Thank you very much.
and to give you a taste of the It's a pleasure to be here today
discuss its implications for work that we've been doing, and
broad domain of spiritual care. wI don't know the details ofhe
people's background here. And I may drift into things
a little bit technical. But I'll try to skip over them
if I see some glazed eyes,
at the end for questions, and which I suspect will be time
particularly interesting. So what I'm going to talk about
today is our research on
for spiritual care in healthcare meditation and what it may imply
And I want to frame this settings in particular.
in which this work is occurring. in the larger context
the Time Magazine issue on the Science of Happiness
that was published about
of our work was featured. This kind of stuff is very much
in the news.
of a National Geographic. And this photograph
was taken in my lab.
who is being set up Thto have his brain monitorednk,
while he engages in particular
This is the cover of a program, ka meeting, a small meeting,s.
that I was asked to organize
at his home in India for the Dalai Lama that was held
Neuroplasticity in the idea on that our brains can changety.
in response to experience,
to training. can change in response
one of the most central Andfindings, if you will,ly
or most central themes
over the last decade. There are many different
mechanisms of neuroplasticity that have been discovered,
but the way that we think about the impact of certain kinds
of practices, like meditation,
behavior and experience, as it may affect an individual's
plastic changes in the brain. isThe work of this kind,n
I believe, will place this on a much firmer scientific footing
so that the healthcare
take these practices much more establishment will indeed
mechanism for them will be seriously, because a scientific
This is just some pictures much more well understood.
which was held a couple from thof years ago. India,
And speaking in the hot seat
is truly an amazing and unusual experience,
different than any other
This is what the room kinlooks like there.alk.
In fact, I just got back
We had a meeting with the Dalai Lama at Emory university
on the theme of compassion
where we showcased some of and depression,
in that area. It was really a spectacularlye
successful and interesting
in attendance. meeting with about 3,500 people
that I want to make in my talk So, there are two points
The first point is that people today, two big points.
of happiness, and things related differ in their levels
like loving kindness to it, including qualities
And these differences are associated with different
underlying biological characteristics.
The second big point that I will make is that happiness,
compassion and loving kindness
as the product of skills that can be enhanced in training.
And that this training induces
And these changes also have peffects on the body in ways.
that may be consequential for physical health.
So those are really the two broad points
that I want to make.
a footnote to these two points. I want to remind all of you
though, that in our country in particular, in addition
to being a state, or a trait, or a skill, happiness
is an inalienable right.
not so apparent in the current environment,
and with our current
But these indeed are the words political administration.
which you all know. But it doesn't hurt to remind us
that this is one of the founding
our country is based. Now I want to just very briefly
show you at the outset
like this are not just that happiness, and qualities
but they also have consequences for morbidity and mortality.
This is from a Finnish
a number of years ago lwith about 30,000 individualsne
who were followed over
where investigators monitored thetheir level of happiness.od,
And people here are divided from very happy
to very unhappy,
this 20-year period. and then followed over
to be very unhappy People who reported themselves
were more than ten times likely to actually commit suicide.
So the qualities of happiness are something to take seriously.
This is a more recent article that was published in the
proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
from a group in the U.K., where they were specifically
monitoring levels of happiness
specific immune, endocrine and well-being, and looking at
that are very importantly and related to health.ices
In this large sample, they found that individual's
level of happiness
with each of these domains, and suggests that, again,
these qualities have potentially
for health. And so it's not just trying
to make a patient feel better subjectively, trying
to increase their well-being, but that these changes
that you may be able
will likely change the brain to induce in patients
on their biology, which may be and have downstream effects
So that is a central theme beneficial for health.
I want to just show you at the beginning some fun slides
that relate to this issue of the malleability
of happiness
In the next three slides, anI'm going to show youcs.
are based on real data. I promise you,
I did not make them up. But they serve to illustrate
a very important point. So we're going to ask
the question whether social and economic factors
modulate our level of happiness.
is whether marriage Sbuys you happiness.n
And here's the answer.
at this point, again, these are real data based on
tens of thousands of people.
of life satisfaction, a proxy for happiness.
At the time you get married,
in your happiness. there's a big boost
as you get further But look what happens
So at five years-plus, from the time you get married.
than before you started. you're actually doing worse
I recently celebrated my 31st wedding anniversary,
and I'm very happily married. So there are many violations
of this normal pattern. But this is in fact, what
the data say in our culture.
is whether widowhood The related question
And here's the answer. produces unhappiness.
