← New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript110 lines
- [00:00]
Arno Delorme
If you do meditation, you're going to mind wander. Even like expert monks will go on retreat. Maybe they get to a trance state of some kind where they don't mind wanderer for an hour or two. But even like on three year retreats, they'll mind wander. Most of the time you can't stop mind wandering.
- [00:21]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Keep watching to learn more. For early access to our videos and livestream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org.
- [00:37]
New Thinking Allowed is presented.
- [00:40]
California Institute for Human Science Announcer
By the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu Book 4 in the.
- [01:07]
New Thinking Allowed Promotions Announcer
New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
- [01:25]
Arno Delorme
Thinking Allowed.
- [01:28]
Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
- [01:41]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we will be exploring the phenomenon of mind wandering. My guest is Arno Delorme, who is a university professor at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Swartz center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and he is a consulting research scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. His research has focused on pure neuroscience methods as well as on the neuroscience of mind wandering, meditation and so called mediums. He is the author of why Our Minds Wander, Understand the science and learn how to focus your thoughts. Arno is in San Diego and now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome Arno. It is a pleasure to be with you today.
- [02:56]
Arno Delorme
Thank you, thank you for inviting me.
- [02:58]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You've been focusing on the phenomenon of mind wandering and doing it from the perspective of neuroscience, which I would think is particularly difficult because at least from my perspective, and please correct me if you see it differently, neuroscience has had a very, very difficult time pinning down how mind works in connection with the brain.
- [03:27]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And I started getting interested in mind wandering 25 years ago and it's mostly when I started to meditate myself and then I noticed my mind is wandering everywhere and this wasn't really addressed, you know, in the scientific literature. There was a little bit on daydreaming and psychology. Jonathan Schooler was starting to do some experiments at UC Santa Barbara, but there was not much and I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun and interesting Just put that as a topic for my research.
- [04:09]
Jeffrey Mishlove
It's a fascinating topic and it's universal. Everybody's mind wanders. So you would think it would be very basic to psychology. But even the language around it, when we talk about the mind wandering, it implies as if the mind itself is moving around to different parts of the brain. Do you see it that way?
- [04:34]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, to some extent. You know, internalization. We talk more about, you know, internalization and externalization. Sometimes you're paying attention to events, you know, environments, and sometimes you're paying attention to your own thoughts. And so mind wandering is a little bit like that. You know, it's jumping from topics to topics and it is fascinating. One reason I think that not that many people were interested in it was people didn't know even it existed. You know, it's like only when you pinpoint. Well, you know, when you're reading, sometimes you read one page and then you don't remember. You have to go back. That's what mind wandering is. But 20 years ago you talked to scientists or you know, laypeople in the street, they would understand daydreaming. But yeah, mind wandering was a foreign concept, which is, I think one of the reasons it wasn't studied before is just because it's very subtle.
- [05:29]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You have to define mind wandering in the context of some task that you're supposed to be doing that you're wandering away from.
- [05:40]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, exactly. So when you're meditating, you know, you're supposed to count your breath and your mind. And so, you know, that's also why I became interested in mind wandering. Because mind wandering is central in meditation. That's what you do half the time. At least that's what I do half the time when I meditate.
- [06:00]
And so that brings your attention right to, okay, you know, here you're not focused on what you're supposed to do also in meditation. It's more subtle than that. You know, you're not supposed, you're supposed to pay attention whether it's mind wandering or not. Mind wandering. So like you don't want to, you know, say this is good meditation, bad meditation. So you know, there's some caveat about meditation. But you know, this is a place where mind wandering is prominent. It's like you're gonna, if you do meditation, you're going to mind wander. Even like expert monks, you know, will go on retreat, maybe they get to a trance state of some kind where they don't mind wanderer for an hour or two. But.
- [06:41]
Even like on three year retreats, they don't mind wander. Most of the time you can't stop mind wandering.
- [06:48]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I find that it's almost impossible for me to concentrate one pointedly for more than 30 seconds.
