#1723 - Amishi Jha

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Amishi Jha (0:14)

Absolutely. Peak Mind, huh?

Joe Rogan (0:17)

That's right.

Amishi Jha (0:17)

Yeah, how long have you been working on this?

Joe Rogan (0:21)

My whole life. Your whole life? But the actual book, a couple years.

Amishi Jha (0:24)

And the idea of improving all aspects of the way the brain works, is this something that's always fascinated you?

Joe Rogan (0:33)

Absolutely.

Amishi Jha (0:34)

Yeah?

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Yeah. The book isn't necessarily about all aspects, but a very important one that drives a lot of other aspects, which is the brain's attention system.

Amishi Jha (0:43)

Yeah, that's a thing a lot of people have a problem with today, right, with phones and distractions and screens and nonsense.

Joe Rogan (0:50)

Yeah.

But it's always been a problem. So meaning you can look back to medieval monks, and they report, you know, I abandoned my family, I've devoted my life to God, and I still keep thinking about lunch when I'm supposed to be praying. So this is not only a modern problem, it's actually a human problem.

Amishi Jha (1:08)

Where does it come from? Is it just a natural function of having a lot of things to think about in the world if you're trying to survive?

Joe Rogan (1:16)

What does, where does what come from?

Amishi Jha (1:18)

The, like, distraction. Like, if you think about it, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you kind of have to multitask mentally, right? You can't just concentrate on picking these mushrooms.

You also have to think, is that a sound of a branch snapping behind me? Is someone sneaking up on me? Like, what's that smell? Like, you have to always be aware of so many different things. It seems almost like a natural part of being a person to be distracted.

Joe Rogan (1:47)

Absolutely. Our brain is built for distractibility, exactly for the reasons that you said. It advantages us to be able to not just focus when we want to, but scan as we're still engaged in a task.

And as I just mentioned, it's not really only a modern problem, because oftentimes, even if we're abandoning every other kind of possible external distraction, and we're just by ourselves alone in a quiet room, we can still feel like it's hard to focus.

So this capacity that drives kind of a shifting, moving attention, waxing and waning, is something that is baked into the way that our brain functions. And I think that's often misunderstood as a problem. People think, oh, no, no, my brain is really busy. My brain gets really distracted. Instead of understanding, that's just the nature of the brain. If you are alive, awake, conscious, about half of your waking moments, your attention is not going to be in the task at hand.

Amishi Jha (2:50)

That's something that people need to learn when they start meditating. That when you meditate, people think, God, why do I keep getting distracted? That's just part of it.

Joe Rogan (2:59)

Exactly.

Amishi Jha (3:00)

You're never going to be completely zen for long periods of time and just completely full of bliss and enlightenment. No, you're going to be thinking about cheese and car tires.

When is it raining?

Joe Rogan (3:14)

No, absolutely. I think understanding that, it shifts, it starts to shift your relationship to what you're trying to do in the practice of meditation. It's not about clearing the mind and that term gets used a lot. Like just clear it out. Not possible. Not going to happen. Not the way that your brain was designed.

But then you start understanding that there is a win to be had in a practice, like especially the kind of stuff that I study in my lab, mindfulness meditation, because in the act of knowing where your mind is and training it to come back over and over, you gain a lot.

You gain almost, in some sense, the super capacity to have more control in your, not just the way your mind functions, but in your life.

Amishi Jha (4:01)

That's where it gets interesting for me because do you have sort of a standard protocol that you think people should apply to their thinking, or is it based on where you are in your life, how much you've already done of this? Does everybody's brain vary in terms of how much distractions they have in their head?

Joe Rogan (4:23)

Deep question, actually. So, yes, it varies. And let's just say the basics are there's a basic profile. So to disabuse ourselves that if your mind wanders, there's something wrong with you, or there's something unique about you, that's everybody.