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Hello. Good afternoon, my friends. My name is Meng and I'm the jolly good fellow of Google.
I'm so delighted today to welcome my friend, an amazing human being, Dr. Richard Davidson.
There's so much I can say about Ritchie and I don't--I'm not even sure where to begin,
so I'll just give you the big picture. Ritchie is the William James and Vilas Research Professor
of Psychology and Psychiatry in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ritchie's work is so
important that it is changing the world and will continue to change the world in very
important ways. Early in his career, Ritchie did pioneering work which found that certain
parts of the brain was especially linked to positive and negative emotions and he went
on to become a pioneer in the field of effective neuroscience, which is a study of neural mechanisms
of emotion. And as if pioneering one field of science is not enough, he also did pioneering
work in something called neuroplasticity, which is the idea that the brain is malleable;
that we can transform our brains with what we think and what we do. And with rigorous
neuroscience, Ritchie and his team had shown that we can all extend our range of mental
and emotional capabilities including training our minds to be happy. And over the years,
Ritchie has won many awards including the most prestigious award given by the American
Psychological Association which is the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He was also
named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2006. And he wasn't
in it in 2005 and 2007. I think he was slacking off. Yes. Sorry. Just kidding. And I look
forward to Ritchie winning a Nobel Prize or two. And in person, Ritchie is also a wonderful
man and I am in awe of him. And my friends, I give you Dr. Ritchie Davidson.
>> DAVIDSON: Thank you all so much. It's really a wonderful honor to be with you all today.
And what I'd like to do today is to share with you some of the excitement and findings
from the hybrid new field of Contemplative Neuroscience which is where I am investing
a lot of my personal attention and energy these days. So, with--that is a little brief
introduction. Let me tell you what Contemplative Neuroscience is and give you a sense of the
range of how we can approach this from a scientific perspective today. We've been interested in
using the best tools of Neuroscience and the concepts of Neuroscience to understand how
the brain can be transformed through the engagement with purely mental practices that have been
derived from the world's great contemplative traditions. The framework of this work, as
Meng mentioned, is the idea of neuroplasticity. And neuroplasticity simply refers to the fact
that the brain is the organ which is built to change and response to experience more
than any other organ in our body. There are many different mechanisms of neuroplasticity
and it is clear that the intentional deployment of specific mental training strategies can
induce plastic changes in the brain which endure and which can transform our cognitive
and emotional styles. And I hope to convince you of that today. I'll talk also a little
bit about relations between the brain and experience and how we can actually study that
objectively in the laboratory; a little bit about the embodied mind, the idea that our
minds and brains are not simply supported by a disembodied architecture but rather there
is bidirectional communication between the brain and the body which provides a mechanism
for our minds to influence our bodies in ways that may be consequential for health. And
I will make some references to that also. And I'll end with some comments on the impact
of this work on both science and society. So, let me say a little bit about this propitious
historical moment in which we all find ourselves and that is a moment where there is an extraordinary
possibility of a serious interchange between neuroplasticity and ideas and techniques from
neuroscience and contemplative practice. Some of this is driven by developments in science,
one of those is epigenetics. Epigenetics refers to the fact that genes are regulated by the
environments in which those genes reside. The idea that our genetic structure provides
an in--an alterable blueprint which then affects our behavior in a deterministic way is an
antiquated, wrong-head Newtonian conception of genetics. It's not the way things work.
The genes that--particularly that are expressed in our brains are ones that are tremendously
influenced by the environment, including our mental environment. We know that there are
certain mental dispositions that can produce an impact on gene expression. Some of those
expression changes can persist throughout the entire life of an organism. So, there's
really an extraordinary window that is provided into the brain through modern research in
epigenetics. There are translational research initiatives, some of which I'll talk about
today, where we're taking some of these ideas from the laboratory and bringing them into
the field. And we can glean from translational studies in the field the impact of certain
contemplative practices in real world settings and collect data in the process that will
both help refine the methods, the contemplative strategies themselves as well as provide evidence
of their impact. One of the things that I've been talking a lot about these days, both
within my lab as well as outside, is an idea called neurally-inspired behavioral interventions.
