E175 | How to Stop Fighting Your Mind (w/ Professor Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva)

In this episode, Alex is joined by Professor Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of thought.

We explore why our relationship with thought may be one of the most important factors in our wellbeing. Kalina explains why spontaneous thought — mind-wandering, daydreaming, creativity and even dreaming — is far more important than modern productivity culture often allows.

We discuss  the difference between healthy mind-wandering and repetitive rumination, and what happens in the brain seconds before a thought enters conscious awareness. We also explore meditation, the unconscious mind, creativity, habits of thought, the cost of avoiding the past, and how we can begin to build a better relationship with our own minds.

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training. Website: alexcurmitherapy.com

Check out The Thinking Mind Blog on Substack: https://thinkingmindblog.substack.com/

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

 [00:00:00] one way to think of thought is as our constant companion throughout life. One thing you could do with it is have a really bad relationship with it and say, "I'm not gonna pay attention to you, and I'm not going to talk to you, and you're not my friend." I tend to advocate for the opposite, to form a relationship with that constant companion and learn how to make friends with our thought I spent most of my 20s and 30s trying to undo my habit of not thinking about my past I achieved and succeeded a lot by not thinking about the past. But then it caught up with me later on, and I started feeling this instability within myself, this lack of knowledge of who I am, this depression that started setting in because I was disowning such a big part of myself. obsessive thinking and ruminative thoughts can become these habits of thought there's no technique that has ever been invented of shutting down thought other than, , anesthesia. You can sleep and you still have mental states. And those mental states, They're all important [00:01:00] in terms of how we feel and how well our health, ends up developing in our life. 

Today, I'm thrilled to be in conversation with Professor Kalina Christof Hadjileva, who is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. Uh, Kalina is an expert on cognitive neuroscience, the science of human thought, with over three decades of experience.

Kalina, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

To start off, it would be great to get your thoughts on why actually is it so crucial that we understand thought, that we study thought, that we become familiar with the nature of thought? Why is this so important?

a simple answer to that, and that is that thought is with us for almost our entire lives, probably our entire lives. But we're also conscious of the thought of thought being with us. 

And so it's one way to think of thought is as our constant compan- companion throughout life.

And one [00:02:00] thing you could do with it is have a really bad relationship with it and say, "I'm not gonna pay attention to you, and I'm not going to talk to you, and you're not my friend." And I tend to advocate for the opposite, which is to form a relationship with that constant companion and learn how to make friends with our thought and how to have actually a fruitful relationship and even a beneficial relationship with thought.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, from my clinical background, I know the quality of your thoughts and your relationship to them has such an enormous effect on your quality of life. If you're, you know, con-continually dragged down by difficult thoughts, it's gonna make your life very difficult. Whereas the opposite is true, if you can have, helpful, pleasant, - constructive thoughts, that makes an enormous difference.

Absolutely. I think the way we relate to our thoughts really defines our existence and our... It's a huge, probably from my perspective, the most important factor [00:03:00] in our wellbeing. The way I define thought is perhaps somewhat differently than some of the more common views on thoughts, which I, in fact, through my research, have tried to counteract.

For me, thought is any mental state or any series of mental states that occur in the mind, and they could be intentional, they could be unintentional, they could be spontaneous, they could be automatic. There's such a huge flavor and diversity of, of thoughts. But really for me, those are simply mental states.

And mental states, we know from the research that we've done and others have done, occur on the average every 10 seconds, we have a new mental state. Sometimes there's more, sometimes they're more often. And imagine how many of those we have throughout our lifetimes. And so again given their ubiquity in our everyday life, and given the fact that we cannot avoid them, there's no technique that has ever been invented of shutting down thought other than, , [00:04:00] anesthesia.

Mm.

You can sleep and you still have mental states. you can be awake and, restful, or you can be awake and busy. You're always having mental states, and those mental states, their quality and the, the way we relate to them as a, as an organism, makes for, They're all important in terms of how we feel and how well we, how well our health, ends up developing in our life.

And how does that view differ from the more conventional view of thoughts that you mentioned?

Yeah, great question. So one of the things that I've tried to kind of combat in my career and life is a perception that, first of all, the only kind of thought that really is thought is the deliberate, goal-directed, intentional, effortful kind of thinking, and everything else is just garbage in the mind.

