Probably all musicians, at least, have heard this joke: A tourist asks a Manhattan resident, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”; and the New Yorker replies, “Practice, practice, practice.”
But what does practicing really do for a person? Apparently, it doesn’t just train muscles. According to recent scientific research, it actually effects change within the brain.
And according to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Richard J. Davidson, physical skills aren’t the only things that one can build with practice.
“Qualities like happiness and compassion are no different than learning to play a musical instrument or to play golf,” said Davidson, the Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior.
Indeed, for all the intricacy of the human brain, which some scientists have said has the most complex organization of any matter in the known universe, Davidson said that his work has resulted in a “simple message.”
“There are certain positive emotional qualities of human beings like happiness and compassion and altruism that recent research suggests should be conceptualized as skills that can be trained,” Davidson said in a telephone interview.
And Davidson, 55, hopes that the recognition he recently received may help spread that message beyond his professional colleagues. Last month, Time magazine included him among “The Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World.”
“It’s been a nice honor and recognition of the work I’ve been doing,” Davidson said. “It is nice to see the world catching up and recognizing its importance.”
Studying meditation
The idea that moral and emotional qualities can be trained is hardly new. It goes back not only to the ancient Greek philosophers, but can be said to be a key idea of Judaism and Jewish education.
In fact, said Davidson, “The goals of most religious traditions are to cultivate positive qualities in people. They have at their core certain spiritual practices that are designed to foster this.”
But Davidson, who grew up in New York City and attended a Jewish day school through eighth grade, said he became attracted to Buddhism through its advocacy of meditation.
“It provided an explicitly delineated path to cultivate mental qualities, more than I experienced in my years of Jewish education,” he said.
This not only led him to meditate, which he has done for more than 30 years, but to desire to study it scientifically. It was for this work that Time particularly recognized him.
“By wiring up Tibetan Buddhist monks, masters of the art of dispassionately observing the inner workings of their own minds,” wrote Andrew Weil, M.D., in the article in the May 8 issue of Time, Davidson “has been able to demonstrate precisely how meditation alters brain function.”
“His research legitimizes, for scientists as well as monks, the study of internal state of consciousness by linking them to the objective reality of electrical activity in the central nervous system,” Weil continued.
“It also gives us a handle for understanding spiritual experiences that have heretofore seemed purely subjective and beyond the reach of scientific investigation.”
‘Out of the closet’
Davidson said he became interested in brain research in high school. “It was my conviction early on that there was more to human possibility than was evident in our everyday behavior, that we as a culture and as human beings could do more to improve ourselves and cultivate positive human qualities,” he said.
“It became clear that one way to understand this was scientific research on the brain,” he continued. “If you hope to understand the mind, then the path to doing that is to understand the brain.”
It was during graduate school — he earned a doctorate at Harvard University in 1976 — that Davidson became interested in meditation.
However, “It quickly became apparent that research in meditation was not going to be rewarded by the scientific community,” he said. “It was considered flaky.” Moreover, “the methods available were too crude to capture the experiences I was having.”
So he worked for many years on studying the brain and emotions. Not until 1992, when he met Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism, did Davidson decide to “come out of the closet” with his interest in meditation.
Moreover, by then both the culture of academic research had changed to allow it, and the technology for doing the research “improved dramatically,” he said.
Davidson came to Madison about 20 years ago, and he and his family have been active in the Jewish community throughout that time. He and his wife, Susan, have been members of Temple Beth El since they arrived.
He is a former board member of the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin. Susan is a life member of Hadassah and a Jewish Social Services volunteer; and their two now college-age children were both campers and counselors at the Madison Jewish community’s Camp Shalom day camp.
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