Dagmar Braun-Celeste

SRINIVASARAO HV

Людмила Логинова

Alexandra Mazek

Sunitha

Madan Dev

Rashmi is a writer, entrepreneur, and motivational speaker. An author of ten bestselling books on entrepreneurship, Rashmi is the #1 business books author in India. Her books include Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, Connect the Dots, I Have a Dream, God’s Own Kitchen, Touch the Sky, and We Are Champions.

Rashmi Bansal

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The road less traveled

Hemasri Chava

BHAGYASHREE BIRANTHBAIL

Dr. Panda is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is Associate Professor at the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code: Lose Weight, Supercharge You Energy, and Transform Your Health from Morning to Midnight, is helping people around the world to align their lifestyles with these daily cycles, having a dramatic effect on their health.

Satchin Panda

<h4>
 DR. SATCHIN PANDA
 is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is
 Associate Professor in the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew
 Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune
 System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code, has helped many
 people to regain energy, sleep well and lose weight. In part 2 of his
 discussion with
 UDAY KUMAR, he
 speaks about how he developed his ideas, and what inspired his
 research.
</h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<h2 class="has-text-align-center">
 The Biology of Time – Part 2
</h2>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: Regarding the point you mentioned about sleep and sleep
 discipline, I
 have an Android phone and although I never knew anything about the blue
 light filter somehow I would turn it on and it would feel softer on my eyes.
 Then I came across your research. What triggered this whole curiosity and
 life changing discovery?



 DP: For a very
 long time, animals and humans have reset their brain clocks in response to
 light. Then there are many blind people who cannot see, cannot even see the
 headline of the New York Times, but when they travel from one place to another
 place, they can readjust their clock to the new time zone, just like normal
 people. But then there are other types of blind people who have lost both
 their eyes because of surgery or an accident, and they cannot reset their
 clock. That means there must be a light sensor in the eye, which is not for
 seeing, but may be essential for sensing.



 So, that clue was there for almost 50 years, and everybody was trying to
 figure out where this light sensor is. Then, after the human genome project,
 it became easier to look for it because we had the information. That’s how we
 stumbled on the melanopsin photoreceptor. If you remove the melanopsin gene in
 a mouse, it cannot sense light accurately, and cannot reset its clock. It
 takes a very long time to reset at scale.



 Then we figured out that it’s a blue light sensing protein – it senses blue
 light. That makes sense because during the daytime we have a lot of blue light
 in sunlight. So, we are designed to sense that blue light and become a lot
 more alert during the day. At night-time we don’t need blue light because it
 keeps us alert. Candlelight and firelight don’t have too much blue light. So,
 we are designed to see more blue light in the daytime and less blue light at
 night.



 Unfortunately, nowadays, what has happened is that opticians want us to have a
 blue light coating, which is actually not the right thing to do. You need blue
 light during the daytime, whereas you don’t need blue light at night. So, it’s
 better to have two pairs of glasses. If you don’t get enough blue light during
 the daytime, you can become depressed. Cell phone tracking data show that we
 spend more than 87% of our time indoors, and most of our indoor lighting is
 not good. In my living room, I might have 250 to 300 lux of light, whereas on
 a cloudy day in New Jersey, outside there will be 10,000 lux. Right now, where
 you’re sitting, since you’re away from your window, you may be sitting in 200
 lux. Out of that, blue light is a small fraction. If you filter out the blue
 light, then of course you may not get so much eye strain from looking at the
 screen, but you will not get the upliftment that you get from going outside.



 The second aspect is that most opticians are selling blue light filtering
 glasses. But is it filtering enough that is biologically significant? The
 answer is no. Most blue light blocking glasses that people are buying filter
 out maybe 5 to 10%. It is like you’re standing outside, and you feel it’s too
 much sun, and you get a transparent umbrella and hold it. So, in most cases
 it’s 5%. The glasses that really filter out blue light will look orange. Only
 orange and other spectra will go through, since blue is filtered out, so we
 see them as orange or even red. The real blue light filtering glasses are
 orange, yellow or red.



 Some people who get migraines will benefit from filtering out blue light when
 they go out, but they’ll also benefit just from wearing sunglasses, because
 that will filter out a lot of light, including daylight. At night-time, for
 people who cannot sleep easily, and cannot control the lighting, the real blue
 light filtering glasses do help. For example, somebody working in a grocery
 store, whose shift ends at 10 p.m. or midnight, who comes home completely
 jazzed up because of the light and cannot asleep, will benefit if they wear
 the blue light filter glasses for one or two hours before the shift ends. That
 will help. So, there are specific cases where they’re more effective, while
 there are many cases where people are just paying for nothing because there is
 no benefit that is significant.



