Interacting Minds - Andreas Roepstorff

The moment that you get into rumination,

The moment that thoughts just seem to be coming back to you again and again and you can't let go of them,

Then with some kind of a mindfulness training it's possible to say,

Well,

It is just a thought,

You can step out of it,

And that in interesting ways allows it to dissolve.

Part of what it seems to do,

A lot of these contemplative practices,

Is that one suddenly realizes that actually between stimulus and response there is a space that can be explored,

There is a space that can be looked at differently.

There is a way to say that that which used to be all of it can just be part of what's here and then let go.

And that in itself is just an amazing discovery.

Welcome to Mind and Life.

I'm Wendy Hasenkamp.

This week I'm speaking with Andreas Ropestorf,

Who's based at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Andreas actually came up in our last show with Evan Thompson,

Where Evan mentioned him as one of the few researchers who's really doing the work of integrating factors like social context into cutting-edge brain research.

Andreas has a background in both neuroscience and anthropology,

And we discuss how these two approaches to understanding the mind are quite distinct but also offer important complements to one another.

I spoke with Andreas last fall in Germany,

Where I was fortunate enough to attend a Mind and Life think tank that he organized,

And we talk about that a little bit more in our interview.

After the think tank,

We attended the Contemplative Science Symposium held by Mind and Life Europe,

Which took place in a beautiful,

Old,

And quite echoey monastery,

And that's where we sat down for this chat.

We cover a number of topics,

Including intersubjectivity and his work to bring together first- and third-person perspectives in studying the mind,

And he goes into one example of this in his research on the ritual practice of firewalking.

We talk about meditation and microphenomenology,

Which is an interview method to unpack brief moments of experience in very deep ways.

We discuss his research on playfulness,

We talk about predictive models of mind,

The power of mindfulness to help with rumination,

And the importance of exploring how two minds can process and respond differently to the same experience.

I think the way that Andreas takes seriously the relevance of social context in his research on the mind is going to be essential as the field moves forward,

So I'm really happy to be able to share his work and perspective with you today.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

It's my pleasure to bring you Andreas Ropstorf.

Andreas,

Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you,

Vindi.

I would love to hear a little bit about your background.

You have a very unique perspective,

I feel,

That you bring to this field.

You've been trained in both anthropology and neuroscience,

Which I think have very different perspectives,

Usually on the mind.

Can you say a little bit about how you got interested in both of those angles?

Yeah.

So,

I guess I was someone who couldn't really figure out whether I belonged in the humanities or in the natural sciences.

After traveling in Southeast Asia and Australia,

I started studying biochemistry and biotechnology and realized after a year that that was just not what I had hoped university would be about.

My fellow students were really wonderful,

But it was just not what I needed.

And then I decided to shift to anthropology,

But at the same time keeping kind of a foot in biology.

I didn't have a clear plan of where that would take me and what I would do with it,

But I just felt that there was something about that anthropology-biology match that seemed right to me at the time.

So did you end up with a degree actually in both?

Yeah,

I ended up with two.

It took a while with kind of two parallel degrees,

But it was a frustrating process for a long time,

And I think what frustrated me was that kind of when I was with my natural science friends,

I was kind of very kind of soft philosophical,

Not really getting it,

They thought.

And when I was with my anthropology colleagues,

They thought I was kind of way out on the spectrum in terms of not understanding the complexities of social life.

Two reductionists from that side.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So in a very interesting way,

There was that kind of strange sense for a while of not fitting in for the opposite reasons,

And that gave me at some point huge problems about who am I and why am I studying,

What am I doing.

But then at some point I even inscribed myself in medicine because I thought that would be the solution.

I'd start studying medicine,

That would give me something,

I should be fine.

And I got so far to the first week of medicine,

And I looked around and there were these kind of people coming right from high school ready to start medicine,

And I could see that there was just really not the right thing to do because I really loved my biology,

I really loved my anthropology.

The problem was not in what I was doing,

But it was in figuring out some kind of a space.

Putting them together.

Yeah,

And I had brought myself into a situation where somehow I was inscribed three places at the same time in university,

And that was just untenable.

Not tenable,

Yeah.

I thought,

How do I get myself out of this again?

And then I saw kind of on a notice board somewhere at university someone who said,

We need a student to do a research project on neuroscience.

And I had had absolutely no neuroscience at that time,

But I went up and knocked on the door and said,

You know,

I'm a good student,

I'm a hard worker,

Can you use me?

And no one else had knocked on the door.

So in a sense I was given this scholarship to study hippocampus electrophysiology.

