The Connection Between Neuroscience and Eastern Philosophy

If you heard the recent episode on Parental Burnout, you'll know that our identities can become really confusing when we become parents, especially for women.  On one hand, society tells us that we have to work hard and do well so we can Achieve The Dream.  And on the other hand, we're told that a Good Mother sacrifices everything for her child - including her career.  So what is a parent to do? This episode brings together a couple of strands of my life that have been existing in parallel for a few months now. A friend of mine introduced me to meditation as a tool that I might find useful to explore when I was struggling with some personal issues. Not only did I find it interesting, but I also found elements of it that helped me to make sense of the situation I was in in a way that I had not been able to do until that point.   Like a lot of people, I had the common perception that meditation consists of sitting quietly on the floor cross-legged with thumb and pointing finger touching, saying ‘ommmm’ but when I looked into the research on mindfulness stress reduction that perception went away pretty fast. It had been shown in the scientific literature to be enormously helpful to people not just in reducing stress but also in reducing the severity of physical symptoms in the body that accompany stress.   But I was still having a hard time reconciling the thousands of scientific research papers I’ve read over the years on how children’s brains develop and some of these new ideas I was learning related mindfulness. And so that is kind of how I discovered Dr. Chris Niebauer and his book No Self, No Problem. After reading it I was able to reconcile those two strands - the psychological research and mindfulness - and I want to share that with you.  Along the way, we'll gain an understanding of the mind that may help us to overcome some of the challenges associated with Parental Burnout - so even if you're not officially (clinically) suffering from burnout, this episode could still help you to better reconcile the different aspects of your life and identity.    

Taming Your Triggers

If you need help with your own big feelings about your child’s behavior, Taming Your Triggers will be open for enrollment soon. We’ll help you to:

• Understand the real causes of your triggered feelings, and begin to heal the hurts that cause them
• Use new tools like the ones Katie describes to find ways to meet both her and her children’s needs
• Effectively repair with your children on the fewer instances when you are still triggered

