Latest / The Inner Well Podcast / Dr. Fred Travis - Part 1: Your Brain on TM
Transcript
- The Inner Well Podcast: Welcome back to the inner well podcast. We're so glad you're here and following along this journey. And I'm really excited to introduce this week's guest and share this conversation with you. In fact, it was such an interesting conversation that we decided to split it into two parts. So this week you'll be getting part one and next week part two will be released of the conversation that I had with Dr. Fred Travis. I'm gonna introduce him properly here. Dr. Frederick Travis received his PhD in psychology at Maharishi International University in 1988. After a two-year postdoctoral position in basic sleep research at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Travis returned to Maharishi University as director of the Center for Brain Consciousness and Cognition. His work has focused on brain development from birth to adulthood, the effects of stress on brain functioning, and the effects of meditation on the brain during and after the practice, as well as markers of higher states of consciousness and the brain patterns of peak performance. Fred has published 92 papers and book chapters and has authored and co-authored four books. He teaches on the undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels and lectures globally on the brain and consciousness. Let's dive in. ⁓ We all contain a space within that when enlivened and nourished will support us with unwavering stability, expansion, and peace of mind. Join us each week as we dive into honest, grounded conversations about transcendental meditation, consciousness, and growth, and what it means to live an integrated life supported by a foundation of creativity and calm. This is the Inner Wealth. Thank you for taking the time out of your, know, very busy schedule. One thing that I've really been intrigued by recently is asking people to introduce themselves without telling me what they do. Before we get into your career, how would you introduce yourself to me, to our listeners, without telling us what it is you do for work? I like to understand the world around me. I remember when I was in high school, I wondered if birds saw in color. And we had a parakeet and I arranged colored doors that it could work with and to see and put seed behind some and not seed behind the others, just to try to understand. And I did find parakeets do see in color. And that's always driving me to understand what's going on. The other thing is I like to. Fix things. if something isn't going in a smooth way, I'd like to fix it. My undergraduate degree was in design and environmental analysis, where you look at what people are doing in spaces and think how you can maximize what they're doing. And the last thing is I like to build things. We have a garage and when they pull the car out of the garage, becomes a workshop. One wall is covered with tools and the other wall is covered with wood and so on. And I think that encapsulates who I am and what I do. love that. I love the bird story. So it sounds like you were a researcher from a very young age, that curiosity about the world and understanding the world is sounds like foundational to what you do now. And it also brings out that science isn't foreign and it's not something that scientists only do. We all do it and that we have an idea of what the world is like and that's made up. It's in our heads. And what we do, we project it out into the world and see does it fit? And then we watch and then we come back and then we change that model. People say, I want to go to this college. That's a model. What do they do? They go to the college. and they'll experience it and then they reflect, is this what I want to do? It's this constant self-referral process that everyone is going through from going from an inner idea to testing it in the situation outside, changing the inner idea, and that's how we go through life. That's so interesting because that's often one way that I word it when I am teaching people TM and they're trying to figure out how they're going to incorporate this practice into their daily life and I'll tell them to treat it as an experiment. You know, try it in one sequence in their morning routine for a week and see how that feels and how that flow goes. And if it's working for them and they feel better, great. If it doesn't feel like it's flowing in their day, try something different. What a great teaching technique. It brings out a concept from Harsha Vedic science called dharma. And dharma is that activity which allows you to grow and expand. The reason I bring it up is how dharma works is when you take a step. If the step is going to help you grow, you actually feel better. You feel just lively and lighter inside. And what that's doing, it's actually what is set up in our, how we've been set into this world, that when we do something that's helping us grow, the brain actually registers it. It's a, you get a pleasure response. And what that pleasure response is doing is it's letting you saying next time in this situation, continue in this direction because it's helping you grow. The opposite is also true if you take a step and you're not happy, you're not comfortable, there's another part of the brain that fires, it's called the amygdala. And it just alerts us, okay, this didn't work this time. And so what we're talking about is really very basic to the human condition. I love seeing that, that it is a really effective way for, based on what's happening in the brain to encourage good habits and behavior and finding out that works best for us. And self-reflective, it's so important that we're not governed by shoulds and coulds and, and hard rules of activity, but we feel what do we think is appropriate in this situation? Because what's appropriate now is not something you can dictate. I often reflect, think, okay, when