Amazing.

Yeah,

And it involved the rat's brain dissecting out hippocampus,

Keeping it alive,

Sending electro physiological needles into it,

Recording stuff from it.

And I think what it first and foremost gave me was kind of a space that I really needed to figure out,

Well,

You know,

What should I be doing around it?

And I realized that I really,

Really liked the research part of it.

I also realized that the anthropology,

Biology link that in a sense it was something that I needed to find out.

And for a long time,

I thought that I would basically do my anthropology without relating it to biology and my biology without relating it to anthropology,

Because I had that sense that the two disciplines were so different and the kind of schooling that you needed to do was so different that I thought by keeping them separate,

I could kind of develop a clear idea of what each of them could give before I should try to do any kind of overlap between them.

And that was almost like a bicultural training,

You can say,

Right,

That that you figure out,

Well,

Something counts here,

Something else counts here.

Both of this makes perfect sense.

There are problems when you do the translation,

Then you kind of problems when people are in the same room.

But I could actually,

You know,

Figure out how to navigate back and forth between them,

Which at the end of the day,

Of course,

Is an anthropological position.

Well,

Right.

How do you do that?

How do you come to terms with that strange aspect of participating and observing?

Yeah.

In both disciplines?

Can you say a little more about,

You said what counts in each side,

Right?

And that struck me a lot working in this interdisciplinary space,

You know,

Being trained as a scientist,

You're very familiar with data and experimentation.

Yeah,

When I first stepped into other spaces of humanities,

I didn't even understand like the currency of what was being talked about.

So can you just give a little bit of example of just the whole viewpoints from the different perspectives?

So I think I had a really good training in biology working in this neurobiological laboratory.

And it was so much about,

You know,

Understanding what's it like to be precise about experimentation?

What's it like to try to develop tools to describe these things that are in the data,

But the data doesn't give them themselves?

So we were looking at electro-physiological traces and there were patterns here and ways of analyzing,

Ways of modeling became,

So to say,

Almost tools to grasp something that we couldn't get at through language.

That was a very interesting and deep experience in that part of it.

It wasn't complicated modeling by today's standard,

But for me it was a revelation.

Whereas I think where anthropology is really particular and probably also different from many other social science and humanities disciplines is that at the end of the day,

It's really about realizing that what you bring into the world is yourself and your own body.

And it's something about starting to trust that those experiences you have and the way you can relate to others are the only means or the main means you have of actually building up some kind of an understanding.

So both of them were very methodologically savvy,

I thought,

But you can say one of them was really about developing tools that would let reality almost speak by itself by giving those tools that could make the data stand out and see patterns in it.

And the other one was really about saying,

Well,

How can I somehow turn my attention to what happens here and be sensitive to what's at stake in this situation for me and shifted away from being just my personal project to see is there something in this which is of more general value.

And I think I'm extremely grateful for both of these trainings.

And I think most of what I do is in a sense shifting back and forth between two different modes of analysis here.

Yeah,

I think it's a really productive synthesis that we don't have enough of.

So with those two trainings and perspectives,

How do you view the mind?

That's a big question.

So how do I view the mind?

Well,

The first very obvious question is that you can approach the mind both from,

Let's say,

This kind of objective third-person analytical perspective where you find ways of getting it.

You see almost signs of the workings of the mind,

And you try to find tools to make them stand out.

And brain imaging that I worked with for a while is one of those instances.

You can say this idea that somehow we can constrain situations in such a way that people's brains,

People's minds do something that's relatively confined,

And that allows us to open a small window onto some of the underlying biological processes.

And that's crazily difficult.

And amazing statisticians and modelists have really been working to see how can you get something sensible out of this?

How can we map that kind of landscape in a non-trivial way?

And this is obviously one aspect of what the mind is,

Is getting some handle on it,

Either through behavior or through something else.

The other obvious aspect,

Of course,

Is then to say,

Well,

There is also an experiential component to it,

That there is something like what it is like to be me inside a scanner or in an experiment or in any other situation.

And the way that I think the place where I first became aware of that was at some point I ended up doing a research project that was doing kind of an anthropology of neuroscience or an anthropology of brain imaging.

And it was very obvious here that,

You know,

This was brain imaging was relatively novel.

We were playing with how can we make sense of the type of experiments we did.

And obviously it was very different being on the inside and being on the outside of a scanner.

Yeah.

So the first experiment I took part in was a small experiment that wanted to investigate what happens when information travels from one hemisphere to another hemisphere.

