Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha
Uploaded: 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-21. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-21. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1723 - Amishi Jha

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience
Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day
hello hello thanks for doing this absolutely um peak mind huh that's right yeah
how long
you've been working on this um my whole life your whole life but the actual
book a couple years and
and the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works is this
something that's always
fascinated you absolutely yeah yeah the book isn't necessarily about all
aspects but a very important
one that drives a lot of other aspects which is the brain's attention system
yeah that's a thing a lot
of people have a problem with today right phones and distractions and screens
and nonsense yeah but
it's always been a problem so meaning you can look back to medieval monks and
they report you know I
abandoned my family I've devoted my life to God and I still keep thinking about
lunch when I'm supposed
to be praying so this is not only a modern problem it's actually a human
problem what where does it
come from is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think
about in the world if
you're trying to survive what does where does what come from the then like
distraction like if you
think about it if you're a hunter-gatherer you kind of have to multitask
mentally right you you can't just
concentrate on picking these mushrooms you also have to think is that a sound
of a branch snapping
behind me is someone sneaking up on me like what's that smell like yeah you
have to always be aware of so
many different things it's it seems almost like a natural part of being a
person to be distracted
absolutely our brain is built for distractibility exactly for the reasons that
you said it advantages
us to be able to not just focus when we want to but scan as we're as we're
still engaged in a task
and it's as we as I just mentioned it's not really only a modern problem
because oftentimes even if we're
abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction and we're just by
ourselves alone in a
quiet room we can still feel like it's hard to focus so this capacity that
drives kind of a shifting
moving attention waxing and waning is something that is built baked into the
way that our brain functions
and I think that's often misunderstood as a problem people think oh no no my
brain is really busy my
brain gets really distracted instead of understanding that's just the nature of
the brain if you are
alive awake conscious about half of your waking moments your attention is not
going to be in the
task at hand yeah that's something that people need to learn when they start
meditating that when you
meditate people think god why do I keep getting distracted like that's just
part of it exactly
you're gonna you're never gonna be like completely zen for long periods of time
and just completely full
of bliss and enlightenment no you're gonna be thinking about cheese and car
tires exactly when is it
raining yeah no absolutely I think understanding that it shifts it starts to
shift your relationship to
what you're trying to do in the practice of meditation it's not about clearing
the mind and that term gets
used a lot like just clear it out not possible not gonna happen not the way
that your brain was designed
but then you start understanding that there is a win to be had and it's a
practice like especially the
kind of stuff that I study in my lab mindfulness meditation because in the act
of knowing where your mind is
and training it to come back over and over you gain a lot you gain almost in
some sense the super capacity
to have more control in your not just the way your mind functions but in your
life that's where it gets
interesting for me because uh do you have sort of a standard protocol that you
think people should apply
to their thinking or is it based on where you are in your life how much you've
already done of this is
ever does everybody's brain vary in terms of how much distractions they have in
their head deep question
actually so yes it varies and let's just say the basics are there's a basic
profile so to disabuse
ourselves that if your mind wanders there's something wrong with you or there's
something unique about you
that's everybody but it is the case that for some people dirt not some people
in every group we've
studied in my lab and this is many many kinds of groups so from active duty
military to first responders
to students to athletes leaders and organizations i mean teachers just goes on
and on if you are
experiencing a protracted period of high demand meaning you got to get
something done like for
students it'd be during the academic semester or for athletes even pre-season
training if you're
experiencing that kind of high demand for multiple weeks your attention is
going to decline your
attentional functioning is going to decline your distractibility or mind
wandering would be the
technical way to describe it is going to increase so that's one thing we need
to know no matter
what your sort of set point is and we do have different set points as
individual differences
now when it comes to your own mind um when when you're working with these
different groups of
people and you're putting together this book and you're putting together these
sort of uh methods
and strategies for uh taking care of the the just the weirdness of being a
person and the weirdness of
the mind yeah are you gaining something out of this personally by going through
all this like is this
helping you as well while you're writing all this stuff down while you're you
know exposing these
various techniques that can improve your concentration and your ability to
focus on things do you find that
it's helping you as well well or is it something that you've always worked on
oh no it's not i mean
i've always been i've been a neuroscientist for a long time i've been
interested in the way the brain
