- I want to welcome all of you.
I am a professor emerita from
the Smith College School for Social Work,
and I severed as Dean Jacob's associate dean
for many years,
which is one of the reasons that I am here tonight.
So this evening is significant for several reasons.
One, of course, is that we have our distinguished lecturer,
Dr. Davidson.
But the other is that this is the first major event
to really honor Dean Jacobs.
She has been dean, or will be dean
of the school in her retirement in May of 2014,
for 13 years.
Two of those years were as acting dean,
and the other 11, I guess the math works,
was as dean.
And Dean Jacobs will introduce Dr. Davidson.
What I want to do tonight
is emphasize the connection between this particular lecture
and an abiding goal of Dean Jacob's,
and an area of achievement in her leadership
over these past many years.
That goal has been to draw on the wisdom,
the skills, and the science,
in the ancient and very modern area
of contemplative practice.
The goal was to enrich both clinical practice
and to help all of us as individuals
and members of a community,
add to our own reflective and non-reactive qualities
that are so central, both to excellent clinical practice
but also a necessary ingredient to a planful, ethical,
and compassionate organizational life.
What she has put into motion
will continue to influence the school
into the foreseeable future.
At later events, others will speak to
her many, many other areas of accomplishment,
and even though it's not my task
I just have to mention a few.
She has increased our
certificate programs for postgraduates.
She has had a bone-deep commitment
to the major work that the school has done on anti-racism.
She has broadened, for both students and faculty,
their life, to include international work.
She has considerably strengthened our relationship
with the college, and though this isn't often mentioned,
she's really been a very good steward
of the financial resources of this institution.
She initiated a tenure system,
and she's had a commitment to recruit from active military
and from veterans.
And also, to make sure that both our curriculum
and our community has been welcoming to them.
And there is, of course, much more.
I would add, we just completed our, under her leadership of
the second successful re-accreditation process.
And though that's not particularly sexy,
it's a tremendous amount of work
and it's very, very important to the standing of the school
and Carolyn certainly has been a major player
in both of those processes.
But what I briefly want to make clear
is how much Dr. Jacobs has been committed
to helping all members of our community in recognizing
that the spiritual dimension of human experience,
however defined, has to be addressed in our profession
if, as we profess, we are interested
in the totality of who a person is.
Fears of pushing a particular religious agenda,
never a goal or certainly an activity on Dean Jacob's part,
should never be a reason to not be open, curious,
and knowledgeable about both the secular and religious roots
that we, and our clients, use to make meaning in our lives
and to address what often seems unexplainable.
And so, in many different ways, Dr. Jacobs has set about
to put spirituality as an area of attention
at the Smith College School for Social Work.
Because almost all religious and many secular traditions
have contemplative practices
as part of their activities,
and because contemplative practices nurture
the quality of attention necessary for clinical practice,
much of her work over the years has centered
in this particular area.
I believe it has significantly added
to the quality of our education and our institutional life,
and for that, Carolyn, thank you.
To this end, Dean Jacobs has done so many, many things.
She has developed and taught a certificate program here,
in Contemplative Practice and Social Work.
She has brought speakers and participants to the community
with expertise in contemplative practice,
and its relationship to health and mental health.
She has supported research on the use of meditation
and the quality of attention and openness to experience
in the classroom.
She has focused much of her considerable scholarship
on social work and spirituality.
She has brought to our community practitioners who have led
voluntary and heavily-subscribed meditation groups.
She has even set aside a lovely, quiet room for faculty
where they can go to collect themselves,
to meditate, to do whatever they want, but hopefully
to emerge from that room a more centered person.
Her present service as a board member
of both Naropa Institute,
and the organization "Mind and Life",
speak to both the national and international recognition
she has received for her work.
But, equally important, is that she has done
and continues to do her own work on centering herself,
and on changing her brain by changing her mind.
So tonight, our Lydia Rapoport lecture by Dr. Davidson
is a culmination of a so much longer journey
in Dean Jacob's time here.
His willingness to come and address us tonight
is, in no small measure, a tribute to Dean Jacobs.
I have been able to witness up-close this journey,
and am very honored to introduce tonight
my friend, my colleague, my dean,
Dr. Carolyn Jacobs.
(applause)
- Thank you.
- Thank you, so much, and a special thanks to Susan.
We have been on this journey a long time.
She managed to retire before the second site visit
and self-study, but we love her anyway.
(audience laughs)
The Lydia Rapoport distinguished lecture
was endowed by Lydia's brother and friends
to allow the school's dean to invite a colleague
with a particular expertise or use
for clinical social work practice.
I would invite you to check our website
to get a fuller description of Lydia
and this particular lectureship.
This summer's lecturer is Dr. Richard Davidson.
Richard Davidson is William James and Vilas
Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry,
director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Lab
and the Lab for Affective Neuroscience,
founder and chair of
The Center of Investigating Healthy Minds, Waisman Center
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in Psychology,
and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
he has been on the faculty since 1984.
Dr. Davidson received his PhD
from Harvard University in 1976.
