WEBVTT

00:00:11.959 --> 00:00:13.084
Good morning.

00:00:13.091 --> 00:00:15.603
So when I was in graduate school, I was a runner,

00:00:15.603 --> 00:00:18.486
and a friend and I decided that we're going to run the Boston Marathon.

00:00:18.501 --> 00:00:21.002
And so we started training and we overtrained,

00:00:20.999 --> 00:00:22.990
and I developed knee and back problems.

00:00:22.990 --> 00:00:24.901
So I went to see a physical therapist,

00:00:24.901 --> 00:00:26.569
and they told me that I had to stop running

00:00:26.569 --> 00:00:28.441
and instead I should just stretch.

00:00:28.459 --> 00:00:31.960
As I was leaving the physical therapist office,

00:00:31.956 --> 00:00:35.410
I saw an ad for a vigorous yoga class

00:00:35.410 --> 00:00:38.086
that promised not only to promote flexibility,

00:00:38.083 --> 00:00:41.792
but also to promote strength and cardiorespiratory fitness.

00:00:41.793 --> 00:00:44.205
So I thought, oh, well, this is a great way

00:00:44.205 --> 00:00:47.320
that I can stretch, but also remain in shape,

00:00:47.320 --> 00:00:49.892
and maybe I could even still run the Boston Marathon.

00:00:49.892 --> 00:00:54.177
So I went to the yoga class and I really enjoyed it,

00:00:54.177 --> 00:00:57.843
except when the teacher would make all sorts of claims,

00:00:57.843 --> 00:01:01.493
you know, all sorts of medical claims, but also claims about, oh, yes,

00:01:01.493 --> 00:01:03.074
it will help you...

00:01:03.074 --> 00:01:06.045
You'll increase your compassion and open your heart and I was just like...

00:01:06.045 --> 00:01:08.574
I remember my eyes would roll and...

00:01:08.574 --> 00:01:11.770
I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am here to stretch.

00:01:11.770 --> 00:01:14.489
(Laughter)

00:01:14.827 --> 00:01:16.642
But what was interesting was that after a couple of weeks

00:01:16.642 --> 00:01:18.460
I started noticing some of these changes,

00:01:18.460 --> 00:01:21.850
I started noticing that I was calmer and I was better able

00:01:21.850 --> 00:01:26.488
to handle difficult situations, and indeed, I was feeling more compassionate

00:01:26.501 --> 00:01:28.127
and open-hearted towards other people,

00:01:28.101 --> 00:01:30.540
and I was better able to see things from other people's point of view.

00:01:30.540 --> 00:01:34.178
And, you know, I was like, hm, how could this be,

00:01:34.178 --> 00:01:35.789
how could this be?

00:01:35.789 --> 00:01:39.776
And, I thought, well maybe, you know, it's just a placebo response, right?

00:01:39.776 --> 00:01:42.304
She told me I will feel this, so maybe that's why I was feeling it.

00:01:42.304 --> 00:01:46.111
So I decided to do a literature search to see if there's any research on this.

00:01:46.111 --> 00:01:48.792
And low and behold, there was quite a bit

00:01:48.792 --> 00:01:55.479
showing both yoga and meditation are extremely effective for decreasing stress

00:01:55.479 --> 00:01:58.621
they're also very good for reducing symptoms associated with numerous diseases

00:01:58.621 --> 00:02:02.274
including depression, anxiety, pain, and insomnia.

00:02:02.274 --> 00:02:06.763
And there's a couple of very good studies demonstrating it can actually

00:02:06.763 --> 00:02:10.860
improve your ability to pay attention, and most interestingly, I thought

00:02:10.860 --> 00:02:13.683
virtually every study has shown that people are just happier.

00:02:13.683 --> 00:02:17.214
They report they're more satisfied with their life, and they have a higher quality of life.

00:02:17.214 --> 00:02:20.276
And so, this was interesting to me.

00:02:20.276 --> 00:02:24.657
And so I decided to switch and start doing this sort of research.

00:02:25.334 --> 00:02:28.279
So as a neuroscientist, you know, how could this be happening?

00:02:28.279 --> 00:02:31.656
How can something as silly as a yoga posture

00:02:31.656 --> 00:02:33.099
or sitting and watching your breath.

00:02:33.099 --> 00:02:36.743
How can that lead to all these sorts of different types of changes?

00:02:36.743 --> 00:02:42.261
So, what we know is that whenever you engage in a behavior over and over again,

00:02:42.261 --> 00:02:44.928
that this can lead to changes in your brain.

00:02:44.918 --> 00:02:47.252
And this is what's referred to as neuroplasticity.

00:02:47.274 --> 00:02:51.036
And what this just means is that your brain is plastic and that

00:02:51.036 --> 00:02:55.330
the neurons can change how they talk to each other with experience.

