Enter the Subconscious

19.12.28 Enter the Subconscious Hour

SM: Sarah McConnell

AS: Audio Sample

JL: John Last

PV: Peter Vishton

DH: Daniel Hirshberg

GS: Graham Schweig

BC: Beth Cabrera

KK: Kenneth Kendler

00:00:00

[music]

SM There's a quote from a central piece of Buddhist scripture, all experiences are preceded by mind, having mind as their master, created by mind. It describes one of the core beliefs of Buddhism. Control the mind and youíll control your experience. But what exactly is ëmindí? How can we control what we don't understand? From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason, I'm Sarah McConnell. Today we meditate on the mind. We'll hear from a professor trying out new mind-measuring technology on a class of meditating students, and explore how meditating on faith can be a form of divine love. But first, we're going to challenge the very notion of mind itself. Here's With Good Reason contributor John Last.

JL I want you to imagine a hot summer day.

[music, ambient sounds of a pool, people talking]

You're lounging by the pool and a friend comes by with a tray, and on it are two glasses of water. Now stop. Which did you take the glass on the left for the glass on the right?

[music fades, noises of ice in glass]

Now ask yourself. Why?

PV We're all psychologists, in a sense. I think almost everybody walks around with an intuitive theory about how their mind works.

JL This is William and Mary, psychology professor Peter Vishton.

PV And there's at least one sort of fundamental flaw you find in most people's theories. There's this belief we have, that the starting point for anything we're gonna do, is we decide to do it, right, and make a decision. I'm going to pick up the glass of water and then my hand reaches out and picks up the glass of water. There's a tremendous amount of evidence that timing-wise in terms of brain activity, it goes the other way, that your brain is, in essence, starting to reach for the water before you have that conscious experience of deciding to do it.

JL All right. I hear you saying, what does it matter if my brain or my body decided to pick up the glass of water? I still decided. But the fact is, when it's your body deciding - you, the conscious part of you, your mind, is not really in control.

PV If you give someone a range of options from which to select, say, some cups of juice, I'd lay out different cups of juice in front of someone. And I say, taste all these and tell me which one you think is best. And the person will taste them. In some experiments, actually, the juice is exactly identical in all of the cups. In that circumstance, people very consistently exhibit a right-side bias. They'll tend to pick the juice that's towards the right. There are a lot of reasons that might be so, people are right-handed, we tend to read from left to right. The thing that is fascinating for me about those studies is if you ask people, okay, you pick this juice over here, why did you pick that juice over there? Everyone will give you a reason. This one was a little bit sweeter or I liked the finish on this one, I like the color on this one just a little bit more - when in fact, none of those reasons have anything to do with why you picked that juice. That's sort of harmless in the juice context. But if it comes to - I don't know how you decided to - to vote, or where you decided to live, where you decided to go to school. It turns out that there are a huge number of factors that influence your decisions and that, since you're not aware of them, you can't really - you can't understand them as well as you could. You can't improve the decision-making behavior that goes with them.

JL You might have noticed something remarkable in what Vishton just said. Our brain is actually inventing false justifications for every decision our body makes. He cites a revolutionary study by Alvaro Pascual-Leone that shows just how deep this seems to go.

PV I find this study endlessly fascinating. So if - if you're in this study, the critical condition here is one where participants decide they're going to move one particular hand. Let's say you're - the person has decided they're going to twitch their right hand. Pascual-Leone has recorded that, he knows that that's taken place. And just at the moment when the go signal is given, he stimulates the brain to make the other hand twitch. That is - I'm sitting there doing this experiment, I've decided to move my right hand and then at just the right moment, someone takes over my brain for a second and they make the other hand move instead. That should feel really strange. It should be sort of like being possessed by something - you've lost control of your own body. For me, the most fascinating part of that study is that no one notices. There've been some follow up studies where they've pressed the participants to say something like, you know, based on your pattern of brain activity, it looks like you're going to move your right hand, but then you move your left hand instead. What - what happened there? People very consistently say, you know, it's interesting you ask that I changed my mind at just the last second.

JL Vishton says this fact reveals a kind of disturbing truth about our consciousness. In a way, we are living in a fiction of our own making. A fiction where I - the person who lives in my mind and the one in control.

