Daniel Goleman: Science of Meditation

hello I'm Daniel Goleman I'm a psychologist a science journalist I worked the New York Times for many years and I'm probably best known for my writing on emotional intelligence what's little alone is that I've been a meditator since my college years I started I mean I was I think a sophomore a junior I did a method that comes from India it's called Transcendental Meditation uses a mantra and I did it because I was anxious and I wanted to calm down I found it did help me calm then I went on to Harvard where I studied clinical psychology and through some stroke of luck I got a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to go to India so with my friend Krishna Das and another friend I went off to India and there I was lucky enough to meet some very unusual meditation masters these are people who have has devoted their whole life to practice and there they were quite remarkable the first that I met was neem Karoli Baba he's a Indian yogi who to my surprise was completely present completely loving happy to see you anytime and I've never actually been in the presence of someone like that the way when I say the presence he had a kind of aura so that not only did you feel he loved you unconditionally what was even stranger for me was that you felt you loved everybody else gone conditionally at least while you're with him and then I went on to both gaya or where I had another lucky meeting with a llama named kunam kunu grumpy chay couldn't be say I first saw at dawn going around the stupid bull gaya with his malam muttering a mantra he lived in a very simple room probably half the size of this that had one wooden plank bed that was it that was the furnishing and he slept on the bed and he sat in the bed all day and like neem Karoli he was open to anyone anytime and he he felt that he was completely present completely loving and you know I contrasted that with my professors at Harvard who were some of the most famous psychologists of the day eric erickson BF Skinner and people like that who you could see between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. on Tuesdays that was their office hours they had a very different attitude they didn't have that open to anyone any time feeling I also studied a Buddhist system of psychology and this was something that was very radical for me because nowhere in my psychology training had anyone said there is a booted system of psychology this was a new discovery for me it was called abhidharma and I particularly liked a book called the Vasudha muga this is a 5th century manual for meditators it's very specific in what practices allow you to achieve what accomplishments so I was very excited I went back to Harvard and I said you know what there's a whole upside to human potential that we don't know about in our psychology but they were not interested there was only one person there who was interested in his name was Richard Davidson he was a fellow graduate student so Ritchie as we call him and I did our dissertations on meditation despite warnings that this was a dire thing to do his career ending as we were told but we did it anyway so fast forward Ritchie has become pretty much a world-famous neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin he has a lab with more than a hundred people has dedicated brain scan machines and you know all the latest equipment and one of the things that we've done along the way we were members of the board of an organization called mind and life Institute and they put on a summer session where they would invite graduate students and postdocs to who were interested in doing research on meditation but generally we're at a place where no one else was interested in like was the case with us but brought them all together and they've formed a new wave of studies in cognitive science and neuroscience of meditation when Richie and I did our dissertations there were only three articles published in the scientific literature on meditation when we did this book which is called altered traits here the science of meditation in Hongkong and Commonwealth countries I don't know what the title will be in China at any rate when we did that book we looked through those six thousand articles using very rigorous standards the very top we wanted only the top articles in the best journals we found about 60 and those are what I'm going to summarize for you here it's very clear from the scientific literature that there are changes in the brain that mean changes in how we think and how the mind operates even in our biology and what we didn't know when we started is now something that's understood widely in neuroscience is a concept called neuroplasticity which means that the more you exercise a brain circuit the stronger it becomes the more connected it becomes and the less you exercise it the more it weakens and meditation is a systematic strengthening of brain circuits I'll make that a little more clear we also look at three distinct levels one is beginners which we see as up to a hundred hours of lifetime practice most of the studies are done with methods like mindfulness based stress reduction which was developed by another friend of ours Jon kabat-zinn for use in hospitals and clinics but now it's spread more widely that gives people about twenty eight hours the next level is long-term meditators most of the people who are many of the people who study with so many remember say our long-term meditators this means you have a day job you have a family you have responsibilities but you also make time somehow for meditation maybe you do it daily you go to retreats maybe once a year maybe more and that group we see as having about a thousand to ten thousand hours of lifetime practice and you know it means that you have to weigh your priorities in life you might get up earlier so you have time to meditate but you find some point in the day where you can do it regularly and that regular practice as you'll see brings people to another level and then there's the kind of what you can call Olympic level practitioner these are professionals so to speak there they're full-time meditators they're monks they're nuns they're Yogi's they're people who live in a culture that understands the value of full time meditation and supports people to do that so those are generally Asian cultures