The Science of a Happy Mind, Part 1 | Nat Geo Live

Richard Davidson: The invitation in all of this work is that we can take more responsibility for our own brains. And shape our brains wittingly in a more intentional way by cultivating healthy habits of mind. (Audience applause) I'm a psychologist and neuroscientist by training. And at the very beginning of my career, I was captured by one fundamental question which still motivates all of our work today. And the question is a very simple one. And that is, when we look around at the people we know, what we see is great diversity in how people respond to life's slings and arrows. Some people are resilient in the face of adversity, and other people are challenged and decompensate quite rapidly, vulnerable.

What are the clues to understanding those differences? And most importantly, how can we nudge people along this continuum to nurture increased resilience and well-being to facilitate a more adaptive response to adversity? So, I did a lot of research on the brain mechanisms and the bodily changes associated with these differences among people. And then my life went through what a dear friend of mine calls an "orthogonal rotation." (Audience laughter) And that orthogonal rotation occurred in 1992 when I met the fellow who is sitting next to me in this picture. His Holiness the Dalai Lama invited me to come meet with him at his residence in Dharamsala, India because he was interested in catalyzing serious neuroscientific research on the minds and brains of Tibetan practitioners who spent years cultivating their mind.

And in fact, on that momentous day in 1992 he was quite stern in a way and challenged me. And he said, "You've been using the tools of modern neuroscience to investigate depression and anxiety and stress and fear. Why can't you use those same tools to study kindness and compassion?" And, for me, it was a wake-up call. I didn't have a very good answer other than that it's hard. (Audience laughter) When we first began to study fear and anxiety, that was hard, too. And I think most scientists would agree that the scientific community has made good progress in a better understanding of the brain mechanisms and the bodily correlates of fear and anxiety.

So, what I'd like to do now is to segue into a consideration of four themes in modern science that enable the work that I'm describing to go forward. So, the first theme is neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity simply means that the brain changes in response to experience and in response to training. Most of the time, the brain is changing unwittingly. Most of the time, there are forces around us which are shaping our brains continuously. The invitation in all of this work is that we can take more responsibility for our own brains. And shape our brains wittingly in a more intentional way by cultivating healthy habits of mind.

This guy is an amazing human being. Matthieu Ricard, French by nationality. He's been a Tibetan Buddhist monk since 1967. And he also has a PhD in Molecular Biology. So, he comes to the table with remarkable credentials, and I think it's fair to say that there is no other person on the planet quite like Matthieu. He has been willing to subject himself up the wazoo for the sake of this kind of science. Matthieu has been in the scanner many, many times. We've recorded his brain electrical signals, and he has been poked and probed in many different ways to investigate how long-term meditation practice may influence the brain.

What I'm showing you here is actually a figure from a single participant in the study and it illustrates brain electrical activity. And you can see that there is a difference between the resting period on the left and the meditation period on the right. What you see here is the expression of high amplitude gamma oscillations. These gamma oscillations, when they are seen in normal human beings, are typically very, very brief. Less than one second in duration, and we observe them continuously at high amplitude in these long-term meditation practitioners. These are oscillations which are associated with states of focused attention, as well as periods of insight. When different elements of a percept, or an idea come together in a kind of momentary insight, you see a burst of gamma, which again typically lasts about a quarter of a second.

The second theme is epigenetics which is the genomic equivalent of neuroplasticity. We are all born with a fixed complement of base pairs which constitute our DNA. That, for the most part, except under very extreme circumstances, is not going to change. However, what will change is the extent to which different genes are turned on or turned off. We can think of genes as having little volume controls. And the forces around us influence the extent to which different genes are expressed, the extent to which they are turned on or turned off.