PV What's going on there is that our conscious thought isn't really in control of most of our actions. It's - it's almost like you're up there in your head, just going for the ride. You watch the things that your body does and then the conscious thought does two things. One, it takes credit for it. It gives this this powerful impression that, oh, I was the one who decided to twitch that hand or I was the one who decided to eat that donut. The - the second thing is it makes up a story about why you did the thing you did. In many cases, it's not the real reason that you did it. But what it does is it looks for some sort of a causal explanation, a reasonable explanation for why we pursued that behavior.

[music]

JL These studies show that the Buddhists might be right. We might be living in a world of our own imagining, a world of self-deception. But unlike the Buddhist scriptures, this research doesn't offer much hope of escape. Our bodies are very much in the driver's seat of our consciousness, and it seems unlikely they'll hand over the keys.

00:06:33

SM That was John Last with William and Mary professor of psychology, Peter Vishton. For some people, the mind is a place of constant pressure and anxiety. And to universities in particular, many students are turning to mindfulness exercises to help free themselves from their own inner demons. At the University of Mary Washington, assistant professor of religion Dan Hirshberg leads a new minor in contemplative studies. What do you think accounts for the rapid growth in this field of contemplative studies in higher education?

[music fades]

DH I think that on the one hand, there became a greater awareness of Buddhist traditions coming out of the 90s. Yoga developed and became very popular. And then on the other, we also have the rigorous scientific study of meditators. Over the years, the rigor of the science has improved, but the general view of meditation is that it's something helpful that can be applied, and that does have real, measurable positive effects.

SM Your first exposure to real meditation was when you traveled abroad in college, right?

DH Yes, I had an introduction on campus, but then I did a study abroad program in India and Nepal, where we meditated twice a day, every day.

SM And what sort of people did you meet there where you were doing more than merely meditate, but actually finding a more transcendent experience?

DH Striving for one anyway. I think we were in Bodhgaya, which is where the Buddha gained enlightenment 2500 years ago. So in that, it really is the epicenter of the Buddhist universe. It draws many different pilgrims from all over the world. And likewise, many different meditation masters as well. The most inspiring people that we met, were the meditation masters that would come in and actually train us in these traditions. One of my first Buddhist teachers was a Sri Lankan Lay-practitioner by the name of Godwin Samararatne. He was a librarian into like his 50s, he never married, he took care of his mother, and late in life, he took an interest in meditation. The depth of his practice was incredible. He never left a true state of contemplation and meditation. That incredibly - even peaceful state where kindness seemed to be the only real focus.

SM Kindness and empathy are everything, arenít they?

DH I'd like them to be. You know, I think they make such a huge difference in human experience. And this is something we teach our students as well - that that that's what it is to be truly present. To be aware of that which is around us and have actual care for it to be able to strive, at least to see it from its own side. And that's the nature of relationship. This is what we strive to do, is to see and be seen. And again, I think meditation can really help with this.

SM Were you striving for religiosity or were you striving to calm the demons inside, or what was your young frame of mind during this period?

DH Well, I was really, you know, again, being kind of a grunge kid. We are anti-institution. And my first impulse was to reject anything that was established religion. So even when I got to Bodhgaya and the center of the Buddhist universe there, I was really resistant to identifying myself as a Buddhist at all. But as I kept studying and as I kept practicing, it just became ñ I, it answered all the questions that I had and took it much, much further. And so both intellectually and then practically as well in the ways of working with mind, I found it to be profoundly transformative. And by the time that program was over, I knew there was nothing else that I wanted to do. I wanted to keep studying these traditions for the rest of my life.

SM What was it about Buddhism that really spoke to you?

DH Well, to begin, I mean, I think the first teaching of the Buddha has to do with the nature of suffering in the way that that simply exists in this world, the way that it appears. So in that it doesn't try to shy away from the persistence of suffering and that being a defining aspect of not just human experience, but the experience of all living things. And then beyond that, it kind of flips it and starts to discuss these notions of empathy and compassion is so central. And so in many respects, you have the heat of some sorrow, cyclic existence of this world, extinguished by moments and the development of compassion and empathy for oneself and for others. And that was a profound instruction as well, that in this tradition, you know, we often take Buddhism to have the orientation of, okay, well, it's only about others. But if you don't have compassion for yourself, then you can't have compassion for others. You really have to be able to offer it completely. The breath is with us from the first moment of life to the very last. And yet we pay so little attention to it. It's totally basic and essential, and yet it's something that we don't tend to be so aware of.

SM I've heard a number of people say that when meditating with an instructor or perhaps with yoga, they often become so relaxed, they weep. And it initially startles them.

