Your Hidden Superpower

Early in his teaching years, Cort kept measuring himself against another instructor, Myoshin Kelly, whose warmth and empathy felt effortless. He read his own conceptual, precise style as something to correct. In a later heart to heart he learned she had been doing the reverse, wishing she had more of his clarity. Both had been auditing themselves against the other's strengths. The realization that it was good they were different, that neither needed to be everything, became the frame for the whole conversation.

Because the default move of the mind is to look at someone else's gift and read our own nature as a deficit. The research on asymmetry gives that instinct a target. These styles are real and durable, so the better question is not how to become more like someone else, but where the hidden superpower sits in the configuration you already have.

It started in the late seventies, before MRI could image the living brain noninvasively. The only available window was EEG, small sensors held to the scalp with gel. EEG has excellent timing but poor spatial detail, the opposite of later imaging, yet it was good enough to compare the two hemispheres.

You wore a net of 256 electrodes, each with its own wire, a mass of spaghetti coming off your head. One such image, a monk in the net, landed on the cover of National Geographic. Gel was injected into each sensor with a blunt syringe, painless but funky, and the setup alone took at least 45 minutes before recording began.

After a resting baseline, subjects viewed emotional material, positive images like a parent hugging a child, and negative images of human suffering, sometimes as video clips with sound. The team watched how the brain responded. The baseline, at first, was collected only to confirm the equipment was working.

After a few years the team looked at the baseline itself and saw that people started in very different places. Taking the activation difference between the left and right prefrontal cortex across a large group produced a bell curve. A few people sat at the far left, a few at the far right, and a large hump sat in the middle.

That was the worry, that it tracked sleep, breakfast, or mood. So they brought people back after a week, then a month, and simply had them rest. The pattern held. It proved more stable than most other physiological signals anyone had studied. Strong left activation today predicted strong left activation a month later.

Stronger left prefrontal activation went with an approach orientation, the readiness to jump out of bed and take on the world, more extroverted and optimistic. Stronger right activation went with a more reserved style, more easily socially anxious, more introverted. Crucially, neither end is better than the other.

That was the early assumption, and many years of study showed it is false. Introverted people are just as happy as extroverted people. The pattern describes a style of engaging the world, not a level of wellbeing. Flourishing depends more on the match between your style and your environment than on the brain pattern itself.

It is orthogonal to them, independent. Awareness, connection, insight, and purpose can all be cultivated whether you sit on the left or the right of the curve. The cultivation simply looks different in each person, and both can be genuinely flourishing.

Left of center, but not at the extreme, in the crowded part of the distribution where most people sit. He also describes himself as primarily an introvert, comfortable with solitude and aware of when he is deliberately activating a more extroverted mode that is not his default.

The discomfort can change while the wiring stays. Cort recalls a time when parties and public speaking ranged from unpleasant to almost unbearable. That sharp discomfort has nearly vanished. What has not changed is the energy ledger. Solitude still fills the meter, and a room full of people he loves still, eventually, drains it.

Two things. Public speaking anxiety, which has completely dissipated, and volatility. He used to get angry when work fell short of his high standards. The standards remain, but the strong reaction has faded. What stayed constant is the energy and enthusiasm for the work, now expressed without the old volatility.

Richie and Cliff Saron, who he has known for more than 50 years and who went on to lead the Shamatha Project, used to scream at each other in the lab, fiery enough that people half-joked about marriage counseling. They remain close friends. The point is that a temperament can change in how it is expressed without erasing the person underneath.

No. The exemplars of the contemplative traditions are dramatically different from one another, each vivid and distinct. The belief that enough practice makes emotions subside is simply not true. These are people who have meditated enormously, and they remain unmistakably themselves.

He left his monastery in the middle of the night, told almost no one, and disappeared on retreat for five years. When he came back, everyone asked how he had changed. A friend, the documentary filmmaker Paul McGowan, summed it up. He is exactly the same, only more so. Practice amplified the signature rather than erasing it.

Because we need different superpowers. Different temperaments solve different problems, and different teachers reach different people. The differences are not noise to be averaged out. They are what make people maximally helpful to one another.

There is real evidence for heritability, studied partly through twins. But heritable does not mean fixed. Even highly heritable traits usually land around 40 to 60 percent, and behavioral characteristics draw on hundreds of genes rather than a single one. That is unlike a single-gene condition such as Huntington's, and it is part of why temperament stays workable.

Mirroring. In some groups of twins, co-twins show opposite patterns of asymmetry, an effect that can even appear in anatomy, with organs on different sides of the body. It traces back to how cells divide in early development, which is why asymmetry in twins is genuinely complicated.

Most of the work was done in right-handed people, who make up roughly 85 percent of the population and almost all process language in the left hemisphere. Left-handed people are more variable, with more bilateral representation across the hemispheres. That extra integration may be an advantage in some kinds of work. At one point left-handers were notably overrepresented among architects.

Meta awareness, simply knowing what is happening in your own mind as it happens. Richie describes earlier years marked by what he and Cort called experiential fusion, being so merged with an emotion that there was no container around it. Building that container is a stabilizing capacity all of us already have.

It starts with awareness of what is actually going on inside, the mental and emotional habits as they play out. You cannot study your own patterns without meta awareness, which makes it the vehicle for everything else. If flourishing is a skill, this may be the critical linchpin of the whole thing.