It turns out that there is no more effective way to produce localized and specific changes
in the brain than behavioral or mental interventions. Behavioral or mental interventions can produce
more specific biological changes than any currently known biological method that is
any known medication, for example. Medications affect the brain quite systemically. They
often produce effects in systems other than those that were targets of the intervention
to begin with. Behavioral strategies are the way to produce more specific effects in the
brain than any known intervention today. Another idea that I've been banding about on the bully
pulpits that I've been privileged to stand on is this one of putting the brain back into
biomedicine, which is a pathway to putting the mind back into medicine. We know that
psychosocial factors, for example, play a very significant role in modulating the course
of certain physical illnesses like cardiovascular disease, asthma. These are disorders that
are major public health concerns. If the environment, the psychosocial environment, can modulate
these disorders, presumably information from the environment is getting in and getting
under the skin and changing the brain in ways which have impact on the body. By working
out the mechanisms through which the brain communicates with the body, we can begin to
put the mind back into medicine in a way which will offer potentially new targets of interventions
which is precisely one of the important strategies that we're pursuing with disorders, for example,
like asthma. Okay. So, that's just a few teasers. I want to just give you a feel for some of
the kinds of works that we've been doing over the last several years which have brought
us to this point. And one of the ones that we've been very interested in, in particular,
is the possibility that we can, through mental exercise, voluntarily enhance compassion.
This is an idea which was really first emerged in the context of dialogues that we've held
with the Dalai Lama, in the context of meanings that were put on by the Mind and Life Institute.
And, actually, Adam Angle is in the audience here who is the Director of the Mind and Life
Institute which is an organization that has been at the forefront of promoting a dialogue
between the world's great contemplative traditions and modern science. And one of the ideas that
emerged in these dialogues many years ago was the prospect of putting compassion on
the scientific map. And when I first met the Dalai Lama in 1992, I made a commitment to
myself and to the Dalai Lama that I was going to come out of the closet with my interests
in meditation, which had been very subterranean up until then. I went on my first meditation
retreat in 1974 when I was a second year graduate student at Harvard and my--the faculty there
were ready to dismiss me as someone who is totally abandoned and ship, but I did have
the clear sense that I would come back to science and that I really wasn't leaving science.
But, in any case, those interests were kept under the rug for quite some time. In 1992,
I first met His Holiness. And at that meeting, I had a very profound understanding that now
was the right time to come out of the closet and to go public with this interest and also
to have the prospect of bringing the concepts and tools from neuroscience that we had honed
so effectively in the study of negative states like anxiety, and fear, and sadness and bring
those same strategies to study positive mental qualities, virtuous mental qualities like
compassion. So, one of the ways that we thought would be a useful beginning step is, "Okay.
Let's take people who are the putative experts in the voluntary cultivation of compassion.
Now, it turns out that there are such people who spend literally thousands of hours, actually,
tens of thousands of hours formally practicing particular mental strategies that are designed
to cultivate compassion. And we launched a study in the year 2000 with long term contemplative
practitioners. These included Tibetan Buddhist monks as well as lay people, most of whom
resided in Asia, and we flew them over to our lab in Madison, Wisconsin and had them
in residence for a number of days where they were undergoing testing. And a number of people
close to His Holiness were instrumental, including His Holiness himself, in helping us to recruit
participants for this unusual project. We began in an incredibly simple way. We started
to--we decided to start in a very basic way. And what we did is illustrated here in a very
simple cartoon of the experimental protocol where we had practitioners alternate periods
where they were just in a neutral state and periods during which they are meditating--excuse
me, in this case, cultivating compassion and they were doing this in short periods of time.
And during these neutral and meditation periods, we challenged their meditation states. And
I won't play these for you, but we presented auditory stimuli that were very, very loud
and in one case, there were strongly negative emotional stimuli that were signs--auditory
signs of human suffering. There were cries and screams that were very pronounced. And
you can think of this--you know, when you go to a cardiologist, you might sometimes
be given a cardiac stress test where you're challenged on a treadmill. Well, this is a
brain stress test, if you will, but specifically looking at how practitioners respond to stimuli
that depict human suffering when they're either in a neutral state or in this state where
they're generating compassion voluntarily. Now, what does it mean to generate compassion
voluntarily? One of the practitioners is actually someone quite well-known who is on--his picture
can be found on Meng's wall and he is Matthieu Ricard, a well-known monk. He has been a Buddhist
monk since 1967. He's French by nationality. The wonderful thing about Matthieu is that
he also holds a PhD in molecular biology from the Pasteur Institute where he worked with
Francois Jacob, the Nobel Laureate. In the words of Matthieu, this is what the practitioners
were doing during this particular protocol when they were generating voluntarily the
state of compassion. And I'll just read part of this to you. He said, "What we have tried
to do for the sake of the experiment is to generate a state in which love and compassion
permeate the whole mind with no other consideration, reasoning, or discursive thoughts." This is
sometimes called pure compassion. Now, you know, there's those commercials on television
which tell you, "Don't try this at home." Well, I would encourage all of you to try
this home, but don't be disappointed if you find that your whole mind with no other consideration,
reasoning, or discursive thoughts, is permeated by love and compassion. This is something
that takes a lot of practice and that's precisely the idea of using the long term practitioners
in the first place. So, this is a picture of Matthieu. And I love to show this picture
because he had been in the MRI scanner for more than three hours just when this picture
was taken--just prior to when this picture was taken. Most people don't look like this
when they come out of the scanner after being in there for three hours. So, he is someone
who is wonderful to have in the laboratory because he does this so joyously. And one
of the really virtues of working with these long term practitioners is they can have these
short periods of meditation where they're generating compassion, and at least by their
own report, they are able to do this very easily in the crazy environment of the laboratory
while they're lying in an MRI scanner that feels like a jackhammer and is producing very
loud sounds from the scanner itself. So, we've been interested in what brain circuits are
recruited when these long term practitioners voluntarily generate compassion. And I should
mention that we compared this to age-matched controls where we've taught them the same
practice. And, actually, Matthieu Ricard developed a training regime that we can offer to novice
practitioners who wish to learn the practice. And these are individuals who are interested
in meditating, had never done it before, and they practiced for one week prior to coming
into the laboratory. This is a busy slide and I'll only walk you through part of it.
