The Science of Mindfulness | Daniel Goleman

I really want to tell you about the secret back story of mindfulness in America I Sharon reminded me I met Sharon when she was 19 she'd come overland she was in India she was from SUNY Buffalo and I said to Sharon I met her in Delhi I said you know there's gonna be a meditation retreat in BO gaya you might want to try it she tried it you can thank me now let me take you back to the 1970s Anderson Cooper is just discovering Magilla gorilla Soren has not yet been born we're walking through a jungle outside Colombo Sri Lanka it's an ancient jungle it's so ancient that there's a bamboo grove where the tree trunks are this thick and the tree the bamboos about 20 feet high and we're walking really mindfully through that jungle one reason is we're going to see a monk tera vaada monk named jana pinaka who at that time had written the only book in the English language if you can imagine that had the word mindfulness in the title the other reason is that the jungle is home to a snake called a crate it's about this long very quick you don't see them but if they bite you you're paralyzed in 30 seconds in died in two minutes so it makes you really mindful so we're walking along and I wanted to study with neon upon oka because I was studying clinical psychology and in clinical psychology you're taught how to assess what's wrong with the person but in the psychological system that mindfulness comes from it's all about what could be right how what we can develop what we can cultivate equanimity compared and caring about other people so I studied that and along the way I met some people you may have heard of Joseph Goldstein who was Sharon and jack Kornfield and someone named Jackie Schwarz think about it Goldstein cornfield Schwartz and Salisbury there could be a law firm or a klezmer band right if it actually turned out to be the Insight Meditation Society that they founded and that's where another friend Jon kabat-zinn or went to a chorus retreat or maybe it was a prelude to those and got a vision for something called mindfulness based stress reduction which was really the first time someone had seen that the benefits of mindfulness could be widely shared outside the original spiritual context that it could be it could help people alleviate pain leave it live better with suffering so about that time I go back to Harvard where I'm studying clinical psychology and I say to my professors hey you know what there's this ancient psychology which is all about the upside of human potential and they did not care at all they're like forget it career-ending move kid so there was one person there his name was Richard Davidson another graduate student he and I really cared about meditation he did it and experienced it and knew in his bones that this was the thing to do so we did our dissertations on meditation at that time there were three articles in the scientific literature that we could cite about meditation very early days now we've gone back and we've looked at the literature and there are more than 6,000 peer review articles on meditation so we we did you a big favor who sorted through we found the very very best we windowed it down to about 60 and those 60 articles are the ones in the book altered traits now let me circle back one of the things that Richard Davidson and John kabat-zinn and I did way back in Cambridge was one of the first studies of an outstanding subject in meditation at least we thought he would be an outstanding subject because he told us he would be it was a Swami who came from India who wanted to be studied this was in the heyday of what's called biofeedback when people are first getting a signal like the heart rate or blood pressure and they could find ways to raise it or lower it and Swami said to us I can control my autonomic nervous system without any feedback so we thought oh this is great we finagle in lab at Harvard Medical School we brought him in and some other scientists friends of ours came and we asked the Swami to raise his heart rate and he lowered his heart rate and we said lower your heart rate and he raised it and then he did something a special thing that he had mastered which he called dog Samadhi and we call atrial fibrillation it's not a isn't it not a good talent to have so after that the Swami wherever he spoke was sure to say scientists at Harvard have studied my brain this was when we first realized that meditation research could be hyped and this was one of the motivators for us and find that using the most rigorous methodological standards to pare down the sea of findings you know you hear about them online and hear about them in the news but what really from a scientific point of view is is the truth there so let me tell you a few of the highlights that it's it's reviewed in detail in in altered traits but we look at three levels the first level are the real professionals these are people basically whose job it is to meditate all the time you find them in Asia there they're nuns they're Yogi's and you find them in Asia because Asian cultures understand that this has value they support people in those institutions to do this I know people like jack Kornfield who was a monk in Thailand could not live here as a monk because you know what in Boston you come to the door with a begging bowl they call a cop it's it's very different here so the first level is kind of industrial-strength meditation and these people go very very deep but a very narrow band of people will do this the next level out is what we find here in America where you'll take a method that maybe the monks and the nuns and the Yogi's are doing full time and you'll render it so that we folks people who have day jobs people who have responsibilities but can go on retreat can learn it and do it so that's that's the middle level and then there's another remove and John was I think the first to take this step and that is to extract it from the spiritual context totally so that it can spread as widely as possible these are the apps that they're talking about these are mindfulness in business and there you may not go as deep but it spreads it goes to scale it spreads as widely as it can and I think their benefits and trade-offs for each of those three so let me highlight some of the findings let's start with the Yogi's these are the Olympic level meditators Richard Davidson flew them over from Nepal or India or France one by one he brought him to his brain lab at the University of Wisconsin and he had them go through some brain scans and special tests one of them actually I was there for the first subject who was a monk named Matthew Picard do you know the name mentor but Matthew was remarkable Matt you got a PhD at the Pasteur Institute which is like the MIT of France he caught in