Dr. Dave Vago
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Kind of a deep question. It is a deep question, but it's a total relevant one. One of the opportunities I had recently was to talk to the NIH about a contemplative perspective for a whole person health model. The NIH and specifically the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health is interested in a fuller picture of what it means to be healthy, to be a healthy human.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
in an integrative way, meaning not just focusing on one system or organ system or one cluster of symptoms, but to think about how we live as good human beings from every dimension, from the social aspects of our health to even to the physical and even whether it comes to financial health, But most importantly, something that's been left out of the equation is spiritual health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And I was asked to talk about what does it mean to have spiritual health and well-being? And what are the aspects of spiritual health that we can really begin to research in a really rigorous way? And that's, I think, the opportunity here. If you think about what people report, even... In the 16th century, Michelangelo was talking about the relation between humans and God, the divine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that connection between the divine and humanity is a context that spiritual health can really facilitate the belief in something better than this inevitability of decline that we're all prescribing to this narrative. we over the ages right we know that spirituality and connection to god or some aspect of the divine or something greater than ourselves has been helping us
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
fuel our constant attempts to do something better or to feel something more meaningful, right? And so I think there is a level that we can work to at using spiritual health as a lens to foster improvement in not only our own personal well-being, but as one humanity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
One of the ways that we now separate sort of ways of thinking about spiritual health is through spiritual experiences, which are much more fleeting and ephemeral, short term. They leave lasting impressions or they have high levels of insight and durability. They can be intense, powerful, transformative experiences.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
This is the kind of experience that we've talked about in the past, the self-transcendent one. where you feel connection or union to something greater than ourselves. And this could be the divine. It could be just nature, like how you feel when you are outside, just surrounded by trees or the ocean or just watching a sunset. This is what Dacher Keltner refers to as awe.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That experience of just being overwhelmed by just the raw, undomesticated energy of nature. The Peruvian, the Quetaro philosophy also talks about this raw, undomesticated energy. And they have a word for it called salca. And it's that feeling that you have when you're in nature or surrounded by something that is more profound than the narratives that we create about our own ego or self.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And when that ego or self and experience of who we are, our identity starts to dissolve in that context of being surrounded by something profound in nature, that's when we have this dissolution of the self. The dissolving of that sense of self combined with a feeling of union and connection to something greater than ourselves is really the spiritual experience that we're talking about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And there's something healthy about experiencing that experience. more regularly, that it doesn't have to be something that you experience when you go to church or that is dictated by certain dogmatic principles in religion. But it's something that can be ordinary, that you can experience watching the sunset or the smile of a child or the taste of something that was prepared by a master chef.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Something that profound can also be transcendent throughout our normal everyday life. That's one aspect of spiritual health. The other one that we've trying to define is a sense of spiritual well-being that's more trait-like, that provides a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a harmony with others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And this is really more based on spiritual religious belief systems where you're countering despair or uncertainty. It's found more in healthcare or palliative care settings when people are nearing death. This is why we have chaplains and rabbis in hospitals. This is the faith in healing, perhaps believing in a miracle or at least less suffering for oneself or family members.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The hope of this kind of spiritual experience also is to replace the despair with something that's more trusting and a possibility of better outcomes. It's the level of acceptance and peace that we can embrace amidst all the uncertainty in the world. We are surrounded by uncertainty. It's hard to even think about what our children's children may experience on this planet.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
When the planet is in jeopardy of dying and losing its resources to sustain itself with natural disasters, that could take over the entire planet, or whether or not humans are going to destroy our existence through some sort of existential threat of nuclear holocaust.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
With all this uncertainty, spiritual well-being and spiritual experiences, like the 12 transcendent ones, I think offer the best opportunity for a real capacity for human flourishing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The recent one, some of it, I've watched a lot of David Attenborough's work in the past. I love his narration. And it's always capturing that spiritual or divine, raw and domesticated energy of nature, which I love. Good stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
This comes back to even the sort of contemporary mindfulness movement that talks about process and human connection and speaks a little bit to altruistic motives. At least the meditation practices that we focus on integrating into clinical interventions are intended for self-specific purposes. They are intended to help us reduce stress,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
improve our concentration, and give us a few tool sets to help live a good life for ourself. So it's very self-serving. But in essence, the core of these practices are intended to not just help you reduce stress and sit on a cushion with your eyes closed. They're intended to provide you the most profound connection. And we're talking about a level of unconditional love.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