But one of the brain regions which is strongly modulated by this meditation practice is a
very interesting part of the brain and it's called the insula and specifically the interior
insula which is shown in this axial image here. The insula is a region of cortex that
is the--a part of the brain that is the only part of the brain to contain a viscerotopic
map of the body. And what that means is that the visceral organs are actually mapped like
retinotopy, like the eye is mapped in the visual cortex. The visceral organs are mapped
in the insula. So this is a region of the brain through which information from the body
is conveyed to other circuits in the brain and it's also a part of the brain that has
descending pathways to these different visceral organs and can modulate activity in those
organs. And what we find is that in the long term practitioners, they are the ones in red
down here, the solid lines are during meditation. The dotted lines are during neutral. The blue
lines are the novice practitioners. And what you can see is these are the responses using
functional MRI that we detect in the insula when the long term practitioners are exposed
to these negative emotional sounds. And what you can see is a big difference between the
dotted line and the solid line in red for the long term practitioners. It indicates
that activity in their insula is being strongly modulated by their meditation practice, whereas
in the novices, there's really no difference between the neutral and the meditation periods.
And it suggests that the insula is an important piece of the story in terms of how the brain
is changed in response to compassion training. There--it's not just the insula, however.
There are a number of other parts of the brain that are dramatically altered in function
by compassion meditation and two additional regions are the amygdala which plays a very
critical role in emotion and this are called the TPJ on the right--in the right hemisphere,
it standards for temporoparietal junction. And the TPJ has been strongly implicated in
perspective taking and particularly the adoption of another person's perspective and it's been
strongly implicated in empathy. And what we see in all of these cases is that activity
in these regions during the generation of compassion is strongly elevated in the long
term practitioners but not in these novice controls. Now, one of the things we've been
doing very recently is this, and I have to tell a little anecdote before I show you this
next set of findings. One of the early visits that we made to Dharamshala, India to be with
His Holiness was a visit where he asked us if we would give a talk to young monks in
the Namgyal Monastery, the monastery connected to his residence. And this was a time when
Francisco Varela was alive. Francisco was a very imminent neurobiologist who was one
of the cofounders of the Mind and Life Institute and who developed the idea and hybrid discipline
that he called neurophenomenology, which I'll talk about in a little while. But Francisco
was on this visit and we gave this talk to these young monks in the Namgyal Monastery.
There were about 200 monks in the audience all sitting dutifully on cushions on the floor.
