Self-transformation through mindfulness | David Vago | TEDxNashville

How is the self represented in the brain, and how is it sculpted through our everyday, moment-to-moment perceptions, emotions, and thoughts? Cognitive neuroscientist Dr. David Vago demonstrates that a systematic form of mental training involving meditation and mindful awareness has the potential to transform our self and our mental habits in a positive way. Learn more about how every moment is an opportunity to change our brain and strongly influence our health and longevity at both the conscious and nonconscious levels.

A cognitive neuroscientist by training, David Vago has close to 20 years of experience with mindfulness practice and teaching, and he has spent over a decade conducting translational neuroimaging, cognitive, and clinical research on the basic mechanisms and therapeutic relevance of mindfulness and associated meditation/contemplative practices. Through his research, Dr. Vago focuses on one basic question: “What are the basic neurobiological and physiological components that constitute adaptive mind-brain-body interactions and their therapeutic relevance in psychiatric settings?” In addition to being an expert in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience, Dr. Vago has studied the neural mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disease and chronic pain using fMRI and is translating these findings into biologically-based diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for alleviating suffering. He is the research director at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a research associate in the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Thank you.

We are all born

with a brain that has 86 billion neurons.

And throughout our life,
we make relatively few new neurons.

In fact, we lose about 2 billion neurons
throughout the course of our lifetime.

So you may wonder -

if we're losing billions of neurons

and we're not making a lot of new neurons,

what's changing in the brain

to support all those
mental habits and behaviors

that make up our self-identity?

Well, the answer is
"activity-dependent plasticity."

This is the function by which
the brain is continually modified

through the 150 trillion
cell-to-cell synaptic connections

that are made in response
to your everyday experiences.

One main point that I hope
you take home today

is that not only are they
contributing to your self-identity,

but they are continually
changing your brain

and they are strongly influencing
your health and longevity.

I hope to also demonstrate

that a systematic form
of mental training involving meditation

can potentially transform your self
and your mental habits in a positive way.

In 2002, I was a graduate student
in cognitive neurosciences -

that was me.

I was studying the brains of rats

to better understand the neural circuitry
of learning and memory.

And activity-dependent plasticity

was a really important concept
for studying memory,

but I was interested
in how that concept could be applied

towards a neuroscientific
understanding of the self

through the lens of meditation
and mindful awareness.

Now, mindful awareness

can be simply thought of
as a way of paying attention

in a way that is continually
watchful and discerning

for what is arising and passing
in our minds and in the external world.

Now, when I was in graduate school,

there was barely
any science of mindfulness.

In fact, before the year 2000,

there was the grand total

of 39 peer-reviewed
scientific articles on the topic.

So for good reason, maybe,
my mentor sat me down one day and said,

"Dave, you will not be successful
in academia by focusing on meditation.

Forget about all that Zen stuff."

And I walked out of his office
feeling rather disappointed, discouraged.

But it did not deter me from this calling.

Fast-forward 10 years -

I was a faculty member
at Harvard Medical School,

studying meditation
in a neuroimaging laboratory.

And about that time,

I was invited to present my research
directly to the Dalai Lama,

along with five other emerging leaders
in the field from around the world.

(Applause)

Thank you. That is very kind.

Yes, this was really
an amazing opportunity.

And the advice he gave the six of us

is something I will never forget
for my lifetime.

He said, pointing his finger
at each one of us,

"You each have the great responsibility

for helping to build
a happy, peaceful world.

Millions of people
want a happy, peaceful world

but are lacking the knowledge
of how to do so.

Through carrying your experiment
month by month, year by year,

you will gain evidence to convince others.

I will watch you,

whether you are really -

whether you are really helping to build
a happy, peaceful world or not."

He then jokingly threatened, hopefully,

(Laughter)

that he would be watching
from beyond the grave

and that even if he were in hell,

he would come back as a demon
and hunt us down

to make sure we were doing this work.

(Laughter)

No joke.

Well, hopefully.

Now, when the Dalai Lama
points his finger at you

and threatens you in that way -
or challenges you, really -

you can't really say no.

So aside from providing
a sense of purpose and meaning for me,

that experience really provided

a pretty solid research career plan
for the next 30 years.

So fast-forward to 2016.

I was provided the opportunity
to come here to Nashville,

to Vanderbilt University,

to direct research at
the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

So my interest in the self
through the lens of meditation

comes back full circle to today,

where I have the resources and the support

to do the science I originally intended
to do back in graduate school.

I'm currently leading a team of scientists

to continue mapping the meditative brain -

or meditative mind -

and to better understand

what a flourishing mind,
brain, and body looks like

from the neurobiological,
the psychological, and social levels.