a microbiology or was it microbiology molecular biology thank you and after getting his doctorate and you know he his advisor won a Nobel he was a very promising student he decided to ditch that and go to Nepal and live with a great meditation master and spend his time in a hermitage so it was when the Dalai Lama said at a meeting where Richie Davidson was and and Matt you know mr. Richie you know our tradition has many methods that help people with emotions when they become destructive you know out of control anxiety or anger or depression whatever it may be he said take them out of the religious context bring them to the lab stay them as rigorously as you can and if they're a benefit to people spread them widely so Matt you who thought he would never go back to science decided he would collaborate with Richie and this was very important because earlier Richie had gone to India with about 5,000 pounds of equipment and he had it was equipped with the letter from the Dalai Lama saying this guy's for real please cooperate and be in a study and he which slept to some yogi and a cave and show him the letter and you know and the Yogi's universally said no no thanks and the reason was interesting they said I don't know what you measure and if it turns out I don't look so good on your measurements maybe it will discourage people in other words they were worried about the impact it would have so Matt to flip that he said to friends of his who were Yogi's this is going to encourage a lot of people to meditate this is going to be good for the world come to it so about 21 have come man she was the first subject and the paradigm is like this you're in a an MRI and if you've been in an MRI it's like a human cigar tube with a big clanking thing like the garbage men are coming all the time and you lie there and you're told in this study we'd like you to concentrate for 90 seconds and then stop for 30 seconds and then concentrate for 90 and stop for 30 like that four times and then do a visualization and then do with compassion then do them with open press in other words I don't know about you but when I sit down to meditate takes my mind a little while to settle he didn't like that and all of them did in other words they have extraordinary mental agility another thing that's remarkable is that well for example if you have a creative insight like oh my god I solve that thing I got I know what to do now I know the answer to that problem your brain at that moment will show a very strong magnitude EEG wave called the gamma and it will last for about a half second and it feels great that's about the only time we see gamma it happens a few other times it's always very short the Yogi's have gamma virtually all the time this was a true altered trait their brain function is different their brain actually how many people here have been long-term like more than a year and I do it almost every morning and sometimes they go on retreat okay so here's some good news if you're in that category the odds are that your brain aging is slower it's not certain but it looks like that another payoff and this is really clear if you do a mindfulness or insight practice or Zen you're much more present moment to moment and this is found on really tough cognitive test tests that you can't gain another benefit is the recovery from stress Anderson was talking about his cortisol was up and so the scientific way of thinking about stress and resilience is what's the peak of the cortisol and how does it take to return to calm that's the operational definition of resilience and the longer you've been a meditator it seems the quicker that recovery becomes in fact for all of the effects there's what's called the dose response the longer you've been a meditator generally the stronger the benefits become so there's an attentional benefit a stress benefit one of the things that we were little bemused by is that all of the spiritual traditions from which these meditation practices have come to America talk about how important it is to be selfless to deconstruct the self not to be I Me Mine focused that turns out to be the least studied phenomena in all of the meditation research there's somehow in this culture we don't really care that much about it we rather increase our attention our focus recover better from stress I'm not saying that's a bad thing it's a good thing if you're stressed and you're distracted but it turns out there's a higher goal that is not often talked about so that's the long-term benefits and then there the beginner benefits and they turn out to be surprisingly pretty good for example that attention thing I talked about you see that from people who do just eight weeks of MBSR or people who do mindfulness or who just start and maybe do total twenty hours the Yogi's by the way have done up to 62,000 lifetime hours so 20 hours is just baby steps but still people get more attentive their focus is better when you multitask as we were talking about with Tony Fadell and and Anderson the brain does not do that it is Anderson does it just does one thing at a time it switches very rapidly it's a fiction that we do several things in parallel and if you were concentrating on that one really important thing you have to do today and your concentration is up and then you think oh I better check my email people check email more than 70 times a day on average or I look at my Facebook more than 20 times a day or I'll do this and this and this and this and you know you start surfing or wandering Facebook then oh yeah I have to do that thing when you go back to it ordinarily your concentration that was up here is now down here unless it turns out you did ten minutes of mindfulness of the breath like we did with Sharon so the the benefits start right right at the beginning another attentional benefit is for students in order to learn you have to be able to register what you're hearing right now or reading right now put in long-term memory and then be able to recall it this is what we call learning right so when students at University were taught mindfulness it turned out not only did the working memory improve but that group of students got scores on the graduate school entrance exam there were 16 points higher so it's it helps students learn I'm gonna circle back to this because I think that's a very important point also you see the same stress recovery benefits maybe not as strong as in the long-term meditators but they're showing up you don't get as upset maybe you're triggered by fewer things and then there's a remarkable effect from the practice Sharon is most associated with a loving-kindness meditation where how many people have done the loving-kindness yeah it's it's usually done with mindfulness traditionally and it's a good way to end a mindfulness session