 Q: Here are my $20 glasses from Amazon! [chuckles]



 DP: Maybe you’ll
 get some placebo effect.



 Q: Exactly! It’s placebo and now I totally know it!



 DP: Just look at
 the glasses, do they actually look slightly yellow or orange? If so, then you
 know.


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 <a href="Q:">Q:</a> I think a lot of families will find this
 advice helpful
 because, with homeschooling, designing an ergonomic workspace for kids has
 become more important than for grownups. There’s just so much that they have
 to do with this new change.



 The other aspect of your research, which I have started
 implementing, is time
 restricted eating. Is it the same as intermittent fasting, or is it
 different? I like time restricted eating better.



 DP: In the
 scientific literature, intermittent fasting is a broad term, because it just
 means doing something intermittently. It goes back to the research on calorie
 restriction: When caloric intake in mice is reduced by 20 to 40% then the mice
 live longer. That led to the idea that we should restrict calories, but then
 it is not easy to restrict calories every day, so they came up with the idea
 that we should eat every other day: There is a diet called the “Every Other
 Day Diet.” And then it was discovered that people who didn’t eat for two days
 out of seven might get similar benefits, and that people who eat less than
 1000 kilocalories for five days in a row every two months also get some
 benefit.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Some people who get migraines will benefit from filtering
 out blue
 light when they go out, but they’ll also benefit just from wearing
 sunglasses, because that will filter out a lot of light, including
 daylight.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 So, all of these are intermittent not continuous. That’s why they lump them
 together as intermittent fasting. But the word “fasting” repels people who
 would benefit, like people who have diabetes. They are told by their
 physicians that they should not fast, because they may become hypoglycemic. In
 our clinical study, we tell them that they can simply choose their 10 hours,
 and they can eat whatever they’re currently eating, then they say, “Yes we can
 do it.” If we tell them that “You have to fast for 14 or 16 hours,” then
 psychologically it becomes difficult.



 Q: Again, the positive reinforcement that you spoke about
 earlier: What is
 the message that helps a person take a positive step forward? I love the
 idea of time restricted eating. What you also showed is that it’s not about
 how much or what, but it’s the time you eat, the discipline, that makes a
 lot of difference.



 It was a Japanese scientist who received the Nobel Prize for
 autophagy and
 there was a lot of conversation about the positive benefits of fasting and
 how it helps with autophagy. So, in the Indian context, there is the idea of
 Ekadashi. I think our ancients knew the benefits of fasting.



 DP: In the Indian
 culture there is weekly fasting, which is similar to intermittent fasting. Two
 days in a week you fast, and that gives similar benefits. Reducing calories
 for several hours over a couple of days does give a lot of benefit.



 Q: Is there any research on the benefits of fasting on emotional
 stability?
 I was reading some yogic literature where a person who was irritable was
 told by his teacher to eat less in the evenings, that it would help him. So,
 I’m just wondering if scientific research also shows any correlation between
 emotional poise and restricted eating.



 DP: Yes, we
 anecdotally hear that people who have anxiety benefit from this and can avoid
 a panic attack. And I think in the book I describe how there is a hormone that
 is passively broken down in the gut that causes panic attacks. So when that
 hormone is managed, it may no longer cause anxiety.



 But what is interesting is the history of fasting, I don’t remember where I
 saw it, perhaps in a documentary, where Dr. Valter Longo talks about fasting.
 Another interesting thing was done by Russian scientists who were doing some
 experiments to try to figure out how to improve the health of
 institutionalized patients with depression and bipolar syndrome. There was a
 very difficult patient who was bipolar, and one day he said, “I’m not going to
 eat.” The warden gave up and said, “Okay, if you’re not going to eat, don’t
 eat. I’m not going to force feed you.” They used to force feed the patients,
 but instead he decided, “Okay, until he begs for food, we’re not giving it.”
 So, the patient went without food and just had water for six days or even
 longer.



