well thank you we are all born with a
brain that has 86 billion neurons and
throughout our life we make relatively
few new neurons in fact we lose about 2
billion neurons throughout the course of
our lifetime so you may wonder if we're
losing billions of neurons and we're not
making a lot of new neurons what's
changing in the brain to support all
those mental habits and behaviors that
make up our self-identity well the
answer is activity dependent plasticity
this is the function by which the brain
is continually modified through the 150
trillion cell to cell synaptic
connections that are made in response to
your everyday experiences one main point
that I hope you take home today is that
not only are they contributing to your
self-identity but they are continually
changing your brain and they are
strongly influencing your health and
longevity I hope to also demonstrate
that a systematic form of mental
training involving meditation can
potentially transform yourself and your
mental habits in a positive way in 2002
I was a graduate student in cognitive
neurosciences that was me I was studying
the brains of rats to better understand
the neural circuitry of learning and
memory memory an activity dependent
plasticity was a really important
concept for studying memory but I was
interested in how that concept could be
applied towards a neuroscientific
understanding of the self through the
lens of meditation
and mindful awareness now mindful
awareness can be simply thought of as a
way of paying attention in a way that is
continually watchful and discerning for
what is arising and passing in our minds
and in the external world now when I was
in graduate school there was barely any
science of mindfulness in fact before
the year 2000 there was the grand total
of 39 peer-reviewed scientific articles
on the topic so for good reason may be
my mentor sat me down one day and said
Dave you will not be successful in
academia by focusing on meditation
forget about all that descent and stuff
and I walked out of his office feeling
rather disappointed discouraged but it
did not deter me from this calling
fast-forward 10 years I was a faculty
member at Harvard Medical School
studying meditation in a neuroimaging
laboratory and about that time I was
invited to present my research directly
to the Dalai Lama along with five other
emerging leaders in the field from
around the world thank you that's very
kind yes this was a really an amazing
opportunity and the advice he gave the
six of us is something I will never
forget from my lifetime he said pointing
his finger at each one of us you each
have the great responsibility for
helping to build a happy peaceful world
millions of people want a happy peaceful
world but are lacking the knowledge of
how to do so through carrying your
experiment month by month year by year
you will gain evidence to convince
others I will watch you whether you are
really whether you're really helping to
build a happy peaceful world or not
he then jokingly threatened hopefully
and he would be watching from beyond the
grave and that even if you were in hell
he would come back as a demon and hunt
us down to make sure we were doing this
work no joke but he'll hopefully now
when the Dalai Lama points his finger at
you and threatens you in that way or
challenges you really you you can't
really say no so aside from providing a
sense of purpose and meaning for me that
experience really provided a pretty
solid research career plan for the next
30 years so fast forward to 2016 I was
provided the opportunity to come here to
Nashville to Vanderbilt University to
direct research at the Osher Center for
Integrative Medicine
so my interests in the self through the
lens of meditation comes back full
circle to today where I have the
resources and the support to do the
science I originally intended to do back
in graduate school
I'm currently leading a team of
scientists to continue mapping the
meditative brain or meditative mind and
to better understand what a flourishing
mind brain and body looks like from the
neurobiological the psychological and
social levels so as we contemplate the
self together today I want you
well I invite you to think about how all
of your life experiences even the guy
only up there have led to who you've
become today and to explore how all of
your thoughts and emotions that you're
having right now today may lead to who
you become tomorrow the Dhammapada one
of the greatest known collections of the
buddha describes our life is shaped by
our mind for we become what we think the
basic idea here is from birth to the
present day our self our experience of
being someone our wants our fears our
desires our hopes our values our ex
Haitians our whole self-identity is
continually constructed by a string of
moment-to-moment processes of selfing
and these moments can be further broken
down into processes of perception
sensory awareness and evaluation all of
which happened on a timescale of half a
second 500 milliseconds and through
neuro physiological research it's been
found that the brain stem and the
subcortical regions are helping to
filter out information that is
irrelevant to you and to prepare your
mind for action now this part of our
mental experience is all happening
without conscious awareness in the
second half of each moment our primary
sensory cortices located throughout the
outer surface of our brain is
integrating information coming from
perception and awareness and preparing
inferences and predictions to inform our
behavior and only by the end of each
moment around 300 to 500 milliseconds
does awareness arise and then we begin
to evaluate what it is we're
experiencing and that evaluation takes
place in aspects of our prefrontal
cortex so this three of moments is
sustaining our mental habits and
dispositions that are self conditioning
and self perpetuating the repetition
it's continually informing our present
state of awareness and coloring our
memories for the past and making
predictions for the future and this
basic idea here really supports the idea
that this little guy here has had about
three billion moments in 42 years to
become the guy who's standing before you
today and somewhere along this string of
moments I developed a bad habit maybe
you can relate when I was 8 years old my
mother gave me a punching bag to deal
with my anger and frustration
thank you mom this was effective on the
short-term I would go down in my
basement and hit that bag every time I
got angrier
frustrated eventually as you can imagine
that punching bag broke and got thrown
out with the trash
but the conditioning did not go away I
never hit any people but I continued to
hit walls and doors and windows I even
have a scar in my hand to go with it a
little over a decade later when I was 20
years old my sophomore year of college I
had the opportunity to go on a
meditation retreat attend a silent
meditation retreat first time not
because of my anger but more so for my
curiosity about Buddhism and my interest
in studying the mind this was a profound
experience for me on multiple levels for
one it provided a signpost in my life
leading me to the path that I'm on today
it also provided a mindfulness-based
skill of meta awareness of my mental
habits now meta awareness refers to an
awareness of where our attention is and
where it's going at any moment and when
we practice using a mindfulness based
approach it acts as a wedge to open up
our minds and provide insight into the
mental habits that are rising again and
again and for my anger
