457 Richard Davidson

University Place Positive Aging Series Richard Davidson, "Mental Exercises and Positive Aging" 7/16/2010 

- Good morning and welcome to the Positive Aging lecture series. Today's speaker is Dr. Richard Davidson from UW-Madison. He has a number of affiliations with campus, including Director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, and also Director of the recently established Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. Dr. Davidson is a William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from Harvard University in psychology and has been at Wisconsin since 1984. Dr. Davidson has published more than 250 articles, chapters, and reviews and has edited 13 books. 

He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research, including just a couple, National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society, and the Hilldale Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2000, Dr. Davidson was the recipient of the most distinguished award for science given by the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2004 he was... Whoops, sorry. He was named one of the most 100 influential people in the world by TIME magazine in 2006. Also in 2006 he was awarded the first Mani Bhaumik award by UCLA for advancing the understanding of the brain and conscious mind in healing. Madison Magazine named him Person of the Year in 2007. We're thrilled with all of the speakers we've been able to get this summer from UW-Madison. We're particularly thrilled to have Dr. 

Davidson because of his schedule and because of his vast, expansive work and as someone who plans outreach programs, I can say he is one of the most accessible and gracious speakers we have. And it's my absolute pleasure to bring to you now Dr. Richard Davidson. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you all very much. It's really a pleasure to be here and a special pleasure for me to speak to the community that has been such a wonderful home for me and my family over these many decades. What I'd like to do today is give you an unplugged talk, so I'm not using slides and I will just tell you a little bit about some of the work that we're doing that is particularly exciting to me and I think relevant to the concerns of older adults and I think has very direct implications for every one of your lives who is sitting in the audience. I want to start with a very brief autobiographical sketch. I am a psychologist and a neuroscientist by trade, and early on in my career, beginning actually in the mid 1970s when I was a graduate student, I had the great fortune of being around a number of people whose qualities were really infectious. 

They were qualities of kindness, of being very present when you were speaking with them, qualities of compassion. And one of the things that I learned about all of these people was that they had something in common, and that is that they were engaged in the practice of meditation to train their mind to be happier, to engage in qualities like kindness and compassion, to strengthen those qualities. And I went, because of the impression that these people made on me, I went to India in the summer of 1974, I spent three months there, to learn what I could about some of these traditions and I came back to complete my graduate work at Harvard hoping to do research on these topics, but it was very clear that because of the scientific methods of the day, and even more importantly because of the complete close-mindedness of science at that time, it was really not going to be possible to do research in that area. And so I began a career of studies on the brain mechanisms that are associated with emotion and disorders of emotion. That has been a very vibrant career and still continues today. I've been studying disorders of emotion like anxiety, depression, and autism, and we are using the techniques of modern neuroscience to learn what we can about how the brain is different in these disorders so that we can develop more targeted interventions. Now, throughout my life since the mid 1970s I personally have been enjoying the benefits of meditation practice that I've been doing personally, but it was not until 1992 that when I first met the Dalai Lama that things began to change. In 1992, I received an invitation from the Dalai Lama to come meet with him at his home in India. He lives in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dharamsala, India, and I went in 1992 to his home because he had heard about me from some mutual friends. He knew that I was interested in these matters, knew that I was a respected neuroscientist and wanted to encourage me to pursue scientific studies, to investigate how meditation practice may change the structure and function of the human brain using the modern methods of neuroscience. 

Now, that was a very profound meeting for me. The Dalai Lama challenged me at that meeting and he said, "Look, you guys have used the best techniques of modern science to investigate fear, anxiety, depression. Why can't you use those same methods to investigate kindness, compassion, and happiness?" And that was a challenge that spoke to me in a very profound way, and I made a commitment to the Dalai Lama and I made a commitment to myself that I was going to do everything I could to put compassion on the scientific map, to call attention to the importance of these qualities through scientific investigation. If one were to look at any textbook of psychology or neuroscience in the mid 1990s, not a single one of those books would have had the term "compassion" in its index. Today, I think you'll see something different, although the work is just beginning. Now, the fact that we began this work converged with a very important development in modern neuroscience, and that development can be summarized in a single word, and that word is "neuroplasticity." What does neuroplasticity mean? Neuroplasticity is a term that each of you should care deeply about. What neuroplasticity means is that the brain can change in response to experience and in response to training. 