to study them as I'll explain later we Richie had to fly them over one by one so at each level we see the same brain circuits get stronger and stronger but with the beginner let me talk about first of all stress when we're stressed out when we're upset when we're traumatized what happens is the the amygdala which isn't in the emotional center right in the middle of the brain it's the brains radar for threat the amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight or freeze response and that means that the body biologically prepares for you know to fight her to flee and that means it shunts energy from the immune system from the cardiovascular system to the legs and arms our organs for that time being get weaker the immune system weakens but we're ready to take drastic action and unfortunately in modern life this system gets triggered over and over again and some people never have a chance to recover the body was designed to have an occasional stress response like that not to have it constant as because is unfortunate case so often in modern life but the good news right from the beginning is that the amygdala becomes less reactive to stress so under a under pressure the amygdala doesn't react as strongly also another good news the recovery from the peak of of the amygdala response is quicker this is the definition of resilience resilience is measured technically in how much time it takes you to recover from the peak of stress back to calm and you see that right at the beginning - another thing that happens during the stress response is that inflammatory chemicals are unleashed in the body because of those biological shifts but again in the beginning meditators you see that is lessened that release and that's good because these inflammatory chemicals and stress causes are one of the factors in long-term chronic diseases like diabetes heart disease cancers and so on and then finally just in general there's less biological reaction under stress then that's the so those are all changes in now the amygdala behaves the other big set of changes occur in the prefrontal cortex this is the brain's executive Center right behind the forehead this is the part of the brain that thinks that plans that decides that can make complex decisions that learns and this is also the part of the brain that controls attention well meditation is an attentional exercise no matter what you're doing the sonne Rinpoche has a line keep mindfulness on guard mindfulness means that you're focusing on one thing or you're in one mental set and your mind wanders off as our minds do about half the time and then mindfulness means you notice it wandered and you bring it back that's like a mental fitness exercise it's very parallel to going to the gym with a weight and every time you do a repetition with that weight and make that muscle a little stronger every time we bring our mind back with mindfulness we make that neural circuitry that much stronger and basically and this is what is found with attention right from the start and meditation that the prefrontal cortex circuitry is getting stronger and stronger it means people want people's mind wander less they can concentrate more they can focus on one thing and ignore distractions and one of the important things today is has to do with multitasking multitasking I should tell you is actually a fiction from a scientific point of view the mind doesn't do things in parallel it switches very rapidly from one to the other so if you're doing that one thing that's so important today that you have to get done and your concentration is right up here and then you think I'd better check my email or maybe I got a wee chat or let's see what's happening on on the Internet and you start going here and then and then you know while later minutes later half-hour later who knows you come back to that one thing ordinarily your concentration that was up here would be down here but if you've done some meditation some mindfulness particularly then your concentration will still be up here so it it is an antidote for the loss of focus and multitasking and then very important for students this was a surprise finding at the University of California if you a one group of students learn mindfulness and they did it for several months then another group did something else comfortable and they found that the students who did mindfulness learned better their memory was better they're able to retain and recall what they had learned later and this was the big surprise on the graduate school entrance exam their scores were 16 points higher it really really paid off in terms of their academic performance and that's all from strengthening the prefrontal cortex circuitry then there are meditations about compassion kindness they're there many such one is loving-kindness another is there was a set that was taken from Tibetan practices and rendered acceptable for anyone it was done at Stanford Emory has done this I should say by the way that the research that we reviewed is from the very best places from Harvard from Yale from Berkeley from MIT that the research is going on at the top universities now there are three kinds of empathy one is cognitive empathy that's I understand how you think I can take your perspective and cognitive empathy allows you to communicate effectively with someone because you're you know the mental models they use you know how a label reality and you can label in the same way the second kind is emotional empathy with emotional empathy you use a different set of brain circuits it's not the neocortex as in cognitive empathy it's what's called the social brain these are circuits in the forefront of the brain that tune into another brain and form an invisible brain to brain linkage and this allows emotions to pass instantly from person to person and through that circuitry you feel what the other person feels that's the second kind of empathy the third kind of empathy uses entirely different circuitry this is called empathic concern is the basis of compassion and empathic concern activates the circuits that we share with all mammals for its apparent love for a child so compassion strengthens those circuits not the cognitive empathy not the emotional empathy but the caring circuitry and here there's a lot of research there's for example brain studies show that just from