Transcriber: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Thank you.
It's a pleasure to be here with you this evening
to talk about the mind
and to talk about how we see the mind.
And this is a process that you can call "mindsight,"
the capacity to actually come into our experience, get with experience.
So one thing that we do with mindsight is we check on how people are doing,
so I'm going to check with you.
Can you hear what I'm saying in the back row?
Wonderful, wonderful.
So in that moment,
what I'm doing is to see if in your inner experience,
you're actually able to hear me.
And one of the things that we are going to look at
is what the mind is.
For example,
what does it mean to have a subjective experience of hearing,
to be aware of hearing?
And also what it means for our mental health.
These are questions that are of interest to a range of people.
Parents, for example, want their children to develop a healthy mind.
The therapists would like the mind of their clients, their patients,
to do well,
and in society, you could make an argument
that if we're going to help people reach their optimum level of functioning,
to have health, to have a sense of well-being and meaning in their lives,
even to approach the planet,
we try to turn the pathway of planetary pain around,
whether it's poverty or pollution,
then you need to really work beginning with the mind.
As Mahatma Gandhi said,
"We must be the change we [wish] to see in the world."
We must really look deeply into ourselves
to start with the kind of connections inside of ourselves
that we'd like to see out in the world.
And there's no better place to start than with mind.
So this is what we're going to be diving into,
and to do that,
we're going to be asking some fundamental questions
and turning them upside down.
So how many of you feel like you actually have a mind?
Raise your hand.
Okay. We do have a mind.
And we know that because, of course, we have feelings, we have thoughts.
And the way we're using the word mind
is not in the sense of intellect versus feelings.
The mind, in many ways, is our subjective experience of all of that.
Okay, so we're going to talk about what that really means
to have a thought.
What does it mean to have a feeling?
Right? So we all have minds, but not everyone actually sees the mind,
because we have a way of seeing the physical world,
and we also have a way of seeing
the inner subjective world of ourselves and others.
And what we can show is that this baby does not even have a definition of mind,
but she will grow up in the world,
and depending on what her teachers do and her parents do
will shape the mind.
Does that make sense?
That relationships actually shape the mind.
But in this case, then,
we need to try to define what it is that's being developed.
Now, I'm a psychotherapist, a therapist of the mind.
I'm trained in psychiatry.
I've done research in psychology.
These are all fields that study the mind.
And what was startling to me,
20 years ago,
was to wake up one day
and realize that even though I was a psychiatrist,
the caretaker of the mind,
I had never received even one lecture -
not even one lecture -
that said what the mind is.
So I started this journey
that's resulted in me asking 100,000 mental-health professionals,
7,000 school teachers
and dozens and dozens of academic individuals who study the mind,
Have you ever been given even one lecture on what the mind is?
And for the teachers and the therapists,
it turned out that over 95% of all mental-health professionals
around the planet -
and I've asked over 100,000 of them -
have never been given a lecture of what the mind is.
And it turns out
in the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, even biology,
there is no definition of the mind.
The field of education doesn't have a definition of mind.
And what's strange is even the philosophy of mind
doesn't have a definition of mind.
(Laughter)
It's really amazing.
So that's the end of my talk.
(Laughter)
So what is this thing called mind?
Why don't we have a definition for it?
Why in the world do we have a word for it?
Some people come up to me after a talk and say,
"Let's drop the word."
I say, "What would you like to use?"
They say, "Brain activity."
So they say, "Well, look,
this girl, she has a brain,
and the mind is just the activity of her brain,"
which is a very common statement from a number of scientists
in the branch of biology called neuroscience.
And I haven't even considered that the way the brain functions -
and we'll talk about this in a moment -
is by electrochemical energy flow across neurons and synapses
and the release of chemicals in what are called action potentials,
which are like an electrical current.
And I want to ask you,
if you are in love with someone,
is that just electrochemical energy flowing along the membranes of axons?
Or is it something different?
And this raises a really crucial issue,
in science anyway,
about what is this thing called mind.
What does it mean to develop her mind, for example?
So I'm going to suggest to you
that when you look at the science of relationships -
the study, for example, of how parents interact with children -
you find a really fascinating fact across all cultures:
when parents sense the inner life of their child,
that is, when they tune into the feelings,
thoughts, hopes, dreams, attitudes,
longings, intentions, motivations -
all of that inner mental life that drives behavior,
when parents focus on the inner mental life of the child,
the child does really well.
When the parent has mindsight,
it actually changes the structure of the brain to become integrated,
called "neural integration."