For example, there's very good hard scientific data to show that the way a mother treats her offspring will induce epigenetic changes in specific genes as a consequence of that maternal behavior. And those changes in gene expression persist for the entire duration of the life of the organism and, in fact, very new research indicates that these epigenetic changes can be passed down for at least a couple of generations. Now, ten years ago this was complete heresy. And this is not fringe science, folks. This is published in the very best scientific journals. So, these findings, along with other similar findings, suggest that there's a lot more malleability, a lot more flexibility in what we once thought was a very closed system.

Now, up until now, the only way that epigenetic changes can be studied in the brain is to actually biopsy brain tissue, which obviously we cannot do in a human being. It's unsafe and unethical. And so, we now have, for the very first time, a technology that allows us to actually look at epigenetic changes in human brain tissue for the first time. And the way we do it is we can take a blood cell and we can convert that cell into a pluripotent stem cell. And once it's converted into a stem cell we can turn it into any other kind of cell. And one of the things that we do in a dish is we can turn it into any kind of neuron that we find in the brain, and we can then look at gene expression in that neuronal stage. And so, this is going to usher in a whole new era of investigation that enables us to look with much greater specificity than has ever been looked at before in terms of how these kinds of mental exercises can, can infiltrate, if you will, and penetrate down to the level of gene expression.

The third is the bi-directional communication between the mind and brain and the body underscore the notion that there is a connection between our psychological well-being and our physical health. Can you envision a time in the future when mental exercise is engaged in the same way that physical exercise is today? And can you envision the impact that that might have? Healthcare utilization should go down. Prescription drug use should go down. And therefore, healthcare costs would go down.

Now, one snippet of data came from the first randomized controlled trial of mindfulness based stress reduction. And we did it in participants who worked at a hi-tech corporation in Madison, Wisconsin. And it was taught onsite, and the study was designed so that the training occurred, beginning in September, and that coincides with the onset of flu season. And the time when individuals typically will get flu vaccine if they get a flu vaccine. So, what we did is we gave all of the participants in the meditation group and all of the participants in a control group a flu vaccine. The only difference in how we did it compared to how it would be done clinically is that we took blood samples before and after the flu vaccine was given that allowed us to quantify the antibody titers mounted in response to the vaccine. This gives us a quantitative index of how effectively the vaccine actually is working.

These are the data from that study. And it's really quite remarkable after two months of training the meditators actually show a boost in their antibody titer response to the vaccine compared to the controls. And these data show that if these participants were exposed to the same level of flu virus, those who went through the eight weeks of mindfulness meditation would have more protection against the virus. The virus—the vaccine would be more effective.

The fourth theme here is innate basic goodness. It doesn't mean that the negative stuff isn't there. It simply means that if we are given a choice, we will choose the good. So, I'm going to show you two short video clips. They were actually shown live, what's in the clips to six-month-old babies. And then I'll explain to you what was done in this experiment. (Audience laughing) Those little... puppets were then offered to the six-month-old babies. One is the elephant with the yellow, and the other is the elephant with the orange. And by the way, the colors were all randomized across babies. Which do you think the babies preferred?

Woman in audience: The helping elephant.

Dramatic! Dramatic! The preference rates dramatically skewed... The babies at six months show a clear and unequivocal preference for cooperation compared to the hindrance. And there are a number of other strong empirical findings which are consistent with this in showing that we indeed come into the world with this quality of innate basic goodness. And one of the reasons why these data on innate basic goodness are so interesting is because in the contemplative traditions from which these practices are derived, they suggest that when we cultivate kindness and compassion, we are not trying to create something de novo in the human mind. What we're doing is nurturing seeds which are already present. We all know that human beings are endowed with a capacity for language.

And, in fact, there are some case studies of feral children who were raised in the wild. And, when they're raised in the absence of a normal linguistic community, they do not develop proper language. And in the same way, we reason that kindness and compassion are qualities that are present from the start, but they require... nurturance. They require a loving, caring, kind, compassionate community for those seeds to be nurtured. And so, the practices which strengthen these qualities are practices which are said to nourish and cultivate qualities which are already there but simply need to be nurtured and strengthened.