works for a long time i started studying attention as an undergrad and went on
to do my you know
graduate work in postdoctoral training and then set up a lab to study attention
and then kind of early
in my time of being a professor i had like this kind of acute crisis of
attention and it was around
the time i just had my my first child and my husband was in grad school setting
up a lab i lost feeling
in my teeth from grinding whoa yeah it was pretty intense and then i remember
one night i was sitting
there with my then almost three-year-old reading a book to him and like this is
important to me i mean
i this is like the only time i really have with him that's supposed to be
quality time feeling like
this is a time i'm supposed to really be here for him reading a book and he
asked me a question put a
little hand on the book asked me a question i had no idea what he was talking
about and i'm like i am
definitely not here i'm not even here when i want to be this is what i want to
do i'm not in the middle
of doing anything else but my mind is not here and it was scary it was like oh
this is not cool and
then i'm like i study this stuff okay just let's go see the literature how can
i find a solution i can't
access my own attention it's slipping through my fingers so i literally did i'm
like i'm going to
study everything i can nothing i came up empty and that was also troubling like
what do you mean there's
nothing i can go to in the literature that's just like here's the best way to
train your attention
so that you have better access to your moment to moment lived experience kind
of empty and then
just to kind of continue the journey i'm like this is there's got to be
something to do and at that
moment it was not just feeling distracted it was starting to feel kind of
depressed and a little
bit anxious too like sort of this bubbling up of uh my life is slipping away
from me and in that moment
it was sort of how funny how serendipity happens but a dear colleague of mine
an eminent neuroscientist
who happens to be an emotion researcher an affective neuroscientist at that
time was at the university of
of pennsylvania he was giving a lecture so you know just as part of my colloquium
i went to this lecture
and i'm sitting at the back of the room he goes through this whole talk he he
ends his talk by
showing kind of two brain images one is of a brain induced to be in a very
negative mood i mean usually
you do this by putting people in the scanner and saying think of your worst
memories like feel bad
you play sad music and they did the same thing on the other side where he
showed a brain image of a
of a person induced to be in a positive mood and he's just trying to make the
point that these are
distinct brain states we can track them they have different functions but of
course given my own life
circumstances at the end of the lecture i kind of shout out from the back of
the room like how do you make
that brain look like that brain i just wanted an answer yeah and i don't know
if he was rushed because
it was the end of the lecture or what but he he just kind of calls out like not
even the microphone i
don't even remember meditation and i'm like what the heck is do you know where
you are you don't say that
this is in the early 2000s meditation was not a thing we don't talk about it to
me it was almost as
offensive as like talking about astrology to physicists or something like was
it really it
was absolutely not something i had ever amongst academics in an academic
neuroscience context really
i did not know that so when did it start becoming something that was taken
seriously
is it now yeah i think meditation's being no absolutely and i would say a lot
of the effort
that i've been up to now we have a field contemplative neuroscience so anyway
so yeah we we're
definitely there i would say over the last 15 years there's been a serious uptick
in the seriousness
taken and a lot of it is because these kind of brain imaging studies where we
could put people in
scanners and we could track them a lot of the work that we've been doing as
well but it really bugged
me that he said that and i was still very much a skeptic like i don't know of
meditation of just
yeah and i had a chance to talk to him afterwards he's now become a very sort
of dear more closer
colleague and he runs an entire center that's tied to um contemplative practice
but at that point it was
just it was almost like he was also kind of closeted he had not come out he was
doing some
of the initial studies closeted with meditation well yeah because he was just
starting to do studies
again it was a liability and when i i mean just to fast forward a little bit
really meditation was a
liability to discuss when i in academic circles when i told my colleagues that
i and it was a big deal
because i'm like a traditional hard-nosed academic studying attention so i'm
gonna make this like tiny
pivot to studying training attention and i'm gonna use this thing called
mindfulness meditation
it was like first it was like silence like you're committing career suicide but
you know you're
gonna do what you're gonna you're gonna do people actually said that to you oh
yeah that's so strange
i mean i love that you're saying it's so strange because in some sense it is
the success of this
enterprise and the rigor with which we've been able to do a lot of research
that has caused a type of
culture change which is a pretty rapid pace of causing that yeah culture change
but for me when
i heard the term you know i'm we can see i'm an indian woman i of course knew
about meditation my
earliest memories are seeing of my seeing my dad meditating and i always
thought that's great you
know that's great for them but i'm like a serious western trained scientist and
until there's any reason to
really think this is a helpful thing i'm not gonna do it but going back to your
question which was
about my personal journey with this practice as it relates to writing the book
and the work that we're
doing you know um i started practicing i went to the pen bookstore after he
said that term with my
own resistance in hand and fo