Science of mindfulness
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The document discusses the science behind mindfulness. It begins by addressing the hype around mindfulness and defining it as paying attention to the present moment intentionally without judgment. It then discusses the benefits of mindfulness, including psychological, interpersonal, and physical benefits. The document also explores the neuroscience behind mindfulness and how mindfulness meditation can help reduce ruminative thinking by weakening the default mode network and strengthening the prefrontal cortex.
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Science of mindfulness
- 1. The Science of Mindfulness Dr. Don Colonne, MD www.infusehealth.ca
- 2. Agenda The Hype Myths and facts Benefits NeuroScience
- 4. Google 7-weeks course combining mindfulness & emotional intelligence. Offered 4 times a year Long waiting list New York Times, April 28, 2012
- 5. Apple http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2015/10/26/what-kind-of-buddhist-was-steve- jobs-really/ Employees enjoy: 30 minutes to meditate Meditation classes Meditation room on-site
- 7. In the army / special forces
- 8. In Schools
- 9. In Universities / Research
- 10. Our Teachers
- 11. By 2050
- 14. Mindfulness : Paying attention to the present moment with intention and without judgment. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn
- 16. What it’s NOT A religion, rite or ritual A spiritual path Positive thinking A relaxation exercise
- 18. MetaCognition
- 19. “Panacea?”
- 20. Types of Mindfulness Practice Formal Practice: Observing what is (paying attention) Nourishing Positive Informal Practice Showing up to your life
- 21. Why the hype?
- 22. Mindfulness Benefits 1. Psychological 2. Interpersonal 3. Physical
- 23. Psychological benefits Minimizes suffering: stress, anxiety, depression, reactivity, etc. Maximizes fulfillment Increases: Self/ emotional regulation Innovation and creativity Attention span Self-actualization Overall wellbeing & Self esteem
- 25. Physical benefits Balances sympathetic nervous system (adrenaline / cortisol)
- 26. We didn’t evolve to be happy… NEGATIVITY BIAS
- 27. We evolved to think
- 28. Thinking a problem? > 60,000 thoughts per day. 2% body weight - 20% O2 consumption Less in sleep, and in deep meditative states Present moment thoughts??
- 29. A human mind is a wandering mind 2250 adults (58.8% male, 73.9% residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years) 3 Questions Outcomes: 47% of our waking hours the mind has wandered away from the task at hand. People were less happy when their minds were wondering than when not. Source: Killingsworth & Gilbert, Science 12, Nov. 2010
- 31. On Line working memory 7 +/- 2 items - Ram “Off-line” Massive hard-drive hi speed parallel processor 100,000,000,000 neurons 50,000,000,000,000 connections
- 32. Where are your thoughts directed?
- 33. Ruminative Thinking How things are right now vs. how we want them to be / think they should be Works well in the impersonal, external world (e.g. problem solving); In the emotional / internal world they increase and maintain the emotional state, while arriving at no solution (“spinning your wheels”). 33
- 34. Solution?
- 36. Precious Organ: The Brain
- 37. Neuroplasticity The ability of the CNS to remodel itself Neuroplasticity is how we adapt to changing conditions, learn new facts, and develop new skills. Constantly occurring; brain is always changing.
- 38. Neuroplasticity (cont’d) Synaptic plasticity: changes in strength of synapse connections Synaptogenesis: Creation and removal of whole synapses Neuronal migration: Neurons moving to different area’s of the brain Neurogenesis: Creation of neurons
- 40. Can thinking change the brain? Piano study
- 41. P.E. Sharp, Journal of Consciousness studies, 18, 2011 Attractor Networks
- 42. Seeing clearly? Our minds add information that’s not there, to create familiar shapes and images…
- 43. … or ignore information that is there Seeing clearly?
- 44. Main Players
- 47. The “Amygdala Hijack” Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, 1996
- 48. Cerebral (Neo) Cortex (“evolved brain”)
- 50. Default Mode Network (DMN) Marcus Raichle, 2001
- 51. Cost of hyperactive DMN
- 52. What is your lack of focus costing you? Work Relationships Mood Health Personal development Etc.
- 53. What if you could switch off your DMN?