Now, this is a really amazing finding,
that the way you as a parent or a teacher or a friend or a therapist,
the way you actually focus
on the inner life of the person in front of you makes all the difference.
There was even a study of primary care physicians,
and if they focused
on the mental life of their patient who came in with a common cold,
the patient got over the common cold a day sooner;
their immune function was better.
There have been recent studies to show
that if you develop your own mind's ability to be present through what is -
basically mental presence -
you actually change the ends of the chromosomes in your cells
because you increase an enzyme called telomerase
that keeps your cells healthy.
What you do with your mind
makes a difference for your relationships and your body.
So we need to ask a question,
What is this mind thing
that can change the structure of the caps on your chromosomes?
It can even change the structure of the brain.
That's been proven now -
that's not just a guess - that's been proven.
What is it?
So what comprises the mind?
Well, we can say, of course, it's awareness,
which no one really understands,
but it's about the sense of knowing and the known -
it's a way understanding awareness -
and it's subjective experience.
So you have an inner sense right now of hearing me,
and you have your thoughts, your feelings,
your hopes, your dreams, your memories.
The subjective texture of all that is not the same as neural firing.
It may be totally correlated with it, but it's not the same.
Some special quality - awareness, subjective experience -
but there's another quality of mind we're now going to dive very deeply into
that is required for us to try to address the question,
Can we create a definition of the mind?
And here it goes.
Take a look at this figure.
This is a figure
that we can actually spend an entire lifetime looking at,
and you constantly come up with new questions.
And here's the idea:
what connects relationships, your body/brain -
which you can call the embodied brain,
and it's the whole nervous system distributed throughout the whole [body] -
and the mind?
And if you sit with this question for a while,
suddenly your vision starts to get a little blurry,
and you start to realize that the essence of mind,
the substance of mind,
is not limited by the skin,
that there's something that connects our relationships and our brains
that needs to be the focus to understand the mind.
Now, let me ask you a question.
How many of you feel like relationships shape the way you feel in life?
Raise your hand.
Okay, great, beautiful.
And how many of you feel
that what you've eaten or not eaten or how much sleep you've gotten
that that affects your body, affects your mind?
Raise your hand.
So we know that the mind
is somehow influenced by both relationship and the brain,
but how can that be?
How can the body and relationships - What do they have in common?
So there's a long line of reasoning behind this
in this field called interpersonal neurobiology
that I work in,
where we take all the fields of science and combine them into one,
using what's called conciliate thinking.
And from that process, we come up with the following proposal:
that even though none of these fields have a definition of mind,
in interpersonal neurobiology, we do.
And here's our suggestion as a working hypothesis:
that beyond awareness and beyond subjective experience,
which are really important aspects of mind,
that a third aspect of mind,
which we're defining as a self-organizing, emergent process
of both the embodied brain and relationships.
You say, well, okay, that sounds kind of okay
or maybe a little strange,
but what is it actually organizing?
And then you come up with the following thing:
that it's energy and information,
energy and information arising from the bodily mechanisms
of this embodied brain,
and that they're also - energy and information -
are shared through the patterns of communication and relationship.
So if we're going to identify what's the essence of mind,
I'm going to propose to you that it's energy and information
that passes between us in relationships
and within us when we talk about the embodied brain.
Now, when I propose this to scientists, they roll their eyes and they say,
"Oh, you must be from California."
(Laughter)
I say, "Why?"
They go, "That is so unscientific."
And I'm trained as a scientist,
so I go, "What's unscientific about it?"
And they go, "Energy."
And I go, "Energy is not scientific?"
I say, "Isn't physics a part of, like, science,
and they study energy; they've got equations, E = mc2?
Has energy in it."
So this is the question I ask you to think about.
Is energy and information scientific?
Are they real?
Is energy real?
And when you start to look at that -
and I've had the opportunity to talk to leaders
in the field of every one of these disciplines I mentioned -
from anthropology to philosophy to neuroscience and even physics -
in all those fields,
though they don't look at it directly,
they refer to processes
that require energy flow, energy changes across time.
And when energy has a certain symbolic value to it,
we call it information,
and so you can argue with them.
One time I was in San Francisco
with the leader in the field of psychology -
a guy in his 80s, senior in the discipline -
and we're riding on this trolley car.
There's people from the field of education, of neurobiology,
and they're hearing this fellow and I have this deep conversation.
I said, "Please tell me,
is there any mental process that doesn't ride along energy patterns?"
He thought about it, and the trolley car's going (Chug-a-chug),
and he said, "Uh, no. I can't think of a single one."