And we had instrumentation with us on that visit and we thought that instead of just
giving a dry academic lecture, we'd actually show them how this stuff is done. And so,
we put electrodes on Francisco and we had a laptop and we were showing him--we were
showing the monks the display of brain oscillations, brain electrical activity on the laptop that
we can record from a person's head. And when we explained and when we put the cap on to
measure the brain activity and showed them on the laptop, as soon as we did this, all
200 monks just burst out laughing, just cracking up hysterically. And we thought that they
were laughing because the--Francisco looked kind of funny with the electrode cap on. It
turns out that they were laughing at where we were placing our electrodes. They were--they
thought it was hysterical that we thought that the key to compassion was the head as
opposed to the heart. Now, it took us many decades to get back to their editorial comment
about our lack of insight. And very recently, we have been interested in how the heart and
the brain are actually interconnected during the generation of compassion. And I won't
go into this in a lot of detail, there are a lot of details to unpack here and this is
a very new work that we've just been published in 2009. But one of the--what you're seeing
here--one of the really cool things that we can do is actually take MRI scans of the heart
itself. And it turns out that there--you can do functional MRI of the heart. And there
are a group of radiologists who are now interested in the development of noninvasive methods
for probing cardiac function that will eventually eliminate cardiac angiography and it's done
through the use of real-time MRI. And so what you're seeing here is an image of cardiac
gated MRI where we gate the MRI scanner, we record the electrocardiogram in the scanner
and we gate the acquisitions to the onset of the main ventricular contraction that we
can detect with the EKG recording. And this is a slice through the left ventricle. And
you can compute various parameters of cardiac function in this way and it provides some
really cool information. And I'll just show you a little bit of this. This is from a new
paper. Antoine Lutz is a scientist in our center. And if you just look at heart rate,
there are a lot of other measures that we can derive, but if you just look at heart
rate, it turns out that during the generation of compassion among the long term practitioners,
you actually see an elevation of heart rate during the practice itself compared to the
novice practitioners. And what's really interesting is this part of the brain called the insula
that I mentioned earlier, is strongly coupled to the cardiac change in the long term practitioners
and not in the novices. It appears that this region of the brain is sensitive to and driving,
we think, the cardiac change. And so this is a parameter of coupling that is on the
ordinate here. And it just shows you that during compassion, but not during the neutral
period, there's much stronger coupling in the expert practitioners in red compared to
the novices in blue. And it suggests indeed that there's something about neurocardiac
coupling during compassion which we think is very important. And this just shows another
area of the brain which is an area of the mid-cingulate region which also has been implicated
in various kinds of emotional processing which shows some of the same kinds of differences
as well. Now, one of the things I'm always asked when I talk about this work in long
term practitioners--and I should mention these long term practitioners are really long term
practitioners. They have to have done a minimum of 10,000 hours of formal practice. Now, 10,000
hours was not just a number we pulled out of the hat. It turns out that for multiple
kinds of expertise, sort of entry level expertise in virtually any complex domain starts at
about 10,000 hours. So that's how many hours you got to put in to get to sort of the entry
level of expertise. And in our study, the average number of lifetime hours of practice
among the long term practitioners was approximately 34,000 hours of practice. Every one of our
practitioners has completed once--at least once--one three-year retreat where they are
practicing a minimum of eight hours a day for three continuous years. Many of them have
done multiple three-year retreats. So, these are individuals who've really spent a very
significant part of their adult life cultivating these qualities. Now, I'm always asked, "Well,
that's really interesting and fine but there's no way in the world I'm going to put in anywhere
near that amount of time. So can short term training be beneficial?" And so, the study
that I'm about to describe to you is a study that we undertook to examine just that question.
And this is a study that is still in the process of being completed. We're analyzing--still
analyzing the data. It's being driven by a wonderfully talented graduate student in my
lab by the name of Helen Weng. One of the cool things that we did in this study is to
take meditation-naive individuals and offer them to two weeks of training just, two weeks,
and we did MRI scans before and after these two weeks of training to determine whether
just two weeks of training 30 minutes a day actually can produce demonstrable changes
in brain function. Moreover, this was a study where when participants signed up, they were
told that this was a research project in which they were going to be offered an intervention
that's designed to cultivate wellbeing. We randomly assigned people to either a group
where they receive compassion training or a group where they receive training derived
from cognitive therapy that trains people to cognitively reappraise situations to appraise
them in ways that are more positive. And so this was a true randomized control trial.
And the other really cool thing about this study is in addition to the participants getting
comparable amounts of training, in each case 30 minutes a day for two weeks, the training
was delivered over the internet. And so, we developed a way to do this over the internet.
Participants logged on to a protected website and they receive 30 minutes a day of training.
The other virtue of having them do this online is that we are able to monitor that were actually
doing it because they had to make some responses as they were going along and they, in order
to advance from one step of the training to the next, they had to make certain key strokes.
So, it enabled us to have some controls over what they were actually doing. So, this just
summarizes some of these key components of the methods with two weeks of compassion,
daily practice over the internet for 30 minutes a day. The comparison group was thought cognitive
reappraisal and the cognitive reappraisal was delivered in the same way, 30 minutes
a day over the internet. We had experts design each of these two trainings and the experts
each believed and each had comparable levels of confidence that the training that they
were designing would produce beneficial effects in the individuals to whom it was offered.
Now, let me say a little bit about what the elements of the compassion training were.