He has published more than 290 articles,
many chapters and reviews, and edited 14 books.
He is a co-author with Sharon Begley
of "The Emotional Life of Your Brain",
published by Penguin in 2012.
Dr. Davidson received an NIMH Research Scientist Award,
a Merit Award from NIMH, and the William James Fellow Award
from the American Psychological Society.
He is past president
of the Society for Research in Psychopathology,
and of the Society for Psycho-physiological Research.
He was the year 2000 recipient
of the most distinguished award for science,
given by the American Psychological Association,
The Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award,
and was named one of the
"100 Most Influential People in the World"
by "TIME" magazine in 2006.
In 2011, he was given the Paul D. MacLean Award
for Outstanding Neuroscience Research
in Psychosomatic Medicine.
He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board at the
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
from 2011 to today,
and as chair of the psychology section
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
from 2011 to 2013.
Now, I think there are
a couple of other things you should know about Richie.
One, is that his daughter is a social worker,
graduate of Columbia,
however, she is working in New York City
with other Smith social workers.
(audience laughs)
So, we can say this:
That he has that kind of affinity
and closeness to our profession,
that really bodes well for what he will contribute to us
tonight in the lecture.
I've come to value Richie as a dear colleague
on the board of Mind and Life Institute.
It is in our time together, exploring
the transformative wealth of contemplative practice,
on the creation of compassionate individuals,
compassionate communities, and hopefully compassionate world
in which we live.
Here, I have come to know Richie,
as an extraordinary researcher and lecturer,
filled with curiosity about the mind,
humbled about what he can say is predictable
about all of that,
faithful to, and grounded in, meditative practices.
I have come, at this stage of my life,
to have a particular bias.
One is that I'm really not interested in
volunteering with people who don't meditate.
I find there is a richness in the capacity to disagree,
to be with one another, and to look at the larger world,
and the capacity to value one another,
for the greater good.
So I am just delighted to welcome Richie to our community,
and to hear his lecture on
"Change Your Brain by Transforming Your Mind."
(applause)
(microphone feedback)
(applause continues)
- Quite a way to begin.
(audience laughs)
Thank you so much, Carolyn,
for your gracious introduction and invitation
to be here this evening.
It has given me an opportunity up-close
to get a feel for what it is that you've done here at Smith.
And it's just deeply touching and moving
for me to see, first-hand, and to honor
your extraordinary contributions
and just to say to all of you,
who have been fortunate enough to be faculty
and students here at Smith under Carolyn's leadership,
that, boy, you guys are really so fortunate
to have had a dean with the kind of vision
that Carolyn has.
And I feel very lucky to have you now
in our collective life at "Mind and Life"
and to participate with you for many years to come
on the board.
So, thank you so much.
Today, this evening,
I want to give you a feel for
the kind of work that we've been doing,
and I thought that it would be best to start
by giving a little autobiographical prelude
to situate the work in some context.
I began my career in psychology and neuroscience
with one fundamental question,
and that question is still one that motivates my work today.
And I was curious to better understand
why it is that some individuals,
when they are exposed to adversity,
when they confront life's slings and arrows,
are resilient,
and are able to effectively deal with the situation at hand,
recover very quickly, and move on with their life,
whereas other people, in response to the same adversity,
seem to rapidly decompensate,
and have a much more difficult time,
and sometimes can spiral
into serious disorder and pathology.
And I was interested to learn more about
what the root of those differences among people are,
and, even more importantly,
I was interested in how we can facilitate
individuals becoming more resilient.
How can we cultivate healthier habits of mind
to improve a person's ability to deal with adversity?
As the bumper sticker says,
"Stress happens."
It doesn't quite say that, but
(audience laughs)
we cannot protect ourselves from adversity.
It's something that is part of life,
but we do have the ability to change our minds,
and if we can figure out
how we can promote a more resilient emotional style,
we can potentially help lots and lots of people.
And so those are really the questions that I began with
and the questions that I continue with,
and I was very, very fortunate when I first began
in my career in psychology,
to be around a number of people whose demeanor,
and whose presence, were just really infectious.
These were the kind of people
I really wanted to hang out with,
and they were, by and large, not the faculty at Harvard.
(audience laughs)
They were people who I was lucky enough to meet
who were, for the most part, outside the academy.
And I had the opportunity
to essentially have an alternative education
at the same time I was getting my traditional education.
One of the things that all these folks had in common,
just resoundingly endorsed in Carolyn's introduction,
they all had an interest in, and a practice of, meditation.
And they attributed some of their,
what I considered to be, delicious and infectious qualities
to their practice.
And so I was sufficiently interested and motivated
so that, after my second year of graduate school,
I went off to India and Sri Lanka for three months,
much to the consternation of my professors,
some of whom thought I was going off the deep end,
others of whom thought I would never return.
I was pretty confident that I would return,
and that my commitment to pursuing science
was quite serious and very much secure in its place,
but I also believed that the education
that I was being given in the halls of William James,
the William James Hall,
were not the whole story.
