Ep. 37: Dr. Ronald Siegel - Optimal Executive Function Through Mindful Rechanneling

Producer: All right. Welcome back to Full PreFrontal, where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here again with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta. As usual, it’s always good to spend some time with you. I always appreciate our exchanges. Today, we’re going to talk about a couple of things, failing. Failing fast and why that matters and compassion and wisdom. And what the heck does Jim Moffatt, later an executive with Deloitte, what does it have to do with it? 

Sucheta: Well, it’s all about talking about learning from your mistakes and becoming a wiser person and growing and developing. We have been tackling a lot of issues with respect to executive function and emotional regulation and mindfulness. I thought I’ll bring in a little interesting story. I was watching an interview of Jim Moffatt. He is the CEO of Deloitte Consulting. Here is a quote that he said, that the best lessons in life are learned through bumps in the road. Of course this sounds like a parent would say to the child or a teacher might say to a student. But it is a CEO of a company and he was talking about this with reference to sticky situations. 

When he was a college student, he did some hardcore construction job as a freshman and a sophomore when he was in San Francisco and he was part of a construction crew. One day he showed up and he was asked to measure footing. He was not provided with any formal tools or instructions other than just measure footing. So what he did is he just grabbed a brick off palate, literally mindlessly, not knowing any better but also not knowing how else he could have gone about it. The mistake he had made was to use a finished brick by accident rather than using an unfinished one. Of course, as you can see, it’s a very subtle observation, paying attention to details and just being mindful. That mistake, of course, got him a massive yelling from the foreman and he stepped back and he was a little rattled but as he thought back and was talking about the situation, he said, “I should have thought before I acted. I should have thought a little bit like what kind of brick will work and what am I asked to do?” 

And so the reference he makes to future leaders in the story was to fail but fail fast. What I notice about this, from the point of view we are going to talk about, is failing, first of all, happens because we are not very thoughtful and may times these are called silly mistakes. When we make silly mistakes, we get a lot of yelling or we have these inconveniences and annoyances. And those annoyances is what becomes the lingering thoughts that occupy our mind. That can really become a huge problem in becoming very productive or getting things done fast and effectively. So that initial pause has such a long lasting impact on preventing mistakes as well as having a good feedback from the environment or from your boss or from your teacher or your parent. That simple step can be learned through practice. 

That brings me to a wonderful guest that we are going to have for the second time is Dr. Ronald D. Siegel. He is an assistant professor of psychology, part-time at Harvard Medical School. He also is in private practice in Massachusetts. He has taught at Harvard for 30 years. He is a longtime student of mindfulness and he is on the board of directors and faculty of the institute for meditation and psychotherapy. He also is a very well-known author and he has written and co-authored many texts as well as articles, as well as books, particularly the one I want to give a shoutout. It’s a self-treatment guide for back sense. 

Since I am at that age where my back hurts, this has been a great resource for me. It’s a book called Back Sense: A Revolutionary Approach to Healing the Cycle of Chronic Back Pain, which integrates Western and Eastern approaches for treating chronic back pain. He is also a co-author of a professional guide, Sitting Together: Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy. He is a regular contributor to other professional publications. One of my favorite works of Dr. Siegel is The Science of Mindfulness: A Research-Based Path to Well-Being, produced by great courses. I highly recommend it.

We are going to have a conversation regarding what is mindfulness practice and how to make this a part of treatment option or a possible solution to all the problems we face. 

Producer: Well, it promises to be a great conversation, a second conversation with Dr. Ron Siegel. I know I qualify to be a part of the show with you, Sucheta, is that I too suffer from debilitating back pain. So now I know why I qualify for this. I thought a lot over the years about this idea if failing but failing fast. I think part of the problem is that oftentimes we consider something a failure when we should really just be considering it part of the learning curve and the learning process to getting better at whatever it is we’re talking about.

This promises to be a great second conversation with Dr. Siegel so let’s get to it. Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. Ron Siegel. 

Sucheta: Welcome back to the podcast. Dr. Siegel, I am so delighted to have you. Let me start. In this segment, I’m excited that we’ll be talking about actual therapy aspect or therapeutic process and using mindfulness lens to bring that on. Before we get started, can you, in simple terms, help us understand this continuum of positive emotions or commonly thrown words such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion? How are they all linked together?

