Self-Transformation Through Mindfulness | Dr. David Vago | TEDxNashville

Summary

The speaker explores the concept of activity-dependent plasticity, highlighting how the brain evolves through synaptic connections influenced by daily experiences. He emphasizes the role of mindfulness and meditation in shaping self-identity, improving mental habits, and enhancing well-being. Drawing from personal experiences and research, the speaker shares the transformative impact of mindfulness on anger, anxiety, and other emotions, while linking it to neuroplasticity. With insights from neuroscience and personal reflection, he invites the audience to consider how their thoughts and emotions shape who they become.

Takeaways

• 🧠 We are born with 86 billion neurons, and though we lose some throughout life, the brain changes through 'activity-dependent plasticity,' modifying its synaptic connections in response to experiences.
• 🔄 The brain's plasticity continuously alters our self-identity and impacts our health and longevity.
• 🧘 The speaker's research focuses on how mindfulness and meditation can transform mental habits and positively shape one's self and behavior.
• 🔬 The speaker studied rats' brains but shifted their focus to meditation and mindfulness, despite initial academic skepticism.
• 🌍 The Dalai Lama emphasized the speaker's responsibility to help build a peaceful world through scientific research on mindfulness.
• 🧠 Self-identity is constructed from moment-to-moment processes involving perception, awareness, and evaluation, occurring every 500 milliseconds.
• 💡 Mindfulness helps individuals gain meta-awareness, allowing them to observe mental habits and emotions like anger, without immediately reacting.
• 🔥 Chronic negative emotions like anger, anxiety, and sadness can lead to health issues like depression, cardiovascular disease, and even cellular aging.
• 🧘‍♀️ Mindfulness training showed improvements in attention and reduced rumination, particularly in patients with chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia.
• 🧠 Regular meditation can enhance brain networks involved in awareness and attention while slowing age-related brain atrophy.

Q & A

What is activity-dependent plasticity, and why is it important for brain function?

Activity-dependent plasticity is the process by which the brain is continually modified through the synaptic connections made in response to everyday experiences. This mechanism helps maintain mental habits, behaviors, and self-identity despite the loss of neurons over time.

How does meditation relate to activity-dependent plasticity?

Meditation enhances activity-dependent plasticity by influencing the brain's synaptic connections, allowing mental habits to transform in a positive way. Through mindful awareness, individuals can reshape their thought patterns, emotions, and behaviors.

What is mindful awareness, and how does it affect self-identity?

Mindful awareness is a way of paying attention in a watchful and discerning manner to what is happening in our minds and the external world. It contributes to the continual shaping of self-identity by influencing the brain's processes through moment-to-moment awareness.

How has research on mindfulness evolved since the year 2000?

Before 2000, there were only 39 peer-reviewed scientific articles on mindfulness. Since then, the field has grown significantly, with nearly 4,000 studies published. Research now explores changes in brain structure, brain function, and the impact of mindfulness on mental habits and emotions.

What was the Dalai Lama's message to the neuroscientists in 2010, and how did it influence their work?

The Dalai Lama emphasized the responsibility of neuroscientists to help build a happy, peaceful world. He encouraged them to use their experiments to convince others of the benefits of mindfulness, which motivated the speaker and others to focus on mindfulness research to support global well-being.

What brain regions are most consistently affected by mindfulness meditation?

The frontopolar cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) are most consistently affected. Meditation increases activity in the frontopolar regions and helps protect these areas from age-related atrophy, while decreasing activation in the PCC, which is linked to rumination.

What role does meta-awareness play in mindfulness, and how does it influence mental habits?

Meta-awareness refers to being aware of where our attention is at any given moment. In mindfulness, it serves as a wedge to help individuals become aware of and regulate mental habits. It can reduce the time spent on negative emotions like anger and allow more insight into habitual reactions.

What were the findings from the mindfulness study on fibromyalgia patients?

