Richard Davidson Quotes

Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

In short, the brain has the power to recruit healthy neurons to perform the function of the damaged ones. Neuroplasticity enables the brain to reassign jobs.

As a result, nature has endowed the human brain with a malleability and flexibility that lets it adapt to the demands of the world it finds itself in. The brain is neither immutable nor static but continuously remodeled by the lives we lead.

Which one hadn't he walked down? Was it Barkovitch? Collie Parker? Percy What'shisname? Who was it? 'GARRATY!' the crowd screamed deliriously. 'GARRATY, GARRATY, GARRATY!' Was it Scramm? Gribble? Davidson? A hand on his shoulder. Garraty shook it off impatiently. The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk.

Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist. He discovered that people who have greater activity in the left frontal lobe, compared to the right, are by temperament cheerful; they typically take delight in people and in what life presents them with, bouncing back from setbacks as my aunt June did. But those with relatively greater activity on the right side are given to negativity and sour moods, and are easily fazed by life’s difficulties; in a sense, they seem to suffer because they cannot turn off their worries and depressions. In

In my research, I have discovered practical, effective ways to do so. I’ll explain more in chapter 11, but for now let it suffice to say that you can modify your Emotional Style to improve your resilience, social intuition, sensitivity to your own internal emotional and physiological states, coping mechanisms, attention, and sense of well-being. The amazing fact is that through mental activity alone we can intentionally change our own brains. Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can alter brain function in specific circuits,

But the scientists had the other half of their group of volunteers only imagine playing the notes; they did not actually touch the ivories. Then the researchers measured whether the motor cortex had noticed. It had. The region that controls the fingers of the right hand had expanded in the virtual pianists just as it had in the volunteers who had actually played the piano. Thinking, and thinking alone, had increased the amount of space the motor cortex devoted to a specific function.

recent research has shown that when we empathize, the brain activates many of the same networks as when we ourselves experience pain, physical or otherwise.

Happiness can be trained because the very structure of our brain can be modified

People who are very Tuned In to context tend to have strong connections from the hippocampus to areas in the prefrontal cortex that control executive functions and that hold long-term memories in the neocortex.

A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. 31 Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up.

One of the difficulties I experienced in trying to learn about the biology of emotions was the definition of terms...How would [Prof. Richard Davidson], as an experimental psychologist, deconstruct [hope]? "I understand hope as an emotion made up of two parts: a cognitive part and an affective part. When we hope for something, we employ, to some degree, our cognition, marshalling information and data relevant to a desired future event. If...you are suffering with a serious illness and you hope for improvement, even for a cure, you have to generate a different vision of your condition in your mind. That picture is painted in part by assimilating information about the disease and its potential treatments. "But hope also involves what I would call affective forecasting--that is, the comforting, energizing, elevating feeling that you experience when you project in your mind a positive future. This requires the brain to generate a different affective, or feeling, state than the one you are currently in.

mindfulness meditation will transform your reactivity to the signals by turning down the volume on your amygdala and orbital frontal cortex. But if you have trouble discriminating internal bodily cues, mindfulness meditation can amplify them by increasing the gain on the insula.

you will think about someone you care about, such as your parents, sibling, or beloved, and will let your mind be invaded by a feeling of altruistic love (wishing well-being) or of compassion (wishing freedom from suffering) toward them. After some training you will generate such feeling toward all beings and without thinking specifically about someone. While in the scanner, you will try to generate this state of loving-kindness and compassion until an unconditional feeling of loving-kindness and compassion pervades the whole mind as a way of being, with no other consideration or discursive thoughts.

A different approach was taken in 1972 by Dr. Walter Mischel, also of Stanford, who analyzed yet another characteristic among children: the ability to delay gratification. He pioneered the use of the “marshmallow test,” that is, would children prefer one marshmallow now, or the prospect of two marsh-mallows twenty minutes later? Six hundred children, aged four to six, participated in this experiment. When Mischel revisited the participants in 1988, he found that those who could delay gratification were more competent than those who could not. In 1990, another study showed a direct correlation between those who could delay gratification and SAT scores. And a study done in 2011 indicated that this characteristic continued throughout a person’s life. The results of these and other studies were eye-opening. The children who exhibited delayed gratification scored higher on almost every measure of success in life: higher-paying jobs, lower rates of drug addiction, higher test scores, higher educational attainment, better social integration, etc. But what was most intriguing was that brain scans of these individuals revealed a definite pattern. They showed a distinct difference in the way the prefrontal cortex interacted with the ventral striatum, a region involved in addiction. (This is not surprising, since the ventral striatum contains the nucleus accumbens, known as the “pleasure center.” So there seems to be a struggle here between the pleasure-seeking part of the brain and the rational part to control temptation, as we saw in Chapter 2.) This difference was no fluke. The result has been tested by many independent groups over the years, with nearly identical results. Other studies have also verified the difference in the frontal-striatal circuitry of the brain, which appears to govern delayed gratification. It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification. Although this is a gross simplification, what these brain scans show is that the connection between the prefrontal and parietal lobes seems to be important for mathematical and abstract thought, while the connection between the prefrontal and limbic system (involving the conscious control of our emotions and pleasure center) seems to be essential for success in life. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