 After that, he came back completely cured and said, “Well, I feel much better!
 I’m ready to leave as I’m completely normal.” The physician warden, who was a
 little curious, wondered, “Was it the fasting or did something else happen?”
 So he tried this experiment on many other patients with emotional problems,
 and found that fasting actually helped a lot of them, not all. So, in Russia,
 a lot of the experiments on fasting and health started from emotional health.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 When we fast, the brain and the rest of our nervous system
 go through
 changes because they’re exposed to ketones as an energy source. For
 mice with certain neurological diseases, like Huntington’s Disease,
 time restricted eating helps them to sleep better, and their activities
 are much better. At the same time, for depression and other conditions,
 bright daylight is still the best antidepressant and it’s plentiful and
 free.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 When we fast, the brain and the rest of our nervous system go through changes
 because they’re exposed to ketones as an energy source. For mice with certain
 neurological diseases, like Huntington’s Disease, time restricted eating helps
 them to sleep better, and their activities are much better. At the same time,
 for depression and other conditions, bright daylight is still the best
 antidepressant and it’s plentiful and free. A lot of people don’t go outside
 enough. Because I wear my light sensing watch I see how much light I am
 exposed to, and if I don’t make an effort, even in San Diego, California, I
 don’t get as much as I should. If you think about it, most of the time we are
 indoors, we have curtains or blinds on the windows, and we are not always
 sitting next to a window. Then, as soon as we go out of the house, we put on
 sunglasses and get into the car.



 So, we are never actually exposed to much daylight. Daylight is very useful in
 reducing depression and people in Nordic countries know this, so they even pay
 to sit in a brightly lit room, with 10,000 lux of light, as an antidepressant.
 At Geneva airport, also, there are light rooms where you can pay to sit.


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The foundations of day-to-day physical health are also
 three factors:
 sleep, nutrition, and physical activity.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I remember when I first came to the USA, I was in Virginia in
 the
 winter. Inside the house, with incandescent light, I would feel almost
 claustrophobic by evening. I had to step out, take a walk, and sit in the
 sun. It took me a good two to three years to acclimatize myself to the
 change in lighting. When we bought our current house we added extra windows.
 I didn’t realize it when I had it, but when I didn’t have it I knew
 immediately.



 Any parting words that you want to share with our readers,
 especially
 during Covid times?



 DP: Sanitation
 and social distancing will help prevent the virus from getting into our
 bodies, but to improve resilience we need a good circadian rhythm. Then, even
 if we get the virus we may not become too sick. For example, among NFL and NBA
 team players, there is no death for those who tested positive. All these elite
 athletes have a very strict regimen – how much sleep they get, their exercise
 regime, and they’re always outside practicing. That’s a clear example of a
 cohort of nearly 1000 people who had the same rate of infection as the general
 public, but no one went to hospital.



 Paying attention to sleep activity, nutrition, and being outside builds up
 resilience, so that even if you test positive you may not die.



 This is a direct effect, and there’s also another indirect effect. People with
 diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure often have a more severe form
 of Covid, but we also know that time restricted eating can help reduce the
 severity of these chronic diseases, so indirectly a circadian lifestyle will
 also reduce the risk of suffering from the virus.



 Q: Sir, thank you so much for all the great work you are
 doing.



 DP: Thank you.
 Have a nice day.



 Q: You too! Bye.


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<hr />

<h4 class="has-text-align-center">Interview by UDAY KUMAR</h4>

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Does light affects our moods?

Susmita Pani

Dr.Ajay D suryawanshi

Raj Bhandari

KB Raju

CHANDER GAMBHIR

Venkata reddy Bonthu

Prof Rajasekaran

<h4
 id="h-dr-satchin-panda-is-a-leading-expert-in-the-field-of-circadian-rhythm-research-he-is-associate-professor-in-the-regulatory-lab-at-the-salk-institute-a-pew-scholar-and-a-recipient-of-the-dana-foundation-award-in-brain-and-immune-system-imaging-his-book-the-circadian-code-has-helped-many-people-to-regain-their-energy-sleep-well-and-lose-weight-here-he-is-interviewed-by-uday-kumar-on-how-he-developed-the-ideas-in-his-book-and-what-inspired-his-research"
>
 DR. SATCHIN PANDA
 is a leading expert in the field of circadian rhythm research. He is
 Associate Professor in the Regulatory Lab at the Salk Institute, a Pew
 Scholar, and a recipient of the Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune
 System Imaging. His book, The Circadian Code, has helped many
 people to regain their energy, sleep well and lose weight. Here he is
 interviewed by
 UDAY KUMAR
 on how he developed the ideas in his book, and what inspired his
 research.
</h4>

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: Good morning, sir. It’s very nice to see you. Thank you so much for
 taking the time. I believe in karmic coincidences, and one day I was
 thinking that there should be something around the circadian code, not a
 complex research paper but something simpler for the common person to read
 and understand, beyond superstition and ritual, which really explains the
 science. Then I discovered your book, and I was very happy.