The study found that mindfulness training led to dramatic improvement in clinical symptoms for fibromyalgia patients. It reduced fear and avoidance at the nonconscious level and lessened rumination at the conscious level, suggesting mindfulness can improve attention and emotional regulation.

How does meditation protect the brain from age-related decline?

Research has shown that meditation increases activity in brain regions responsible for meta-awareness and sensory awareness, and protects these regions from normal age-related atrophy. Regular meditation helps maintain brain structure and function, delaying cognitive decline.

What is the significance of the Dhammapada quote, 'Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think,' in the context of the talk?

The Dhammapada quote highlights the idea that our thoughts and emotions continually shape our self-identity and brain structure through repeated processes. The speaker connects this to the concept of selfing, where each moment contributes to our evolving mental habits and future self.

Outlines

00:00

🧠 Understanding Brain Plasticity and the Role of Meditation

The speaker begins by explaining the concept of activity-dependent plasticity, where the brain's synaptic connections constantly change in response to experiences, forming our self-identity and mental habits. Despite losing neurons over time, these connections shape behaviors and influence health and longevity. The speaker then shares their academic journey, initially discouraged from studying meditation, only to later become a faculty member at Harvard Medical School researching meditation. An interaction with the Dalai Lama provided them with a lifelong purpose: to contribute to a peaceful world through meditation research.

05:04

🧘‍♂️ The Path of Meditation Research

In 2016, the speaker joined Vanderbilt University to lead meditation research aimed at understanding the mind, brain, and body. Their research focuses on how life experiences shape our self-identity, citing the Buddhist concept from the Dhammapada that 'we become what we think.' They explore how mental processes happen in rapid, unconscious sequences, with perception, sensory awareness, and evaluation occurring within milliseconds. This continual self-construction process reinforces mental habits and shapes both present and future behavior, influencing the individual's experience of reality.

10:10

🔥 Breaking Negative Emotional Patterns with Mindfulness

The speaker reflects on personal experiences with anger management and how meditation helped them develop meta-awareness of mental habits. Mindfulness provided them with the ability to observe emotional triggers, such as anger, and reduce the impulse to act on them. This led to better emotional regulation. The speaker extends this idea to other emotions like anxiety, fear, and sadness, which can negatively impact health. Chronic negative emotions are associated with risks of depression, cardiovascular disease, and even accelerated cellular aging. Mindfulness training helps break these patterns by shifting how we process emotions.

15:16

🧠 How Meditation Alters the Brain

The speaker describes the growing scientific research on mindfulness and its effects on brain structure and function, emphasizing four key regions. The frontopolar cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula are crucial in supporting meta-awareness and attentional control. Meditation strengthens these areas and protects them from age-related atrophy. On the other hand, the posterior cingulate cortex, associated with rumination, shows decreased activity in meditators. This research supports the idea that mindfulness enhances self-regulation and reduces repetitive, negative thought patterns, contributing to a healthier brain.

Keywords

💡Neurons

Neurons are the fundamental cells of the brain responsible for transmitting information through electrical and chemical signals. The video mentions that humans are born with approximately 86 billion neurons, and throughout life, we lose some while making relatively few new ones. This sets up the context for how brain changes occur through connections rather than neuron production.

💡Activity-dependent plasticity

Activity-dependent plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change and adapt based on experiences. This concept is key in explaining how mental habits and behaviors form and evolve over time, supporting the idea that our brain is constantly modified by the synaptic connections that respond to everyday experiences. It underscores how the brain maintains self-identity despite losing neurons.

💡Mindfulness

Mindfulness is described as a way of paying attention with watchfulness and discernment to what arises in the mind and the external world. The speaker relates mindfulness to meta-awareness, a practice that can reshape mental habits, reduce negative emotions, and enhance self-awareness. Mindfulness is central to the video’s exploration of how mental training can positively influence self-identity and brain function.

