Some of the research that I think is most
interesting and – and actually most optimistic – is the research on meditation
and the brain. So I want to give you just very brief background. This has nothing to do with meditation, but
basically, positive and negative emotions look different in the
brain. So when we're feeling happy, joyful, vital, alert, we have higher left-to-right
ratios in our prefrontal cortex. When we’re feeling depressed, anxious – in
fact, even people who have post-traumatic stress disorder or severe depression – we
have much, we see much greater activity in the right-to-left ratio in the prefrontal
cortex, which is this part of the brain that developed more recently. So when they did a study on meditators, they
brought in this Tibetan Lama, and what they found is that his left-to-right
ratio was much higher than any of the other 175 subjects they brought into the laboratory. And so they asked, is this just a random artifact, right? Was he kind of born happy, and so then he
decided to be a monk and a meditator and meditate? Or did the tens of thousands of hours that
he had dedicated to this practice actually have
an impact? So they did the gold standard, which is a
randomized control trial. They took 41 biotechnology employees who had never meditated. If they can do it, anyone can. They randomly assigned them into a mindfulness
group taught by Jon Kabat- Zinn or a waitlist group, and then they looked
– is there change in the activity of the brain? And what they found is that four months later,
there were significant differences in this left-to-right ratio, where
they had much greater activity in the left to right with greater positive emotions, vitality. This is extraordinarily hopeful. And I want to explain why for those of you who aren't psychologists. In psychology there's something called a happiness
set point. And it's been repeated over and over again
in the research that we find that people basically, just like you have a weight
set point, you basically have this kind of continuum of happiness that you're born with,
and you can't really move it too far. So what they found is that when you win the
lottery, you have this initial blip of ‘Yes, life’s going to be great forever,’ and
then a year later, you're back to your baseline level of happiness. If you're in a terrible accident and you become
a paraplegic, you have this huge dip, and then within one year,
you’re back almost to your baseline. When I first read this, I thought it was shocking,
so surprising, and yet they replicate it again and again. So, this is great news if you were born happy,
right, it’s like, it doesn't matter, you know – you get divorced,
you lose your job, whatever, and you just pop back up. It’s like you’re a Bobo doll. This isn’t such good news for most of the
people that I work with who are coming to see me, where they weren’t necessarily
born happy, and so even if you work really hard and you make a lot of money
and you get the house in Hawaii or you win the lottery or you marry the perfect
person, or you have – it, it doesn't actually change your happiness level. What is so hopeful about this new research
is what it says is that, even though changing
your exterior circumstances – winning the lottery – doesn't change your happiness
level, changing your interior landscape can. Changing our interior environment through
training the mind and heart and body in these practices can actually shift our levels
of happiness. Richie Davidson, who is the principal investigator
of the study, he says, “Happiness can be trained because the very
structure of our brain can be modified.” So what he's talking about here is neural
plasticity – our repeated experiences shape our brain. Does this remind you of anything? Right, it’s exactly what this monk told me – what we practice becomes stronger. Everything that we practice, every single moment, matters. So, these are brains from Harvard. I think that makes them a little more special. And basically, Sara Lazar did this wonderful
early research, and what she found is that meditators – the actual parts
of their brain that have to do with attention, concentration, emotional intelligence,
compassion – those parts of the brain actually get stronger, bigger, it's
called cortical thickening. And that this thickening is correlated with practice. What we practice gets stronger. So the way I like to think of it is we have
these superhighways of habits and they're just, like, they’re well-grooved
pathways in our brain. They just, you know, they’re what we automatically do. And what mindfulness is helping us start to
do is to kind of like build, a kind of like... I think of it as, like, digging a country
road. You’re, clearing all the brambles in your
brain, you're creating this new neural pathway that's like, oh, I’m going to actually
do it with compassion this time or with a little more patience or a little more
presence. And so instead of going down that same superhighway of habit, we’re shifting,
and we're going down a different pathway. And every single time that we do this, we're
strengthening that pathway, so that eventually that pathway becomes the
habit.