 SP: Thank you.



 Q: The more I read it, the more I can feel your sincerity in putting the
 contents across.



 SP: Yes, it is
 difficult because being a scientist it’s always hard to simplify and at the
 same time not to lose the facts.



 Q: Yes, it’s a very fine line.



 I wanted to talk to you about your circadian clock app. I’ve personally
 been using it and it’s a very comprehensive app! It covers a lot of
 things.



 But first, can you talk a little more about your childhood, especially time
 with your grandparents?



 SP: It’s pretty
 well described in the book, and as an idea it’s immense. Only in retrospect,
 after studying circadian rhythms, could I understand the difference between
 the way my paternal and maternal grandparents lived their lives. My maternal
 grandfather was working for the Indian Railways in a small town in Odisha so
 at times he had to do the night shift. He had access to relatively good health
 care. My paternal grandfather was a farmer, who lived on a farm and didn’t
 have access to health care because it was a small village in the middle of
 nowhere. The end stages of their lives were very different. My maternal
 grandfather, who ate better food and had better access to health care,
 succumbed to a neurodegenerative disease. He died earlier than my paternal
 grandfather, who lived in sync with Nature. He didn’t have electricity, he
 slept well, and he ate a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. I guess the only
 thing he bought from the market was salt. I can’t remember anything else, not
 even jaggery.



 In retrospect it was interesting to see how these two lives played out. I
 think that also gave me some early insight into the seasonality of plants and
 flowers, and it brought some curiosity. Most of science talks about how x
 affects y, but it doesn’t talk about timing. So, I realized that maybe the
 biology of time would be the next frontier in science. That’s why I decided to
 work on the biology of time.



 Q: Beautiful! I love the phrase “biology of time.” I also noticed the way
 the time with your grandparents nurtured a natural curiosity in you. You
 talk about this even in your TED talk, for example, your sister telling you
 that the frog comes up at a certain time. I thought that was just
 fascinating.



 SP: Back then, we
 didn’t have the time displayed everywhere. In those days, perhaps we had one
 watch in the house. It is interesting that animals and plants keep track of
 time to fifteen minutes accuracy, or even five minutes accuracy, irrespective
 of what time they go to bed and wake up in the morning.



 Q: There is something to be said about the world today. I work in the
 technology sector and ten years ago I was also involved in some BPO activity
 and went to India to visit one company. At 2 a.m. all these young people
 were working like it was like broad daylight, and I was worried for them.
 I’m more worried now knowing the science. What are they doing to their
 biological clocks? Can it be reversed? Can we heal? What does science
 say?


<hr class="vertical-space1" />

<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Animals and plants keep track of time to fifteen minutes accuracy, or even five minutes accuracy, irrespective of what time they go to bed and wake up in the morning.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 So, we are saying that some of it can be reversed. One can live a healthier
 life. It’s not irreversible damage. Even if you take the case of a car. I may
 not have taken good care of my car, but if I start taking good care of it, it
 will not continue to degrade at the same rate. If I reduce the rate of
 degradation I will get a few more years out of the car. The same thing happens
 when taking care of your health. If you think about the modern healthcare
 system, where we find medication and surgery, underlying all that is one
 universal principle which stems from the germ theory of disease. Sanitation,
 vaccination, and antibiotics are the foundation of the modern healthcare
 system. For example, there is no way a person can successfully go through
 surgery without sanitation and antibiotics. Similarly, the foundations of
 day-to-day physical health are also three factors: sleep, nutrition, and
 physical activity. Whether a person is healthy or sick, if they don’t pay
 attention to these three things, their system will break down. Conversely, no
 matter how sick they are, if they pay attention to these three, then the
 chance of recovery is much better.


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 Q: I think that’s where the whole notion of prevention and cure comes into
 play. Money put into prevention probably goes much further than trying to
 fix the system.



 SP: Yes, but we
 should not make the distinction between prevention and cure because people who
 are already sick feel that they have missed the train. For example, when
 somebody gets diabetes, it may never be cured. They learn to manage it. Giving
 them hope that they can manage it and stay healthier is a very powerful
 message, because most people will pay attention to their lifestyle only after
 they get the disease. We should not tell them, “Hey you missed the train
 because your condition cannot be reversed.” Instead, everything we are talking
 about actually helps them live life to their full potential, irrespective of
 what condition they may have.