💡Self-identity

Self-identity refers to the thoughts, emotions, desires, and mental habits that make up who we are. The video explains that self-identity is continuously constructed by moment-to-moment processes of 'selfing,' shaped by our thoughts, experiences, and emotions over time. Mindfulness and meditation are presented as tools to modify and positively influence self-identity.

💡Meta-awareness

Meta-awareness is the awareness of where our attention is directed at any given moment. The video illustrates how mindfulness practices cultivate meta-awareness, enabling individuals to observe their mental habits without becoming entangled in them. This heightened awareness allows for the regulation of emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety.

💡Rumination

Rumination refers to the process of dwelling on negative thoughts or emotions. The video highlights that excessive rumination can be harmful, contributing to mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Through mindfulness training, individuals can reduce rumination by learning to observe their thoughts and let them pass without judgment.

💡Frontoparietal control network

The frontoparietal control network is a group of brain regions involved in attentional control and meta-awareness. The video explains how mindfulness meditation strengthens this network, allowing individuals to remain aware of their thoughts and bodily sensations while flexibly switching between internal and external focus. This network plays a key role in the benefits of meditation on brain function.

💡Posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)

The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is a brain region associated with self-reflection and rumination. In the video, mindfulness meditation is shown to decrease activation in the PCC, helping individuals break the cycle of rumination and reduce the impact of negative emotions on their mental well-being.

💡Neurophenomenology

Neurophenomenology is an approach that combines modern neuroimaging techniques with first-person introspective methods to study the brain. The speaker uses this term to describe their research on mapping the meditative mind, showing how different brain regions function during mindfulness and meditation practices.

💡Chronic stress

Chronic stress refers to prolonged exposure to stressors that can negatively impact mental and physical health. The video discusses how chronic stress, particularly linked to emotions like anxiety and anger, can shrink brain regions and weaken immune function. Mindfulness is presented as a way to mitigate the effects of chronic stress and promote healthier emotional regulation.

Highlights

The brain has 86 billion neurons, and throughout life, we lose about 2 billion neurons, but brain plasticity adapts through 150 trillion synaptic connections.

Activity-dependent plasticity is the key mechanism that allows the brain to continuously change and adapt to experiences.

Meditation and mindfulness can positively influence self-identity and mental habits, as demonstrated by neuroscientific research.

In 2002, the speaker faced skepticism about researching meditation, but went on to become a Harvard Medical School faculty member studying meditation using neuroimaging.

The Dalai Lama encouraged the speaker and others to contribute to building a happy, peaceful world through meditation research.

Mindful awareness is described as a way of paying attention that is continually watchful and discerning, helping to understand the self.

The brain constructs self-identity through moment-to-moment processes, integrating perception, sensory awareness, and evaluation.

Studies show that anger, anxiety, and fear can have destructive effects on mental and physical health, including increasing the risk of heart disease.

Mindfulness training can improve mental habits of attention and reduce fear, anxiety, and rumination, particularly for individuals with conditions like fibromyalgia.

Neuroimaging has revealed that meditation can strengthen brain regions associated with awareness, attention, and emotional regulation, while reducing activity in areas linked to rumination.

Research has shown that mindfulness can protect brain regions from age-related atrophy, particularly in the prefrontal cortex.

The speaker shares personal experiences with anger and how mindfulness helped manage emotions by fostering meta-awareness.

Mindfulness helps reduce time spent in judgment and evaluation, allowing individuals to experience emotions without acting on them impulsively.

Neurophenomenology, combining modern neuroimaging and introspective methods, has been used to map the meditative mind.

Every thought and emotion can reshape the brain, offering an opportunity to change mental habits and improve emotional well-being.

Transcripts

Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman

Thank you.

We are all born

with a brain that has 86 billion neurons.

And throughout our life, we make relatively few new neurons.

In fact, we lose about 2 billion neurons throughout the course of our lifetime.

So you may wonder -

if we're losing billions of neurons

and we're not making a lot of new neurons,

what's changing in the brain

to support all those mental habits and behaviors

that make up our self-identity?

