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Perceiving and Remembering – Converging Views from Neuroscience and Early Buddhism

I'd like to start by saying a little bit more about my background for those of you who don't know me, although it's nice to see familiar faces on the screen today. My professional training has been as a neuroscientist, a medical doctor, and a psychiatrist. I had a clinical practice of psychiatry for about 35 years, primarily seeing patients with anxiety and depression. I've retired now from clinical practice, but I'm still on the faculty at the University of California, Davis, where I've been for close to 40 years. I teach psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, and neuroscience. I'm also still involved in brain research, which I've been doing for over 50 years. Since the late 80s, when MRI scanners became widely available, I've been using brain imaging methods to study what's happening in the brain and what might be wrong when people who have psychiatric disorders seek treatment and volunteer for research. It's been a journey of learning how to relate the basic anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience of the brain to the human experience.

I have also had a practice in Buddhism. I was first interested in it and had a meditation practice in my early years, but when I went to medical school, that seemed to disappear in the hustle and busyness of training and my early academic career. So it's really been the last 15 or 20 years that I've come back to a serious commitment to studying and practicing in this tradition. Having spent those earlier years studying the brain and the mind from other perspectives, I realized that I developed a kind of bilingual feeling for the subject matter. I would sit in a dharma talk and hear what people were saying, and I'd think, "Well, that's just like this principle from neuroscience." Or I would be reading a neuroscience article and think, "Oh, that's just like something the Buddha talked about in this sutta when he was teaching us about how the mind works and how to be skillful with a human mind." This has been a very useful and enriching synergy for me.

I want to share that perspective with you today on a couple of topics: how memory works, and how people perceive the world, using both the language of neuroscience and the early Buddhist tradition. This synergy has really increased my level of confidence in both traditions, since they seem to be pointing at the same basic facts about the nature of the mind. I also want to communicate a caveat: even though I'll be using a lot of the metaphors and language of neuroscience, I don't mean to imply a materialistic metaphysics. Science has a valid claim to being useful, as do many other traditions of knowledge, but that's not the same as having a valid claim to the ground truth of the basic reality in which we find ourselves. If I show pictures of brains and nerve cells, please don't extrapolate that I think this is absolute ground truth; I just think it's a very useful way of framing what's going on in our bodies.

Memory, Karma, and Intention

I'd like to start with a quote from the 10th-century Chinese Zen Master Yunmen^[1]. When he was quite old, he was asked, "What is the fruit of a lifetime of practice?" And he replied, "An appropriate response." I've always found this terse and pithy quote to be very useful because it highlights the reality that one of the most important fruits of dharma practice is a transformation of how intentions and actions arise in our mind and in our heart. The freedom that the Buddha spoke about was, in large measure, freedom from the effects of greed, hatred, and delusion. When the heart is free of those things, the way we respond to what's happening around us is transformed. It has a bass note of benevolence about it, but is perfectly customized to the situation.

The Buddha talked about intention, and how intentions arise in our mind, in a lot of ways. One of the ways was with the concept of karma (or kamma in Pāli^[2]). In the West, this idea is sometimes misunderstood as some form of cosmic justice where people who do bad things eventually get punished for it. But the Buddha had something much more simple and direct in mind. Whenever we act in the world, there are intentions behind our actions. Sometimes we're not clearly aware of what they are—we'd rather not know, so we tell ourselves our intentions are one thing when they are actually something else. But it's the actual intentions behind our actions that influence our future life. That's the way the Buddha generally meant his teachings about karma. It's not a force outside of us; it's the simple relationship of what activates in our minds, motivates actions, and then shapes who we are in the future. What we intend now shapes who we are in the next mind moments, days, weeks, and months.

In the Penetrative Sutta^[3], the Buddha says, "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, and intellect." The karmic results do not come from the outcome of our actions. If a surgical patient dies in spite of a surgeon's best efforts to save them, this doesn't produce bad karma for the surgeon. But if the surgeon had been careless, neglectful, or malicious, then that is bad karma. It's the intention, not the outcome. The intention is what arises in the mind and leaves a trace that influences us in the future.