It is agreeable to imagine a future in which the tiresome ‘analytic–Continental split’ is looked back upon as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication – a future in which Sellars and Habermas, Davidson and Gadamer, Putnam and Derrida, Rawls and Foucault, are seen as fellow-travelers on the same journey, fellow-citizens of what Michael Oakeshott called a civitas pelegrina. (Rorty 1997a, pp. 11–12)

She goes on to recount how she “once found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a bit of a daze in Davidson’s food market. He told me in hushed tones that he’d just seen Gödel in the frozen food aisle.

It is superficial and misleading to claim that pragmatism came to an end with the arrival of analytic philosophy. On the contrary, after the linguistic turn, philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson were able to refine and advance themes that were anticipated by the classical pragmatists. The most original and creative thinking of the best analytic philosophers advances the cause of pragmatism and helps to bring about the sea change that the classical pragmatists initiated.

It is true that the role of Satan is not strongly emphasized in Scripture before the time of the Babylonian Exile, while polytheism is rampant in the ancient Near East. An emphasis upon Satan during this time would have been too easily misunderstood as a rival god to Yahweh. But this is not to say that the knowledge of Santan was nonexistent until postexilic times (Issues in Revelation and Inspiration, p. 117).

Generosity is so important in all of the world’s religions because it no doubt expresses a fundamental aspect of our interdependence and our need for one another. Generosity was so important for our survival that the reward centers of our brain light up as strongly when we give as when we receive, sometimes even more so. As mentioned earlier, Richard Davidson and his colleagues have identified that generosity is one of the four fundamental brain circuits that map with long-term well-being. In the 2015 World Happiness Report, Davidson and Brianna Schuyler explained that one of the strongest predictors of well-being worldwide is the quality of our relationships. Generous, pro-social behavior seems to strengthen these relationships across cultures. Generosity is even associated with better health and longer life expectancy. Generosity seems to be so powerful that, according to researchers David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit, just thinking about

Research from other labs had linked the neural synchrony of high-frequency brain waves to mental processes such as attention, working memory, learning, and conscious perception; the suspicion is that by firing in sync, neurons cause far-flung networks to work together, with the result that cognitive and emotional processes become more integrated and coherent.

This study, which we published in 2007, provided strong evidence that the brain’s attention systems can be trained. Like any form of workout, from weight lifting to cycling to learning a second language, it causes an enduring change in the system that is engaged. In this case, that change is the ability to maintain laser-sharp concentration with less and less activity in the brain’s attention circuit.

This happens when someone who is hyper-focused on social context becomes emotionally paralyzed, so intent on parsing every nuance of the social environment that—like a dinner guest taking her place at an elaborately set table and finding six forks flanking her plate—she is afraid of making the wrong move. Similarly, someone who is extremely sensitive to context might shape her behavior to what she thinks the situation demands, presenting herself as one kind of person to her spouse, another kind to her boss, and still another kind to her friends, until soon she begins to doubt her own sincerity and authenticity.

Then we carefully fitted a hairnet with electrodes sewn in place over each volunteer’s scalp, first soaking each sensor’s sponge tip in salt water so it would conduct electrical impulses better. From the control room next door, another assistant monitored the electrical contacts, yelling over the intercom when one needed to be fixed: “Eighty-seven in the right frontal region; thirty-six in the right parietal region!” (In that case, we would use a syringe to drip a little more salt solution onto the electrode’s sponge.) Each participant got a plastic cape to keep the drips off his or her clothes, so between the electrode-studded hairnets and the capes it looked like we were running a futuristic beauty salon.

I didn’t trust the film clips we’d been using to induce the emotions we wanted in infants (it takes a more developed comic sensibility to find bathing gorillas amusing, after all), so I decided to go with the basics: video clips of an actress laughing or crying.