So again, you take a big hit. But you come right back
down to baseline. Now, of course, the question,
which is a question that
obsessed with, is the question our culture is particularly
can buy you happiness. of whether money
So if looking from 1945-2000, if you plot the real income
per head in the United States,
by and large, spectacularly economically successful.
If you superimpose upon that
who report themselves to be very happy in our country,
it's flat.
to the economic success. It's absolutely unrelated
is completely unrelated Now it'sto happiness.hat money
If you look across cultures,
much, much worse, thoin fact, are also worseoing
in terms of levels of happiness.
and countries that are part of But within western culture,
democracies, there is no western industrialized
and happiness. relation between money
Can happiness, compassion, So where does that leave us?
be enhanced or are we all stuck
at our respective set points? And I'm going to suggest to you
that while the data that I showed you are in fact,
what the data reveal in terms of
of well-being and happiness the rto certain socialsness
and economic factors, that doesn't mean
that happiness and well-being cannot be enhanced.
So the work that we do, I frame within the context
of neuroplasticity. There's a lot of work which
suggests that there are many domains.
I've just listed a few here.
We know that as a person learns to play a complex instrument,
there are actually changes
that can be tracked with in the brain that are induced
both structural moand functional changes.ds,
So this is an example of how
is associated with important the learning of a complex skill
Certain motor skills changes in the brain.
There was a recent paper are similar.
literature showing that jugglers, as they become masters
at juggling, have induced changes that can be tracked
in their brain. We know from research
at the animal level, that there are profound maternal effects
that can be induced in the brains
of their offspring. The differences that a mother
expresses toward her offspring
compassion, actually induce changes down to the leveld
of gene expression in the brains of those offspring.
And those changes persist for the entire life
of that organism. These are phenomena that can be
addressed using rigorous
We also know that stress scientific methods.
on a very recently discovered aand extremely importants
mechanism of neuroplasticity. And that is neurogenesis.
Neurogenesis refers to
something that even, the growth of new neurons,
a lot of skepticism about; ten years ago, there was
We now know that neurogenesis 15 is a robust phenomenon.ved.
It occurs in all brains.
life of an individual. It occurs throughout the entire
impairs neurogenesis. We also know that neurogenesis
plays an extremely
of learning and memory. So, imagine that there are
two individuals.
"A" and "B" here. And imagine that they're both
exposed to some stressful life event here.
The way I've drawn these curves is meant to illustrate
differences in the rapidity with which these individuals
recover from the stress to which they have been exposed.
So in this diagram, person "B" recovers much more
quickly compared to person "A". We believe that these
differences reflect important features of differences
among people in the capacity
can be tracked using to regulate emotions, which
I won't bore you modern neuroscientific methods.
But if you show a person with the details.
that depicts human suffering a picture like this,
instead of reacting with disgust or anxiety
to a picture like that, to change their response
so that they have compassion
who is suffering, it transforms the wayl
the brain responds
I won't go through to those kinds of stimuli.
But one important area the details of this.
is the amygdala, which we know in the brain which is modified
for the mediation to bof negative emotion.ite
Now it turns out that the differences among people
in their capacity to modulate the amygdala, is associated
with downstream biology,
consequential for health. peIn this particular study, be
we measured the stress hormone
the differences among people cortisol, and found that
in regulating their amygdala in how able they are
to differences in cortisol is actually related
very important for health. profiles, which may be
in the interest of not boring Anyou with scientific detail.at
I can come back if there is interest.
I want to now spend the rest
What's the impact of more systematic training of the mind
on the signals in the brain that are associated
with emotion. And this brings me
to a very unusual project,
our lab for the past six years. This project was inspired by
my first meeting with the Dalai Lama, which was in 1992.
Then beginning in 2001, we had a string of long-term
meditation practitioners
and spend time in my lab. This is one of them here.
He actually is named
He's published Matthieu Ricard.
He's been a Tibetan Buddhist a number of popular books.
He also happens to hold a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology,
where he received that Ph.D.
he worked with Francois Jacob, from The Pasteur Institute where
So he comes with particularly unusual credentials.
This is another monk
This is actually the one in our lab.
of the National Geographic. And when they that come to our lab,cover
we actually spend as much time
as we do in the laboratory, jbecause they have played
a very critical role
these experiments to make them in helping us actually design
to the kinds of practices sethat they have learnede
over the course of the years
training their mind. they have spent
giving Matthieu instructions This is just a shot of me
And this is Matthieu just after he came out of the MRI scanner.