There's another way the Buddha taught about the importance of our intentions. In the discourse on the two kinds of thought, he says: "Whatever a mendicant frequently thinks about and considers, becomes their heart's inclination. If they often think about and consider malicious thoughts, their mind inclines to malicious thoughts. If they often think about and consider cruel thoughts, their mind inclines to cruel thoughts... If they often think about and consider thoughts of goodwill, the mind inclines to thoughts of goodwill. If they often think about and consider thoughts of harmlessness, the mind inclines to thoughts of harmlessness."

This principle is identical to a fundamental principle in neuroscience, which is summarized as: "Neurons that fire together, wire together." This means that whenever an intention of body, speech, or mind is activated in the brain, it strengthens the connections between the neurons that embody those intentions. By strengthening those connections, that type of intention will be prioritized, it will grow stronger, and it will be more likely to show up in similar situations.

Reflection and the Ālaya Consciousness

The Buddha also spoke about the importance of reflection and how it can affect our intentions. In a sutta where the Buddha is instructing his son, Rāhula^[4], he asks him, "What do you think, Rāhula? What is a mirror for?" Rāhula answers, "For reflection, sir." The Buddha then explains, "In the same way, Rāhula, bodily actions, verbal actions, and mental actions are to be done with repeated reflection. Whenever you want to do a bodily action, you should reflect on it: 'This action I want to do—would it lead to self-affliction, to the affliction of others, or to both?' While you are doing a bodily action, reflect on it... Having done a bodily action, you should reflect on it... Thus, Rāhula, you should train yourself: 'I will purify my bodily actions, verbal actions, and mental actions through repeated reflection.'"

The Buddha teaches that one can purify one's actions through repeated reflection. Reflecting on whether an action harms yourself or others brings the intention closer to conscious awareness, allowing you to change your motivation. But there's another fascinating element here from the point of view of neuroscience: remembering and reflecting on an action after it has been carried out can actually change the memory trace for that intention. It can change its influence on your future experiences and actions. This is fundamental to the way people think about memory today, particularly in psychotherapy.

Before expanding on that, I want to bring in a related Buddhist idea from the Yogācāra school: the ālaya-vijñāna^[5]. About 700 years after the time of the Buddha, they introduced a more explicit way of thinking about karma based on the "storehouse consciousness." The word ālaya means store or storehouse (as in the Himalayas, "where the snow is stored"). In the Yogācāra tradition, the ālaya is where the traces of our past experiences are stored in a dormant or latent state. They called these latent traces karmic seeds (bīja). When these seeds are triggered and reappear in present-moment experience, that is the ripening of the fruit of karma.

The Yogācāra view of the ālaya focuses on all aspects of experience, not just intentions, which is exactly how neuroscientists think about memory. Biologists are very happy with the concept of a storage system for latent information that can come back when needed. DNA is basically our evolutionary karma. Many of our genes become latent when we're fully grown, but they can be reactivated. If the weather gets really cold, certain genes wake up to generate warmth. If you transition to a lifestyle with a lot of exercise, certain genes turn on to cope with that extra demand. This even happens with meditation practice; potentials that were latent become activated.

Neuroplasticity and Episodic Memory

For neuroscientists and psychologists, memory and neuroplasticity are how we understand the traces of our early life experiences, feelings, and beliefs. Sometimes things happen to us that have nothing to do with what we intended, yet they affect us deeply. The brain's ability to adapt and change based on experience is neuroplasticity, and memory is its common-sense expression.

Our brains have different functional sub-units (the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain) that cooperate to govern behavior. These circuits have different capacities for remembering. Declarative or explicit memories are things we are fully conscious of and can put into words, like semantic memory (facts about the world). Implicit memories are non-declarative and hard to talk about, like procedural memory (riding a bicycle) or perceptual conditioning.

I want to focus on episodic memory (or autobiographical memory), which primarily involves the hippocampus, the thalamus, and the cortex. Episodic memory is our memory for specific episodes of our experience. If I asked you what you had for breakfast this morning, or where your favorite vacation was in the last decade, your mind could recreate those situations. The defining characteristic of episodic memories is that they are situated—they have an autobiographical context (who was there, where it was, when it was, how you felt). This is different from semantic memory; you might know Ottawa is the capital of Canada without ever having been there.

A basic principle about episodic memories is that as they are formed, they are shaped by things we already know. Crucially, memories did not evolve to accurately record the past as perfect archives; they evolved to meaningfully guide our behavior going forward. If the meaning of a remembered event changes, the memory itself changes.

