Matthieu Ricard on Happiness - part 2

but now I'm going to show you some of the of this size very briefly so let's go back okay so here the places where the militares come from nice quiet places you know if you have to go for $20,000 of meditation you better find a quiet place and then you can try in traffic jams so those are various places I was lucky to be and photograph in the Himalayas over 40 years this is a really good place for meditation there's nothing else you can do no supermarkets no movie halls and then so just another of those place then the great teachers those who taught us you know spiritual practice meditation here did you go consider mache some of you might have heard he was one of the dilemmas tesha was it it was a great master of the 20th century and he spent 13 years in meditation himself solitary retreats was a great scholar a great poet it was a extraordinary human being above all and so myself and other even some friends here were lucky to spend some years near him and benefit from his teachings and many of the disciples who went to the lab the first batch were some of his students Kankuro mache my first teacher with a my met in 1967 and then I was going back and forth from Pasteur Institute studying with him and then I finally decided to sit to stay near him until he passed away so now here quite a different scene 10,000 kilometers away in Madison Wisconsin with 226 source of electrons and electrons electrons a fellow gram is not terribly précised to see the deep structures in the brain but it's very very sharp and fast to detect very fast Changez about the millisecond change you can detect and depending where the activation change you can roughly know if isn't the same in the prefrontal cortex in the back of the brain and so forth so it gives you some kind of ID for some studies it's very good and here and again you hear some time in the newspaper just at the same way that the speak of the happiest person in the world all these cliches that this monk studies Tibetan monks but there's not not the case at all what with what was studies were long term practitioners they are lay people there are men woman equal number in fact and from the east and from the West this is a British doctor so you see he did nine years of retreat and with untoned it's putting the cap on him and then here's a great teacher make your mo she who wrote the joy of living and other books who was wonderful he did many minions of retreat he started when he was 13 years old and to do two consecutive two years meditative retreat so as he says unfortunately that's not the way you meditate in MRI machine it has set for characteristic it is cold it is narrow it is dark and it is noisy so there's not the best place to meditate but still you can make something out of it so here after the first time I ever went medicine with Richie Davidson leading scientists on emotion and so we spent some time up to two-and-a-half so that was at the end of 24 so a great relief from everyone and so this is just to give you a quick ID with the electroencephalogram meditating on compassion our loving-kindness which is certified well Buddhist terms loving-kindness is the wish that may all sentient beings be happy and find the cause of happiness so when that unconditional love in a way encounters suffering is become what we call compassion which is the wish made of being be free from suffering and the causes of suffering so basically the same thing the same benevolence whether it meets in general with all sentient beings or it encounters laughing so here we the point is you need to compare with something and with someone so naive subjects what they are people that we explained that the principles of compassion meditation and they did it for a week since sadly the best coach came back to the lab and even for those subject we asked them to States a resting state where you do nothing and instead while you try the best you can to bring this unconditional love and compassion within your mind at the wilting of a of a person or just like as if as it kind of experience so and then you do that the same with meditators so what you see here the down curve is the novice subjects the blue that the violet line is when they rest nothing happened and then the blue line is when they engage in compassion meditation nothing happens either it's not that they don't feel something but that something is not strong enough to make it a threshold no but when you now do with meditators and that study was done with fifteen of them and there's some kind of average at the rest time they also rest don't do anything special but when they engage in the compassion meditation there's this incredibly intense activation and this is about the frequency so that's in the gamma range of the brain frequencies the gamma range which has to do with synchrony in different areas of the brain and so forth but it also occurs in areas of the brain connected with positive effects prefrontal cortex the insula that has to do with empathy with loving-kindness with receiving also emotions in your own body and so forth so there is huge difference so big in fact that you know they are to call all the expertise is something wrong with that no it's the way we do things the way we measure it and me teachers are doing something strange you know they're changing their tweet that tits or something because it creates some you know some kind of gamma activation with the strong massive activation whatever but then it was done with many meditators check with many other conditions and it turns this always comes like that so it seems to be specific to the result of training and then to eliminate then if you compare with what you get when you do MRI studies which is a quite different method and with very very precise in terms of going deep in the brain into small locations so here you can again for this loving-kindness meditation the meditators resting and then those are the area that are activated the more sort of yellow they are it indicates a stronger activation so those are different areas that you see activated in the meditators and it's very fast 30 seconds of rest and they two or three