That there's, there's that perception, and I'm a little bit exaggerating it now. But one thing I'll say is and that'll [00:05:00] contextualize my approach to thought, is I didn't grow up in the West. I was born and raised in Bulgaria, which is a tiny country in Eastern Europe, right next to the Black Sea

back in the days when I was growing up there it was bordering Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, and a country that we all associate with Soviet domination. But my relationship to thought was different from what it would have been if I'd grown up in Western countries because I never learned that much more capitalist kind of industrialist approach to the mind that treats it as a, as a tool and a machine to be used and never to let idle.

You know, letting your mind idle would be a sin according to a lot of these more industrialist kind of approaches to life and the mind. So, I spent my first 22 years of my life growing up and learning and studying in Bulgaria, and then I made a jump to one of [00:06:00] the, The one of the strongest bastion, if you like, of industrialism, capitalism, and technology nowadays, the Bay Area.

So I moved straight from Bulgaria to, to Stanford to do my PhD and landed in the middle of the tech boom. That was the, the late '90s. And right away I could see the additives to thought and to different areas of life. One is within science. I wanted to study the kind of spontaneous thought that happens in our minds all the time, and I find it fascinating.

But right away I found that if I actually wanted to graduate with a PhD and publish any scientific publications, the only kind of thought I could study was the executive goal-directed cognitive control type of thought. And everything else was considered the kiss of death for an aspiring scientist.

You couldn't

conventional?

It just wasn't considered a legitimate s- subject of scientific investigation. So if you didn't [00:07:00] have a task and you didn't have people ... If, first of all, it was actually not very easy to study thought. Most of the things that were considered legitimate and profitable scientifically to study were things like vision and language and memory.

And thought was considered a little bit fluffy and a little bit, well, if you really want to, you could study it in terms of executive functions but you're not never gonna be, like, the star that you could be if you studied something much more computationally y- easy to analyze. And so I, you know, jumped into studying the only thing I could from thought, which was executive functions and cognitive control, and this deliberate type of problem-solving that was the way thought was defined.

And there was ... You know, the way thought would be defined or even problem-solving would be defined was the ability to get from a problem to a solution.

Yes.

In a way, using a lot [00:08:00] of cognitive effort and working memory and thinking really hard in deliberate, effortful fashion. That was kind of the, the, the zeitgeist, the, the feeling around what thought should be.

And everything else was just mental chatter and unnecessary fodder in the mind that we as scientists would be, would, would demote ourselves from our pedestal of authority if we even tried to study, because there was assumption that it's, it's very difficult to study, because you can't be controlled.

You can't just give a task to people and then manipulate the different perceptions that they're having, different mental processes they are having. So, that was kind of the, The scientific perspective that I kind of entered wh- when I started my PhD in California.

Which is kind of fascinating because hearing you describe that executive function kind of thought, which of course is [00:09:00] super important and we hear about this all the time. But listening to you describe it, people don't spend most of their time in that kind of thought, do they?

People spend most of their time in the kind of thinking that happens quite a lot more automatically than that.

Yes, exactly, and that's something that we've done research on and other groups as well, is what percentage of time do people have spontaneous thoughts versus deliberate thoughts, and what percentage of time people think in problem-solving ways versus freely flowing ways. And that actually differs across people, at least in what they report.

But on the average, people spend about at least half of our lives again, that could range from 30 to 60%, depending on the person and depending on the, the circumstances, the time of day. So, I would say something like half of our lives, half of our waking lives, we spend thinking something that's [00:10:00] mu- in a way that's more spontaneous, in a way that's less constrained, and in the way that isn't deliberately trying to solve a particular problem that we're consciously aware of.

Now, that's not to say the spontaneous thought isn't there for a, for a purpose that we might, might not understand. In fact, I think it has a really important purpose and a really important benefit that it gives us. But it's not something that we set out in this kind of a conquest within the mind to achieve.

It's something that spontaneously grows and happens and benefits us in ways that we're not deliberately driving. And yes, as you said, that's a huge part of our life. It's again, ranges from 30 to 60% of our waking existence. But I'm pretty sure for some people it's more than that, and for other people it may be perceived to be less in part because some people try to erase it from their life because they think it's a wrong way of being, it's a wrong way of thinking.

They feel guilty about engaging it, or they feel anxious about engaging in it.

