Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson joins Frontiers in Health & Happiness to explore the science of well-being, meditation, mindfulness, compassion, and how training the mind can physically reshape the brain. He shares fascinating insights from studying the brains of monks, discovering how long-term meditation may make them different from untrained people, and reflects on his decades-long friendship with the Dalai Lama and its influence on his work.
What if happiness, compassion, and resilience were not fixed traits, but skills you could train? In this episode of Frontiers in Health & Happiness, Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, explains how simple practices like meditation and mindfulness can help reshape the brain and support a healthier, more meaningful life.
Dr. Davidson shares some of the most fascinating findings from his decades of neuroscience research, including what he discovered while studying the brains of monks and long-term meditation practitioners. Their brains showed striking differences from those of untrained people, including patterns linked to deep awareness—and evidence suggesting their brains may even age more slowly.
The conversation also brings the science down to earth, exploring how anyone can build well-being through small daily practices. Dr. Davidson discusses the Healthy Minds Program app and its four pillars—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—showing how even a few minutes a day can help reduce stress, strengthen compassion, and support human flourishing.
Along the way, Dr. Davidson reflects on his friendship with the Dalai Lama, whose warmth, curiosity, and questions about the mind helped inspire a lifetime of research. Join us for an accessible conversation about mindfulness, meditation, happiness, compassion, brain health, and what it means to care for the mind in everyday life.
Resources discussed in this episode:
Ayla Fudala: Hello and welcome to Frontiers in Health and Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My name is Ayla Fudala, Senior Communications Coordinator, and I'll be asking experts how to live a healthy, happy life.
You're listening to our Virtues for Well-being series, where we're exploring how core human virtues like purpose, empathy, generosity and caring shape our physical, mental and social health. Over the course of the series, we're looking at how these qualities are defined and measured, what the science says about their impact on both individuals and communities, and how we can intentionally cultivate them in everyday life.
Today, we're extending that exploration inward to the mind and the brain with Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. Dr. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of Humin, a global nonprofit dedicated to turning the science of well-being into practical tools for daily life. He has authored more than 600 scientific papers, and co-written The Emotional Life of Your Brain with Sharon Begley and Altered Traits with Daniel Goleman. His latest book, Born to Flourish, created with Courtland Dahl, was released this March.
In our conversation, Dr. Davidson will walk us through evidence that how we train our minds can literally reshape our brains. We'll talk about how qualities such as happiness, resilience, compassion and emotional balance are rooted in specific brain circuits that remain changeable throughout life and how intentional mental training can strengthen these circuits.
Well, thank you so much for joining me Dr. Davidson. You've helped to popularize the idea that happiness and compassion can be learned like any other skill. Can you explain the science behind that to our listeners?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, certainly. Qualities like happiness, compassion, well-being have often been thought of as kind of fixed characteristics. People, as adults, recognize that they may be somewhere on this continuum, from having very low levels to very high levels. And people often think there's not much they can do about that. Our work really shows that that's simply a misreading of the evidence. Because the brain exhibits plasticity and because these qualities are associated with brain circuits that we know exhibit plasticity, we strongly believe that these qualities can be nurtured. And that's exactly what our evidence suggests.
It’s fundamentally not dissimilar from training any other kind of skill. We know that if we practice a musical instrument on a regular basis, we'll get better at it. If we practice a certain kind of complex sport, we'll get better at it. And the same is true for these qualities of flourishing.
And there's now many hard-nosed scientific papers showing that and also showing that when these skills are trained, it's not just changes in our subjective experience that are altered. There are behavioral changes, neural changes, and systemic biological changes that also have been documented in practice.
Ayla Fudala: What does that kind of training look like?
Dr. Richard Davidson: The training can be super simple. So in practice, connection is about qualities that are important for healthy social relationships, qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. And so if you reflect on the people, for example, who you work with and think of some positive quality that resides in those people, you can you can do this really simple practice of thinking about this positive quality prior to an important meeting with your colleagues, and investigate how that might change the tenor of the meeting.
We do that all the time in our Center for Healthy Minds. We begin every meeting with this kind of practice. We do our best to walk the talk, and it's amazing how meaningful those simple little things are that we can sprinkle in our daily life. And if we put our butts on the cushion each day for a few minutes to remind ourselves to do that when we're out and about, it could be especially helpful.
Another example, for a schoolteacher, would be to reflect on their purpose in becoming a teacher before they start work. Teachers have reported to us that this is like an elixir for their soul, and it gives them an incredible vitality. It reminds them why they became a teacher in the first place, and really helps them navigate the challenges that they experience on a daily basis. So those little simple things are what we can do, and it really doesn't take much. And it's amazing how effective they could be.