Participants were asked to contemplate and to visualize the suffering and then wishing
their freedom from suffering for a number of different classes of people. First, a loved
one. Now, it's not very difficult for most people to conjure or visualize someone that
you love. It could be a family member, a spouse, a child, to visualize this and visualize suffering
that they may have encountered and then wish that they'd be free from that suffering. In
addition to a loved one, they also direct this meditation to themselves. In addition,
we have them direct it to a stranger. This is someone that they actually see on a regular
basis. It might be a bus driver, it might be a cashier, it might a janitor, someone
they see on a regular basis but whose life--whose life they really don't know much about. And
they are asked to do the same thing for them: to visualize them, to visualize whatever suffering
they think may--they may be having and then the freedom from that suffering. Then a person
is asked to visualize and contemplate a difficult person; someone who pushes your buttons and
then engage in that same process for that person. And finally, directing this to all
beings. Participants use mental phrases that are silently repeated. The phrase most often
used was, "May you be free from suffering. May you experience joy and ease." They're
instructed to notice visceral sensations especially around the areas of the heart as they engage
in this practice. And finally, they are instructed to feel the compassion emotionally and not
simply to repeat the phrases cognitively. Now, this was a fairly elaborate experiment.
I'm only going to be telling you about very selected pieces of it. We have people go through
a simulator, which is a mock MRI scanner before this all happens. Time one is a period prior
to their random assignment to either the compassion group or the reappraisal group. They come
into the laboratory and they receive--they get an MRI scan and some questionnaires. They
then go through two weeks of training for 30 minutes a day on the internet. And then
at the end, they get another MRI scan. And we also give them some economic game tasks
and the donation test which--both of which I'll tell you about. But these are ways of
assessing altruistic behavior to see if we can get an actual behavioral measure of the
impact of compassion training. So, I'll say a little bit about economic games. Now, about
10 or 15 years ago, one of my good friends, Danny Kahneman, who is a psychologist at Princeton
who also won the Nobel Prize in Economics maybe five or six years ago and does work
in Behavioral Economics. Danny once said to me, he said, "Ritchie, if you really want
to change the world, you'd better start hanging out more with economists." And so, I've been
taking that to heart and certainly have spent much more time in the last five years with
economists. And one of the things they do is they have very clever ways of using behavioral
tasks in the laboratory to make inferences about cooperative and altruistic behavior.
And so, we designed a game based upon some things in the literature, but this is a unique
game and I'll walk you through the essential elements of this game. The game involves three
players: a dictator, a recipient, and a third party. We're interested in the behavior of
the third party. At the beginning of the game, the dictator is endowed with a certain amount
of money as is the third party. The dictator makes the first move and can transfer some
amount of money to the recipient. The third party can act to redistribute money from the
dictator to the recipient so that the transaction is rendered more fair. So let's say the dictator
only gives the recipient a really small amount of the money that he was endowed with to begin
with, the third party can use some of the money that he was endowed with to take money
from the dictator, transfer it to the recipient and the money is doubled in the process. The
participants are informed that they will actually be given all of the money that they play with.
So this is for real. There is no deception and they actually walk away with the money
that is transacted. And it turns out that the cooperative solution is the solution that
maximizes the gain among all the participants. Yes?
>> Is there an error in the [INDISTINCT]? >> DAVIDSON: Sorry? No. This is--you mean
it should be subtracted? Is that--I'm not sure what your--well, let me actually show
you a subsequent slide. It may help to clarify this. So, I want to just show you in an independent
sample, not from the intervention study itself, but a study where we had a group of non meditators
come in to the laboratory and play this game. What we found is that among--when the--when
the dictator makes an unfair offer, that's these bars here, if a person reports themselves
to have very high levels of empathy on a standardized measure of empathy, if they are the third
party, they redistribute significantly more money compared with individuals who report
themselves to have low empathy. And in response to fair or generous offers by the dictator,
there are no differences in the amount of redistribution as a function of empathy. So,
what these data simply indicate is that those individuals who are behaving in the third
party who redistribute more wealth, they are the ones who also report high levels of empathy.
And that--this is just another way of showing it. So, higher levels of emphatic concern
are associated with more funds that are redistributed by that third party. Now, if you look at the
effects of compassion training it turns out after just two weeks of compassion training,
there is a significant difference in the performance on this game with the participants after two
weeks of compassion training redistributing more wealth compared to the group that was
assigned to the reappraisal condition. Remember, these participants were randomly assigned
at the outset. So these are not preexisting differences. Now, in terms of the brain imaging
findings, I'll just show you a snippet here. One of things that we did in addition to the
economic games is we gave people a simple donation task. This was a study done in college
students and we paid them $165 to participate in this study. And we told them at the end
of the study that--I'll just move to that--we told them at the end of the study that we
are going to offer them the opportunity to donate some amount of money that they were
receiving to any charitable cause of their choosing. The only constraint was that the
charitable organization had to have an online mechanism for contributing. So, this is--you
can think of it as a real world index of helping behavior and they were offered the opportunity to donate
any amount of money from the funds that they were being given to any charitable cause.
