How much of what we experience comes from the world itself, and how much comes from our expectations about it? In our latest AMA, Richie Davidson and Cortland Dahl explore how the brain constructs perception, why the gap between reality and expectation can amplify suffering, and what changes when we begin to notice that process as it happens. We had a few moments of technical issues with frozen screens or background noise, but they don’t last long.
What’s inside
Why your brain constructs reality the way it builds a dream
Why controlling the mind backfires
TMS: is it cheating?
Why open awareness loosens pain
The neuroscience of grief and regret
A preview of our upcoming November summit
The full hour mapped below, plus the flashcards and the recording for paid members
Companion Flashcards At Bottom
Your brain builds reality like a dream
A listener named Linda asked about acceptance, and about the idea, drawn from Anil Seth and Lisa Feldman Barrett, that reality is a construction of the mind. Cort answered first, and reframed where suffering actually comes from.
It’s actually the gap between reality and our expectations of what should be happening. However big that gap is, that’s like the size of suffering in that moment.
—Cortland Dahl
Cort was clear it is not erasing expectations. It is seeing that they are there and that they are out of step with what is happening, bringing them into the light of conscious experience rather than letting them run under the hood.
Then Richie discussed how the brain networks that build our beliefs and expectations are the very networks through which we perceive. He used the dream as proof.
Just as in a dream, we can feel those emotions in our body, and there are documented changes in our heart rate and breathing, and yet there’s nothing out there. It’s all in our mind. It turns out that’s actually the way it works with the real world. That’s how our brains construct reality.
—Richard Davidson
His image for the practice came from Mingyur Rinpoche: caught in the middle of a river, you are swept along by the turbulent flow. Become aware of the thoughts and expectations driving your perception, and it is more like sitting on the bank, watching the water move without being pulled in. Cort added a pointer for anyone who wants the science firsthand, calling Anil Seth’s TED talk one of the best he has seen.
The picnic and the four police officers
Victoria asked why open awareness loosens physical pain. Richie described what his lab calls “stickiness,” the attachment or aversion that makes an emotion reverberate long after the thing that caused it is gone. In open awareness, the reverberation drops away.
In some of our own research, the response in sensory regions is actually larger when you’re doing open awareness. It’s not diminished. But there’s no reverberation. It happens and comes back to baseline. We’re not creating emotional zombies.
—Richard Davidson
That fast return to baseline, he said, is a neural signature of resilience. Cort then told a story from the Tibetan tradition that ties to this. Imagine you drive to a park for a picnic, thrilled to be there. Then four police officers walk up and tell you that you are ordered to stay in this park all day, that they will block you if you try to leave.
Even though you wanted to go there in the first place, suddenly everybody’s trying to think how they can get out. Life does not like to be constrained and controlled in any way.
—Cortland Dahl
The mind works the same way. The harder we clamp down on a feeling, the more it strains to escape. Open awareness runs the other direction. Cort called it a practice of trust, close to the opposite of control.
FREE · 2-MINUTE PRACTICE LED BY CORT
2-minute practice:
Wherever you are, settle into a comfortable posture. Let your eyes stay gently open or close them. Take a few moments to simply feel the breath moving in and out of the body. Notice the sounds around you, or the silence. Then open the heart a little by bringing to mind the many challenges in the world right now, the suffering so many are carrying, and form a quiet intention: that whatever good comes from your practice might ripple outward and ease the suffering of others. Rest there for a few breaths, then carry that motivation into whatever comes next.
The full hour, mapped
Read the gist below, then drop into the recording at any timestamp.
03:46 — “Grandpa!” and the end of the sitting.
Twelve minutes into an early-morning practice, Richie’s two-and-a-half-year-old grandson opened the door. He let the formal session go and kept practicing as grandpa. Anywhere, anytime meditation; everywhere, all the time.
08:32 — Active practice is as powerful as the cushion.
The Healthy Minds research finds the benefit of active practices comparable to formal sitting. Cort put his son down for nearly every nap for three years and came to see those as the real practice.
09:59 — Acceptance and the gap.
Suffering tracks the gap between reality and our expectations. The shift is not dropping expectations but seeing them clearly.
13:54 — Your brain constructs reality like a dream.
Anil Seth, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the river metaphor. Perception is built by the same networks that build belief.
17:40 — So how do we share a reality at all?
Rob from Toronto asks about controlled hallucination and shared social realities. Richie on entrainment, cooperation, and why it remains “a shared illusion of a sort”.”
20:18 — Why open awareness loosens pain.
Stickiness, reverberation, and the larger-but-faster response that marks resilience. We are not creating emotional zombies.
27:00 — The picnic and the four police officers.
Why control backfires in a park, in a relationship, and in the mind. Open awareness as trust.
29:40 — TMS and the urge to hack the mind.
TMS stands for “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, and Richie explains that TMS belongs to a broader family of methods designed to modulate brain function relatively non-invasively. There is growing interest in whether these tools could affect meditation, but he emphasizes that we do not yet know whether they meaningfully support practice. The Center for Healthy Minds has also been exploring neuromodulation and meditation more broadly. Cort shares about neuromodulation as one more entry point into an interdependent system.
37:37 — Where does awareness live in the brain?
Edith’s question. Visual cortex, anterior cingulate, and the honest answer: no single location, no single switch
40:24 — The unresponsive who were actually aware.
Melanie Boly’s work: patients thought to be vegetative held more awareness than we credited, unable to communicate it. A communication problem, not an awareness problem.
45:18 — The neuroscience of grief that doesn’t fade.
Amygdala and hippocampus jammed together, and reconsolidation: a memory is a reconstruction that changes each time it is recalled, not a photograph.
51:20 — When grief opened into gratitude.
Cort on his father’s sudden death four years ago, holding the feeling fully in the body, and the sadness opening, unbidden, into gratitude.
57:38 — A free November summit.
A free online gathering through ServiceSpace this November, with Sharon Salzberg, Jud Brewer, Robert Sapolsky, Martin Picard, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Laurie Santos.
November 2026 Free Online Summit with Legends of Neuroscience and Practice