In [00:11:00] non-goal-directed thought.

Yes.

Mm-hmm. Do you have a system for how to classify all the different kinds of thoughts a person can have?

Yes. So the last 10 years I and my, a number of my colleagues have been working on a framework that we call the dynamic framework of thought. And what we have in that framework is a way to distinguish between different kinds of thought on two dimensions. So one dimension is the one that's quite obvious and very familiar to people, and that dimension is how do different kinds of thoughts differ if you're directing them in a deliberate fashion, as you

that's the, the volitional, the volitional spectrum, you could

Exactly. That's the force of will. So how much of my will am I applying in determining what my next thought is going to be about or the flavor of that thought is going to be? So the goal-directedness, if you only look at that as one dimension, basically different thoughts fall on that continuum [00:12:00] of very goal-directed, a little bit goal-directed And not completely not goal-directed.

And so along that continuum, you can put something like deliberate problem-solving would be very goal-directed. Something like creative thinking actually is a mixture of goal-directedness and spontaneous free-flowing generation of ideas. So that might be in the middle is where we would put it, although g- creative thinking is actually very complex and dynamic.

And then as you go further and further away from goal-directedness, you would label these things something like daydreaming, maybe mind-wandering. And actually even further, you would go into nighttime daydreaming because, Sorry, nighttime dreaming.

Mm-hmm.

So you go from daydreaming to actual dreaming at night.

Because when we're asleep, we're still having thoughts, we're still having mental states, we're still having these experiences, but they're very free-flowing and bizarre, [00:13:00] almost by systematically bizarre. And they're very much not goal-directed because one of the things that happens when we sleep is the frontal cortices and the neocortex in general is actively suppressed.

So the mechanisms of the brain that typically allow us to be goal-directed and are recruited, they're activated when we're goal-directed in deliberate fashion, are actually suppressed during sleep, and that is one of the things that enables us to stay asleep. If we start trying to do-- If you're lucid dreaming and you start trying to manipulate your dream too much people actually wake themselves up doing that.

So effort and cognitive control in sleep wakes you up, so that's why it's suppressed. And so this continuum is one of the ways in which a lot of people think about thought. And what we've introduced is actually a second dimension that really is important to distinguish things like daydreaming and mind-wandering from something else that is very clinically relevant [00:14:00] something like rumination or obsessive thought.

So if you just have one-dimensional view of different kinds of thought, then rumination and obsessive thoughts, they're not goal-directed. They're not intentional. And so oftentimes they get lumped together with things like mind-wandering and daydreaming. But there is a crucial difference between them that goal-directedness doesn't capture.

Even though both rumination and mind-wandering are not goal-directed, rumination is very fixed and very non-free, right?

Very repetitive often.

Exactly. It's repetitive. It's you're trying to get away from something maybe, but you- your mind keeps going to it. And so there's a draw there that pulls the mind and almost like ties it up to one mental kind

like an addiction.

Exactly.

I feel like I'm in this cycle, I can't get out of it.

Exactly. A sa- same thing with obsessions and you know, anything that [00:15:00] becomes so repetitive that you're having troubles. You're using your goal-directed thinking to get away from it, but it's oftentimes impossible. That's why people can't snap out of their depression or rumination. There's some very strong but non-intentional way in which the mind becomes narrowed the thoughts become narrowed and drawn to something.

And so what we've introduced in our framework, the dynamic framework of thought, is the second dimension of what we call automatic constraints on thought, which are forces within ourselves of mental forces that are not intentional, but they could be forces of habit, or they could be emotional forces like current concerns that keep drawing our thoughts to a particular thing that we are worried about currently, or that just feels really emotionally salient in our lives right now.

And those emotions, habits, and sometimes perceptual things that are [00:16:00] very salient whether that's a pain, the perception of interoceptive perception of pain can be very salient. That's one of the prototypically salient interoceptive perceptions. Or something in our environment like a screen.

Screens can be very perceptually salient. They draw our thoughts to them, and we call these automatic constraints from thought because in a non-intentional way, they narrow our thought streams and make them make them go towards a limited range or one thing rather than letting them freely explore what's in our minds, such as what can happen during mind wandering or nighttime dreaming, or daydreaming for that matter.

