So now let's get on to what's actually going on in the brain,
and I'll start with a story. So Lolo Jones was an Olympic hurdler...
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 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 at a point after that, I started
to notice that I was telling myself to make sure my legs were snapping out.
That's when I hit the hurdle. So I overtried. 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. And 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 region 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 had 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 both deactivated in 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 more thoroughly.
So we followed... This is actually a technique that Christopher
deCharms really piloted, and he'll talk a little more about it in his talk, but
the idea is that we can take real time neural feedback to bring the subjective
experience together, with brain activity. And we can
give people feedback of their own brains while their meditating.
And this is 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 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'm not very good at statistics, but I can tell the difference between
these two people's brains. I'll just walk you through what this looks like.
Here's a novice. These are three minute runs, so
he says 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 going red. So there must be something wrong here.
And the very next run, his brain looked 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 use this as neural feedback,
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
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 was trying to be like, 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. And I was like, Oh my gosh,
this is unbelievable! It's doing exactly what 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 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're discontent, there was something that we
hadn't noticed before. With deactivation 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 of 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. Harder, ahh, pay attention to it 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 it went. Stopped trying... Ahh,
Yoda... No, try 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,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi' described this several decades ago, as this mental state
where we're fully immersed in the present, totally energized, we're selfless,
it's effortless... We're just, we're just doing it. You can think of, you know,
sports figures like Michael Jordan or other folks that are just really in it,
and it just seems completely effortless. This is flow.
And we even had some examples where experienced meditators were
reporting getting into flow in our scanner, and
that this was correlating with decreased activity in their
posterior cingulate cortex.