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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The foundations of day-to-day physical health are also three
 factors: sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. Whether a person
 is healthy or sick, if they don’t pay attention to these three
 things, their system will break down. Conversely, no matter how
 sick they are, if they pay attention to these three, then the
 chance of recovery is much better.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 Q: I love that. It’s a very ennobling message. There’s always an
 opportunity to get on the train and start from wherever you are, which is
 what you say a lot in the book – it’s never too late. And to your point
 about observation, especially when observing plants, there is a line in your
 book – it was like watching a Broadway show sitting in the front row – and
 you also describe vanilla farmers. Can you talk a little bit about observing
 plants and how that triggered your curiosity further as you went
 along?



 SP: The plants
 and animals on the planet have circadian rhythms. That’s how they adapt to
 cold, warmth, and everything else. For example, if you plant seeds, you’ll
 notice that the seedlings spread their leaves during the daytime to capture
 the sun, but at night they close their leaves as if they’re shivering from
 cold, because they want to reduce the heat loss.



 Similarly, depending on what time of day pollinators are present, most flowers
 open their petals at a specific time. When I was working with vanilla, I
 discovered that it flowers very early in the morning before sunrise, and
 that’s why the farmers wake up around one or two a.m. and go to the vanilla
 field to hand-pollinate the flowers before sunrise. Being in tune with the
 circadian rhythm of the vanilla flowers was breaking the workers’ circadian
 clocks because they had to wake up early! I observed that a lot of the farmers
 in the vanilla fields slowly developed an allergic reaction to vanilla. I
 don’t know whether it’s genetic, because of exposure to a lot of pollen, or
 due to a combination of their circadian rhythm being broken, being sleep
 deprived, and exposure to the allergen. That’s why the chance of getting
 allergies might have increased.



 It is an interesting observation, but I guess these days we don’t have time
 for these observations because instead we observe what is trending on Twitter
 and Facebook. What is interesting is that if you mine the Twitter data, there
 are very nice circadian, weekly, and annual rhythms. In Google Analytics you
 can look for these patterns in the searches that people make. You’ll clearly
 see that the things people think about, worry about, or are curious about have
 circadian rhythms. As you might imagine, searches for pain medication increase
 at night. People search for coffee more often in the morning and late
 afternoon. Studying these data, you start to know the predictive value of
 rhythms to help us anticipate events as opposed to just being responsive.
 Anticipation versus response actually increases efficiency by 10% to 20%.



 Q: Wow!



 SP: For example,
 if you are opening a shop in a market and you know that people only come to
 the market by 9 or 10 a.m., after finishing their morning activities at home,
 what is the point of opening the shop at 6 a.m.? Also, it’ll be useless to
 open at 12 noon because you have missed the morning customers. So, rhythms are
 played out in commerce. Plants turn their photosynthetic mechanism on one or
 two hours before sunrise. They are opening shop one hour before sunrise so
 that they can get the first rays of the sun and convert them into energy.



 Having that circadian clock gives them the advantage of getting maybe 10% to
 15% extra photosynthesis. The circadian clock helps the plant kingdom fix 10%
 more carbon. And imagine, if they didn’t fix that additional 10% we would be
 dead by now. Then, at the end of the day, photosynthesis winds down one hour
 before sunset, so they don’t waste any unnecessary energy to keep the
 photosynthetic system going



 Q: Brilliant!



 SP: It’s all
 about prediction.


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 Q: As you rightly said, one of the key things is that rhythm is universal,
 and if we flow with it, it supports us, whereas if we go against it, there
 is friction. In Heartfulness, it is recommended that we meditate early in
 the morning, before dawn, and do the detox cleaning practice in the evening,
 and a prayer before sleep at night. The timings are based on the circadian
 importance of getting better returns at certain times of the day for certain
 activities. Is this also the case with other aspects of lifestyle? For
 example, is there research on recommended times for students to study? A lot
 of kids nowadays burn the midnight oil.