Yes. Okay, so we've got two spectrums, and I'd like to maybe consider them separately. So you've got the first spectrum is a spectrum of volition. To what extent are you directing your thoughts through willpower? And then the second spectrum is to what extent are [00:17:00] there these automatic restraints as a result of a number of different mental forces on your thinking?

I think the first spectrum is super useful to understand because, I mean, to my ears, every point in the spectrum has an important function. But you mentioned specifically creative thought, which is this delicate balance. It's not purely goal-directed. There's an element of spontaneity, and this is something I've noticed to be true.

When I think and discuss creative thought, I'm thinking we need to create some kind of constraint. So for example, if I'm preparing for my podcast with Kalina, I-- that's-- I know I'm doing that, so I know I'm going to be thinking about questions related to that. But at the same time, I'm not in every moment thinking, "What is the best possible question I could ask?"

I'm kind of letting the answers come to me. I'm letting them rise up. And so that's what-- how, how I tend to recommend people [00:18:00] think creatively is create one restriction. So create like a bubble or a document or a text box or whatever it is. Give it a label. So it might be ideas for y- your new article about evolution, say, and then let the ideas filter up.

Is that kind of how you think about creative thinking as this balance?

Absolutely. That's one of the most fascinating and personally to me, most enjoyable way of being creative. There's many ways of being creative, and some of them are a lot more trying to get productivity out of us. But this way that you're describing is in fact exactly what musicians would call improvisation uh, what children would call play and what I would call in terms of thought processes spontaneous thought.

And so what happens there is exactly like you described, a, a very delicate but very beneficial and fruitful balance between deliberate gentle [00:19:00] guidance that isn't like hands-on and kind of micromanaging the thought process. So it allows a huge freedom, it allows for, for a lot of play to happen within the thought process.

But it creates maybe something like goalposts or maybe something like intentions gentle intentions about where things might go next. And so, even something like lucid dreaming could feel like that too. So in lucid dreaming, we may have an intention of, you know, maybe I wanna fly in my dream, but I don't wanna be like directing exactly where I fly next because that'll wake me up.

A- another way in which that plays out is during psychedelic experiences where people embar- embark on a psychedelic journey or a therapeutic session, they will often start it with a, with an intention. And of course, set and setting in, within psychedelics are important because the set and the setting both mental and physical, create this structure within which the freedom can [00:20:00] unfold, but not completely unconstrained.

They create some kind of a structure and some very loose constraints within which the play can happen. The most uh, experience I've had with these processes is um, through my ... I'm an amateur musician, and I play the piano, and I I, uh, love playing jazz, and I've been trying to play and improvise with other people.

And what I have come to understand about the difference between something like playing classical music, which is very scripted and constrained about what you're going to play in every next moment of time, compare that to something like an improvisation, is that most improvisation in jazz is not completely free.

In fact, it's never completely free. Even during free jazz, You're still, uh, you know, playing notes on that instrument, so there are some constraints. But even beyond that, what happens very critically, very similar to what you described in something like a, a jazz improvisation [00:21:00] session, is that you actually have a tune.

Y- the tune has chords, you may not play the tune that the original song came with. In fact, you might play it at the beginning, but then you improvise on it. And the way you improvise but stay within that tune, within that song, is by having these goalposts, which are the chords. So there's a certain chord progression, and when I improvise, what I try to do is kind of like what you described with the questions.

You have certain questions in mind, and then you let the conversation unfold but then every once in a while you come back to a question and anchor that kind of journey, right, in some way. And so the same thing happens during an impr- you know, an improvised solo. You know, the, the, the musician who's playing it is not just going off completely crazy in their mind.

They're actually thinking about what's next. But they're not thinking about what's next in a very prescriptive step-by-step fashion

[00:22:00] More intuitive.

the spontaneity of it. Yeah, they're just... they have a certain intention of way-- of where they wanna land next or where they wanna get to next, but that intention is very free in some way to also not necessarily do it, but for most of the time it happens.

 Another experience that is very similar that I've had and many people have had too that is when I go to a new city and I want to explore it, I will start in the morning, and I may have the intention of maybe going to one or two places, but really what I wanna do is just walk around the city. And in a similar way to where I described the questions serve as these pointers, they're just intentions.

And I might even not end up going to all these places but having something in mind that could kind of inspire the movement is actually very similar to the way I think of spontaneous thought. So if we had something like half an hour of our day and [00:23:00] wanted to engage in spontaneous thought one thing that we could have is, like, an intention.

