When I was at the Society for Neuroscience meeting,
I heard the Dalai Lama say that if neuroscientists could create an intervention to give him the
effects of meditation without meditating, he would be the first one to sign up.
Ultrasound might be it.
If you pardon my French, we are scared shitless of this technology.
We're just at the very beginning of unlocking this immense technological and scientific power.
As I create technology that helps you become happier,
does that reduce your ability to make good decisions? How do we define good decisions?
I have a little delay, it's all good though and I'll just be there around noonish.
That was Shinzen.
He's the lab co-director, Shinzen Young.
He is very special.
His real name is Steve Young.
So he doesn't look like what you might expect Shinzen to look like.
He became Shinzen because he became ordained as a Buddhist monk in Japan in the 1970s, I believe.
Here's toilet reading, would be the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
But on top of that, Shinzen is also a science geek and so he's this trifecta in this field.
I've seen him cry, literally,
describing mathematical theorems.
So I met Shinzen in graduate school and I really wanted to know
what can we know about brain activity that would explain to us how consciousness emerges.
Jay and I had a relationship that built over several years so I started to teach him some
of our techniques and we started to talk about how ultrasonic neuro modulation be relevant to
these techniques and then there was a point at which it's like, let's do ultrasound and mindfulness.
This is where I used to come meditate because you get a bit of shade.
We can change the way the brain functions for positive effects in terms of a broad spectrum
of human happiness goals.
You all right? – Yep, how you doing?
Let's do it.
Shinzen was also the first
subject for trying to combine non-invasive brain stimulation in meditation practice.
So we're gonna do day three of the protocol that we've been doing.
What we're targeting with ultrasound is quieting
a brain network that is active in all of us and when it's active it's often responsible for some
negative self-focused thought and it causes people distress so by targeting the posterior cingulate cortex,
we seem to be disrupting the activity of that network, giving it just a little less ability
to self-organise again.
People will say in our studies, I still had those thoughts but I wasn't
angry about them, I was able to observe my thoughts.
Because the ultrasound is so highly focused,
we have to set the target for each individual subject, so it seems like meditation targets that specific
brain area, we're trying to boost the effect of meditation by making it happen a little bit faster.
Everything is so vivid that it's a kind of nothing. That's why you just laugh.
It's like very big and very smooth, very rich and very thin, exactly the same time.
That's the best smell in the world.
We've used this paradigm on advanced meditators like Shinzen.
Now the question is, will it work on beginners?
I like to go in with no expectations. I love to be surprised.
I was really just scared and angry a lot and I was dealing with a lot of trauma.
We're starting to actually have a chance to treat the deep conditions that are leading to a lot of the issues
that we're worried about.
Depression, anxiety ... all of these things that are tormenting our society.
Am I meditating or am I just ...?
Good question. At this point we just want you to stay awake.
So often in our experiments, subjects receive about five minutes of brain stimulation.
Although it's turned on and off in that time and then they typically sit either meditating or doing nothing
and then about 20 minutes after that they tend to experience the biggest changes to what it feels
like or to their meditation practice.
If you don't have much meditation experience and you've never
felt those those deeper states and you have that for the first time, it's a discovery the first time
you have that.
You realise like, oh I didn't realise I was holding that tension, it's like releasing a
muscle that you've been holding tight for your whole life.
Ultrasound is not the first wave that
we've injected from outside the skull into people to try to have some beneficial effects and if we
go way back in the 40s and 50s, people delivered electroshock that was seen as, by many, inhumane.
From there we went to all kinds of other treatments.
Chemicals are placed in the
hopper of the tablet making machine and the pills come popping out.
Drugs are easily available but
they're horribly non-specific in their action.
They affect the entire brain and the body.
And so there's a host of side effects that are not just emotional side effects but also
physical side effects in using these different medications.
So compared to the drugs, ultrasound
is targeting a very specific region that has a very specific effect on this default mode network.
Yeah, I think the RA came in and I said it's been five minutes, do you want
to do a little bit more?
I was like, absolutely, yes please.
I was able to sink into equanimity very quickly.
So if you have depression, if you have chronic pain, if you're suffering from addiction,
mindfulness is not really something that you want to do, you don't want to sit with yourself
for, you know, even 30 seconds, let alone 30 minutes.
This removes the barriers to entry
and makes it more rewarding up front so that you can do the work.
We hope that this technology will have huge positive benefits in terms of
human happiness, reduction of suffering, elevation of fulfilment, self-understanding, positive
behaviour change and ultimately a call to service.
Is where we want this technology to accommodate.
My experience in the Bay area didn't work out quite as I had planned.
The Bay area is all about
growing technology exponentially, finding a unicorn and, you know, making that a billion dollar company
and then growing it from there.
I realised that the culture there wasn't quite what I needed to build
this in a safe, slow, scientific and kind of boring way.
I don't have anything inherently wrong with money,
but I understand it's a corrupting influence and that may set you up for creating a relatively
dangerous brain stimulation system.
It would not be right at this point to just create something
that you sell on Amazon and tell people to use it every day.
We just don't know if that's safe and
as a scientist that's what I have to say.
I hope we know what we're doing along the way and I hope that we engage it
with mindfulness and being careful and thoughtful and not just doing things
because we can.
There might be doses and locations in the brain that you could definitely have a
holy cow effect, right?
Whoa, give me that one again.
That's not our goal to target those.
It's not to say people won't figure that out but this shouldn't be a high.
It should be a therapeutic tool.
This technology scares me and the future without a radical improvement really scares me
a lot lot more.
So that's why we got to democratise enlightenment.