Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
So I'm really happy to be part of this historic event at Brown.
I think it says a lot about where we are in history,
a time when communication and information transfer
between countries and hemispheres and states
is greater than it ever has been before.
And that can cause some problems
and some wars,
but it also can create great opportunities
to bring together people with different perspectives,
different religions, different expertise
to solve some of the world's greatest problems
in ways that have never been tried before.
And we're talking about the big problems
like happiness, suffering, war and peace.
So I'm a neuroscientist
in the Department of Psychiatry in the medical school,
which, if you go to Brown, is pretty far away.
It's actually not far away, but it seems like it is
(Laughter)
from the main campus.
I'm in an interesting dialogue with people on the main campus
in religious studies and in East Asian studies.
What the dialogue that -
So psychiatry considers me a lone nut,
but I'm actually a part of a much larger dialogue
between science, medicine
and contemplative traditions of major world religions.
And so when I use the word "contemplative,"
I'm talking about a wide range, a family, of mental training practices,
which are designed to cultivate positive qualities of mind.
So, primarily, one of those qualities would be attention.
So being able to bring your attention back to an object, you know,
that you're intending to pay attention to.
So in addition to attention,
we're also talking about positive qualities
like compassion, patience, generosity -
things like that.
So this greater dialogue is called contemplative studies.
This is going on all over the world; it's not just at Brown.
Within contemplative studies, we have contemplative science -
so studying, empirically and scientifically,
contemplative practices like meditation.
And within contemplative science, we have contemplative neuroscience -
so neuroscientists studying the effects of meditation.
So why would neuroscientists be interested in contemplative practices?
That's what I want to talk about today.
I'm sure you've seen lots of really flashy, sexy magazine articles
about the Dalai Lama and monks getting put in scanners
and things like that.
I'm actually not going to talk about that.
I want to talk about - sorry.
I want to talk about why the average neuroscientist
might be interested -
or someone in psychiatry -
might be interested in contemplative practices
and sort of take a step back
and walk you through
some of the discoveries and forces within neuroscience and psychiatry
that have led us to this dialogue.
Okay?
So the first one is some of the things that we've come to learn
about the nature of happiness itself.
It would make sense, and we've sort of assumed,
that if we get everything we want
and we get rid of everything we don't want,
we'll be happy.
Makes sense?
Totally logical.
Totally wrong.
That's just not the way the data has turned out to be.
We're one of the richest countries on the planet,
but we're not really one of the happiest.
And the people who are the richest in our country
aren't, you know, necessarily much happier than the poorest people in our country.
So that's a problem.
Getting what we want doesn't actually equal happiness.
From psychiatry, we go from the opposite spectrum.
If you get rid of like, desperately unhappiness,
then we'll be happy.
But that also hasn't turned out to be true.
And in fact, we knew this about 60 years ago.
In 1948, the World Health Organization
defined health as the complete state of mental, physical and social well-being
and not just the absence of disease.
But we've spent so much time in psychiatry focusing on mental illness
that we don't really have a sense of what mental health is.
So that's a problem.
Another thing that we know about happiness,
that we've learned about happiness,
is that it seems to be inextricably linked to the faculty of attention,
or more specifically,
our pervasive tendency or habit to not pay attention.
So there was a really great article that was published in Science last year
by Matt Killingsworth.
He's a researcher at Harvard,
and he sent out an iPhone app that just probed people throughout the day
and said, "What are you doing?
And are you paying attention to what you're doing?"
And he found that half of the time,
people were not paying attention to what they were doing;
their minds were somewhere else.
So we have this very pervasive habit
to not be paying attention to what we're doing.
And he also found that people's minds -
the title of the article was "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind."
He actually found
that when your mind is wandering and it's not focused on what you're doing,
whatever you're doing - it could be taking out the trash -
if your mind is wandering, it's actually less happy.
So here's a habit that we have:
half of our lives we're spending doing this habit,
and it's not actually serving us in terms of making us happy.
So I'm going to be talking a lot about habits and happiness.
So, clinical neuroscientists have also found a connection
between attention and happiness.
So the areas of your brain,
the frontal part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex,
which are related to attention,
they tend to be underactive ubiquitously across all kinds of clinical syndromes.
So not just depression, which is what I study,
but also things like schizophrenia,
substance abuse, eating disorders, anxiety
and, of course, attention deficit disorder.
So the more problems with attention -
all of these things have -
in all of these disorders you'll see a weak prefrontal cortex
and problems with attention.
Now, this is important because the prefrontal cortex
tonically modulates or inhibits the limbic system,
which is our emotional system.
So if you have a weak attention system, or prefrontal cortex,
your emotions will be really reactive.
A really good example of this syndrome,
which is, in neuroscience, called "hypofrontality"
or "not enough up front,"
(Laughter)
is adolescence.
So adolescence - our limbic systems are kicked into gear,
so we've got lots of passion and lots of emotions,
and no prefrontal cortex to limit that
because it hasn't developed completely yet -
not till it's sort of -
when you get out of college, maybe you'll have some control.
(Laughter)
So, literally, it's, you know, emotions out of control,
and I think we all remember our adolescence,
and I don't know about you, but it wasn't a particularly happy time.
(Laughter)
So another thing coming out of neuroscience,
which I think is probably one of the most important discoveries -
it's not even a discovery anymore; it's more like a principle -
in neuroscience
that I think has the ability to change the way we think about ourselves
is something known as "experience-dependent neuroplasticity."
And basically, our brain changes with experience,
and we get good at what we practice.
So that's the very basic way of thinking about it.
So if you exercise your physical body,
certain muscle groups get stronger,
certain movements get easier.