Well, the answer is "activity-dependent plasticity."

This is the function by which the brain is continually modified

through the 150 trillion cell-to-cell synaptic connections

that are made in response to your everyday experiences.

One main point that I hope you take home today

is that not only are they contributing to your self-identity,

but they are continually changing your brain

and they are strongly influencing your health and longevity.

I hope to also demonstrate

that a systematic form of mental training involving meditation

can potentially transform your self and your mental habits in a positive way.

In 2002, I was a graduate student in cognitive neurosciences -

that was me.

I was studying the brains of rats

to better understand the neural circuitry of learning and memory.

And activity-dependent plasticity

was a really important concept for studying memory,

but I was interested in how that concept could be applied

towards a neuroscientific understanding of the self

through the lens of meditation and mindful awareness.

Now, mindful awareness

can be simply thought of as a way of paying attention

in a way that is continually watchful and discerning

for what is arising and passing in our minds and in the external world.

Now, when I was in graduate school,

there was barely any science of mindfulness.

In fact, before the year 2000,

there was the grand total

of 39 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the topic.

So for good reason, maybe, my mentor sat me down one day and said,

"Dave, you will not be successful in academia by focusing on meditation.

Forget about all that Zen stuff."

And I walked out of his office feeling rather disappointed, discouraged.

But it did not deter me from this calling.

Fast-forward 10 years -

I was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School,

studying meditation in a neuroimaging laboratory.

And about that time,

I was invited to present my research directly to the Dalai Lama,

along with five other emerging leaders in the field from around the world.

(Applause)

Thank you. That is very kind.

Yes, this was really an amazing opportunity.

And the advice he gave the six of us

is something I will never forget for my lifetime.

He said, pointing his finger at each one of us,

"You each have the great responsibility

for helping to build a happy, peaceful world.

Millions of people want a happy, peaceful world

but are lacking the knowledge of how to do so.

Through carrying your experiment month by month, year by year,

you will gain evidence to convince others.

I will watch you,

whether you are really -

whether you are really helping to build a happy, peaceful world or not."

He then jokingly threatened, hopefully,

(Laughter)

that he would be watching from beyond the grave

and that even if he were in hell,

he would come back as a demon and hunt us down

to make sure we were doing this work.

(Laughter)

No joke.

Well, hopefully.

Now, when the Dalai Lama points his finger at you

and threatens you in that way - or challenges you, really -

you can't really say no.

So aside from providing a sense of purpose and meaning for me,

that experience really provided

a pretty solid research career plan for the next 30 years.

So fast-forward to 2016.

I was provided the opportunity to come here to Nashville,

to Vanderbilt University,

to direct research at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

So my interest in the self through the lens of meditation

comes back full circle to today,

where I have the resources and the support

to do the science I originally intended to do back in graduate school.

I'm currently leading a team of scientists

to continue mapping the meditative brain -

or meditative mind -

and to better understand

what a flourishing mind, brain, and body looks like

from the neurobiological, the psychological, and social levels.

So as we contemplate the self together today,

I want you -

well, I invite you to think about how all of your life experiences,

even the guy all the way up there,

have led to who you've become today

and to explore

how all of your thoughts and emotions that you're having right now, today,

may lead to who you become tomorrow.

The Dhammapada, one of the greatest known collections of the Buddha,

describes

"Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think."

The basic idea here is from birth to the present day,

our self, our experience of being someone,

our wants, our fears, our desires, our hopes, our values, our expectations,

our whole self-identity

is continually constructed by a string of moment-to-moment processes of selfing.

[Selfing - A String of Moments]

And these moments can be further broken down

into processes of perception, sensory awareness, and evaluation -

all of which happen on a timescale of half a second, 500 milliseconds.

And through neurophysiological research,

it's been found that the brain stem and the subcortical regions

are helping to filter out information that is irrelevant to you

and to prepare your mind for action.

