Can we create a new reality with an awareness of our two minds? | Lee Smith | TEDxSaltLakeCity

[Music] we all have two different Minds one of them tends to cause most of our difficulties and the other usually has wise solutions to those difficulties let me tell you the story of Victor Frankle a viones physician Who as a Jew during World War II was interred in a series of Nazi concent ation camps ending in owitz and his intellectual curiosity led him to watch closely how different people responded to this worst of stressful situations some people were fearfully vulnerable suffered miserably often died but there was another group that seemed somehow resilient almost thrived now what was the difference between these two approaches it turns out to be the differ difference between these two minds the resilient people would often find purpose and meaning in their life in lifting and compassionately helping those who were suffering Frankle himself said the nais can control my situation and my body but they can't control my mind if I want to I can be here with my beloved in Love and Hope regarding regard less of the situation our ancient sages describe these two minds one fearful and judgmental the other the source of our deep values of wisdom and love now let's put a little neural biological science to this the limic system in the brain is the part that generates emotion and automatic habit responses we'll talk about three parts the first is the amygdala the amydala its job for us is to protect us so it's always scanning for danger and threat and eliciting fear and sometimes anger types of responses and it asks questions that cause a lot of our misery and difficulties on the other hand we have the prefrontal cortex and this is our voice of wisdom and reason and it's in dialogue with that fearful anger REM mind over there you know take it easy we can solve this problem calm down get focused and this wise prefrontal cortex also activates the anterior singulate cortex now this part of the brain has mirror neurons in it that allow us to feel empathy to feel compassion and on brain imagery this combination of these two cortices the loving and wise mind or in constant competition in balance with the fear and anger mind when one is activated the others inhibited you've probably experienced that when there's a lot of fear and anger present it's hard to be wise and loving and in fact if that anger starts becoming a habit of chronic hostility it even damages structurally that loving anterior singulate the anterior singulate also gives us a sense of self so which self am I my little protective habits or my deeper values of love and wisdom am I the self that sees the world as separate you over there me over here competitively and maybe you're a threat US versus them and maybe we have to be careful about them or is my real self the one that sees the world as we so I'm part of something much larger I'm interconnected and making a difference the answer to that question which is my real self has profound implications not only for Building Bridges but for our health some studies I did at the University of Utah found that over half of the most common Primary Care medical problems were rooted in a nervous system that was over over responsive dysfunctionally responding to stimuli over responding to pain stimuli to create chronic pain over responding to gut stimuli to cause some of the most common intestinal problems over responding to stress stimuli with anxiety disorders so now and and they were rooted in this amydala this fearful mind being on overdrive no longer protective but now dysfunctionally pathological and in fact if that habit of chronic hostility is generated over time it kills not only kills them but we can kill ourselves with that hostility let me show you this this deals with the most common medical killer cardiovascular disease many years ago uh several hundred University students in North Carolina were studied with a personality inventory that has scales on it for sin ISM and hostility then they stashed those scales away for decades a generation later a research at Duke Reacher at at Duke asked the question I wonder what chronic hostility does to your health the death rates and he went back and dug out some of these old tests specifically on the Lost students then now at middle age he found these lawyers and asked them about their well-being now why we're studying cynical hostility and lawyers is anybody's guess nevertheless this is what he found those high on the hostility scale this is at middle age age 50 those high on hostility were dying mainly of cardiac events heart attacks at a rate five times the low hostile group now still earlier in San Francisco a cardiol who had noticed this connection with heart disease videotaped a number of his heart attack patients and he would ask them do you feel hostile toward people around you and the kind of answer he would get would be well no what do you take me for anyway in other words their wise mind is saying I don't want to be hostile I don't admire hostile it rather be something else that I admire but their old practiced habit is telling a different story and in violation of their own wisdom and so he wondered I wonder if we can change this destructive Behavior habit by having them tap in to their own wisdom the kind of person I'd love to be around and give them practices that over time will actually practice in a new habit to replace the old one and it worked they could change that habit but then his question was as a cardiologist what does that do to their heart attacks and so he did this very nicely designed study hundreds of people who had just had heart attacks all are being treated with the usual preventive medical things but half of them got this intervention to change the old fearful anger stuff to be in more in line with their wisdom and here's what happened now these are folks who had had heart attacks and his question is can we prevent second or recurrent heart attacks and cardiac death and this is what happened over four years the yellow line are those that had the standard of medical care and the green line is where they added in this behavioral intervention now that's a 50% reduction in recurrent heart attacks I have to tell you that's more than any single medical preventive thing that we do and tapping in to this wise mind if you want to prevent heart attacks and cardiac death practice your wise mind dealing with people who have stress related problems in the trenches I've been really impressed that almost all of us have the solutions to these distressful things already within us if we can just access them and actualize them let's use an illustration many