00:02:55.330 --> 00:03:00.134
And so, there's a couple of studies demonstrating

00:03:00.134 --> 00:03:02.880
that you can actually detect this, using machines like the MRI machine.

00:03:02.880 --> 00:03:04.565
The first study was with juggling.

00:03:04.565 --> 00:03:06.916
They took people who had never ever juggled before,

00:03:06.916 --> 00:03:09.400
and they scanned them, and then they taught them how to juggle,

00:03:09.417 --> 00:03:11.542
and they said, "Keep practicing for three months."

00:03:11.515 --> 00:03:14.617
And they brought them back after three months, and they scanned them the second time,

00:03:14.617 --> 00:03:17.749
and they found that they can actually detect with the MRI machine

00:03:17.751 --> 00:03:20.377
changes in the amount of Grey matter in the brain of these people

00:03:20.383 --> 00:03:22.847
in areas that are important for detecting visual motion.

00:03:22.847 --> 00:03:27.635
So, I thought, OK, three months, you know...

00:03:27.635 --> 00:03:32.570
Can meditation change brain structure too?

00:03:32.570 --> 00:03:36.329
Something as simple as, you know, as juggling.

00:03:36.329 --> 00:03:37.481
What about meditation?

00:03:37.481 --> 00:03:39.314
So the first study we did,

00:03:39.314 --> 00:03:41.650
we recruited a bunch of people from the Boston area,

00:03:41.650 --> 00:03:44.029
and these were not monks or meditation teachers,

00:03:44.029 --> 00:03:46.235
they're just average Joes who on average practice meditation

00:03:46.235 --> 00:03:47.706
about 30-40 minutes a day,

00:03:47.706 --> 00:03:49.568
and we put them in a scanner,

00:03:49.568 --> 00:03:51.755
and we compared them to a group of people who were demographically matched,

00:03:51.755 --> 00:03:53.500
but who don't meditate.

00:03:53.500 --> 00:03:56.089
And what we found is this:

00:03:56.089 --> 00:03:58.209
That there were indeed several regions of the brain

00:03:58.209 --> 00:04:01.751
that had more Grey matter in the meditators compared to the controls.

00:04:01.757 --> 00:04:04.755
One of the regions I'm going to point out to you

00:04:04.755 --> 00:04:07.122
is here in the front of the brain, it's the area that's important

00:04:07.122 --> 00:04:09.331
for working memory and executive decision making

00:04:09.331 --> 00:04:11.480
and what was interesting about it

00:04:11.480 --> 00:04:14.010
was when we actually plotted the data versus their ages.

00:04:14.010 --> 00:04:17.716
So here in the red square, that's the controls.

00:04:17.716 --> 00:04:19.647
And this is something you see actually,

00:04:19.647 --> 00:04:21.646
it's been well documented that as we get older,

00:04:21.646 --> 00:04:24.379
not just there, but across most of our cortex,

00:04:24.379 --> 00:04:26.478
it actually shrinks as we get older.

00:04:26.478 --> 00:04:28.496
And this is part of the reason why as we get older,

00:04:28.496 --> 00:04:34.745
it's harder to figure things out and to remember things.

00:04:34.745 --> 00:04:37.273
And what was interesting was that in this one region,

00:04:37.292 --> 00:04:41.667
the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds,

00:04:41.647 --> 00:04:45.577
suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent

00:04:45.577 --> 00:04:51.093
the natural age-related decline in cortical structure.

00:04:51.093 --> 00:04:53.450
So now, the critics, and there were many critics,

00:04:53.450 --> 00:04:57.365
said, well, you know, meditators, they're weird.

00:04:57.375 --> 00:05:00.209
Maybe they were just like that before they started practicing, right?

00:05:00.193 --> 00:05:02.867
A lot of them were vegetarian, so maybe it had something to do with their diet,

00:05:02.867 --> 00:05:04.788
or something else with their lifestyle, you know.

00:05:04.788 --> 00:05:07.419
Couldn't possible be the meditation, it's something else, right?

00:05:07.419 --> 00:05:11.661
And to be fair, you know, that could be true.

00:05:11.661 --> 00:05:14.382
This first study could not address that.

00:05:14.382 --> 00:05:16.895
So we did a second study.

00:05:18.219 --> 00:05:21.047
In this study, what we did is, we took people who had never meditated before,

00:05:21.047 --> 00:05:24.995
and we put them in the scanner, and then we put them through

00:05:24.995 --> 00:05:27.611
an eight-week meditation-based stress reduction program

00:05:27.611 --> 00:05:30.700
where they were told to meditate every day for 30 to 40 minutes.

00:05:30.700 --> 00:05:33.267
And then we scanned them again at the end of the eight weeks,

00:05:33.267 --> 00:05:35.086
and this is what we found.