- [06:57]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, why is that? There's many potential explanations to mind wandering which we, you know, we might go into these. I don't know.
- [07:12]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I would assume that it has evolutionary reasons for existing. If I'm some small animal out on the savannah in Africa, I can't pay too much attention to any one task for too long because there's always a.
- [07:29]
Arno Delorme
Risk of predators, the prioritization of the different tasks. Yeah, you want to disengage from your task, you know, reevaluate. Okay, what's the most important task I should do right now? And then, you know, re engage. You don't want to be stuck in one task. Like there is this, you know, if we were not mind wandering, for example, and you're watching a very long movie, you know, that's very, you know, it's very interesting. Well, you might stop feeding yourself, you know, you, you won't like reprioritize. Okay, now I need to eat something because I'm starting to mind wander about food. So. Yeah, so it has an evolutionary advantage in that way for sure. But the mystery remains, like if we want to concentrate, like we tell ourselves, okay, I'm going to concentrate here for 10 minutes and you just can't do that. As you said, after 30 seconds you'll start thinking about something else.
- [08:31]
Jeffrey Mishlove
In spite of the fact that we can't hold our attention for very long at all, people are capable of writing novels and building skyscrapers and engaging in long term projects that require focused attention.
- [08:48]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, yeah. And so.
- [08:52]
Yeah, that's an interesting part because it's not because you're mind wandering that you're necessarily.
- [08:59]
You can't focus. So I think that's a message to tell your audience it's okay to mind wandering. And there's pathological mind wandering where you mind wander too much. And also we're all on the gradient. I was doing these experiments in the lab and I was asking, so I had students and just put them in a room asking them, okay, just press a button whenever you're mind wandering. It was a little bit more elaborate than that, but that was the message. And then I had students, they stayed in the room for two hours. They never pressed the button. It's like I never mind wander.
- [09:41]
And so, you know, the subjective experience is quite different. Also when you're mind wandering and your, your Task is, for example, to pay attention to something you can convince yourself, oh, I wasn't really mind wandering. So you start, you know, so it's very, very subtle, you know, this mind wandering, it's not like you go completely on a tangent and then completely lose attention in what you're doing, although that is possible. But very often you're continued to be engaged in the task. Like, for example, driving. We can think about other things when we're driving. And that's the type of mind wandering. We actually, in our experiments we differentiate three levels of mind wandering. Either you're fully engaged in the task, you have an intermediate states where you're in between mind wandering and engaging the task, and a state where you fully mind wandering. And we're looking, you know.
- [10:41]
The science part is to look at transition between these states.
- [10:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
There are certainly occasions where people will deliberately mind wander. If you're, for example, doing a brainstorming exercise, you want your mind to sort of veer off in unexpected ways.
- [10:59]
Arno Delorme
Yeah. And you know, it is debated in the scientific community whether there's two camps. There's camps which says, oh, this is a type of mind wandering. And there's another camp which says, oh no, this is voluntary. So it's not mind wandering. Mind wandering has to be involuntary. And from my perspective, it's like these are just thoughts that pop up in your brain and some are more voluntary than others, but it's more like continuum. It's not like fully voluntary or fully involuntary. You know, if you hear, you know, a fire truck and you think about fire, you know, is it voluntary or non voluntary? I mean, you heard something in your environment that, you know, triggered some thoughts.
- [11:49]
So yeah, the line is blurred between, you know, food evolent, what's fully voluntary thoughts and what's fully involuntary thoughts. You know, you heard, you hear birds chipping outside and you think of your childhood, you know, and in your grandmother's garden they were birds, you know, is it voluntary or involuntary? It's triggered by the environment.
- [12:11]
Jeffrey Mishlove
As a neuroscientist talking about human experience, you're already on very, very shaky grounds. I wonder, for example, how does a neuroscientist define a thought?
- [12:26]
Arno Delorme
Then we're going into ontologies, which is more like beliefs. So I have my own beliefs, you know, what are thoughts?