And I really needed to learn
what these other traditions and cultures had to say.
So I went off to India for the first time in 1974,
and I had my first taste of serious meditation practice,
and it was enough to convince me
that this stuff is really important, and that
if western psychology and neuroscience knew more about it,
this would be a terrific set of tools
that would be greatly beneficial
to a wide swath of humanity.
So I came back with a very fervent aspiration
to pursue research on meditation,
and in fact, did publish a few studies in those early days
but it was made very clear to me
by the faculty that were teaching me,
that if I wanted a successful career in science, they said,
this is not a very good way for you to begin,
and you should find something else to study.
So the message was given to me,
very loudly and clearly,
and I was a very dutiful student
and I took their message to heed,
and, in fact, I launched a career on emotion in the brain
which I still very much do today,
and the work that we do with contemplative practice
is very much within that umbrella,
because among the most important targets, if you will,
of contemplative practice, is the transformation of emotion.
So this made sense to me,
and there were lots of important things
that needed to be done, that hadn't yet been done,
and so off I went to do that.
And my life changed in a very dramatic way in 1992.
And in the fall of 1992 I met, for the first time,
His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama had heard about me from some mutual friends,
and invited me and a couple of other people
to Dharamsala, India,
to talk with us about the possibility
of doing serious neuroscientific research
on the minds and brains of individuals
who've spent years cultivating their mind.
These were advanced meditation practioners
in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
And His Holiness also challenged me,
on that day in 1992, he said,
"Look, you guys are using the tools of modern neuroscience
"to study anxiety, and depression, and sadness.
"Why can't you use those same tools
"to study kindness and compassion?"
And there was no really good answer,
other than that it's hard.
(audience laughs)
But when we first began to study fear and anxiety,
that was hard, too, and I think most scientists would agree
that we've made a lot of progress in that line of work
and there's no reason, in principle, why we cannot
use those same tools to study kindness and compassion.
So that was a very pivotal meeting for me,
and I made a commitment to His Holiness,
on that day in 1992,
that I was going to come out of the closet
with my interest in meditation.
Because for a couple of decades or for 15 years,
I had been a closet meditator,
and I was practicing but I didn't tell people
about what I was doing,
and I certainly didn't talk about this with my colleagues.
And His Holiness just provided licence
for all of that to change, and change in a very dramatic way
and he encouraged me to undertake this kind of research.
It took us a few years to ramp-up,
but we then began a really major project
which still continues to this day,
where we have been bringing long-term meditation practioners
to Madison, Wisconsin to be in residence in our lab
for between a few days and a few weeks,
to probe their minds and brains
in the ways that neuroscientists and psychologists
have learned to probe.
And I will share with you this evening
some of the fruits of those investigations.
So that's where I will begin with the talk tonight.
This is a picture that was taken in 2001,
and this is the first time His Holiness
came to visit our laboratory.
We're showing him here the control room
in our MRI scanner suite, where we use MRI
to non-invasively interrogate the human brain.
And actually there's a great story
that I'll briefly mention.
When His Holiness came to see this,
he had been peppering me in India
with very detailed questions about how these techniques work
and this was an opportunity to show him,
and we wanted to show him not just an MRI machine
but we wanted to show him
the cool things that we can do with it.
So, what we did, is we had
one of my students lying in the scanner, and waiting,
until we walked in, and he ended-up having to wait
several hours,
(audience laughs)
lying in the scanner, but he was a meditator
so it wasn't a problem for him.
(audience laughs)
This is one of the ways that graduate students
actually have really cool times in my lab,
like hanging out in the scanner
and watching their own brains.
We can talk about that later.
But what David was doing in the scanner was waiting,
and then what we agreed upon, was that I was
going to ask him to do something incredibly simple,
that always works,
which is to ask him to move the fingers on one hand,
move the fingers on his right-hand,
and we'd be able to see the left hemisphere light up,
the left motor regions.
This is the area of the brain that controls the right-hand.
And then if we have him move his left-hand
we can see the motor cortex in the right hemisphere
become activated.
And this is something really simple and it's very reliable
and you can see it with the naked eye,
so it's quite dramatic.
So we did that, and I asked David to move his fingers,
and, sure enough, his brain behaved as we thought it would.
And then His Holiness said, "Can I ask him a question?"
"I'd like him to do something."
And of course we said, "Sure."
And His Holiness asked him to please imagine
that his fingers were moving on his right-hand
but to not actually move them.
And we were actually able to see his hands,
they were extending outside the board of the scanner
and there's a window through the control room
so you can actually see the person lying in the scanner,
so we were able to see that he, in fact,
was not moving his fingers,
but he was imagining his fingers moving,
and these kinds of experiments had actually been done,
to some extent, before,
but it was amazing that His Holiness requested that,
to see what would happen,
and, sure enough, we saw
many of the same parts of his brain become activated
when he was just imagining his fingers moving,
compared to when he was actually moving his fingers,
which was actually a very propitious moment for His Holiness
because His Holiness saw that this was a way
that we can actually see
the neural echoes of pure mental activity.