In fact, it can be said that the brain is the only organ in our body which is specifically built to respond to change and to respond to experience. Through systematic experience and through training, we can alter our brain. We can alter its structure and function in ways that can make it function more adaptively, more optimally, more successfully. And one of the important questions which we undertook in those early stages of this research program is how the brain might be changed through long-term meditation practice, and this was a research question that the Dalai Lama was particularly interested in encouraging us to pursue. And so beginning in the late 1990s we began a very unusual research project which still continues to this day. And this research project involves bringing to Madison, Wisconsin some of the most talented meditation practitioners in the world. Individuals who have spent years cultivating their mind to develop certain positive, wholesome qualities, like happiness, like compassion and kindness, as well as qualities of focused attention, of presence and so forth. And we've been flying these individuals, many of them live in Asia, we've been flying them to Madison where they come for typically three or four days and spend those days in residence in our laboratory and we probe them in many different ways. We put them in our MRI scanner and we investigate their brains. Our research has resulted in a number of very high-profile publications, the first of which appeared in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

This is one of the most prestigious journals in all of science. It's been around for more than 100 years, and in 2004 when our first article on these long-term practitioners appeared, it was the very first time in the 100-plus years of this journal's history that an article on the topic of meditation appeared in this journal. And what we had been able to show in a series of systematic studies is how the circuitry in the brain that is critical for our ability to regulate our attention, to concentrate, to focus, how that circuitry is altered and how the circuitry that is involved in regulating our emotions is also altered. Now, one of the important facts about this research project is that these individuals have been practicing an enormously long period of time. In order to gain entrance into the study, practitioners had to spend a minimum of 10,000 hours in formal practice and the range went from 12,000 to 62,000 hours of practice with the average being 34,000 hours of practice. Now, these are big numbers. You can go do the arithmetic at home, but you can see that they're big numbers, but we didn't pick these numbers out of a hat. It turns out that 10,000 hours is about the number of hours that's needed to develop expertise in any complex behavioral domain. So think of musicians, for example. In order to be at the sort of entry level of expertise in the playing of a musical instrument, requires about 10,000 hours of practice. 

In order to be an expert chess player or an expert bridge player at the sort of world class level requires a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Similarly, to be a competitive athlete requires that number of hours as well. And so we chose 10,000 hours based upon the extents of scientific literature on the development of expertise. Now, one of the questions which we are frequently asked about this work is, "This is all well and good. It's maybe not surprising that someone who's practiced an average of 34,000 hours has a different kind of brain, but there's no way in the world that I'm going to practice this amount of time. And also, maybe I'm starting to practice in my 60s or 70s or 80s. Can I still make a difference in my brain?" So in response to those kinds of questions, there are two comments. One has to do with research that we have been conducting that is not on long-term practitioners, but rather is with individuals who have never before practiced any of these kinds of mental training methods and we have asked the question, whether really short amounts of practice in otherwise completely meditation-naive individuals makes a difference. We've recently completed a study where we have trained people over the course of just two weeks, two weeks of practice, where individuals are practicing for 30 minutes a day in a guided way. 

And we did brain scans on these individuals before and after this two weeks of practice and remarkably, just two weeks of practice actually changed the brain in measurable ways. So that we're able to actually detect effects of training after just that short amount of time. In other work we have had adults go through a standard eight-week class where they go to one class per week. The class is about two hours or two and a half hours for each session. They attend one of those classes per week and we've measured them before and after as well as done follow-up using measures of brain functions and other kinds of indices which I'll mention in a moment, and we have found in that work as well that the brain can change over the course of that period of time. Now, one of the questions which we might ask is whether the adult brain, and particularly the brain of someone in their 6th, 7th, or 8th or 9th decade of life still has the capacity to change. So, the good news, guys, is that all of our brains have the capacity to change. In fact, recent research indicates that one of the key mechanisms of neuroplasticity is a phenomenon that is known as neurogenesis. Neurogenesis refers to the brain's capacity to generate new brain cells. And when I was a student in the 1970s, we were taught that the brain is different from other organs in the body. 