And this was again for real. There was no deception. They actually executed the transaction
online and did it in private so there was no one looking over their shoulder. Okay.
Now, there was no difference between the compassion group and the comparison group--excuse me,
in how much was redistributed. So, two weeks of compassion training is insufficient to
produce any change in this donation task. It was probably naive for us to think that
we could produce a change after two weeks. However, we did find something interesting
and that is when we looked at the brain data, it turns out that among people in the compassion
group, those who showed more activation in an area of the brain that's been implicated
in positive emotion were the ones who donated more money. So, the greater the activation
change, that is, more increase there was an activation in this region as a consequence
of the two weeks of compassion training, the more money was donated by the participants
in the compassion group. The participants in the reappraisal group showed no significant
relation between activation in this region and donations. So, what these data suggest
is that people respond to this compassion training in a very variable way, which is
not surprising to us, and those who respond the most, who is showing the biggest boost
in activation in this brain region are the ones who show the largest increase--the largest
amount of donation on this donation task. We also looked at changes in this region on
certain questionnaire measures that we gave and there's this measure of self-reported
love. I must confess that I'm not a big fan of this kind of self report measures but nevertheless,
we give them to see if we can learn anything. These are two example items from this questionnaire.
I develop strong feelings of closeness to people easily. I find it easy to trust others.
Those are two items. And it turns out that people in the compassion group, again, who
showed greater activation in the nucleus accumbens report a greater increase in love from time
one to time two that is over the course of two weeks. So the bigger the boost and signal
in this region that has been associated previously with positive emotion, the greater the increase
is in love of their report. And you can see that the purple dots are the participants
in the compassion group, the blue are the ones in the reappraisal group and the participants
in the compassion group are showing the biggest boost in both the measure--the self report
measure of love as well as in this brain signal. So, one of the things that we were talking
about at lunch was pushing the envelope on methods to interrogate brain function and
structure, which is an important piece of what we do in our center. So there's a strong
methodological component about a third of the scientists in my group or physicists these
days who are developing new methods. And one of the methods that we use is diffusion tensor
imaging, and the uncinate fasciculus is a pathway that connects limbic regions to the
prefrontal cortex. And in order to regulate our emotions, to change our relationship to
our emotions, which is something that we hypothesized occurs through certain kinds of contemplative
training, we think that this pathway is going to be a target of those contemplative interventions.
And so, this is just the kind of image that you can get with diffusion tensor imaging.
And this is uncinate fasciculus and we can quantitate parameters of the fiber track that
goes between these regions. And this is something that we're interested in examining as a potential
structural target of training and is part of our ongoing research today. I want to just
briefly talk about neurophenomenology because the relationship between a brain and experience
is really a central piece of what we do. And one of the wonderful opportunities in working
with long term meditation practitioners is these are people who have spent years familiarizing
themselves with the mechanisms of their own mind. And when we went into this, we had the
conjecture that we would find closer connections, closer correlations, more robust correlations
between people's reports of their experience and neural correlates of the experience among
long term practitioners because these long term practitioners spent years training their
mind to become familiar with its processes and content. And so, if we're examining correlations
between the brain and experience, we would observe those correlations more robustly in
these long term practitioners. And so, this is an enterprise, as I mentioned earlier,
which was pioneered by Francisco Varela. And so, we've been looking at this recently. And
this is just an example of how we do it. This is a monk in our lab where we are monitoring
brain electrical signals with a 256 channel net that's on the head and the practitioner
is rating the clarity of this experience. Clarity is a specific technical term in the
contemplative lexicon of practice. And there's a lot of variation in the clarity of experience
that these practitioners report when they're engaged in meditation. So we have a practitioner
meditating and they are reporting on the clarity of their experience. This is actually a picture
from some early work. In recent work, they are using a joystick to rate this continuously.
And this is the kind of data that we can get where what you're--what you see in red is
a metric that is related to their reports of clarity on a moment to moment basis. This
is time moving along the abscissa. And on the ordinate here for the red line is the
clarity of experience and the blue is a particular parameter of brain activity, of neural isolation
that we've previously found to be robustly increased during meditation practice. It's
oscillations in the gamma frequency range. These are about 40 cycles per second and they
are thought to play a very important role in certain kinds of learning and we see them
very robustly in this long term practitioners. And so, this just shows the correlation across
time within a practitioner between his reports of the clarity of experience and the magnitude
of signal in the gamma frequency range that's recorded with this measured brain electrical
activity. So this is from one practitioner. This is another example where there are different
blocks throughout several days of practice and this is the quantitative correlation,
these are, again, the correlations between their verbal reports and the gamma signal.
