Dan Siegel, M.D. - Discussing the science of mindfulness

my name is Dan Siegel my university is UCLA and my specialties I'm a child adolescent and adult psychiatrist I'm at the mind-sight Institute which is not a part of UCLA so in terms of my affiliation that's really where I work I'm also a clinical faculty member at UCLA and I run with sue Smalley the research program called the mindful awareness Research Center at UCLA so that's just the formal stuff yeah so you know the interest in mindfulness at a university I think comes from the the findings inspired by mindfulness practice and then researched by people like Jon kabat-zinn and Richard Davidson that adults who focus their attention in a mindful way in a training period of about eight weeks could actually change the way their brain function that finding along with some amazing discoveries in neuroscience that the brain continues to change throughout the lifespan not just in childhood really I think advert people very interested in how to use the mind to change the structure and function of the brain so that's for the use and adults for children you know we're very interested in seeing if education can develop parts of the brain that develop early on called the prefrontal areas apart just behind the forehead that help give you the capacity for example to pause before you act or to have empathy for others and at this point education for the most part focusing on reading writing arithmetic is not helping the prefrontal cortex develop directly we need to add a fourth are what you can call the fourth are reflection and reflective skills allow a child to develop these prefrontal abilities and so that they can really develop what are called executive functions we've done a pilot study to show that if you could teach mindfulness to teenagers and adults with attention deficit issues you actually can improve their attention functioning even more than you do with medications so this is the idea of meditation about medication but combined together we feel that even medications plus mind training that is mindful awareness practices like yoga or med would help develop these prefrontal circuits in the brain that seemed not to want to function too well in attention deficit problems other areas at UCLA other people have been studying issues like David Cresswell has studied mindful awareness traits and as shown in fact that people with mindful awareness traits this capacity for example to be non-judgmental to not be reactive to be very aware of what's going on those are some of the traits those individuals can actually use their brain in certain ways differently to calm a very reactive lower emotional center of the brain whereas people are not mindful don't have that skill and there's an example of using naming where you name an emotion to tame the internal world that's a very useful ability so if a child for example is feeling angry if they've developed mindfulness and they say I'm angry that can help calm the whole state down but if they haven't had mindfulness training it won't necessarily help them the pilot study that was done showed that in fact kids with more challenges to their executive functions got much more improvement than kids who didn't have difficulties now we need to do a follow-up study to see what exactly that means you know larger sample and do more controlled examples of you know kids who were like that not like that what were the essential components that helped but we did in fact in this pilot study with inner kids with Susan Kaiser Greenland's work show that the kids with more challenging situations got better it's not that surprising when you think that you're really trying to support the development of a part of the brain that if it's challenged will be eager to develop if you will and if that brain is already pretty well developed well there's not much more to add one way of understanding how mindfulness works is by looking into the circuitry of the brain and so we all have actually a handy model of the brain which is actually our habit so if you take your hand and fold your thumb into the middle of your palm and your fingers over this would be an example of a brain where the person's eyes are here top of their headers here their brain is connected to the body itself at the spinal cord which is represented your in your wrist the way the brain is composed it's architecture helps us understand how mindfulness works if you lift your fingers up and lift your thumb up we go to the first part of the brain in this goal which is here called the brainstem and this is where you have the regulation of the body and where you also have the fight flight and freeze response that are created this area of the brainstem very primitive area works together with the next area that's on top of it called the limbic area and this is represented by the phone the limbic area helps generate our emotions there are parts of it that help us feel our feelings we also distinguish different aspects of memory and in particular this limbic area responds to our relationships okay now this limbic area and brainstem area they work together and because these are below the next area of the brain the cortex we call them subcortical a lot of our impulses our automatic behaviors are just innate learn reactions to things our instincts are driven by these subcortical areas including information that comes up from the body itself your heart pounding your intestines churning feed up to the limbic area in the brainstem and get you all revved up so that's a kind of loop it creates what we call our emotional state the cortex developed when we became mammals also as the limbic area did but the front part of this cortex from your second-to-last knuckles down your fingernails the front part developed them became primates and this part where your fingernails are is called the prefrontal cortex because it's the front most part of the frontal lobe this is the part that's most developed in humans and it's this part that gives us the ability to pause before acting on an impulse and the way it works is there are fibers that come down from this middle prefrontal area that actually calm down the irritable limbic area or brainstem area literally this prefrontal region regulates the lower