Train Your Brain

“We see meditation as the next major shift in public health. Back in the 1940s, if you told someone they were going to run, they'd ask, 'Who's chasing you?' What happened is that people like Richard Davidson came along and proved that exercise is good for you. And now we understand how important it is.” That's how Dan Harris introduced neuroscientist Richard Davidson, one of the pioneers in the field of contemplative neuroscience. Davidson then spoke:

“There's a study published in 2010 by some friends and colleagues of mine from Harvard who used smartphone technology with thousands of people. They sent messages to people around the world and asked three questions. One was: what are you doing right now? The second was: how is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you're doing, or focused on something else? And the third was: how happy or unhappy are you right now?

What they found is that the average American adult spends 47 percent of their waking life not paying attention to what they're doing. When they're not paying attention to what they're doing, they also report being chronically unhappy.

When I was a graduate student in William James Hall, though it wasn't assigned to me, I actually read William James. One of the things he wrote was this major two-volume book in 1890 called 'The Principles of Psychology'. There was a chapter on attention in which he said, 'The ability to voluntarily bring back a wandering attention, again and again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.' He goes on to say that in education we should cultivate this capacity, and that would be education par excellence.

But it's easier, he says, to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about. I think if William James had encountered the contemplative traditions, he would have immediately seen that these are methods that can actually educate attention. And help us in that way.

In terms of scientific research, we live in a remarkable time for science. And there are four themes in modern science right now that provide an important foundation for this kind of work that we and others do.

The first is neuroplasticity. The idea that the brain can change in response to experience. That's what the brain does. The brain is the organ built to change in response to experience. And our brains are constantly changing, consciously or unconsciously. And I think most of the time, for most people, brains are being changed unconsciously. The invitation in this work is that we can actually take more responsibility in shaping our brains to cultivate healthy and virtuous mental qualities. Which will also have beneficial effects on the body.

The second theme is the equivalent of neuroplasticity in the field of the genome, and that's what we call epigenetics. For those unfamiliar with it, let me say a few words. We're all born with a fixed set of complementary base pairs that make up our DNA. But each gene has what we might call a little volume control, ranging from low to high. And this volume control is highly dynamic based on how we move through the world, our behavior, the activities we engage in, our emotional lives. All of this affects these volume controls and can regulate our genes. So we might have a predisposition to anxiety, we might have a predisposition to panic attacks, but that doesn't mean those genes will necessarily be expressed.

Genes can be modulated on their own, and we published a study in 2014 showing that if we bring long-term meditators into the lab and have them meditate intensively for eight hours, we can show changes in gene expression over the course of those eight hours. What we found, for example, is that genes involved in inflammation, which are at the root of many chronic diseases, those genes decreased in expression. Their expression diminished over the course of that eight-hour practice. And we also had a control group that came to the lab for a day of leisure, where they had equivalent time sitting, equivalent time walking, the same diet for the day. And they showed none of these changes.

The third theme is that there are massive two-way highways between the brain and the body. This allows changes in the brain to affect the body. And it's also responsible for how changes in the body can impact our minds and brains. That's why certain body-based practices or body-based therapies have the beneficial effects they do. As our bodies change, they modulate activity in the brain and vice versa.

The fourth theme is probably the most controversial of all. But in many ways, I think it's the most interesting to me these days. And it's one where there's growing scientific evidence. The fourth theme is that human beings are born with innate basic goodness. What I mean by that is if a child has the choice between wanting to participate in or observe a cooperative, altruistic, and affectionate interaction compared to a selfish and aggressive one, the child will actually prefer the cooperative affectionate interaction over the selfish one. And this can be seen in children as young as six months old.

How do we know this? Well, you can ask them. And how do you ask a six-month-old baby? The way we can ask a six-month-old is by monitoring and using very precise instruments. We can track their eye movements. We can monitor where they're looking. And if you show video clips depicting these types of interactions, the six-month-old shows more interest in the affectionate and altruistic encounter than in the selfish and aggressive one. And there's growing evidence to suggest this.

So one of the things we learn from the contemplative traditions is that the word meditation, in Sanskrit, one of its meanings is familiarization. We really have the opportunity to become more familiar with the basic nature of our mind. And it may well be that at its core, the basic nature of our mind is one that possesses these qualities of clarity and innate goodness, which modern research is making increasingly apparent.

The theme of neuroplasticity is clearly very important in allowing this work to proceed. And one of the exciting things is that we're now seeing insights from laboratory research being brought into real-world contexts, where we have the potential to make a real difference. And there are many situations in which this work is gaining influence. I just came back today from Baltimore, where for the last two days I participated in a symposium at Johns Hopkins University on learning and contemplative practice. Where the application of these methods in education is being considered. At the Center for Healthy Minds, we've developed a curriculum for preschool children that we call the Kindness Curriculum. Sharon Salzberg, who is here in the audience, has been extremely helpful and collaborative in assisting us in developing this curriculum.

The curriculum is being taught in public schools in the Madison Metropolitan School District and it's a curriculum that teaches children this age simple practices of mindfulness and kindness. Randomized control trials are being conducted, with children randomized by classroom, to measure the impact of this kind of curriculum.

Now, why preschool children? Well, it turns out this is a period when the brain shows particularly high plasticity. It's because children this age, three to five years old, if you teach them a second language they learn much more easily. It's why children this age have much greater ease in learning to play a musical instrument. It turns out the brain also shows this kind of plasticity for social, emotional, and attentional skills. Which are cultivated by these contemplative practices.

Jim Heckman, who is a Nobel Prize winner in economics from the University of Chicago, conducted some solid economic analyses and determined that for every dollar spent investing in preschool children in high-quality curricula, there's a seven-dollar return on that investment by the time the child is 30 years old. This is a moral obligation we have in this culture to do what we can for children this age to help them take off on a more positive trajectory.

We have a study coming out for publication soon that will be our first scientific report on the impact of the Kindness Curriculum, showing clear evidence of certain benefits. But it's still very early, and the work is still in its infancy. And one of the messages I'd like to communicate tonight is that we're all excited about this scientific work, and it's helped move this field forward. But there's actually much more work to be done.

And let me close these opening remarks with another applied domain where I think this work will have enormous impact. There are reasons to believe, based on things Dan mentioned and what we've studied, that of course these practices certainly won't cure diseases. And there's much they don't address. But there are reasons to believe that when these methods are offered in healthcare settings that prescribe drugs, the use of prescribed medications could actually drop among individuals who regularly engage in these kinds of practice. We need a large, serious, and important study to investigate the impact of regular practice of these methods on healthcare utilization, on healthcare costs, on the costs of prescribed medications.

I was recently looking at data from the Madison public school district on healthcare spending they have to pay for their employees. And I looked specifically at the isolated category of costs for antidepressant medications for their staff, and the number was astronomical. And I'm not someone who is anti-medication. I believe that medication in certain circumstances, judiciously applied, can be very useful.

But I'm also convinced that we can do better, and that we can bring these numbers down. And if we find that people who engage in regular practice of these meditation methods show decreases in healthcare costs, decreases in prescribed medication costs, and if that shows up in a solid study, it will be something very impactful. So we need to do this kind of study, and we need to do it soon.”