Eventually, they become effortless and automatic.
The brain is no different.
The neural networks that you exercise become stronger,
and eventually the thought patterns and mental habits
that are being represented by those neural networks
get stronger and become effortless and automatic.
And the ones you don't use,
just like if you don't use certain muscles,
they get weaker.
And the ones that you never even considered using,
well, they're not going to really grow either.
And the second thing to know about neuroplasticity
is that the most powerful way to change your brain
is not actually medication;
it's actually behavior
because that's what it was designed to change in relation to.
And not just any behavior -
specifically, mental behavior or mental habit.
So William James called habit "the basic structure of mental life."
So habit - I'm going to be talking a lot about habit.
So when you exercise your physical body,
you know which muscles are the strongest because they're the biggest
and when you pick up something, it's easy.
So that's easy to know.
But how would you know which neural networks are the strongest?
How would you know that?
And the answer is that they're the ones that are the most easily activated
and the most easily available to your consciousness.
So we're going to do a little audience participation here.
I need your help for this one.
So I want you to -
I'm going to give you a mental thought to bring to mind.
I'm going to time you to see how quickly you can bring it to mind.
And I know that you're quick because you all got tickets to this thing,
and they sold out in 60 seconds.
So I know you're quick at some things.
So if you feel comfortable, close your eyes
so you're not distracted,
and I want you to bring to mind
something you don't like about yourself.
Okay?
Okay. You can open your eyes now.
And that was about three seconds.
Anyone, can you raise your hand if you just couldn't think of anything?
Okay.
So we got like maybe 3 out of 120.
That's a very strong neural network you've got going there,
and that's - so you're, basically, Olympic athletes of self-criticism.
(Laughter)
Good job.
So that's a strong neural network,
and you didn't get there because that just happens to be strong.
We know that it gets strong because you practice.
And so you've actually been practicing that habit
probably for a really long time and probably every day,
and probably every hour,
and maybe even moment to moment.
And I chose that particular neural network and mental habit
because that is one of the foundational ones:
when it gets really big, it becomes major depression.
So we know it's not one that we necessarily want to get good at,
but here we are - we're all really good at it.
And it seems to have a purpose, you know,
but I can tell you that it tends to lead to problems.
So a couple questions.
One, did you know that you were practicing that all the time?
Two, did you want to be practicing it?
Do you want to be good at that?
Is that really something that you want to be good at?
And if the answer is no to both of those things,
what other neural networks
are you strengthening unintentionally?
Because the judgment neural network is really related to, you know -
it has a couple other modules,
and if you're that quick to find fault with yourself,
how quickly are you going to be able to find fault with others?
Or find fault with - I was going to say your spouse,
but looking at you guys, I don't know how many of you actually have those -
but your girlfriend, your boyfriend, whatever,
your children, other people's religions -
that kind of thing.
You know, and I can't help - I've been watching the news, actually,
and I think we all have been watching the news recently,
and it's really hard not to think about
the people that have been celebrating Osama bin Laden's death.
You know, and when I first saw it on The New York Times -
I watched one of those like little web videos -
I thought, "Wow, we're practicing hatred,
and I'm not sure that we really want to be practicing that."
I mean, I really don't think that the people who are practicing that,
and we are,
we don't really want to be doing that.
It's yet another habit
that we're just sort of unintentionally practicing and getting really good at.
And as we know from neuroscience,
when we practice these things, they become automatic and effortless.
Wow, automatic and effortless hatred.
Like, mmm, that doesn't sound like a recipe for world peace.
So what is it that we do want to practice?
What are some qualities of mind that we actually want?
So here I'm going to ask you again to play along.
I want you to think about someone that you admire.
You know, maybe somebody from your childhood
that had a particularly positive influence on your life, okay?
And then think about,
What is the exact quality that that person has that you admire?
So I'd like to hear some of the ones that you came up with.
(Audience) Humor.
(Audience) Strength.
What was that?
(Audience) Caring.
(Audience) Energetic.
(Audience) Perseverance.
(Audience) Patience.
(Audience) Kindness.
Okay. I think we got some ideas there.
I didn't hear any hatred,
so maybe there's just, you know,
I'm just not seeing that coming out of people.
You know, when I first did that exercise,
I chose my third-grade teacher, who was Mrs. Barbado,
and I also chose kindness and warmth as being the quality,
and I remember looking inside -
Oh, the next thing I want you to do is look inside yourself
to see how much of that quality you have.
And so when I looked inside myself to look for kindness and warmth,
I pretty much found nothing,
and moral:
I was just kind of a grumpy bitch.
(Laughter)
It happens, you know.
(Laughter)
So if you had that response when you looked inside
and thought, "Wow, I have none of the qualities that I admire,"
it can be kind of - you can kind of have a sinking heart about that.
But based on what we know from contemplative neuroscience
and what we know about neuroplasticity,
we can actually start to think of these things
like kindness, energy, compassion, generosity
not as innate qualities that you have or don't have
but as, actually, skills
that you can cultivate through practice and training.
And we know from the neuroscience and the studies now
that these practices actually do cultivate these qualities,
and we have access to a whole array of practices
that can cultivate these qualities.
And we also know that the neural networks that subserve these qualities
can be modified through training.
So, if you slept through the first part of my talk,
here's my recap.
One, happiness is not about getting what you want;
it's about the mental habits that you practice from moment to moment.
I hope you know what they are,
and I hope that they're going in the direction that you want.
And I think that this new convergence of fields
has a very hopeful message:
that we can become the people that we admire,
and like Gandhi said,
we can become the change that we want to see in the world.
(Applause) (Cheering)