Summary: For the past 40 years, neuropsychologist Dr. Rick Hanson has investigated this essential question: How can we be truly, deeply happy, regardless of the circumstances of our lives? For the first time in history, we can track the effects of specific behaviors on brain activity and demonstrate how meditation and mindfulness practices can change the structure and activity in our brain in positive ways. In his audio program The Enlightened Brain, Dr. Hanson teaches us how we can lay the foundations for lasting happiness by learning new ways to use our brains. In this Producer's Pick, Dr. Hanson explains that by knowing with increasing clarity and specificity something about what's going on in the brain when someone is in a positive or wholesome state of mind, then we can use the power of the mind alone to stimulate the neural substrates underlying those wholesome states of mind, and thereby strengthen them.
