Transcriber: Juliana Rodrigues Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you.
Hey, how's everybody feeling?
(Audience) Good. Catherine Kerr: Good?
We're going to talk about inner experience.
I'm really, really pleased and honored to be here
talking to you today about mindfulness.
I don't know, you've probably heard of mindfulness
-- raise your hand if you've heard of mindfulness.
Great, lots of people.
It has been in the news,
it's a secular form of meditation that's being incorporated
in the healthcare settings all over the world, including Brown.
It's really effective for people at high risk of depression relapse,
people who have been previously depressed,
it's really helpful for people with multiple sclerosis,
and it reduces the tendency to worry or self-criticize
with thoughts like, "This talk is a complete disaster."
"I can't believe how badly this is going, everyone hates me."
Somehow, it helps to tune that down.
But do you know what mindfulness involves?
What do you do, does anybody know?
Do you guys know?
I'm going to tell you right now.
Most of the published studies have used a standardized format
designed by someone named Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Practices are labeled "sitting meditation,"
"walking meditation," whatever.
It's hard to know exactly what is meant there.
I'm going to give you the secret key to mindfulness
that goes beyond these descriptive labels.
Here's what people who are enrolled in a standardized mindfulness course
actually do.
They learn to direct their attention to the body and the breath.
And that's why mindfulness starts with the body.
So here are the instructions from the first exercise of the first class
- it's a 45-minute long exercise, and it focuses on detail
and every part of the body, and it starts with the toes.
So everybody take a second to check in with yourself,
notice your breath,
and see if you can direct your attention to your left foot,
so that you're experiencing the big toe, in the left foot.
And if you can, the little toe, not moving them,
but just feeling them individually; and perhaps the toes in between.
Do you notice how with the simple act of focusing
the room became quiet and calm?
Very interesting, isn't it?
Here we see a key to mindfulness.
Mindfulness, especially in beginners,
involves a very close focus on physical sensations
in different parts of the body, and also sensations to the breath.
It asks you to notice the quality of the sensation,
for instance, is it cool or is it warm?
So, here's the question.
Remember that mindfulness is protective against depression,
it reduces negative thoughts.
How does a practice that begins by paying close attention to the toes,
how does that reduce negative thoughts?
That's the question, that's the mystery.
I'm going to just give you a little back story.
I arrived at this question in an unusal way.
I had a health crisis, a long time ago,
and I became interested in body-based mind-body therapies
like Tai Chi and Yoga.
I found them really helpful.
I was originally trained as a historian,
but I received an NIH career award fellowship
to retrain as a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.
And there I developed a research focus
on the mind's attention to the sense of touch and healing.
And not just in mindfulness, but in Tai Chi,
and even in the placebo effect.
So, when I began my research,
I viewed mindfulness as a body-focused, mind-body therapy.
But it turns out, most mindfulness researchers and psychologists
look at it as a mind-focused, mind-body therapy.
I'm going to talk to you a little bit about which is it,
at the end of this talk.
I've been working here at Brown and collaborating
with humanists, and philosophers, as well as neuroscientists,
and that's given me a deeper perspective
I'll share with you at the end.
So, let's consider the question:
how might body-focused attention, in mindfulness,
produce specific benefits for the mind?
It turns out that when you pay close attention to your toes,
or to your breath,
you're actually learning how to use your attention
to control the sensory volume knobs in your brain.
You can control how loud a sensation is,
and you can turn the volume up, or turn the volume down.
This is something that all of us do, all the time.
And if you're focusing on your toes or your breath,
this will be processed in the brain's primary somatosensory cortex.
This is where the surface of the entire body,
including the hand, the toes, the lips, are all represented there.
How does the volume knob system that I told you about work?
It actually involves a structure that sits underneath the cortex,
called the thalamus - that's that red arrow -
And the thalamus is the gatekeeper for the cortex.
Basically, there's a loop that connects the thalamus and the cortex,
creates an oscillating rhythm that pulses ten times per second,
and this pulsing rhythm is called the alpha rhythm.
It's basically an online editor.
And what it is doing
is editing sensations that are irrelevant.
When you focus on a specific body area, this alpha wave gets small.
Think like Walden Pond on a Sunday afternoon.
When that happens, a sensation is amplified.
In areas that you're not focused on
- think Cape Cod on a choppy day -
the sensation is blocked.
I'll tell you a little bit more about that;
that might seem confusing.
It turns out that you can use your mind to regulate
the height of the alpha wave, in a really fine-grained way.
You can use your mind to regulate this editing mechanism.
If you weren't able to do this, you guys would be flooded with sensation,
with extrasensory inputs.
So, take for example, right now: You hear my voice, right?
Right?
OK, just checking.
But your thalamus is also registering the sensations in your buttocks.
But you can focus on what I'm saying,
because the alpha rhythm is being used to turn up the volume on my voice,
and to turn down the volume
in the sensory stream representing your buttocks,
if you're able to focus on my voice.
(Laughter)
So what happens when people do mindfulness,
and they focus on the toes or they focus on the breath?
We looked at this question,
and we basically recruited a bunch of people,
we split them into two groups.
We trained half the group in mindfulness,
and then we measured really precisely,
with a special instrument
for recording the brain's faint magnetic fields,
called magnetoencephalography -- that's one of our subjects.
She really enjoyed the brain scan.
What we found
was that people who received the mindfulness training,
who received the training in focusing on the body
were better able at controlling the alpha rhythm in the handmap,
in the primary somatosensory cortex,
when we cued them to attend either towards or away from the hand.