Ayla Fudala: So I'd like to ask the obvious follow up question: how do you train someone to be happy? And could you train me to be happy?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, you can train someone to increase their level of happiness. Where you choose to draw the line to say that this person is happy versus not happy is arbitrary, but there's absolutely no question that you can increase a person's level of happiness or well-being.
In our work, we use the terms flourishing and well-being much more than we use the term happiness. We don't really talk much about happiness per se, because you can flourish when you're sad. And flourishing is not about being happy all the time. If you lose a loved one, it would be really strange to be happy. It's a genuine occasion for sadness, for grief. So it's not about being happy all the time. It's really about being okay all the time. It's about being flexible, about being resilient. But that doesn't mean being happy all the time.
Ayla Fudala: For someone who feels they're just not a happy person and doubts that anything can change that--or I guess in this context, I could say-- someone who very rarely feels happy, who often feels sad-- what could change that?
Dr. Richard Davidson: When a person says that they feel sad all the time, it's helpful to begin with a kind of curiosity-driven exploration of what exactly that means. When a person says, I am sad, what does that mean? Does that mean all of you is sad? Is there any little teeny part of you that may not be sad? Do you feel sadness all over your body? Is there any part of your body that doesn't feel sad? Who is the I that is saying I feel sad? Is this I something that's totally fixed and unchangeable? Does it vary at all? When you begin asking questions of that sort, the rigidity and the solidity of this identification begins to loosen. It becomes more porous. And this is really important for cultivating flourishing.
Ayla Fudala: Suppose that person had clinical depression. Have you done any studies on how these interventions might be able to help people who have been diagnosed with depression or similar mood disorders?
Dr. Richard Davidson: When I was a student, I was trained to look at people and to try to figure out what's wrong with them. And now we look at people and we try to figure out what's right with them. And cultivating those qualities that are present in everyone.
But they often begin to wilt because they're not nurtured. And so what we have found in clinically depressed individuals is that these strategies really help, and that they're comparable to other evidence-based strategies. We see not just reductions in depression, but we also see increases in well-being. And that's not true of all treatments of depression. Often you see reductions in depression, but not necessarily increases in well-being. They're not reciprocally related all the time.
Ayla Fudala: So can you tell me more about how the training impacts different groups of people differently? Have you seen any different impacts by age or by location in the world or any other demographics?
Dr. Richard Davidson: So mostly the answer to your question is we don't know. There's still a lot of those issues that have not been systematically explored. What has been explored is that people who start off with higher levels of depression and anxiety do better in response to these this kind of training. And it's not that surprising because people who are already at high levels of well-being baseline, they have less room to move, so to speak. They're already doing pretty well, and it's hard to demonstrate that they can do even more well, so to speak. But if you start off with more impairment, there's more room to move. And for those individuals, you see a much larger response.
Ayla Fudala: You serve as the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. For listeners who may not be familiar, what is the center for Healthy Minds and how does its work aim to advance the science and practice of well-being?
Dr. Richard Davidson: The Center for Healthy Minds has a mission to cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. It's been an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2009, when the Dalai Lama came to help inaugurate the center. And we have a broad range of research that we pursue in the center that ranges from biological research in the laboratory to uncover the neural and other biological bases of well-being, to very applied research in the real world, to look at the impact of strategies to cultivate well-being on large populations with a variety of different outcomes.
Ayla Fudala: You also founded the nonprofit Humin. How does Humin translate your research into practical tools or programs that people and organizations can use in everyday life?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Humin was founded in 2014, and I founded it really because I've become an activist scientist, very much like climate scientists have become in many ways, activist scientists. If we believe our data, that show that well-being is best regarded as a skill, I think we have a moral obligation to go out and do everything we can to help people learn this skill, because I think most people would agree that the world can use a little bit more well-being and flourishing.
And so our nonprofit, which is now called Humin-- it used to be called Healthy Minds Innovations-- one of the things that we do is produce an app called the Healthy Minds Program, which is totally freely available, and it's a program that trains people on the four key pillars of well-being in our framework. And those four key pillars are awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And we've published a number of randomized controlled trials that establish the efficacy of this program. And the app is now used by more than a million people throughout the world. And it's been named as one of the three best meditation apps by The New York Times Wire Cutter several years in a row.
Ayla Fudala: If I signed up for the Healthy Minds app today, what could I expect to start with?
