Transcriber: Eunice Tan
Reviewer: Tanya Cushman I'm a psychologist
and a neuroscientist by training. When I first began my career,
I began with a question: why is it that some people are more vulnerable
to life's slings and arrows and others more resilient? And that question is still central
to all the work that we do. And we're particularly interested in how we can nudge people
along this continuum to nourish and nurture the qualities
that promote human flourishing. In the early part of my career, I focused almost exclusively
on the negative side of the equation, on adversity, on the brain circuits that were important for understanding why some people
are more vulnerable to stress, why others may be more likely
to develop a depression or anxiety. And then something very significant
happened in my life. In 1992, I first met
His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And this picture of His Holiness
was taken in Madison, Wisconsin, and he's visited us several times. And he was the chief inspiration
in our turning toward the positive. And in that critical moment, in 1992,
he challenged me, and he said, "Why can't you use the same tools
of modern neuroscience to study kindness and to study compassion in addition to studying anxiety and fear and depression and stress?" And I didn't have a very good answer
for him on that day other than that it's hard. But you know, when we first began
to study kindness - when we first began
to study anxiety and depression, that was hard too, and we've made some progress in that area. So the work that we
and others have been doing is predicated on a critical insight
in modern science: the insight concerning neuroplasticity. Our brains are constantly changing, constantly being shaped
by the forces around us. But we have, typically, very little awareness
of what those forces are. Our brains are changing,
wittingly or unwittingly. Most of the time, it's unwittingly. Most of the time, we're not aware, and we also have little control
over those forces. And the invitation in the work
that I'm sharing with you today is that we can actually take
more responsibility for our own brains by transforming our minds. But first, let me share with you
what some of the consequences of having our brains
being shaped unwittingly are. And I'd like to focus on four challenges that have been critical
in our society today. And these challenges are failures
of well-being in very important ways. The first is distractibility. Research indicates that if we take people
out and about in the world, and we text them - and this has been done in a study
that was published a number of years ago, very influential study
with several thousand people - we text them, and we ask them
three questions. The first question is
"What are you doing right now?" And they check off
from a list of activities. Second question,
"Where is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you're doing
or is it focused elsewhere?" And the third question is "At this very moment,
how happy or unhappy are you?" Here's what was found: the average American adult spends 47% of her or his waking life not paying attention to what we're doing. Folks, we could do better. (Laughter) And when they were not paying attention
to what they're doing, they were significantly less happy. The scientific paper
upon which this is based was titled "A Wandering Mind
is an Unhappy Mind." In addition, there is a huge increase in the incidence
of attention deficit disorders in children in this country. This is a graph showing
a trend over the last decade. There are many reasons for this increase, but some of them have to do with
a genuine increase in distractibility. If we're all honest with ourselves, our nation is suffering
not simply from a fiscal deficit but from an attention deficit. We also are suffering from loneliness. Despite the fact that we're all
so much more interconnected, 76% of middle-aged Americans report that they have moderate
to high levels of loneliness. And this loneliness
is not an ephemeral, subjective state; it also impacts our bodies,
our physical health. Recent research shows that loneliness is actually
a more significant predictor - by more than a twofold magnitude - of early mortality compared to obesity. So this exacts real tolls
on our brains and our bodies. And, again, research shows
we can do better. Negative self-talk and depression. We all have a narrative in our mind
that we carry around about who we are, and sometimes we have
negative beliefs about ourselves, which can culminate in depression. And this turns out
to be a very serious problem. Depression is on the rise. If you look at trends
just over the last few years, what you see is a very large increase,
particularly among women. Over the last three years alone, there's been a 33% increase
in diagnoses of major depression in women. And this trend is occurring
in teens as well. These are disturbing trends
in kids ages 12 through 17, and the gender difference
also is, very unfortunately, robust, where the incidence
is much greater in females, and this trend is getting worse over time. And, again, the evidence suggests
that we can actually train our mind and harness the power of neuroplasticity to change these qualities in our mind. Suicide rates are very disturbing. During the Great Depression,
there was a huge elevation, and those rates have come back down. And then since the year 2000, there has been, unfortunately,
a steep rise in suicide rates. And, again, this is not something
restricted to adults. Our teens are showing more than doubling
over the last 10 years in suicide, so that today in the United States, unfortunately, more than one teenager, every single day,
is taking her or his own life. There also is a pervasive loss
of meaning and purpose that people are reporting. And this loss is not simply,
again, a subjective quality but also exacts a toll on our health
and other aspects of our well-being. Research shows that a lack of purpose
predicts an early death. In a recent study, people who are in their 60s
with a low sense of purpose had more than twice the likelihood
of dying within five years compared to people who reported
a high sense of purpose. So, again, there are intimate connections between our psychological well-being
and our systemic health. Each of these challenges
affects the mind and the brain. We're not thriving, but the invitation
is that we really could be. So we've developed a framework
