So now let's get on to to what's actually going on in the brain
she was favored to win the
2008 Olympics in fact she was in the finals in the lead at the ninth of ten hurdles and what she said in an interview
With time magazine was I was in the middle of the race and I at one point
I realized I was winning, and it wasn't like oh, I'm about to win the Olympic gold Medal
It just seemed like another race and then a point after that I
Started notice that I was telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out
that's when I hit the hurdle, so
I over tried
Now the idea here. It wasn't that she had thoughts. It's that she got caught up in thinking, right?
She got caught up
She tripped herself up literally and it turns out that this is a pretty common process about half the time of the day
We're actually spent either daydreaming or getting caught up in our experience
and you can think of this as a continuum daydreaming stress and of course the far end is addiction and
Because we do this so much
We can actually study this in the brain, and it's now aptly called the default mode network because this is what we default to
I'm going to highlight a particular
Part of the Brain called the posterior cingulate which you can see here in the back of the brain
Which turns out when you look at all the data?
there are a bunch of different things that will activate the posterior cingulate when we're thinking about ourselves when we're mind wandering when we're
thinking about the past and future judging things
When we're thinking about ourselves in social situation liking choices that we've made when it's involved in prevention goals immoral behavior
I'm just going through this large list and
Finally of course craving what do all of these have in common? What does this brain region actually do?
The idea is that this brain version gets activated when we get caught up in our experience and of course with mindfulness
Training the idea is to notice what that feels like and to let go so let's see if this is actually true
We did a study a couple of years ago where we took novice and experienced meditators
and we scanned their brains while they were meditating and we have them do a number of different types of meditation to see what was
Common amongst all these different meditation practices and as you can see here these two
regions these two main regions of the default mode network are
Deactivated and experienced meditators compared to novices
So this was interesting it was relatively novel. We didn't believe it
We wanted to see if we could actually prove this in more more, thoroughly, so we followed it
This is actually a technique that Christopher's charms
Really?
Piloted and he'll talk a little bit more about it in his talk, but the idea is we can take real-Time neurofeedback
to bring the subjective experience together
with brain
activity and we can give people feedback of the real of their own brains while they're meditating and this is what the with what a
Typical graph looks like and the idea is people can meditate with their eyes open letting the graph rest in the background
and then they can check in from time to time to see if it correlates with their experience of getting in their own way as
well as when they're meditating when they're concentrating on their breath and
What our studies show that we have a very good correlation between this graph and people's subjective experience now
That was a novice. Here's an experienced meditator now
I don't I'm not very good at statistics, but even I can tell the difference between these two people's brains
I'll just walk you through what this might what this look like here is a novice these are 3-minute runs
So he said you know there's nothing special here
Nothing special here reporting that it was lining up with his experience in his third run
He said I don't think your feedback works because I was thinking about my breath, and it was showing it was going red
So there's must be something wrong here and the very next run his brain looks completely different, and he said oh I get it
Feeling the physical sensation of my breath rather than thinking about it. So he'd actually used this as neurofeedback even though this wasn't the experiment
Now I'll just walk you through how we can take these data and bring them together so that we can learn even more about what?
These specific brain regions are doing here's an experienced meditator going through the experiment and after each these are one-minute runs now
They're describing their experience, and he said I caught myself
I was trying to guess when the words were going to end and when the meditation was going to begin
So I've trying to be like okay ready set go and then there was an additional word that popped up
and I was like oh shit, and there's that red spike you see there and
then I sort of immediately settled in and I was really getting into it and
Then I thought oh my gosh. This is amazing. It's describing exactly what I'm saying and then you see this red spike
And I was like okay, don't get distracted and I got back into it and we got blue again. I
Was like oh, my goddess is unbelievable. It's doing exactly my mind's doing so he was laughing at this point
and he said
so I find it really funny because that's to the next question that's a
Perfect map of what my mind was going through that's a perfect map of what my mind was going through so what exactly?
What was his mind going through we can take all of these data from all these novice and experienced
meditators and bring them together and in a data-driven
Fashion we can figure out what exactly this brain region is doing and we can confirm what other people have found so when you're distracted
When you're thinking about yourself the posterior cingulate gets activated and you can see that here in this whole line of distracted awareness
But we also found a new category where they were describing controlling things trying to
Effort or when they were discontent that was something that we hadn't noticed before
With the activation of the posterior cingulate again when people are concentrated the posterior cingulate gets deactivated
We know this already, but there's this whole other category that came out as well this effortless doing when people weren't efforting
I'll give you a couple examples
So this person said I was worried that I wasn't using the graph as an object of meditation
So I tried to look at it harder and somehow pay attention more to it of course it went red
Pay attention a little bit more so here's some examples of deactivation the first one toward the middle
I had some thoughts which I don't see in the graph
Maybe because I just let them flow by the second person noticed that the more I?
relaxed and stopped even trying to do anything the bluer when stopped trying ah
yoda note
why not do or do not there is no try so we're getting at this sense of
Flow for those of you that aren't familiar with this me hi chicks and mahAi described this
Several decades ago as this mental state where we're fully immersed in the present totally energized were selfless
It's effortless. We're just we're just doing it you can think of
You know sports figures like Michael Jordan or or other folks that are just really in it, and it just seems complete effortless
This is flow
And we even had some examples. We're experienced meditators were
Reporting getting into flow in our scanner and that this was correlating with decreased activity in their posterior cingulate Cortex