the beginning there's more activity in those circuits for caring and people become more generous it pays off they're more likely to give to someone who is indeed people also this is an interesting side effect they're happier because activating that circuitry also activates the brain circuits for feeling good it feels good to help someone out there's this Tibetan saying that the first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it this is exactly what the brain studies are showing another important finding is a people who do this kind of practice are able to be more present to another person suffering ordinarily when people are with someone who's in distress or suffering or upset they get like this washes over them through that second circuitry the emotional empathy unfortunately people sometimes handle that by just tuning out I remember friends of mine who have done a retreat on the streets of New York where you live as a homeless person for a week and you do your practice there say that the most painful thing for them is that once you become a homeless person you do not exist people don't look at you they walk right on by and that may be because they're managing the distress that they'd feel if they really tuned in to a person who's in such need so this there's less of that tuning out people are more empathic and they in terms of feeling with suffering but they don't turn away and they're more likely to actually help to like give up a seat to someone on crutches something like that and very interesting unexpected benefit is also with what's called unconscious bias unconscious bias is us and them thinking that you don't even know you have so it's a hidden prejudice but it can be detected through some sophisticated cognitive tests and it turns out that this diminishes with compassion practice - so those are all findings right at the beginning of meditation then they're the people or the long-term meditators remember they're people with a daily practice might go on a retreat once or twice a year have a job and so on but they're making practice a priority and in our math we counted the people in this category is having from 1,000 to 10,000 lifetime hours so over your lifetime you probably have never done this but if you think well if I practice on the average a half hour a day for a year that's a lot of hours and if I do it for a decade that's a lot more hours and if I do it for several decades it adds up so these findings are in that category and you find the same effects but they're much stronger the brain is continuing to change there's a what's called the dose response relationship so those response means the more you do it the better the result is and so when it comes to attention the prefrontal cortex you find that this circuitry has become even stronger focus is even better than in the beginners there's more what's called brain efficiency brain efficiency is measured in a clever way if you're talking to someone and that person says something and you start thinking about that thing then you're you will not be present for the subtle changes in their face and so on that communicate emotion and there's an analog of this and in a cognitive lab test where they find that long-term meditators have less of what's called an attentional blink which means that the brain is more efficient it's dealing with what's here right now and then ready for the next thing dealing with that ready for the next thing ready for the next thing one of the things I find encouraging is that long-term meditators seem to show less attentional and memory decrement with aging you know as people age they tend to lose certain kinds of memory and that effect seems to slow down there was also a little controversy around this but it seems that brain shrinkage which also is inexorable from the 30s on slows down with meditation although exactly what that might involve is still a matter for scientific debate but when minger Ricochet somebody remember say his brother went on a retreat for four and a half years he happened to have been a subject in Ritchie's lab before he went and he was interested to see what happened to his brain while he was away so he came back to the lab and he let Richie assess his brain aging at age 41 his brain looked like a 33 year old so we know it at the highest level of practice that exists and it's probably a spectrum depending on how much practice we do one of the definitions are the definition of maturity is increasing the gap between impulse and action and it turns out that the prefrontal cortex also has a circuit that can manage the amygdala which is where impulse comes from and that this two increases with meditation practice and then there's the stress resulting remember this is the amygdala again everything you see in the beginners is more so in the long term more equanimity the amygdala is less reactive to stress the prefrontal circuitry for inhibiting the amygdala gets stronger and stronger they can see this in brain scans one of the things that the amygdala does is release a stress hormone called cortisol we is very effective in the short term and very destructive in the long term because cortisol weakens the immune system and cortisol release is also lessened with long term practice and there's an even quicker recovery from upsets so all of the benefits that we saw in the beginners are enhanced same with kindness and compassion the long-term meditators are even more present to people who are having pain and suffering and even more likely to help if there's a need we found one paradox though every major spiritual tradition particularly Buddhism talks about the the self as an illusion and deconstructing itself as part of practice there are almost no research studies in the West on self selflessness we found maybe four and what they seem to show in long term meditators is that the brain system for I me mind thinking my this my to-do list my preoccupations whatever that that circuitry becomes less strong and not only that but the brain area for attachment for clinging actually seems to shrink that this is a brain change it was unanticipated most of the changes seem to be slowing the shrinkage but this one seems to be enhanced actually then there are general effects like effortlessness the long term meditators particularly with mental tasks the part of the brain