HUMAN FLOURISHING IN CHALLENGING TIMES with Professor Richard J Davidson at HAP20

our first speaker for happiness in its causes 2020 is a world-leading neuroscientist and psychologist renowned for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain he's a close friend and confidant of his holiness the dalai lama and was named by time magazine in 2006 as one of the hundred most influential people in the world the last time he was on our stage was in 2008 after and after many invitations to return including one that i delivered in person in new york city i think it was back in 2014. that was a good errand to be on anyway after after all these invitations finally professor richard j davidson is able to join us again from the usa for our virtual event to speak on human flourishing in challenging times hello richie and over to you thank you so much beth and thank you for putting this meeting on in these challenging times and for all you're doing to promote human flourishing on the planet we need this today more than ever before it's really an honor to be with all of you today to share a little bit of insight from our work and to consider how this may be especially important during these times i am a neuroscientist by training and when i first began my career i was interested in why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and why others are more resilient and how we might nurture the qualities that can increase resilience to help us adapt to challenging circumstances and this question today is as relevant uh perhaps even more relevant than it was when i first began and in the early part of my career i focused a lot on the adversity side of this equation i focused on stress on depression anxiety on fear and then in 1992 i met his holiness the dalai lama for the first time and his holiness challenged me and he said why can't we use the same tools of modern neuroscience that we've been using to study stress and anxiety and depression why can't we use those same tools to study kindness and to study compassion and that was the beginning of a wake-up call for me to focus more on the positive side of the equation when i was a student of psychology and neuroscience we were taught to look at people and to try to figure out what's wrong with them and what his holiness was really asking us to do is to completely turn this on its head to look at people and try to see what's right with them and then to nurture those qualities which could be enormously helpful particularly during times like we have today the radical and simple conclusion that we've been led to from more than 30 years of work can be summed up in a really simple sentence uh that is three words and that is that well-being it's a little more than three words well-being is a skill well-being is a skill and it's a skill fundamentally no different than acquiring other skills and we know that there are certain kinds of uh um there are certain kinds of expertise that we can acquire that can only be acquired through practice for example we cannot learn to play a musical instrument by attending lectures and by reading books we must also practice the same is true for well-being and this is an insight that is derived actually from modern neuroscience in neuroscience we consider that there are two fundamentally different kinds of learning two fundamentally different kinds of knowledge one kind we call declarative which is learning about things it's conceptual we can learn the value of kindness and understand why it may be helpful in certain situations but of course that kind of learning will not necessarily make us a kind person in addition to declarative learning we need a second form of learning that we call procedural procedural learning is acquired through practice it's skill based and it is implemented in totally different brain circuits compared to declarative learning and in order to promote well-being to promote flourishing we need both we need both declarative and procedural so i'd like to spend the first few minutes of this short presentation just telling you about a couple of important concepts in modern science that provide a critical foundation for understanding how this work has evolved the first concept is neuroplasticity it's a word that i'm sure many of those in the audience have heard of neuroplasticities refers to the idea that the brain changes in response to experience and in response to training our brains are constantly being shaped wittingly or unwittingly most of the time our brains are being shaped unwittingly most of the time we have only a dim awareness of the forces around us that are shaping our brains and those forces are ones over which we have very little control and yet they're constantly shaping our brain but we also know that we can shape our brains intentionally and so here is the invitation and it's based on hard-nosed science and that is that when we nurture positive qualities of our mind it turns out that our brains change and the changes that occur in the brain enable those qualities to endure over time a few years ago i co-authored a book with dan goleman my dear old friend and the title of the book excuse me at least in the u.s the title of the book is altered traits altered traits is a play on altered states and it refers to the idea that genuine transformation persists across contexts and over time genuine transformation is enduring and so we are interested in practices that include both declarative and procedural learning that have the potential of leading to enduring change so neuroplasticity is one of the critical underlying mechanisms if you will of well-being as a skill the second is the equivalent of neuroplasticity in the realm of genomics and this is what scientists refer to as epigenetics epigenetics is the science of how genes are regulated each of us is born with a sequence of base pairs that constitute our dna and for the most part for most people that sequence won't change it will remain constant over the course of one's life but it turns out that genes have what we might think of metaphorically as little volume controls these are mechanisms which regulate the extent to which a gene is turned on or turned off and we know that these epigenetic mechanisms are highly variable and are subject to environmental influence and also they are associated with our demeanor let me give you a couple of examples we know for example that the way a mother behaves toward her offspring will induce epigenetic changes in the offspring and those epigenetic changes affect the experience the behavior the brain chemistry and even the brain structure of those offspring and so these are mechanisms that regulate the extent to which different genes are turned on or turned off and they have profound effects on our mind our brain and our body moreover modern research this is research that's quite recent indicates that these epigenetic changes at least some of them can be passed on for at least a couple of generations