00:05:35.086 --> 00:05:39.700
So what you see is that several areas became larger.

00:05:39.709 --> 00:05:42.335
In this slide we can see the
hippocampus,

00:05:42.330 --> 00:05:47.354
and in the graph, the controls are in blue and the meditation subjects

00:05:47.354 --> 00:05:50.368
are in red, and what we see is that the
hippocampus,

00:05:50.368 --> 00:05:52.734
this is the area that's important for learning and memory,

00:05:52.734 --> 00:05:57.700
it's also important for emotion regulation and it was interesting it was less

00:05:57.700 --> 00:06:00.516
Grey matter in this region in people who had depression and PTSD.

00:06:00.501 --> 00:06:04.960
Another region we identified was the temporo-parietal junction

00:06:04.984 --> 00:06:06.683
which is here above your ear,

00:06:06.683 --> 00:06:10.552
it's important for perspective taking and empathy and compassion.

00:06:10.552 --> 00:06:14.085
And again, these are both functions which people report changing when

00:06:14.083 --> 00:06:17.875
they start practicing meditation and yoga.

00:06:17.876 --> 00:06:20.710
Another region we identified was the amygdala.

00:06:20.737 --> 00:06:23.189
And the amygdala is the fight-or-flight part of your brain.

00:06:23.189 --> 00:06:26.071
And here we actually found a decrease in gray matter.

00:06:26.071 --> 00:06:28.671
And what was interesting was that the change in Grey matter

00:06:28.671 --> 00:06:30.463
was correlated with the change in stress.

00:06:30.463 --> 00:06:32.503
So the more stress reduction people reported,

00:06:32.503 --> 00:06:35.706
the smaller the amygdala became.

00:06:36.337 --> 00:06:40.575
And this was really interesting, because it's sort of opposite and parallel

00:06:40.575 --> 00:06:43.173
of what some animal studies have shown.

00:06:43.173 --> 00:06:46.349
So colleagues using rodents,

00:06:46.349 --> 00:06:49.943
they took rodents who were just happy, normal rodents,

00:06:49.943 --> 00:06:52.133
and they had them in their cage, and they measured

00:06:52.133 --> 00:06:55.218
their amygdala, and then they put them through a ten- day stress regimen.

00:06:55.218 --> 00:06:58.204
And at the end of the ten days, they measured their amygdala,

00:06:58.204 --> 00:07:02.057
and this exact same analogous part of the rat brain grew.

00:07:02.057 --> 00:07:06.484
So we found a decrease with stress, they found an increase with stress.

00:07:06.484 --> 00:07:10.017
What was interesting was that then they left the animals alone,

00:07:10.017 --> 00:07:12.887
and three weeks later they went back and tested them again.

00:07:12.887 --> 00:07:16.087
And three weeks later, that same part of the amygdala was still large,

00:07:16.087 --> 00:07:19.104
and the animals, even though they were in their original cages

00:07:19.104 --> 00:07:22.355
where they were happy, were still acting stressed out,

00:07:22.355 --> 00:07:25.105
so they, you know, they were cowering in the corner,

00:07:25.105 --> 00:07:28.120
and they just weren't exploring the space the way they had before.

00:07:28.120 --> 00:07:32.525
And so, this is the exact opposite of what we saw at the humans,

00:07:32.525 --> 00:07:35.578
because with the humans nothing has changed with their environment.

00:07:35.578 --> 00:07:37.754
They still had their stressful jobs,

00:07:37.754 --> 00:07:40.076
all the difficult problems were still being difficult,

00:07:40.076 --> 00:07:41.792
and the economy still sucked,

00:07:41.792 --> 00:07:47.108
but yeah, their amygdala got smaller, and they were reporting less stress.

00:07:47.108 --> 00:07:50.322
And so, together these really show that the change in the amygdala

00:07:50.322 --> 00:07:54.191
is not responding to the change in the environment, but rather it's representing

00:07:54.191 --> 00:07:59.837
the change in the people's reaction or relationship to their environment.

00:08:01.945 --> 00:08:05.403
And then the other thing that the study shows is that,

00:08:05.850 --> 00:08:09.650
it wasn't just the people were saying, "Oh, I feel better."

00:08:09.650 --> 00:08:13.643
Or that it was a placebo response, or that they're trying to please us,

00:08:13.643 --> 00:08:16.790
but there was actually a neurobiological reason why they're saying they

00:08:16.790 --> 00:08:18.908
felt less stressed.

00:08:18.908 --> 00:08:21.788
And so the idea that I'd like to share with all of you today is that meditation

00:08:21.788 --> 00:08:23.120
can literally change your brain.

00:08:23.120 --> 00:08:24.606
Thank you.

00:08:24.606 --> 00:08:26.249
(Applause)