- 54. From this… Destruction of Conditioned Attractor Networks
- 55. …to this
- 56. Creative / innovative thinking
- 57. Questions? I’m here to help you succeed! info@infusehealth.ca For more resources visit: www.infusehealth.ca
Editor's Notes
- Encourage to ask questions, but preferably at the end (take notes) Give credits to Don and Christie Explain this is the only lecture, other sessions will be very different in format. Added this lecture as we realized it helps very intelligent people embrace very simple looking practices. About me: I have been quite a seeker for most of my life – I started my 3rd career in my early 30’s in my search for meaning, fulfillment and an attempt to express my fullest potential. I found all of that in my current – and probably my last – career: naturopathic medicine. I practice out of Burlington @ infuse integrative medicine, and have a special interest in anything related to the mind and mood. I started my professional career as a physio and found myself bored within 1 year of practice. So I decided to spice things up a bit by working oversees, in Southeast Africa
- I’m sure most of you have heard the term ‘mindfulness’ these days (show of hands)
- Spike in interest Mindfulness is quite a hype… (show examples of fields in which its used, incl SIY and Google searches graph, graph on studies).
- Evolved into the SIY Institute
- Mindfulness in health care: hospitals using it to treat pain, anxiety, and more
- The army / special forces: working under high pressure
- Respected Universities around the world, incl Oxford, Dublin, Aberdeen, Geneva
- Mindfulness teachers come in all shapes and sizes: Dr. Jon Kabat Zin (PhD in molecular biology) – brought mindfulness to mainstream medicine; MBSR – started with chronic pain patients. Dr. Zindel Segal, cognitive psychologist & professor at UoT, co-founded MBCT (based on Kabat Zinns work), Chade Meng – Googles jolly good fellow: combined MBSR and emotional intelligence into SIY programs. Mind & Life Institute – dialogue between the worlds great contemplative traditions and modern science. Dalai Lama, Dr. Richard Davidson – Dalai Lama asked him why don’t you do research on healthy brains/ brains of meditators? Results blew him away – EEG, fMRI Dr. Daniel Goleman – psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence
- Not a passing hype but here to stay. At par with physical exercise by 2050.
- But: does everyone know what it truly is? Anyone able to give a definition? Ask the audience for feedback
- Present moment: includes your own thoughts, feelings, whats happening in your body and mind – how they are constantly reacting / responding to the external environment. No judgement: objectively, non-reactively Imagine watching your own thoughts float by as if it’s a movie. Exploring anger with curiosity
- Introspection: The examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes. What it is: training of the mind – to be more focused, more alert, less reactive, less lost in ruminative thinking (instead very clear thinking)_ and more creative.
- Dispelling some myths: A spiritual practice (not any more than eating healthy and working out – maintaining a healthy body and mind). A secular practice that was first described in eastern contemplative practices, then confirmed by modern science.
- Gamma activity indicates a constellation of neurons binding together for the first time in the brain to create a new neural network pathway. This is the creation of a new idea. Gamma ranges enhanced by: buddhist meditation (mindfulness), sustained focused attention, introspective awareness Lower frequencies: other forms of meditation/ visualization, TM, chanting and mantra induced meditation, relaxation, hypnosis
- Thoughts as mental events, rather than facts. Objectively examine your own thoughts
- But…. What’s the big deal? Why is this beneficial? Why is it so popular? What are people looking for? - To be a little happier, calmer, less stressed out or anxious, more connected to life / present moment. A better/ more pleasant person, To increase attention span, be more creative, more resilient to stress / working under pressure, curiousity – anyone wants to share? Why did you sign up for this course / decide to give up your lunch hour for 10 Mondays in a row?
- Thinking can cause stress response (give example: butterflies, heart rate, sweating, etc) – no actual but a perceived threat. Definition of stress – doesn’t have be perceived as unpleasant Acute (like Lucy) vs chronic Cortisol crosses BBB (adrenaline doesn’t) and after 21 days of exposure to stress neurons start dying (starts at hippocampus – new learning = most sensitive)
- Speaking of adrenaline … Fight or Flight: chronic vs acute Negativity Bias: Didn’t evolve to be happy, but to be cautious – the not so cautious died – velcro (STICKY) and teflon: (SLIPPERY) negatives stick, positives bounce off – eg criticism vs compliment – which will you remember/ focus on when you go home that evening? Good news: Being happy is a skill that can be learned
- Who is happier?