I said, "Isn't it true that the field of psychology
has no definition of the mind?"
(Chug-a-chug-a-chug)
He goes, "We don't. That's true."
I said, "How about this definition?
That you can look at the mind
as this emergent self-organizing process
that arises from and also regulates -
this is a property of systems -
it arises from that which it actually is going to turn back and regulate,
the flow of energy and information within us and between us."
And the trolley car's going (Chug-a-chug), and everyone's listening, listening in.
And then he goes, "That is great."
And I went, "Oh, thank God."
Because this is not something that's accepted in any discipline,
but what I'm going to suggest to you
is it helps us take the wisdom of anthropology,
the wisdom of sociology, of psychology,
of biology, of physics, of philosophy,
of the contemplative sciences,
of education,
of the field of just understanding life as a human being on the planet,
and it gives us this powerful thing to do.
What's so powerful? Who cares? Why care about it?
Well, first, it tells us that the mind is created in our relationships.
It's why relationships are so important.
But the body is also important, this embodied mechanism.
And it tells us that we can take a guess at what a healthy mind is.
And this is the amazing thing,
that when you say that energy and information is integrated,
you find that the science of integration,
which is the linkage of differentiated parts,
it says that when you're integrated, you're in harmony, you're flexible,
adaptive and coherent,
and when you're not integrated, you go to chaos or rigidity.
And you can look at the DSM -
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
or the psychiatry and psychology mental disorders bible,
and you find that every single symptom of every single syndrome
is an example of chaos, rigidity or both,
and you go, "Oh my God,"
and you can predict, as we've done in interpersonal neurobiology,
that in fact, major psychiatric disorders are disorders of impaired integration:
like speech disorders, people with schizophrenia,
people with autism, people with bipolar disorder,
as nonexperientially derived difficulties,
and then experientially derived ones like abuse and neglect -
impair the growth of the integrated fibers in the brain.
So when you look at this definition of health,
what we're saying is that health is integration,
the linkage of differentiated parts,
then what you can do
is you can teach people to monitor energy and information
both inside of themselves to create integration,
and modify that for integration,
and look at energy and information flow between themselves and others.
Honoring differences and promoting linkages
is the essence of a healthy relationship of any sort -
in a family, in a school, in a community.
Integration, in this view, is health,
and we can empower people throughout all of society
to try to create more levels of integration.
Now, how do you do this?
Mindsight is the way you do it.
Mindsight is the ability to sense energy and information flow
and move that flow within us and between us for integration.
And when you do this, you find this amazing set of principles.
You find that you can teach people
to monitor and modify this flow for integration
and identify chaos and rigidity.
I'm going to give you a list of processes and finish my talk with these processes.
And let me ask you,
How many of these would you like in your life?
Because this is an outcome
of integrated practices between yourself and yourself -
in what's called mindfulness practice -
and between yourself and your child - in what's called secure attachment.
This brain has parts of itself that have become integrated,
and though this looks complicated, you can simplify it
by thinking that we all have a brain that grows throughout the life-span,
and you can understand it
with a model of a hand where everything is pulled together.
I'm just going to tell you that those middle fingernails there,
if you put your fingers over the top, put your hand like this,
you'll see these middle fingernails, if you put your head like this,
and they pull everything together,
they coordinate and balance everything.
These integrated fibers grow with integrated relationships.
This is the amazing, simple finding
from 20 years of studying all these sciences:
integrated relationships stimulate the growth of integrated fibers.
And finally, let's see, what does that give us?
Whether you're doing mindfulness practice,
when an observing self is honoring the differences between itself
and an experiencing self -
that's integration internally, in what's called internal attunement -
or between one person and another, like between a parent and child,
this is what you get.
You get the ability to regulate your body.
You get the ability to attune to other people.
Integration gives you the ability to balance your emotions.
It gives you the capacity to extinguish fear.
It gives you the capacity to be flexible, to pause before you respond.
It also allows you to have insight into yourself,
or have a mindsight map of me,
where I connect past, present and future.
It gives you a mindsight map of you,
understanding the internal world of another person.
It gives you a sense of a mindsight map of we,
the greater good,
and it also gives you not only intuition,
but it allows you to have a creative and spontaneous life.
So what I'll leave you with
is that these nine functions
are the way you can use a mindsight skill ability,
to yourself, and how to teach to other people,
to actually create more integration in the world.
And when integration is made visible,
we have kindness and compassion.
And that's the hope and that's the promise
of bringing more mindsight into our world.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)