There was no actual behavior occurring,
this was all happening in the mind,
and we were able to see some crude reflection of it
in our instruments.
So, we began with the study of compassion,
because this was something that is clearly near and dear,
a central part of His Holiness' agenda.
And this is an area that had been totally neglected
in western psychological and neuroscientific research.
If you go back to textbooks of psychology
in the early 1990s,
I doubt you would find a single textbook
with the word "compassion" mentioned in the index.
And that is nothing short of scandalous,
given how central compassion is to human behavior.
So this is where we began,
and we were able to study this
in a fairly straight-forward way,
because practitioners in this tradition engage in
certain kinds of contemplative exercises, you can say,
that are designed to cultivate or strengthen
this quality of compassion.
(coughs) Excuse me.
So, we began in a very simple way,
where we had practitioners alternate
between a neutral state and a meditation state.
And they did this either while we were
recording their brain electrical signals,
which I'll show you in a moment,
or when they were lying in the scanner.
And there are many virtues of working
with these long-term practitioners,
one of the virtues, though, is that at least by their report
they report that they were able to
really immerse themselves in these practices
even in the strange environment of our laboratory,
even with wires hanging off their head
or lying in the tube of an MRI scanner.
And I should say that all of these long-term practitioners
had done a minimum of one three-year retreat, they all had
a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice, lifetime.
The average amount of lifetime practice in this group
was about 34,000 hours.
So, you can do the arithmetic at home,
but 34,000 hours is a big number, and these are people
who've spent a significant chunk of their adult life
engaged in practice.
So, in the words of one of the practitioners,
this is what they said they were doing,
and I'll just read part of this.
"What we have tried to do, for the sake of the experiment,
"is to generate a state, in which love and compassion
"permeate the whole mind, with no other consideration,
"reasoning, or discursive thoughts."
Now, sometimes there are those commercials on television,
which say in fine-print at the bottom,
"Don't try this at home."
Well, I would encourage you, please do try this at home.
But don't be frustrated if it's difficult for you to do this
without any other "reasoning or discursive thoughts."
Because, at least speaking for myself,
the mind is much more distracted,
and discursive thoughts are highly likely to arise,
but at least if you believe the reports
of these practitioners,
they report that they were able to do this
in a very focused way.
This is one of the practitioners that was in this study,
someone who has given us permission to identify himself,
someone who's actually quite well-known
in the meditation world,
this is Mingyur Rinpoche,
who is author of a number of popular books,
including "The Joy of Living" and "Joyful Wisdom,"
and was one of the early practitioners
who actually visited our lab on several occasions.
Now, when we test these kinds of practitioners,
what we see when we record the brain electrical activity,
is nothing short of completely, amazingly striking.
This is stuff that you don't see typically
in this kind of laboratory.
We see changes that are visible to the naked eye,
and that's not something that is very common
in work using these kinds of measures.
If you look at the period during the resting state,
and then when the practitioners move into a meditation state
this stuff here is
high-frequency oscillations
that we call "gamma oscillations".
These are oscillations that are about 40 cycles per second,
and in the untrained brain
we see these for very, very short periods of time,
typically less than one second.
They are often associated with states of focused attention,
and with different elements of a complex percept
coming together.
Here, in the long-term practitioners,
we see this going on for seconds, in certain cases minutes,
and even in a few cases, for hours,
among individuals with whom we've tested.
The presence of these gamma oscillations
is highly-correlated with the amount of lifetime practice
of these practitioners.
Now, this is another one of our practitioners
who has also given us permission to identify himself,
and this is someone also quite well-known,
his name is Matthieu Ricard,
he is the author of a number of popular books,
including his first book, "The Monk and the Philosopher",
the first popular book, which was written with his father,
who is a very well-known French philosopher,
and he's written numerous books since then.
This is Matthieu after he had been in the scanner
for about three hours.
Most people don't look like this when they come out.
(audience laughs)
Matthieu also is quite unique.
He has a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Pasteur Institute
where he worked with François Jacob, a Nobel laureate.
He's been a Tibetan Buddhist monk since 1967.
He comes with remarkable credentials,
and he has been absolutely key to bridging
the two worlds
of science and contemplative practice
or, Buddhism, together.
And this is Mingyur Rinpoche sitting on the bed of a scanner
just about to go in.
Now, what do we see
when we put individuals like this in the scanner
when they're generating compassion?
What we see is a remarkable change
in a very unusual place in the brain that's circled here.
Now, these are images that we can get
from the MRI scanner.
We can non-invasively scan the brain
and these images are called axial images,
so that if you slice the brain
from the neck to the top of the head, in horizontal slices,
the images that you get will look like this.
And roughly about two thirds or three quarters of the way up
on each side of the brain,
is an area that we call the anterior insula,
and the anterior insula is a very interesting area.
The insula in general is an interesting area.
It's the only part of the brain that has a map
of the visceral organs in the body.
It is literally the gateway for the interaction between
the mind, the brain, and the body.
That communication goes through the insula.