Siegel: Well, it’s very interesting. Human being evolved to have a great deal of concern with what other human beings are thinking and feeling. We’re very, very social primates, actually. For survival, it’s very important for humans to figure out a way both to cooperate with one another as well as to be included in the group and not get excluded in the group, as well as how to be the kind of member of the human group where you’re valued in some way. Because if you think about it, the brain evolved when we were hanging around in groups of 25 to 50 primates and that’s who you were your whole life, right? That was your entire community.

Sucheta: Yes.

Siegel: So reading other people’s intentions and getting along with them was very, very, very important and it’s very important for us today. Study after study shows that when you look at measures of success and what do you think about this success in terms of financial success or position in an organization or capacity to maintain family relationship. All of this, that intellectual ability, in other words, how quick you are in IQ tests or how high your SAT score is, pale in relationship to our capacity to be able to read one another and understand one another, and have what’s called emotional intelligence. That’s what’s predictive of life success. 

The words you’re talking about, empathy and sympathy and compassion, all have to do with this very subtle realm of reading and understand of the human beings. We humans have a very basic mechanism of empathy. We actually share it with other primates and it’s believed to come from what are called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons were first discovered in the lab where they were studying macaque monkeys. If I recall the exact situation correctly, it was lunch break and they had these monkeys wired up with various electrodes in their brains. One of the researchers was eating something, perhaps a banana or something and noticed that in one of the macaque monkeys, the parts of the brain associated with eating were starting to fire, were starting to light up, simply watching the researcher do this. That was very intriguing. 

They studied this more and they realized that there are these whole sets of neurons that fire in us when we see someone else doing something. There are many examples of this. The most vivid of which is if you or any of your listeners have ever gone to see an erotic film or a horror film or something. We’re watching simply representations on the screen of other people doing things and yet we feel their experience fully in our bodies, right? We either feel the erotic feelings or the fear or whatever it might be. So these mirror neurons are very, very powerful for us and they lead us firstly to this capacity for empathy which is simply to feel the feeling of another as if it were one’s own but not losing perspective that there’s an ‘as if’ going on here. In fact that’s how [Kohl] Rogers, who is a master of training psychotherapists in empathic resonance and develop the whole therapy system around, that’s how he would describe empathy. To feel the feeling of the other as though it were one’s own but without losing the awareness that it’s not exactly mine, it’s happening through empathic resonance.

Now, sympathy is interesting because sympathy involves noticing the suffering of the other and also feeling with them in their suffering. And compassion takes it a step further because compassion involves noticing the suffering of another and having an affirmative wish to somehow help. There’s an altruistic impulse in there, to somehow ameliorate the suffering of the other. It turns out that all of these things can be trained. I’m not sure about studies on sympathy but there’s certainly training in empathy. I believe in your other podcasts, things you talked about, mentalization or theory of mind which is basically helping people to reflect on what the other person’s experience might be right now. If somebody is having executive functioning problems, sometimes they have difficulty with that and one needs to be actually trained in it while for some other person, it may come quite naturally to immediately understand other’s experiences this way.

Compassion can be trained. There have been a number of studies showing that doing exercises that are designed to imagine the suffering of the other and generating a deliberate wish to help actually makes this more compassionate. In fact, mindfulness practice increases compassion. One of my favorite studies about this, if I may briefly share --

Sucheta: Sure, yeah.

Siegel: -- was that they randomize people to three groups. One had mindfulness practice training in awareness, present experience with acceptance. One had deliberate compassion training in which they had people imagine the suffering of the other and wishing them well in some way. The third group was randomized to something like help education class. It was designed to meet the same number of hours and have the same amount of involvement but not actually trained in either of the skills. The challenge is how do you measure whether you have increased compassion because there’s so much social desirability around that. In other words, you ask somebody, are you compassionate? Everybody wants to say, yeah I’m compassionate. Nobody wants to say, not least bit. I’m not compassionate. 

How are you going to measure this? They came up with a very, very clever way to measure it. At the end of the study, they would invite the subjects to come into a room. At first it was a waiting room in preparation for their exit interview. There was a receptionist who would say, “Okay. Take a seat. It’ll be a little while before the interviewers are ready for you.” In this room, there were three seats. Two of them were occupied by confederates, by actors who were just acting as thought they were subjects in the study waiting. The real subject comes in after having either done their health education class or their mindfulness class or their compassion class and they naturally take the third seat. Well, then a third confederate or an actor comes in and it’s a young woman on crutches with her leg in some kind of a brace. She awkwardly stands up against the wall and looks uncomfortable. The outcome measure they used was would the real subject give up his or her chair within two minutes as a measure of did this person develop more compassion or not from the training? Sure enough, both the people at the mindfulness training and the people at the compassionate training gave up their chair much more readily. They were more attuned to the suffering of the other and they had more of an impulse to help.