It’s a 10-week workshop with one module delivered every week, an amazing community of like-minded parents, a match with an AccountaBuddy to help you complete the workshop, and mini-mindfulness practices to re-ground yourself repeatedly during your days, so you’re less reactive and more able to collaborate with your children.             Dr. Chris Niebauer's book No self, no problem - Affiliate link     [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 1:45 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I'm really excited about today's topic because it brings together a couple of strands of my life that have been existing in parallel for a few months and they're now beginning to interweave themselves in the most interesting, useful and exciting ways. I've been struggling with some personal issues for several months and a friend introduced me to meditation, not specifically as a way to help me through it, but more of a useful tool that I might find interesting to explore. And I did find it interesting. And I also found the elements of it helped me to make sense of the situation that I was in in a way that I hadn't been able to do until that point. And then sort of in parallel to that I had been aware of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work to introduce Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at a clinic in Massachusetts, and that it had been shown in the scientific literature to be enormously helpful to people, not just in reducing stress, but also in reducing the severity of even physical symptoms in the body that accompanies stress. But I kind of had this perception I think a lot of people have that meditation is basically kind of sitting quietly on the floor and your legs crossed and your thumb and your first finger are touching and you're saying, umm, and so some reading got me over that perception pretty fast, but I was still having a hard time really squaring the thousands of scientific research papers that I've read over the years on how children's brains develop. And then some of these new ideas that I was learning related to mindfulness. And so a couple months ago, the folks who are in my Finding Your Parenting Mojo membership had voted to cover the topic, The Sense of Self and Parenting, and they wanted to know things like, why do I feel like I have to be the perfect mom and the perfect housewife? And how do I reconcile the compromises I've made with my career and the things that I enjoy with as my role as a parent? And why does it feel as though I'm losing the very parts of myself that made me feel alive and real and valuable? And so one aspect of this work led me to the episode that we covered a few weeks ago on Parental Burnout, but another led me to our guest today, Dr. Chris Niebauer. And he wrote the book, No Self No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism, and I devoured the book in a day. It's incredibly readable. And suddenly it felt as though those two strands of my life, the psychological research and the mindfulness meditation had become one, and I wanted to share more about that with you. So Dr. Niebauer earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University of Toledo specializing in the differences between the left and the right sides of the human brain. He's currently a professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on consciousness, mindfulness, left and right brain differences and artificial intelligence. Welcome Dr. Niebauer. Dr. Niebauer 4:23 Thanks. Thanks, Jen. Jen 4:24 So I'm super excited about this. There are a lot of books you can read about mindfulness and meditation and some of them you read a sentence you're like, what exactly does that mean? And how is that relevant and yours was just so clear, and so cogent. It was fun to read. It was interesting to read, and it was also just super, super clear, kind of walking you through this process. So it's really an honor to have you here today. Dr. Niebauer 4:47 Thank you. I appreciate those comments and a lot goes out to my publisher, Randy Davila. He is an editor. There were quite a few lines in there that were probably really complex and fortunately, he was wise enough to remove a lot of that and make it much more accessible to people. And so that goes out to him and people at Hierophant Publishing, they were super helpful throughout the whole process. Jen 5:13 Hats off to them as well then. So I wonder if we can maybe start by having you tell us how you arrived at the ideas that you describe in the book. Did you have any kind of background in mindfulness or meditation early on? Or was it something you arrived at later? And how did those ideas kind of knit together for you? Dr. Niebauer 5:30 So most of my childhood, I wanted to be a musician, and we're talking like 80s hairband, kind of rock music kind of thing. And it was kind of late in my teens when my father had died very unpredictably, and death suddenly became a very big overwhelming reality in my life. And I found almost instantaneous neurosis, worry, anxiety. It was like a switch just got flagged on. And I was struggling with it, a lot of my 20s. And I was trying to figure this thing out and neuroscience sort of made sense. And the whole psychology thing made sense to me. So I was one of these types that knew instantly, I want to be a Psych major because maybe they have an answer. And so I went into psych, and I got my undergrad, and then it was just absolutely obvious I was going to go to graduate school because that was just a logical progression with it. And as I progressed, I was ever more disappointed that a lot of the things I went into it for, like, what's the way out? You know, the mind and the psychological mechanisms got me into this mess, why can't they get me out? And I started searching and I stumbled upon Alan Watts. And he introduced me to the whole concept of Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and Hinduism, and Taoism, and it just opened up just, it was like everything I was looking for. But I never left psych. And I never left neuroscience because I think the foundations and kind of the foothold that neuroscience provides us on some of these questions, it's a great place to start. And so, even though I don't think the brain is going to yield and give us all the answers that we want, the brain is a good place to start a conversation about these issues, because, you know, so many people are talking about the epidemic and the virus and how this is I mean, the whole world has changed. But the idea of anxiety, neurosis, worry, intrusive thoughts, these have been plaguing us for such a long time that they become normal. It's the ordinary person is a quivering neurotic mess and that's… Jen 7:54 Hey, how did you know that about me? Dr. Niebauer 7:57 It's so true for so many, for all of us really. And so when I got into this, it sort of was a strange disconnect to say, well, you're a neuroscientist, shouldn't you be into the science and you shouldn't be off meditating and you shouldn't be off, you know, doing Tai Chi and studying Kung Fu and all these ancient practices of the East. But I found that one, they really complemented each other in a way that it just felt right. It's like, yeah, this is working for me. And so that's the path that sort of got connected about maybe 20 years ago, and I just kind of followed it through. And the deeper I go into Eastern philosophy, the more it helps me with neuroscience. The more I go into neuroscience, the more it helps me with Eastern philosophy. Jen 8:44 So let's define some of the terms that we're going to be working with today. And one of them kind of kicks us right in the deep end I think, what is me and I and the self as a sort of central concept? Dr. Niebauer 8:56 It is perhaps my favorite question to ponder. You know, when I say I, what do I mean? Jen 9:01 Right. Because, I mean, before I read your book, it seems sort of obvious. Dr. Niebauer 9:07 Oh, it seemed. It’s one of those deceptive questions because it seems absolutely obvious. Who am I? I'm Chris. Well, I am what I do, right? I'm a professor. And I'm a parent. And I start off, I define myself by these social roles, that some are choices, some have been imposed on me, but they're collectively