And, in retrospect, it's not that surprising
that the insula is tweaked quite dramatically
when practitioners are generating compassion.
And the way we find this out,
the way we learn about it, is this:
The practitioners are meditating on compassion
and we challenge their meditation by presenting
sounds of human suffering.
So, we present to them sounds of a woman screaming,
a baby crying unconsolably.
These sounds of human suffering are processed in the brain,
and we can then interrogate how the brain
differentially responds to those kinds of sounds
when the practitioners are meditating on compassion.
And if you look down here,
the red lines are the long-term practitioners,
the blue lines are age- and gender-match controls.
I should say that
at this point in time,
fully 50% of our longterm practitioners are women,
so they're not all monks.
(coughs) Excuse me.
We've made a very tenacious effort
to recruit female practitioners,
and we've been quite successful in doing that,
and I can tell you
that among the long-term practitioners
we don't see any evidence of any robust gender differences
but we can talk about that later.
So, in any case, these red lines are the practitioners,
the blue lines are the controls,
and the solid line is when they're generating compassion.
The dotted line is during a neutral control condition.
And you can see among the controls,
who are depicted in blue,
there's not very much difference
between the meditation period and the control period.
Among the long-term practitioners there is a huge difference
such that the activation in this part of the brain
is increased.
It's like we turn up the volume control in our insula.
And it may be associated with the fact that
these states are very much embodied.
Compassion is something that very much involves,
and likely requires,
the body in order to have the kind of response
that these long-term practitioners do.
So this was an early indication of a dramatic change
that we see in the brain
that is associated with this practice of compassion.
Now, another area that we have examined
is the area of attention.
Another target of contemplative practice.
And this is one of my
all-time favorite quotes in psychology.
This was written by William James in 1890
in his chapter on attention
in "The Principles of Psychology,"
and James said, "The faculty of
"voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention,
"over and over again, is the very root of judgment,
"character, and will."
And he goes on to say that
"An education which should improve this faculty
"would be the education par excellence."
Those italics, by the way, are in the original.
And he ends this paragraph by saying,
"It is easier to define this ideal,
"than to give practical directions for bringing it about."
I think if William James had more intimate familiarity
with the contemplative traditions of the east,
he would've clearly seen that these are vehicles
for educating attention,
and attention is the building block for learning anything,
and everything.
If we're not attending to what we're doing,
which most of the time we're not,
if we're really honest with ourselves,
we can say more about that later,
but if we're not attending to what we're doing,
we're not going to be learning
in the way we have the capacity to learn.
And so, attention is so fundamental,
and we wanted to take WIlliam James' invitation
and see if certain simple kinds of meditation practices
can be used to educate attention.
So, there are many different constituents of attention
that psychologists and neuroscientists study
and have identified,
and I'll just mention two of them this evening.
One is a really interesting phenomenon,
known as the "attentional blink",
and what the attentional blink is,
is your attention can, if you're asked to focus
on a particular aspect of your environment,
you can zoom in on that aspect,
and then if another instance of whatever it is
that you're supposed to be paying attention to
occurs, very soon after the first instance,
it's as if your attention blinks.
It's as if your mind goes blank,
and you get so excited about the first instance,
that you completely space-out,
and can't attend to the second.
So we can actually see how attentive you all are,
and do a little experiment here.
So please focus your attention on that cross-hair,
and I'll present a series of letters and numbers to you,
and I want you to just pay attention to the numbers,
and I'll ask you about them after.
Did I present the number "1"?
How many people say "1"?
"2"?
"3"?
"4"?
"5"?
"6"?
"7"?
"8"?
"9"?
Okay, you're a very good attentive group.
So, let me show you roughly what I presented.
I presented a series of letters,
and then I did present the number "3",
and it was followed very soon, as soon as the crude software
known as "Microsoft Powerpoint" allows you,
of course we don't use this software in the laboratory,
and so I can't really do it the way we do it in the lab.
But, almost all of you got "3",
and I would say about 80% of you got "7".
Now, when you do this repeatedly, over time,
it turns out that people tend to miss the second number
quite a bit.
And they get so excited that they found the first number,
(audience laughs)
that their minds just are unable to see that second number.
That's what the blink is about.
So, we wanted to see
if three months of intensive mindfulness meditation
makes a difference.
So these are practitioners.
The light bars are before
they go on this three-month retreat actually.
The black bar is three months later.
And we have a group of controls
over the course of three months,
and during that three months, for the last week,
they learn this same practice.
And what you can see
is that the folks who were meditating got better,
and the folks who were the controls showed a slight bump
probably because they were doing it a second time,
but this is much more substantial and significant,
suggesting that, contrary to what many neuroscientists
have invited us to believe,
the attentional blink is not an obligatory response
of the nervous system.
It's actually something that can be trained and educated.
So, let me give you another example.
Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
have a particular feature of their attention
which is quite diagnostic of their ADHD,
and what that feature is, is that they are
very variable in their responses.
It's not that they're always slow.
Sometimes they're slow, sometimes they're fast.
They're very variable.