of us probably have a distressful problem with a relationship and yet if we can just get out of this judgmental separate little mind and tap into our wisdom by asking if this relationship was everything I ever wanted it to be I just love being around this person what would make it that way how would we be treating each other and we all know the answers to this you know we'd be lifting each other up instead of putting each other down we'd be kind and and empowering and safe to be authentic I mean we know but this little judgmental mind is over here saying well sure that's the way I would love to be but when they're act out there hurting me I can't really be that way as though they were reaching in taking control of me and making me feel and act ways I would never choose to our ancient sages would say when you point the finger in blame you give your power away and your power is your real self they would say simply call your power back be the real self you want to be in a relationship whether there are Nazis out there or not now how do we move more solidly into this wise and loving mind two words intent and practice the nervous system is designed to amplify whatever I give my attention to and to inhibit the rest you've probably experienced this you've been at a party and there's noise and tumult but you and I are in a caring completely attentive conversation and the noise just sort of disappears or I can give my attention to the noise and I lose my conversation so what do I intentionally give my attention to which of these Minds do I want to feed and nurture and the practice part is the part about changing the old habit that's come from this fearful judgmental angry mind it doesn't help to say don't get angry you just activate that habit but if you ask the question what for this situation what do I do instead and tap into your wise's mind come up with better ways very clearly lots of detail and prac practice that in both mentally and actuality and you begin to replace the old habit with the new one that actualizes this wise mind so what practices have been proven to turn on this prefrontal anter singulate wise and loving mind well not surprisingly one of them is meditation if you think about meditation what is it well you take you know a few minutes few every so often and just dwell in the qualities of your love and wisdom you just practice them here's an interesting mindfulness meditation is getting a ton of research in the health World these days mostly positive both for physical health and for mental health and look at this interesting study now these are brand new meditators they are meditating mindfully 15 minutes a day three days a week for eight weeks and then they take them and put them in the functional MRI scanner to see what's this mindfulness doing to their brain sure enough here we have and this is even when they're not meditating during the rest of their day it activates this wise prefrontal cortex the loving anterior singulate cortex that activation correlates with moments of happiness and importantly it inhibits that fearful amydala which correlates with less anxiety and fear less pain and importantly less suffering for whatever is here now the plot thickens what is mindfulness it consists basically of five things drawn from the wise mind but before you can get to the wise mind you just have have to get still out of the old automatic thoughts just quiet and centered to access this mind and do so in the present moment we can't control the future can't control the past what we can control is how we're going to be right in this moment with what's here which gets us to the third component acceptance that what is here is here no resistance no denial just acknowledging it's here and asking given that what's here how do I respond in a wise and valuable way and there are two corollaries that are very important one without being judgmental of it that's that little mind and with compassion people do hurtful things often because they're hurt or they're insecure or they're caught up in their fearful mind and to see that with healing compassionate intent rather than angry judgmental thoughts is key to this process of getting in the wise mind and here's where the lot thickens it's not just during meditation we bring it into our daily moments and they become some of the mindful moments become some of the Great Moments of our day now this is where the plot thickens in one way brain tissue is a lot like muscle tissue use it or lose it whatever I exercise in the brain the part that I exercise grows new neurons new fibers new tracts and actually thickens that part of the brain and the part that's neglected shrinks look at this interesting study the graph down here on the side you're looking on the vertical axis at the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and age down at the bottom age from 25 to uh 50 and you can see the Red Line This is typical that as we get older that prefrontal cortex starts to shrink it shrinks a lot faster if you spend a lot of time in this stressful fearful angry mind mind but look at the Blue Line these are people who have regularly been meditating exercising their wise mind as they age it doesn't shrink and maybe even grows a little bit so aware of this which mind do I want to feed and grow and it turns out it's not just meditation as a way to practice you can studies that have shown other ways in scanners to turn on this wise mind that you do through your day or things like this Simply Smile get up in the morning and practice smiling laugh at yourself in the mirror and do Smiles in others gratitude identify things and dwell in that gratitude Express that gratitude mentally activates the wise mind even physical exercise will turn on this wise mind as long as it's not competitively hostile optimism turns it on the stuff around us there's a lot of good things and stuff not so good where do I give my attention and Beauty savoring the beauty walking in the beauty being thankful for the plants giving me life and feeding my body and soul so this brings us to a stunning conclusion realization these two different Minds see the world through a different lens of reality and being aware of them and the difference between them I can choose which one do I want to feed and literally grow and thus the reality that I choose to live in May We Choose Wisely

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 38,767

Keywords: tedx talk, tedx, Health, English, Science (hard), ted talk, ted talks, ted x, Neuroscience, ted, TEDxTalks, tedx talks, United States, Biology, Lifestyle, Medicine, Relationships/Romance

Id: 5tSPF8lTDRw

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 22 2014