 SP: Sometimes
 this can be taken out of context. For example, we know that there are better
 times to exercise, but that’s for elite athletes who want that extra one
 second advantage. If we say that late afternoon is the best time for exercise,
 then people who need to exercise may say, “Well, morning may not be the best
 time to exercise.” So, in the pursuit of perfection, we should not give up
 what is good now. For sleep, it’s very clear that we should sleep at night. We
 have excellent sleep when we go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m., whereas we cannot
 sleep for six to seven hours, even when we try, during the daytime. But that’s
 very different from exercise, or studying for an exam, because when there is
 an exam, we have to study. We cannot say, “No, I’m just waiting for my best
 time!”


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 Q: I’ve used that excuse a few times, but it didn’t work out very well. I
 like what you are saying, and it is the same with meditation. Even though
 there is a best time of the day to meditate, it is still better to do it now
 than wait for that ideal time.


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To be continued.

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<h4 class="has-text-align-center" id="h-interview-by-uday-kumar">
 Interview by UDAY KUMAR
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The biology of time

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Time is the next frontier

Radhe Mohan Tripathi

Parvesh

michael r riley

P S LAL SRIVASTAVA

Annie is an acclaimed science writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Scientific American, Slate, Time magazine, and The Best American Science Writing. She is the author of Origins and The Cult of Personality, and her TED Talk has been viewed by more than 2.6 million people. A graduate of Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is currently a Learning Sciences Exchange Fellow at New America.



Annie Murphy Paul

<h4
 id="h-annie-murphy-paul-is-a-journalist-and-author-who-writes-about-the-biological-and-social-sciences-her-books-include-origins-how-the-nine-months-before-birth-shape-the-rest-of-our-lives-the-cult-of-personality-testing-and-the-extended-mind-the-power-of-thinking-outside-the-brain-in-this-interview-by-uday-kumar-she-speaks-about-her-latest-book-and-the-implications-the-extended-mind-has-for-children-s-development-and-how-we-learn"
>
 ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
 is a journalist and author who writes about the biological and social
 sciences. Her books include
 Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives,
 The Cult of Personality Testing, and The Extended Mind: The Power of
 Thinking Outside the Brain. In this interview by
 UDAY KUMAR, she
 speaks about her latest book, and the implications the extended mind has for
 children’s development and how we learn.
</h4>

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 Q: I want to congratulate you on The Extended Mind, because this topic is
 not for the faint-hearted. The more I read, the more I feel the pains and
 the tribulations you have gone through to stitch the whole story together
 and make sure it holds. How did you come across this? What gave you the
 signal that this is it?



 AMP: It was a long
 and winding road, as books sometimes are. I started out with the idea of
 writing about the science of learning. I focused on that in my magazine
 journalism for a while. It actually pretty closely followed the contours of my
 own life, because I had done the research and recording for
 Origins when I was pregnant with my second son. Then, when my sons
 were older and went to school, I became very interested in their learning, the
 instructions their teachers were giving them, how that all worked. I knew I
 wanted to write something about the science of learning, but I couldn’t seem
 to find a big idea that would pull it all together. The more I explored the
 science of learning, the more it felt like a collection of techniques and
 methods that were very useful, but there wasn’t a big idea for me as a writer,
 which I need to get excited and pull me through all that hard work.



 So I started widening the range of things I was reading, including venturing
 into philosophy and cognitive science, and that’s how I came across the 1998
 article by Clark and Chelmer on the idea of the “extended mind.” I don’t
 remember it being a lightbulb moment, but it eventually came to be the idea
 that pulled together all the threads. I felt they were in some way related,
 but I really could not put my finger on how. Things like embodied cognition
 and situated cognition, the way the physical place affects the way we think,
 and then socially-distributed cognition, the idea that we think with other
 people. All those things seem to be modelling how thinking happens, as opposed
 to the conventional idea that it all happens in the head.



 But until I encountered the idea of the extended mind, I didn’t have a name
 for what exactly I was talking about. And then from there, I wouldn’t say it
 all fell into place, but it gave the book the spine that I needed to string
 all those different pieces together.



 Q: How long was the project overall?



 AMP: It’s hard to
 say, because the science of learning stuff kind of morphed into what I was
 writing about the extended mind; the science of learning material flowed into
 the extended mind. I would say I was working on the book itself probably for
 five years, but I was writing articles, doing research, and reporting on the
 science of learning for five years before that. That really informed what I
 eventually wrote in The Extended Mind.



 Q: It shows! I am halfway through your book right now, and I am taking my
 time because I am also looking up the research studies that you are
 referring to, and in many ways it has made me a student of the subject. In
 Heartfulness there is the idea of moving from thinking to feeling – the
 journey of consciousness moves from thinking to feeling to being to a state
 of non-being. So I got onto your concept of the extended mind immediately.
 This is brilliant coming from the angle of science. In your book, there is a
 sentence, “The future lies in thinking outside the brain.” Do you want to
 talk a little about that – what you see from that standpoint when you talk
 about the future?