And it turns out that these correlations are highly reproducible. The blue lines are the
correlations in the gamma range in the gamma frequency. The maroon is correlations in another
frequency band that's not nearly as robust. And each unit here, A1, A2, et cetera, through
A9 is a different practitioner. So this is for nine different practitioners, some of
whom we tested on repeated days. And what you can see is that most of the correlations
exceed point six and all the correlations are positive. And a way to summarize it is
here. This just shows a depiction of the spatial distribution of these correlations across
the head. And you can see that these correlations are quite restricted to the frontal region.
This is an aerial view of the head, this is the nose here, and the red depicts highly
significant correlations. And you can see that that is found in these long term practitioners
in the frontal scalp region and we do not find correlations that are significant at
all in novice practitioners. Now, in the next remaining minutes, I want to give you two
other examples. One is the effects of these kinds of practices on attention and the other
is the effects on peripheral biology. And in the interest of time, I'm going skip a
lot of the details, but I want to read you this one quote. This is really a favorite
quote of mine. This was written in 1890 in the chapter on attention in William James'
two-volume tome, "The Principles of Psychology." It's really an amazing statement. He said,
"And the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again
is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not.
An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence." And
by the way, the italics are in the original. "But it is easier to define this ideal than
to give practical directions for bringing it about." I think if James had more contact
with the contemplative traditions, he would clearly see the utility of this kind of training
for attention. And this is a process that we know a lot about in terms of its underlying
neural basis and we know how to measure it very sensitively and behaviorally in the laboratory.
And I won't go through a lot of details, but one of the ways we look at it is with the
attentional blink task. And just let me tell you what this task is. If you are presented
with a rapid stream of stimuli, one every tenth of a second, so you get 10 stimuli a
second and, say, you get a stream of letters, and every now and then there are numbers and
I simply ask you to report every number that you see in a stream of mostly letters. It
turns out that you will mostly likely miss a second number if it follows an initial number
within a window of around 3 or 400 milliseconds. This is known as the attentional blink. It's
as if your attention is blinking, it's as if you are going momentarily unconscious.
So the stimulus is presented but you are totally unaware of it. And many psychologists have
referred to this as a kind of neural refractory period where the brain is just in a--in an
off period and you simply are inaccessible to incoming information. We were skeptical
of that conjecture and we had the intuition that training in certain kinds of meditation
practices which specifically strengthen attention should transform this process and decrease
the propensity to show this attentional blink or another way to say it in a more positive
way is it simply increases awareness, moment to moment awareness, and that's exactly what
happens. I won't go through all the details, but we were able to show that over the course
of three months of training longitudinally and it changes brain function in predictable
ways as well. These are data which had been--which were published a couple of years ago. One
of the characteristics of kids with ADHD is that they have very variable response time
distributions. The distributions in the middle here are skewed distributions that come from
kids with ADHD where you find a right-sided skew which means that they're showing abnormally
long response times whereas these are normal subjects up here that show a much tighter
distribution. And it turns out that meditation tightens your distribution of response times
to make it much less variable. And it changes certain brain patterns which promote this
kind of stability. And, again, this is very new work that's just in press now and I won't
go through the details because we don't have time. Let me just give you a teaser about
peripheral biology. We did a study several years ago where we had people go through an
eight-week meditation training procedure. The training was done in the beginning of
September, it ended around Thanksgiving time. And we gave people flu shots at the end of
their training. We had a control group and we simply looked at antibody titers mounted
in response to the influenza vaccine and this is what you find. After eight weeks of training,
there's a significantly more robust response to influenza vaccine suggesting that if these
people who were exposed to comparable amounts of virus, the people who went through eight
weeks of meditation would have a more robust immune response from the vaccine. So this
is just eight weeks of training in otherwise naive subjects. More recently, we have decided
we need to do this a little bit more rigorously and experimentally. And this is a bit of a
gruesome picture, but we--this is blown-up, magnified. We use a vacuum procedure. I was
telling some people over lunch about this where we raised the first layer of skin over
a course of about 45 minutes to create blisters. There are 12 blisters in a ring. It's a painless
procedure. I've had this done to myself too many times. We smear capsaicin cream around
the blister which produces a local flare or an inflammation. We can then extract the fluid
from the blisters and look at molecular markers that are associated with healing an inflammation
to look at local changes in healing. And we can compute measures of flare size. And I
won't go through all the details but, again, the eight weeks of training in Mindfulness
Based Stress Reduction compared to a comparison condition produces significantly decreased
flare size and practice matters. Those people who practice more over the course of these
eight weeks turn out to show a larger change in pro-inflammatory cytokines which play an
important role in modulating inflammation and healing, which is what these figures show
here. People who went through meditation and who practice more showed a bigger reduction
in pro-inflammatory cytokines. The comparison group showed non-significant changes in the
opposite direction. So, let me just end with a few challenges, conundrums, and opportunities
and sort of summarize where I think we're going to be in the future. I've talked--well,
I'm going to skip that, really, about practice and experience in the interest of time. One
of the challenges in research of this kind is active comparison groups. I didn't have
time to go into details, but we spent a lot of time thinking about appropriate comparison
groups like the cognitive reappraisal group for the compassion training and we've developed
another control group that we've used to compare Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction that matches
these methods on all kinds of characteristics that are very important. We're--we are particularly
interested in applying some of these methods to a typical population, for example, children
with autism, also educational settings, to prisons, where we may help to cultivate skills
of emotion regulation which would benefit prisoners, particularly after they are released.