What would I hopefully like to understand about myself through that spontaneous thought? And then we just let the spontaneous thought and, and see whether it leads us there or not.

Now my impression, and please do correct me if I'm wrong about this, is that first spectrum, which we're still discussing of the spectrum of volition, it feels like one of the things that defines where you are on that spectrum is to what extent you're engaging with the unconscious mind. So if you're very at the far end where it's very volitional, I feel like you're not really engaged with the unconscious at all.

You have a very specific goal. You know, "Kalina, stop talking. I don't have a question. I need to think of a question now 'cause I need to fill the space." You can't have dead air. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got dreams, right? Totally unintentional and totally involving the unconscious. And it strikes me as they obviously both serve quite different functions.

Like the [00:24:00] unconscious feels more like an attempt to catch all, to not miss something, to get the big picture, and to make sure you're not missing anything crucial, like in your life, let's say. But obviously the the expense of that is you're missing like fine detail. You know, you might miss something small.

And then volitional thought is kind of the opposite, where it's zooming in on something very, very focused, and that's about precision and getting something precisely right. But obviously you're not seeing the whole picture at all. Your, your consciousness is very condensed around something. So I almost think of it as a zoom almost, from low resolution big picture to high resolution.

Does that-- Is that kind of in keeping with your way of thinking about it?

Partly. So, the way I think of, ... I, I try to think of the conscious and the unconscious, which I'm very interested in psychologically as, as how do we understand more about them, given that by definition we do not have access to our unconscious. So our, you know, phenomenology, what we can [00:25:00] understand consc- what we can understand with our minds is not sufficient.

So what I think of as the way I try to understand them is in terms of what I believe the neural processes that correspond to conscious and unconscious processing in the brain are like. And so, with some caveats one way to think of it, and that's probably just a metaphor, it's a metaphor for how the mind works in terms of the brain.

But the, the neocortical regions are probably a lot more important for conscious processing than something like the medial temporal lobe, for example, and the subcortical structures like the amygdala or even some of the basal ganglia. And so what I ... the way I think of it is that volitional thought is an interaction between the neocortex and the subcortical structure that is much more heavily led and orchestrated by the neocortex, and the neocortex doesn't listen as much to what's happening [00:26:00] in the inside of the brain in those subcortical structures

it's like the boss, the CEO yelling down at the employees, you know, "We need to get these accounts out today."

Yeah, it's like a hierarchical relationship that then there's still stuff happening at the core of our brains and our minds, but the conscious kind of shell of it is, like, plugging its ear and saying, "La, la, la, la, I don't want to know. I'm just gonna be, like, on my task," right? And so it creates this disconnect within the brain and the mind in terms of the there's no dialogue.

And so we could be ... Volition, when volition comes in, volition can be ex- ex- extremely important for helping us cope with challenges in our environments, for helping s- helping us survive, for helping us achieve and do whatever is necessary for us to get a job you know, put food on the table and all these things.

But in the process we're also [00:27:00] disconnecting from the processes that can and often are happening at the inside of the brain that's much more connected to our body and to our metabolism and uh, physiology. And again, there's moments when- w-- I do not wanna be thinking about you know, how I'm feeling or how my body is digesting the food and so forth.

I just... It's very important to be thinking about something that's happening right now in my world and surviving it. But what then happens is that when volition becomes chronically employed and encouraged to be constantly a marker of our thoughts, then there's a disconnect with the rest of our organism and the rest of the brain that has multiple functions.

So something like the hippocampus in the medial temporal lobes and really most of the subcortical structures all the way down to the hypothalamus that then [00:28:00] connects us to our physiology and hormonal releases. They're there to help us survive too. And one of the ways in which they help us survive is by connecting to our bodily s- bodily physiology, the homeostasis in our body, and, and also actually maintain the homeostasis of the brain as well, because the brain is not just a computer that's composed of a bunch of you know, transistors with you know, little electrodes.

It's actually a part of our organism. Our organism is a biological organism, and the brain is much more than its neurons. It has... It's basically mostly h- hormonal processes happening and neurotransmitter processes happening, and the neuron, the neuronal firing is just one of the small things among the, the many other things that are happening there.