In other words, they were able to flexibly increase or decrease
the alpha rhythm, as needed.
So, remember I told you about Walden Pond versus Cape Cod?
You can see the difference there.
Are you starting to get the pattern?
OK, I hope so.
After training, meditators were able to change their alpha power
in this small region in the handmap.
They were able to switch, quickly and flexibly,
from the Cape Cod waves to the Walden Pond waves,
depending on the needs of the moment.
We know that people with chronic pain and depression,
and people with stress
have a lot of trouble making these kinds of switches:
switching sensory streams, switching tasks,
switching brain dynamics.
The next test of this embodied mindfulness approach
will be to see whether mindfulness helps people with depression or chronic pain
by making the sensory attentional system
more flexible and responsive to rapid changes in context.
And we know in chronic pain, that the attention system
can be very inflexible,
because processing resources are biased towards the pain sensations.
And in depression, even if people recovered from depression,
the sensory attention system can become inflexible
because attentional resources are consumed
by negative preoccupations, and thoughts, and worries.
So, is this resonating?
The main thing is, in depression, in chronic pain, and other situations
people are not able to process the sensory world in real time.
This ability to respond to the immediate context,
that is so important for wellbeing.
It's something that we use all the time.
It matters in social situations,
in situations involving complex sensory and memory tasks.
And the loss of this ability to switch streams and switch tasks
can make people feel isolated and alone.
We know from our study that the simple body-focused mindfulness practice
can help improve flexibility in the brain sensory attentional system.
And according to our theory, this sensory attentional flexibility,
the ability to flexibly vary the alpha rhythm,
should enhance emotional and cognitive processing.
And that's going to be our next test.
And we're hoping to see whether this metric is associated
with reductions in depression, and reductions in negative thoughts,
and reduce distress and chronic pain.
Interestingly, it turns out
that the early Buddhists advanced a similar theory 2,500 years ago,
in a famous practice text called "The Four Foundations of Mindfulness."
Guess what the first foundation of mindfulness is.
Anyone?
(Audience) (indistinct comment)
CK: Mindfulness of the body and breath.
Mindfulness of the body and breath
is the first step, a critical first step,
for learning how to regulate emotion,
and learning how to regulate negative or repetitive thoughts.
This type of view is radically different
from descriptions of how sensation and thought are related
in the Western tradition; for example, with Descartes,
where body sensations, and sensations more generally,
are viewed as totally discontinuous with thoughts;
whereas in early Buddhism,
aspects of sensation were viewed as continuous with aspects of cognition.
Think about that for a second.
It's a lot of words, but what I'm saying
is the sensory world and the thought world are related.
The reason I mention this, and I think it's important,
is because the only reason I've had access to this text
is because of the prior work of Buddhist scholars.
This is important because here, at Brown,
we're taking an interdisciplinary approach
that we're developing in the Contemplative Studies Initiative,
where we have meditation neuroscientists
working side by side with textual scholars.
And the reason this is important is that there may be other ideas
that could improve human health that are deeply buried in these texts.
We need the humanists and the scientists to work together,
to explore, and test these questions.
Let's just re-engage and focus on our breath for a second.
Checking in,
just noticing that you're breathing,
and focusing on sensations in the belly, or at the tip of the nose,
and noticing the quality of the sensation that you feel.
Many people actually feel something quite tangible
when they do this exercise.
Ask yourself if you felt something.
Did you feel your attention?
The reason this is interesting
is because the beautiful thing about attending to the body
is that, when we do this,
we're both the observer and the observed.
And it may be that, in mindfulness, what you're learning
is how to feel your own mind and attention.
You feel the quality of your mental focus: is it jumping around, is it steady?
And from a philosophical perspective,
you might say that this mindfulness curiosity
about body sensations is neither mind nor body,
but is actually right at the mind-body interface.
The clinical psychologists and I were both right.
That's the answer to that question.
If you look at it from an engineering perspective,
one of the things that may be happening is that you may be learning how to feel
your own cortical dynamics.
That is an interesting idea.
These are the questions that an embodied mindfulness approach
allows us to ask,
and it allows you to kind of check in with your sensory experience
at a different level.
I want you to think about how different this view of sensation is
as an object of curiosity.
Your sensations are something you're curious about.
This is so different from the usual approach in mainstream culture
where we're flooded with sensation from televisions and the Internet.
The sensationalism is not a recent thing.
Byron, the Romantic poet, talked about the thirst for sensation,
and the craving void, the drive to agitate or distract ourselves.
It doesn't have to be this way.
We can develop a different level of consciousness
about our sensory environments,
the sights, and sounds, and body sensations that we're taking in.
This embodied mindfulness practice is available to us at any moment
during the day.
The simple act of closely attending to body sensations,
on the bottom of the feet, as you walk,
has the potential to give huge benefits for wellbeing.
I want everyone to try that tomorrow.
This might be good not just for patients
but also for physicians
who work in challenging, chaotic environments,
as well as medical students who can become cognitively fatigued
from taking in so much information.
We're starting here a Mindfulness Wellness Program
to begin to look at some of these questions.
I've given you a key for exploring how simple embodied mindfulness
may be able to reset cognitive and emotional baselines,
and help not just patients but those who are called to serve them.
These are just some of the potential benefits
that a mindfulness practice that starts with the body
might offer for health.
Thanks.
(Applause)