And it was in an MR scanner and the study was quite simple.

Some persons should be tickled under their left foot and as a response they should tap with the right finger and then there would be the interhemispheric.

And as often happens when you're an anthropologist,

You end up getting a task.

And my first task was to be the tickler.

And we had a very complicated setup where there was kind of a muscle massage apparatus that could vibrate,

But it could not go near the scanner because it was magnetic.

Right.

And there was a long fiber.

Oh my gosh.

I was standing and holding this thing and then,

You know,

Touching the person's foot and not touching,

Touching,

Touching.

And as a response,

We could see this tapping with the finger and,

You know,

From the outside just looks like a perfect stimulus response.

So the next experience was I became the subject of the participant experiment.

And as I moved inside the scanner,

I discovered what none of us had thought about.

There was a mirror in the scanner.

Right.

And in that mirror,

I could see the person approaching me here.

It's starting to tickle me.

And I thought from inside the scanner,

From this first person perspective,

It wasn't really obvious whether I was reacting to the tickling or to the anticipation.

Right.

Because you could see it.

Coming there.

Sure.

Because I could see it.

And I was really annoyed with the experiment.

And I thought,

This is a really stupid experiment.

Why am I lying here?

It tickled under my foot.

So I thought I would cheat him.

So I began systematically whenever I was tickled on my foot to think of one thing and then think of something else in the other situations.

That's great.

Which,

You know,

In my naivety,

I thought at that time would conflate the picture.

Would mess up the data.

What I didn't know,

Of course,

Is you do statistics.

But the interesting point was that,

Kind of interesting realization was that you can say inside of this stimulus response paradigm that looks automatic,

There is a space of agency once you're inside of it,

But you can't see that from the outside.

Right.

It was only because I could tell him that this was at stake,

That in a sense,

You realize this space of agency.

So you can say that will give you the first and the third person.

But I think what I really learned from studying these experiments was something else.

After I came out again,

I discussed it with my anthropology colleagues.

One of them said,

Well,

That's kind of weird.

You know,

Here you are inside a noisy environment.

Someone comes and tickles you under the foot.

Why on earth do you tap the finger?

Which they told me to.

Yes,

They told me to,

Right?

That's of course really banal in the first instance.

But once you think a bit more about it,

You realize,

Well,

That the whole experimental logic relies on something that's not reducible to be first or third person.

That it's,

So to say,

Embedded into kind of a shared understanding of,

Well,

What's it like to be an experiment?

I will do what I am told.

Right.

Which is a very different frame than your normal life.

Which is a very different framework,

And which is also a very different framework from the idea of the first person and the third person.

Because it really suggests that so much of what our minds are up to,

And so much of what we do with our minds,

Is not something that goes on in an isolation,

But really something that comes out of,

You can say,

These situations of exchange,

Of presenting frames of reference,

Of setting each other up,

Of negotiating things with each other.

Right.

And internalizing the situation and responding to it all at once.

And you're responding to it.

Yeah.

And in a sense,

You can say the only reason that I do a tapping of my finger as a response to the tickling of my foot is that somehow someone told me,

And I thought I would be involved in this kind of game here.

Right.

So I think it was a very simple experiment,

But that kind of idea has really stayed with me ever since,

That there is something about minds that certainly can be seen from the outside.

But at least if you're a human mind,

Most of the times we're also involved in these incredibly interesting and complex ways of being open to others.

And this being open to others shape not just our experiences and our brain activities,

But also the whole,

The way the situation is set up.

Yeah.

I love the way you describe that.

Normally in this field anyway,

People talk about first person and third person,

You know,

Just as if they're separate ways of viewing things.

But what you bring out is a really,

They're really tightly interrelated.

So that that perspective,

That kind of interwoven perspective that you just raised puts in context a lot of the research that I think of when I think of you,

A lot of intersubjective ways that the mind and the brain respond.

One study I'm thinking of is the fire walking study that you did some time ago,

Or I'm sure there's others.

Can you share any examples of studies where you've tried to parse out the ways that interpersonal or cultural effects change the way,

You know,

Brains or physiology responds?

Yeah.

So I'm based at this center called interacting mind center at Aarhus University.

And then,

You know,

Obviously we interested in interaction,

Not just minds,

But also bodies and brains and hearts and all these things.

And I think what we are becoming increasingly aware is that in,

If you study mind or the brain as if it was a thing in isolation,

It looks like a thing in isolation.

But the moment that you sort of say,

Open up to say,

Well,

Let's bring someone into the table as well,

Another person,

Et cetera.