DH People can be startled in lots of different ways. There's lots of new experiences that arise. And likewise, there's lots of different things that can be discovered. So on the one hand, if we can suddenly become in touch with a deeper sense of our own humanity, we can develop a sense of compassion of our ñ or for ourselves. That's overwhelming and kind of floods out. The emotion is there. The emotion is present. And people can connect with that very directly, even without words. So sometimes that's more than enough.

SM You've been doing an interesting thing, trying out headsets that can monitor brain waves for people as they meditate. I imagine you have a headset and you're able to sort of watch on a screen whether you're able to control, flatten or animate your brainwaves. Is that what this is?

DH Basically, yeah. You know, the technology is still developing. Some of them purport to read those brainwaves and give you audio feedback for when you're in a meditative state or not. The other one, which is more sensitive, can be used for more scientific purposes. And on that one, you can see brainwaves in real time. There's different types of brain waves associated with different types of brain states. And so the goal is to learn how to place your brain physiologically within these states of emitting these waves.

SM There was an extraordinary student that you had who was exemplary in cognitive neuroscience and yet who said your courses really transformed her life. How so?

DH She was truly an outstanding student, one of the very best to graduate. She had the scientific side down, but I think part of what always drove her interest in her inquiry was delving deeper into human experience and what helps us experience our lives. So on the one hand, science tells us a lot about that. But on the other hand, it doesn't really get down to the heart of human experience either. When she took the advanced course in contemplative practice, where they are given the opportunity to study any form of contemplation that they're interested in, she decided to do lucid dreaming. So in the Tibetan tradition in particular, there's actually a form of practice where meditation doesn't end when we lose consciousness and go to sleep. One strives to maintain a state of awareness throughout all the various stages of sleep. While dreaming there's various techniques to awaken within the dream, realize that you're dreaming. And as a result of that, you're able to manipulate your experience. And again, being such a diligent student and a diligent practitioner, it took her a couple of months but eventually she did start having some lucid dreams.

SM Do you think there's anything about this meditative experience that cannot still be understood by science?

DH I think science is its own language and has its own mode of inquiry. So it tells us a lot of things, but it speaks its own language. Unfortunately, it's too often the case of that language really doesn't map on to our subjective experience. In many respects, it removes the - the love, I guess you could say. Almost takes the heart from it. And sort of look at it only from a scientific perspective, it's really only telling one side. I don't think science is much closer, really, to telling us what our experience is. I don't think it does the best job of telling us what mind is. And even beyond that, I don't think it's even reaching to tell us really what is beyond mind.

[music]

SM Dan Hirshberg is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Mary Washington. Coming up next, how love is at work in Indian religion.

00:16:38

SM Meditation and mindfulness have become a big part of self-love, a wellness movement encouraging people to take a moment for themselves amid the hectic flurry of daily life. But my next guest says self-love is only part of the equation. Graham Schweig is a professor of Indian religion at Christopher Newport University and the author of a recent book about love in the Indian tradition. He's also a celebrated yogi, having taken up daily meditative practice when he was still a teenager in the 1960s. Graham, what was your first introduction to Indian religion?

[music fades]

GS It came about in a very strange way. My parents took me out of public school - middle school, and put me in a private school in the Washington, D.C. area. And the headmaster thought I should get a head start, take a summer course. And he was teaching linguistics. I didn't even know what it was until I started taking it. And he talked about the Middle Eastern languages, Hebrew, Hittite and all these things. He moved then over to the east, to India, started talking about Sanskrit and the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts in the world, the texts in which we find yoga and so on. And I just, for some unexplainable reason, had to learn more. First of all, I was struck by the beautiful, sonorous recitations of Sanskrit. Just beautiful stuff.

[recites Sanskrit passage]

I mean, it just sings.

SM Did you begin yoga and meditation?

GS Yes. Back then, in the mid 60s, the immigration laws had lifted for Indian immigrants to come. And so every yoga teacher practically that came to the U.S. at the time I visited, I had audience of such a teacher in D.C. and I started practicing yoga at age 14, very, very seriously. Such that at age 15, I asked my parents if I could drop out of high school. And they said, well, okay. But what would you do all day? And I said, meditate. Can you imagine?

SM Did you?

GS Yes.

SM I can't imagine that.

GS Yes. Well, that's what I did. I seriously took up the life and practice of yoga. I became a very strict vegetarian, which I am to this day. But then a year later, I felt like I wanted to pursue an academic track to gain the knowledge of Sanskrit.