We all know that if we injure our skin, that it will heal. We were taught that the brain is different, that we're born with a fixed complement of brain cells and the process of development is one of irrevocable cell death. And that the brain does not regenerate new neurons. We now know that that dogma is definitively and unequivocally wrong. There are modern data over the last ten years which definitively show that every normal adult human being throughout her or his life until the very last day of life continues to generate new brain cells. The average adult generates somewhere between five and ten thousand new cells a day, and those cells are taken up in circuits that are very critical for our learning and memory and other kinds of behavior. We also know that stress, psychological stress is deleterious for neurogenesis. In other words, psychological stress impairs the brain's ability to generate new brain cells. And methods which reduce stress are likely to promote neurogenesis, although we don't have that evidence in hand as yet, but there's every reason to believe that methods based upon meditation should, because of their anti-stress properties, should actually facilitate neurogenesis. We also know that physical exercise promotes neurogenesis. 

It enhances the brain's ability to generate new brain cells. So one of the other issues that we've investigated in our laboratory is the extent to which these methods actually change the body as well as the brain. And one of the things that we have learned a lot about over the last decade in particular is the mechanisms through with the brain and the body communicate. There are many pathways of bi-directional communication between the brain and the body. So any method which changes the brain should also have effects on the body, which will change certain bodily systems in ways that may be relevant for our physical health in addition to our mental health. And this is an area that we've been intensely interested in and in one experiment that we did, that was actually conducted with employees at a hi-tech corporation here in Madison, Wisconsin, we taught a group of these employees, based on random assignment, we taught them a simple meditation practice that they did over the course of two months and we timed this study so that the training began at the beginning of September and it went through the months of September and October and ended in mid-November. And that's about the time when flu season begins and many people in the course of their ordinary lives get flu shots. And what we did is, we gave the participants in this study flu shots and we did it in a slightly different way than is usually done. The flu shot was the same, but what we did is, we took blood samples before and after the flu vaccine and through those blood samples we can assay the blood for antibody titers that are mounted in response to the vaccine. And this gives us a quantitative, objective index of the extent to which the vaccine is actually working. 

And it turns out that when you get a flu vaccine, there's tremendous variation among people in how effective that vaccine is. For some people, it's really effective. For other people, it's not so effective. It turns out that the extent to which it's very effective or not so effective has a lot to do with the qualities of your mind. And if we can enhance the qualities of your mind through this two months of meditation practice and change the brain in those ways, can we influence the response to the flu vaccine. And the answer is, unequivocally, yes. We showed in this study that among these employees at this hi-tech corporation, those who were randomly assigned to the meditation group and received two months of meditation training actually had a significantly more robust response to the flu vaccine. And so upon exposure to the same level of flu virus, those who went through this two months of training would be more protected from the deleterious effects of the flu virus. And so these findings, along with others in our laboratory, indicate that these methods affect both the brain and the body and they change the body in ways that we think may be health promoting. So we're very encouraged by these findings. 

We believe that these methods are methods that are easy to implement, they don't require any instrumentation. You can actually learn them virtually for free. It's something you can carry around with you all the time, since it exists, the capacity to do this is simply the product of our own brains and minds. And that these are strategies and methods which you can carry with you for your entire life. And it doesn't require any special circumstances. You can do it any time and it can potentially have some real benefit. Now, having said all that, let me also say that I don't think that this is going to be panacea for everything. There are many kinds of illnesses which these methods will not affect. And so they need to be used in conjunction with other, more conventional, strategies. But there's very little downside to the use of these methods and there's a lot of potential upside to them. 

I want to just say a few more things about the kind of work we're currently doing to give you a little bit of flavor for where we're headed and what we think the potential is. We, as Sarah mentioned in her introduction, we have recently launched a new center at the University of Wisconsin called the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. And this center will be the framework and the umbrella under which the research in this area will be conducted. I think it's fair to say that our center is the epicenter right now on the planet for research of this kind. And we're very excited about those opportunities. One of the commitments that we've made in our new center is not just to continue our basic research program of the sort that I described, but we are going to be engaged in a process of what we call translational research. And what we mean by "translational research" is to take what we've gleaned from the laboratory and bring it out into the world to real people in real contexts where we believe we have the potential to make a real difference. And there are three major areas that we've designated as ripe opportunities in the local community for translational research. And I'd like to tell you about each of these three very, very briefly. The one that's furthest along is a major initiative which we'll be beginning this September, although it's been in planning now for about 18 months and it is with the Madison public school system. 