First, babies are very expressive emotionally, giggling or crying or recoiling in terror or disgust so strongly that you have no doubt what they’re feeling. Also, babies are blissfully ignorant of social constraints. An adult might try to stifle a guffaw if he thinks the humor in a video clip is sophomoric (albeit hilarious) and censor a disgusted grimace if he thinks showing disgust is unmanly. Babies wear their emotions on their sleeves.

Only when both muscle groups participated did we see a shift toward greater left-side activation in the brain. This finding supports the folk wisdom that if you intentionally produce a genuine smile, you will feel happier. We now had brain data to prove it.

Yet we had fingered the prefrontal cortex. This region was considered the seat of human reason, the locus of forethought and wisdom and rationality and other cognitive functions that distinguish us from “lower” animals. But we were saying it rules our emotions, too—and that the barricade that psychology had erected between reason and emotion has no basis in fact.

And nothing against the Dicks and Richards of the world, but I always disliked that one. Call me immature if you like—I’ve earned it many times over—but come on: The word. Is slang. For penis. If he was a woman named Virginia, would he insist we refer to him as Vag? I think not! (God, I hope not.)

It is rare that the human mind can determine the truths of nature, or even of ourselves, by intuition or casual observation. That

[...] experiența noastră nu este bazată pe percepția directă a ceea ce se întâmplă, ci, într-o mai mare măsură, pe așteptările și proiecțiile noastre, pe gândurile obișnuite și reacțiile pe care am învățat să le avem ca răspuns și pe un număr uriaș de procese neuronale. Trăim într-o lume pe care mintea noastră o construiește mai degrabă decât să perceapă detaliile nesfârșite a ceea ce se întâmplă.

Gradul de inflamare în creier și corp joacă un rol important pentru cât de gravă va fi o boală precum Alzheimer, astm sau diabet. Deși adesea de natură psihologică, stresul face un rău și mai mare inflamației, aparent parte a unui răspuns biologic străvechi, cu scopul de a avertiza asupra pericolului care va dispune de resursele corpului pentru însănătoșire. (Un alt semn al acestui răspuns: faptul că vrei să te odihnești când ai gripă). În vreme ce, în preistorie, amenintările care declanșau aceste reacții erau fizice, ca de exemplu ceva ce ne piutea mânca, în zilele noastre, cauzele psihologice sunt elementul declanșator - un partener furios sau un comentariu critic. Cu toate acestea, reacțiile corpului sunt aceleași, inclusiv supărarea emoțională.

Pielea umană are un număr neobișnuit de mare de terminații nervoase (aproximativ cinci sute pe doi centimetri pătrați), fiecare fiind o cale prin care creierul trimite semnale pentru ceea ce se numește inflamație „neurogenică”, provocată de creier. Dermatologii au observat că stresul poate avea ca rezultat semnale luminoase sau tulburări inflamatorii cum ar fi psoriazisul sau eczemele. Asta face ca pielea să fie un laborator minunat pentru studierea impactului supărător asupra sănătății noastre.

There are many interpretations of the word “mindfulness.” Its most common interpretation involves the use of meditation. But mindfulness includes many other aspects. One is contemplation. Being mindfully aware may sound difficult at first, but it’s not. Nor is it something we have to work hard to achieve. Mindful awareness is simply paying attention to what is happening now. In doing nothing other than living in the moment for a few minutes, we can let thoughts and feelings come and go without holding on to them or judging them. In doing so, we build the muscles of concentration, observation, and relaxation all at the same time. This is different from thinking, in which we often judge each moment on what has been or what could be. I sometimes call it mind-full awareness because the mind is full of nothing but a gentle focus on the breath. It is the direct opposite to being mind-less. Mindlessness is when we are on autopilot and not paying attention to the present moment. We’ve all been there. We sometimes feel as though we are sleepwalking through our lives. Minutes, hours, even days can go by that we don’t fully recall because we don’t feel aware of what is happening. By sitting and mindfully breathing for ten minutes a day, in as little as eight weeks you strengthen the part of the prefrontal cortex involved in generating positive feelings and diminish the part that generates negative ones. —Richard Davidson, PhD Sometimes in mindlessness we find ourselves reacting automatically in negative ways—lashing out or saying things we later regret. We ask ourselves, “Why did I do that?” or “Who was in charge of my mouth?” It doesn’t have to be this way. We all have the ability to become more present. First we have to truly believe it is possible. Then we create the intention. The more we tune in to our own thoughts and feelings, the more choices we give ourselves in terms of our responses. The key to all these mindful practices is to keep going and not be overcritical of ourselves. Whenever we become aware that our minds have wandered from our practice, we just gently refocus. Learning expert Tim Gallwey calls this “awareness without judgment” and claims that it is one of the greatest tools for learning in what he describes as the “inner game.” The more we reinforce this message, the more we improve our own focus—and the more we help our children accept that they can make mistakes without being overcritical of themselves. One

Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had been meditating for more than forty years when he redirected his research to the effects of meditation on the brain. This shift in his work occurred at a meeting with the Dalai Lama, who wondered at the focus of his research: “You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to study depression, and anxiety, and fear. Why can’t you use these same tools to study kindness and compassion?”11 This question would lead him on a journey to find out just how much we can learn from EEG.

Richard Davidson,

Richard Davidson who is a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin has expertise in the brain and emotion, and he’s found in his research that when we’re agitated, when we are upset and angry and anxious, there’s a lot of activity in the right prefrontal area, just behind the forehead, also the amygdala, the brain’s trigger point for the fight-flight-freeze response, when we’re on the other hand in a really positive state, I feel great, enthusiastic, what a wonderful day, there’s a lot of activity on the left side and no activity on the right side, each of us have a ratio at rest of right-to-left activity that predicts our mood range day to day. He finds there’s a bell curve for this like for IQ, most of us are in the middle, we have bad days, we have good days, if you’re very far to the right you may be clinically depressed or clinically anxious, if you’re very far to the left, you’re very resilient, you bounce right back from setbacks. So Davidson paired up with a fella named Jon Kabat-Zinn who has made mindfulness, as he calls it, very popular, for example, in the medical sector, as a way to manage chronic conditions, and also in the states of business recently, a lot of businesses are bringing it in, and it’s more or less what we just did. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn went to a biotech start-up, a 24/7 you know high pressure environment and they taught people how to do mindfulness which is more or less the exercise of watching the breath, but they did it 30 minutes a day, for 8 weeks. What he found was that before that people’s brains were tilted to the right, they’re pretty hassled and stressed, after eight weeks, 30 minutes a day, they were tilting back towards the left and what’s very interesting is people spontaneously started saying: “Hey, you know, I’m starting to enjoy my work again, I remember what I love about this job”. In other words the positive mood was really making a difference.

Empathy meant that people felt the pain of those who were suffering. But when another group instead got instructions in compassion - feeling love for those suffering - their brains activated a completely different set of circuits, those for parental love of a child.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Often the question of which books were used for research in the Merry series is asked. So, here is a list (in no particular order). While not comprehensive, it contains the major sources. An Encyclopedia of Faeries by Katharine Briggs Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend by Miranda J. Green Celtic Goddesses by Miranda J. Green Dictionary of Celtic Mythology by Peter Berresford Ellis Goddesses in World Mythology by Martha Ann and Dorothy Myers Imel A Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz Pagan Celtic Britain by Anne Ross The Ancient British Goddesses by Kathy Jones Fairy Tradition in Britain by Lewis Spense One Hundred Old Roses for the American Garden by Clair G. Martin Taylor’s Guide to Roses Pendragon by Steve Blake and Scott Lloyd Kings and Queens from Collins Gem Butterflies of Europe: A Princeton Guide by Tom Tolman and Richard Lewington Butterflies and Moths of Missouri by J. Richard and Joan E. Heitzman Dorling Kindersly Handbook: Butterflies and Moths by David Carter The Natural World of Bugs and Insects by Ken and Rod Preston Mafham Big Cats: Kingdom of Might by Tom Brakefield Just Cats by Karen Anderson Wild Cats of the World by Art Wolfe and Barbara Sleeper Beauty and the Beast translated by Jack Zipes The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm translated by Jack Zipes Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old by Ralph Manheim Complete Guide to Cats by the ASPCA Field Guide to Insects and Spiders from the National Audubon Society Mammals of Europe by David W. MacDonald Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham Northern Mysteries and Magick by Freya Aswym Cabbages and Kings by Jonathan Roberts Gaelic: A Complete Guide for Beginners The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley Holland The Penguin Companion to Food by Alan Davidson

As one looks at the Torah, the five books of Moses, some forty-five whole chapters are devoted entirely to the subject of the sanctuary and its services. Some forty-five additional chapters in the Prophets and Writings (the two other major divisions of the Hebrew Bible) focus upon the same subject—not to mention the whole book of Psalms, comprising the music of the sanctuary. The Old Testament is, in fact, saturated with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sanctuary references and allusions, forming a dominant motif throughout its thirty-nine books.11