So if you look at the distribution of reaction times,
which is shown best-illustrated in this histogram here,
this is just showing the distribution of reaction times
compared to age-matched controls up here.
And you can just see that this distribution is broader.
It just means that these kids are much more variable
in their responding to stimuli that are being presented.
And we asked whether mindfulness meditation
could make a difference,
specifically in this parameter of attention
which is so closely diagnostic of ADHD.
And if you pay attention to this set of bars here,
this is showing the standard deviation of reaction time,
which is just measuring the variation, the variability
of reaction time.
Lower numbers here are better.
And what you can see is that practitioners,
after three months of practice,
are showing a reduction in variability
whereas controls are not showing any change whatsoever.
And there were all kinds of changes in the brain
that we measured,
that were associated with these changes in behavior.
And I won't bore you with the details,
but we found changes in the frontal parts of the brain
that were highly-correlated with the change
in their variability of reaction time.
Okay, so one of the questions which I'm frequently asked,
because so far I've told you about long-term practitioners,
and I've mentioned findings with people who were doing
three months of intensive meditation practice.
Can short amounts of practice make a difference?
So, we wanted to address that question
in the context of compassion training,
and this is a study done by one of my graduate students,
Helen Weng, which just was published actually last week,
and it asked the question
whether short-term compassion training
can change behavior in the brain.
What we did in this study,
this was a true randomized controlled study,
people signed-up for a study where they were told
that they would be taught a method,
or an intervention, a practice,
which is designed to cultivate well-being.
And we randomly assigned them
to either compassion meditation,
and I'll say more about what that was in a moment,
or to a training based on cognitive therapy,
where they were given the same amount of training.
And cognitive therapy is
one of the more empirically well-validated treatments
for depression and anxiety.
So they were randomly assigned to one of these two groups.
They practiced for 30 minutes a day.
These were all individuals who have never done
any meditation practice before.
The other novel feature about this study
which is both advantageous as well as disadvantageous,
is that we delivered the practice over the internet.
Now, we realize that it's not the most optimal way
to deliver this kind of intervention.
On the other hand, if we actually see
that we can see beneficial effects,
the possibility of scaling something like this is enormous.
And I'll say something about that
maybe during questions and answers.
So it was a two-week compassion intervention.
They practiced daily, 30 minutes a day for two weeks,
and the comparison group was taught cognitive reappraisal,
that comes from cognitive therapy.
So the elements of the compassion training were these,
and I'll go through this
for those who may not be that familiar with it:
We asked people to contemplate, and visualize,
different individuals in their life,
and to visualize a time in their life
when those individuals may have been suffering,
and then cultivate the strong aspiration
that they be relieved of that suffering,
and we start with a loved one.
So, a family member,
or a very, very close friend,
bring that person to your mind and to your heart,
and visualize a time in their life
when they may have been suffering,
and then cultivate the strong aspiration
that they be relieved from that suffering.
We then move on to themselves:
Imagine a time in your life,
when you may have been suffering,
and then, again, cultivate the aspiration
that you be relieved of the suffering.
We then have them move on to a stranger,
and by a stranger we mean someone who's face you recognize,
but you don't know them very well.
It could be someone who's in the same class as you,
someone who works in the same building as you work in,
but you don't know much about their life.
Bring them into your mind and your heart,
and imagine a time in their life
when they may have been suffering,
and cultivate the genuine aspiration
that they be relieved of that suffering.
And then we have them move on to a difficult person,
someone who really pushes your buttons,
and bring that person into your mind and into your heart,
in a genuine way, and imagine a time in their life
when they may have been suffering
and cultivate the genuine aspiration
that they be relieved of that suffering.
And then we have them move on to all or as many beings
as they can envision.
We ask them to use a phrase
which they silently repeat to themselves,
a phrase such as, "May you be free from suffering,
"may you experience joy and ease."
The participants were instructed to notice
whatever visceral sensations they may have been experiencing
while they're doing this,
and they were also instructed
to feel the compassion emotionally,
and not to simply repeat these phrases cognitively.
And this is the study design.
We randomize people, as I said, into these two groups,
we then put them in the scanner
before we went through the two weeks of training
then they went through two weeks of training,
and then after the training,
we put them back in the scanner,
and we also gave them a bunch of really interesting, weird,
economic decision-making tasks.
These are tasks that economists really love,
and they're tasks that give us
a behavioral measure of altruism, and of fairness.
And I don't have time to go into the details,
if there are questions I'd be happy to answer them,
but take my word that these are
quite well-studied kinds of measures,
and what we found is that, after two weeks of training,
the compassion group is behaving more altruistically,
more pro-socially, and the compassion group is also showing
changes in different regions of the brain,
and the magnitude of change that we see actually predicts
the extent to which they behave altruistically
on this economic decision-making task.
And that's what all this stuff is showing you here.
And I don't need to go into the detail,
I just gave you the bottom line,
but the amazing thing is that this is seen after just
two weeks of practice for 30 minutes a day.
That's a total of seven hours of practice,
which is sufficient to change the brain
in these reliable ways.