that, say, a mother has for their child, that sense of connection that a mother has for their child is the same sense of love and connection and unconditional love that we're trying to achieve with the people in our life, the people in our direct life, our spouses, our children, our neighbors, but even the people that you have difficulties with as well.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So I think we're really at a point in our lives where that sort of moral beauty is essential to our humanity to survive, right? Because that human connection without it, we're setting up walls and creating polarization between our worldviews that don't allow us to resonate with the most fundamental aspect of being human, which is social connection.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So I think the mindful practices that are very trendy, that are leading to the best evidence for health outcomes are also deeply rooted in this sense of cultivating moral beauty and pro-social behaviors. And that's where I think altruistic motives to help others instead of just ourselves start to emerge. So we're more likely to feel that connection with others when we do these practices.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And there's just much more sense of true happiness when we help others and we see it in ourselves when we do these kinds of actions, even just putting a tip in the tip jar. In the beginning, it's really self-serving because you want someone to see you do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
But when you see just the reaction of somebody who may receive your blessing or a tip from the tip jar and how it makes them feel, that's where the genuine level of transcendence actually happens. And it's that moral beauty I think that Docker is talking about that taps into that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Oh, for sure. The whole philosophy behind mindful communications is based on this idea that we're always thinking about what to say next when somebody's speaking, we're not trying to deeply engage with others. In fact, there's new evidence that a particular style of communications through mindfulness is really efficacious is one that's called dyadic work, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So where two people actually sit across from each other and really stare into each other's eyes to really have profound impact, right? And to really hear somebody and listen deeply. That takes a lot of work. It's really hard for someone to feel completely heard right, that you understand me, that you resonate with me at a deep level.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And we're starting to see this even in neuroscience as to how best we can measure these kinds of connections, right? The deep level of connection that somebody has when they resonate deeply, you start to actually see intracortical synchrony between individuals, meaning that their brains are synchronized between people. And that's where you start to see that deep level of connection.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
But often in conversation, you're right. It's not frequent where you have true connection between people that were just having a conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's not easy to do. And that's why it's so uncomfortable for people to do. But imagine if you had Kamala and Donald Trump in the same room staring at each other and being fully present in the moment, maintaining eye contact and just sitting in silence with each other, right? What a model that would be for people to engage in.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The idea behind decentering is to provide a healthy psychological distance between oneself and one's thoughts. So you can then take your thought and put it out in front of you and say, well, I'm not angry. I am having a thought that I'm angry or it's not that I am not good enough. It's just a thought that I am not good enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Right at that level, even in the debates on say like gun control, for example, there's a lot of people who you are adamant against guns are horrible. Guns are terrible. They're all they're meant to do is to for killing. And then you take people who really believe strongly in the power of guns to protect them and why they believe so strongly that they should have them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And if you just put them next to each other and have them debate, they're not going to agree, but imagine putting them in a situation. where you deeply had to sit and just connect with them at that profound level, it changes the dynamic to the point where once you feel finally vulnerable and comfortable to connect at that level,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
There's opportunity to ask questions, to understand more, where are you coming from? And in some cases, there was a great example of this. I think it was an NPR sponsored event where they had gun control people from both sides engage in a conversation. And what they found was when they gave them the real space to share their experiences together,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The one individual who was advocating for keeping guns and having guns on them was talking about their experience of trauma in their childhood where they were beaten and abused by their father. And the one time that he felt empowered was when he was able to get a hold of a gun. and threatened his father that if you ever hurt me again or my mother, I will kill you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And as threatening as it may sound, it was empowering for the individual to say that they had some way to protect them who was beaten all the time. It was interesting just to witness that individual sharing that experience to somebody who was a strong advocate for gun control and taking guns away. And why that gun was so powerful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It gave another perspective to just human connection with different perspectives. So there is something powerful about taking the time to really be present with an individual and listening. So people feel completely heard and that changes the dynamic in any relationship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
I think we're always seeing reflections of ourselves in others. And the whole mindful communications model focuses on just making space for presence for
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