I meet this person and we're having a conversation, this is what I'm going to say. Then I meet the person, I say something completely different. It's because at that moment, this is what's appropriate. So this idea of self-referral that you're teaching your students is key and they can take that and it's gonna help them throughout their life. Where were you in your life when you heard about TM and what was it that drew you to learning it? Because before you got into researching it, at some point you learned it first. Yes, it's a funny story. ⁓ I was in a theater group for two years and I left the theater group because I wanted to continue to grow in a different area. Specifically, I wanted to learn some meditation technique. I was doing a lot of reading at that time and I was on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I went up to Boston. I was staying with my roommate that I had in college and he was a semi-professional soccer player. So what you do on weekends is you go to soccer games. And so we were at a soccer game and he had a girlfriend, his girlfriend brought someone to be with me. And I'm sitting there, I must've been quiet because she said, do you meditate? And I said, well, I don't meditate, I, and be here now and, and all these other books I've read. said, you should go to Cambridge and learn TM. I don't. Remember who this person is. I don't remember what she looks like. I said, okay. So I went home, I looked in the papers and there was an ad for TM and I went into the, into the lecture and they talked about using part of your full potential. And it really fit my experience. When I was with the theater group, I was stage manager. It was summer stock, fall, winter and spring. We tour around the East coast. We would, I was stage manager. when we got to a venue, say at two o'clock in the afternoon, I was in charge of getting everything up for our seven o'clock show. Some days it was really easy. It's like, I had this whole map and I just had to click the boxes. Other days it was like walking through a fog. ⁓ I didn't know where things were and what should we do and so on. So I really experienced time I was clearer and other times I was less clear. Times I really was in touch with this deep, silent, expanded, quiet alertness. Other times it was completely gone. So in the TM lecture, when they said, well, you have this surface of the mind that you have, the mind has this vertical dimension. It's like a body of water and bubbles rise from the body of water. Like thoughts rising in the mind coming from deep inner silence and what we're being taught to in school is to just learn about the surface of the mind, catch this thought and this thought. School isn't teaching us to fathom deep inner silence. That really resonated with my experience. And so I learned TM. And what was that like? ⁓ It was quite remarkable because TM is not flashy. It's not, it's not accentuated feelings or accentuated experience. It's just deep inner silence and contentment. It's like a wave settling down to the ocean. And suddenly you're at a place where there's no place you have to go, nothing you have to do. It's just. Maharshi uses the word being to describe this state. And so that's what I experienced from all this rushing around and trying to think and do and decide and where to go and so on. And in the first meditation completely settled down. And then when I came out of that meditation, there was such a deep sense of happiness. Now the word is bliss, but it's not a ⁓ sort of movement, active, passionate sort of bliss, it's just deep inner silence and content. And so after the, when you learn TM, then there's three group meetings afterwards. After the third group meeting, I decided I should become a teacher. That propelled me to going to teacher training in 1973. And then I've been teaching TM and working with the TM movement ever since. How did you make that jump then into researching it and getting into the brain research? It's another funny story. I came here to Maharshi International University in 1974 to get my degree in psychology. I was looking at other psychology programs because again, remember I'm interested in how things work. So was very interested in why are we more alert sometimes, less alert than others? Why is sometimes our attention going to the wrong part of a situation? ⁓ Where do insights come from? And then as I mentioned, I'm practicing transcendental meditation. I'm experiencing a source, dynamic source of thought, dynamic source of creativity. And so when I decided to get a PhD, my natural idea was to get it in psychology. It was an extension of my undergraduate degree in design, environmental analysis. And all of these psychology programs were really specific. cognitive processing, personality, motivation, development. I wanted something that was really looking at consciousness. That's the deepest part of who we are and how it's expressed in the world around us. So when the PhD was offered here at Maharshi International University, in which everyone practices TM and that experience of inner being is part of the ongoing education, I just went straight for it. And during the PhD program, you take coursework, but you also do research. So there I was and I was running subjects. I was having findings. Meanwhile, my wife, Nita, was working for the head of the department and he received a grant to analyze EEG. And he's David Orm Johnson, very prolific researcher, but very busy. And so he asked my wife, would you like to analyze the EEG? Now to no need of, she has a degree, master's degree, environmental engineering. She's very smart and, but she's never quite got electricity. So after two weeks, we're having lunch. She said, would you like to learn EEG? And being a good husband, said, why sure. So I went in and I really enjoyed it. Because it's something really concrete. You can almost hold the EEG in your