subcortical limbic brain stem and even bodily areas so in many ways what we think happens is mindful awareness practice creates a state of activation in that moment that in a way harnesses the power of this prefrontal area in that moment as you repeatedly practice something that state can become a trait because neurons which are firing together wire together so with the strengthening of this prefrontal area what happens is for example if a child is angry and the brain stem is activating a fight response the limbic area works with that to develop a feeling of fear there's a sense of betrayal by what happens when you're really angry you're burning up your heart is pounding and everything is going to get you to fight to get a knife to get a gun just hit someone to do something really violent but your prefrontal cortex as you pause and the very parts of the brain that allow you to pause are also the same part of the brain this middle prefrontal area that allows you to have insight into what's going on my heart's pounding I'm really angry empathy for someone else maybe that guy didn't mean it or maybe he's doing the best he can and then even a sense of morality so when we developed the middle prefrontal areas we actually can not only pause but we can think of the larger social good and enact a behavior that's better for everyone and that's where mindfulness really alters things like bullying like violent acts of aggression and it's where mindfulness can change the world literally one person one relationship at a time it is possible that if let's say I've practiced mindfulness for a year eight weeks or whatever I've done that I've learned a different way of actually living in the world so you may not notice but I may be practicing mindfulness right now right so I'm not doing a formal sitting and no one's tease that apart yet you know if if you've become a way of living mindfully is that actually something that keeps on perpetuating the positive benefits of mindfulness and I my gut feeling is in fact that that's true that even just giving kids a limited exposure to mindfulness and reminders to do it even if they don't do regular practice they'll have incorporated that into their lives and they'll say things like I need to watch my breathing or I know there's an alternative way or why can't I do this mindfully you know especially with children who soak up things like a sponge you're giving them this tool I think can change the direction of their development for the rest of their lives we do work in preschools because there's evidence to suggest that the ability to have executive functions the regulation of attention gets fairly well matured at age 7 that's pretty young so why not teach some kids tools of strengthening their capacity to focus attention long before they're 7 so that's why we've gone into preschools as those circuits those prefrontal circuits mature you have the opportunity to find the way that even as kids get older after 7 you can still help them improve after all we've done a study on adolescents and adults so the brain continues to change throughout the lifespan the studies on mindfulness and most have been done on on adults and there you see that adults can change after an eight-week program so much so you can see shifts in the brain where the brain gets into what's called an approach state rather no withdrawal state a sign of resilience they can really stay with things are even difficult you can show that adults have all sorts of capacities to discern or to tell what's going on in their inner world when people who haven't had the training can't do that so even an eight-week training can have interesting and important effects on the brain of adults there's no reason to think it wouldn't be useful also for kids even after the age of 7 when their executive functions have matured to a certain extent it helps kids become kinder to themselves to each other it helps them be more empathic it can help them have more regulation of them their emotions so they're more they're more even keel it helps kids even if you see the castle work and interpret that work on social and emotional intelligence and interpret that as a way of becoming more internally focused on one's self and others that work on the castle program shows that kids also do better academically so if we extend their important work to the general notion of being reflective and think of that as a form of mindfulness then you could say that that specific kind of work the social emotional intelligence work promotes academic excellence as well the castle work is a the Consortium for academic social and emotional learning it's a program based out of Illinois that has been studied an intervention program to teach kids to be aware of their emotional state how to modulate their internal state and to figure how to problem-solve how to be aware of other people's emotions and it helped communicate with those emotions more effectively those are the five basic things essentially that castle does they've studied their intervention program about 200 schools they don't use the word mindfulness but their techniques are very much in I think a fundamental way that kids look internally what you might call internal education or what I call the fourth are basically reflective skills these ways of knowing the internal world and how to change it you know allow you to have mind sight to see and change the mind and these are basically what we learned when we we learn - some people don't take - certain techniques and they take - others for example some people don't really like focusing on their breath and they prefer a movement like yoga some people like something's more dynamic like Tai Chi so when people don't respond it doesn't mean mindfulness isn't good for them it may mean that particular mindful awareness practice just didn't suit their physiology or their temperament or whatever so I think we can say that mindfulness could be helpful to everyone it's just which way are they going to learn it so that's for the the generality of it in terms of the consistency of the results you know mindfulness needs to be taught by people who are themselves practicing mindfulness I think that's what a lot of experts are suggesting and some of the research in the