Changing the Course of a River

By Brian Mattmiller '86

Richard Davidson remembers clearly when he first knew that, one day, he would study the human mind.

As a teenager in the mid-1960s, Davidson volunteered two nights a week in a sleep laboratory in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York. The lab did fairly uneventful research, and Davidson spent his time on mundane tasks like cleaning electrodes. But one thing captivated him, night after night. As the subjects drifted into REM sleep, the monitors would come alive, capturing a storm of brain activity - the physical signatures of the dreaming mind.

For the better part of his remarkable professional life, Davidson has trained that youthful fascination on what is perhaps an even more mysterious quarry than dreams - that of human emotions. By creating ways to scientifically plot the dimensions of emotional activity in the brain, Davidson has helped open the door to a better understanding of both the healing power and the destructive force of emotions.

Davidson has found, for example, that abnormally low activation in one region of the brain - the left prefrontal cortex - is frequently associated with clinical depression. He has looked at the same brain region and mapped the focal points of shyness and stranger anxiety in children. He has tracked how smiling, holding hands with someone, and meditation each can trigger positive physical changes in the body. He has identified the brain's emotional control center that has gone haywire in people prone to explosive violence.

The UW-Madison psychologist's work has garnered him the top honors in his field, including the American Psychological Society's William James Fellow award and the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. It also has captured the attention of the Dalai Lama, who spent two days in Madison in May immersed in the research.

Today, Davidson's office is in a new wing of the UW's Waisman Center, where he directs the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. He is surrounded by a fleet of powerful imaging tools that are akin to a Global Positioning System for mapping brain activity. It's a special vindication for Davidson, considering that early in his career, his ideas were perceived as ranging from unconventional to "completely nuts," as he recalls. He struggled to piece together funding, especially at the federal level. "The thought that you could measure emotions by putting electrodes on the head was regarded as a loony idea," he says.

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