hand. You can hold the brain in your hand. Electrical activity of the brain is something almost material, something you can see and hold. And so it really, it really talked to me, my desire just to work with things. Second, what it's doing, it's giving you a picture of consciousness, which you cannot hold in your hands, which is very abstract. which is very personal. You can't know what someone else is thinking, but because it's brain functioning, which underlies their thinking, underlies their state of consciousness, you can look at brain function and you can ask questions. What's the effect of stress on the individual? And you can see it in terms of brain functioning. What's the effect of development on the individual? What changes? You can look at it in terms of brain development and you get a very good picture of what's going on in consciousness. You can ask people what happens during this process of transcendental meditation where the mind goes from surface thinking, the more quieter levels of thinking until the mind completely settles down to this inner being, this field of wholeness. You can never actually experience what they're experiencing, but with the brain, you can begin to understand what's there. What happens with regular TM practice over time? How does the inner being become integrated with the outer activity? Again, you can see that from brain activity. So that's what brought me in to this EEG. And that was in 1986. And then I graduated in 88. I've been doing it ever since. Well, that just set up several of the questions I was going to ask you about what it is that you've found in now decades of research and understanding the brain. are the effects of stress on the brain? Because I think that's one of the biggest reasons that people are drawn to learn TM today is because there's a recognition that they're overwhelmed and they need to do something to take care of themselves. The stimulation of our modern world is too much. So what is the effect that we see of modern life, the chronic stress, the constant stimulation of our phones on This is a critical question for this age, the effect of increasing activity around us on how we feel, how we act, how we respond. I'd just like to pause a moment because stress is not something out there waiting to come in. Rather stress is how we perceive the situation. That is, if we perceive the situation as being too much, I can't handle this. Then the body responds with what's called a stress response. What happens is the the frontal lobes, which give you the big picture, they're shut down. ⁓ So what you're doing is you have tunnel vision on what's going right now at this point in time, you lose the ability to see the big picture, but it is a perception. so some people seem to thrive under lots of challenge. And that's because there's the brain under challenge, the brain under stress. Under challenge, what's happening is you're being asked to do a lot of things, but you're able to deal with it. You know you have the resources, not an intellectual, artificial affirmation, but just deep inside, yeah, I can deal with this. And what happens is under a challenge situation, that's when we experience flow. That's when we experience our best performance. Because what's happening is the brain stem, brain areas are putting new adrenaline into the brain, and the front of the brain is actually functioning. better, faster, you're more alert, you're bringing up new ideas. You're able to access memories, you're able to access intuition. This whole range of the mind is available for you. When we perceive it's too much, and this could be due because we just got a text that a friend of ours is sick, or we just got a text that we need to do a special project, or... We did not get a good night's sleep last night. So in a situation where you're functioning really well, if you come in one morning and you haven't gotten enough sleep, that day is going to be stressful. And what happens under stress, frontal lobes go offline. these, there's an increase of what's called the amygdala. So everything you're doing is being really processed in a very full and deep way. You don't have the ability to put things into memory. You can process, you can put it in very quickly. The memories are very raw in terms of the response to what's the emotional impact of what's there. And the brain's a river and not a rock. So whatever we experience, we give it, what the brain is doing is it's incorporating into its functioning. So if you're in a situation and you experience it as stressful, frontal lobes are offline, you're not seeing the bigger picture, you don't have access to inner creativity, you're focusing on just what is happening right now, that begins to be how the brain always functions. And you're very reactive. ⁓ You lack the ability to see outside of the situation. You lack the ability to see what's the creative opportunity here. And I think this is what you're referring to is where people have been under stress over and over and over. And now they're habituated to it. What's happening, not only is that happening in the brain, what happens under stress is the muscles are tense. Because of that, there's tension on the artery circulatory system and the blood has to push harder to get the blood through and it's leading to high blood pressure. What happens under stress is you're taking stored sugars, you're putting it into the blood so you have the energy to take care of the demands around you. That leads to diabetes. So this is the character of the world we live in today. If people don't have a way to change the stress challenge line, this is what transcendental meditation is doing. What transcendental meditation does is it turns off, it resets the fight or flight response, the sympathetic nervous system. It puts it more at an ideal optimal functioning. And this is measured by something called perceived stress. And