Kindness Is the Science

In 1992, His Holiness the Dalai Lama encouraged neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson to turn the tools of his lab—brain-scanning technologies he developed to study cognitive dysfunction—toward the positive qualities of the mind: compassion, wisdom, and kindness. For Davidson, it was a reorientation that would define the next three decades of his career.

Early on, Davidson, also a psychologist by training, was drawn to specializing in depression, anxiety, and stress rather than the solutions-oriented approach that has since made his reputation synonymous with mental health. As founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has tested the practical exercises that not only maintain mental well-being but also cultivate the brain’s innate capacity to flourish, articulating his findings in Born to Flourish with coauthor Cortland J. Dahl, a contemplative scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds and the cofounder and executive director of Tergar International, a global meditation community. 

Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving
By Richard J. Davidson and Cortland J. Dahl
Avid Reader Press, 2026, 304 pp., $30.00, hardcover

At the heart of Born to Flourish is a quartet of practices—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—that might be called the four noble truths of flourishing. What emerges is a straightforward series of exercises that people can do while juggling family and work schedules. The authors are precise about the time commitment: 4.5 minutes a day to derive real benefits and improve overall well-being. For example, as part of one of its morning appreciation-building exercises, they advise thinking of a loved one while brushing one’s teeth to initiate a lifelong rhythm of connective intentions. 

The authors are equally direct about the central obstacle to flourishing: distractions. Drawing on studies by Harvard psychologists Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert, they note that the average person is distracted for 46.9 percent—just about half—of their waking life. 

Distraction is toxic. It can ruin a moment of genuine human connection, undermine a productive stream of work or a moment of creative insight, and even make a challenging moment more challenging. 

While this might seem an obvious or redundant criticism, the real fruit of Born to Flourish is the practical mentality its authors impart and the discipline to stay focused on it. In conversation with the Dalai Lama, Dahl asked, “Should we include Buddhist principles like impermanence and interdependence in our training program?” The Dalai Lama shook his head. “No, no . . . don’t do that. That’s Buddhist business!” 

With prescriptive prose that can, at times, read like mantric affirmations in a self-help manual, Davidson and Dahl are nonetheless lucid and patient in delivering their main argument: that empirical science evidences the immediate and ameliorating effects of kindness, not only as outward attention directed toward others but as an inward spur to one’s own betterment. 

That said, the apparent simplicity of kindness is deceptive. The Dalai Lama famously said that kindness is his religion, a claim Born to Flourish takes seriously, grounding it in studies of advanced meditators who practiced for more than 30,000 hours. Here, Dahl’s expertise as the author of A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism shines. Together, Davidson and Dahl illuminate popular approaches to meditation that overlook the ritual cultivation of compassion from which they emerged. 

Referencing brain-imaging analyses to understand what distinguishes advanced meditators, Davidson and Dahl complement their deliberate expositions with a generous dose of layman’s neuroscience. Empathy is a neuronal phenomenon, they explain, and altruistic behavior activates the brain’s mirror neuron system—regions linked to empathy—while also strengthening self-regulation and our capacity to respond to suffering in a healthy way.

Although Davidson and Dahl root their findings more in Western science than Buddhist faith, the latter provides consistent, motivating inspiration. Once neuroscience backed their convictions—that the means of flourishing could be repeated reliably in practice—the time came to systematize their findings for general use. 

“Even five minutes a day of intentionally training your mind can help you tap your full potential to flourish,” the authors write, noting that positive mindfulness during even the most mundane house chores or the worst personal crises can induce epigenetic changes and increase brain plasticity. 

Davidson and Dahl bring the same analytic attention to their own lives, referring to themselves in the third person as Richie and Cort, respectively. With unflinching attention to the minuscule components of daily life, they mine their morning routines for mindfulness, grateful for their wives’ attention to the reciprocity of cohabitation. 