minutes of engaging in the meditation and within 15 seconds they come almost at the optoma so this is something that they can immediately engage in at almost the maximum level now you do the same thing with novice the understand resting state as the meditation state as you can see not much happening I mean it's nothing wrong with that just simply show that you have not been training it kind of true for everything now doing mathematical equations or playing piano or something one way or not we don't have developed the skill then we don't do it well so now after that's okay what happens if we do it for a shorter period so there was three months studies that showed after three months as I will show you also anxiety goes down immune system is boosted and then we start going not when I say we you know scientist friend sometime I go there and discuss with them but so what happens eight weeks four weeks and then even down to two weeks make a difference so what we're doing here is doing Metta which is loving-kindness meditation and then to compare it with something that is quite efficient it's cognitive reappraisal it's a good psychological matter to consider a situation in a different life from different perspective and usually it's it is in itself quite good for pro-social behavior but if you measure pro-social behavior with some kind of games economic games and so forth you see a significant increase much more pro-social tendencies and behavior in those with the two weeks of lovingness meditation compared to the control group and that's not just behavior and economic games if you look at the brain within two weeks you have a deactivation in those people of the lesser activation of the amygdala that has to do with agressivity with anger with fear and and there was more control from the higher cognitive aspect of the brain just two weeks so that's quite remarkable but then also you know the idea was know how flexible those states are enter in and out can you modulate the intensity so here will experience meditator that was Tanya's singer asked could you by chance you know do for me like 30 percent of compassion or sixty percent and then 90 and could you jump from one to the other now go from 90 to 30 30 to 60 60 to zero back to straight to 90 I won't say let's try so that experiment we spent 22 hours an MRI in three days that was kind of marathon MRI and then average everything and then you can see here whether we do it with unconditional compassion with loving kindness with compassion for someone in pain no matter any of those states they were when they measure the activation of the related areas like the especially the insula that has to do with empathy clearly you can see that kind of progression between thirty sixty and nine so it was quite interesting and then we said when you do a particular training there's also spillover as a skill for something that you have not trained for whether you become good at something but that makes you automatically good at something that you didn't necessarily trained for for instance imagining pain physical pain you know we don't meditate just thinking I'm going to visit for three hours how can I suffer a lot feel it strong to take so that we don't train for sure but will the training aankhon attention and compassion give you a skill that any mental state actually you could generate it was trying first there's a whole bunch of study on the real pain and how you can modulate I don't think I have time to go into that but this really works I can decrease up to thirty percent of the subjective pain by different types of meditation including compassion but here you could just imagine a burning sensation like someone putting an iron on your forearm and what would that do if you imagine that little bit bit stronger and very strong very hard so that 30 percent 60 percent 90 percent and then the military's just did it when you measure the brain the various networks involved with pain they found the same tradition so it shows that the mind has become flexible the mind can be used can be trained to whatever task you put it on so that requires an increased quality of vigilance of attention of mindfulness so there's also plenty of tests that measure people's quality of attention it's called the continuous physical CBT continuous performance task that means you have a small number very small like no size 12 on middle of the screen numbers flashing and this very fast it if did several per second each time there's a zero you push a button if it's not a zero don't push the button seems quite stupid but after 10 minutes 30 minutes 40 minutes the tendency is to make so many mistakes you push when it's a 8 you don't push when it's a zero so what happens typically is your sort of performance goes down and down and down you get tired now here with the experienced meditators there was some of them that just came out of three years of retreat basically many of them had a completely flat curve I mean flat line that means 45 minutes missed a thousand times pushing that thing on this very fast zero mistake zero three subjects achieve that and the other ones were 98.5 ninety eight point eight you know all this kind of looks flat and what was very revealing is one of them was just one of those who did 3s retreat he was just sitting like that you know and I said what is finished I can continue if you know what's the problem so he was even feel tired it was quite funny but enjoyable so what does that says when you hear someone saying that no when we begin to learn something we don't do it well and we are very nervous and staring and quickly we we have to stop and rest and so that we have no ease we have tension University no riding a bicycle for the first time then as you go you do it well and we don't get tired so easily you know you can ride a bicycle for a long time you can lift your hands and look in the sky and whistle and see you on four so that's that's a skill doing something well and with ease that's applies to attention so attention is is crucial because if you want to cultivate anything else compassion loving kindness if your mind is wandering all over the place it's not going to work