It is as if,

You know,

We react to the presence of that other person.

And there is kind of an openness in our systems that relates to it.

It's not automatic in the sense that it always happens,

But there is like a potential for this way of being engaged with others in situations or relating to others in ways that we don't really know.

So probably one of the studies I'm very fond of was designed by an anthropologist who started people doing fire walking across the world.

So this is where people walk on hot coals?

This is people who walk on hot coals as part of a religious situation.

Dimitri Sicalis came from Greece and they did it a lot in Greece,

But he also knew this place in Spain where people were involved in it in a ritual context.

Something that people have to train up to be able to do.

This is a whole village kind of once a year,

They come together and they create this arena within which they do it.

And there,

The idea that we were interested in exploring was really an idea that Dimitri has brought forward to say,

Well,

You know,

Does that do something to other people that they see someone doing this kind of traumatic feat?

And then what we did was to bring some heart rate monitors just to see what happens to the heart rhythms of someone who walks on coal and then what happens to the heart rhythm of someone who watches it.

And maybe not surprisingly,

You know,

Before you have to go on burning coal,

Your pulse just shoots up.

But what was maybe more surprising was that when we looked in the data at some of the relatives as well who were not going to walk on burning coal,

We saw almost similar patterns in them,

Although they had never done it.

So in a sense,

It's as if,

You know,

Just sharing the anticipation of what is going to happen next is something that need not only happen in Europe,

But can also happen in the people that you know this is going to go through.

You can say this is kind of a resonance system.

We don't know what kind of mechanism.

Heart rhythm is a very basic way to look at it.

But I guess it suggests this kind of openness in which we are not just our own experiences,

But we also share the experiences of others.

And in terms of rituals,

And that was entraulogically kind of interesting and a classic story,

What you could say that persons who were walking on burning coals were not just doing it for themselves,

But they were in a sense also engaging with the rest of the community in doing it.

And once we looked at the data,

We could see that the difference in how the ritual structure at the heart rates of people was not between firewalkers and not firewalkers.

But it was really about those people who came from the village.

And then you can say your tourist in town who had no affiliation with the ritual,

Etc.

Okay,

So the people who were close with the firewalkers,

They were affected,

But the people who didn't know them were not affected to the same degree.

When some of our clever friends did clever statistics on it,

We could tell differences between these two sets.

Again,

Suggesting that the capacity might be there,

You can say automatically,

But it requires something else.

It might require a sense of connectedness,

A sense of all these other things.

So that kind of,

You can say,

Openness to the world that it seems to be what is to be human is something that I guess we become deeply inspired by.

And it works at a body level,

It works at a language level in terms of instructions,

All these things.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

Are you familiar with the work of Jim Cone?

No.

Okay.

So he is working on a set of ideas,

Which he calls social baseline theory,

Which is basically viewing social connection as a way of sharing biological resources.

So he does a lot of work on handholding under threat stimuli in the scanner and seeing how holding the hand of someone you trust will reduce the activation in the brain and threat symptoms.

But what's really unique is he's brought about the idea of flipping this such that it's not that holding a hand will reduce a raised level,

But in fact being alone is an unusual state and an increased threat level to begin with.

Whereas the social connection is actually the baseline of how we're designed to operate.

That would make a lot of sense.

Yeah.

No,

It just,

I hadn't thought about the firewalking study in that context,

But it's almost like a physiological evidence of this shared resources almost.

Like the people who are close with the people who are about to undergo this stimulus are almost like using their energy to help or something.

Well,

Yeah,

I mean,

Essentially you're in it with them,

Right?

Yeah,

Exactly.

You share this kind of experiential space.

Yeah,

In a very real energetic way.

So how does all of this play into the contemplative space?

Yeah,

So when we first started being interested in contemplative work,

I worked on the kind of really naive and stupid assumption that it was all about being in isolation with the world,

And this is about,

So to say,

Retracting in.

And then the moment,

Of course,

That you take part in almost any kind of contemplative activity,

You realize that the same things is at stake there.

That in almost every situation,

That's something that goes on in a community.

There is a relation to a teacher.

There's a relation to other people who are meditating along.

There are just the simple things as the instructions that you are being given as,

You know,

Try to do these things,

Try to do something else,

Which I think has been,

It's only now that we are really getting an understanding of the degree to which you can say contemplative practices is also a cultural and a social activity.

And the resources for it and the tools you get are not just something that you find in yourself.

It's also something you find in others.

So we were just in this week here,

Spending a few days with a lot of people who were good at meditating and some people who were very good at doing phenomenological interviews.