I'm actually going to skip this in the interest of time,
and just
mention two other things
in the last few minutes that I have.
One is to say that these practices
don't just affect the mind and the brain,
they also affect the body.
This is a finding from a study that was published
now quite a long time ago, a decade ago, this was actually
the first randomized control trial ever done
of mindfulness-based stress reduction.
And Jon Kabat-Zinn,
who developed mindfulness-based stress reduction,
was a collaborator on this study,
and Jon actually taught the MBSR course
that this study was based on.
It was done with high-tech employees
at a corporation in Madison, Wisconsin,
and what we did is the MBSR class began in September,
it ended around Thanksgiving time,
and we gave everyone a flu shot at the end,
in the MBSR group and in the control group.
It was an ordinary flu shot but we also took blood samples
which allow us to quantify the magnitude of antibody titers
in response to the vaccine.
This gives us a quantitative index
of how well the vaccine is working,
and what you can see is that after two months of MBSR,
the meditation group is showing
a significantly greater response to the flu vaccine,
compared to the controls, who are not going through MBSR.
And so, if these two groups are exposed
to the same level of flu virus,
the MBSR group would be more protected.
So, this affects the body in very important ways,
and there are now many studies
which have begun to articulate the systems in the body,
the immune system, the endocrine system, and so forth,
which are directly affected by these practices,
and one of the most important is inflammation,
which plays a very important role
in many chronic health conditions,
and inflammation is reduced,
and the molecular mediators of inflammation are modified,
through these practices.
Okay.
This is a paper which appeared in 2011
by a group at Duke University,
and this paper has nothing to do with contemplative practice
but it's a paper which is a very important one
and it has profound implications,
and I'll just say a little bit about what was done.
This group at Duke has been following a cohort
of 1,000 people from birth in a city in New Zealand,
Dunedin, New Zealand.
So this is a cohort that's identified at birth,
they're a random cohort,
and they've been following them since they were born
on many different psychological,
mostly psychological measures.
These individuals, at the time this publication was written,
were 32 years of age, and they had been followed from birth.
And the question they asked in this study
is what the relation is between early measures
within the child's first six years of life,
most of the measures come from when the kids were
four and five years old,
early measures of a construct that they call self-control,
and a primary attribute of self-control
is the ability to regulate one's attention.
So they asked what the relation is
between these early measures of self-control
when kids are four and five years of age,
and outcomes when the individuals were adults,
when they were 32 years of age.
And they looked at a number of health-related outcomes,
outcomes involving drug-abuse,
and also financial outcomes.
And here's what they found:
So, in this panel is a bunch of outcomes
related to health and substance abuse,
and basically what these data are showing
is that, when you're four and five years of age,
if you're in the highest quintile
of self-control,
then you show the lowest level of substance-abuse
when you're 32 years of age.
So again, the kids who,
when they're four and five years of age,
are the top in self-control,
when they're 32 years of age
they are showing the lowest levels of substance abuse.
And this, in the blue line
is informant-rated substance dependence,
so this is not a self-report measure.
This is about as good a measure as you can get.
On this panel are a bunch of outcomes
related to financial success,
including one which is the light blue line here
which is actual income.
And this is very, very carefully controlled
for the socioeconomic status of the family of origin,
and what they found is that individuals,
when they were four and five years of age,
if they were in the highest group of self-control,
they earned approximately 7,000 dollars a year more
at age 32, compared to their counterparts
who were in the lowest quintile of self-control
when they were four and five years of age.
So, the financial consequences of these characteristics
are dramatic, and other measures go along the same lines.
And finally, this is adult criminal convictions.
So this is actual criminal convictions by the legal system,
and again, kids in the highest quintile of self-control
when they are four and five,
have the lowest criminal convictions.
Those who are in the lowest quintile,
have the highest criminal convictions.
Now, this is their abstract,
and I want to read you the last sentence of this abstract.
They say, "Interventions addressing self-control
"might reduce a panoply of societal costs,
"save tax-payers money, and promote prosperity."
So what can we do?
What are those interventions?
What can we do to facilitate
these kinds of characteristics
when the kids are really young?
So we decided we wanted to explore
applying simple contemplative practices
to preschool children, to begin this project.
And we asked His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
for advice about how we should go about this,
and he burst out laughing and said,
"I've never had children. I have no idea."
(audience laughs)
But he did encourage us to pursue it scientifically.
So, we have developed a "kindness curriculum",
that involves mindfulness and kindness,
that we're now deploying with preschool children
in public schools in the city of Madison.
We're doing it with 200 kids this year,
we'll be doing it with about the same number next year,
and by then we should have a decent sample size.
These are just some of the topics that we work with.
The curriculum involves
90 minutes of class instruction each week,
and I should say that we precede it
with 10 weeks of training for the preschool teachers.
They go through a kind of MBSR course,
plus a few extra weeks focused on applying these strategies
with their students in the classroom.
- [Audience member] Is that published?
- I'll address that later.