So when people, I mean, obviously clear obvious function to volitional thought, but there's almost something oppressive [00:29:00] about having to be forced into volitional thought all of the time. And the clinical example which jumps out is-- at me is perhaps a child that's growing up in a chaotic environment that's parentified too young.

Maybe their parents are quite permissive or quite immature, and the child is forced to step up into some mature adult functions far too young. And these are the kinds of children who when, when they grow up and they might engage in therapy or some sort of psychological treatment, often that treatment is actually ends up being helping them reconnect with their intuition, helping them reconnect with their bodies, helping them reconnect with their more spontaneous thoughts and desires.

So what you're saying, although it's quite new to me, the way you're phrasing it, it makes a, a whole lot of sense clinically that there are these situations where we end up with these maybe imbalances of the way that-- of, of thought patterns and the resulting disconnection with important parts of self, I guess.

[00:30:00] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the ways in which I think about unconscious and conscious processes in the mind is through the metaphor of parent-child relationship and how over time the child becomes the grown-up, right? So that literally actually happens in the brain. Not literally, literally, but there is neurogenesis that happens throughout people's lives, where new neurons become born in the ventricles inside of the brain, and then they go into parts of the hippocampus, a part called the dentate gyrus, from where they can grow into new neurons and then contribute to you know, new memories, new understandings, new experiences, and contribute to helping us sort out our, what our lives mean and so forth.

And then they have the ability to then grow into additional into neurons throughout i- in the brain. And so [00:31:00] that growth that happens requires certain conditions. So neurogenesis is in fact suppressed if there's too much stress going on in our life. And conscious effort, which is really volition, is a a, basically a type of effort in the body.

Conscious effort is can contribute to the, it goes along with all the release of stress hormones. That is what stress hormones are there for. They're there to help us exert effort. But when that becomes chronic and that becomes the gold standard of how we should spend every minute of our waking lives, that constant effort and volition ends up becoming suppress- suppressive of the new generation of new neurons, the neurogenesis, but also new understandings and new experiences that we could have.

So there's a really interesting phenomena that I'm fascinated by called sharp wave ripples that occur in the hippocampus, and those are synchronous bursts [00:32:00] of activation that occur spontaneously in the innermost core of the hippocampus. And they only occur when we are either resting and, quote-unquote, "doing nothing," meaning that we're not physically active or stressed and engaged in exploring some kind of a novel environment.

And they also occur when we're engaged in deep sleep. So deep sleep most of all, and then the second most frequent occurrence of these sharp wave ripples in the hippocampus are during restful wake- wakefulness. And so these sharp wave ripples have the potential... So they only occur then if I'm busy, stressed, or in some way engaged in novelty and perceptual stimulation, they become suppressed.

They're not happening. But when they do happen, they have a chance of spreading in terms of their waves of activation all the way to the [00:33:00] neocortex. And they-- some of them spread and some of them don't. The ones that spread tend to be the ones that are more synchronous and more clustered with other little ripples that can turn into a wave.

And that's how I see basically the origination of our spontaneous thoughts and the origination of this dialogue and relationship between the conscious processing, most of which probably happens in the neocortex, and these unconscious churnings of new things and new neurons that is happening outside of our conscious awareness but has the potential of enriching our conscious experience and changing

Yes, and alerting us to maybe there's a new direction we need to go down. Maybe there's something important that we're missing. That's how I feel the unconscious helps us.

Yeah. I mean, there's so many things that the unconscious does for us. And again, just as a neuroscientist, when I think of the [00:34:00] unconscious, I really think of all these processes that are happening in the medial temporal lobes and the basal ganglia, which we've done some imaging studies. One of the study we did was with meditators who had a lot of experience meditating, and we asked them to press a button for us whenever they had a spontaneous thought arise against the background of their breath, right?

So they're monitoring their breath, but even in people with decades of meditation experience, even in monks, there's thoughts that arise against the breath. And what we saw with them, and this is the... If there's any people on earth who can tell you as soon as possi- as soon as possible when a thought arises, it's them.

What we saw with them was the seconds before they would consciously become aware of a thought their hippocampus and the medial temporal lobes in the per- parahippocampus was active seconds before that. It's almost as if it's, it's about to create a thought, right? It's doing something, the preconditions of thought.