awareness for acknowledging people's emotions without the judgment the immediate evaluation of some what somebody's saying just to listen right to listen fully without reacting that also involves intentional speech right just to ask yourself is this really necessary for me to say why do i need to say this in order to make a point or just to maintain awareness or connection?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Is it helpful for this particular relationship to improve by what words I choose to use at this point? So there's presence, awareness, empathy, right? Listening to what people are experiencing, this intentional speech so you can moderate, is this an absolutely necessary thing to say? Regulating, right? If something intensifies in our speech, can we stay composed?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Adapting really to that particular, maybe controversial or emotionally evocative kinds of speech that may... that come out in a conversation and then reflecting is how you can follow up really to evaluate any resolution to disagreements about things. So this model of mindful communication should not only reduce conflict, but it's supposed to improve collaboration.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's supposed to achieve deeper connection. And these dyads are showing evidence that they work even better than just practicing on a cushion by oneself. But if the intention is to find and nurture pro-social types of connections or altruistic types of behaviors, that kind of connection may be necessary in order to facilitate that kind of personal relationship with others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Oh yeah, decentering, for those in your audience who don't know, it's a psychological process that involves really two components. One is this sort of disidentification from one's internal experience. And the other is reduced reactivity to those thoughts that you may be having. So the idea here is that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We all have, if we take stock of our mental habits, we have sensations, thoughts, and feelings that are not always really helpful. Things like I'm stressed, overwhelmed, but other things that are very personally deconstructive in some ways. So we say, or destructive in some ways. I'm not good enough is one of the most common feelings that people experience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And the thoughts that go along with it are always overwhelming. connected to some negative self-worth or levels of unhappiness, or even just feelings of I'm angry, I'm worried, it becomes reified into our own self-identity that I'm an angry person, I'm a worried person. And the idea behind decentering is to provide a healthy distance, psychological distance between oneself and one's thoughts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that distance, that disidentification from that internal experience is probably one of the most critical mechanisms by which any clinical intervention functions to improve our relationship to our own thoughts and feelings. And this requires strengthening the capacity of what we refer to as meta-awareness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So you can then take your thought and put it out in front of you and say, well, I'm not angry. I am having a thought that I'm angry or it's not that I am not good enough. It's just a thought that I am not good enough. And that distance, that disidentification from that internal experience is probably one of the most critical mechanisms by which
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Any clinical intervention functions to improve our relationship to our own thoughts and feelings and this requires strengthening the capacity of what we refer to as meta awareness. Right? And we've now. put these into our models for mindfulness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We've identified areas in the brain that are important for developing this skill, but it allows us to have that decentered experience with our thoughts and feelings and sensations. So we don't get tied into or feeling obstructed by, or those thoughts getting in the way of just everyday behaviors, right? There's
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
data in our lab and others that show specifically that there's a particular brain network called the frontal parietal brain network that allows you to gain insight and awareness of your sensations thoughts and feelings without being entangled by them or having those thoughts feelings and sensations be part of your own self-narrative there's another network called the default mode network
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
that is responsible for activating that self reflective narrative and usually it's associated with those negative types of thoughts i'm angry i'm worried i'm not good enough and that becomes part of our experience and if you have those kinds of thoughts of anger, sadness, anxiety, and fear. I'm not good enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
These negative sort of self-worth thoughts, they are actually influencing our, our physiology at the, even at the cellular level that they're leading to contributing to the risk factors for premature mortality, right? We're going to lead to chronic
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
inflammatory responses to those experiences that are leading to rises in blood pressure that contributes to our chronic stress states yeah meta-awareness and the process of decentering is probably one of the most critical skills that we develop through mindfulness practice or even any behavioral intervention like CBT, where you gain a healthier relationship to those thoughts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And you see the dynamics with these different brain networks very clearly in models of disease and dysfunction and health and wellness and interacting. So you have a better way of flexibly switching out of that narrative that's could be disruptive and into something that just allows you to be aware of those thoughts without identifying with them or letting them control us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Yes, we talk about the letting go process as one of the most critical, again, processes for the practice without getting stuck, right? So we know that whatever our attention grabs onto, the attention economy of our own brain and physiological system is such that whatever our attention grabs onto or gets a hold of creates a level of engagement