He had been in the scanner
Most people don't look like this for about three hours.
of the scanner. But he was just radiant
most of the time. This is just a picture
in the lab, in another lab
help us run these experiments. where some of the monks
of data from these studies. I'lWhat we've done in some ofit
these studies is just have
for brief periods of time. the practitioners meditate
with a neutral state. And we've probed the meditation
period with, in some cases, strong emotional sounds
that we present during the meditation.
So for example, during
we've presented very negative coemotional sounds,on,
sounds of a person screaming, for example,
to see what happens in the brain
is generating compassion when the individual
to this kind of adversity, and they are exposed
suffering, if you will. So in this work, which is on
the voluntary cultivation of compassion, we've been
studying practices that are central to the Dalai Lama's
mission and his lineage.
practices that are designed Theto cultivate compassion.ic
And in the words
I'll just read part of this. of Matthieu Ricard,
the practitioners were doing This describes what
What we have tried to do in this experiment.
is to generate a state for the sake of the experiment
permeate the whole mind, in which love and compassion
reasoning wior discursive thoughts.on,
This is sometimes called
or non-referential compassion. pure compassion,
there are sometimes Now those commercials,sion
where they then say,
Well, you can try this at home, but the likelihood is that
if you are relatively untrained,
to do this, because this is the end point of many, many,
many, many years of training, where the mind gets
very, very focused and is able to do something like this.
Most of us novices
with any kind facility. are rNow we have observed this
dramatic changes in the brain when the practitioners engage
in these kinds of practices.
electrical activity Aduring a resting periodin
and then during a transition
You don't need, even, any fancy computer signal processing
to see that there's just a
in the EEG very dramatic, overt difference
from a neutral resting state when the practitioners go
These are dramatic changes. They actually have never been
seen before in the human brain. And we reported them
a few years ago in an article that, a post-doc of mine,
Antoine Lutz, was the first author on.
This just shows from the original article.
At that time, we had eight
and ten age-match controls. The practitioners were showing
dramatic increases
whereas the controls, who were in these signals,
meditating for a couple of weeks taught to meditate and were
were showing modest changes before they at best.o the study
And most of them showed no systemic change at all.
One of the questions that we
of their meditation training asked is whether the length
any of these changes actually predicts
And the answer is yes, that we see in the brain.
The practitioners that we itested, all had a minimum of
10,000 hours of formal practice.
one three-year retreat, where they were meditating
at least eight hours a day, seven days a week,
for three continuous years. The actual range of practice
in this study went from 12,000 to about 62,000 hours
of practice.
between the changes in these There's a very strong relation
the number of hours of practice. signals in the brain and
interesting part of the brain that we've been looking at,
specifically in relation
It's illustrated in this to compassion practices.
And it's called the insula. The insula is the only place
in the brain that contains a
That is, it actually maps viscerothe body stateshe body.
and provides information about
to the rest of the brain. The insula also has descending
pathways to the body, and can influence the body
in systematic ways. The red lines belong to
the long-term practitioners.
belong to the controls. And this is during the
generation of compassion. And these are evoked changes
in the brain that we detect with fMRI in response
to those emotional sounds that I described.
What you can see is this. That the solid line
is the meditation period. The dotted line
is the neutral period.
practitioners are generating What you can see is that when
a specific enhancement compassion, there is
to the emotional sounds. of the insula response
of the brain that's changed. Now that's not the only area
particularly interested in Another area that we've been
that has been very strongly iimplicated in empathyn
that has been linked
the mental state of others. to mAnd it is an areaabout
that is known as the right
It's in the right hemisphere, temwhere the parietal andn.
temporal cortex come together.
increase in activity And again there's a dramatic
the long-term practitioners-- Excuse me, when they
are generating compassion.
and say, "Well this is Now you may look at this
no one here is about to go off all well and good, but probably
for three continuous years." and meditate
produce effects So can which are similar.aining
And it's our conviction that
can make a difference. even small amounts of training
with just two weeks of training. So we're involved now in a study
who receive two weeks of a compassion intervention.
It's a daily practice which they're asked to do.
They're asked to do it for
And we have a comparison group 30 minutes a day for two weeks.
cognitive reappraisal. that's taught
that's derived from cognitive therapy, which is used to treat
patients with depression. And we actually deliver
the intervention online.
to a protected Web site. And so they log-on
the intervention. AAnd that's a way for use
to monitor the number of minutes
The intervention is delivered per dby highly experiencedd on.
practitioners.
compassion training include the contemplation and visualization
of suffering, and then wishing
for a number of different the people, for a loved one,ing
for themselves, for a stranger, for a difficult person,
and for all beings. And so they are given
that instruction
visualize the suffering to vof these individuals,gine,
and then that these individuals would experience a relief
from suffering
And they do this for for each of those categories.