SM So you began to explore the - this notion of Divine Love?

GS Yes. Yeah. This was - I found at the very heart and ultimate stage of yoga, one gained self-realization, all to be able to abandon the self for the sake of the object of love. The - the idea that one, first of all, has to become purified of mind and heart. The troublesome experiences of the past, the difficult challenges that one has had in life, all of these things are there and that's OK. But one has to shift in one's relationship to those things to be able to leave them and go beyond. That's the power of yoga. It's not bad that we've had bad experiences or troublesome experiences. What's bad is if we get stuck there and we don't know how to go beyond them. That's what yoga does. But then yoga goes further. It's not just about transcendence, it's about moving so deeply within the recesses of the heart, so that we can actually pour out loving kindness to others.

SM And where do we find this in writings from Indian religious practices?

GS Yes. Well, one of the texts that I've always loved is the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is often referred to as the Bible of Hinduism. But really it's held such fascination to people in the West since 1785, with the first translation into English by Charles Wilkins.

SM Did - did some of the greatest writers, philosophers and thinkers from the Western tradition begin to incorporate it or explore it in their own writing?

GS Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The transcendentalists in New England. Henry David Thoreau. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other poets had begun to really tap into this - this great wisdom, tradition. Finding things there that they couldn't find anywhere else, such as the whole idea of - of a kind of transcendent being on the one hand, but yet also a kind of felicitous, an absolute joy where love is pictured as a kind of supreme and eternal dance with the divine.

SM Is that not similar to Western traditions? You think of the hymn in Christianity, ëLove divine, all loves excelling, Joy from heaven, to earth come downí.

GS Yes. I mean, there are - there are parallels. I would say that there are parallels more - a bit - between - Catholic mysticism, like John of the Cross, who speaks about these different relationships, these intimate relationships one can have with God.

SM So Christians, for instance, are learning that God doesn't force us to love God but hopes for it. And wants it ñ similar?

GS Yes, similar, but different. The - there - there is in Christian traditions the idea that the soul is innately flawed. In Hindu traditions, the soul is perfect, but it's covered with a lot of imperfections. So it's about digging down deep enough to get to that perfect soul. Also, a mark of differences, there is no God of judgment. There's this idea that there's cosmic justice, karma.

SM A naive question...

GS Please.

SM In all religions, there's always that conflict between the ideal and the practice of it.

GS Yes.

SM And so you don't see among Christian nations or among Hindu nations, an absence of war, conflict, murder and vice.

GS Yes, that is true. And religion, one can easily say, has been one of the greatest sources of bloodshed and terror in the world. And at the same time, amazingly, it is also the place to find some of the greatest human achievements. But, you know, religion is not the problem. It's the way we go into these things. One famous Persian poet by the name of Rabia al-Adawiyya, she wrote this beautiful phrase. She said, ëOh, Lord, if I worship you in hopes of heaven, exclude me from heaven. If I worship you out of fear of hell. Throw me into hell. But if I worship you for your own sake, please don't withhold from me your eternal beautyí. That selflessness is the highest level of religion.

SM It's human love for one another a selfless love or a selfish love?

GS It's the place to practice selfless love. This is - we have marvelous opportunities in our relationships in this world to get a taste of pure love and to get a taste of when love is not pure. And this we can gain from relationships with animals, with children, with friends, with spouses, with family members and so on. That's what this Eastern tradition says, is that these relationships here are meant to help us find this perfect love.

SM Among the things you're working on now is a book called The Yoga of Love. Tell me about that.

GS Yes, it is about this supreme vision of a dance of divine love, how human beings long and desire and yearn for greater and greater closeness. And this is idealized in this vision, which is exquisite poetry from the Sanskrit that I translated, and I speak about the traditions that interpret it.

SM Can you translate for us some of it?

GS Let's see. I can give you the first verse,

[speaks Sanskrit]

Even God seeing those autumn nights with blooming jasmine flowers turned his mind toward love's delights, taking full refuge in the power of yoga, essentially. So here not only do humans practice yoga. But God practices yoga. Yoga means union. You know, in love - if love is vibrant, we always desire even greater closeness with those we love. So love is about, if I can make up a word here closer-ness. Greater and greater closer-ness.

SM And are there tricks to that?