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So much so that it starts to be blind to everything else, right? And we see this all the time. And there's a phenomenon called change blindness, right? There's a classic study where you're asked to do a very specific thing that takes a lot of effort, counting the number of times a ball is thrown back and forth between individuals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And there's this big gorilla that comes in the room and stares right in the middle of the room and starts beating his chest and then walks off the camera. And you don't even see it. Often people don't even see that big gorilla came in because of this phenomenon of how engaged we are when we're focused. And some of the thoughts that are negative in content, we stick to so much so that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And we start ruminating right into this sort of reiterative cycle of stickiness that we often are no longer present to anything else that's happening around us. Right. That level of stickiness is strong. We're measuring it. We can see it that you're not responsive anymore to other things in your environment. We get tunnel vision and stuck in particular ways of seeing the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We no longer can engage with things around us. So mindfulness has been shown to reduce that level of stickiness that you can, and so much so that in advanced practitioners, it's at the level of milliseconds that you can see a difference of how people get stuck on an object or a thought. And in the practice, you talk about the training happens with, often the idea is rising and passing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That's what I was looking for. In the insight tradition, arising and passing is the training of learning to see an object, right? Okay. I always use this as an example. Here comes the cup and it's arising in your mental space. You pay attention to it and then it passes, right? The arising and passing of an object in space is exactly what we do with thoughts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We train to observe a thought as it arises and as it passes. And the more training you have in that technique, the better you're going to be able to let go of thoughts and just watch them as passing clouds in the sky. That is the essential mindfulness practice, is to not suppress anything that's in there that's all these different thoughts, because that's not going to help you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's just going to come back to haunt you later. but is to become more familiar with all those thoughts and just be aware of them. Welcome them in, right? That's the Rumi poem that is often described in these mindfulness interventions. It's the welcoming in of anything that arises in your mind, whether it's negative or positive, it doesn't matter, but to just become familiar with your own mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
and to then just watch these thoughts, feelings, and sensations move across your conscious awareness as if they're passing clouds in the sky. That is the ultimate practice of learning to let go of all the different obstructions that get in the way of cultivating that more fundamental part of practice, which is the prosocial connection,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
which is the experience of awe, of just of the things that are all around us, the feeling of gratitude that we're living and breathing and able to share that kind of experience with each other. So that's, you have to wipe away all the cobwebs first before you can really get into those more transcendent experiences. So it's essential to cultivate that level of attention and its stability first.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that's why Vipassana, mindfulness, these practices always start with just a concentration practice where it's just learn to stabilize attention first, then gain insight into your mental habits, and then work on the non-dual experience of dissolving a sense of self. And that speaks to really where the science and the field is going.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Like we are now contemplative science and contemplative research. thinks about the introduction of psychedelics as a way to manifest the mind with intensity. So you become very aware of what's happening in your mind and gives you the opportunity to go beyond it, to let those things go. They're just thoughts, just feelings, just sensations, and connect with something deeper and more profound.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Yeah, so David Yade and Jonathan Haidt, Andy Newberg and I actually wrote a paper on the experience of self-transcendence and created a model on this experience, like I referred to in the beginning, which was a feeling of being connected or union with self and others and this dissolution of dissolving a sense of ego or self.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that, yes, so that now David Yadin is at Johns Hopkins doing work with psilocybin specifically to look at whether that kind of experience, those sort of self-transcendent experiences can contribute to health outcomes. And the data seems to be suggesting yes, and much faster than a lot of the more behavioral interventions. So the question now with contemplative research
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
is how best can we combine the meditative and cognitive behavioral practices with psychedelics in clinical context to help improve outcomes. So self-transcendence, again, becomes a critical piece to how health and well-being are experienced in everyday life settings for people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's no longer this esoteric kind of experience you might have on a meditation retreat on the top of a mountain in Nepal, but it can be just going outside and looking at the sunset.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Sure. The way I described this model, and now I've actually added another final piece to that, which is self-integration. So if you think about a conventional self, right, we can think about I, me, and mine. Those are three ways to describe our conventional sense of self that arises from identifying with one's thoughts, emotions, and possessions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And this is foundational in the way we experience self-identity as separate from others and the world at large. We have our self and You have yourself and I, me, mine can be thought of in this sort of metaphoric way as a house. So the house can represent the I. It's the agentic feeling I am. It's the structure, the foundation. It's primary sort of identification points, what you can identify with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That's who I am. It's my house. And each room in the house represents the me. There are various roles and attributes that we identify with. You may be a father, you may be a play sports, so you're an athlete. And each one of those sort of attributes or selves are like different rooms, a kitchen, a bedroom study. We all have different roles or personas and they all fill these different rooms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The mine is the stuff we put in the house. It encompasses all of our possessions that belong to us, material objects. It could be our car. It could be intangible possessions. It could be like beliefs or memories even. That's the mine, the stuff we put in the house or in the rooms. And so