They use phrases 30 minutes a day for two weeks.
They repeat silently. tThe most common phrase is,.
"May you be free from suffering.
joy and ease." May you experience
instructed to pay attention to the visceral sensations,
especially in the area
that may be elicited of the heart,
They also are specifically by this practice.
the compassion emotionally instructed to feel
the phrases to themselves cognitively.
Those are the essential elements
They go through this training. of the intervention.
after they finish Wtheir two weeks of trainingr
to see how just two weeks of training
may have changed the brain. What we do in the MRI scanner is
we expose them to these pictures
You can think of this that depas analogousffering.
to a cardiac stress test. When you go to a cardiologist
to have your cardiovascular function assessed, you are
often given a stress test where you would challenge
the cardiovascular system with exercise.
Well, this is a brain stress test.
We are administering stimuli
In this case to depict these to the person.
to challenge the person to see how the intervention,
may have affected their ability to deal with
these kinds of stimuli. Now we also administered
a number of self-report questionnaires, one of which
is a questionnaire called the self-compassion scale.
Two of the items
I try to see my failings on the scale are these.
When I'm feeling down, as part of the human condition.
with curiosity and openness. I try to approach my feelings
after two weeks of training, Now on these scales,
significant increases. participants report
to the control group, the cognitive reappraisal
control group, which shows
We also asked them, no after the scan,er.
to rate the their experiences on a number of different
dimensions. And one of the dimensions
that we asked them about
propensity to want to approach is their willingness or
who is suffering the person in the picture
And again, the individuals with a wish to help them.
condition actually report significantly more willingness,
or interest in want to approach and to help, compared to
the subjects in the cognitive reappraisal conditioning.
Now when we look at what's happening in the brain,
sure enough, that same part of the brain that
I talked to you about earlier,
shows a significant difference it's the insula,
If you look at the compassion betwtraining conditionns.
versus the cognitive
there's a huge difference in the activation of the insula
when they are generating compassion.
Another scale that we used
developed by my colleague here at the Institute on Aging,,
Carol Riff. Two of the items from this
particular subscale are,
of my life, I am pleased when I look at the story
And in general, I feel confident with how things have turned out.
Well, it turns out and positive about myself.
in the insula that thewhen the personctivation
is doing the compassion practice
the participant's reports signof well-beingdicts
on this self-acceptance scale.
they show in the insula, The more activation
of well-being. the greater the levels
we did in this study is this. NowWe paid people for theirgs
participation in this study.
they completed the whole study. And these actually were students
that were the participants
So $165 was a pretty nice sum inof money.dy.
At the end of the experiment, we gave them an opportunity
to actually donate
we gave them some portion of the $165
of their choosing. to any charitable cause
at all. AndThis was real money.ion
They were doing real donations. So this was all
completely straightforward. They actually executed the
transaction in the laboratory online in the last part
of the experiment.
whether changes in the brain So we asked the question
particularly in this same area, actually relate to
the amount of money that the subjects gave.
And it turns out that there's an extremely strong correlation
between activation in the insula
that subjects actually donated and the amount of money
at the end of the experiment. We found that the subjects
in the compassion group donated more money,
and particularly those
boost in activation thin this brain regiont
donated the most money
Now another dimension that after the experiment.
And I won't spend much time on it now.
I'll go through these slides
of leaving time for questions. quickly in the interests
In the framework Is attention--
we can think of meditation of neuroscience,
on two major domains. One is emotion, and
specifically positive emotions, like compassion
of the sort that I showed you.
So meditation really can be thought of as a training ground
to cultivate
more well regulated attention. more focused attention,
from William James, from his two volume tome,
the Principles of Psychology. William James was just
extraordinarily visionary in his understanding
of the importance of attention. And he said here,
"The faculty of voluntarily bringing back
a wandering attention over and over again
is the very root of judgment, character and will.
But no one is compos sui
And an education, which should if you have it not.
would be the education improve this faculty,
But it is easier par excellence.
to give practical directions to define this ideal than
And I should note that for bringing it about."
are in the original. the italics here
So James really understood They're not my italics.
of cultivating attention. And I'd like to suggest to you
that meditation is the premier method that
we know something about today,
the right set of procedures for educating attention.
Most practitioners
I think will tell you athat training attentionon
is really the substrate.
which is needed for all other kinds of meditation.
It provides the tools for doing other things with meditation.
So it's often the first thing that is cultivated.
We've recently published
One is in long-term a spractitioners.s.
