How To Quit Google To Study Human Brain. Unique Interview with Manish Saggar — Stanford Neuroscientist & Former Developer
I’ve got a chance to ask Manish Saggar a few questions about his way to Stanford University and discoveries of the International Shamatha Project (ShP) — research studying the effects on intensive meditation training on the human brain and behavior. The ShP turned to be one of the most ambitious and successful scientific projects in recent history.
Manish, feels like everyone, especially in Silicon Valley, is interested in meditation right now. The Shamatha project, you’ve been part of, was designed to study benefits of Buddhist practice. They brought together people from the neuroscientific world and monasteries to examine how intensive meditation training (~6h/day for 3 months) can positively impact human brain and behavior. What was your motivation to join this project?
Being a computer science graduate student at UT Austin, I was happily doing summer internship at Google in 2006 when I met Alan Wallace (Buddhist monk and teacher). Allan had come to give a talk at Google head quarters about meditation. I couldn’t attend his talk, but I was fortunate to bump into him in the parking lot. I am always passionate about meditation and when he told me about the Shamatha project I was so excited to join it! He suggested me to call Clifford Saron (Principal Scientist behind the Shamatha Project at UC Davis). Cliff eventually became my PhD thesis co-advisor.
When I first called Cliff, his first question was “What do you know about neuroscience?”. “I know that brain is somewhere around here. (pointing to the head) And it works as a program. I am doing internship at Google, so I know how to write programs”. Cliff’s answer was: “Well, you really need to learn something about neuroscience before you can be the part of this project. Maybe let’s talk in 1–2 years and then we will see”.
But I was so excited! I went back to UT Austin and took maybe 6–7 courses in neuroscience department in a row and then called him again two years later. I guess that impressed him and I got the Ok to be part of this amazing project. My job was to develop methods to analyze the high-dimensional EEG data, collected during meditation, and he eventually funded my PhD dissertation work.
Once you get into neuroscience research, you can’t go back. Because brain science or neuroscience is so fascinating that once you step into this world, it’s hard to get out of it. Google has repeatedly asked me to consider full time position, but I had to say no for now!
As a neuroscientist, you should study only facts, and previously meditation was quite edgy topic. On the brink with religion. What was your approach to meditation before you joined the project?
I think Cliff is one of the most meticulous scientists in neuroscience I’ve met in my life! His idea is very simple: if you can quantify something, if you can measure something in controlled lab settings, and results have repeatability across labs — only then science is going to believe in it. That’s why as part of the ShP, we examined the changes in brain and behavior that are measurable (e.g., improvements in attention and emotion regulation and EEG brain activity).
As part of my thesis, I analyzed (and later modeled) scalp-recorded EEG activity while participants were meditating at three different time points (beginning, middle and at the end) during the retreats. We had around 2000 samples per second with close to a hundred sensors, so millions of data points across to analyze. Being a computer scientist, I love to play with and make sense of large data sets — so that was fun!
Also the ShP was designed to test whether the results observed in one group replicate in another. So we had a group of retreat participants who took part in the 3-month long meditation retreat and another control group (matched on age and gender) that was flown in just for testing purposes. The control group later received their own meditation training in an identical 3-month long meditation retreat. So whatever findings we had in the EEG data on the first retreat we found that actually got replicated during the second retreat, in a completely different set of people. That was amazing as it tells you that the changes observed are perhaps associated with training itself!
I think easterners are more interested (or used to) in the spiritual aspect of meditation, where they see meditation as a means to attain spiritual boons. In the West, and more scientifically oriented populations, meditation is considered as a means to improve memory, attention and emotion regulation. Which is not a bad starting point!
Do you meditate by yourself? How do you do it? How often?
My family is very spiritual. At the age of 13, I got introduced to my meditation teacher (Sant Rajinder Singh; http://sos.org), who taught me to meditate on the inner light and sound. The idea is to focus all your attention on the “third eye”, sixth chakra without getting engaged in to the stream of thoughts and repeat peaceful words or the name of God or whatever you are comfortable with. It’s a very focused attention-style meditation.