- [12:35]
You know, I believe, you know, consciousness is just where thoughts occur, you know, so consciousness is the contents of the thoughts. When you're meditating and the mind is quiet, you know, there might be no thoughts. It's like a pond, you Know, compound, and you're at peace. And then thoughts bubble up maybe basically to the surface and you can see them as disturbing. Okay, they're disturbing my meditation. But in some meditation tradition, there actually good thing, like in transcendental meditation, the thoughts which bubble up is very releasing their energy. So you need to let them bubble up. And it's actually, if you, if you were mind wandering all the time during your meditation, it's a good thing. You let a lot of thoughts bubble up. So, yeah, there's different perspective on thoughts. How, you know, how you define thoughts.
- [13:27]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You're using the metaphor of bubbling up like bubbles in a can of soda or.
- [13:35]
Bottle of soda. So you can see the bubbles emerging out of the liquid. But I would imagine from a neuroscience perspective, there are no bubbles at all.
- [13:45]
Arno Delorme
There's probably no bubbles. I mean, thoughts is so, you know, it's, it's. That's why they're very interesting thoughts, is because they are, you know, neural correlates. You know, for example, you're thinking of a dog. Well, I can put some electrodes in your brain, you know, in the dog neuron that's going to light up. But also these are subjective, you know, thoughts we experience. And so we have. So, you know, that's, it's, that's really at the boundary, you know, like mind and matter. You know, it's like thoughts are really there, right there on the edge of mind matter interaction. So it's very interesting, but also, you know, controversial topic. I personally believe that. Which is not what most mainstream scientists would think, but that your personal experience is primary because you can be dreaming this whole world, but at least you're here dreaming the whole world.
- [14:47]
So your experience is primary. So my experience of the thoughts are primary. And then I can make neuroscience stories, you know, how the thoughts occur in the brain. But it doesn't negate my experience, which is something I'm more sure of than what happens in the brain. What happens in the brain depends on.
- [15:10]
Decades of studies and papers and people doing all these experiments. What's happened in my subjective experience, I can tap into it right now.
- [15:21]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Your subjective experience is unique to you. It is private. It has qualities that are difficult to express in scientific or mathematical terms. And if we assume, as you just stated, that your subjective experience is primary, people often argue that it's not as if the mind is in the brain. It's more like the brain is in the mind.
- [15:50]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [15:53]
Yeah. These are some of the. So that's, you know, our scientific hypothesis. Our scientific hypothesis. You Know, at the Institute of Noetic Sciences is that consciousness is primary.
- [16:11]
Or at least on par with matter. I think, you know, some scientists would debate, you know, that specific topic, but. But yeah, we can't negate the first person experience.
- [16:23]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You do spend a lot of time in your book talking about the fact that it is possible to learn how to have a measure of control over mind wandering. That we're not really the total victim of wherever our mind chooses to go, that we have a, a measure of responsibility for where our thoughts go.
- [16:47]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, and I don't think I use the word control because control means like I'm going to stop my wandering and it's going to happen. And for me I see, you know, like.
- [17:02]
You can tune mind wandering, you know, with exercises. So you have to be dedicated. So it's like sports, you know, you can think about running, but that's not gonna, you know, you know, increase your cardio and then, you know, so same thing about mind wandering. You can think about stopping to mind wanderer and that's gonna have zero effect whatsoever. If anything, you're gonna be upset that you can't stop mind wandering. So yeah, it's, it's more getting into noticing, you know, and retraining basically your brain through meditation or other exercises. In my book, you know, I have like many different exercises people can use which are all inspired by meditation. And I think the, the crux of all this exercise is to realize you're not your thoughts. You know, detaching from your thoughts and not. Because if you're attached to your thoughts.
- [18:07]
In general, being attached to your thoughts makes you unhappy. So you can detach from your thoughts. And it's okay to mind wander as long as it doesn't disrupt your day. Most people will have pathological mind wandering, like for example, rumination during depression. That's a type of mind wandering. You rehearse the same thoughts, negative thoughts you can't get out of the loop. These can be addressed with some of these techniques.
