WEBVTT

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Good morning.

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So when I was in graduate school, I was a runner,

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and a friend and I decided that we're going to run the Boston Marathon.

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And so we started training and we overtrained,

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and I developed knee and back problems.

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So I went to see a physical therapist,

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and they told me that I had to stop running

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and instead I should just stretch.

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As I was leaving the physical therapist office,

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I saw an ad for a vigorous yoga class

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that promised not only to promote flexibility,

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but also to promote strength and cardiorespiratory fitness.

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So I thought, oh, well, this is a great way

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that I can stretch, but also remain in shape,

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and maybe I could even still run the Boston Marathon.

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So I went to the yoga class and I really enjoyed it,

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except when the teacher would make all sorts of claims,

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you know, all sorts of medical claims, but also claims about, oh, yes,

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it will help you...

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You'll increase your compassion and open your heart and I was just like...

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I remember my eyes would roll and...

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I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am here to stretch.

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(Laughter)

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But what was interesting was that after a couple of weeks

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I started noticing some of these changes,

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I started noticing that I was calmer and I was better able

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to handle difficult situations, and indeed, I was feeling more compassionate

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and open-hearted towards other people,

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and I was better able to see things from other people's point of view.

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And, you know, I was like, hm, how could this be,

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how could this be?

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And, I thought, well maybe, you know, it's just a placebo response, right?

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She told me I will feel this, so maybe that's why I was feeling it.

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So I decided to do a literature search to see if there's any research on this.

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And low and behold, there was quite a bit

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showing both yoga and meditation are extremely effective for decreasing stress

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they're also very good for reducing symptoms associated with numerous diseases

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including depression, anxiety, pain, and insomnia.

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And there's a couple of very good studies demonstrating it can actually

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improve your ability to pay attention, and most interestingly, I thought

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virtually every study has shown that people are just happier.

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They report they're more satisfied with their life, and they have a higher quality of life.

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And so, this was interesting to me.

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And so I decided to switch and start doing this sort of research.

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So as a neuroscientists, you know, how could this be happening?

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How can something as silly as a yoga posture

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or sitting and watching your breath.

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How can that lead to all these sorts of different types of changes?

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So, what we know is that whenever you engage in a behavior over and over again,

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that this can lead to changes in your brain.

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And this is what's referred to as neuroplasticity.

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And what this just means is that your brain is plastic and that

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the neurons can change how they talk to each other with experience.

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And so, there's a couple of studies demonstrating

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that you can actually detect this, using machines like the MRI machine.

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The first study was with juggling.

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They took people who had never ever juggled before,

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and they scanned them, and then they taught them how to juggle,

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and they said, "Keep practicing for three months."

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And they brought them back after three months, and they scanned them the second time,

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and they found that they can actually detect with the MRI machine

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changes in the amount of Grey matter in the brain of these people

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in areas that are important for detecting visual motion.

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So, I thought, OK, three months, you know...

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Can meditation change brain structure too?

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Something as simple as, you know, as juggling.

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What about meditation?

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So the first study we did,

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we recruited a bunch of people from the Boston area,

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and these were not monks or meditation teachers,

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they're just average Joes who on average practice meditation

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about 30-40 minutes a day,

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and we put them in a scanner,

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and we compared them to a group of people who were demographically matched,

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but who don't meditate.

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And what we found is this:

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That there were indeed several regions of the brain

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that had more Grey matter in the meditators compared to the controls.

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One of the regions I'm going to point out to you

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is here in the front of the brain, it's the area that's important

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for working memory and executive decision making

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and what was interesting about it

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was when we actually plotted the data versus their ages.

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So here in the red square, that's the controls.

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And this is something you see actually,

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it's been well documented that as we get older,

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not just there, but across most of our cortex,

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it actually shrinks as we get older.

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And this is part of the reason why as we get older,

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it's harder to figure things out and to remember things.

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And what was interesting was that in this one region,

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the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds,

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suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent

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the natural age-related decline in cortical structure.

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So now, the critics, and there were many critics,

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said, well, you know, meditators, they're weird.

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Maybe they were just like that before they started practicing, right?

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A lot of them were vegetarian, so maybe it had something to do with their diet,

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or something else with their lifestyle, you know.

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Couldn't possible be the meditation, it's something else, right?

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And to be fair, you know, that could be true.

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This first study could not address that.

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So we did a second study.

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In this study, what we did is, we took people who had never meditated before,

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and we put them in the scanner, and then we put them through

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an eight-week meditation-based stress reduction program

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where they were told to meditate every day for 30 to 40 minutes.

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And then we scanned them again at the end of the eight weeks,

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and this is what we found.

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So what you see is that several areas became larger.

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In this slide we can see the
hippocampus,

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and in the graph, the controls are in blue and the meditation subjects

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are in red, and what we see is that the
hippocampus,

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this is the area that's important for learning and memory,

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it's also important for emotion regulation and it was interesting it was less

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Grey matter in this region in people who had depression and PTSD.

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Another region we identified was the temporo-parietal junction

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which is here above your ear,

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it's important for perspective taking and empathy and compassion.

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And again, these are both functions which people report changing when

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they start practicing meditation and yoga.

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Another region we identified was the amygdala.

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And the amygdala is the fight-or-flight part of your brain.

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And here we actually found a decrease in gray matter.

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And what was interesting was that the change in Grey matter

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was correlated with the change in stress.

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So the more stress reduction people reported,

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the smaller the amygdala became.

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And this was really interesting, because it's sort of opposite and parallel

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of what some animal studies have shown.

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So colleagues using rodents,

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they took rodents who were just happy, normal rodents,

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and they had them in their cage, and they measured

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their amygdala, and then they put them through a ten- day stress regimen.

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And at the end of the ten days, they measured their amygdala,

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and this exact same analogous part of the rat brain grew.

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So we found a decrease with stress, they found an increase with stress.

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What was interesting was that then they left the animals alone,

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and three weeks later they went back and tested them again.

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And three weeks later, that same part of the amygdala was still large,

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and the animals, even though they were in their original cages

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where they were happy, were still acting stressed out,

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so they, you know, they were cowering in the corner,

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and they just weren't exploring the space the way they had before.

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And so, this is the exact opposite of what we saw at the humans,

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because with the humans nothing has changed with their environment.

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They still had their stressful jobs,

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all the difficult problems were still being difficult,

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and the economy still sucked,

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but yeah, their amygdala got smaller, and they were reporting less stress.

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And so, together these really show that the change in the amygdala

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is not responding to the change in the environment, but rather it's representing

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the change in the people's reaction or relationship to their environment.

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And then the other thing that the study shows is that,

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it wasn't just the people were saying, "Oh, I feel better."

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Or that it was a placebo response, or that they're trying to please us,

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but there was actually a neurobiological reason why they're saying they

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felt less stressed.

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And so the idea that I'd like to share with all of you today is that meditation

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can literally change your brain.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)