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That from the Buddhist perspective, this, I mean, mind complex, um, is problematic because it leads to attachment. We cling to the positive experiences. We fear the negative ones becomes this rollercoaster of emotions. It gives rise to the dualities, the separation of self and other of mine and yours good and bad. It's impermanent, as we know, everything in our reality is impermanent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And so we cling to those things and it causes suffering. Self-awareness allows us to step outside the house and just we're not just one room or another room. We have this composite, right, that the ourself is comprised of this entire house. And that's insight into our true nature of what's expansive or interconnected more than we realize on an everyday basis.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We realize how ourselves kind of work in different contexts and that we're not just one room or even the entire house. were actually realized that there are other houses also in the neighborhood that their other selves and that we're all part of this vast neighborhood and that all of our experiences are interconnected and interdependent all the different windows that we can look out into the world
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
provide us perspective, but that the individual really is the community and the community is the individual. This is actually a fundamental principle by the Ubuntu practice to realize how we are one. And there's some really great Pani Shad stories that talk about how ourselves are connected to the greater whole. And so through awareness,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We recognize our own needs, our wants, our fears, our expectations, that our self-identity and how it's distinct from needs, wants, fears, and expectations of others. And this is a relative reality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And once you gain insight into our own mental habits and realize that this is a very relative view of the world, one of the biases that we come to the world with is that is the whole world, is only what we see. But there is this absolute reality that's beyond our own senses, right? So we hear between 20,000 to 20,000 hertz, for example.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It doesn't mean that sound doesn't exist below 20 hertz or above 20,000 hertz. It's just our reality is relative to what our sensory apparatus can detect and translate into something meaningful. So once you realize that there's an absolute reality, We expand our awareness, and this leads to what we refer to as self-transcendence.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's the ability to recognize that there are boundaries between self and other, and that we can dissolve them or begin to dissolve them when our perspective becomes more non-dual and more unified. That's something that we can investigate also with a scientific lens. This is the self-transcendent. and we can't forget about self-regulation, which is critical to just surviving in this world.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's how do we manage our impulses, um how do we be mindful of our tendencies to act our habits and to regulate them in ways that are going to lead to better health outcomes so these are all techniques that we can use to just be better humans in this reality so with self-awareness and the insight you get the self-regulation
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
that necessary to survive in this sort of society and in the community and the self-transcendence you get from the non-duality of our experiences all leads to one real great view of navigating all these perspectives of self and integrating them into a unified embodied narrative that is really holistic in nature, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We see the whole individual and our relationship to all others on the planet and that gives us a more full picture of our experience in relation to the world. That is the model, the SART model
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Now start to I, that helps us better understand and integrate all of these different insights and perspectives into one coherent sort of experience of self or the I-me mind complex and transcending it, not attaching to it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's really just a practice that through that decentering process gives you a pathway for allowing you to become aware of ourselves, our mental habits, and to work with that kind of experience to be more aware, just a better human being in general. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Great to be here again with you, John. Really great time to think about being PassionStruck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
There's some resistance. Of course, grit is just another technique, right, to help you with self-regulation, right, to get really develop resilience. The only problem I see with grit is that it could lead to conflict with one's own goals. It may not be able to get through a difficult, challenging experience alone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that could leave you feeling unsatisfied or unsuccessful in your attempts to reach those goals. And that's where acceptance practice can be very helpful. And there's aspects of even co-regulation with others or connection that can help you so you're not completely relying on just oneself. For grit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And there's always a growth mindsets that help with the tools to develop self regulatory capacity. And again, this is all about just calming the mind, right, all the mental afflictions that come with having a mind. have to be tamed in some way. So inhibitory control, learning how to deal with impulses, but also just learning to regulate and stabilize flexibly your attention is critical.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that leads to the most fundamental part of self-regulation, which is equanimity, to be able to respond to challenges without reacting and to weather the storm, even maybe the sound of a dog barking in the background without letting it disrupt your level of calm, for example.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Let's try to unpack that a little. So memory, of course, has its nuances and complications of how a memory is formed in different modalities, right? So you have different sensory modalities that you have an experience with, and each one has a unique way of consolidating into some permanent trace in your brain and that's subject to retrieval later.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