But you know,

The very interesting experience was here that the moment you direct your attention to it,

It becomes obvious that just a small thing like the instructions that you are given in order to open up a particularly experiential space just radically sets you up for what it is that you're looking for.

And small changes to these instructions configures it completely differently.

So do you want to give an example?

Yeah.

So we gave an example and we had a very interesting example where we were told to do just an ordinary pay attention to your breath,

And then notice whenever there's a distraction,

Return to your breath,

Absolutely standard instruction.

And then we were told that we should stop when we had a particularly kind of good distraction or noticeable distraction,

Because that was what we would be interviewed about.

And my own experience was that that whole meditation became a meditation and distraction because I constantly had not just the breath,

But also that kind of idea is this distraction,

Which is I'm thinking about the distraction,

Right?

Is that a good distraction or not?

Does it count?

Does this count as a distraction?

So in very subtle ways,

You could see that this strange configuration just came about by a certain hint to say,

Well,

Maybe this is how you should let your mind explore itself right now.

And in my case,

The good distraction became the moment when I lost focus on my breath and the distractions.

And then I realized,

Oh,

This is a good distraction,

But it took forever because keeping these things in parallel just seemed to work it out beautifully.

And the other side,

You can say of this intersubjectivity or communicative aspect is that we worked with people who are very good at doing these micro-phenomenological interviews.

Yeah.

Do you have what that is?

Yeah.

So it's kind of on the surface of relatively simple interview technique where someone will just ask into an experience you have just had.

And the trick on the side of the experimenter is to try to be extremely concrete and keep you to be concrete about your experiences.

And then they will repeat back when you say,

So I experienced this.

And they'll say,

So you did experience that.

And then you say,

Well,

No,

That was not quite what I experienced.

It was something else.

And what is so interesting about being interviewed in this method is that one suddenly realizes that inside of just like a single second,

It is as if there is so much going on at the same time that you don't pay attention to at the moment.

But you can actually go back to it again.

And it's like revisiting a landscape which must have been there all the time.

And in a very interesting way,

One seems to be quite sensitive as to whether that experience one is now exploring is something that's kind of made up in the interview or whether it was something that was already there.

Right.

I don't know exactly how you can tell the difference.

Yeah.

But it really feels like this kind of going back and revisiting.

And sometimes you can see that now this particular experience is different from the one I had before.

So the interview has changed it.

But the first realization is that you can say language and being with another person that can ask that language,

That become a mirror to yourself is an extremely powerful way to open up for that experiential space that you otherwise did not get any kind of access to.

Yeah.

Do you have any examples you can think of of something that you were not aware of as it was happening but then through this interview process became clear?

Yes.

So,

The first experiment we did here was this idea of paying attention to your breath and then notice it when there was a distraction.

And I was kind of struggling with these distractions that kept popping up.

And when I then revisited them again,

It was a very strange experience because it was like a landscape,

A topology,

Where it felt as if the breath in itself was like kind of a wave that was just rolling over sand.

And this moment that the wave withdrew again,

This thought about is this a good distraction would just be kind of almost growing up from the sand and then the wave would come back again.

And that was this extremely interesting experience of you can say the breath doing one thing and those thoughts coming up doing another thing.

In kind of alternation with each other.

And that strange experience that the moment that I was in between an in breath and an out breath,

It was as if there was a break where this thought could just pop up.

And then back again,

It would cover and it would try to come up,

But it didn't have a chance and then it would come up again.

Interesting.

And I never thought of these processes of thought in these instances that there was like my agency was doing the wavy thing,

Right?

And then these thoughts were just having a life of their own that I couldn't control.

But they were more revealed at some time.

And they were more revealed sometimes at other times.

And of course,

This is not how you think of your thoughts,

Right?

They are a wave and a flower that grows.

But it was a very kind of intense exploration of it.

And one set,

You can say metaphor or not observation probably stays with you.

Suddenly I've noticed that there are other instances where these things that grows up and there are things you can control in relationship to them.

Could also be other situations.

We had another very interesting exercise where we were given a strange poem by the German poet Rieke.

And it started out with the word bewildered.

And we were not told what to do with it.

I was extremely bewildered at first.

And the first long meditation was all a meditation about being bewildered.

And then they'd had some sections which was about what's it like to be in a medium in a sphere where you don't belong.

And the metaphor was a bat that should not be flying and is yet flying.