so when loving-kindness you wish well yourself and people you love and people you know in an ever-expanding circle and it turns out as sharon alluded this has very beneficial effects on the brain it's not exactly what she was saying it's not that you you've changed the brain the altered traits the real brain change happens the more you meditate but even if you do as she said eight minutes of loving-kindness meditation it makes you more likely to help someone in need you know to give up a chair for someone on crutches things like that and in fact the research on the practices that encourage loving attitude seem to have a more powerful effect right at the beginning than any other kind of meditation this is still the mind wanted to learn to love better this is very important I think for society for our lives for communities for families Richard Davidson Ricci at University of Wisconsin developed a kindness program for preschoolers the kindness program goes like this you talk about being kind what it's like and if someone is kind to you and you tell the teacher that kid who was kind gets a sticker and the kindness garden if you're three this is like major payoff like oh man I got a sticker in the kindness card so kids who are in the kindness program as they go into grade school turns out that usually is to get into the thing about it we put our children in an environment every day where they're rewarded individually for doing better than other kids and so kids become competitive and very self-centered except the kids that had the kindness curriculum so for me a lot of this has a kind of payoff in how we could be treating our kids differently let's start with what Tony Fadell was talking about the distractions I mean today's kids as he said have a video babysitter there are more distractions now than any time in human history for all of us he made a clear case for that there's a saying in cognitive science what information consumes is attention a wealth of information means a poverty of attention you can only pay attention to one thing at a time the the book I wrote emotional intelligence was really an argument for teaching kids social and skills in school they call it SEL social-emotional learning I was worried 20 years ago that kids were not getting the right FaceTime you learn these skills in life you learn it from your mom and your dad and your siblings and interactions and today's children are spending more time than ever in human history staring at a screen they're not having that interaction so I feel we not only need to teach SEL we need to do but I witnessed uptown here in Spanish Harlem PS 112 it's a school for first and second graders they all come from the housing project right next to the school it's up against FDR and those kids have very traumatic lives one of the the teacher told me one day a little girl came into class really upset and she said what happened the girl says I just saw someone who was shot the teacher said to the class how many of you know someone who's been shot every hand went up it's a very traumatic place to be a kid half the kids in this class were so-called special needs ADHD autism spectrum whatever I thought it would be totally chaotic but the class was very calm and very focused and the teacher said here's why every day they have a session they call it breathing buddies you get your favorite stuffed animal and you find a place to lie down on the floor and you put the animal on your belly and you watch it rise on the in-breath fall on the out-breath rise on the in-breath fall it's mindfulness for seven-year-olds and it works and they love it think about it Sharon said that the action in mindfulness of breathing is the moment you notice your mind has wandered and you bring it back meditation of every kind mindfulness included is mental fitness which we've put a lot of time into physical fitness but think about making the mind stronger strengthening attention strengthening your simple ability to control what's going on in your mind technical term for this is cognitive control that's what those kids in PS 112 are learning there was a study done in New Zealand where they followed kids who had been measured for cognitive control ages four to eight they tracked them down in their 30s and they found that the kids that were highest in cognitive control four to eight had much better financial success and better health and cognitive control was a better predictor than your IQ in childhood or the wealth of the family you grew up in so this is a one way to the level the playing field think about it this also doesn't depend on those companies to change the app it puts the control mechanism in the brain of the person who's using it cognitive control I can pay attention to what I want to when I want to and I don't think it's just attention we should help kids with I think that we should help them with compassion with caring I also happen to think we should teach them systems thinking because this generation of children is going to encounter a world where the system's we take for granted like the environment are going out of control they're going to need to be pretty sophisticated in how they handle it a couple of other findings that might interest you that I didn't mention therapies that are based on mindfulness like is one called mindfulness based cognitive therapy turn out to be as effective for anxiety and depression than medication as medications now you may not have heard that before and there's a good reason no pharmaceutical company will make a penny from this fact however it's important to know it's not that it'll work for everyone or for you know bipolar might be purely medical but it's very important to know what Jon kabat-zinn developed mindfulness based stress reduction is extremely helpful for people with chronic pain for people who have a disease that they have to live with because with mindfulness you change your relationship to the experience of that pain of the disease symptoms and that helps you have a better quality of life this is spreading worldwide now throughout hospitals and beyond so mindfulness and meditation is a mental fitness exercise and mental fitness practice I think should become universal let me finish with some questions that I heard the Dalai Lama ask and I really love them he said whenever you face an important decision ask yourself three questions who benefits is it just me or a group is it just my group or everyone and is it just for now or for the future thank you [Applause]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0

Views: 54,544

Keywords: Daniel Goleman, Mindfulness in America, Wisdom 2.0, Wisdom, Mindfulness, Soren Gordhamer, New York, 2017, NYC, Meditation

Id: eKF8NE42RZ0

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2018