To illustrate this, consider a classic memory test. If I read a list of words to you—"bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, nap, snooze, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, wake, peace, yawn, and drowsy"—and then distract you for 15 seconds before asking you to write them down, about half of people will confidently write down the word "sleep," even though it wasn't on the list. The word "sleep" is strongly suggested by the gist of the list. Episodic memory prioritizes meaning over exact details. If you have people sleep through the night and test them in the morning, the percentage of people who remember the word "sleep" is even greater. During sleep, memories are refined, consolidated, and compressed, leaving us primarily with the meaning. Researchers used to call this a "false memory," but they don't do that as much anymore because it implies that some episodic memories are perfectly accurate. All memory is about meaning, not archiving. It's better to call this a "memory illusion," and it illustrates perfectly how memory works.

"Flashbulb memories" are another example. These are episodic memories that are exceptionally vivid, strong, and rich with emotional meaning, like remembering where you were during the events of September 11, 2001. A year later, 97% of Americans said they remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment they heard about the attacks. What makes these memories feel so clear is the emotional arousal and how frequently they are recalled and talked about. However, when memory researchers interviewed undergraduates within a week of the attacks and then a year later, their descriptions only agreed about 60% of the time. Nearly 40% of the details had changed. When we talk about an event and retrieve the memory, things start to get a little muddled, and the memory actually changes.

The Three Phases of Memory and Reframing

How do memories change over time? There are three phases of memory processing:

1. Present Moment Experience: Mental content is continually recorded by the labile storage circuits of the brain (the hippocampus).
2. Labile Phase: Immediately after an event, and up to a couple of weeks, the memory trace is labile. It can be easily updated, modified, and crystallized.
3. Stable Phase: As the memory consolidates into long-term memory (a process heavily reliant on sleep), the hippocampus teaches the cortex how to simulate that pattern of activation. It becomes a stable store that is resistant to change.

The most important point is this: when you take a stable memory and retrieve it, you are making it labile again. It is only in this labile state that memory traces can be updated, modified, or changed.

When you retrieve a memory, you bring it from the stable store back into present-moment experience. This is what reflection does. It reactivates—makes labile again—something that was in a fixed state as a karmic seed. Once it becomes alive again, it can be modified by the reflections that occur or the new meaning that is created. This maps perfectly onto the metaphor of the ālaya. Stable stores are the karmic seeds. Retrieval is the karmic fruit—when the seeds ripen. That is the moment they are susceptible to being modified.

In psychotherapy, when troublesome memory traces are reactivated, they can be reframed. If the meaning changes, the memory is changed. Often, memory traces are reactivated and just "replanted" unchanged, which solidifies the seed. But if a mindful and compassionate reflection occurs, it can modify the seed, even to the point of exhausting it completely when it's reconsolidated with a fundamentally different meaning.

This has profound implications for dharma practice. When the karmic seeds of difficult experiences are triggered and ripen, it's a challenge, but it is also an opportunity. It is the only time there is a possibility of changing the long-term store. This requires meeting the experience with mindfulness, self-compassion, and wisdom.

There's another implication here: when profound and deeply affecting things happen to us (in life or in meditation practice), it's wise to treat them with special care when they are fresh. Sometimes it's wise not to talk about them too soon. The wisdom in the mind knows how to settle these things down naturally. If you talk too soon to someone who isn't really interested, it might diminish the experience and replant a seed that isn't as beneficial. It's wise to allow things to settle and consolidate.

Questions and Answers (Part 1)

Questioner: I had a stroke in the hippocampus about 30 years ago. I now teach autistic middle schoolers, and sometimes I just forget their names. In terms of my practice, sometimes I just feel like it's hopeless. Rick Maddock: That sounds like an unusual presentation, and I'm sorry you've had to go through that. The hippocampus is super important for episodic memory, but there are many other kinds of memory. Our practice shapes who we are and how we respond going forward even without conscious episodic memories. Emotional memories, procedural memories, and how we conduct ourselves in relationships are entirely different kinds of learning. There are many other avenues of transformation. Questioner: Thank you. At the very least, my practice relieves anxiety and makes me much less likely to get reactive to middle schoolers doing crazy things.

Questioner: I used to be a criminal defense attorney, and what you're saying about how memories change over time reminds me of how witnesses can be influenced by suggestions. Also, intention plays out in the legal world in terms of mens rea. I have a general question: my sister and I grew up in the same household. I have a great memory of our childhood, but she has almost no memory of it. How is it that our brains are so different? Rick Maddock: The brain is an incredibly complicated organ. The diversity of human brains is probably a feature, not a bug. Every generation has highly diverse minds and brains, even among siblings.