And then at some point,

Kind of at the end of the meditation and particularly after hearing,

Kind of exploring that meditation or that experience through the interview,

I realized that I had kind of come to terms inside the poem with an idea of myself being in a medium where I didn't belong,

But I actually belonged there.

And that was soothing.

And when I then returned again to that bewildering where then at first,

Kind of going back to it in this interview,

Bewildered was like a text that was standing in front of me.

Very clear letters.

I could tell they were.

You could see the words.

I could see the words and the size and the font and they were capital and sans serif and all that.

It's very,

Very strangely concrete.

And then at some point when I revisit them,

It was as if they melted.

And the letters were kind of,

The word wasn't there in language.

I could still see where the B was melting into the E and into the W.

But it was that idea of bewildered being the key focus just wasn't important any longer.

Interesting.

Which was kind of a really strange process of revisiting an experience that was there.

And it also coincided with kind of a sense of,

Oh yeah,

This might be what the poem is about and what I can do with it.

So you can go on about these experiences in themselves.

They feel maybe interesting for you in the moment,

But I think what the methodology really brings about is a powerful tool to open up a space where you can revisit those particular experiences and one can see how they come about and maybe how they changed and how they're shaped as well.

Yeah,

I was going to say this is an example.

I would have thought this is an example of a kind of a pure first person investigation of really subjective experience.

But just reflecting on what you said earlier,

It is an intersubjective experience also based on the person who's interviewing you and that's shaping perhaps your reflection and all of that.

And this is a very interesting case of almost like a minimal instance of intersubjectivity because part of what you are trained in when you learn the method is not to give any hints about the interpretation to the person being interviewed.

But just repeat what that person says again.

But it is as if just having the other person as a mirror and sending what you say back again,

Kind of that reflection via the other one makes you see,

No,

It's not the same signal that comes back and forth.

Right.

Even though you just said it.

Oh,

You said it and then it comes back again and then it's not quite the same.

So there is this very interesting looping via the other that if you look at it as we're just sending out a signal and I get the signal back again,

Nothing happens.

But when you realize that it's a matter of an experience that gets changed into language that's reflected through the subjectivity of another person that comes back again,

Then suddenly it seems to do very,

Very interesting things.

Yeah.

It really highlights the inherent challenges of trying to get at subjective experience at all.

It does.

It does.

And methodologically,

It's what do we do with it?

That was my next question.

It's complicated.

It's a mess.

Yeah.

It's a mess.

So we have a research project on play and learning at my research center.

And one of my colleagues who is trained a lot in the micro-phenomenality method,

She's very interested in this experience of playfulness.

And she used some simple experiments to try to explore,

Well,

What is this experience of playfulness?

What characterizes it?

And that involves some Lego bricks and then people who were told to build ducks out of Lego bricks,

Either ducks for all sorts of reasons,

Either in a kind of playful mode or more in a kind of production line work like way.

And then she interviewed people about what was it like?

And very interestingly,

When people talked about that experience of the playfulness,

They ticked all the boxes of being internally motivated.

They didn't know the theory about it,

But those were the things that came about.

And something very beautiful came about it as well was that,

In a sense,

Through the process of acting playful with the material,

They became surprised by what they were doing themselves.

They created something that they had not anticipated.

And that surprise that in a sense almost came back from the material,

From realizing combinations that you couldn't foresee the consequences of.

And suddenly they're there.

They become a mirror of your productivity,

Which is different from what you expect.

People would often feel,

Well,

Actually this was not too bad.

This was better than I anticipated.

And that gives kind of a sense of empowerment that then allows them to say,

Well,

Let me explore some more.

And then it can come back again.

So it's almost as if here you enter into a dialogical process with the material itself.

That this kind of just trying things out that seems to be involved in playfulness means that there is suddenly something there,

Which I did,

But I didn't do it in the sense that I wanted to do it like that.

And once it is there,

That can empower and allows you to explore more.

And you have a very interesting circle going.

So that would be an instance where,

To my knowledge,

This is the first attempt of getting at,

Well,

What is that feeling of playfulness?

Why could it actually be allowing you to explore something?

Why might it be intrinsically rewarding?

Because we can see all of the classical psychological features,

They just come out of people's kind of revisiting what was it like to be doing this.

Yeah.

Surprise,

Joy,

Feeling of agency,

All these things here.

Right?

Yeah.

This is a couple of times as we've been talking,

The word anticipation has come up or,

Yeah,

Unexpected and things like that,

Which is making me think of predictive models of mind.

I'm just wondering how that plays in,

What you were just saying about play and this,

An experience of something unexpected happening,

Kind of maybe being more salient or outside of our normal like mode of prediction.

