Neuroscience of Mindfulness, Part 1
Mindfulness–is it just an overused buzzword, or could it be the key to mastering our brains and living a more connected and fulfilling life?
As told by Dan Siegel, “Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life on automatic and being sensitive to the novelty in our everyday experiences.”
On a neuroscience level, mindfulness is so much more.
In fact, Laine and I were so in awe of how intentional thoughts can not only strengthen our brains but also encourage empathy and connection with others, we couldn’t help but make this a two-part episode.
Most findings in this episode come from Dan Siegel’s The Mindful Brain, as he’s spent decades studying this topic and founded the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Additional resources can be found below.
Knowing how practical this topic is as well, be sure to stay tuned for Part 2 next month where we’ll walk you (and a special guest) through some mindfulness practices that you can incorporate into your daily life!
Resources:
Dan Siegel, The Mindful Brain
Yi-Yuan Tang, The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation
P. Zelazo, K. Lyons - “The Potential Benefits of Mindfulness Training in Early Childhood: A Developmental Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective“
General Outline of Episode
We are in desperate need of a new way of being in ourselves in our schools and in our society. Our modern culture has evolved in recent times to create a troubled world where individuals suffering from alienation, schools failing to inspire and to connect with students, in short society without a good moral compass to help clarify how we can move forward in our global community. As a physician psychiatrist psychotherapist and educator, I have been saddened and dismayed to find so absent from our work as clinicians a firm grounding and a healthy mind itself. After asking 65,000 mental health professionals face to face in the lecture halls around the world if they've ever had a course on the mind, or in mental health 95% replied no. What then have we been practicing? Isn't it time for us to become aware of the mind itself not just the highlight symptoms of illness? It is my deepest hope that by helping each other attune to our minds we can move ourselves and our culture beyond the many automatic reflexes that have led our human community down such destructive pass. The human potential for compassion and empathy is huge. Realizing that potential may be challenging in these troubled times, but perhaps it may be as direct as a tuning to ourselves, one mind, one relationship, one moment at a time. Siegal
This is the neuroscience of Mindfulness
What is it?
Oxford Dictionary defines it as the quality or state of being consciously aware of something OR
A mental state is achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment
Derived from Asain contemplative traditions - observation of experience without evaluating or judging - Brown and Ryan
Siegal “Mindfulness in its most general sense is about waking up from a life on automatic and being sensitive to the novelty in our everyday experiences.:
“more than simply just being aware”
Shifting from automatic to manual, from mindless to present
What makes change possible
Why” Because how we focus the attention of the mind can help shape the brain
The mindfulness-awareness research center states mindfulness awareness can be found in a lot of places (prayer, yoga, thi chi, meditation) - all of which are about focusing the mind on the moment - most share the common use of breath to focus
Why does this matter
The number of times you do things without thinking about what you are doing
Eating
Driving
Showering
Our brain lets us do this on auto-pilot - allowing us to daydream or have mind chatter - can be good but too much and we can feel numb, dead inside
Can also cause knee jerk reactions - “A cascade of reinforcing mindlessness can create a world of thoughtless interactions cruelty and destruction.”
First episode ‘walking on a path and you see a stick and you jump automatically - let's expand
Fall
Knee feels an intense amount of pain
More than that ‘why am I so dumb? Why did I jump at a stick’ what is wrong with me?
Our brain does some dumb things trying to keep us alive - one of them is to sometimes cause mental suffering far greater than physical suffering
Trying to get you to not do the thing again
Not always helpful
Mindfulness teaches a way of just letting the pain be experienced, and then go, without the mental chatter to follow “feeling the pain without suffering”
Mindfulness is about experiencing life as is, and letting go of the internal battle.
Sensing what is, without needing to hold onto judgment
Letting go of suffering that doesn’t serve you
Discernment
“a form of disidentification from the activity of your own mind”
- the activities of the mind are not the totality of who you are
Why and How?
Mind and The brain
Science great unanswered questions up there with the big bang theory and what is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity
The brain can affect the mind - but the mind can affect the brain - can’t just say that the brain creates the mind because it's a dualistic relationship
“The process that regulates the flow of energy and information, our definition of the mind, can directly stimulate brain firing and ultimately change the structure connections within the brain.”
A study by Lazar, Kerr, Wasserman, Gray, Greve, and Treadway showed the practice of mindfulness increased thickness in multiple parts of the brain - the middle prefrontal cortex and around the insula on the right side of the brain - in direct correlation to the amount of time spent to the amount of thickness the two parts of the brain one the middle prefrontal area bilaterally and two a related neural circulate the insula which was particularly thicker on the rights of the brain. The degree of thickness in this area was correlated with the length of time spent practicing mindfulness meditation.
Why would we have this?
Because in a perfect world - we all have it
Secure attachment - the child feels held/understood/present with parent - there is stability in that relationship - parent is present - teaches the child to connect, how to be present - how to regulate This is attunement.- with attunement the regulatory circuits in the brain - specifically prefrontal fibers and areas around the insula thicken
How - Empathy - we are wired to connect! 6 episodes - brain spends a ton of time on how to connect - what others are doing? What are their feelings, intentions - actions? Mindfulness is turning those resources inward - securely attaching to oneself
What does this mean on a neuroscience level?