One of the things that I said earlier on is that the brain is plastic. That is, it has the capacity to change, and that capacity to change is present throughout our life. That is very, very true. There's one other corollary of that, which I haven't yet said, and that is that the brain is more plastic for certain kinds of qualities earlier in life than it is later in life. And so let me give you one example and that is the learning of the second language. Or the learning of a musical instrument, is another case in point, but learning of the second language has a lot of evidence for, if you learn a second language before the age of seven, you can learn that language and have a virtually perfect accent. And that is something that is very, very difficult to do later on. And so while all of us are capable of learning additional languages, the likelihood of us learning that language with a perfect accent that is indistinguishable from a native speaker, is close to zero. And the reason has to do with the plasticity of the brain earlier in life. So it's our conjecture that if we can reach kids really early in life and teach them simple skills to regulate their attention and to regulate their emotions, those skills really have the potential to stick. 

And if you look at the data on when problem behaviors arise, and there is a crisis in our country now with adolescents. If you look at the data on mortality during the adolescent period, it is 300% increased over the mortality in the period just before adolescence. And that increase in mortality is entirely due to behavioral causes, and typically due to crazy decisions that adolescents make. It's decisions that result in suicides, in drunk driving accidents, in mortality associated with substance abuse, and so forth. I'm sure that those kinds of tragedies are tragedies that each of you has heard about and probably some of you have had occur very close to you. It is our hope that if we can reach kids before they hit this period of adolescence, we could actually make a difference. And so we are going to be initiating a project in two elementary schools in the Madison public school system, two of the most ethnically diverse elementary schools in the city, the Lincoln School and the Leopold School. And we are going to be first providing an intervention for the teachers to teach them some of these skills themselves. The intervention will go for ten weeks, and we're then going to be delivering intervention to the kids in fifth grade. And we're then going to be tracking those kids, following them through the transition into middle school to see whether these methods can make a difference. 

If our results are successful, we believe this can become a national model for how to incorporate these methods in a completely secular way within the public school curriculum. A second major initiative that we have underway is with returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. And many of you know that these individuals are coming back into their communities in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the country and they are coming back and very quickly disintegrating in many ways. The suicide rate among these individuals is astronomical. The rates of domestic violence are skyrocketing. And these are individuals who are suffering in a very significant way. We believe that some of the methods that we've been dealing with may be very helpful. In fact, this morning I was just on a conference call with some key leaders in healthcare in the Pentagon to discuss the application of these methods in returning veterans. They are desperately trying to investigate any method that might be helpful and we believe that within the state here we have, again, a tremendous opportunity to apply these interventions and do it in a way where we're also collecting data to determine the efficacy of these interventions and follow these individuals over time. The third area where our center is engaged in a translational research effort is one that is -- in many, many states in the United States today, largely as a consequence of the economic adversity that we've been experiencing. 

And that is that, in many states there are truth in sentencing laws that tie the hands of judges when an offender goes to jail and the prison sentences that are being imposed are no longer economically sustainable and so many prisoners are being released before their sentence is up, particularly non-violent offenders and those who have a first offense. And what is of great interest to the department of corrections here and elsewhere is having a curriculum that prisoners are given during a pre-release phase that helps them adjust to going back into the community and minimizes recidivism. The rates of recidivism here in Wisconsin as well as nationally are ridiculously high and eat up a very large segment of the corrections budget. And if we can make a difference in helping these individuals readjust to their community and minimizing, decreasing recidivism, these are methods that will make a difference in terms of the lives of these people and also it will make a difference in terms of economic benefits that would occur from decreasing recidivism. So that project is still very much in the planning stages and we hope to initiate it at some point in 2011, but the education project and the project with the veterans are both launched in different ways at this point. The education project will start in earnest at the beginning of September. So those are some of the activities in which we're engaged and I think that this is just a very propitious opportunity, despite the challenging times that we're now in, I think that there also is tremendous hope and optimism for the capacity of human beings to change, and in some sense, the adversity, excuse me, that we're all subjected to really provides a feeding ground for the development of these interventions that I think can be tremendously valuable in helping us to accommodate and approach in a healthier way the kind of challenges that we all are facing. So, I want to stop here in order to give all of you a chance to ask questions. I'm sure there are many. So let me thank you for your attention and I'll be happy to take your questions. 

(applause)