It turns out that this is actually trainable for us which is good news because acting compassionately in the world actually does lead to both happiness for ourselves and others. The Dalai Lama is a rather compassionate guy himself is famously quoted as saying, “You want other people to be happy? Practice compassion. You want to be happy yourself? Practice compassion.”

Sucheta: That’s so wonderful. I think you talked about this aspect of trainability is really heightening your attention to the needs of others which to me is that executive function process where we are exercising intentional suppression of certain set of thoughts that may not be favorable to the future self. And so when you’re helping others, you become more socially included. We are not that strategic but I think lot of times the people I work with often suffer from social difficulties primarily because of their disregulation of their own attention and intention. 

This reminded me of Simon Cohen, who has written a book called Zero Degree of Empathy. He’s a neuroscientist as well who does a lot of work with autism. One of the things in his book he talks about is zero positive and zero negative. So folks having trouble with this empathic aspect of identifying this emotional set of emotions and those were psychopaths, for example.

But what was interesting in his book that I find very relevant to everyday life for all of us is gradual decline in your empathy quotient as you go through life. Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi are a 10 and then maybe sociopath maybe 0 but we begin somewhere at 7. But if we got cut off on the highway or somebody sent a nasty email, we start from 7 and go to 5 and then 4. Mindfulness practice can have great impact on leaking of this empathic stance. Would you agree with that?

Siegel: Well, it’s interesting. The body of research that I’m aware of that has bearing on this is actually research into wisdom. There’s a group of people, Robert Sternberg is the lead on this in the United States, who have tried to study scientifically both what is wisdom and can it be cultivated. Particularly, they have addressed the question in many, many studies, do people grow wiser as they get older? 

Wisdom and compassion, it’s said in Buddhist traditions that they’re like two wings of a bird. They tend together because it’s very hard to actually be compassionate without some wisdom because you’ve got to be able to see the needs of others to be compassionate. To be wise without compassion is to be cut off from real human connection. So the answer to whether people grow wiser as they grow older is a resounding sometimes. What happens is sometimes people become much wiser. They become much less preoccupied with themselves and much more able to see the big picture and much more able to see that everybody suffers and everybody struggles and life is difficult. Other times, people kind of double down within whatever their defenses are. You see this. People become even more bigoted, for example, as they become older or more rigid in their way or less accepting of diversity as they become older. 

The question is, which way are we going to go? It seems from some of the research that the critical variable is are we actually trying to cultivate wisdom? Most of us don’t say, “I want to become wiser” but it takes the form of, “are people interested introspection?” Are they involved in some kind of psychological growth project for themselves? That could be entering into therapy but it could be anyone of many other ways that people take time to reflect and try to grow. Are they involved in some kind of spiritual or religious path in which they are trying to be basically better human beings in some way?

It turns out that when people make this a goal in their life, they tend to become wiser and I would venture that they probably become more compassionate and more empathically attuned. But if people don’t, if people sort of [circle the horses] and decide no, looking out for number that’s the answer, well then they become less wise.

Sucheta: I see. Well, you have certainly given a clear framework about we not only knowing that wisdom can be developed but we should really pursue it deeply because I think it can bring a lot of social change for communities.

Siegel: In terms of your theme, in many ways, wisdom which is an elusive concept because it’s like what exactly is this? In many ways, what it is having extremely good executive functioning. 

Sucheta: Exactly.

Siegel: Better than average. Really, the ability to have the big picture view. If we think of people, and we can think of all people we’ve known in our lives that we think of as wise, maybe they’re distant figures like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or somebody like that or maybe they are mentors we’ve had or people we’ve known in our life. People who are wise this way actually have amazing executive functioning, right? 

Think of the executive functioning if Nelson Mandela when after having been imprisoned by the apartheid government for all these years, got out and he thought retribution, that’s not going to be a good idea. That’s not going to be helpful. That’s going to create more suffering for everybody. Taking the land away from the White landowners? That’s just going to destabilize the economy then everybody will be poor. That won’t be smart. Let’s think of what will really help everybody here even though I’ve been horribly, horribly injured by these people? That’s executive functioning. 

