The Modern Science of Mindfulness, with Dr. Richie Davidson

Speaker 1 · 0:03Hello everyone. Today's a special day. I am extremely honored to have Dr. Richie Davidson join us today. He is the founder and director for the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's been there since 1984. He's published more than 375 articles and 80 chapters and reviews, as well as he's edited 14 books. Many of you have read The Emotional Life of Your Brain and his latest book, Altered Traits, which was published a few years ago with Daniel Goleman. He's really best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. He's a friend and confidant of the Dalai Lama. He's a highly sought-after speaker and expert leading conversations on well-being on international stages, such as the World Economic Forum, where he serves on the Global Council on Mental Health. Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2006. He's one of the most influential people of my world. When I say he's a pioneer in this field of research on emotion and mindfulness in the brain, like it's hard to overstate that. I'm just very honored that he's here joining us today. I think he's gonna share a lot of valuable insights. He walks the talk. You know, when you see him on video, when you see him speak, you know he has a practice. Like there's a true presence to him, there's a depth to him. And to me, that's maybe the most important thing because he's sincere about his work and there's heart in what he's doing. So welcome, Dr. Richie Davidson. It's an honor to be here with you, and thank you so much for coming today.

Speaker 2 · 2:10So I want to begin by talking about four themes in modern science that have provided a foundation for all that we do. And these are very important. It's really important to appreciate that the scientific research in this area has caught on not because of the work that we've done or the work that any other scientist who's working on meditation has done. It's caught on because the time was right. And the time was right because of some really important developments in modern science, which enabled the mainstream scientific community to believe that this was possible. And so, what are these themes? The first is one I'm sure all of you have heard of neuroplasticity. Our brains are constantly changing, constantly being shaped. And our brains are being shaped by forces around us continuously, and our brains are being shaped wittingly or unwittingly. Most of the time, our brains are actually being shaped unwittingly. Most of the time, we are, if we're aware at all, only dimly aware of the forces around us which are shaping our brain and often completely unaware. And we have very little control over these forces and factors. The invitation in all of this work is that we can actually play a more intentional role in our own neuroplasticity. And a lot of what we've learned on the further reaches of meditation practice have come from the study of Mingarin Pouche and others who have had very long-term practice. When we first studied Mingarin Pouchet's brain in 2002, he already, at that time, he was in his 30s, he already had approximately 62,000 hours of lifetime practice. You can go do the arithmetic at home. That's an astounding number. He had already done three three-year retreats by that time. Really quite extraordinary. So we've learned a lot about the brains of these long-term practitioners. And this was an important place for us to start because if we didn't see anything different in a person like Mingi Rimpoche's brain, then the likelihood of seeing anything in a beginner would be very low. And so we wanted to first study these very long-term practitioners. And indeed, we saw dramatic differences in their brain. And here's the simple yet radical finding which has emerged from this work. It turns out that when people cultivate healthy habits of mind through meditation, their brains change. That's an amazing fact. And so we can actually be in the driver's seat. We can play a role in the shaping of our own brain through the cultivation of these healthy habits of mind. And it's difficult to overstate the importance of this. This provides us with a mechanism, if you will, to help us understand how different practices of meditation may lead to enduring changes in our experience and our behavior and our brain function and other biological functions. So it's super important. Now there is a related, you might think of almost as an equivalent theme in the realm of genomics. And this is referred to as epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science of how our genes are regulated. So all of us have a sequence of base pairs which constitute our DNA. And for the most part, for most of us, that's not going to change over the course of our lifetimes, except under unusual circumstances. But what will change is the extent to which any gene is turned on or turned off. Our genes are highly dynamic in that way. And this is kind of amazing. You can think of genes having little volume controls that go from low to high. And there are many factors which influence the setting of those volume controls, including behavioral, environmental factors, our emotional demeanor, and so forth. Just to give an example, we know that the way a mother behaves toward her offspring can induce epigenetic changes in the offspring. And those epigenetic changes alter brain structure, brain chemistry, systemic biology, and our behavior and experience. And moreover, very recent research indicates that these epigenetic changes can actually be transmitted across at least a couple of generations. Now, some of you, I'm sure, have heard about the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which certainly occurs, and epigenetics is in