You can recall that experience in some reconstructed way and think about it. And unfortunately, if you really think about memory enough, you realize how very little we can recall about our life.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
You think about some of the most profound moments in our lives that we can recall, and they're always associated with intense arousal or some sort of high level of emotion, and often some sort of trauma, unfortunately. So it's the way that memory is, or that experiences are encoded into our memory It really depends on those factors of intensity and arousal and emotion.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
If there's a need for there to be a learned experience that we want to be able to recall later in an episodic way, meaning there's a feeling state associated with it, there's maybe some visual kind of representation that we can recall. Maybe there's other sensory aspects of the memory that we want to bring back later.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That's very unique to say something like riding a bike and learning how to ride a bike because that's also a memory, but it's a skill based memory that we refer to as a procedural or skill based type of memory. And in fact, even automatized thoughts can also engage the same circuitry as riding a bike or skill based procedural types of memory.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's but those are fundamentally different types of memories that are created. And we just have to recognize that they're different and involve different circuitry. There's basal ganglia, for example, that are really important for skill based learning. And you don't have to explicitly recall them. They don't use a language to know how to ride a bike when you get on it. Your body knows. Right.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So it's very much more an embodied kind of form of memory. The more explicit forms of memory that are declarative in nature, that rote memorization that we're used to is reading facts and being able to regurgitate those are also much more complicated for humans because it just takes much more effort to encode and consolidate and then be able to retrieve them later.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
There's a whole biochemical cascade of events that happens during an event of memory over experience in order for it to be consolidated into short-term or working memory and then later stored into long-term storage where you can recall it easily. There's also habits of thinking that repeat themselves over time and that become much more difficult to change if they happen over repeatedly.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The metaphor for this actually was created by Ralph Gerard in the 1940s and Donald Hebb when they talked about long-term potentiation and how cellular processes work to create a memory trace. And the metaphor is the sandcastle. It's a really nice way to think about the experience of water trickling down over a sandcastle. And at first it creates grooves in that sandcastle.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Oh, sure. Well, I was saying before we started this, we forget there was a pandemic that happened that shut down the whole world for two years. Since 2020, yes, I was an associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a faculty member at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. I was a director of research for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And then over time, the water, as it repeats the same patterns, it will make deeper and deeper grooves. Another theoretical model that just came out more recently by Robin Carhart-Harris, he talks about canalization. And this sort of station is the deepening of the canals of those memories.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And so if it's traumatic, it's going to be even deeper groove and much harder to change if it has that intense emotion or a level of arousal tied to it. That's what happens with memories that are especially destructive mental habits that related to trauma.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that's why psychedelics may actually have a real profound ability to extinguish those types of traumatic memories because they have a dramatic way of inducing neuroplasticity to change that canalization that may have happened over time. over trauma, over intensity. And the only way to get out of that deep groove is another sort of intense kind of experience.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That's what happens with exposure therapy as well. When you expose yourself to something that was previously traumatic, it allows you to experience the same sort of sensory modalities of the experience, but reconsolidate them in a more adaptive kind of trajectory.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Not an easy thing to do, but much easier to do when you're exposed to the same context and then changing the outcome, changing instead of something that was deeply hurtful, you're making something positive out of it. That's how extinction works to replace or compete with existing. There's controversy over whether the actual original trace is actually deleted or that you're just competing
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
with the old memory trace with something more adaptive that's how the memories will change so fundamentally we can say different types of memory episodic declarative procedural these are very different circuitries involved you say that there's a very clear time course of having experience to the point where you consolidate the memory and can recall it and anywhere along that biochemical cascade you can interfere with it
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And in fact, sometimes if you interfere at the right time with the right chemicals, you could really weaken the memory through like protein kinase blocking or like CAMK2 or PKA, PKC. These are different kinase or enzymes that are responsible for helping the memory trace encode.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And then you can also use those kinds of chemicals to help either facilitate a recall later or to block it even more after the memory has moved into long-term storage. So there's a lot of research that's still happening along those lines to help people How do you reduce the impact of something that may be traumatic?
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Is there something you can take right after a traumatic event to reduce the traumatic nature of it affecting later behavior or thoughts? Or how do you stop it from being overwhelming later on when you have to expose to that memory that is intrusive into your everyday life?