Sucheta: Exactly, exactly. As we come to the end of the podcast, can you describe to us what loving, kindness, mindfulness look like and what is that at a therapeutic level? What do clinicians or experts who provide this kind therapy do in their sessions with their clients?

Siegel: Well, mindfulness practices are being integrated into all different forms of psychotherapy. There are some forms that are specifically focused on mindfulness. There are things like mindfulness. They have cognitive therapy or acceptance and commitment therapy which is a form that relies heavily on mindfulness practices or dialectical behavior therapy which is used for people with serious emotion regulation problems and relies a lot on mindfulness practices. There are many different kinds of systems of therapy that use mindfulness practices. 

We’re talking about mindfulness as though it’s one thing. It’s actually a bit of a basket of different kinds of exercises because if mindfulness involves awareness of present experience with acceptance, well sometimes the area where we’re having the most difficulty is simply being aware, figuring out how to train the attention so we can have somewhat more flexibility in how we direct our attention. Sometimes the place we’re having trouble is with acceptance. In other words, thoughts and feelings and we have a great deal of difficulty tolerating them. Sometimes it’s difficulty accepting other people. We are filled with a lot of judgmental thoughts towards others which usually along with judgmental thought towards ourselves. 

Sometimes there are practices that are designed to address one particular part of this. You are mentioning love and kindness practices. Those are designed to help people with acceptance. Basically what those look like is to first imagine somebody who is naturally loving and kind. It could be a friend or a family member or somebody more distant like Nelson Mandela, for example, or the Dalai Lama or Jesus or Mohammad or Moses. Some figure of this way, Mother Teresa. We begin by just learning how to generate loving, kindness feeling toward that other person and then imagining that other person generating them toward ourselves and then we expand out and experiment with generating love and kindness feelings toward all sorts of other people in our lives, including other people we don’t know, including people we find annoying and difficult. 

What this does, and there’s a lot of studies now of this, it actually helps with this acceptance. It helps to have a more charitable view of ourselves and others out of that to be able to get along better with ourselves and with others. But that is actually only one component of many, many different therapeutic applications. If listeners are interested, I think you’ll probably give them a resource to this but a book that I wrote, The Mindfulness Solution: Everyday Practices for Everyday Problems really goes to how do you use mindfulness practices to work with all sorts of therapeutic challenges but everyday therapeutic challenges like everyday depression, everyday anxiety, everyday interpersonal conflicts, chronic pain, and those kids of disorders. It’s really a step-by-step how you develop a mindfulness practice and how you can apply it therapeutically yourself to all of these various life challenges. That’s a resource that might be helpful for listeners and they can take a look at some of the exercises that are in it; download the meditation for free at mindfulness-solution.com as well. It’s actually a big question. There’s lot of elements to this but that’s a resource people can use to explore it further.

Sucheta: You point a very important distinction, at least for me, that I literally myself thought that loving, kindness, mindfulness is the mindfulness practice that can be adapted to different aspects of psychotherapy but thank you for really shedding light on that. This really helped me to understand what components can be imported.

In closing, I don’t know how you’ll answer this in one minute but to me there’s a direct link between mindfulness and happiness. Can a human being aspire to be happy and is that a reasonable and attainable goal? Are we thinking right when we talk about happiness? 

Siegel: Well, the people who studied this have pointed out that there’s many different kinds of happiness. There’s the happiness that comes from winning. There’s a happiness that comes from having pleasure at the moment. And then there’s something else which we might call well-being or satisfaction which comes from living in the world, being in the moment, being open-hearted, understanding that there’s ups and downs, and actually being able to open to and feel comfortable with a full range of feeling, everything from joy and pleasure to sadness and disappointment. 

Mindfulness practice is help with a ladder. They help us to really have this sense of well-being or satisfaction that allows us to experience life as rich and meaningful and connected during good times and during bad times. It’s a little bit different from the idea of happiness like, oh it will make you a winner all the time and you’ll always feel on top of the world. No, not necessarily. But you will feel a sense of meaningful connection and the capacity to be able to deal with all the different joys and sorrows that come up life. 

Sucheta: Well, I cannot thank you enough for your incredible crisp and clear way of describing these complex topics and helping us understand this. It has been a very, very delightful experience for me. So once again, I thank you for your time and I will link all the information that you have mentioned and the resources that can add value to our listeners’ quest to become more mindful. Thank you, Dr. Siegel.