But can you say a little bit about how the mind is viewed as a prediction machine and how that might interweave here?

So in our work,

Like almost everyone else in the field these days,

We are very inspired by all of the predictive mind or predictive coding models that are essentially saying that in the most gross formulation that rather than the brain is about representing stuff on the outside,

Then it's really about kind of predicting which kind of sensory inputs that might come next.

Right.

Because the prediction will be,

If in a sense,

If you have predicted what comes,

This is a sense that the world is understood,

Right?

And a failure to predict is a sense that whatever happens in the world is not understood.

And the predictions come from a model that's internally.

.

.

And the predictions comes from some kind of a model that both takes into account what is expected to happen in the world and what are the expected outcomes of my actions and how do these things feed into each other.

And the underlying idea is that these things work at all levels in a hierarchical system from very basic perception and all the way up to cognitive models.

And in the later versions of these models here,

One strong assumption is that what organisms are trying to do is to reduce the uncertainty around them because the more they can reduce this kind of uncertainty,

The better they are able to.

.

.

The safer they are.

.

.

.

Safer and control their environment,

All these things.

And some have said that this could lead you to kind of a dark room problem,

That the best thing for an organism is to stay in a corner in a dark room because then.

.

.

Oh,

Yeah.

Then you can just predict that nothing will happen and you're safe.

So there's kind of an inherent attention to it.

Yeah.

Now,

I think even though we would.

.

.

I'm really very inspired by the people developing these models.

And there seems to be something that doesn't quite fit a lot of the stuff that we see.

So for instance,

The way that we think about play currently is to say,

Well,

Maybe play is a very interesting phenomenon because it seems to be about setting up a situation where surprises are going to be generated.

And once they're generated,

Then you can do something with them.

So it's almost like an activity that has as,

If not a main purpose,

And certainly a purpose or a side effect,

That these surprises are constantly going to happen.

And that allows me to do something with them and deal with them.

And depending on how skilled you are,

Depending on all sorts of other things,

These surprises might be quite radical.

And in other circumstances,

They can seem from the outside to be minimal,

But that there is this element of bringing yourself into situations where surprises happen because it actually allows you to do something with them.

Right.

Because that would be,

The theories would say that what we're trying to do is reduce the surprise element because this is the uncertainty or things that are unpredicted.

But this is like a special case where you're making it safe and encouraged that surprises will happen.

Which of course is what all classical theories of play say,

Right?

That play is about setting up this particular sort of same framework within which different things happen.

And in particular,

The intersubjective play is extremely interesting there because there's something about,

You know,

Sending something out to the other that is inherently unpredictable when it comes back again.

So in a sense,

If we go with that idea,

We as humans are not just very good at reducing uncertainty around ourselves,

But also create these situations where uncertainties can be explored and where you can learn from them,

Where you might be able to negotiate them with others.

Yeah.

Cause play is also really essential for learning,

Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And this way of,

In a sense,

Going in an explore mode is essential to it,

But it probably requires the possibility to resolve it.

And then we currently think for a lot of learning purposes also that reflection comes in,

That you actually have ways of saying,

Well,

What was it that happened there?

So a lot of teaching situations you're asked to reflect,

And if you are not surprised,

There's not a lot to reflect.

It's just not very interesting.

But it seems precisely to be those situations where you wonder,

What was that?

And that's another area where into subjectivity,

Our ability to come up with solutions together is amazing because you can suddenly via the help of the other person or another person's realize,

Well,

That was what it was about.

So the resolution can come post hoc.

And in a similar way,

You know,

A lot of the very advanced meditators,

You could say seen from the outside,

Nothing much happened,

Right?

They sit still.

Right.

And if you look at your bodies,

Or if you meditate yourself and look at your own body,

There's this strange experience of all sorts of surprising things happening in your body at the same time that seems to fill everything.

It can be scary at times,

You can see your heart beating.

So it's almost as if that kind of some forms of contemplative practices is also opening up to a surprising internal landscape that seems to have a life of its own.

Interesting.

And if you want to allow yourself to,

To look at the type that these things are just popping up.

Yeah.

And I think what what I think about with prediction,

And then meditative practice is,

Seems to be something really important about not responding.

Yeah.

And again,

If we stay within these kind of hierarchical predictive models,

And the hierarchical seems to be very important,

You can say that very classic gesture that you confront something in the meditation,

Something occurs in your meditation.

And then you realize that,

Well,

It's just a thought,

Right?

Yeah.