Now, this part of our mental experience

is all happening without conscious awareness.

In the second half of each moment,

our primary sensory cortices,

located throughout the outer surface of our brain,

is integrating information coming from perception and awareness

and preparing inferences and predictions to inform our behavior.

And only by the end of each moment - around 300 to 500 milliseconds -

does awareness arise,

and then we begin to evaluate what it is we're experiencing.

And that evaluation takes place in aspects of our prefrontal cortex.

So this string of moments is sustaining our mental habits and dispositions

that are self-conditioning and self-perpetuating through repetition.

It's continually informing our present state of awareness

and coloring our memories for the past

and making predictions for the future.

And this basic idea here really supports the idea

that this little guy here has had about three billion moments in 42 years

to become the guy who's standing before you today.

And somewhere along this string of moments,

I developed a bad habit - maybe you can relate.

When I was eight years old,

my mother gave me a punching bag to deal with my anger and frustration.

Thank you, Mom.

This was effective on the short term.

I would go down in my basement

and hit that bag every time I got angry or frustrated.

Then, eventually, as you can imagine,

that punching bag broke and got thrown out with the trash.

But the conditioning did not go away.

I never hit any people,

but I continued to hit walls and doors and windows.

I even have a scar on my hand to go with it.

A little over a decade later, when I was 20 years old -

my sophomore year of college -

I had the opportunity to go on a meditation retreat -

a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

First time.

Not because of my anger but more so for my curiosity about Buddhism

and my interest in studying the mind.

This was a profound experience for me on multiple levels.

For one, it provided a signpost in my life,

leading me to the path that I'm on today.

It also provided a mindfulness-based skill of meta-awareness of my mental habits.

Now, meta-awareness refers to an awareness of where our attention is

and where it's going at any moment.

And when we practice using a mindfulness-based approach,

it acts as a wedge to open up our minds

and provide insight into the mental habits that are arising again and again.

And for my anger, it provided awareness

to all the triggers and impulses and feelings and thoughts

that are associated with my anger.

Now, the state of mindfulness

is often described as that wedge of meta-awareness,

and if inserted deeply enough into our minds,

as described by Buddhist scholar Andy Lenski,

it will open our minds up to wisdom.

And wisdom is subtly different from awareness

in the sense that it can be described

as the direct experience with our mental habits.

For my anger, it was the sensory awareness in my body:

it was the tightness, the clenched fists, the impulse or readiness to act.

That was my anger.

The idea here is that when we practice mindfulness,

the awareness and the wisdom work together,

helping to reduce the time spent in judgment and evaluation,

to be situated in the present moment with our sensory awareness,

and to allow the emotions like anger to arise and pass

without the impulse to act.

Now, aside from anger,

there are other thoughts and emotions

that can have negative impacts on our health and well-being.

Anxiety, fear, worry, and sadness

all have the tendency to be destructive mental habits and dispositions,

but only when they are happening with great frequency,

when they put the people around you, including yourself, at risk for injury,

or they interfere with your social functioning.

It turns out that these three dispositions, specifically,

have the most extensive scientific data to support their role as risk factors

for the onset of clinical levels

of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease,

and have even been shown

to increase the rate of cellular aging at the level of your DNA.

One study by the Centers for Disease Control

found that an angry disposition

increases your chances - your risk - of dying prematurely of a heart attack

by two and a half times.

And there's a whole number of studies

showing that these three dispositions and the associated chronic stress

can have negative effects on your immune system functioning,

on sensitization of pain pathways,

and atrophy -

shrinking of the brain regions responsible for regulating these negative emotions.

So it becomes this really bad cycle

because if you don't have the ability to regulate the emotions,

well, it's going to be much harder to regulate them in the future.

So one of my studies that I wanted to share with you today

introduced mindfulness training to a group of women diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disorder

associated with widespread muscular tenderness

and chronic fatigue

as well as a host of other clinical symptoms.