[00:35:00] So, that and some other research from non-human animals really converges to suggest that what was going on in our medial temporal lobes, especially in the hippocampus and the amygdala, and probably some parts of the cerebellum and other subcortical structures, is not actually accessible to consciousness per se.

It only becomes accessible when it spreads to the neocortex, or when the neocortex establishes a dialogue of reverberatory activity, of activity that goes back and forth between these structures. Yeah, so going back to the unconscious I think what these structures are doing there, first of all is not directly ready to be accessed by consciousness unless it reaches the neocortex.

And second there's so much that they're doing. Yeah, in some ways they're trying to identify new ways of understanding our worlds and our experiences. But in other ways, they're also kind of, Something like the hippocampus, for example, is really about [00:36:00] navigating. Navigating space, that's first how it was researched in terms of spatial navigation.

But also it literally helps us navigate the memories of our experiences, and so constructing these storylines through our past or understandings of why something happened and why we did something in the past exactly. So this is actually a form of navigation. Narratives are just our navigation. And if you look at indigenous some indigenous cultures actually navigate their spaces, their land through stories.

So there's an intimate relationship between stories and navigation in space or in our mental or in our lives.

And is that s- is that why people who are-- who want to get really good at memory tasks, they construct like a memory palace, so it's like a geographical representation of their memory?

Yeah, because the palace... I mean, it doesn't have to be a palace. I could construct a memory city. Anything that's already spatial, that has a [00:37:00] spatial layout that I can explore in term- and imagine I explore in terms of my navigating through that space. So the imagination of me navigating some space is very similar and in fact serves as a scaffolding for the imagination of me navigating any kind of experience, whether it's my life experience or whether it's some m- set of memories that I would like to remember.

In the time we have left, 'cause we've spent a lot of time on spectrum one, let's talk a little bit about spectrum two. So it feels like if spectrum one is a spectrum of volition, spectrum two, spectrum two is a spectrum of momentum or perhaps innate repetitiveness, automatic repetitiveness.

Is that a fair way to describe it, do you think?

Yeah, that's part of part of it. And one thing I'll say at the outset here is that, is that's a spectrum too that has been much less [00:38:00] researched than the first spectrum, in part because our culture and science, which is part of our culture, puts such a premium on volition that most of us scientists have been incentivized and encouraged to just study volition.

So we understand how that works a lot more in the mind and in the, in the brain than how the second spectrum of these automat- automatic restraints on the mind works. So absolutely. One of the ways in which that spectrum does work is the way I think of it is from free movement to constrained movement in the mind.

That's one of the ways to think of it. But more specifically a, an experience that everyone has had is in terms of habits. So habits, whether they're mental or, or motor, constrain our movements in some very powerful ways without our intentions. So of course, the pro- typical example of riding a bike.

At the beginning, it takes a lot of thinking about every... Or even driving a car or doing anything [00:39:00] complex, maybe playing a, a piece on a musical instrument. To begin, many takes a lot of thinking about n- every next movement and consciously executing every next movement. But the way habits work is that over time, as you repeat the same sequences, the sequences become chunked into units that can be executed automatically.

So, you know, if I'm learning to play a piece on the piano, to begin with, I'm reading every note, but after like, you know, 500 times of playing it, I just lift my first finger to play the first note, and then the rest is played by the fingers. So people oftentimes metaphorize this kind of habit as it's in my fingers or, you know, it's in my body exactly.

And in some ways, it is in the body, but it's also in the parts of the brain that actually maintain skilled behaviors, skilled automatically learned behaviors. And so this automaticity is part of what can also happen in, in [00:40:00] thoughts. So sometimes I think this is actually a lot of obsessive thinking and ruminative thoughts can become these habits of thought where given certain cue, like whenever I think of something, I ended up feeling bad about myself.

And I think what happens in the mind is that the sequence of thoughts that maybe to begin with were not automatic have occurred so many times in that particular sequence that now as soon as I, you know, think of you know, let's say my father Right? I suddenly start feeling bad about my past because I didn't have a good relationship with my father.

Or maybe I had an oppressive relationship with my mother. So I avoid thinking about my family and my past because whenever I think about that part of my life, I end up feeling bad. And I don't know how I end up feeling bad, I just know that I do, so I avoid going there. And so what's h- what could have happened there in the process of, of time and, [00:41:00] and kind of linkages, mental linkages, is a chunking and a consolidation of a whole sequence of mental states that now are even no longer experienced as a sequence of mental states, but just as a shorthand of getting from one place to another.