- [18:35]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You mentioned athletics and that you can't become a better athlete just by thinking about it. But I'm under the impression that there are schools of athletics, which is exactly what they do. They practice visualizing, for example, the perfect basketball shot or something. And then if they can visualize it perfectly, they find that it's actually easier to do physically having the thoughts.
- [19:04]
Arno Delorme
I'm going to increase my cardio. You know, it doesn't work like that. So it's this, I think it's this because this is a type of exercise now they're doing, you know, they're doing some kind of training. So same thing with mind wandering. You're retraining your brain, but, you know, it's over repetition and some level of effort you put into it. It's just not a thought that crosses your brain. Oh, I'm going to stop my wandering.
- [19:30]
Jeffrey Mishlove
One of the physiological facts you do point out in your book is related to the default mode network of the brain. And I found that fascinating because, of course, when I was a young person studying physiological psychology, nobody ever talked about the default mode network or about any networks at all in the brain. This is a whole new way of thinking about the brain, I gather.
- [20:01]
Arno Delorme
Yeah. And this really emerged about 20 years ago. So basically, the default mode network, it's using these scanners. So if you go to a hospital, you go to these big magnets, they're scanners, and that can detect blood flow. And so 20 years ago.
- [20:21]
Some researcher realized, well, there is something happening in the brain when people do nothing.
- [20:28]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Which.
- [20:28]
Arno Delorme
Came as a surprise, even though this seems obvious. But this is what they call the default mode network. It's like what's happening in the brain when people do nothing. And that's very related to mind wandering, because when people do nothing, basically you think about random things. And so that's a form of, of mind wandering. And since then, the default mode network, mind wandering.
- [20:58]
Basically resting states of the brain, has been a major, major topic in neuroscience.
- [21:04]
Jeffrey Mishlove
The default mode network being sort of the resting state of the brain or the mind.
- [21:13]
Arno Delorme
Exactly. Although, you know, it's. It can be different things for different people. Like, for example, for very experienced meditators, you ask them to do nothing and they go into your meditation, you know, so it would be very different from, you know, just some other person who just start thinking about random things and. And then even when you're resting, you know, it depends on your day. You know, you had a good day, you're going to be very relaxed and maybe not have a high density of thoughts, or you have a very bad day and your mind is going to race. So there's. Yeah, the default mode network is just a bucket where we just put everything. Then you have to differentiate it.
- [22:01]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I gather that unlike the way I was taught about the brain when I was younger, that there are locations in the brain. The default mode network isn't like a single location. It's more like a group of locations interacting with each other.
- [22:20]
Arno Delorme
Yeah. So different part of the brain. Some frontal areas, some more central areas, and some more parietal Areas which are all talking to each other when you're doing nothing, basically. And part of this is linked to mind wandering. Part of this is also linked to the prioritization of tasks. Your mind wandering, you realize your mind wandering. So now that's no longer mind wandering. You just realize your mind wandering. And then you start thinking about self, something else, and you start to mind wander again. So it's all these networks, and that's just one of the network. You know, there is the salience network. You know, once you experience something salient, it's going to redirect your attention. So it's another network, visual network, auditory network. So, yeah, there's, you know, different types of network.
- [23:16]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Correct me if I'm wrong, that in neuroscience these days, let's say in the last decade or two, we're developing whole new ways of thinking about how the brain works.
- [23:27]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, I think we're more creative these days, you know, that we were like 20 years ago.
- [23:34]
So, you know, definitely. So 50 years ago. We're in the dark ages. You know, like it was the behaviorism. Behaviorism is the brain is a black box. And, you know, it was like anyone who was trying to do cognitive science, so trying to, you know, look at.
- [23:53]
People'S cognition beyond just be behavior. You know, it's like you couldn't get an academic job. And then, you know, in the 1980s, we got the rise of cognitive neuroscience, where.