If you cannot regulate your attention, you cannot do anything in the world
In my personal belief, all meditation techniques are wonderful, but if somebody would ask me what is the foundation — then I have to say it’s focused-attention meditation. Because if you cannot regulate your attention, you cannot do anything in the world, especially something as complex as deep meditation. That’s how I started and I’m still doing it. In our tradition, it is recommended to sit one tenth of the day, which is two and a half hours, in meditation. It’s a very old tradition coming out of Sant Mat. Sant — means saint, and mat means teaching. So teaching of saints.
We recently had a baby (~10 months ago), still feels recent! So I’m trying to meditate at least 20 minutes a day, every single day. But I really hope to reach the goal of an hour a day soon.
Do you do it at home or at work in the middle of the day?
Because of the baby and recent changes in lifestyle, I could never find any time to meditate. So I decided to try something different. It usually takes 30–40 min to reach work (in heavy traffic), so every morning I would leave around 40 min before work and promise myself that whatever time is left after reaching office I will meditate in the car in parking lot. Beautifully, I have to say, I get 20 min every day to meditate in the parking lot!
Sounds like a lifehack to avoid traffic! What was your biggest discovery during the project? What amazed you the most?
I was always a believer in meditation. We found that we could enhance attention and even have brain activity changed. It was incredible. But the coolest part was that although the meditation retreat was three months long, we could see changes in behavior and brain activity half way through the retreat (i.e., within 1.5 months). It’s kind of fascinating and I still don’t know exactly why it has happened but whatever changes we expected to happen in three months actually happened in 1 and a half month.
I think these results could inspire Cliff and other researchers to do much shorter trainings. The fascinating point is that you don’t need that much time to at least measure enhancements in the cognitive aspect (perhaps you do need much more for enlightenment!)
Shamatha project was made in a group of people who were meditating during three months in kind of isolated conditions. Outside of the city, of course, you have less stress. How a regular person can implement meditation in everyday life? For those who are working in the offices as we do.
Definitely, retreat settings are special in many ways. But coming from my personal experience, when you meditate at the beginning of each day, even if it’s only 20 minutes, the spillover or carryover effects of meditation can last throughout the day.
For example if I find time to meditate in the morning and I have a good meditation, then throughout the day whenever there is a problem or stress coming my way, I can be aware of that before it hits me. If you just take a minute or two to realign yourself three or four times a day, that’s a beautiful thing to keep the stress away. Perhaps you don’t really need 6 hours unless, of course, you want enlightenment. (laughing)
My last question, I can’t miss the chance to ask a scientist. So what do you think about future of our brain? Are we going to put some devices ON or INSIDE our brain or we’re going to open more of it’s possibilities?
In the last century, we have been trying to understand what a brain can do and what it can’t do when you have a disorder. But recently we started to answer this question. So now we ask how we can enhance, optimize the brain functioning.
When I came here in 2011 (talking about Stanford) I was lucky enough to be part of a very cool project. We were trying to enhance creativity in healthy adults using Design thinking based training. We found that can enhance creativity in people and also we could see changes in the brain activity based on that enhancement. We recently published two articles about that and several are on the way.
Going forward, I think people are going to focus more on augmenting or enhancing brain’s capacity by training or by non-invasive technologies like stimulation (e.g., tDCS).
We have to be careful though. For example, if I break my leg and the doctor puts a cast/splint on it, the goal of the cast it to heal the fractured bones or muscle, not to replace them. So as long as we keep that in mind we won’t have unhealthy dependency on technology. People are amazing at creating new technologies but they are also amazing at creating bugs. If we get too dependent on technologies to help the human brain and less on enhancing the brain “muscles” themselves, we could end up in a bad position.
So are you saying that nature has much less bugs than technology created by human does ?
Maybe. I think we should not have unhealthy dependence on technology. The more we train the brain and open it’s unlimited potential, the better.
Thank you, Manish!