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
I was really excited about all the opportunities to do research, specifically looking at mechanisms by which mind-body practices like meditation, yoga, breathwork function to improve health and well-being outcomes. What I realized, though, at 2020 during the pandemic was, aside from being stuck and not being able to do any research,
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It is incredible. It's not legal yet, but once it does get approved by the FDA, it's likely to revolutionize how we work with trauma and treatment protocols specifically to help reduce the impact, the long-term impact. of trauma. Stanislav Graf, one of the pioneers in the field of psychedelics, will be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
I believe that because it has a profound ability to hijack the neuroplastic sort of effects of serotonin in the brain. And there's not only is there an ability to help reconsolidate memories that have been traumatic.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
But there's a sense of meaningfulness that comes out of those transcendent kinds of experiences that most participants will say that it's among the top 10 or five most meaningful experiences of their life, right? And that compared to placebo is dramatic difference.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So it's not only is it hijacking this special circuitry that this 5-HT2A serotonin receptor binding induces this real change in neuroplasticity where now a real sort of what you call is you take a memory trace that may be traumatic, you make it labile, meaning normal. You make it temporarily pliable or plastic such that you can now change it.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And you're taking that memory, you're using pharmacology to make a traumatic memory susceptible to a more adaptive type of experience that you remember. not in a positive way, but in a way that you can more easily cope with.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It has these dramatic abilities to work along with the behavioral approach that you get in psychotherapy to augment the necessary changes in those kinds of traumatic memories that are going to be therapeutic.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
was that there was a great need for scaling what we're finding in the sciences, in the neurosciences, the neuropsychiatric sciences, also in integrative medicine, to bring that to the world more in a scalable way. There was lots of people who were consuming meditation, mind-body practice from apps and digital health companies that were starting to emerge.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It's a really good point, and psilocybin and MDMA have shown to do that. In fact, even MDMA, which has been even more successful in the VA system, or people who experience trauma, especially related to war, There's this increased feeling, ratings of loving, sociability, friendliness that come with that. So that decreases the ability to detect hostile faces.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It decreases that feeling of rejection, even after playing competitive games. So it helps really, I think, break down some of the boundaries or or walls that people put up to defend them. The fragility of that sense of self that's been wounded and then allows you to work with that, right? Leveraging the plasticity that happens just from using those. But again, it's always done in the context of
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
A lot of scaffolding around help. What does it mean to break down this I, me, mind complex? Right. That's transformative. And I think as we talk about integration of spiritual well-being into our concept of whole person health.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That kind of self-transcendent experience that contributes to deep, profound shifts in our traumatic memories are really going to be how it's bringing the sacred into the everyday. It's helping us promote sense of meaning, facing something greater than oneself, but also a level of just overall being from the deeply profound experiences that we can have that are beyond the self.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
as central to alleviating suffering both at an individual level but maybe also at a societal level yeah one of the ways that that i think are really critical right now is well dialogue is really critical interdisciplinary dialogue from diverse disciplines and studying the mind consciousness from multiple perspectives i think contributes to the alleviation of suffering and one of the ways
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
directly, especially right now, given all the conflict in the world, is the emergence of this new technology, AI. We haven't really talked about it, but AI, artificial intelligence, is starting to be designed or with consciousness-like qualities. And how we integrate that into our everyday experience is going to be critical to the future of humanity. So there are ways of thinking about
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Empathy, emotional complexity, meaning making, purpose, moral agency, responsibility, even creativity. All of these kinds of fundamentally human characteristics are now being translated into these AI systems. And I think the big opportunity for us is to use those for good. I think there are ways that we can leverage our technologies that will help us rather than harm us.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And that is an opportunity that I think even the contemplative research field can contribute to in a positive way. And that's where I think there's the sort of a real shift in our society and in driving sort of digital kinds of therapeutic tools for health and wellbeing to really scale all of the wisdom-based traditions that are out there in dramatic ways.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We know that the best teachings are great wisdom holder And one individual and that relationship is going to lead to improving people's suffering. But if we really need scalable solutions, then we have to embrace the fact that technology is going to be part of that equation.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
That's where people were getting information. That's where they were getting their practices and content. But they weren't really backed by a lot of science. In fact, there was very little science happening there. So I had the opportunity to start working remotely for the digital health industry. And my wife's a clinical psychologist. So we decided we also we were living in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And I think contemplative research is one perspective that will help design AI systems that, for example, can embody those human qualities, but in a more ethical kind of way. The ethics piece is critical, though.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Yeah, the society actually is trying to create research networks around AI and contemplative practice or what it's like to be human and using those kinds of characteristics to really think about ethically and responsibly integrating those kinds of human-like characteristics into AI systems that are being built. So yes, let's connect again in the future. I'll let you know how that's going.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The ISCR is really trying to build lots of these kinds of opportunities for working groups where we focus on high priority research topics like self-transcendence and spiritual health or AI and human consciousness. to figure out the best ways that our society will benefit from those conversations.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
In fact, there's going to be a mind and life meeting next year that's going to focus on AI systems and consciousness from a contemplative perspective. So I'll be happy to come back and report to you on how that goes.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