- [24:08]
Yeah, cognition was considered. And then in the year 2000, it became okay to study, you know, states like meditation, but it wasn't before or talk about consciousness. You know, before the year 2000, it was very taboo. You were risking your career by talking about consciousness. Yeah, I remember one of the first experiments I did, and I just had people sitting in the room counting their breath.
- [24:36]
And, you know, and pressing a button whenever they lost the count of their breath. And, you know, people in my department thought I was crazy. What are you doing? Like, this is not even on an experiment. We show pictures. We show.
- [24:49]
But now it's very well accepted. There's hundreds of researchers doing this kind of experiment. So we have evolved quite a lot also in terms of the organization of the brain and how we study the communication of the different brain areas, the.
- [25:08]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Measurement of blood flowing into different parts of the brain so that you can tell through the blood flow whether certain parts of the brain are more active or less active than other parts of the brain when a person is engaged in any particular task.
- [25:26]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, exactly. And these days with AI, you can almost see what people are thinking in Real time, you have the concept. So you have people watching movies and you can see some concept lighting up. So you might know, oh, they're watching a dog right now and someone enters, et cetera. So you won't get the whole picture, but you get fairly good pictures of decoding brain in real time.
- [25:56]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Would you say that when the mind wanders, it's as if the mind is a point in space and it travels to different portions of the brain? Is that in any way an apt metaphor?
- [26:09]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, when the mind wanders, there's definitely something, some neural correlates. I wouldn't say, you know, you travel. I would say more. It's like the different brain areas become coupled, you know, than when you're not mind wandering. That's how I would phrase it. But also I wouldn't discard, you know, the first person experience. You first experience mind wandering, you know, as yourself, you know, then we're making inference, oh, you know, that's what happens in the brain. Truth is we don't know yet exactly what happens in the brain because these are very hard to study. It's all based on people's report. I was mind wandering, so we were doing experiments, you know, when people, they press a button when they're mind wandering. And then the way we try to infer what's happening in the brain is we look before, so before they press the button, they're just distracted, they're mind wandering. And then after they press the button, they realize, oh, I was not thinking of counting my breath. And now they reconcentrate. So we compare the brain activity before and after and that's how we infer, you know, that's what's linked with mind wandering. But it always starts from the first person experience. So it doesn't start like are we going to look at the brain and we know what happens? We're looking at the brain, we have no idea what happens. So it's all about getting the proper label. And in that case, the label are people's subjective experience.
- [27:39]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, when a person pushes the button in your experiments, it means that they are now aware fact that their mind was wandering. That would be, I think, considered a form of metacognition.
- [27:55]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, exactly. So, you know, that's what we call meta conscious event. And that's a very, you know, very interesting state that's cultivated also during, you know, meditation. You're trying to pay attention to what happens.
- [28:12]
In your own mind, you know, when you're meditating your task.
- [28:17]
I'm trained in Zen meditation and the technique which is just sitting. So you just sit and you observe what happens in your mind. And so that cultivates the meta awareness. Being aware of your own thinking and some experiments I did and others did as well is to show that advanced meditators tend to mind wander less often than naive subjects. So it does help with mind wandering.
- [28:52]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You describe a cycle that people go through. First they're concentrating, they're applying their attention to a task at hand, then the mind wanders, then they become aware that the mind is wandering and then they focus again back on the task. So the cycle keeps repeating itself, I gather.
- [29:12]
Arno Delorme
You know, that's where it's interesting because we give some attribute to thoughts like the momentum of the thought, how much momentum the thought has. So you know, if we're imagining it as bubble, you know, at the beginning there might be little bubbles and then you're getting oh, this thought, you know, it's like this thought is very interesting. I'm very either happy or upset about things. Let me just get embedded 100%. Then you have lots of bubbles and then it loses momentum a little bit. Test bubble and then you'll realize, oh, I was not, you know, driving, washing the dishes, meditating, I was doing something else, I was having that thought. But it is associated from the subjective perspective to the thought losing some momentum or you know, you can call it energy.
- [30:03]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Some people I think would even go so far as to identify mind wandering with having an out of body experience.