for understanding a healthy mind, and this framework includes four pillars. The first pillar is awareness, and awareness includes
the capacity to focus our attention, to resist distraction. It also includes a quality that psychologists and neuroscientists
call "meta-awareness." Meta-awareness is knowing
what our minds are doing. How many of you have ever
had the experience of reading a book where you're reading each word on a page, and you read one page,
you may read a second page, and after a few minutes, you have absolutely no idea
what you've just read? (Laughter) That is an example
of a lapse in meta-awareness. But the moment we recognize
that we've been lost and come back, that is a moment of meta-awareness. And we have reason to believe
that meta-awareness is crucial - actually, it's necessary, we believe,
for real transformation to occur. The second pillar
of a healthy mind is connection. Connection refers to those qualities which nurture harmonious
interpersonal relationships, qualities like appreciation,
like kindness, like compassion, having a positive outlook. And, again, the research shows
that it doesn't take much to start activating
these latent qualities, which can flourish and become stronger. The third pillar
of a healthy mind is insight. And insight is about insight into the narrative
that we all have about ourselves. At the very extreme end of the continuum, there are people who have
a very negative narrative. They have negative self-beliefs, and they hold those beliefs
to be a true description of who they are. That is a prescription for depression. And a healthy mind entails changing
our relationship to this narrative. Not so much changing the narrative itself but changing our relationship to it so that we can look at the narrative
and see it for what it is. What is this narrative? It's a constellation of thoughts. And when we can see it as that, we can foster more room,
more breathing room, and this leads to increased well-being. Finally, the last pillar
of a healthy mind is purpose. And here, we're talking
about having a sense that our life is headed
in a particular direction. And most importantly, it is about taking more and more
of the activities in our lives as belonging to this sense of purpose. Can you envision living your life so that taking out the garbage
and doing the laundry is still related to your sense of purpose? Being able to broaden it in this way is a very crucial ingredient
of a healthy mind. Have you ever trained your mind? Research from neuroscience
leads us to understand that there are two fundamentally
different kinds of learning. One form of learning
we call "declarative learning," which is learning about things. I can learn the value of kindness by sitting down and studying
texts about kindness, but this won't necessarily
lead us to become kinder. We can teach people the value of honesty, but this will not necessarily
make them an honest person. In order to cultivate these qualities,
we need a second form of learning, and that is called "procedural learning." Neuroscience teaches us
that these kinds of learning operate through totally
different brain circuits. We need both to produce
real transformation. The wiring in our brains
is not fixed; it's adaptable. And we can harness the power
of neuroplasticity to change our brain. Let me give you one example. This is an example
from research that we did, where we randomized people to a group that received
compassion training for two weeks, another group that received training
from cognitive therapy. We put people in the MRI scanner before and after
the two weeks of training, and lo and behold, we see systematic differences
after just seven hours of practice. Our brains can change
in a remarkably rapid period of time. The changes that are displayed here
are changes in a circuit that involve the prefrontal cortex
and the ventral striatum - a circuit very important
for certain kinds of positive emotions, which gets strengthened
after just this short amount of practice. So these and other kinds of data indicate that the brain really
can change quite quickly. It doesn't mean
that these changes will last, but it means that they can occur, they can begin, and with systematic practice,
they will endure. We view this as an urgent
public health need. So we need to start someplace. I would recommend three minutes a day. When human beings
first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And yet, today, we all do. This is not part of our genome;
this is a learned behavior. And it doesn't take much to start these mechanisms
in the brain to change. So, we can do this
when we're doing other things. We can do this while we're commuting. We can do this as we're literally
brushing our teeth. We can do this as we're having our first cup
of coffee or tea in the morning. We can do this as we're walking. This can be incorporated
in routines of our daily life. So we can nourish our mind,
and through it, we can change the world. We can reduce implicit bias,
bias that gets under the skin - this is something that we've shown
can occur with strengthening connection. We can increase school achievement, and we and others have shown this
with training and awareness. We can reduce healthcare costs,
potentially, by cultivating well-being, as the connections
that I've illustrated show. We can cultivate
a strong sense of purpose, we can reduce distraction, and we can increase
productivity and focus. And I'd like to end with just a one-minute,
short period of practice to give you an experiential taste of this. So if you all just sit for a moment,
put down your pens and devices. And I invite you to bring a loved one
into your mind and your heart. You can leave your eyes open or closed. And for those who are viewing this online, please share this one minute with us. And as you bring this loved one
into your mind and in your heart, cultivate the strong aspiration that they be happy
and be free of suffering, and they share the same wish for happiness and the same wish to be free of suffering as all human beings. And you can envision a time in their life when they may have been
having some difficulty, and you can say
a simple phrase in your mind, "May you be happy,
may you be free of suffering." And simply notice
whatever may come up for you. And then we can do this
for many categories of people, including a difficult person. So I invite you to join us
on this journey, and the very future of humanity,
we think, depends on it. Thank you very much. [Applause]
