we can take more responsibility for our own brains.
And shape our brains wittingly in a more intentional way
by cultivating healthy habits of mind.
( audience applause )
I’m a psychologist and neuroscientist by training.
And at the very beginning of my career
I was captured by one fundamental question
which still motivates all of our work today.
And the question is a very simple one
And that is, when we look around at the people we know
what we see is great diversity in how people respond
to life’s slings and arrows.
Some people are resilient in the face of adversity
and other people are challenged
and decompensate quite rapidly, vulnerable.
What are the clues to understanding those differences
and most importantly
how can we nudge people along this continuum
to nurture increased resilience and well-being
to facilitate a more adaptive response to adversity.
So, I did a lot of research on the brain mechanisms
and the bodily changes
associated with these differences among people.
And then my life went through what a dear friend of mine calls
an “orthogonal rotation.”
( Audience laughter )
And that orthogonal rotation occurred in 1992 when
I met the fellow who is sitting next to me in this picture.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama invited me
to come meet with him at his residence in Dharamsala, India
because he was interested in
catalyzing serious neuroscientific research
on the minds and brains of Tibetan practitioners
who spent years cultivating their mind.
And in fact, on that… momentous day in 1992
he was quite stern in a way and challenged me.
And he said, “You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience
to investigate depression and anxiety and stress and fear.
Why can’t you use those same tools
to study kindness and compassion?”
And, for me it was a wake-up call.
I didn’t have a very good answer other than that it’s hard.
( Audience laughter )
When we first began to study fear and anxiety
that was hard, too.
And I think most scientists would agree that
the scientific community has made good progress
in a better understanding of the brain mechanisms
and the bodily correlates of fear and anxiety.
So, what I’d like to do now is to
segue into a consideration of four themes in modern science
that enable the work that I’m describing to go forward.
So, the first theme is neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity simply means
that the brain changes in response to experience
and in response to training.
Most of the time the brain is changing unwittingly.
Most of the time there are forces around us
which are shaping our brains continuously.
The invitation in all of this work is that
we can take more responsibility for our own brains.
And shape our brains wittingly in a more intentional way
by cultivating healthy habits of mind.
This guy is an amazing human being.
Matthieu Ricard, French by nationality.
He’s been a Tibetan Buddhist monk since 1967.
And he also has a PhD in Molecular Biology.
So, he comes to the table with remarkable credentials
and I think, it’s fair to say that
there is no other person on the planet quite like Matthieu
and he has been willing to subject himself up the wazoo
for the sake of this kind of science.
Matthieu has been in the scanner many, many times.
We’ve recorded his brain electrical signals and
he has been poked and probed in many different ways
to investigate how long term meditation practice
may influence the brain.
What I’m showing you here is actually a figure
from a single participant in the study
and it illustrates brain electrical activity.
And you can see that there is a difference
between the resting period on the left
and the meditation period on the right.
What you see here is the expression
of high amplitude gamma oscillations.
These gamma oscillations
when they are seen in normal human beings
are typically very, very brief.
Less than one second in duration
and we observe them continuously at high amplitude
in these long-term meditation practitioners.
These are oscillations, which are associated with
states of focused attention, as well as periods of insight.
When different elements of a percept, or an idea
come together in a kind of momentary insight
you see a burst of gamma, which again
typically lasts about a quarter of a second.
The second theme is epigenetics
which is the genomic equivalent of neuroplasticity.
We are all born with a fixed compliment of base pairs
which constitute our DNA.
That for the most part, except under very extreme circumstances
is not going to change.
However, what will change is the extent to which
different genes are turned on or turned off.
We can think of genes as having little volume controls.
And the forces around us influence
the extent to which different genes are expressed
the extent to which they are turned on or turned off.
For example, there’s very good hard scientific data to show
that the way a mother treats her offspring
will induce epigenetic changes in specific genes
as a consequence of that maternal behavior.
And those changes in gene expression
persist for the entire duration of the life of the organism
and in fact, very new research indicates
that these epigenetic changes
can be passed down for at least a couple of generations.
Now, ten years ago this was complete heresy.