Born to Flourish offers a clear illustration of how, even in Davidson’s seventy-three-hour workweek, there is ample space to develop all four of the pillars of flourishing in each moment. The simple expression of gratitude that Davidson directs toward his wife, Susan, for making his morning porridge, by boiling water for her tea, unfolds into a course of purposeful thinking that has defined the hallmarks of Davidson’s career. 

Equally, for Dahl, his wife, Kasumi, is a reliable partner not only in marriage but also on the path to flourishing. As part of their nighttime ritual, they commit to an intention practice by thinking of a person, situation, or memory and sharing three things they appreciate about it, thereby transforming the unconscious habits that precede sleep into a means to flourish. The key here is that normalcies and regularities, contrary to the domestic monotony that many in the West have fled for far-flung monastic retreats expecting illumination, are fertile soil from which to cultivate the sweetness of flourishing, to use the authors’ phrase. They write:

One day, you will find yourself practicing the skills of flourishing without having to decide whether you should. It will simply happen. And when these habits begin to happen spontaneously, you will begin to taste the sweetness of flourishing.

Loneliness, the authors emphasize, reduces brain matter, specifically that associated with planning and decision-making. Appropriately, then, Born to Flourish is a robust community effort. Along with Davidson, Dahl, and their wives, a diverse cast of characters appears in the book’s journey to elucidate and systematize the science of flourishing. Some of the most colorful are Davidson’s colleagues at the Center for Healthy Minds. 

Whether in concert with research at the Max Planck Institute in Germany (where Tania Singer discovered how self-inquiry strengthens the regulation of emotions), taking a meditative walk with French Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard in Bhutan, or scanning the brain of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Born to Flourish resonates with experiential learning grounded in dialogue and community. Davidson’s colleague Pelin Kesebir and her sister Selin, both social psychologists at the Center for Healthy Minds, add another dimension by analyzing millions of digitized American books from the 20th century to track how frequently terms like virtue, honesty, and compassion appeared in the culture and how dramatically they have declined. 

Mingyur Rinpoche plays a significant role in the development of the research on flourishing that brought Davidson and Dahl together. As Mingyur Rinpoche’s student in India and Nepal, Dahl was accustomed to his teacher’s gifts as a precocious meditator, who, in his 20s, had already devoted himself to years of practice. In Kathmandu, Dahl would enter retreats and, under his guidance, translate Buddhist texts into English. In the US, results from Mingyur Rinpoche’s fMRI tests would lead Davidson to foundational conclusions about the nature of thought, attention, emotion, and distraction. 

[…] it was clear that Rinpoche and the other advanced meditators had strengthened their awareness (one of the core dimensions of flourishing) to such a degree that they could willfully control their attention, emotional responses, and thought activity. 

To put the results simply, distraction can be understood as a form of suffering. And the authors are clear-eyed about its structural causes: We live in an attention economy, one in which big tech conglomerates have a stake in the very lack of awareness and connection that drives disinformation and isolation. A capitalist health care system that profits from the proliferation of physical and mental illness is not neutral ground for the cultivation of flourishing.

While the neuroscience of ritualizing compassion may be in its infancy, Davidson and Dahl are leading a wave of studies showing that kindness is an innate trait that, when fostered, promotes mental health. If there is a caveat, it is that the authors risk falling into laboratory-based abstractions. No brain exists in isolation, and if the challenges that impair flourishing remain overactive in a society overrun by consumer capitalism, the majority will continue to be imperiled by the vulnerabilities inherent in human brain sensitivity. 

With its careful language, even the act of reading Born to Flourish becomes an opportunity for the reader to find purpose by honing what the authors call the “meta-awareness” of the text on the page. Drawing from the shared well of neuroscience and Buddhism, Davidson and Dahl have written a sincere and uplifting book in which each letter that transforms into thought offers a new chance to flourish. The brain does not intrinsically sense daily life as a minefield of terrifying distractions but as fertile soil out of which kindness might grow, rooting all to the solid ground of common, lived experience.