You could say,

This shift from the thought being what completely fills you up,

To being able to from somewhere else,

Wherever that is,

In a hierarchy or space or whatever it is,

Just say,

Well,

That which used to be everything,

From where I look at it now,

I can see that this is just a thought,

And then I can let it go.

Yeah.

So called de-reification.

That kind of a de-reification,

Again,

Is something that might be playing itself out inside one of these strange hierarchies we're seeing from something else.

Then what was reality is just a model.

Right.

And that's kind of a meta model that allows one to see this.

These kind of shifts are very interesting.

Yeah.

I have a PhD student at our research center.

She studies people who have suffered from depression and look at what MDCT seems to be doing with them and- Mindfulness based cognitive therapy.

Mindfulness based cognitive therapy,

Right.

And one of the ideas seems to be that what mindfulness based cognitive therapy might allow you to do is that the moment that you get into rumination,

The moment that thoughts just seems to be coming back to you again and again,

And you can't let go of them,

Then with some kind of a mindfulness training,

Or MPC training,

It's possible to say,

Well,

It is just a thought.

You can step out of it.

You might step into your body.

You might do something else.

And that in interesting ways allows it to dissolve.

Yeah.

And looking at her very first data,

It seems that indeed on all the clinical measures,

Her intervention has worked.

And where we see neural effects of the intervention is precisely when they're asked to ruminate in the scanner.

So in that situation where something is potentially nagging,

They can do stuff that they couldn't do previously.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting because one of the most consistent findings in the field is that mindfulness based cognitive therapy can be effective for depression,

Particularly depression is marked by this kind of rumination.

So that's great that you're starting to look at the evidence also narrowly about how that's working.

And going back to what we discussed previously,

It's part of what it seems to do a lot of these contemplative practices is that one suddenly realizes that actually between stimulus and response,

There is a space that can be explored.

Yeah.

That can be different,

That can be looked at differently.

So if we go with that idea that,

Say,

One of the reasons why MPCT might help people with depression is that these ruminating thoughts that tends to take over,

That there is a way to say that that which used to be all of it can just be part of what's there and then that go.

Yeah.

And that general model is that it's as if in between stimulus and response,

There is a space where actually there's room for some kind of an action.

Yeah.

So it's on your own behalf or on the behalf of your body or something else.

But that kind of automation or immediacy seems not to be there in reality.

And that's,

In fact,

Almost like the experiment we explored previously,

Right?

Where seen from the outside,

It looks as if there is a direct link between stimulus response,

Someone being tickled under the footprint.

Right.

So I think it's a response,

But once you're inside it,

You realize that actually there is a whole space of action.

There's a mental space there.

And at least for me,

This being in touch with contemplative practices that are very kind of primitive and premature level has in a sense allowed me to begin to explore between the sensations and the actions is a space that's modulated in so many different ways.

And that in itself is just an amazing discovery.

Yeah.

Wow.

So what do you think are the most important areas or directions for the field to move now?

So I don't know where the field is going,

But I can see where my own interests are dripping.

And right now exploring these tools to say,

Well,

How do we get at the experiential?

It's just a whole new world that opens up.

And trying to see other ways that we can not triangulate,

But match up or parallel with the ways in which we can measure this from the outside.

That's obviously an interesting and important field.

Now,

The other field that I'm really interested in these days,

And I think it has a contemplative dimension to it,

Has to do with other ways that we can set up these shared reflexive spaces together.

Other particular ways in which you can,

In an embodied way,

Kind of realize that something goes on in me that's not necessarily the same that goes on in others.

And once that you realize that,

Create possibilities to say,

Well,

Here is a space that we can share,

Where we can explore both the differences and the similarities.

And I think part of that is to become aware of the way that your own experiences are made up,

But also become aware of the fact that other people might be moving in the same space or experiencing it or acting in it quite differently.

And once that becomes an embodied experience,

Both your own way of doing it and the other person's ways of doing it,

We get these kind of very interesting mirror effects again,

It seems,

That might have potentials for actually creating spaces to not just feel them,

But also share them and bring them out to each other.

So currently,

I think that's ability to figure out how do we create experiences that could be shared and how do we create not just the language,

But also the kind of the instructions or the settings within which we can share them.

That to me is the most interesting right now.

Yeah,

And that seems hugely valuable.

Well,

Thank you for your work and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

It's been a pleasure,

Wendy.

This episode was edited and produced by me and Phil Walker.

Music on the show is from Blue Dot Sessions and Universal.

Mind & Life is a production of the Mind & Life Institute.