So this automaticity is one of the ways in which or of h- of habits and also this compression of, of sequences of thoughts can happen over time, and that can lead us to these places of feeling like we can't go there because it makes us feel too bad.

So I guess two things I'd want to highlight is the first one, just like with volition, it's not that really automatic thoughts are bad necessarily or unautomatic thoughts are bad. It's, it's a spectrum, and they both have their, you know, u-utility. And the second thing would be even when... And this is my observation again clinically, even when automatic thoughts have gotten to a bad place, they [00:42:00] typically probably started as a helpful coping strategy.

So for example, you may have started washing your hands frequently because you were exposed to something and you needed to wash your hands to keep them clean. But perhaps this spiraled out of control. Now you're washing your hands 10 times a day. Now perhaps you have obsessive compulsive disorder.

Your hands have eczema as a result of the amount that you're washing them. So it started as a helpful coping strategy. Somewhere along the way, somehow it became very, very automatic and reinforced, and now that same coping strategy is actually causing a whole bunch of distress itself.

 Yes, absolutely. I think I completely agree. I think a lot of these... First of all, habits are not by nature harmful. Habits can be very helpful and you can build good habits. But also the, the bad habits that often we end up having started off as some kind of a coping strategy that was necessary, oftentimes necessary for survival.

Yeah, [00:43:00] including the habits of not thinking about something. I mean, or like in the extreme clinical version of that, you would refer to something like dissociation. I mean, dissociation per se is a very important coping mechanism, But it then creates the burden of having to unpack that and having to undo also the damage that it did as it saved someone in the future, right?

So, something like the habit of not thinking, which I'm very familiar with. I spent most of my 20s and 30s trying to undo my habit of not thinking about my past because, you know, I immigrated when I was in my early 20s, and I kind of left behind myself in Bulgaria when I moved to California and tried not to think about everything that happened to me in Bulgaria, because not all of it was positive, and also I just wanted to make a new life for myself.

And what I found that to begin with, that was a very adaptive strategy. I was... I achieved and [00:44:00] succeeded a lot by not thinking about the past. But then it caught up with me later on, and I started feeling that you know, this instability within myself, this lack of knowledge of who I am, this depression that started setting in because I was disowning such a big part of myself.

And so what my experience with that was that it was really hard to now start thinking about what I'd established a habit of not thinking about. So it took me decades to get to a point where I could now think about something that I automatically stopped myself from thinking for so

long. 

And do you, do you have any other principles as to how people can develop a bit of a healthier relationship with thoughts and thinking?

Yeah. I mean, it's, it really is a relationship, and it really is very similar to the way we may a, a long-estranged relative who we may have. How do we... I- [00:45:00] if, if we've spent many years of our life not having a good relationship with our thoughts how do we go back and rekindle that relationship? It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes a lot of care and intention as well.

So volition certainly has a huge part to play, but volition employed to the surface... to the service of spending time with ourselves rather than the service of, you know, making money or,

So vo-vo-voluntarily introspecting

Voluntarily introspecting, but actually even more importantly, voluntarily creating the conditions and taking the time for that relationship to grow.

And so voluntarily introspecting is important, but like you said, if it's too heavy-handed and if it's too kind of, managerially done, it could backfire. So voluntarily-- I think volition is really important. You're just clearing chunks of our day when we could be in that mental state when the [00:46:00] sharp wave ripples can start happening and give us new thoughts.

And then creating also the conditions of safety within which we can receive these thoughts, whether that's with a therapist or whether that's with a... In-- While gardening or any environment that creates a sense of safety in us, I think it's very important because what often comes out when we turn our minds towards our unconscious spontaneous churnings is not necessarily pleasant right away.

There's certain friction that we need to go through in order to build that relationship down the road.

Right. I mean, I, I think we've only just scratched the surface here. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but you've given me a lot to think about. Hopefully, if you guys have watched on YouTube, I will be requesting a graph that demonstrates these two spectrums so you can understand that better and how this relates to different kinds of thoughts we've described.

In the meantime, Kalina, thank you so much. We'll have to have you back at some point in the [00:47:00] future, I'm afraid.

For sure. Always happy to come back, and thank you for having me.