part a mechanism responsible for that. And there's good scientific evidence to show that. I'd like to invite you to consider the possibility of the epigenetic transmission of awakening. Same mechanism, very different outcome. But all of the data suggests that it's possible. And so we and other scientists have published evidence in hard-nosed scientific journals showing meditation, particularly in long-term meditation practitioners, this is not something you see in beginning practitioners, but in long-term meditation practitioners, there are epigenetic changes that are induced by meditation practice. And those epigenetic changes influence many different systems in the brain and the body. And those epigenetic mechanisms may be passed down across generations. We don't know that latter piece that has not yet been investigated in this realm. It has been in the realm of trauma. But because it's been found in response to trauma, there's no reason to believe it wouldn't also be found in this positive way. So that's something really important to consider. So the third theme is related to these, and that is the bi-directional communication between the mind and brain and the body. Our minds are embodied. And we know that people who report higher levels of well-being are physically healthier. Now, this is not true of everyone, but if you look at large population-based studies, epidemiological studies, this is indeed what you find. And this leads to the conjecture that the intentional cultivation of well-being will result in changes in our physical health for the positive. Now, this is still an area that requires a lot more scientific research, but the evidence clearly suggests this. And if this is indeed true, it has really profound implications. And there's a whole corpus of scientific evidence on the changes in systemic biology, biology below the neck that's relevant to physical health, showing that certain kinds of meditation practices can have beneficial biological effects in these ways. And finally, the last theme that I'd like to mention is a theme that is probably the most controversial among these four. These three themes at this point in time are extremely well established. But the fourth is a little bit more controversial, although there is a very substantial corpus of scientific evidence that's growing that is supportive of this. And that is that each of us, every human being comes into the world with innate basic goodness. So what do I mean by that? I mean that when we come into the world as young infants, if we are given a choice, we will choose a pro-social alternative. We will choose a warm-hearted and cooperative interaction compared to one that might be selfish or aggressive. And why is that important? It's important for many different reasons, but it implies that qualities like kindness and compassion are not qualities that we need to somehow create de novo out of nowhere, but rather they're actually the basic nature of our mind. And when we engage in a practice to cultivate kindness and compassion, what we're actually doing is familiarizing ourselves with who we are. We're nurturing seeds that we've come into the world with. We're doing a bunch of work now looking at very rigorous measures of implicit bias. And we have data showing that both a combination of mindfulness and connection practices, loving kindness and compassion practices together are particularly effective in reducing implicit bias. And there's a lot of evidence to show that before about the age of three, three years, a toddler does not make any distinction based on skin color. Absolutely none. They're oblivious to it. And after roughly the age of three, those distinctions begin to be made. And so it's clear that we come in an unbiased state. And those biases are obviously learned. And I think that we have a moral obligation to provide skills to our children to resist the devastating impact of certain messages that they get from the media and other sources that inculcate these biases in them. And these biases, by the way, are also at the root of the achievement gap in the United States. One of the major and increasingly problematic issues in our education in the US is the growing gap in academic achievement between blacks and whites. And that achievement gap is substantially driven by what educators call a disciplinary gap, which is the disproportionate administration of harsh and punitive punishment toward members of racial and ethnic outgroups. And that is driven by implicit bias. And so I think that we have a moral obligation to do everything we can in our teacher education to prepare teachers to be as free of these biases as possible. Now, we're not going to be able to completely free ourselves of these unless you know we're fully awake. But short of that, we can reduce these biases. We know that, particularly through practices that strengthen connection. And implicit bias is so critically important for what's happening today in our country. We can improve school achievement, increase school achievement on hard nose metrics of grades and standardized tests. We can actually reduce healthcare costs, and there's a little bit of evidence to show this. We can improve teamwork and collaboration, we can reduce distraction, and we can increase productivity, focus, creativity, and resilience. We are doing a bunch of basic research on the impact of meditation on brain aging and on some of the key factors which are responsible for neurodegenerative diseases of aging. So, in a nutshell, here's the basics of that. All of our brains age, and we're not going to change that. Anyone who says anything different, they're selling you snake oil. So our brains are aging, and that's just a fact. However, the rate at which our brains age is