GS The tricks are to get out of the way. Now, to get out of the way. Practice yoga, practice yoga allows you to go beyond your conditioning and the kinds of obstructions that would block us from releasing our hearts more fully and more purely. It's about, you know, it's the process of moving from an intrinsically ego-centric existence to an alter-centric existence, the ability to be centered upon another instead of upon oneself. Love is about two things. On the one hand, it's about acceptance of the way things are and to understand the way things are. And at the same time, love is about a contribution - changing the way things are. So love is at this dialectical movement between acceptance and contribution.

[music]

SM Well, Graham, this has been delightful. Thank you for sharing your insights on With Good Reason.

GS Thank you so much. Glad to be here.

SM Graham Schweig is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Christopher Newport University. The music you're listening to, it's composed and produced by Elliot Maturesen. This is With Good Reason, we'll be right back.

00:28:00

SM Welcome back to With Good Reason, I'm Sarah McConnell. This is a day in the life of Sharina Ong

AS You know, wake up, get ready, of course. Feed myself. Go to class. I would try to get work done. Right now I'm training for a half marathon. Some of my classmates, we would - we would go out to bars downtown. Things like that.

SM Sharinaís delicate balance between work and play and self-care is something we're all familiar with. But it can be pretty hard to achieve. In that list, Sharina mentioned the work she does for a startup called Next Day Better.

AS It extremely flexible work schedule. What I'll usually do is like, OK, now I have this task like working on the proposal, let me set aside an hour or two for that today, maybe an hour or two tomorrow.

SM Could this be the next generation of work where success relies on getting a task done? Not how many hours you spend in the office.

AS We just have to complete whatever we need to complete by the time we agree to complete it.

SM Organizational psychologist Beth Cabrera says this kind of flexibility in the workplace is key to finding work-life balance not just for women, but for men too.

[music fades]

BC Let employees choose when, where, and how they're going to work and not just expect them to be sitting in their office and - as a proxy, kind of, for performance.

SM Beth Cabrera has spent years serving women about what it takes to find balance between careers and everything else. Her book, Beyond Happy: Women Work and Well-Being, shares some of the wisdom she's gleaned. Now a senior scholar at George Mason University's Center for Consciousness and Transformation. Cabrera is convinced our current work culture just isn't working. Beth, what inspired you to write Beyond Happy?

BC Well, let's see, where do I start? My husband I met in grad school at Georgia Tech. And - and when we graduated, we moved to Madrid, Spain. My husband is from there, so we kind of ñ we were going back home for him. And I got a job as a professor at a university. Took me about six years to earn tenure there. During that time, we also - both of our children, our son Alex and our daughter Emily, were born. But about three years after I earned tenure, my husband got a great job opportunity in Arizona. So I had to kind of leave my - my hard earned tenured position and - and think about what to do as my next career move.

SM Isn't that traumatic? Whether it's the man or the woman leaving for the spouse is a huge decision that sort of is traumatizing for both.

BC It is. The fact is, about 86 percent of the cases of trailing spouses are women. It tends to be the man is often already earning more, often has the potential to earn more. And very often it is the woman who leaves her - her job. And I actually thought for a while about just leaving and not even looking for work because the kids were five years and seven years old. Then they were wanting to have playdates and they wanted to play soccer and - and take piano lessons. And I knew how hard it had been to earn tenure once and for a while there, I just thought, well, I'll just be a mom now. And - and that was very traumatic because I loved my job. So I realized that was not an option. I needed to continue to do what I loved. And I ended up finding a part time position at Arizona State University as a professor there. That's when I start doing research on women's careers.

SM You say that working isn't working for anyone today. How can you possibly say that? That's a remarkable statement.

BC Oh, yeah. I think it's true. I mean, it's - it's especially hard for women. But it's not working for anyone. It's becoming, I think, even more demanding. You know, not - not being able to spend time outside of work with your family, is a problem. We need to focus more on performance and less on face time. And we can do that with most of the knowledge work that we have now. You know, you can work in very different ways and we need to let employees choose when, where and how they're going to work and not just expect them to be sitting in their office and - as a proxy kind of for performance. But it's also about energy management. I mean, we - we are humans, not machines. But the way we are managed is - is not respecting the fact that we need time to reenergize. We can't expect organizations to be at their best if we're not letting our employees come to work at their best. And they need time to reconnect. They need time to take care of their health, to get to the gym, to sleep enough. And that's not happening in the demanding workplace that we have today.

SM Give me an example of an inflexible circumstance, but how we could change that?

