Some of the research that I think is most interesting and – and actually most
optimistic – is the research on meditation and the brain.
So I want to give you just
very brief background.
This has nothing to do with meditation, but basically, positive
and negative emotions look different in the brain.
So when we're feeling happy,
joyful, vital, alert, we have higher left-to-right ratios in our prefrontal cortex.
When
we’re feeling depressed, anxious – in fact, even people who have post-traumatic
stress disorder or severe depression – we have much, we see much greater activity
in the right-to-left ratio in the prefrontal cortex, which is this part of the brain that
developed more recently.
So when they did a study on meditators, they brought in this Tibetan Lama,
and what they found is that his left-to-right ratio was much higher than any of the
other 175 subjects they brought into the laboratory.
And so they asked, is this just a
random artifact, right?
Was he kind of born happy, and so then he decided to be a
monk and a meditator and meditate?
Or did the tens of thousands of hours that he
had dedicated to this practice actually have an impact?
So they did the gold standard, which is a randomized control trial.
They took
41 biotechnology employees who had never meditated.
If they can do it, anyone
can.
They randomly assigned them into a mindfulness group taught by Jon Kabat-
Zinn or a waitlist group, and then they looked – is there change in the activity of
the brain?
And what they found is that four months later, there were significant
differences in this left-to-right ratio, where they had much greater activity in the left
to right with greater positive emotions, vitality.
This is extraordinarily hopeful.
And I want to explain why for those of you
who aren't psychologists.
In psychology there's something called a happiness set
point.
And it's been repeated over and over again in the research that we find that
people basically, just like you have a weight set point, you basically have this kind of
continuum of happiness that you're born with, and you can't really move it too far.
So what they found is that when you win the lottery, you have this initial blip of ‘Yes,
life’s going to be great forever,’ and then a year later, you're back to your baseline
level of happiness.
If you're in a terrible accident and you become a paraplegic, you
have this huge dip, and then within one year, you’re back almost to your baseline.
When I first read this, I thought it was shocking, so surprising, and yet they replicate
it again and again.
So, this is great news if you were born happy, right, it’s like, it
doesn't matter, you know – you get divorced, you lose your job, whatever, and you
just pop back up.
It’s like you’re a Bobo doll.
This isn’t such good news for most of the people that I work with who are
coming to see me, where they weren’t necessarily born happy, and so even if you
work really hard and you make a lot of money and you get the house in Hawaii or
you win the lottery or you marry the perfect person, or you have – it, it doesn't
actually change your happiness level.
What is so hopeful about this new research is
what it says is that, even though changing your exterior circumstances – winning the
lottery – doesn't change your happiness level, changing your interior landscape can.
Changing our interior environment through training the mind and heart and body in
these practices can actually shift our levels of happiness.
Richie Davidson, who is the principal investigator of the study, he says,
“Happiness can be trained because the very structure of our brain can be modified.”
So what he's talking about here is neural plasticity – our repeated experiences shape
our brain.
Does this remind you of anything?
Right, it’s exactly what this monk told
me – what we practice becomes stronger.
Everything that we practice, every single
moment, matters.
So, these are brains from Harvard.
I think that makes them a little more
special.
And basically, Sara Lazar did this wonderful early research, and what she
found is that meditators – the actual parts of their brain that have to do with
attention, concentration, emotional intelligence, compassion – those parts of
the brain actually get stronger, bigger, it's called cortical thickening.
And that this
thickening is correlated with practice.
What we practice gets stronger.
So the way I like to think of it is we have these superhighways of habits and
they're just, like, they’re well-grooved pathways in our brain.
They just, you know,
they’re what we automatically do.
And what mindfulness is helping us start to do
is to kind of like build, a kind of like...
I think of it as, like, digging a country road.
You’re, clearing all the brambles in your brain, you're creating this new neural
pathway that's like, oh, I’m going to actually do it with compassion this time or
with a little more patience or a little more presence.
And so instead of going down
that same superhighway of habit, we’re shifting, and we're going down a different
pathway.
And every single time that we do this, we're strengthening that pathway,
so that eventually that pathway becomes the habit.