And the other is in less well trained practitioners,
but still intensive meditation, which I'll describe in a minute.
But this is from a very recent
Julie Brefczynski paperwas the first authorhed.
who is a post-doc in my lab.
functional MRI to interrogate the neurosystems associated
with the tension
while they were doing a particular kind of meditation
that involves focusing attention.
I won't, again, bore you
But there are a range of with the details.
that have been described different areas in the brain
of attention, all of which as underlying different facets
in the long-term practitioners, wercompared to severalnged
different control groups, which we had in this study.
Another study that we also
was a longitudinal study. This kind of evidence7
is particularly important.
over the course of three months. This was a longitudinal study
a retreat center And it was done at
we set up a mobile laboratory. here in the United States, where
before and after an intensive three-month meditation retreat,
where participates
for about ten hours a day, in this retreat were meditating
in complete silence. for three continuous months
We were specifically looking A very intensive practice.
which is considered at to be relatively fixedon,
and unalterable.
is a phenomenon that is known as the attentional blink.t
What the attentional blink is,
If you are presented with a rapid stream of visual stimuli,
let's say in the simplest case
Most of these are letters and you occasionally get numbers.
They are occurring
At the short interval, they're very, very rapidly.
between each stimulus. about a third of a second
three stimuli per second. So eaIt's just firing away.tting
And if the person's task
that he or she sees, is to report each number
quite startling if you're a whsubject in the experimentlly
and actually experience it, you do not perceive
the second number when it follows immediately
an initial number.
in time, you don't see it. When it's very closely spaced
or your attention blinks. It's aIt was thought to beblank
a robust property of the nervous system, where
the nervous system is kind of in a refractory period
and you're literally unconscious
Well, it turns out of the next stimulus.
If you meditate tfor intensively in this way,
you become much more aware, moment to moment,
of the broad array
in your environment. of information
your intentional blink, Anwhich was thoughtter
not to be possible. So I won't go through
the details of this, but
that among these practitioners we found very robust evidence
of the meditation retreat, from before, to the end
increase in their ability tto detect these stimuli.
And another way to say it,
of their attentional blink. We found corresponding changes
in their brain. We monitoring their brain
while they were doing this task.
in their brain that underly Athis change in their capacityes
to pay attention. So the last thing
I'll just briefly mention,
I haven't shown you any direct evidence for it yet.
The changes that are occurring
are connected to the body. in the brain
the insula, as well as Through structures like
and our immune systems. Part of the program of research
in which we've been engaged is not just to study
what's happening in the brain,
how those changes in the brain but also to study
And in one study that we did, I'll just give you one example.
This comes from a study that
that we did with employees here was publisin Madisonyears ago
at the Promega Corporation, where we collaborated with
the UW Division of Integrated Medicine, and specifically
the mindfulness-based stress reduction program
directed by Katherine Bonus.
to these individuals We administered MBSR
and looked at changes ovin the brain and the body.s
And one of the things that
to influenza vaccine. we All the participantsses
in this study were given
And by taking blood samples aat different points.
after the vaccine,
a quantitative measure you can actually get
mounted in response oto the vaccine.rs
And what you can see
in the meditation group actually show significantly
enhanced vaccine response compared to the healthy--
compared to the non-meditating
These differences are of controls.
make some clinical difference. a magnitude where it's likely to
some final reflections So let me just offer
Then we can open it up and conclusions.
I've shown you that compassion, loving kindness and
other related characteristics are best viewed
as trainable skills.
to enhance these skills changes the brain and the body.
Finally, the expression of compassion
by a spiritual caregiver can
and not only help the patient potencope with adversity,ent,
but to actually change
to change their brain and to change their body
in a way that may be potentially
So what you folks do health promoting.
a source of comfort in yourand understanding, to be
but through that, to actually literally change the patient's
biology in ways that may be health promoting.
I want to end with, really a remarkable quote
from Albert Einstein. It's one of my favorite quotes.
And it directly pertains to this topic.
It was written by Einstein
who was asking for some advice. in a And in that letter,of his
Einstein said, "A human being is part of a whole,
called by us, 'the universe.' A part limited
in time and space.
his thoughts and feelings, He experiences himself,
from the rest, as something separated
of his consciousness. a kindThis delusionelusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us
to our personal desires and to affection
for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be
to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion,
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature
in its beauty." Let me end
by just expressing my gratitude to the many people in my lab.
This is just those
in the studies that I describe who directly participated
all the work. wI just, these days,ng
am a conductor and cheerleader. And also to
His Holiness himself. Thank you very much.
( applause
)