very variable. And it turns out that if you take a large group of people, first of all, you can measure brain aging using MRI very objectively. And if you take a large group of people, on average, their brain age is going to be correlated with their chronological age. However, for some people, their brain is aging more quickly than their chronological age. And for other people, their brain is aging more slowly compared to their chronological age. We were talking earlier about Mingi Rinpoche. We actually did a case study of him because we had so many MRI scans. And it turns out that his brain is aging in the 99th point nine percentile in terms of the slowest rate of age-related changes. It is aging, but it is aging very slowly compared to a large group of age match controls. So this is one example. And so the other issue is that we know that one of the factors which is a trigger for neurodegeneration is neuroinflammation. So we know that there's inflammation in the body, and that plays a role in many chronic illnesses. There's also inflammation in the brain. And we now, for the first time, very, very recently, have ways of measuring inflammation in the brain non-invasively in humans. And there is reason to believe that a lot of the symptomatology, for example, in Alzheimer's disease, is associated not with the primary lesion, but with the inflammation that occurs around the lesion. The lesion is the deposition of what's called these amyloid deposits that muck up the brain. But that creates an inflammatory response. And if the inflammatory response is too large, that will actually take a toll. And it's the equivalent of chronic inflammation in the body. And so another thing that we're studying is this phenomenon of inflammation in the brain as we age and looking to see whether different kinds of meditation may influence this inflammation in the brain. Okay. I wanted to just say a little bit about the need right now. Before the pandemic, in a large study done in the US, 76% of adults reported themselves to be either moderately or severely lonely. Other research shows that distractibility is dramatically increasing. Rates of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder are skyrocketing among our youth. If you look at the rates of major depression over the last five years pre-pandemic, a very large database maintained by the Center for Disease Control, the rates have increased among women by 33% over the last five years. During the pandemic, a recent paper published within the last month shows that the rates of depression in certain age groups in the U.S. have tripled during the pandemic. And the pandemic has exacerbated many of these trends. If you look at rates of depression in teenagers, you see the same thing, and the trends are extremely disturbing. In the US today, there's more than one suicide every day among teenagers. In the last year, for which there are data, there are more than 50 suicides. I think it was for 2018 in the United States. So there's clearly an urgent need, and many of these problems can be traced, at least in part, to a failure to cultivate well-being. So we need to do everything we can to bring strategies which can be used upstream preventatively to help address this need. I want to read you a quote from this is someone who used to be the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the NIH institutes. This is the largest funding agency for mental health research in the world. And I know Tom very well. And he was director for 13 years. I want to read this quote to you. He said, I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders. And when I look back on that, I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs, I think $20 billion. I don't think we move the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I hold myself accountable for that. And one of the things that Tom was really a skeptic about when we first began our work was meditation. In fact, after our first paper on long-term meditation practitioners came out in 2004, Tom pulled me aside and he said, Richie, why are you wasting your time on that? We need you to do traditional research on psychiatric illness. And fast forward 10 years, 2014, both of us were in a dialogue together in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, talking about the importance of mindfulness. And this is just one of several data points to suggest that there has been a lot of movement in the mainstream scientific community around this. Now, I would encourage you to check out tryhealthyminds.org. We have an app that is out called the Healthy Minds Program. It's completely free. So I would encourage any of you who are interested to please try it, download it, give us your feedback. You can go to the website tryhealthyminds.org. So tryhealthymindsalloneword.org, and you can learn more about it. And you can join us by becoming a citizen scientist and donating your data so that we can better learn how to disseminate and engage wider and wider communities to bring these practices to different sectors of our world. And I want to end with this quote from the Dalai Lama. This was from a book that was on the best sellist for some time. The Dalai Lama said the systematic training of the mind, the cultivation of happiness, the genuine inner transformation by deliberately selecting and focusing on positive mental states and challenging negative mental states is possible because of the very structure and function of the brain. But the wiring in our brains is not static, not irrevocably fixed. Our brains are also adaptable.

Speaker 1 · 23:49Dr. Richie Davidson, I really appreciate your time on behalf of all of us. Deep bows. Thank you so much. We're very, very grateful for your time today. Thank you, Richie.