BC It's micromanaging. I mean, it's - it's the inflexibility, as a manager who - who only thinks you're working if he sees you in the office working. One reason it's not happening is - is that it really is a change of management style. If they are able to say this is - these are the results that I need from you, this is the time line and communicate that well, then all they should care about in the end is seeing those results. And if you come in late and leave early and decide to, you know, get the kids from school, go home, make dinner and then work for two or three hours after dinner when the kids are asleep. That shouldn't matter to the manager as long as you meet the deadlines and have the results that are expected.

SM So many of us only get to talk with our closest girlfriends to compare notes. But you have the advantage of learning intimately about the work-life balance of a thousand women. Right. What do you think you gleaned from that personally?

BC Well, I it was the first was the sense of frustration across so many women. Everyone talks about balance and that's what we're all looking for and all trying to find. And that's impossible. I mean, we're not going to find perfect balance ever. There is always going to be something in your life that's going to interfere with work, a sick child or something that happens. And there's always gonna be work things that are gonna interfere with - with life. And you're gonna have a last-minute deadline or a meeting and youíre - you're gonna miss the play. So that's what really got me thinking about the importance of taking care of our well-being instead and focusing on enhancing our well-being. So in my book, in Beyond Happy, I kind of distill everything down into two very important dimensions. And the first dimension I call ëfeeling goodí and feeling good is about experiencing positive emotions throughout the day. It's not eliminating negative emotions, but it is recognizing that we get a lot of benefits if we experience more frequent, positive emotions. So it's - you can think about it just kind of on a day to day basis. Are you happy? Are you having good days? But there's another equally important dimension, that I call of the ëdoing good dimensioní. And we also need this sense that our life is meaningful. And so that's kind of less of a day to day thing, but more of a when you look over your life and look back over your life. Are you doing things that matter? Are you making a positive impact in - in someone else's life? You know, it's kind of the why. Why are you going and getting out of bed every day? And sometimes that's very frustrating and has negative emotions associated with it. But you really want to have both of those in order to be thriving and feel like you have a high well-being.

SM When you had the chance to interview hundreds of women. Were there any aha moments for you on the positive side?

BC Well, I think the women who - who very clearly said what I'm doing is important, whether it be the impact that I'm making at work or the impact that I'm having on my family. They were clearly less frustrated. And there were also women who - who had the feeling good down and so who were grateful. One of the women that I that I interviewed, her name is Patsy Fox. She was working for DreamWorks in London, had a fantastic job. She was the head of business development for all of Europe, I believe. And their two sons were born while she was working at DreamWorks, but her second son was born with Down Syndrome. They decided that they wanted to move back to the States, to be closer to family, and they both quit their jobs. They moved to Colorado, I believe, and he found work immediately. And Patsy decide to stay home with the kids. That was hard for her. You know, like it was like it was for me. You know, she - she realized that she - she derived a great deal of meaning from her career. She missed the contributions that she had been making to the industry. She missed the financial contributions she'd been making at home. So she ended up going back to work for a small firm called Anchor Bay Entertainment. And she laughingly told me, she said, I went from promoting movies like Shrek and Saving Private Ryan to selling Thomas the Train videos. But it was it was perfect because, you know, she realized that she - it gave her, again, a sense of meaning, but it also let her work on a more flexible schedule. She had a home office, so she could be home to have lunch with the kids, when the therapist came to work with her son, she could greet the therapist. So, you know, she didn't have perfect balance, but it gave her the flexibility to combine her work and her - her life, and also gave her a sense of meaning that that she had realized was lacking when she wasn't working.

SM I noticed that about my contemporaries when I was raising small children, that the women who were working part-time, any combination of hours and also taking care of children seemed to really feel self-actualized.

BC Yeah, you know, I mean, the research shows that the majority of women would prefer to be working part-time. And I think that's what we need more of in the workplaces, is more options. We need more options for job sharing, for reduced hours for - for part-time work. And - and that's a problem because a lot of the part-time work then you don't have the benefits. So finding ways to take slow lanes. Think about your career as a jungle gym instead of a ladder. And so, you know, going sideways, even going down. And - and it's hard because that's not the way we view successful careers. They still are, you know, from the idea of the climbing the ladder, but I think we need to get much more creative about seeing careers in different ways and having very different careers with - with slow lanes, with off ramps, with on ramps, with different ways of working to let us choose at different times in our lives what - what works best.

SM I remember I was in a mostly male workplace environment and my maternity leave was two weeks of vacation, two weeks of sick leave, and however many weeks you think you can live without a paycheck.

BC Right.

SM Which for me was two weeks. So that was a six-week maternity leave.