Questioner: I'm a psychotherapist working with highly suicidal teens, so I run into a lot of trauma. I try to encourage them that it's not important to remember every detail, but rather how the trauma affects them internally. When trauma happens to a youth versus an adult, does episodic memory make them remember it differently? It seems like children wall off the details to protect themselves, while adults remember more. Rick Maddock: Children are more likely to wall off memories because of their potentially disruptive effect. If someone who has been traumatized is ready to go over those memories with a safe caregiver, it usually leads to some resolution and the replanting of different seeds. The best indicator of whether it's essential to remember all the details is how much those reactive seeds have been exhausted. If the reactivity is gone, remembering exact details isn't necessary. But sometimes details remain as a source of psychological inflammation, and until they are brought into the present moment, they can't be changed. Mindful relaxation and reflection will eventually bring most of those seeds to light safely.

Questioner: I remember the movie Inside Out, where they try to keep sadness away from memories. Is recalling difficult experiences when you're feeling joyful or happy a good time to explore them in mindfulness? Rick Maddock: Yes, feeling good and confident is a great qualifier for retrieving challenging memories. But having the freedom and space to process them is also really important. If you don't have the time or space to cope with a difficult memory right now, it might be better to wait for a time when you do. The brain also uses sleep to do some of this reprocessing, using dream consciousness to rearrange things when you aren't busy. You should use discernment in deciding when to open up that box.

Questioner: I had COVID earlier this year, and I think I've seen a slight decrease in memory. Do you have any ideas on how to improve it? Rick Maddock: If you're fully recovered, aerobic exercise has a well-documented beneficial effect on the hippocampus. Twenty to thirty minutes of exercise that gets your heart rate up, four or five times a week, can have a restorative effect. Sleep is also crucial. During deep sleep, the cellular channels between neurons dilate, and fluid washes through, clearing out waste. This only happens during deep sleep, so make sure you get plenty of it. Exercising also promotes deep sleep.

Questioner: I'm confused about unconscious intention. In the context of the Eightfold Path, I thought intention was a conscious thing. Is there an interaction between unconscious and conscious intention? Rick Maddock: The word intention is often used to mean conscious intention, but I think the Buddha used it in a broader sense. I view consciousness as a spectrum. Some things are easily apprehended, while others are harder to see, and some we will never be conscious of in ordinary mind states. Often, there is more than one intention arising simultaneously, but only one wins the competition and governs our behavior. One of the benefits of mindfulness is developing a broader awareness to notice these different intentions bubbling up. Even if we don't act on them, they incline the mind. Part of the practice is skillfully seeing these actual intentions arising without blame. If we have the skill to see them arising, we might choose not to act on them.

Questioner: A friend of mine who is in her mid-70s had a difficult upbringing and has taken up a practice called "re-parenting," where you imaginatively reinvent a loving parent. It gives her comfort, but she still goes back to the bad things from her youth. What do you think of this process? Rick Maddock: I'm not deeply familiar with the method, but the principles sound reasonable. It likely depends on the kind of guidance she's getting from the person facilitating the program.

Questioner: How many of these karmic seeds or memories are coming to fruition at any one point in time? My hunch is a lot. What is the implication for practice when you're just sitting there, and nothing particularly upsetting is happening? Is awareness and compassion just doing "house cleaning"? Rick Maddock: Yes, minor things constantly come up during regular practice that can be transformed by reflection. If things pop up that feel like they have pressure behind them, you can reflect on them. How does one prioritize them? I think they set priorities on their own based on your current conditions and what you anticipate in the coming week. It's a gradual process, and having a regular practice gives you many opportunities for this daily cleaning.

Questioner: A teacher once recommended reaching out to someone you've hurt in the past. I did that with someone I hadn't seen in 40 years, and she was appreciative. Is that a formal Buddhist practice? Or is it enough to just think of people I've hurt and practice loving-kindness? Rick Maddock: It's a practice often found in 12-step programs, and I can see why it's powerful. The reason it's powerful to reach out is that it really focuses your mind because there's a real person there. But if you can focus your mind without them in front of you, that works just as well. The karma is internal. When you fully retrieve the memory, reflect on how it was harmful to them and yourself, and remember it as a mistake you don't want to repeat, you change the karmic seed. It's a form of complete accountability.