it provided awareness to all the
triggers and impulses and feelings and
thoughts that are associated with my
anger and the state of mindfulness is
often described as that wedge of met
awareness and if inserted deeply enough
into our minds as described by Buddhist
scholar Andy Lenski it will open our
minds up to wisdom and wisdom is subtly
different from awareness in the sense
that it can be described as the direct
experience with our mental habits for my
anger it was the body awareness of the
sensory awareness in my body it was the
tightness the clenched fists the impulse
of readiness to act that was my anger
the idea here is that when we practice
mindfulness the awareness and the wisdom
work together
helping to reduce the time spent in
judgment and evaluation to be situated
in the present moment with our sensory
awareness and to allow the emotions like
anger to arise and pass without the
impulse to act now aside from anger
there are other thoughts and emotions
that can have negative impacts on our
health and well-being anxiety fear worry
and sadness all have the tendency to be
destructive mental habits and
dispositions but only when they are
happening with great frequency when they
put the people around you including
yourself at risk for injury or they
interfere with your social functioning
it turns out that these three
dispositions specifically have the most
extensive scientific data to support
their role as risk factors for the onset
of clinical levels of depression anxiety
cardiovascular disease and I've even
been shown to increase the rate of
cellular aging at the level of your DNA
one study by the Centers for Disease
Control found that an angry disposition
increases your chances your risk of
developing or dying prematurely of a
heart attack by two and a half times and
there's a whole number of studies
showing that these three dispositions
and the associated chronic stress can
have negative effects on your immune
system functioning on sensitization of
pain pathways and atrophy shrinking of
the brain regions responsible for
regulating these negative emotions so
becomes this really bad cycle because if
you don't have the ability to regulate
their emotions as well it's going to be
much harder to regulate them in the
future so once one of my studies that I
want to share with you today introduced
mindfulness training to a group of women
diagnosed with fibromyalgia fibromyalgia
is a chronic pain disorder associated
with widespread muscular tenderness and
chronic fatigue as well as a host of
other clinical symptoms
and we found that these patients had a
high level of anxiety and fear
associated with their pain and when we
gave them mindfulness training we found
that there was dramatic improvement in
all their clinical symptoms so that was
good but we were interested in what the
mechanism was that may be a contributing
to this clinical improvement so we gave
these patients a behavioral task that
assessed how they paid attention to pain
related words at the non-conscious
perceptual level and the more conscious
evaluative level of processing and we
could do this by varying the duration of
time that we showed them the words when
we showed him the words for 100
milliseconds they did not have a lot of
time to process the words consciously
but we could observe whether or not they
look towards or away from the words at
500 milliseconds they did have time to
process the words consciously and we
could observe whether they got stuck
thinking and ruminating upon the words
so we found two major differences
between the groups that X got exposed to
mindfulness training and those who did
not those who were untrained avoided
those pain related words at the non
conscious perceptual level and those who
were trained in mindfulness looked
towards the word suggesting that they
had less fear and avoidance and more
approach related behavior towards their
pain and remember this is the stage of
processing that they didn't have any
awareness that they were doing this the
untrained group also had a tendency to
ruminate or get stuck at the later
stages of processing whereas those
trained in mindfulness were able to see
the word let it go and complete the task
more readily so these results
demonstrate that mindfulness training
has the ability to improve our mental
habits of attention at both the
conscious and non conscious levels
when we do neuroimaging we take a modern
imaging and a first-person introspective
methods approach in our lab and in
others and we can call this a neuro
phenomenological approach to mapping the
meditative mind and this identifies the
brain networks and systems of
functioning they're supporting
mindfulness based practices now I said
before that there weren't many studies
on mindfulness before the year 2000 well
since 2000 there have been up to close
to 4,000 studies on the topic and of
those 4,000 studies 21 have looked at
changes in brain structure and 80 have
looked at brain function in a
cross-section of novices who have been
trained in for the short-term and expert
meditators and although there have been
some reported differences between styles
of meditation practice and between
novices and experts I want to bring to
your attention the most common and most
consistent findings that are found
across all the studies in for brain
regions to make it easy that are
changing in brain structure and function
the frontal polar cortex is the most
anterior part of our brain right behind
your foreheads it is also thought to be
the most highly evolved part of the
human brain and responsible for
supporting meta awareness and in
conjunction with the dorsal anterior
cingulate cortex and the anterior insula
these three regions work together in a
complex attentional Network referred to
as the frontal parietal control network
to allow yourself to be continuously
aware of your body sensations and to
flexibly switch between internal mental
processing and thinking and of the in
the outside world ok another and it's a
one really interesting finding here is
that we find in our lab that the more
one meditates the more
TV one gets in this network of brain
regions and other labs have founded the
more one meditates the more protected
these regions are from the normal
age-related atrophy that we all get
unfortunately all our brains are
shrinking in size after age 20 sorry but
if you meditate you protect them and one
other region that you see decreases in
activation is the posterior singlet
cortex or PCC that's a major node in a
larger functional network associated
with self-reflection and rumination so
meeting the challenge set forth by the
Dalai Lama the science is beginning to
emerge to support a role for mindfulness
and meditation in improving meta
awareness and decreasing an emphasis on
ruminative types of processing
especially in the context of high
cognitive demand and also to transform
the brain and our mental habits so we've
learned that every thought and emotion
is leading to transforming our brain
literally re sculpting our brain at
every moment and although we do not have
any control of what what has happened in
the past we have the power in this
moment and going forward to choose how
you pay attention to your thoughts and
emotions every moment that becomes an
opportunity for you to for you to change
the way we perceive the world and ease
the burden by which there is potential
for destructive emotions like anxiety
anger and sadness so I leave you with
the question what will you fill your
mind with thank you
[Applause]