BC And for a lot of women, they can't afford that much.

SM No, right.

BC I think thatís a serious problem that our country has - the only developed country in the world that doesn't have a mandated maternity and paternity leave. I think that's - that's a vital change that we must work to make happen. The problem with the flexibility policy is that all companies have is, many of them come with negative career consequences. As soon as you take those flexibility accommodations, that they are seen as accommodations and you're seen as less committed to your career. So - and that can be even worse for men, younger men and millennials coming along very much want to be more of a partner at home. And they want to, you know, not help at home, which is what men have done in the past. But they want to, you know, either be the lead parent or completely divide things 50/50. But they can't do that if the workplace doesn't change. When they try to get flexibility at work, it - it hurts their careers. And so we need to change the workplace for everyone. So not only so women can participate more fully in the workplace, but so men can participate more fully at home.

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SM Beth Cabrera. This is fascinating. Thank you for sharing your insights and With Good Reason.

BC Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun.

SM Beth Cabrera is a senior scholar at George Mason University's Center for Consciousness and Transformation. Her book is Beyond Happy: Women, Work and Well-Being. Coming up next, how close are scientists to unlocking the genetic keys to depression?

00:40:40

SM Although even the experts don't know all that much about depression, they do know that it's caused by both environmental and genetic factors. Two researchers, Kenneth Kendler at Virginia Commonwealth University and Jonathan Flint from Oxford University, recently completed a scientific first. They isolated genetic markers that are linked to depression in Han Chinese women. I spoke with Kenneth can learn about their study.

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KK The story begins with Jonathan and Yiping Chen, from China, who has previously conducted a range of large-scale studies in more traditional medical disorders, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease. And she became interested in the possibility of trying to conduct a psychiatric study within China. So, I remember sitting at a cafe in Oxford about 2008 in which we first began to discuss the possibilities of this study. Why did we want to study it in China? Well, there are a couple of key reasons. One is homogeneity. So, heterogeneity is a substantial issue with complex disorders. There are many different potential forms and the chances of success of finding risk factors are to reduce heterogeneity. So, we decided we wanted to only study women of Han Chinese ancestry. Depression will not always be expressed the same way in different cultures. So it was important to try to increase the uniformity of both the genetic background and the environment and culture.

SM And then on top of all this, of course, you looked for only women who had exhibited major bouts of depression.

KK That's right. So, depression is a slippery word because, of course, it also means a sad mood that everyone experiences after a variety of disappointments in life. When a psychiatrist or mental health professional talks about depression, it's something quite different. You have to open up the DSM manual. It talks about a condition that lasts at least two weeks when the depressed mood is almost constantly present throughout one's waking hours. Our eating is disrupted, our sleep is disrupted, our ability to concentrate is disrupted, our - our thinking about the world becomes distorted. We start feeling guilty about things that really aren't our fault. We can't concentrate and make simple decisions as you made at a shopping store, trying to pick what kind of rice you're going to buy, things that you would easily be able to do. You lose confidence in yourself and at the extreme you begin feeling that life - that your life is no longer worth living and you may develop active feelings about ending your life. That's what we call major depression or clinical depression, and the large majority of people after bad things happen to them, everybody expresses interpersonal conflict: you've got job difficulties, all of us, our parents are eventually going to die. We get sad. We think about them. We cheer up. But it occurs in patches over days. You might have a couple of bad days when you're not sleeping three or four days later, you're still sad, you're upset. Some memory comes back, but you're back functioning. That's how most folks are able to deal with these adversities. Now, the depression, the syndrome I describe, it's not rare. That is about one in seven women in their lifetime will experience this kind of depressive episode. We also know that less than half of the people who have the depression get treatment. And of those, many don't ever get psychiatric treatment. Multiple go to their doctor, sometimes go to their minister, so that on average, individuals are not always getting optimal treatment for this condition.

SM So when you teach your actual study, you started examining the gene sequence of each of these individuals looking for markers for depression.

KK That's correct. And the best way to think about that would be imagine that we took the DNA of individuals who had depression and we systematically compared them to individual controls going down the DNA site by site. And what we were looking for was some variation in that DNA molecule, which was significantly different. And the depressed women versus the control women. Now, the D - the genome is a very big place. There are 3.3 billion base pairs. So we had a variety of statistical techniques to focus only on those that were variable. We have a fancy name for those called single nucleotide polymorphisms or ësnipsí. And when we look at so many different places, we have to use particular techniques to make sure that it's not occurring by chance because we were literally looking at millions and millions of markers.