We are interested in further exploring internet-based interventions for obvious reasons. We've been
very interested in how we can better measure practice. We've developed a wired zafu which
we give to people, which is a meditation cushion that actually has a pressure-sensitive device
in it and can record the number of minutes you're actually sitting on it. And so, even
dedicated meditators will sort of slightly inflate the--so we give these to people. We
don't tell them until after the fact that they've had a wired zafu. And their reports
of their time meditating don't always conform to how much time they actually are sitting.
But there are other ways of getting it, that's through experience sampling where people are
beeped during the day and so forth. These are all things that we're working on. We've
also been interested in more novel outcome measures of slots such as health care utilization.
The conjecture here is that these kinds of practices may encourage people to take more
responsibility for their health and actually show decreased health care utilization which
may make a big difference in terms of the bottom line. And also, this idea of sustainable
wellbeing, one of the things that we think happens with this kind of practice is that
individuals become directly--directly experience their interdependence with the environment.
And sustainable wellbeing can be defined as psychological wellbeing in the numerator and
a person's ecological or carbon footprint in the denominator. And we're--we've been
very interested in both the numerator and the denominator and how they may be affected
by this kind of training. And we're doing studies now. We are getting indirect measures
of people's ecological footprint to see if that might be something that is altered through
long term practice. So, just a few slides about envisioning the future. In 2050, I believe
that mental exercise will be accepted and practiced in the same way that physical exercise
is today. Also, in 2050, we will have a science of virtuous qualities. In 2050, we'll incorporate
the mind back into medicine and better understand how the brain can modulate peripheral biology
in ways that affect our health and I think this will lead us to collectively take more
responsibility for our own health. We'll also develop a secular approach to provide methods
and practices from the contemplative traditions to teach teachers and children ways to better
regulate their emotions and attention and cultivate qualities like kindness and compassion
and regard these qualities as the product of skills that can be trained. We'll transform
corrections so that forgiveness can be cultivated in victims and emotion regulation and stress
reduction in offenders and increase awareness of our interdependence upon others and upon
the planet and be more responsible caretakers of our precious environment. And finally,
I think that in 2050, we'll see more active promotion and more widespread adoption of
these practices into major institutions of our culture and I think this will help restore
some basic virtuous qualities like civility, humility, gratitude, and other similar qualities
in our culture. So, to help catalyze and focus our efforts, we're launching at the University
of Wisconsin the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, and this is our mission. And
you can check us out. We're now online at investigatinghealthyminds.org. I also want
to call your attention to an upcoming opportunity. I think that you got a flyer about it. This
is a meeting that's happening in a few weeks in Washington, D.C. with the Dalai Lama and
it is a Mind and Life sponsored meeting. It's also co-sponsored by a number of major schools
of education, including from Stanford and Harvard and Wisconsin. And we've recently
got word that the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is participating in this meeting.
It's going to be held October 8th and 9th in Washington, D.C. And finally, I want to
just to extend my deep bow of gratitude to the people who really do the work. I, these
days, feel like I'm mostly an orchestra conductor and do what I can to stay out of the way of
an incredibly talented group of people, some of whom are listed here, and also to His Holiness
who has inspired this work tremendously. And I want to end with two quotes and then I'll
really be finished. These are, again, among my favorite corpus. One is from Henry David
Thoreau. He said, "As a single footstep will not make a path on the Earth, so a single
thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again
and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts
we wish to dominate our lives." And I want to end now with one of my all-time favorite
quotes from Albert Einstein. This is something that he wrote in a letter to a friend of his,
giving advice about a daughter who was in need of some help. And Einstein said in 1921,
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us, the Universe, a part limited in time
and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the
rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Thank you.