

Yeah, so actually that's quite interesting, that view.

But getting back to your question, why do people find it so hard?

So there was a study published in Science not too long ago by a group of social psychologists.

And it was a study of, quote, boredom.

And what they did essentially in this study, the core of it was they took people into the lab and they said, we had a little problem and you guys are going to have to wait for like 15 or 20 minutes before the experiment starts while we fix some piece of equipment and they were in a waiting room.

There were magazines and books around and they also said that social psychologists are really good at creating these scenarios.

And so another experimenter came in and said, you know, they're from another research group and they understand that they have to wait a little while and we have another experiment that you can do in the meantime and it involves receiving electric shocks.

And of course, it's completely voluntary.

You are free to participate or not.

And the bottom line is that this is particularly male undergraduates in the United States prefer to shock themselves than to sit alone and not do anything.

It's a robust finding.

People could not sit without doing something, is the bottom line.

And the reason, I think, is that once we actually begin to inspect our own minds, most people are frightened at the chaos that they see.

One of the things we found when we look in a very granular way is that when people start to meditate,

we see a statistically reliable increase in anxiety in the first week.

Interesting.

And that's often when people say, I can't do this.