So as we contemplate
the self together today,

I want you -

well, I invite you to think about
how all of your life experiences,

even the guy all the way up there,

have led to who you've become today

and to explore

how all of your thoughts and emotions
that you're having right now, today,

may lead to who you become tomorrow.

The Dhammapada, one of the greatest
known collections of the Buddha,

describes

"Our life is shaped by our mind,
for we become what we think."

The basic idea here
is from birth to the present day,

our self, our experience of being someone,

our wants, our fears, our desires,
our hopes, our values, our expectations,

our whole self-identity

is continually constructed by a string
of moment-to-moment processes of selfing.

[Selfing - A String of Moments]

And these moments
can be further broken down

into processes of perception,
sensory awareness, and evaluation -

all of which happen on a timescale
of half a second, 500 milliseconds.

And through neurophysiological research,

it's been found that the brain stem
and the subcortical regions

are helping to filter out information
that is irrelevant to you

and to prepare your mind for action.

Now, this part of our mental experience

is all happening
without conscious awareness.

In the second half of each moment,

our primary sensory cortices,

located throughout
the outer surface of our brain,

is integrating information
coming from perception and awareness

and preparing inferences and predictions
to inform our behavior.

And only by the end of each moment -
around 300 to 500 milliseconds -

does awareness arise,

and then we begin to evaluate
what it is we're experiencing.

And that evaluation takes place
in aspects of our prefrontal cortex.

So this string of moments is sustaining
our mental habits and dispositions

that are self-conditioning
and self-perpetuating through repetition.

It's continually informing
our present state of awareness

and coloring our memories for the past

and making predictions for the future.

And this basic idea here
really supports the idea

that this little guy here has had
about three billion moments in 42 years

to become the guy
who's standing before you today.

And somewhere along
this string of moments,

I developed a bad habit -
maybe you can relate.

When I was eight years old,

my mother gave me a punching bag
to deal with my anger and frustration.

Thank you, Mom.

This was effective on the short term.

I would go down in my basement

and hit that bag every time
I got angry or frustrated.

Then, eventually, as you can imagine,

that punching bag broke
and got thrown out with the trash.

But the conditioning did not go away.

I never hit any people,

but I continued to hit walls
and doors and windows.

I even have a scar
on my hand to go with it.

A little over a decade later,
when I was 20 years old -

my sophomore year of college -

I had the opportunity
to go on a meditation retreat -

a 10-day silent meditation retreat.

First time.

Not because of my anger but more so
for my curiosity about Buddhism

and my interest in studying the mind.

This was a profound experience
for me on multiple levels.

For one, it provided
a signpost in my life,

leading me to the path that I'm on today.

It also provided a mindfulness-based skill
of meta-awareness of my mental habits.

Now, meta-awareness refers
to an awareness of where our attention is

and where it's going at any moment.

And when we practice
using a mindfulness-based approach,

it acts as a wedge to open up our minds

and provide insight into the mental habits
that are arising again and again.

And for my anger, it provided awareness

to all the triggers and impulses
and feelings and thoughts

that are associated with my anger.

Now, the state of mindfulness

is often described
as that wedge of meta-awareness,

and if inserted deeply enough
into our minds,

as described by Buddhist
scholar Andy Lenski,

it will open our minds up to wisdom.

And wisdom is subtly different
from awareness

in the sense that it can be described

as the direct experience
with our mental habits.

For my anger, it was the sensory
awareness in my body:

it was the tightness, the clenched fists,
the impulse or readiness to act.

That was my anger.

The idea here is that
when we practice mindfulness,

the awareness and the wisdom
work together,

helping to reduce the time spent
in judgment and evaluation,

to be situated in the present moment
with our sensory awareness,

and to allow the emotions
like anger to arise and pass

without the impulse to act.

Now, aside from anger,

there are other thoughts and emotions

that can have negative impacts
on our health and well-being.

Anxiety, fear, worry, and sadness

all have the tendency to be destructive
mental habits and dispositions,

but only when they are happening
with great frequency,

when they put the people around you,
including yourself, at risk for injury,

or they interfere
with your social functioning.

It turns out that these
three dispositions, specifically,

have the most extensive scientific data
to support their role as risk factors

for the onset of clinical levels

of depression, anxiety,
cardiovascular disease,

and have even been shown

to increase the rate of cellular aging
at the level of your DNA.

One study by the Centers
for Disease Control

found that an angry disposition

increases your chances - your risk -
of dying prematurely of a heart attack

by two and a half times.