- People who are in the moment are happier. (source: a wondering mind is an unhappy one – Scientific American) App: what were you doing, was the mind on the task and was it pleasant or unpleasant or neutral. 2,250 participants. Present moment thoughts: only in emergency situations, dangerous sports, elite performance (eg musician). Thoughts are more often about something negative than positive (negativity bias: something is not right).
- Real world sample via i Phone app Database: www.trackyourhappiness.org 3 Questions How are you feeling right now? What are you doing right now? Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?” (no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; or yes, something unpleasant). Conclusion: The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement (that allows people to learn, reason, and plan) that comes at an emotional cost.
- More Creativity when accessing the “Off-Line” hard drive. Working memory: performing functions Can have High efficient computer, but if you have poor RAM can’t utilize rest of resources (or it will be very slow). RAM is needed to run operating software. Online RAM doesn’t save info – needs to be saved on offline hard drive Meditation/ attention training increases RAM. Working memory easily depleted after attention demanding task, fragile and susceptible to stress/ emotional state. Can be hijacked by 5 senses and DMN (mind)
- We’ve come this far because of our brain, and have achieved miraculous things… but we have paid a price – lost our ability to simply be, bliss out, chill, be happy and content, connected to intuition – everything happens in our heads (through language)
- Eg: Breakup of relationship
- Whats the difference with other attention training techniques? – Not only does it enhance your focus…
- Amazing organ – the only one that can completely regenerate itself in response to its environment. A process called neuroplasticity.
- Neuroplasticity: The brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment. Synapse: a junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.
- Heb’s law: Neurons that fire together wire together: if two neurons are active at the same time, the synapses between them are strenghtened. Reinforcing routines and habitual thought patterns. A phenomenon known as long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic strength has been found to exist at synapses throughout many brain regions, and this form of long-lasting, activity-dependent plasticity typically follows Hebb’s rule, requiring precisely-timed co-activation of the pre- and post-synaptic elements
- “Thinking is movement confined to the brain”. Cardboard example – formation of a crease Control group: just thinks of playing the piano without visualizing the keys Mental practice: visualizes the keys without touching them
- – Each circle represents a neural element. – they don’t all fire (eventhough brain has the capacity) – brain tries to be efficient, but you don’t see reality as it is. Becomes more and more difficult to see things any other way (rigidity). Thick arrows (#2-4) show strengthened synaptic connections. The thin ones for the initial learning disappear. Generalization: Here, because the synaptic connections involved in the original learning have become so strong, activation of even a subset of the original neurons causes a reinstatement of the whole pattern. Something slightly similar triggers the whole attracter network (eg PTSD)
- Our minds fill in missing information to create familiar shapes and images. Einstellung effect: when previous experience in solving similar problems triggers an initial idea on how to solve a current problem. This idea prevents the consideration of alternatives, even when they are more optimum.
- Unable to see 2x “the”: efficient or rigid (can’t see reality as it is)? Inattentional blindness
- Let’s look at which structures are involved and prevent as from seeing clearly and creatively (stuck in a rod) and might need some re-wiring/ re-condiitoning
- Neo Cortex (“evolved brain”)
- Amygdala: - Scans all environmental and bodily sensations for signs of potential threats and danger to the organism.. Receives info from hippocampus (memories) on which it bases its threat evaluation. Triggers feeling of discomfort, frustration, anxiety, anger, fear, panic - fight & flight or freeze reaction to protect the organism from harm. Triggers Hypothalamus: HPA-axis to release stress hormones. Thalamus: central station: processes all senses, except smell.