defined by society, gender, age, so many, I could go through a long list of all these things that kind of just got thrown on to me. And then I find myself defining myself in terms of those characteristics. But when you tear those away, and people have moments where they start realizing, well, maybe I'm not my job, and oh, and sometimes it's just a sudden they get fired and they find themselves who am I if I don't have my career? Sometimes it's thrown unpredictably and then sometimes it's, you know, you get a certain age and you start thinking, am I really my paycheck? And no. And am I really this and all these socially defined roles. And so what's underneath to all of that? So in my view, the self, as most people think of it is largely an idea of who we think we are. And when you tear all that down, you start shifting from this kind of left brain, categorical identity that's socially constructed to something that's much more of a mystery. And it is an actual mystery. And so when people say, well, who are you? The honest, I could give you a bunch of left brain answers, but the honest response is, I don't know. You know, it's a mystery and it's maybe purposely a mystery. It's an interesting little puzzle that I think in some ways I could, I think yesterday, this came up during a conversation when we were talking about the self and if all these ideas of the self are just ideas then there's no kind of reality to the self. And maybe that's true. It's certainly my position. But that doesn't mean that there's no soul. Soul is an interesting concept that psychology got rid of a long time ago. And maybe they had to, to kind of investigate the science. But it's an interesting trend now in psych, where they're starting to throw that term around, again, not as a replacement for the self. So they're not talking about the soul as this social construct, or the soul is what I do, or the soul is somehow identified with this body or the mind or the intellect. But they're defining it as, again, a mystery. And it's something we can't put into words. And that's one of the things that I find. We live in a very interesting time where science tells us if we can't put it into words, it doesn't exist. And we're slowly picking up on this notion that reality is filled with interesting experiences, that even if they can't be put into words, they're real, nonetheless. Jen 12:10 Okay, and so we're going to come back to some of those ideas around language. And also, you've mentioned the left brain and right brains roles. I'll come back to that very soon. But I think this is going to come up. So I just wanted to find it. What is suffering? Dr. Niebauer 12:21 There's two types of suffering, and I only address one. And so there's real physical suffering in the sense that someone breaks leg or they have physical ailment or disease. And I really am not addressing any of that. In fact, this came up a couple times, I get this question where someone will say, well, you know, I've been to my physician, and if everything is fine, why do I have to take this pill? And I'm like, look, well, you know, maybe we are spiritual beings, but we're having this human existence. And we have a body. And you know, sometimes it's good to listen to your MD. And there are times, yeah, you know, all the answers may not be in the mind. There may be real physicality to the body. And that kind of suffering I don't really speak to very much. The kind of suffering I'm talking about it’s the suffering that I experienced. And the one I talked about when I think of it as an epidemic and that's the suffering caused by thinking. The suffering that's caused by our thinking epidemic are overthinking and ironically, we think that the cure is more thinking. And so we're trying to fix a problem by throwing the disease onto itself. And so we're trying and this is what happens, a bunch of Western intellectuals were great at thinking and so we tried to solve the problem with thinking with more thinking and of course, that's what has gotten us deeper and deeper into the situation, which is the kind of suffering that I'm really talking about. And that's what I talked about in the book. Jen 13:52 Okay, super. All right, so let's get into some of this left brain right brain stuff because this is not, you know, men are from Mars, women are from Venus stuff. This is actually real neuroscience, this is how the brain experiences the world. So can you tell us about some of those differences between the left brain, the right brain and how they experience the world? And how do we know these things? Dr. Niebauer 14:12 There is a long line of research in the left and right brain and there's a journal very reputable journal called Laterality that has published findings for 40 plus years in left and right brain differences. One of the problems with doing research in the left and right brain is the problem with all of science and that's when it becomes popular. There's nothing worse than science for an idea to become popular. And once sort of cut on, it's a nice simple idea we have and if you look at the brain, a kid will notice this. It's not like you have one big brain. It's really obvious that you have a left and right side, they're physically distinct entities and until you push them both back and see the corpus callosum which connects the two sides, I mean, they have their own blood supply. They're really it's like jamming two separate brains in the skull and then hooking them up with a bunch of wiring. So they have this called the corpus callosum, which means big bridge. So they have this big bridge that connects them. But the reality is that they're two really physically separate brains that we have in our skull. And people have been trying to find a simple way to say, okay, what is the left and right brain difference, and I've got my way, I think I’ll just give you a little bit of the research. And so when we look at the left and right brain, the left brain does stand out in terms of what we do in Western culture. The left brain is language, it is the dominant speech center, it categorizes. And so categories are very interesting things. Because when we categorize the world, we skip over all the individual all these differences because the world is chaotic mess, and it's fluctuating and changing and the limit the left brain does is it takes that one way in which you might be able to group things together, and it creates a category. The left brain is really good at categories. And using these categories, it creates what we might call our belief systems, our ideas, and I talked quite a bit about the split brain patients because what they discovered with the split brain patients who literally had that connection severed and they had the isolated left brain, it's the left brains tendency to create theories about what's going on around it. And the left brain spontaneously made up theories to explain the world told stories. Well, this is why I'm doing this. This is why I'm doing that. And the problem with this storytelling left brain is how wrong it often was. And it was totally wrong. But it never knew it was wrong. Jen 16:44 And give us an example, please, because this sounds really abstract. Dr. Niebauer 16:47 Yeah, okay. Sure. Let's make it really, so you've got a split brain patient. Jen 16:51 Okay. And when you say split brain patient is that someone who has, the brains have been surgically… Dr. Niebauer 16:55 Surgically severed, they're separated, they have no interconnection with each other. Jen 17:00 And that’s the treatment for epilepsy, isn't it? Dr. Niebauer 17:03 Yeah. So the original treatment was for something medical, these individuals had severe epilepsy. And the problem was, is that the seizures would spread from one side of the brain to the other. And then the whole brain is experiencing a seizure. So the idea is let's just cut that connection, and then we'll at least keep the seizure activity on one side. And from a medical standpoint, it worked. It was extremely successful. But what they had discovered is that now that they had the two sides of the brain separated, they could test them individually with the split brain patients, and so they would send messages to the right brain things like stand up, well, the...