and so this is not fringe science this is mainstream science and we know that epigenetic mechanisms can be harmful and they also could be helpful if you're exposed to trauma we know that trauma can induce epigenetic changes which also can be passed down from one generation to the next but in addition we also know that practices like simple meditation practices can also induce epigenetic changes and we've demonstrated that in the laboratory in fact we've shown that these epigenetic changes can be rapidly induced you can see evidence of these changes over the course of just a single day of practice and we have demonstrated that by bringing people into the lab in the morning having them go through a day of meditation we take blood samples before and after that single day and we can see by uh comparing the initial sample to the sample after six or eight hours of practice that uh there are changes that are induced as a consequence of the practice we have a control group that comes in uh for the same period of time for a day of leisure in the laboratory they have the same sedentary day they eat the same things and they do not show these changes so these mechanisms neuroplasticity and epigenetics provide an important foundation for understanding well-being as a skill now in our center we have developed a framework for understanding the plasticity of well-being that is what are the core elements of well-being that show the capacity for change and that can be uh um cultivated to promote human flourishing and i'd like to name these four and then talk a little bit about a little bit more extensively about one or two of these the first we call awareness and awareness is where you would put mindfulness and it involves our unique capacity to regulate our attention and also another capacity that's so important that psychologists and neuroscientists call meta awareness meta awareness is knowing what our minds are doing now to many viewers this may sound a little strange don't we all know what our minds are doing well let me give you an example that i think is a common one certainly i've experienced this and let me ask you how many of you in the audience have had the experience of reading a book where you read each word on a page and you may read one page you may read a second page and after a few minutes you have absolutely no idea what you've just read your mind is somewhere else that's an example of a lapse in meta awareness but the moment you recognize that your mind is lost that's a moment of meta awareness you can bring your mind back to the present moment research indicates that the average adult spends a very large percentage of her or his daily life actually not paying attention to what they're doing a study that was published 10 years ago that involved more than 3 000 adults in different parts of the world found that the average adult spends 47 percent of her or his waking life not paying attention to what they're doing that's an incredible number and i have the conviction that we could do better so the first pillar of well-being is awareness the second pillar is connection connection is about the qualities that promote healthy social relationships qualities like appreciation gratitude kindness and compassion during this time of the pandemic spending a few moments each day intentionally cultivating appreciation reflecting on the people who are helpful to you and to others during this time can be enormously important it is an elixir for the mind and the heart and so even taking a few moments and cultivating these qualities associated with connection can be really beneficial the third element of well-being or constituent is insight insight is about self-knowledge it is insight into the narrative that we all carry around in our mind about who we are our self-narrative and we know that there are folks on the extreme end of a distribution who have a very negative self-narrative they have negative self-beliefs and they actually hold those beliefs to be a true description of who they are and of course that is a prescription for depression and so part of well-being is not so much changing this narrative but it is changing our relationship to this narrative so that we fully understand what this narrative is it's a bunch of thoughts finally the last pillar of well-being is purpose and purpose here is about finding our sense of direction in life and clarifying our values why are we doing what we're doing and when we ask ourselves these questions we can clarify our purpose and align more and more of our everyday behavior around this sense of purpose can we envision even mundane activities of daily life like taking out the garbage or washing the dishes as being related to our core sense of purpose so each of these four elements of well-being is implemented in different brain circuits it's associated with different biological correlates it and cultivating each of these four pillars of well-being can lead to resilience in our center we have an associated non-profit that we've started which produced an app called the healthy minds program which is freely available all over the world and the healthy minds program has instruction practices but also scientific content around each of these four pillars of well-being so in order to promote optimal flourishing during these challenging times each of these four pillars is really an important ingredient it's not just mindfulness it's not just any one of these things it's really a balance among all of them so i would encourage you to join us on this journey when human beings first evolved on this planet none of us were brushing our teeth and yet this is a behavior that i'm sure every one of you who are participating in this meeting does at least for a few minutes every day and this is not part of our genome this is something that we've all learned to do as a species because it's important for our personal physical hygiene and i think most people who are participating in this meeting would agree that our minds are even more important than our teeth and if we spent even as short a time as we do each day brushing our teeth if we spend that amount of time also nourishing our mind and cultivating well-being this world would be a different place so please join us on this journey and cultivate well-being each of these four pillars and you can go to the website tryhealthyminds.org to learn more about this work and also to join us on this journey so thank you all so much and i appreciate your attention richard that was absolutely wonderful and professor davidson is going to be joining us again for a fireside chat at 11 45 a.m how can we be happy despite life's curveballs and also richie i just wanted to say thank you for sharing that nurturing what's right with people is really important and that enduring change is possible

Channel: Happiness & Its Causes

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Id: 9PlrWIMV_3Q

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021