 AMP: Yes. I think
 I wrote that the future lies in thinking outside the brain in the context of
 how very complex our culture has become. As humans, we have created this
 incredibly complex culture and society, which in many ways is beyond the
 capacity of our biological brains to handle. We are interacting with this 21st
 century world, with all these enormous challenges and complexities, but we are
 still using our Stone Age brains, which evolved for very different kinds of
 purposes. Our brains didn’t evolve to deal with abstract concepts so much as
 they evolved to move the body, manipulate physical objects, relate to other
 people, and navigate through space.



 So these are the things the brain does easily, effortlessly and well. The more
 we can leverage those natural human strengths in the service of the things we
 ask the brain to do, at school, at work, and in our daily lives, the better
 those activities will go. But we have this bias – I really think it’s a
 prejudice – against thinking outside the brain. We almost fetishize the brain
 as a sacred organ, when it really has these built-in limits that are just a
 product of its status as a biologically-evolved organ, and they are shared by
 all of us. We are obsessed with individual differences and intelligence, when
 the main thing we should really be focusing on are the limits that are common
 to all of our brains, and thinking about how to transcend those limits,
 because we really do have to meet the challenges of the moment.



 I am thinking about climate change and political polarization. These huge
 challenges we have are so complex, and we need to meet these moments as
 individuals and as a society, and the biological brain is not really up to
 that job. So thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural
 resources, and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Thinking outside the brain, drawing in these extra neural resources,
 and using them skillfully is our best shot. It’s humanity’s best
 shot to tackle the serious problems that face us.
</h5>

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 Q: I intuitively get it. I think it is something we have lost over time. It
 comes to us naturally if we are receptive enough, and that’s where you talk
 about the whole idea of interoception, and how the body is actually
 communicating with the brain.



 In your work, as you were looking at and reading some of these things, was
 there any research or idea around the interplay of the heart and the mind? I
 am not talking about the pump, the organ, but the field of operation that we
 keep harmonizing with and with which we achieve a state of flow.



 AMP: Yes. That’s
 how I tried to structure the book. Extending with the body, then space, and
 our relationships with other people, I see it like a set of concentric circles
 that are rippling ever outward.



 Q: As a reader, how do I apply some of these basics as a busy professional
 in consulting, who has billed all the hours and still has work left to do?
 Do you have any tips you want to share with a working person on how to
 extend the mind?



 AMP: Let’s start
 with that one thought you just mentioned – interoception, the capacity for
 sensing the internal signals of our bodies. I think we have this notion in our
 society that to do difficult mental work means to push the body aside, to push
 it out of the picture, just be a brain working at a desk, at a screen. It is a
 mistake to think that that is how the best kind of thinking happens. It’s
 actually cutting out a huge source of human intelligence.



 What I would recommend for that consultant, to help with his busy schedule, is
 rather than powering through and gritting your teeth and ignoring the body,
 take a moment to settle back into your body, and remember you have a body.
 Tune into what your body is telling you. That can be a source of really
 valuable information that you will be missing out on if you are not in touch
 with it.



 In the book, I describe using a meditation exercise, the body scan, to pay
 close, non-judgmental and open-minded attention to all those sensations that
 are arising in the body all the time, but which we often in our busy-ness
 ignore or push away. Pay attention to those signals and, over time, you can
 learn what they are telling you, and how they can guide your behavior.



 It doesn’t have to take long. It’s just a matter of remembering to do that –
 checking in with your body rather than acting as if you are just a head, from
 the neck up.


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<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 Experts are the ones who are out there mucking around in the real
 world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new
 things, and figuring out how things work. That is another type
 of thinking outside the brain: where you’re not doing it all in here
 the head, you’re doing it out in the world.
</h5>

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 Q: I like that, and the body awareness exercise you share in the book. In
 Heartfulness, we have some of these exercises like guided relaxation that we
 teach to children. I had my kids do this through the pandemic before they
 started school, because they were not used to so much screen time. Also,
 observing which nostril is dominant at any point in time and seeing how it
 switches.



 I also read the part in your book where you talk about expertise – how
 being an expert is not just about mastering those 10,000 hours. Experts are
 actually extending, trying more, tracking more. While we are breaking down
 the holy altars of the brain, can we also break down the concept of
 expertise?