Siegel: Right. Thank you so much for having me.

Producer: All right. So again, that was Dr. Siegel, our second conversation with him. Wow, Sucheta, what a great conversation. I learned a lot from him as I did on the first conversation. Any immediate thoughts about it?

Sucheta: Certainly. So fascinating and so relevant to the work I do. The most important thing I thought we can start off by thinking is humans are the most social beings. Anything that threatens our sense of connectedness or social connectivity can create stress for us and we do many things to circumvent that or avoid that. We talked about that in our last podcast. But e also, in this discussion with Dr. Siegel, talked about these emotional tools that we have, the capacity for empathy which is having the awareness than you and the other is different but having the capacity to see and feel what the other person is feeling. And then the second tool that we discussed was sympathy, which is noticing the suffering and feeling it with another person. And the last tool is compassion, which is not just noticing but having that motivation and spring into action, to do something about the suffering that you notice. 

These tools were designed to mobilize us in the social context and maintain the connectivity. I really, really like to connect that with executive dysfunction that I see, that people with executive function abilities or lack thereof struggle in exercising these mental tools that are (1) part of emotional regulation but (2) part of that mindful connection to the social world. There are a lot of disadvantages that they experience because of that. The important here is that reading and understanding other human being is at the heart of emotional intelligence. So that capacity to read and understand other human beings and their emotions mean you have to stop thinking about your own emotions for a second. That requires impulse control. 

A lot of people who don’t have mastery letting go of their thoughts about themselves spiral into having a very one-pointed view of the whole situation. You make me angry. I am feeling angry so I am going to say whatever comes to my mind. But if you suspend your thoughts about your own anger for a second and think about how are you feeling about this. If you say, Oh, my God. The person looks a little upset. So even though I am angry, I wonder why the other person is upset. I haven’t even said anything but they are upset. To even take a perspective of other person, we require to use these tools that we have access to.

The second part of the process that I was thinking a lot about is making it as a priority, not just having empathy, sympathy, and compassion but mobilizing mental resources for the benefit of the greater good. That requires you to mentalize how would life be different if I include the thoughts and feelings of the other? How would it benefit both of us if I let you express yourself? That’s the fist thought that came to my mind, Todd.

Producer: Interesting. Help me understand. What’s the relevance of mindfulness training as it relates to your work, Sucheta?

Sucheta: Very much so. Dr. Siegel was amazing in explaining this idea about what does mindful practice as well as training looks like. It is nothing but that way of helping yourself, self-regulate behaviors and then eventually generate wish to help others. You see there are two parts to it. One is to see and feel what you feel based on how others feel. And then second is to do something about it. So this mindfulness training is nothing but becoming more attuned to the feelings that other people have and becoming more attuned to the emotional needs of the other. 

This attunement is very much part of my executive function training process where I train people to take perspective of the other. A lot times what I’m dealing with in my practice is conflict management or I’m dealing with advocacy, self-advocacy; children and adults not able to talk to their teachers and explain their situation. So if I forget my homework fourth time and if you are a teacher, there’s definitely less empathy or compassion for me and I need to do some good explanation regarding this was not intentional but accident and persuade you to change your mind. That requires to exercise or activate this empathic resonance that Dr. Siegel was about. The second point is, if is don’t have the best emotional control, then my feelings come out immediately without any filter. 

If that happens, then it causes destruction, its path or social relationship. And so the mindfulness is to really question the feeling that I have about my condition. Is this real? Is this irrelevant? Is this immediate? Is this urgent? Mindfulness training acts like a pause but not a remote control. I have described this before, that brain is wired to have many, many tools and not all tools are used well or used often. And so mindfulness practice is instilling this pause but not a mental remote control.

The last part, I think, is really important is to really become a witness to your emotions and observe the emotions and not so much fear them. If I can indulge you, Todd, you have such a beautiful voice and this poem that I have come across, Rumi’s poem. Would you take a minute to read it? It’s called The Guesthouse.

Producer: My pleasure. The Guesthouse by Rumi. So here it goes, “This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out

for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

Sucheta: Wonderful. That sounds so melodic. Thank you for reading it.

Producer: Thank you for letting me do that.