what's found is with TM practice, perceived stress goes down. Perceived stress is going down because the person's sympathetic nervous system is more settled. They're able to see the situation, see beyond the immediate moment, see where are the tools I have to take care of this. So in the same situation that you're in before you start meditation, you find it's less stressful. Perceived stress is lower. Sympathetic activation is lower. What you just described is almost exactly what every single student I have expresses when they talk about their experience, even in the first few days of learning TM. And I kind of summarize it as that there's just more internal space from where we can have the big picture to choose how we want to show up in a situation rather than going into those default reactions that happen when we're stressed. But people express it in all kinds of different situations, whether that's, you know, not snapping at their kids or the annoying coworker or the person who's not pulling their weight at work that normally just frustrates them and ruins the whole day, just kind of slides off a little easier. This is a great concrete analogy of having more inner space. Cause that's what's happening is if we think of ourselves as an ocean, And this is this field of being and thinking and feeling is just the wave of the ocean rising up. And what's happening without TM practice is you're caught up in the little wave. You have very little inner space. You identify with every thought, every feeling, everything that's going on. Your moods go up and down. Or she says we're a football to the environment. As that wave transcends, as our individual thinking and feeling begins to become more expanded inside experiences, inner being. It's as though there is more inner space and we have more resources. We have more options. We have more ways to look what's going on. So that's a great analogy. you. So tell us what that process looks like in the brain when we start practicing TM. What's happening? Excellent. What's happening in the brain is localized areas of functioning begin to settle down. And a global awake style of functioning begins to, it's a crossfade, begins to become more predominant. And it just follows the experience during TM where thoughts are becoming secondary in experience and inner silence is becoming more primary. It's this crossfade from being caught into the outside and thinking and feeling and being having this inner silence. And what we see in terms of the brain, ⁓ with a step back, the brain has two major inputs that come in. One comes in from outside and that's our senses, seeing, hearing, touch, taste. Also, we'll put thoughts and feelings into that. And that comes to the very center of the brain, it's called the thalamus. And the thalamus sends it to a specific part of the brain and that specific part of the brain is active. So that's what we see in waking state. ⁓ shifting pattern of functioning as you go from seeing to thinking to deciding response to feeling and so on. But there's a second major input and that's from inside, it's internal, it's just wakefulness, it's alertness. Comes up the brain stem, it also goes to the thalamus and it also, this core of the brain and then from the core of the brain, it goes to the cortex and comes back. And what these circuits are doing is they're maintaining alertness, wakefulness. So it's as usual, science makes things very complex, but what this means is that for you to see something, you have to be awake. If you're tired, if you're asleep, you don't experience the world. These two things are really intimately connected. What TM is doing is decreasing the localized processing. Thoughts, the feelings are becoming less engaging, less overwhelming. We talk about finer levels of thinking. They're becoming secondary. They're not as if they're not as loud. And what that means is the localized circuits are settling down. So with that, we find the frequencies of thinking during beta activity, it's 16 to 20 cycles per second, focused mental activity called gamma, 20 to 50 cycles per second. That activity is going down, becoming less and less. What remains are these inner circle circuits of wakefulness. It takes about 50 milliseconds to go from the core of the brain to the surface, the cortex, 50 milliseconds to go back. So our loop goes up and down one-tenth of a second. So every second, these loops are going up 10 times per second. So what we see happening as the mind is becoming more quiet, that's associated with these wakefulness circuits, and we see a 10 cycle per second wave. It's called alpha. It's actually called alpha one, because it's the lower part of the alpha ranges from eight to 10 cycles per second. So as a localized activity of the brain is settling down, what it continues to go on is those circuits that maintain wakefulness, coldness. Because that experience of meditation is not something made up in your head. It's not a concept in your head. It's actually the experience of the brain. of the mind being at its resting state, being at its ground state, where it's just alert, it's awake, it's full. And so that's the EEG that we see. And one thing that I often tell my students is that we're not meditating just for the sake of meditation alone. We're meditating for the sake of our life and the effects that that has outside of meditation. So all of these things that we're experiencing in the brain and in our whole physiology during meditation, how does that lead to practical effects in daily life outside of the meditation and how we're experiencing the world and how that kind of challenge stress line shifts? Transcendental meditation is a scientifically validated technique that provides access to become more ourselves. Join us next week for more conversations with real people living fulfilling and peaceful lives with infinite support from their inner wealth.