Dr. Richard Davidson

There are certain states which, if they occur with regularity, will lead to a trait.

They'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state.

There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Goleman, who I wrote the book Altered Traits with.

And the origin of Altered Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier where we said the after is the before for the next during.

as the before for the next journey.

Yeah, so what we mean by that is that how you are after a state, say you do a little meditation practice and it leads to a state change, that state change may persist

in some way and that becomes the next before for the next during.

The during is the state, is say the meditation state.

And so it's a description of how a state can lead to a trait.

In the domain of emotion you might think that frequent bouts of anger, which you can think of as a state, can lead to the trait of irritability.

which is sort of chronically having a low threshold, you can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state.

So a trait of irritability would be a trait where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example.

So yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect.

And I'll go through that, but it's also important to recognize that you can be showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity in another part of the brain simultaneously.

And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics, but there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another, and so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable.

So with that as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see

a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately 1 Hz, one cycle per second, to approximately 40 Hz.

And from roughly 1 to 4 Hz is delta activity that is typically not seen during waking, it's predominant during deep sleep.

And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow wave activity during deep sleep is actually diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool.

And there are actually some really interesting highly novel strategies now using neurostimulation to actually boost slow wave activity during deep sleep, which