And there's a whole number of studies

showing that these three dispositions
and the associated chronic stress

can have negative effects
on your immune system functioning,

on sensitization of pain pathways,

and atrophy -

shrinking of the brain regions responsible
for regulating these negative emotions.

So it becomes this really bad cycle

because if you don't have the ability
to regulate the emotions,

well, it's going to be much harder
to regulate them in the future.

So one of my studies
that I wanted to share with you today

introduced mindfulness training to a group
of women diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disorder

associated with widespread
muscular tenderness

and chronic fatigue

as well as a host
of other clinical symptoms.

We found that these patients

had a high level of anxiety and fear
associated with their pain.

And when we gave them
mindfulness training,

we found that there was
dramatic improvement

in all their clinical symptoms.

So that was good.

But we were interested
in what the mechanism was

that may be contributing
to this clinical improvement.

So we gave these patients
a behavioral task

that assessed how they paid attention
to pain-related words

at the nonconscious perceptual level

and the more conscious
evaluative level of processing.

We could do this

by varying the duration of time
that we showed them the words.

When we showed them the words
for 100 milliseconds,

they did not have a lot of time
to process the words consciously,

but we could observe

whether or not they looked towards
or away from the words.

At 500 milliseconds, they did have time
to process the words consciously,

and we could observe

whether they got stuck thinking
and ruminating upon the words.

So we found two major differences

between the groups that got exposed
to mindfulness training

and those who did not.

Those who were untrained
avoided those pain-related words

at the nonconscious perceptual level.

And those who were trained in mindfulness
looked towards the words,

suggesting that they had
less fear and avoidance

and more approach-related behavior
towards their pain.

This is the stage of processing

that they didn't have any awareness
that they were doing this.

The untrained group also had a tendency

to ruminate or get stuck
at the later stages of processing,

whereas those trained in mindfulness
were able to see the word, let it go,

and complete the task more readily.

So these results demonstrate

that mindfulness training has the ability
to improve our mental habits of attention

at both the conscious
and nonconscious levels.

When we do neuroimaging,

we take a modern neuroimaging

and a first-person, introspective
methods approach

in our lab and in others,

and we can call this

"a neurophenomenological approach"
to mapping the meditative mind.

And this identifies the brain networks
and systems of functioning

that are supporting
mindfulness-based practices.

Now, I said before

that there weren't many studies
on mindfulness before the year 2000.

Well, since 2000, there have been
close to 4,000 studies on the topic.

And of those 4,000 studies,

21 have looked at changes
in brain structure

and 80 have looked at brain function

in a cross-section of novices
who have been trained for the short term

and expert meditators.

And although there have been
some reported differences

between styles of meditation practice

and between novices and experts,

I want to bring to your attention

the most common
and most consistent findings

that are found across all the studies
in four brain regions -

to make it easy -

that are changing
in brain structure and function.

The frontopolar cortex
is the most anterior part of our brain,

right behind your foreheads.

It is also thought to be the most highly
evolved part of the human brain

and responsible
for supporting meta-awareness.

And in conjunction with
the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

and the anterior insula,

these three regions work together
in a complex attentional network,

referred to as the
"frontoparietal control network,"

to allow yourself to be continuously aware
of your body sensations

and to flexibly switch
between internal mental processing

and thinking in the outside world.

Okay?

And so one really interesting finding here

is that we find in our lab
that the more one meditates,

the more activity one gets
in this network of brain regions.

And other labs have found
that the more one meditates,

the more protected these regions are

from the normal age-related
atrophy that we all get.

Unfortunately, all our brains
are shrinking in size after age 20.

Sorry.

But if you meditate, you protect them.

And one other region
that you see decreases in activation

is the posterior cingulate cortex, or PCC.

That's a major node
in a larger functional network

associated with self-reflection
and rumination.

So meeting the challenge
set forth by the Dalai Lama,

the science is beginning to emerge

to support a role
for mindfulness and meditation

in improving meta-awareness

and decreasing an emphasis
on ruminative types of processing,

especially in the context
of high cognitive demand,

and also to transform the brain
and our mental habits.

So we've learned
that every thought and emotion

is leading to transforming our brain,

literally re-sculpting our brain,

at every moment.

And although we do not have any control
of what has happened in the past,

we have the power
in this moment and going forward

to choose how you pay attention
to your thoughts and emotions.

Every moment then becomes an opportunity

for you to change the way
we perceive the world

and ease the burden

by which there is potential
for destructive emotions

like anxiety, anger, and sadness.

So I leave you with the question:

"What will you fill your mind with?"

Thank you.

(Applause)