We found that these patients

had a high level of anxiety and fear associated with their pain.

And when we gave them mindfulness training,

we found that there was dramatic improvement

in all their clinical symptoms.

So that was good.

But we were interested in what the mechanism was

that may be contributing to this clinical improvement.

So we gave these patients a behavioral task

that assessed how they paid attention to pain-related words

at the nonconscious perceptual level

and the more conscious evaluative level of processing.

We could do this

by varying the duration of time that we showed them the words.

When we showed them the words for 100 milliseconds,

they did not have a lot of time to process the words consciously,

but we could observe

whether or not they looked towards or away from the words.

At 500 milliseconds, they did have time to process the words consciously,

and we could observe

whether they got stuck thinking and ruminating upon the words.

So we found two major differences

between the groups that got exposed to mindfulness training

and those who did not.

Those who were untrained avoided those pain-related words

at the nonconscious perceptual level.

And those who were trained in mindfulness looked towards the words,

suggesting that they had less fear and avoidance

and more approach-related behavior towards their pain.

This is the stage of processing

that they didn't have any awareness that they were doing this.

The untrained group also had a tendency

to ruminate or get stuck at the later stages of processing,

whereas those trained in mindfulness were able to see the word, let it go,

and complete the task more readily.

So these results demonstrate

that mindfulness training has the ability to improve our mental habits of attention

at both the conscious and nonconscious levels.

When we do neuroimaging,

we take a modern neuroimaging

and a first-person, introspective methods approach

in our lab and in others,

and we can call this

"a neurophenomenological approach" to mapping the meditative mind.

And this identifies the brain networks and systems of functioning

that are supporting mindfulness-based practices.

Now, I said before

that there weren't many studies on mindfulness before the year 2000.

Well, since 2000, there have been close to 4,000 studies on the topic.

And of those 4,000 studies,

21 have looked at changes in brain structure

and 80 have looked at brain function

in a cross-section of novices who have been trained for the short term

and expert meditators.

And although there have been some reported differences

between styles of meditation practice

and between novices and experts,

I want to bring to your attention

the most common and most consistent findings

that are found across all the studies in four brain regions -

to make it easy -

that are changing in brain structure and function.

The frontopolar cortex is the most anterior part of our brain,

right behind your foreheads.

It is also thought to be the most highly evolved part of the human brain

and responsible for supporting meta-awareness.

And in conjunction with the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

and the anterior insula,

these three regions work together in a complex attentional network,

referred to as the "frontoparietal control network,"

to allow yourself to be continuously aware of your body sensations

and to flexibly switch between internal mental processing

and thinking in the outside world.

Okay?

And so one really interesting finding here

is that we find in our lab that the more one meditates,

the more activity one gets in this network of brain regions.

And other labs have found that the more one meditates,

the more protected these regions are

from the normal age-related atrophy that we all get.

Unfortunately, all our brains are shrinking in size after age 20.

Sorry.

But if you meditate, you protect them.

And one other region that you see decreases in activation

is the posterior cingulate cortex, or PCC.

That's a major node in a larger functional network

associated with self-reflection and rumination.

So meeting the challenge set forth by the Dalai Lama,

the science is beginning to emerge

to support a role for mindfulness and meditation

in improving meta-awareness

and decreasing an emphasis on ruminative types of processing,

especially in the context of high cognitive demand,

and also to transform the brain and our mental habits.

So we've learned that every thought and emotion

is leading to transforming our brain,

literally re-sculpting our brain,

at every moment.

And although we do not have any control of what has happened in the past,

we have the power in this moment and going forward

to choose how you pay attention to your thoughts and emotions.

Every moment then becomes an opportunity

for you to change the way we perceive the world

and ease the burden

by which there is potential for destructive emotions

like anxiety, anger, and sadness.

So I leave you with the question:

"What will you fill your mind with?"

Thank you.

(Applause)