“Although meditation research is in its infancy, a number of studies have investigated changes in brain activation at rest and during specific tasks that are associated with the practice of or that following trained in the mindfulness meditation. These studies have reported changes in the multiple aspects of mental functions and beginner and advanced mediators, healthy individuals and patient populations the narrow science of mindfulness meditation yi-yuan tang”
MInd and the brain
Development of the brain
Genes
Who we are - how we develop- even how our brain develops - experiences - a firing of a neuron in response to a stimulus
Experience happens - Neuron activates - connects to another - blood vessels expand- releases either an activating or inhibiting neurotransmitter at the synapse - where they connect
The receiving neuron will either fire off or not based on stimulation or inhibition
Sigal” 100 billion neurons, on average, are linked to each other via 10,000 synaptic connections. Which are created by genes and sculptured by experiences: nature needs nurture. Neurons fire when we have experience - these experiences cause us to grow new connections”
Neuroplasticity: connections change in response to stimulus
Experience= neural firing
“in some situations promote the activation of genes, which then leads them to the production of proteins that enable new synapses to form and old ones to be strengthened.
Experience = Neurogenesis (growth of new neurons) any age
Mindfulness awareness is one experience that seems to foster neuroplasticity.- focused attention activates brain activation.
Brain - outer layer of the largest part of your brain - cortex - gray and white matter (cells and neurons - gray is processing and white is communication) in a series of layers - with columns inside the layer to help process information across different parts of your brain (brain cell reception) - its what creates all of the complexity of who we are
Hand model of the brain
“the back of the cortex from your second knuckle backward carries out a perception of the outside world except for smell and awareness of the position of the limbs.”
Sense of the world
“the front of the brain carries out the motor, attentional, and thought.
from your second knuckle to your last knuckle is a region where the first zone carries out motor action, the next zone forward mediates motor planning,
This area allows us to take in what others are doing or experiencing and create those states in ourselves
In front of this is the prefrontal cortex - humans human
The side area of this is the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (pointer finger) “the chalkboard of the mind”
Self-regulation
Focus our attention
The middle finger and ring finger - nails to knuckles - very important area
the orbital frontal cortex,
the anterior singular cortex,
ventral lateral and medial prefrontal cortex
The area that receives info from the entire brain impacted by the insula - insula is an information highway (brain wifi).
Can take in information about our body, our emotions, our experience and create a representation of someone else's body/emotions/experiences - social communication
if you lift your fingers up and put them back down you may notice these touch everything in the brain automatically- this is what we call neural integration
Neural integration- communication, coordination, and centralization of the brain - how we create attunement
Research is showing that mindfulness awareness can create this integration - create attunement
in mindfulness - focusing attention - neurons to fire - or rewire
This happens all the time but this is us doing it on purpose - Segal calls this snagging - “stimulate neural activation and growth” - purposefully causing neurons to fire in our mid prefrontal regions and promoting integration - boosting our wifi signal
Bigger wifi signal? _ better reach - integrations means we can connect to more parts of our brain and better so that our brain can communicate -
Neural Integration
Remember we assess and then make sense
Neural integration means we can monitor and influence these firing patterns
If we are a self-driving car our neural integration or boosted wifi helps our car realize that it needs to use the breaks - specifically on the automatic nervous system
Seigal “brakes and accelerator functions are coordinated” - specifically between your sympathetic (activated) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) this is how we get body regulation
Increased communication between Left and right side of the brain
Our two hemispheres
Have some different functions
Episode 1 - part of your brain is older than others - the brainstem and then limbic system - also your right lobe develops faster than your left lobe (left comes on around 2 and catches up closer to 3 or 4)
A bridge between the two is the corpus callosum - which also starts developing around 3 and continues developing until the mid to late 20s
Right Lobe - Believed that there are more of the integrated columns mentioned - means that it communicates with areas better helping to have more of an understanding of context and the bigger picture
Left -more detailed oriented left hemisphere- cortical columns appear to work more on their own helping to zoom in on communication
Seigal “The streams of input from the subcortical regions feed different sources of sensory data into these two regions, which help us understand why such distinctions emerge.”
Left - linguistics linear logic and liberal thinking
Right - “nonverbal holistic, visuospatial, and then a whole host of non correlated specialties such as autobiographical memory, integrated map of the whole body, raw spontaneously motion, intense empathetic nonverbal response, stress modulation, and a dominance in the altering aspects of attention. The right side is thought in some perspectives to mediate distress and uncomfortable emotions and correlate's withdrawal from novelty.”
The left is seen to mediate more positive affective State”
Mindfulness helps to connect the two sides - neural integration -
Anterior singular cortex - CEO - allocates attention resources- what we focus on and how it activates us - mindfulness - induction of alpha and Theta waves in an EEG - stability and calming
There is a connection between attention regulation and executive functioning in this middle prefrontal area - specifically, the ACC involved in the reduction of negative emotion - damage to this area in studies has shown significant behavioral changes - increased aggression, emotional blunting, decreased motivation, impatience, lower threshold for fear or subtle responses, and inappropriate behavior.
Integration helps us instead to support the ACC - helping us to be flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable - coordination and balance in the function of the brain
Integration - - expands outside of ourselves - connects us to a bigger whole -connecting us to others on a very big level - Segal “Mindfulness awareness promotes neural integration. Today more than ever we desperately need a scientifically grounded view that supports our societal encouragement of reflection to promote compassion and care for one another period the integrated role of the mindful brain offered here maybe one approach that can help us find common ground for promoting reflecting in our lives now and for generations to come”