Sucheta: This poem is so emblematic of what Dr. Siegel’s message is. In fact, I have heard him make reference to this poem in his presentation. If we take a perspective of a household or who welcomes any guest that arrives and invites that guest and doesn’t carry any particular feeling towards the guest, then your emotions, your heart is open to all sorts of emotions and not all emotions can become permanent part of the furniture. We can have a better perspective on dealing with crisis, dealing with upsetness, or dealing with just feeling peeved. Lat comment about this mindfulness training and executive function is a lot of these emotions and feelings are very insidious. They are unknown to conscious mind and so you may feel a certain way and not even know why am I feeling that way. If you don’t pay much attention, you may behave corresponding to those emotions and those behaviors is what causes a lot of disruption in your everyday life, as well as your relationship get impacted with that. Mindfulness is really, really paying attention to those emotions that you don’t have conscious access to and then prevent the behaviors that become impacted by those strong and powerful emotions. 

Producer: I thought the link between wisdom and executive function was quite fascinating as well. 

Sucheta: Yeah. Wasn’t it amazing that the goal of life is to grow but not everybody may carry that goal? Of course to grow is to emotionally mature, and to emotionally mature is of course nothing but to become wiser. I find this so fascinating, again, pertaining to my work. I love the way Dr. Siegel made reference to Robert Sternberg’s work on wisdom. 

As you grow older, there are two paths that one can take. Almost you come to a junction and you can either go in the path of rigidity and even bigotry. Or second, you can become the open-minded and accepting and forgiving. It just depends what kind of nurturing you have done to let your mind take the second path. Mindfulness practices can really help in you going in that direction and growing up and becoming a much more kind and compassionate and universalist, so to speak. 

There are lots of benefits as you can imagine from becoming wiser. You are likely to be more patient. You are likely to have more balance to view on things. You are not rattled by small setbacks. You have a much long range perspective on things, how they turn out. It’s almost like you become a CEO of a company who is looking at tenure 10-year outcomes rather than one month or quarterly report, so to speak. That perspective allows you to see that it’s not all bad. 

I want to tie this in the research in morality as well because that also, to me, sounds like a way that we believe we are a person of certain capacity and we employ our moral judgment and we are wise with it. I heard a social psychologist and research scientist, Jonathan Haidt, who talk about a new moral world. He said that it has within it everything it needs to prove itself and it has within it defenses against any possible argument that could be thrown at it. It’s impossible to see the defects in your own moral matrix. He calls this as a fault in your moral matrix. That means you believe that your observations about the other is actually true and you can become rigid and inflexible and you can offer resistance to change. 

All this are fundamental blocks in seeing the possibilities in the world in a different way. There’s course correction to be made and a course correction can happen if you do something about it. Mindfulness training is one way to do inner work and develop emotional acumen or externally you can grow and develop or become more mature and wise is by traveling around the world or engaging in new experiences. Simple things such as escape the room, where you’re trying to solve a problem within an hour and take the clues and navigate this tiny room and get out of it alive. Not that you’re going to be trapped there forever but that’s a good experience that can bring you a lot of temporary experience of frustration and uncertainty. And then you navigate your emotions and your thought process through it.

Another way to do it is of course to read literature, a wide array of literature. In literature, that teases your imagination and makes you reflect and think about the metaphors and analogies and situations that you really don’t have any direct experience with or eve have the capacity to fathom. That’s why this solid fiction, game of Thrones, for example, can really help you as well. 

I took a lot out of this discussion with Dr. Siegel and my personal belief that to grow is to expand your mind; and to expand your mind needs to happen with the assumption that you may not expand your mind because of your own limitations. I hope we all take a chance on ourselves and provide those opportunities otherwise, our US ambassador to Britain was talking about this, that there is a lack of unity and people are talking at each other and people are talking past each other. People are still not talking to each other. This talking to each other requires you to exercise nothing but this mindfulness. Once every individual takes this mindfulness practice seriously, there is a chance that they will become better citizens. And is the countries and cities and towns and counties and states begin to do that, you can have a country that’s mindful and then you can interact and solve world’s problem even more effectively.

Producer: Well, I don’t think there are many people who realize that all the flaws and deficiencies that they exhibit are because of a lack of mindfulness. There’s too many people out there who say mindfulness training is not for me. I’m a business person. I don’t have to do that. Well, as you and I both know, Sucheta, you’re never going to achieve wisdom without it. 

All right. Lots to think about from today’s conversation. That’s all the time we have for today, unfortunately. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in and listening today. We look forward to seeing you again next week on Full PreFrontal.