Dr. Richard Davidson: You can expect to start with the foundations program, which is a four-week program that gives you a little taste of each of these four pillars. You can spend one week on each of the four pillars, one week on awareness, one week on connection, one week on insight, and one week on purpose. And also, what you can expect is that it's easier than you think. And so it doesn't require doing this in a special place in a special posture. You can engage in these practices not only as formal meditation practices, but also while you're engaged in other activities of daily living, for example, commuting or doing your laundry-- non cognitively demanding activities of daily living. And we've demonstrated that the efficacy of this program is comparable, whether you're doing it as a formal meditation or as an active practice, while you're engaged in other activities of daily living.
Ayla Fudala: Wow, that sounds amazing. Can you tell me more about what your studies have found on the efficacy of the app?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Sure. We've done several randomized controlled trials. To give you one example: we have been working with different sectors. One of the sectors we've been working with are public school teachers. And public school teachers are a group in the United States today that is very highly stressed for all kinds of different reasons. The stress was especially exacerbated during Covid, and it really hasn't recovered fully by any means.
And we have found in two RCTs with public school teachers, one with a sample size of around 660, the other with a sample size of about 850, that teachers who are engaged in this program for as short as five minutes a day (that's what the average engagement was) showed significant reductions on standardized measures of depression, anxiety, and perceived stress, and also increases in measures of flourishing and well-being.
In a very recent RCT in Louisville, Kentucky, in the Jefferson County Public School District, we also have evidence that the student performance in academic tests, standardized tests, is different for students who are taught by teachers who have gone through the well-being training compared to teachers who did not. And so specifically, we found that student’s performance on the standardized math exam was significantly better for students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training, compared to the performance of students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group, which is kind of amazing. The students had no idea that there was even research going on. The sample size for the students was about 12,000. And so these are really important data because they support the conjecture that flourishing is contagious, and it actually affects those around you in ways that are measurable and beneficial.
Ayla Fudala: That's really good news. My mother is a public-school teacher, so I'll have to tell her to sign up for the app. And yeah, I can definitely confirm that she's stressed out all the time, so hopefully this will help.
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, and I should mention that we have a new book that just came out about two weeks ago called Born to Flourish. And this material is summarized along with lots of stories in this new book. It's written by myself and Cortland Dahl, who is a collaborator at our center.
Ayla Fudala: Yeah, that was going to be my next question, actually. You just published Born to Flourish. What motivated you to write this book and what do you hope readers will take away from it?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, what motivated us to write the book is really the same motivation that is propelling us to be active as scientists. We want to get the word out, because I think that most people would agree that this is something that is sorely needed. And so in this book, we provide an overview of these four key pillars of well-being awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We also have specific practices sprinkled through the book that readers can try to cultivate these skills. And our hope is that making this information more widely accessible in the form of a book like this will encourage people to explore and to try these methods.
Ayla Fudala: Moving on to your research in your work, what kind of evidence have you seen that training the mind can actually, physically change the brain?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, this has been a key pillar of our work for many years. I'm a neuroscientist by training, and one of the key insights of modern neuroscience is that the brain exhibits plasticity. It's really the organ that's built to respond to experience and to training.
We first published papers showing that the brain changes in response to simple forms of meditation in 2003. In 2004, we published the first paper on long term meditation practitioners, showing that their brains were different than age and gender matched controls.
So these were early studies more than 20 years ago, that established that there were key attributes of brain function that were altered by this kind of training. And more recently, we and others have shown that there are also some structural changes in the brain (although there's a lot of caution that is important to be recognized there).
We also published a high-profile paper failing to replicate some of the structural changes in the brain that have been found with modest levels of meditation experience. So it's a complicated picture. It's not all pointing toward changes in the brain, particularly structural changes with really short amounts of practice. But certainly it does show that functional changes in the brain can be achieved quite quickly and are very important, we think, in supporting the behavioral changes that have been observed.
Ayla Fudala: What have you learned in your research about how mindfulness or meditation practices affect the brain over time?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, there's a lot to say about that. We can spend, you know, hours going over that. Succinctly, we can say that modern research has demonstrated that simple mindfulness practices affect three primary networks in the brain. One is the default mode network. A second we call the central executive network. And the third we call the salience network. Each of these three are large scale networks, and mindfulness practice can affect the connectivity among these networks, as well as the relative activation of individual networks. But it primarily affects the connections among the networks. Research shows that even modest amounts of training can produce changes in connectivity, including measures of structural connectivity-- that is, white matter connections that can be measured and visualized with diffusion weighted imaging, which images the white matter fibers that connect different brain regions.