- [30:12]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, it's a type of disembodiment in the sense that.
- [30:18]
When you're really embedded in your mind wandering, you stop paying attention to what's going outside.
- [30:27]
If you look at people's eyes when they're mind wandering, they just might be looking up or something. And so yeah, you're getting out of your body, you know, embodied experience into this mental space and then you come back.
- [30:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
So it does seem like a process that in spite of our best efforts to hold our mind steady and to concentrate, we're going to keep mind wandering. It's almost like breathing, I suppose. There's a natural cycle, you or the heartbeat. You're going to go in, you're going to go out. It's just a cycle that human beings go through.
- [31:08]
Arno Delorme
That's the very good description. It's a cycle we go through. We don't know for sure the function of that cycle. Like for breathing we know the function. Like if we stop breathing, we die. For mind wandering we don't know exactly the function. We talked about evolutionary advantage. There's also Research that shows it's a type of micro sleep during the day, you know, you're engaged and then you're going into starting to mind wander, daydreaming basically. And then it helps also do, you know, clean waste in the brain. Like when you're sleeping, you know, there's cleaning waste in the brain. So it's a type of rest, lightweight, light rest of your brain. So that has this function.
- [31:59]
And then there is also creativity when you're like, there's experiments that show that.
- [32:08]
If I ask you a question and then I either give you something very engaging for the next two minutes or just give you nothing where you can mind wander, you're going to be more creative after two minutes about the question I ask you, you know, if I ask you, okay, what are the. I give you a brick, what can you do with that brick? Find like hundreds of things you can do that. Break paperweight, build a house, etc. You got to be more creative. If I let you mind wander and you're spontaneously going to find more solution. So there's this advantage, but on the other side of things, there's this whole literature that shows that like they compared people, you know, so you get on your smartphone, you get text message, what are you doing right now? Are you focused on what you're doing, not focused on what you're doing and how are you feeling? And there is a very strong correlation between mind wandering and not being happy in the moment. Whatever you're doing, you can be mind wandering about your next vacation. It's going to be worse than if you're paying attention to what you're doing right now. So if you're, you know, if you're walking in the forest and you're just in the forest, happy to be there, you're going to be more happy than if you're thinking about your next vacation, wherever it might be. But it's the same for unpleasant, you know, potentially unpleasant task as well. You're less happy when you're mind wandering. Even if it's pleasant mind wandering.
- [33:42]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I find for myself that often if my mind is wandering, I will remember a moment when I treated somebody else badly.
- [33:55]
And then I feel bad, why did I do that? But I usually try to take the time when that happens in my own way to send healing to that person who I treated badly as a way to kind of make up for it.
- [34:14]
As an opportunity for me to do a little mental house cleaning, like to dig out those little places. You could say it's almost like popping a mental Pimple or something to remember a bad feeling and then try to heal it in some way.
- [34:31]
Arno Delorme
It's a great approach to noticing your thoughts and doing something about them.
- [34:40]
And also, you know, you're. It's like other studies showed that the content of your mind wandering, you know, it's like dreaming, you know, it depends what you've experienced during the day. So like, personally, one thing I do is I limit drastically, you know, the type of news I watch because then I know I'm going to mind wander about it, either be upset or.
- [35:07]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And.
- [35:08]
Arno Delorme
Yeah, it's not something I want in my mental space that I think is beneficial to me. So I limit the type of information my mind can grab.
- [35:20]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Today, with the highly polarized political environment that we live in, a lot of people are doing exactly that. They turn the news off because they don't want to have to be ruminating all the time on the fact that we have a felon in the White House.
- [35:40]
Arno Delorme
And there's a cognitive reason also for polarizing news. It's like, it's just grab the attention better. So that's what advertisers want. They want to grab your attention. So they're going to make up stories, usually bad stories. I don't know if you know, that Zen story of it's someone and they break their leg and they have to go to hospital and then their neighbor says, oh, you're so unlucky, you just broke your leg. And then they spend the night at the hospital and they, there's a landslide and their house.