Questioner: I wanted to share an exercise about befriending yourself as a child to lay down an alternate track of support. Also, regarding head injuries, I was in a bicycle accident years ago that caused temporary short-term memory loss. Now in my 70s, I can feel my memory fading. Is this residual trauma or normal aging? Do brain circuits actually repair themselves, or do they just rebuild around the damage? Rick Maddock: The exercise of befriending your child-self sounds very constructive. Regarding your head injury, the hippocampus is highly active and operates near the limit of its capacity, making it vulnerable to disruption. The decline in episodic memory is also a normal characteristic of aging. However, neuroplasticity involves both rerouting and rebuilding. The hippocampus is one of only two locations in the brain that has neural stem cells that constantly generate new baby neurons, even into your 90s. Exercise accelerates that process and helps more of those new neurons survive to maturity.

Questioner: I have a chronic vestibular condition and do neuroplasticity retraining involving exposure therapy to find balance. How does neuroplasticity relate to dealing with suffering in meditation? Rick Maddock: Every moment of experience is a moment of neuroplastic change. Engaging with experience mindfully is always a step in the right direction. For vestibular neuroplasticity, your brain needs exposure to adapt, and doing so with a calm, confident mind is ideal. Arousal and caring about what you're doing accelerates neuroplastic change. If you do exposure exercises that really matter to you, it will have a synergistic effect on the neuroplastic change.

Questioner: How is a memory physically stored? Is it a protein on a cell? Rick Maddock: Mostly, it is stored as an anatomical change in the connections between nerve cells. These can be tiny structural changes, like an increase in the number of neurotransmitter vesicles—tiny storage bubbles at the tips of neurons. If a connection is strengthened through repetition or significance, a neuron might go from having 500 vesicles to 1,000, making it much more potent when communicating with the next neuron in the circuit.

Perceiving and Constructing Meaning

One of the primary goals of dharma practice is to recognize and abandon tendencies toward grasping and clinging that undermine our well-being and cause suffering. Some of these unskillful tendencies are conditioned by cultural factors and past experiences, but some are just innate biological tendencies. Our biological tendencies are wonderful because they helped us survive and evolve, but they might not provide the best help for other aspirations, like wisdom, compassion, or freedom. In some sense, dharma practice is a workaround for our biological design. The Buddha sometimes talked about "going against the stream" of conventional responses.

The Buddha talked about perception as one of the Five Aggregates (Khandhas)^[6]. The aggregates comprise everything we experience:

1. Form (Rūpa): The body and materiality.
2. Feeling Tone (Vedanā): Our affective response to experience (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral).
3. Perception / Recognition (Saññā): How we make sense of our experiences and construct meaning.
4. Intentions / Fabrications (Saṅkhāra): The choices that motivate our thoughts, speech, and actions.
5. Consciousness (Viññāṇa): Our direct, conscious awareness.

When I first learned about the aggregates, I was struck by how much it reads like the table of contents of a modern neuroscience textbook. We have sensory physiology (form), emotion and feeling circuits (feeling tone), perceptual construction (recognition), and action planning and motor systems (intentions). Perceiving, evaluating, and intending are what the brain is doing at the most basic level.

This triad of functions is reflected in the large-scale architecture of the brain. The frontal lobe is specialized for planning, intending, and acting. The posterior part of the brain (occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes) is specialized for perceiving. The evaluative functions (knowing what to care about) reside in the more primitive, midline structures of the brain. The exact same division of labor exists at the microscopic level in the layers of the cerebral cortex. The Buddha's formulation maps beautifully onto neuroanatomy.

The Buddha called these the "aggregates of clinging." We tend to cling to them because we distort our perceptions, adding qualities that aren't naturally there—like assuming they are part of a self, that they will satisfy us permanently, or that they are enduring. In the Vipallāsa Sutta^[7] (The Distortions of Perception), the Buddha describes these distortions: "Sensing no change in what is changing, sensing pleasure in what ultimately is suffering, assuming self where there is no self, sensing the unlovely as if it's lovely—gone astray with wrong views, beings misperceive with distorted minds." When those with wisdom practice the dharma, they "recuperate their right mind... By accepting right view, they overcome all suffering."