Ayla Fudala: What did you find when studying the brains of monks?
Dr. Richard Davidson: What we found studying the brains of monks is that they were different than studying brains of untrained people who are age and gender matched. One thing that we have seen is they exhibit high levels of gamma oscillations, which are recorded with EEG from the scalp surface. These are oscillations that are fast frequency, they are about 40 cycles per second. These gamma oscillations are prevalent during meditation, but we also see them expressed at very high levels when a person is just in their resting state without formally meditating. The gamma oscillations are also highly synchronized among different brain regions and what it reflects in these long-term meditators we are not definitively sure of, although we do think that it corresponds to phenomenological reports of a widened aperture of awareness.
So with regard to awareness, one of the dimensions that awareness can vary on is the aperture. We can have a very narrow aperture where our awareness is very focused, or a much wider aperture, a more kind of panoramic aperture, and the gamma oscillations that we see across multiple brain regions that are highly synchronized. We find associated with these reports of widened aperture kind of panoramic awareness in these very long-term practitioners. So that's one really striking finding that we see. Another finding that we've reported, which is a very different kind of finding, is based on structural MRI scans. And what we see there is that the rate at which the brain ages, using automated machine learning measures of brain age, that the rate at which the brain ages is slower in long term meditation practitioners than it is in age and gender matched controls, so on. The brains are aging, but they're aging more slowly.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. That's incredible. So if you want your brain to age more slowly, practice a lot of meditation and mindfulness.
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, I think that that is what the data suggests.
Ayla Fudala: How do you see contemplative practices supporting virtues like compassion, emotional balance or resilience in everyday life?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so this is a very important question, and it's a good opportunity for me to remind listeners that there are many different forms of meditation. So when we talk about meditation, it's kind of like sports. There are, you know, many different kinds of sports, and there are many different kinds of meditation, some of which involve explicitly cultivating certain virtues like kindness and compassion. And the way they do it varies depending upon the practice.
But one simple way of doing it is imagining others. It could be, you know, a friend or a loved one, and imagining a time in their life when this person may have had some challenge or difficulty, and then wishing that they be relieved of their difficulty, relieved of whatever suffering they may be experiencing.
You visualize the person. You then very authentically generate this wish for them to be relieved of suffering. You can use a phrase. May you be happy. May you be relieved of suffering. Or may you flourish. And you do that a few times. You can then move on to others. And that kind of strategy has been found to be enormously effective at generating kindness and compassion. And it's not just, again, the subjective experience of kindness and compassion. There are studies that have found hard-nosed behavioral changes and biological changes in the brain and in the body as well.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. So there are specific meditations for increasing your compassion.
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, many, many, many.
Ayla Fudala: Are there meditations for cultivating different emotions as well?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, there are meditation practices designed to cultivate each of the four pillars of well-being-- awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. I wouldn't say there's meditation practices for all the different emotions. So, you know, there's no meditation practice to cultivate fear. It would kind of be a little strange to want to cultivate fear, but there are meditation practices to cultivate fearlessness. So, yeah, I mean, there's there are literally hundreds of different kinds of meditation, most of which have not actually been studied in the West.
Ayla Fudala: And what types have you studied? You said you studied compassionate meditation. Any other types?
Dr. Richard Davidson: We've studied compassion meditation, mindfulness-type meditation practices, and we've also done a little bit of work on what we call insight practices.
Ayla Fudala: What are insight practices?
Dr. Richard Davidson: So insight practices are practices that are designed to explore the nature of the narrative that we all carry around about ourselves. We all have a narrative about who we are, a set of beliefs, and a set of expectations about who we are. And insight practices are practices that are designed to help us gain insight into this narrative. And it's not so much to change the narrative, but to change our relationship to the narrative.
So, you know, earlier we talked about depression. You might think of people who are suffering from depression as having a very negative narrative, and there's a lot of work to suggest that they do. They have negative beliefs about themselves. They have low expectations of themselves. And what's really important for cultivating well-being is not so much changing the narrative initially, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so they can see this narrative for what it is. So it's instead of accepting the beliefs and the expectations as a true veridical description of the way things are, to see them as a reflection of a narrative. And there are other narratives that we can have that would change the way we perceive the world. And just that little mindset shift is enormously important, and that's something that can be cultivated with these insight practices.