 AMP: I definitely
 see that connection. A word that I really like, which was coined by one of the
 originators of the theory of the extended mind, Andy Clark, is “brain-bound.”
 We have this brain-bound approach to work and school, and also to expertise.
 We think about expertise as an individual putting in those 10,000 hours to
 become an expert, and there’s very little reference to how, for example,
 nobody becomes an input by themselves. It’s quintessentially a social process,
 and that’s something I write in the book: People like physics graduates or
 doctors-in-training become experts by interacting with others and being
 socialized into their fields. It’s true of all of us.



 I mentioned those two because I cite some studies in regard to them
 specifically. We think of experts as doing it all in their heads, we think of
 experts as knowing exactly what to do and doing it, and it is very clean and
 efficient. But actually, experts are the ones who are out there mucking around
 in the real world, getting feedback in the real world, trying out new things,
 and figuring out how things work. That is another type of thinking outside the
 brain: where you’re not doing it all in here the head, you’re doing it out in
 the world.


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<hr />

<h5 class="has-text-align-center">
 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of
 movement, and of social interaction, the more we can pull those into
 academics, and leverage them to make learning more
 effective.
</h5>

<hr />

<hr class="vertical-space1" />


 When you think about an expert designer or architect, they’re often making
 models of the project they’re working on or the problem they’re trying to
 solve, and interacting with that model, moving their body around the model.
 They’re not doing it all in their head. Artists and designers often say that
 their best ideas emerge in the process of sketching, and drawing, and
 iterating their ideas on paper. It’s not as if they have the idea inside their
 head and they just dictate it. It happens in the process of doing the work
 itself. I think we have some mistaken ideas, some brain-bound ideas about what
 expertise is and how it works, and if we want to become experts it would be a
 good idea to revise those.


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 Q: I completely agree. There is also this element of intellectual humility
 that experts have. They’re willing to accept what they don’t know and
 listen. I think it is also a sign of the extended mind, where the mind has
 factored in the humility of “What I know is less than what I don’t know.” I
 think that’s where experts keep growing, while others maybe taper off over
 time.



 Now, extending the idea of expertise, that instead of people thinking
 better they extend their minds better, how do we teach our children these
 skills? Not in terms of a policy, but from what you see, from your research,
 are there any thoughts on how to teach kids, how to design their work
 spaces?



 AMP: I think there
 are so many implications for what we could be doing right now with our kids,
 with our students. You mentioned earlier that you tell your kids about tuning
 into their bodies before school starts. Scientists have found all these
 individual differences in how people are attuned to their internal signals,
 and the reason those individual differences arise is because of differences in
 the kinds of messaging children receive from their caregivers. “Is it okay to
 listen to my body? Is it okay to take those messages seriously, or am I
 supposed to ignore those messages and pretend they don’t exist?”



 So encouraging our kids to tune into their bodies is certainly one thing I
 have taken away from the research, in terms of what I do with my own kids.


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 I’ve also stressed to them the importance of movement and gesture. Again, we
 have this idea that thinking and academic work happens when students are
 sitting quietly at their desks, when really the human brain and body evolved
 to move, and there are so many ways movement can enhance thinking. Likewise,
 being outside, often we can combine those two things: movement and being
 outdoors. Those two things can work together to really replenish depleted
 stores of attention and executive function. It’s a lot to ask kids to sit
 inside hour after hour, focusing on these things that they are not necessarily
 naturally interested in.



 The more we can incorporate these other aspects of the body, of movement, and
 of social interaction, the more we can pull those into academics, and leverage
 them to make learning more effective. I talk about thinking with other people,
 and thinking with peers, about teaching others, debating, and storytelling.
 These are all ways we can leverage children’s natural sociability, social
 instincts and interest in the social world in the service of what we want them
 to learn.


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To be continued. 

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<h4 class="has-text-align-center">
 Interviewed by UDAY KUMAR Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
</h4>

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How to nurture your children’s inner strengths – part 1

Dr. Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, the co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, for the development of mindsight, insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families, and communities. He is the author of five New York Times bestsellers and is the founding editor for the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.

Daniel Siegel

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Know yourself

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The road less traveled

Does light affects our moods?

The biology of time

Time is the next frontier

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The road less traveled

Does light affects our moods?

The biology of time

Time is the next frontier

How to nurture your children’s inner strengths – part 1

Know yourself

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