The best place, if you're interested in what I've been doing with contemplative research and digital health industry, you can go to contemplativeneurosciences.com. Or if you want to really connect with the community of contemplative research, check out iscrsociety.org. The society is really doing the bulk of connections across countries.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
both meditation, mindfulness, integrative health, and psychedelic science to really benefit humanity. So check them out when you get a chance. ICR.org and contemplativeneurosciences.com if you want to see more about my work personally.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Really great. I love your questions. Thanks, John. And thanks to all your community members who are out there listening. You can always reach me through my website. So I look forward to continuing the dialogue and we'll come back another 500 episodes later and see where we're at. Awesome. Okay. Thank you for the opportunity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So we had some desire to leave politics of the United States and move to Canada. So that's what we did. We picked up, we got in the car, drove to Canada. My wife's Canadian. I'm now a permanent resident. We live in beautiful British Columbia where our family's very happy living here. It's beautiful. We're very attracted to the mountains and the lifestyle and the community here is just fantastic.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
But I've now moved full time into doing consulting for the digital health industry. helping develop science, not only in product design and doing things in an informed way, but also making sure that the metrics of health are embedded into these kinds of products that people are consuming at very large rates.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
People really are looking for solutions and we want to provide scalable ones that have real credibility, that actually move the needle for living well, for health span, for longevity, for the most profound, deep experiences of well-being that we last time referred to as self-transcendence or spiritual health.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Especially now that we look at the data of who's suffering in the world, it's one out of every four people in the entire world are experiencing a debilitating mental health crisis of some sorts, whether it's actual diagnosed condition or whether they're just having existential angst or dealing with trauma, being around war. It's happening
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
in our direct family units and we have to address it in the most approachable, relatable, scalable ways. And that's where I'm really at right now. I still do a lot of academic work. consult on research grants at Vanderbilt. Still, we're looking at the effects of meditation and sleep and breath work on the glymphatic system of the brain, which is a metabolic waste clearance system.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
I'm also an advisory board for the Thich Nhat Hanh Center of Mindfulness at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Sad Guru Center for a Conscious Planet, also part of Harvard Medical School. working with UPenn and their masters in positive psychology program, the Mind and Life Institute still.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
And I'm president now of also the International Society for Contemplative Research, which is an academic society that's focused on studying contemplative practices across the spectrum of different modalities within society. So education, healthcare, and even in the humanities. So we're really trying to focus and broaden how contemplative practices can be researched across the spectrum of society.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
It definitely weighs heavy on me to think about what matters and that I try to think about waking up in the morning and thinking about how can you have the most impact today and starting there given everyone has certain skills. And there is this sense that I think as humans, we all have a calling or feeling inside that says, This is something that you're really attracted to. Do this.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
Mine really has been about science and human flourishing. One of the premises that I tried to live by is the mission of Mind and Life. I used to have the Mind and Life Institute used to have a mission. Right now it's bridging science and contemplative wisdom to foster insight and inspire action. towards flourishing.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
I'm much more interested in the science and using my neuroscience background to help provide a scientific understanding of the mind and the mind, body, brain connections to help reduce suffering and promote human flourishing. So what are the ways that we can accomplish that kind of mission? We can do it through dialogue.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
We can do it through science and research, and especially with interdisciplinary groups, right? So everyone from the philosophical traditions, the wisdom-based contemplative traditions, but then the neurosciences and the clinical sciences. How are we all speaking together to accomplish this goal we have for humanity, which if depression and anxiety
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
If one out of every four individuals is experiencing a depression and anxiety that's debilitating and life debilitating, meaning like they, it affects how they even get up in the morning and not be able to take care of themselves. People are suffering at higher levels than any time ever in human history. And it's increasing dramatically. Like between 2019 and 2020, it was one in eight people
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
back in 2020. And that was a 35% increase of rates of depression and anxiety just due to the pandemic starting. And the World Health Organization just put out data for last year that showed that it's no longer one in eight, it's one out of every four. And so no matter what we think we're doing to help, the world is still in need of
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
dramatic changes in order for not only us to sustain life in a capacity where everyone's happy and flourishing and well fed and just living a life of peace and comfort, but in order for humanity to flourish, The earth has to be taken care of too. The planet is going to die.
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Dr. Dave Vago on the Neuroscience of Mattering: How to Feel Valued & Seen | EP 565
So there's a lot of real critical opportunities here for us to leverage our feelings of calling to do something for not just ourselves, but for the sake of humanity. I just try to bring my own scientific lens to that calling and provide insight from that perspective.
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How Deep Work Unleashes Five Keys to Mattering in Life | EP 564
The idea behind decentering is to provide a healthy psychological distance between oneself and one's thoughts. So you can then... take your thought and put it out in front of you and say, well, I'm not angry. I am having a thought that I'm angry, or it's not that I am not good enough. It's just a thought that I am not good enough.
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How Deep Work Unleashes Five Keys to Mattering in Life | EP 564
And that distance, that disidentification from that internal experience is probably one of the most critical mechanisms by which any clinical intervention functions to improve our relationship to our own thoughts and feelings. And this requires strengthening the capacity of what we refer to as meta-awareness. Here's the deal.