which generates an effort exertion as more relaxed this is what you see in Champions this is what you see in the brain of the master of any domain that you know a chess champion that while they're executing their expertise their brain is actually less active than other people they don't have to think about it and you see this also in long-term meditators another happy finding for long-term meditators particularly those on retreat one day of retreat turns off the body's inflammatory genes as I said inflammation is extremely important as a cause of chronic disease and it seems that long-term meditation tells the genes that cause this to be quiet this is called epigenetics it's the understanding that it's not whether you have a gene or not it's what's more important is whether the gene turns on or not and here the inflammatory genes turn off whether it's clinically significant will take more research but we think it might be another biological finding is that individual cells in the body seem to live longer there's a cap at the end of DNA called the telomere and this determines how long that cell will live and when it will die and the telomeres seem to be longer in meditators metabolism seems to be slower the breath rate slows down and this is a sign of what's called parasympathetic arousal parasympathetic arousal is the body's recovery mode if you are stressed out you need to get into a parasympathetic mode in order for the body to recover and this seems to suggest that long-term meditators are in that mode more of the time and finally there are the Yogi's these are the people who are lifetime full-on meditators 12,000 to 62,000 lifetime hours these are people who flew over one by one to the brain lab at Wisconsin and went through extensive testing this happened only because of the help of match of a card some of you may know of Matthieu he he had a PhD from the French equivalent of MIT in the microbiology and soon after he God is PhD he gave up that career and went to Nepal and became student of a lama a meditation master and then became the attendant to one of the greatest meditation masters of the last century can say Rinpoche and Mathieu went back to his scientific training to convince Yogi's that he knew who he thought might be highly accomplished to fly to Wisconsin it's a long term it's a four-day trip also you know he had to explain what science is the thing that seems to have made the difference was their understanding that if they went it might be a benefit to humanity that is they had a compassionate motivation none of them cared about what you know how am I going to do on these tests not the point will this help other people will it inspire them to practice might okay I'll do it so there were 14 Yogi's from Nepal in India and then seven from a retreat center in in France if you do a three-year retreat by the way you get credit for nine or ten thousand hours so twelve thousand two sixty two thousand is a lot a lot a lot of meditation one of the first findings I was actually there in the room match it was the guinea pig for this they were trying out the protocol and they had four different kinds of meditation concentration visualization compassion and open presence and they want but for statistical analytic reasons they needed Mathieu to do the following do a concentration for 90 seconds then when you hear a bell do nothing for 30 then do it again for 90 seconds and then do nothing for 30 90 34 times for each meditation I don't know about you but when I meditate sometimes it takes a little while for my mind to settle down and focus but every yogi could do it instantly the mental agility was unbelievable so they all went through that kind of protocol one of the big surprises had to do with a brainwave called gamma we all experienced gamma or but only in a special circumstance when you're struggling with the creative problem or trying to get a solution to a problem the minute you get the insight yes that's the answer your brain wave shows a gamma it's the highest amplitude highest strength brain wave on an EEG and it also comes up if you vividly remember a time say you bit into a peach and the moment they smell and the taste and the sound and all that comes together in the brain you also get a gamma lasts about a quarter second half second it turns out that the Yogi's have rich gamma from all parts of the brain all the time it's not the only brain way but it's never been seen an arresting brain wave in anyone before this is completely new to science and the Yogi's related to kind of a spacious awareness of presence readiness for anything another surprise was when they're asked to do compassion the gamma wave enhance was increased by seven to eight hundred percent that's another thing that's never been seen in science still another has to do with how they responded to pain the in lab test they have a kind of diabolical device it's a square metal plate that can be heated very precisely to the point where it feels really painful but your skin will not burn so they find that point for each person in lab tests and they give them a taste of it here's one second and then they say in ten seconds you're going to feel that pain for ten seconds the minute they get a ten second warning the emotion of the centers in the brain for feeling pain go shooting way up and then during the pain they stay up and then for ten seconds after they stay up that's in ordinary people and the Yogi's they get the 10-second warning there's no change the pain comes and the sense of the brain circuits for sensory inputs go up not for emotional reaction then the pain ends they go right down and then they're flat again something else never been seen by science so it's quite clear from the scientific research that first of all there's a the more we do the more it impacts the brain our body our mind and that this is an expertise which the modern world needs I think today more than ever so I think bottom line is that any culture which still has the ability to protect to nurture and support people who have the techniques who have the wisdom have the knowledge for this kind of practice would be doing the world a favor if they preserve it thank you [Music] [Applause] you

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Length: 31min 32sec (1892 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017