Perceptions can be distorted, but they are also malleable and can be conditioned by wisdom. In a dialogue between Sāriputta and Ānanda^[8], Sāriputta says that some beings find freedom because they "truly understand which perceptions make things worse, which keep things steady, which lead to distinction, and which lead to penetration." We can actively cultivate perceptions that help us achieve steadiness of mind and penetrating insight.

From a neuroscientific perspective, perception did not evolve to act like a video camera accurately recording the external world. Perception evolved to construct representations of the world that can guide adaptive behavior for survival. Perception constructs meaning. Cognitive scientists know that our perceptions are useful, but they are not strictly accurate.

To illustrate this, look at visual illusions. You might see two tiles that appear to be wildly different shades of gray when placed in a context of light and shadow, but they are actually the identical color. Our brain automatically alters the color we perceive based on our prior experience with shadows. It changes the color to make the scene meaningful. Similarly, two tables drawn on a screen might look like totally different shapes due to perspective cues, even when they are identical shapes rotated 90 degrees. Our mind imposes a different appearance because it assumes depth. It's incredibly useful, but it's not what is actually there.

How does the brain implement this? In the visual system, information travels from the retina to the thalamus, and then up to the visual cortex. However, there are at least ten times as many neural circuits coming down from the cortex to the thalamus as there are going up from the retina. The cortex is constantly sending down prior knowledge, contextual information, and expectations, telling the thalamus what to expect and actively filtering what comes in. Internal information predominates in the construction of meaning across all our senses. We perceive what should be there based on what we already know. Our brain reifies these constructed perceptions, and we assume that's just the way the world is.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman proposes the "Interface Theory of Perception." He argues that our perceptions function like a graphical user interface on a computer. The objects we perceive are like icons on a desktop. When you look at a file folder icon on your computer, what's really there is a highly complex electrical engineering circuit board operating in machine language. That underlying reality is not useful to you, so software engineers created an interface. Hoffman says evolution did the same thing: it constructed a meaningful interface that hides the overwhelming complexity of reality, showing us only what is useful for our survival. Different species have completely different evolutionary interfaces. Hoffman's evolutionary simulations show that organisms perfectly tuned to perceive "ground truth" are consistently driven to extinction by organisms that only perceive what they need to perceive to survive.

We have to take our perceptions seriously—if you drag a file to the trash, you lose it—but they do not have substantial reality. The Buddha taught this explicitly in the Pheṇa Sutta^[9] (The Foam Sutta). He compared form to a lump of foam, feeling to a water bubble, perception to a mirage, fabrications to a hollow banana tree, and consciousness to a magic trick. "However you contemplate them, examining them carefully, they are void and hollow."

Ventral and Dorsal Streams of Awareness

There is another aspect of perception where neuroscience and dharma practice align perfectly: the spectrum of attention. Meditation teachers talk about the distinction between sati (mindfulness as detailed, focused micro-awareness) and sampajañña^[10] (clear comprehension as a broader, global, situational awareness). We have the capacity for both, and they can be seamlessly integrated.

Neuroscience understands this through the architecture of our perceptual streams. In the visual system, information from the optic nerve is split into two pathways:

1. The Ventral Stream ("What" pathway): Uses parvocellular neurons (small cells). It provides fine-grained, focal analysis. It is object-oriented, identifying categories, colors, and specific details. It culminates in the temporal lobe (language, facial recognition) and is highly tied to conscious, abstract cognition.
2. The Dorsal Stream ("Where/How" pathway): Uses magnocellular neurons (large cells that pool information broadly). It provides big-picture, global awareness. It processes dynamic situations, movement, distance, and spatial relationships. It is action-oriented and culminates in the frontal lobe (action planning and intentions). It operates more implicitly, in the background of conscious awareness.

If you look at an object, your ventral stream says, "That is a green plastic watering can." Your dorsal stream looks at it and intuitively computes affordances—it knows you can grab it by the handle, fill it with water, and pour it. The ventral stream reifies objects and is susceptible to illusions based on context. The dorsal stream is not easily fooled by those same illusions because it computes how to actually physically interact with the space.

In psychotherapy, the ventral stream—because it deals with abstract cognition and views—is often the source of reified, distorted beliefs that cause anxiety and depression. A useful intervention is to help people cultivate their dorsal stream awareness—their situational affordance perceptions. When you feel anxious or stuck in distorted thoughts, expanding into broad, situational, body-based awareness can provide immense relief.