SM So when you look systematically tried to look through the DNA sequences and all these people, how long did each one take and how hard was it to find the tiny little markers you were looking for?

KK Finding the markers was not the hard part. We do that pretty accurately using the kinds of machinery that's available today. The difficult part was the statistical analysis we had, depending upon how you want to count. Maybe about five million markers that we decided to concentrate on. Because those were the regions of the human genome where people differed from each other. So our task really was, one by one, to go through those five million markers trying to find which ones differentiated.

SM And you could only find two among the five million?

KK Well, you could use the word only. No one had done it before. So that was - we were pretty pleased with that accomplishment. But actually, we haven't gotten the story far enough, because once we had convinced ourselves that these signals were real, we had made a prior agreement with a Chinese investigator who had studied about 4000 cases of depression and controls in Beijing and that she would allow us to try to replicate these variances. We made our arrangements with her, she got her DNA out of a lab, they got the aliquots, they shipped it to the Beijing Genome Institute in Hong Kong and they sort of put it through their fastest pipeline. And for weeks, both Jonathan Flint and I, the first thing I did when I woke up this morning, I turned on my cell phone, I opened up my email. Did we get the mail from the Beijing Genome Institute? Were we going to replicate? Or were we not going to replicate?

SM Would they show you? Case by case?

KK No

SM Batch by batch?

KK They would give us aggregate results. But of course, behind those aggregate results are dozens and dozens of stages that both myself and a variety of the statistical colleagues and the teams, both at Oxford and at VCU, were making sure the quality was done properly. But I remember the afternoon and it - you know, it popped up on my e-mail box and I kind of I took a deep breath. I looked around, said, OK, I opened up the email and I had to pinch myself because the two main findings were robustly replicated on the other sample, it was almost too good to be true.

SM So in other words, you would expect to find those same two variants if you looked at the DNA of, let's say, Robin Williams?

KK Not necessarily because there are substantial ethnic differences in how DNA variation occurs across ethnic groups. So the markers don't strongly replicate in European populations, but that's because the markers are so different. We really can't adequately test it in European samples.

SM But you could now, you think, you should be able to go to - if the theory holds, other women in this population size, and if you find these two markers, you should be able to predict that they have major depressive episodes.

KK That's too strong. What we could predict is they are slightly increased risk for major depression. So we have to get away from the idea that we're finding the gene for depression. What we have discovered through much modern genetic research on complex disorders. And by that, I mean things like heart disease, asthma, multiple sclerosis, breast cancer, depression, schizophrenia. Is that the genetic vulnerability that passes across families is made up of dozens and probably hundreds of individual genetic markers, each of which contribute small amounts. So we can be quite precise. That is the risk that you would have. Increase is about 20 - 20 percent higher at maximum from these individual genetic variants.

SM So it's not like a self-pregnancy test.

KK Absolutely not. And that's why this - this is a research finding. This is not a finding that currently has clinical implications. We cannot begin to test people for their vulnerability. It shows us they can be done, that we have a first couple of clues and that we need to really gear up to work harder to get to much larger samples and greater gene discovery.

SM Let's say the hypothetical happens and we eventually map out all the markers we need to make more definitive determinations. What good does that do us?

KK Then we hope that large pharmaceutical companies will get involved. Will it be possible once we understand that if you have - have some deviation in this particular pathway, I can put a drug in, that'll impact on that that little enzyme or that little enzyme and correct that deficiency. That will allow us to develop more effective therapies that are based on an understanding of the disorder itself. Well, we need to be clear as the anti-depressants that we use now, including the old-fashioned tricyclic antidepressants and the new SSRIs, these were all discovered serendipitously. They were not discovered by understanding what the biology or the underlying etiology is. And in general, throughout the history of medicine, you can develop more effective treatments once you actually know what's causing the illness than you can using chance alone.

SM Kenneth Kendler is the Rachael Brown Banks distinguished professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Major support for With Good Reason is provided by the law firm of McGuire Woods and by the University of Virginia Health System, using advanced cardiac imaging to better diagnose conditions before they become serious health issues, UVAhealth.com. With Good Reason is produced in Charlottesville by Virginia Humanities. Our production team is Allison Quantz and Cass Adair. Jeannie Palin handles listener services. For the podcast, go to WithGoodReasonRadio.org. I'm Sarah McConnell. Thanks for listening, and we're wishing all our listeners the best for the New Year.