so to come back to the short-term those one of the first study was done with three months people there's just 60 people randomly assigned from a biotech company 30 meditate 20 minutes a day for 3 months 20 don't and they say if you want after the 20 after the 3 months will give you the course if you like but come to the lab every week we measure your parameters after three months the level of anxiety was significantly smaller in the military's not in the other ones the level of the immune system was much more robust than in the non-meditators the level of cortisol that his measure of stress was smaller much less than in non-meditators and so forth and so forth big changes so now the sort of the aspiration of the dilemma what can we contribute to society now comes in the sense of that we can consider that seriously you know I remember very well at the beginning of the study Time magazine made a cover story about those study but what did shows as illustration was not that it was a beautiful blonde no it was a photoshopped something of course levitating over a beach meditation works no the article was not so bad with the cover that they could not resist putting that so now I think it's causally a little bit more seriously which is good because now we can you know movement for happiness you can even in France you could have secular training to attention secular training to emotional balance secular training to various components of well-being and nobody will jump saying this is some kind of weird religious sort of cult or something so yes I will make them any other study I'm not going to go in details but so just briefly before ending might do a small meditation together if you wish but before that I just want to to again go back to the essential assists yes we should improve the living conditions in at the workplace in the society in the family provide provide the conditions for flourishing I remember very well at the time of Abu Ghraib when George Bush said as few bad happens that you know did what they did terribly wrong in terms of abuse and torture in Iraq each airs about a rainbow Zimbardo who was one of psychology's that did the Stanford Prison Experiment way so that people could were really wrong very fast even with students he said it's not the apples that are honest is the best body called the barrel or the the container that is rotten so we need to provide a social environment that is conducive to well-being we have policies that leads to well-being and as as Ron Lyle often says no well-being cannot be expected to be just by chance a byproduct of the GDP or something there are different criterias there should be taken as goal for what they are primary goals and not that know fully if economy goes well we'll all be happy don't worry about that because some in many instance in our times they are byproducts of endless growth that obviously are detrimental to well-being and to the environment we can see that everyday so those indicators of no prosperity in terms of economics well-being it's the quality of life of the way we impact positively or negatively the environment those indexes have to be considered for what they are because they are different time scale by the way short-term mid-term longer-term so then you have more consideration for others general tourism is the sort of concept that can help to reconciliate those time scale and try to build up a model where we take those indicators in consideration but just to before we do a SWOT meditation and take up some questions because I've lost track of time yes so I thought I would briefly show you that also compassion in action you know we just spoke about what we do in the Himalayas so we have been doing a number of projects in the health which with hundred thousand patients a year in our clinics this is in Nepal and we are a palliative care units and we also work with indica people we work in India and Bihar in remote villages where we will build also a health center and we work in to try to improve the condition of women to bring solar electricity you know rainwater collection we will school with with a wonderful social entrepreneur that could be school with bamboos and this is terrible with bamboos in Nepal for 2,000 kids 70% girls for a quite minimum amount of money and it lasts for quite some time it's earthquake-proof ecological everything so and in Tibet we built 15 different dispensaries and clinics where there was nothing in remote nomadic areas and we program for the health of the mother and the child at time of delivery obviously the need for a bridge isn't it it's our car so again in five bridge so we build 18 bridges when on the Yangtze River with a curved elderly this happiest person in the world for sure Tibetan doctors is neither neither a dentist no ophthalmologist elderly people and happiest woman in the world now and you can bring a school like that for twenty-five thousand dollars which is pretty small amount and so forth and so forth here's a school for 800 kids 26 villages so very quickly and briefly but that's also a way for sure to bring a better well-being in the outer conditions but let's also get continuously inspired by the inner conditions so that's way in a way forward if to define at least the Buddhist part maybe I would say my own little definition will be transform yourself to better serve others and unless you do that transformation sometime you can you know try to help others in unskillful way here helping victims of earthquake last year in eastern Tibet many thousand people died we try to help the victims to go through the winter we're hoping to build an earthquake resistant school next year and so forth and a few good nice smiles to end this guy is a bar to smile they don't lick how do you call that this kind of thing you make to remove wrinkles so this organization if you want to have a look thank you you

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 26,761

Keywords: Matthieu Ricard, happiness, happier, wellbeing, well-being, meditation, mindfulness, mindful, neuroscience, Mind and Life, compassion, kindness, empathy

Id: slUv9TN3azI

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2011