This maps directly to the Buddhist concept of sampajañña. While often translated as "clear comprehension," it implies full situational engagement. Bhikkhu Sujato translates it directly as "situational awareness." Buddhādasa Bhikkhu called it "wisdom in action." By cultivating this broad, open field of attention, we gain a clearer understanding of the actual intentions that are implicitly framing how we size up a situation. As Joseph Goldstein notes, cultivating sampajañña helps us understand the motivations behind our actions, making mindfulness a profoundly transforming practice.

Questions and Answers (Part 2)

Questioner: You suggested that enhancing dorsal stream activity is a way to help reduce suffering. How do you do that, and is that what an affordance circuit is? Rick Maddock: Yes, that's an affordance circuit. Just knowing that this big part of our anatomy exists, even if it's on the periphery of our awareness, allows you to start directing your attention to it. It's a trial-and-error process. In the Carlos Castaneda books, Don Juan teaches him how to run in the desert on a moonless night: don't look directly at things, look to the side. The ventral stream is concentrated in the center of vision, while the dorsal stream is spread over the whole retina. By looking to the side, you access the magnocellular system, which sees situations and enables action. You learn to make it a little more prominent in your awareness.

Questioner: I've been looking at predictive coding, like the work of Anil Seth. The experimental evidence for it sometimes shows very small effect sizes. How good is the experimental evidence that predictive coding makes a difference? Rick Maddock: Effect sizes depend heavily on the details of the experiment. For conventional, everyday activities, the differences might seem small. But the Buddha taught this from mastering and observing his own mind, and neuroscience is showing the same thing. It makes a profound difference when you push your system beyond what it evolved to do. Evolution shaped an animal to survive in the wild. If you want to free yourself from that predicament, you have to learn to see through the errors and distortions you habitually project onto reality.

Questioner: I've found that somatic therapy and somatic awareness really align with what you've described. When my brain is overworking, I ask, "What else is here?" and it brings me into somatic awareness, releasing my triggers. Rick Maddock: I'm so glad that has been useful to you.

Questioner: What are the differences between male and female brains regarding neuroplasticity and development? Rick Maddock: Language is generally lateralized to the left hemisphere. However, women tend to have more bilateral language ability than men. Conversely, spatial awareness is somewhat lateralized to the right hemisphere, and this is slightly more bilateral in men. In terms of development, the myelination of the frontal lobes—which governs action planning, values, and executive control—completes around the late 20s. This process finishes about five years sooner in women than in men, which might partly explain why young men sometimes struggle more with executive control and impulse management.

Questioner: How does one foster more flexible and altruistic outcomes in the face of perceptual distortions? Rick Maddock: Meditation provides perspective on the insubstantial, constructed nature of perception. Not reifying our perceptions gives us more flexibility and freedom in how we respond. Additionally, perspective-taking is a dorsal stream talent. Cultivating the ability to see situations from another point of view—and recognizing that your view is just your view—naturally encourages a more altruistic perspective.

Questioner: How does trauma, like PTSD, relate to time and physiological experience? Rick Maddock: People suffering from PTSD are, in a way, unable to stay in the present moment; the past is continually imposed upon the present. The memory process I described—where a labile memory becomes a stable, assimilated store—hasn't been successfully completed. The memories are resistant to change but keep intruding into the present. The brain is trying to retrieve and reconsolidate the memory in a less toxic way, but it's failing. Psychotherapy is highly effective because it helps assimilate that past episode into a normal, stable store so it stops intruding.

Questioner: There seems to be a tension between Hoffman's interface theory and the dorsal stream approach. Hoffman suggests the interface reduces information for efficiency, while the dorsal approach (looking to the side in the dark) seems to suggest gathering more information. Which is better? Rick Maddock: I wouldn't say the dorsal stream uses more or less information; it's just formatted differently. It's the difference between object recognition and situational engagement. Both ways of sizing up the world evolved because organisms need both abilities. Hoffman's point is that the interface doesn't contain excess "ground truth" information that isn't relevant to survival. The dorsal stream is simply a broad, concise formatting of situational data. The Buddha wasn't advocating for the dorsal stream over the ventral stream; he just noticed that paying attention to situational awareness is a uniquely valuable way to see the underlying intentions shaping how we size up the world.