work on a pliant let's say for people who are depressed and preventing depression has shown that you really need to have the actual clinician practicing mindfulness so it'll be an interesting study to do that I think is being carried out now by the garrison Institute to see the difference between mindfulness teaching from a mindfulness teacher versus teaching mindfulness techniques to a teacher's never learn mindfulness and whether that makes a difference for the students the question of taking time in a busy school day to teach kids reflective skills mindfulness skills the ability to look at the inner world all these being names for the same experience those skills actually can help kids academically so while it may take a little bit of time it actually can increase the efficiency at which kids learn and can improve their social skills their social relationships their emotional skills their ability to be in a relationship with their own inner world so so in all those ways well it takes clock time it actually is worth every second of that in a way what mindfulness education does is it trains the prefrontal cortex that helps keep the whole system in balance and helps you have empathic relationships so that we're actually teaching something that isn't taught in any other part of the curriculum you can almost argue that mindfulness ought to be the first basic skill that's taught so that all the rest follows after that regarding the question of negative effects one of the things that being mindful and being taught mindfully skills does is get kids in touch with their inner world so one of the programs that I consult too has found that kids become more aware of their inner memories and emotions so schools have to be prepared that if a child is being mistreated at home if a child had frightening experiences they may get more in touch with the memories and feelings of those experiences and bring them up in classrooms and teachers may feel as one teacher said to me that a Pandora's box was opened up my feeling about it is that as a community of caring adults we need to provide children who spent so many hours in schools with an opportunity to know themselves and in the short run there may be things teachers have to do to get support for that child bring the family in be helpful in whatever ways they can in the medium run and long run it's all good because if a child has something going on inside of herself that she's never talked about it's better that she talked about it then rather than ten years later when she'll use up huge amount of personal resources social resources and create unbelievable pain in the next generation if she isn't given the opportunity to work on that so in the big picture mindfulness can help even if it brings up emotions that a child feels they're not ready to deal with you know if all schools took mindfulness on as a basic skill to teach all children there's a potential for there to be a huge shift in how the next generation brings their minds their hearts their whole relational abilities to be connected with each other into the world and so this isn't just about stress reduction or certainly not just about relaxation which mindfully is not mindfulness is really a lifelong skill that can change the individuals life for the better relationships that that child has in his or her life for the better and in that way one relationship at a time improve the world you know I've heard stories of kids who come home from school having learned a mindful awareness practice like meditation or yoga who when their parents are getting in a tense moment of friction will ask the parents to do focusing on their breath or stretch and I think children can be our best teachers they can teach us not only by example but literally teaching us the skills that they're learning and my experience as a child psychiatrist has been that when kids in my practice are learning mindfulness skills the parents quickly come in to learn them themselves because they see the changes that happen in the children and I'm thrilled that this can be a family event because just like family meetings you can have family discussions about the internal world sharing family time mindfulness is an opportunity to actually get closer with each other we're just beginning to do Studies on mindfulness interventions with kids so we don't have the long-term studies yet but I can tell you in my own practice of teaching mindfulness to my patients that what they tell me about which is so rewarding to hear about is that when these kids have learned to know their own internal world to be able to be present with their own emotions to learn mindfulness techniques so they can actually bring stability and clarity to their own mind the course of their life is different this is for kids who maybe are a little anxious or kids who have mood issues that are going wild in their lives the stability and clarity of being able to stay present and let emotions arise and fall without getting being swept up by them changes everything if we take these positive outcomes and this is from experiencing children up close and personal for sometimes years at a time and seeing how it changed their lives and we see how in fact this may be helpful to kids in general to learn these skills then a child who may not know how to understand their own emotions may not have kindness toward themselves may not know how to read other people's feelings this changes the whole course of their life because you're giving them a life skill that helps them move deeply into inner knowing and an inner clarity that we can see is an invitation for meaning and connection both with oneself and with other people that gift of mindfulness is a gift that keeps on giving because that child will be able to have relationships with others in their child and adolescence by preparing them before the teenage years they're gonna have a skill that will continue with them and then when they go on to have their own children you'll see an outcome of secure attachment that itself may promote these aspects of a mindful life

Channel: Room to Breathe

Views: 55,323

Keywords: mindfulness, meditation, ucla, education, science, documentary

Id: yqUNtLbwoj4

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2013