- Emotional responses from people which are immediate and overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has triggered a much more significant emotional threat. Emotional brain takes over cognitive/ rational brain and acts first. Mindfulness helps prolong the time between stimulus and response (and respond rather than react). The amygdala is the trigger point for the fight, flight, or freeze response. When these circuits perceive a threat, they flood the body with stress hormones that do several things to prepare us for an emergency. Blood shunts away from the organs to the limbs; that’s the fight or flee. But the response is also cognitive—and, in modern life this is what matters most, it makes some shifts in how the mind functions. Attention tends to fixate on the thing that is bothering us, that’s stressing us, that we’re worried about, that’s upsetting, frustrating, or angering us. That means that we don’t have as much attentional capacity left for whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing or want to be doing. In addition, our memory reshuffles its hierarchy so that what’s most relevant to the perceived threat is what comes to mind most easily—and what’s deemed irrelevant is harder to bring to mind. That, again, makes it more difficult to get things done than we might want. Plus, we tend to fall back on over-learned responses, which are responses learned early in life—which can lead us to do or say things that we regret later. It is important to understand that the impulses that come to us when we’re under stress—particularly if we get hijacked by it—are likely to lead us astray.
- We’re spending a great deal of time and energy processing and responding to our senses – even in our sleep (eg swopping a mosquito) Mindfulness turns inward, away from external sensual input. Prefrontal: Higher brain functions – self consciousness: it is I who am perceiving
- Executive Network (externally oriented attention): demanding, focused mental activity (eg solving a math problem) - crucial to working memory and cognitive control of thought, emotion and behaviour. Default Mode Network (internally oriented attention): Self-consciousness – thoughts about you/ your story, running commentary / constant mind chatter = the conditioned mind. Evaluates things from a highly self-centred perspective of whether they’re likely to be good, bad, or indifferent. Connected to hippocampus (memories) - The medial prefrontal cortex could then evaluate those memories from an introspective viewpoint. Salience Network: “The operator” Detection of internal and external stimuli to direct behaviour with the goal of maintaining homeostasis (balance within the organsim). Important interface between emotion and cognition, and in the conversion of feelings into intentions and actions. Important for advanced functions, such as controlling one’s own emotions, concentrating on solving problems, recognizing one’s own mistakes, and making adaptive responses to changing conditions. Anterior insula: mediates switching between engagement of the central executive network and disengagement of the default mode network. When unbalanced: cognitive dysfunction (in the case of the central executive network), altered arousal and interoception (in the case of the salience network) and altered self-referential processing (in the case of the default mode network).
- Overall O2 consumption remains the same when DMN is active vs when focusing on specific task (blue areas). Confirmed a human mind is a wandering mind. “The brain is a very expensive organ, but nobody had asked deeply what this cost is all about.” Raichle (neuroscientist) and a handful of others are finally tackling this fundamental question – what exactly is the idling brain up to, anyway? The DMN provides the brain with an “inner rehearsal” for considering future actions and choices. Day dreaming: the ultimate tool for incorporating lessons learned in the past into our plans for the future. Running through future scenarios helps us achieve outcomes we want – and avoid ones we do not, perhaps as a direct result of learning from memories of past mistakes. So important is this exercise, it seems, that the brain engages in it whenever possible, breaking off only when it has to divert its limited supply of blood, oxygen and glucose to a more urgent task. In support of this idea, Raichle points out that the default network constantly chatters with the hippocampus. It also devours huge amounts of glucose, way out of proportion to the amount of oxygen it uses. Raichle believes that rather than burning this extra glucose for energy it uses it as a raw material for making the amino acids and neurotransmitters it needs to build and maintain synapses, the very stuff of memory. “It’s in those connections where most of the cost of running the brain is,” says Raichle. https://autoimmunethyroid.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/the-default-brain-network/ The exact same area of the brain in all participants would turn off when focusing on a particular task – first thought of as random noise, but the patterns were too consistent. Would turn on when doing “nothing” https://autoimmunethyroid.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/the-default-brain-network/
- Time traveling Lack of focus Reactivity Overwhelm Mindful: ability to switch, respond skillfully
- DMN Salience network + 4) Central Executive network
- More synchronized – seeing things more clearly, as they are. Still capable of all skills developed as an adult.
- Thinking outside of habitual thought patterns. DMN/ exective mode can dampen “innate intelligence” – EUREKA moments didn’t come by thinking, just hit. – often after a period of rest. “Gamma activity indicates a constellation of neurons binding together for the first time in the brain to create a new neural network pathway. This is the creation of a new idea. Immediately following that gamma spike, the new idea pops into our consciousness, which we identify as the Aha! moment.” The gamma burst was preceded by an Alpha lull in activity. It appears there might be some basis for purposely quieting the mind and slowing the brain waves in order to consciously generate Gamma waves.