And this is not fringe science, folks.
This is published in the very best scientific journals.
So, these findings along with other similar findings suggest
that there’s a lot more malleability
a lot more flexibility
in what we once thought was a very closed system.
Now, up until now the only way that epigenetic changes
can be studied in the brain
is to actually biopsy brain tissue
which obviously we cannot do in a human being.
It’s unsafe and unethical.
And so, we now have, for the very first time, a technology
which allows us to actually look at
epigenetic changes in human brain tissue
for the first time.
And the way we do it is we can take a blood cell
and we can convert that cell into a pluripotent stem cell.
And once it’s converted into a stem cell
we can turn it into any other kind of cell.
And one of the things that we do in a dish
is we can turn it into any kind of neuron
that we find in the brain, and we can then look at
gene expression in that neuronal stage.
And so, this is going to usher in
a whole new era of investigation
that enables us to look with much greater specificity
than has ever been looked at before
in terms of how these kinds of mental exercises
can, can infiltrate, if you will, and penetrate
down to the level of gene expression.
The third is the bi-directional communication
between the mind and brain and the body
underscore the notion that there is a connection between
our psychological well-being and our physical health.
Can you envision a time in the future when
mental exercise is engaged in the same way
that physical exercise is today.
And can you envision the impact that that might have?
Healthcare utilization should go down.
Prescription drug use should go down.
And therefore, healthcare costs would go down.
Now, one snippet of data came from
the first randomized controlled trial of
mindfulness based stress reduction.
And, we did it in participants who
worked at a hi-tech corporation in Madison, Wisconsin.
And it was taught onsite and the study was designed so that
the training occurred, beginning in September
and that coincides with the onset of flu season.
And the time when individuals typically will get flu vaccine
if they get a flu vaccine.
So, what we did is we gave
all of the participants in the meditation group
and all of the participants in a control group a flu vaccine.
The only difference in how we did it
compared to how it would be done clinically is that
we took blood samples before and after the flu vaccine was given
that allowed us to quantify the antibody titers
mounted in response to the vaccine.
This gives us a quantitative index of
how effectively the vaccine actually is working.
These are the data from that study.
And it’s really quite remarkable after two months of training
the meditators actually show a boost
in their antibody titer response to the vaccine
compared to the controls.
And these data show that if these participants were
exposed to the same level of flu virus those who
went through the eight weeks of mindfulness meditation
would have more protection against the virus.
The virus– the vaccine would be more effective.
The fourth theme here is innate basic goodness.
It doesn’t mean that the negative stuff isn’t there.
It simply means that if we are given a choice
we will choose the good.
So, I’m going to show you two short video clips.
They were actually shown live, what’s in the clips
to six-month old babies.
And then I’ll explain to you
what was done in this experiment.
( Audience laughing )
Those little…
puppets were then offered to the six-month old babies.
One is the elephant with the yellow
and the other is the elephant with the orange.
And by the way, the colors were all randomized across babies.
Which do you think the babies preferred?
Woman in audience: The helping elephant.
Dramatic. Dramatic!
The preference rates dramatically skewed…
The babies at six months show
a clear and unequivocal preference for cooperation
compared to the hindrance.
And there are a number of other strong empirical findings
which are consistent with this
in showing that we indeed come into the world
with this quality of innate basic goodness.
And one of the reasons why these data
on innate basic goodness are so interesting is because
in the contemplative traditions
from which these practices are derived they suggest that
when we cultivate kindness and compassion, we are not trying to
create something de novo in the human mind.
What we’re doing is nurturing seeds which are already present.
We all know that human beings are endowed
with a capacity for language.
And in fact, there are some case studies of feral children
who were raised in the wild.
And, when they’re raised
in the absence of a normal linguistic community
they do not develop proper language.
And in the same way, we reason that kindness and compassion
are qualities that are present from the start
but they require… nurturance.
They require a loving, caring,
kind, compassionate community
for those seeds to be nurtured.
And so, the practices which strengthen these qualities
are practices which are said to
nourish and cultivate qualities which are already there
but simply need to be nurtured and strengthened.
”
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