- [36:13]
Is basically destroyed. And like, oh, you're so lucky you're not in your house. So, yeah, I, I like to think of fate, you know, like, and that helps me, you know, to tune down, you know, the thoughts when I'm upset about, you know, these politicians or these other politicians or being less polarized. And also, you know, I also like to acknowledge the humanity in everyone. You know, even, you know, extreme right, extreme left, you know, supporters. They are humans, they have feelings, they love their family. I don't know. There's a lot of things we have in common.
- [36:55]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Ruminating over an unfortunate situation, whether it's a fantasy or a real life situation, is probably not the healthiest way to spend your time.
- [37:06]
Arno Delorme
The rumination is very interesting because, you know, with the, at least, you know, the way I experience it.
- [37:17]
There is a, you know, you're attached to your rumination to some extent, so you don't want to let it go. And so, you know, some of the technique I put in my, in the book is realizing it doesn't serve you. You know, I like the work by Byron, Katie, where you just, you know, imagine how you would feel without that thought and realizing, I would be so happy if I don't have that thought. And then you realize, and then you stop having that thought naturally because you've realized deep down, okay, this is not making, this is not serving me. This is not making me happy. So. So yeah, we have control in our lack of control whenever we realize at a deeper level this is serving me or this is not serving me. We have the power to stop it, but it's not easy. We need to really want it.
- [38:22]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I find for myself what seems to work is a kind of gentle pressure that I can put on my own thoughts. If I try to force it, I will never have this thought again. Well, then it's going to for sure come back. But if I just sort of gently ignore it, it'll probably go away.
- [38:43]
Arno Delorme
What you're saying is like, don't think of the pink elephant for the next five minutes. The only thing you're going to think about is the pink elephant. So yeah, it doesn't work to repress thoughts. And you know, that's in that sense. I said, well, you can't control your thoughts, but you know, you can become friends with your thoughts, especially the ones which are upsetting you, and let them not take all your mental space, basically. But you have to do the work.
- [39:16]
Jeffrey Mishlove
I would imagine as a neuroscientist that a thought, it would be considered part of a chain of associations that occurs when different aspects of the brain are communicating, communicating with each other. That would be very different from esoteric circles in which a thought itself is considered to be a spiritual entity.
- [39:41]
Arno Delorme
So I think you can see it both ways. I mean, for example, you know, in our experiments we look at, so mind wandering, we ask people, okay, what were you thinking? What's the content of your thinking? And then we look for chains. Okay, it's like you were mind warning 10 minutes ago. Does what you're mind wandering about now related to what you were mind wandering 10 minutes ago and most often not, you know, so you know, there is no strong correlation within one thought there might be strong correlation. You think of going to grocery store and then you were seeing your friend at the grocery store, et cetera. So it's the same kind of thoughts, but it has different parts. So within one thought you do have strong association, but across different mind wandering episodes, you know, which occurs as you say, you know, every 30 second to one minute and a half, then you know you have no potential association. So that also informs, I think, the spiritual aspect. You know, when you're looking at your own internal, you know, mind wandering, when you're meditating, basically you're studying yourself. Mind wandering. That's how I see, you know, a big part of the meditation is, is studying, you know, your brain patterns. So SC and statistics can inform the way you look at your own brain pattern. The two are linked.
- [41:04]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Arno this has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a great deal about how my own mind works. I'm very grateful to you. I'm happy to introduce your work to the New Thinking Allowed audience. It's been a pleasure to be with you and I look forward to learning about more of your research as well.
- [41:26]
Arno Delorme
Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me.
- [41:29]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [41:54]
Foreign.
- [42:00]
For early access to our videos and live stream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinking allowed.org.
- [42:14]
New Thinking Allowed Promotions Announcer
Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tarot 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon.
- [42:29]
California Institute for Human Science Announcer
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu.
- [42:57]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You can now download all eight copies.
- [43:00]
California Institute for Human Science Announcer
Of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies.
- [43:07]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Go to newthinkingallowed.org.