Ayla Fudala: Is most of the training through your app meditation-based or mindfulness-based?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, mindfulness is often thought of as a type of meditation. So the app is a meditation-based app. But the practices in the app can all be done as active practices when you are engaged in activities of daily living, so they don't have to be done as formal meditation practices. So that's why we often refer to the app as well-being training or training in human flourishing, because they're not technically all meditation. You can be doing physical exercise, you can be commuting, you can be doing your laundry, you can be washing the dishes. And all of them are compatible with training your mind to flourish.
Ayla Fudala: Do you have a favorite contemplative practice or type of meditation that you would recommend for our listeners?
Dr. Richard Davidson: I recommend the meditation practice that is the practice that you actually do. So whatever it is that you can do on a regular basis every day, that that's what I recommend you do. And so that's more important than anything else. And so consistency is really important.
So this is one of the reasons why in our app we expose people to a range of different practices, in the hopes that they can find something that they really could stick with. And do this for a minimum of five minutes a day, every day. If you do it for five minutes a day for 28 days, our data show that things will change.
Ayla Fudala: Wow, your brain will change.
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, we have evidence to show that five minutes a day for 28 days is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain detected with MRI.
Ayla Fudala: Do you feel like you've been able to implement these practices a lot in your own life?
Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I mean, I meditate. I've been meditating every day for 50 years. It's made a huge difference in my life. I could never carry on the lifestyle that I lead without it. By most kind of more objective standards, I think most people would think I live a crazy, stressful life. That's all self-imposed, and it's just because I love what I do and I'm very passionate about what I do. And so I take on a lot. But I really have a strong sense of purpose and vitality that really comes from my practice.
Ayla Fudala: What originally inspired you to pursue this area of research?
Dr. Richard Davidson: What inspired me was being around other people who were extraordinary, people whose demeanor convinced me that that there is an enormous range of human possibility that, particularly here in the West, we have not really systematically acknowledged or explored. And, you know, a lot of that was driven by my relationship with the Dalai Lama. Most people, when they're in his presence, they feel really good. He brings out the best in people. And this is, again, because flourishing is contagious. And you just feel you feel really good around people who are so warm-hearted. And I was really motivated to learn more about this and find out what their secret sauce was.
Ayla Fudala: Wow. So the Dalai Lama inspired you in this work? How did that friendship first begin?
Dr. Richard Davidson: I first met him in 1992. He was interested in encouraging neuroscientific research on meditation, and he heard through the grapevine that I was a serious neuroscientist that was also interested in this, but had not really begun to study it. And so he was really interested in meeting with me and exploring this. And really, that was the original inspiration.
Ayla Fudala: How has your relationship with the Dalai Lama influenced the kind of questions you ask about the mind and well-being?
Dr. Richard Davidson: It's influenced it a lot. He has asked questions that are of two types. One is really kind of very deeply fundamental, almost philosophical questions like about the nature of the mind and how it may be related to the brain. And he also has asked a different kind of question, which is a much more practical question about how can we nourish flourishing in others? And can science help us do that? And so both of those types of questions have really been inspiring to me.
Ayla Fudala: Great. Well, my last question for you is, do you have any final words for our listeners?
Dr. Richard Davidson: We're living in the middle of really challenging times, and we are all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. Our minds are being undermined and eroded by many forces around us. There are signs of disconnection and of lack of purpose, distraction that are rampant and really eating away at our society as we know it.
And so I think it's probably more important now than at least in any other time in my lifetime, for us to begin to take these kind of practices seriously and to nourish our mind, because our evidence shows that if we spent even as short a time each day as we spend brushing our teeth, if we spend that nourishing our mind, this world would really be a different place. That really is all that it would take. And so I encourage listeners to please join us on this journey, because the very future of humanity as we know it, I think, depends on it.
Ayla Fudala: Thank you so much to Dr. Richard Davidson for joining us, and for illuminating how training the mind can reshape the brain and support qualities like resilience, compassion and emotional balance. If you'd like to learn more, we encourage you to check out his new book, Born to Flourish, as well as the many resources available online through the Center for Healthy Minds and Humin.
This has been another episode of Frontiers in Health & Happiness, the official podcast of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. To learn about upcoming events, visit our website, sign up for our mailing list, and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, BlueSky, Facebook, and YouTube.
In our next episode, we'll be joined by Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, science director at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and a leading expert on joy. She'll share insights from the Big Joy Project, a global citizen science initiative using simple daily micro-acts to boost well-being, and discuss what the data reveals about who benefits, how, and why. We hope you'll tune in as we continue to explore how virtues and everyday practices can help both individuals and communities flourish.
New episodes in our Virtues for Well-being series will air every two weeks. Episodes can be found on the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness website and YouTube channel, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else podcasts are found. Thank you for listening.