There's a detailed description of this on our website,
and for anyone who wants to implement this
in a context where they can actually collect evidence on it,
we are making it available.
So, I'll say more about that later.
This is just some early data.
These are teacher reports of pro-social behavior,
like cooperative behavior in the classroom,
for kids in the intervention group
and kids in a control group.
This is an objective measure of attention
that we administer.
So, here we present this kind of stimulus to a child
and we say, "We'd like you to simply press an arrow key
"to denote which direction the center fish is pointing.
"Is this fish pointing to the left or to the right?"
And this is a trial where there are distracting flankers,
this is called a "flanker task".
And this really screws-up not just kids' performance,
but it screws-up adult performance.
You tend to make more errors on these kinds of trials,
and you also tend to go slower.
Now, what we found is that
after eight weeks of this intervention,
the kids in the intervention group who are here
improved significantly in their accuracy,
and they also showed a decrease in their reaction time,
so they actually got faster and more accurate,
which is really kind of amazing, given that this is based on
eight weeks of 90 minutes a week of in-class training.
We also administered
a task that we call "the other sharing task"
that was developed by a scientist in our lab, Lisa Fluch.
What we do is we learn who the kid's, each child's,
best friend is in the class,
and who each child's least favorite person is in the class,
and we get pictures of these kids,
a picture of their best friend,
a picture of their least favorite friend,
(audience laughs)
and we also have a picture of a stranger child,
a child that they've never seen before,
same gender child, on another envelope,
and finally on a fourth envelope
we have a picture of an obviously sick-looking child.
And then we give the kids a bunch of stickers,
and we say, "Please distribute these stickers,
"and place them in the envelopes,
"according to who you'd like to have them go to."
And what we see is that before the intervention,
they give most of their stickers to their best friend,
denoted in blue,
and give the same very few number to the rest.
(audience laughs)
And after the intervention,
they actually distribute them equitably.
So we believe that change is possible,
that the brain is actually more plastic earlier in life,
that this is really an optimal time to intervene,
and the kids love it.
We, as I mentioned, go into the classroom three days a week,
the children are complaining
because they want it five days a week,
and they don't understand why we don't come every day,
rather than just three days a week.
Now, I want to end by just showing you
a very short video clip.
This will take about five minutes,
and we'll end just after this.
This is a clip that actually comes from
a documentary film that's been made about
some of the work in our center.
The film is called "Free The Mind",
and it actually recently premiered in the United States
in New York, on May 3rd,
and has been shown now in several cities
throughout the country.
And this is just a little trailer from that film.
One of the projects which was featured in that film
is the work we're doing with preschool kids,
so I'll show that to you, and then we can talk.
(gentle orchestral music)
- [Teacher] We'll meet you at the next floor, okay?
We have elevators, right?
I know that you didn't have a good time with them,
but your Mom and Dad weren't in there with you, right?
How about, you and I, we'll take the elevator one time,
and then, (mumbles) we'll take it again.
It's okay.
Do you need a hug?
It's okay.
- There are different parts of the brain
that become active when we have feelings of sadness,
and feelings of frustration,
and feelings of happiness.
And we can change our brains, for the better.
- [student's parent] The challenge first, for us and Will,
the doctor that we met with,
he recommended medication for Will.
It was--
- He looked like ADHD and he was recommending Ritalin.
- And, for us, to put a three-year-old
or four-year-old on Ritalin
was not the path we wanted to go on,
and we're looking at alternative ways
for him to bridge his development
to get beyond the need for that.
- Social-emotional learning is teaching kids
how to be more emotionally intelligent.
So teaching kids to take the perspective of others
before they act,
and being more self-aware, knowing what their emotions are.
(student cries)
- Does it feel tight in here?
Show me with your hands how it feels inside.
Where does it feel tight?
Right there? Or in your throat?
Okay, watch me:
Put your hand on your belly,
and take a deep breath with me, alright?
Blow it out.
Tell him how you're feeling when you see him so sad.
- I feel sad.
- You feel sad, too?
Show me where in your body you feel sad.
- In here.
- You feel sad in your body.
It doesn't feel so good, does it?
(gentle piano music)
- When you pay attention, what happens to your body?
Does it get all busy?
- [Students] No.
- [Teacher] No? What happens to your body
when you're paying attention?
It gets slow.
You can pay attention on the outside
and you can pay attention on the inside.
So the first thing we're going to do today
is pay attention on the inside.
Is everybody ready?
- This is for you.
It's very cool, isn't it?
Shake it up really hard,
like as if you were really mad, or really angry.
Now, this jar is like your mind when you're angry and upset.
And then, we see the angry dots settling down.
- We can actually be happier people, we can suffer less
if we take responsibility for our own mind.
- Well, I heard that when you
go by elevators,
they get you really, really angry,
or really upset.
Is that true?
How does it feel on the inside when that's happening?
- Scared.
- You feel scared?
I'm wondering if we could
walk over by the elevator together, is that okay?
- In a little while.
- And then shake this up,
when you start feeling scared,
on the inside.
Is that okay?
Great, here, you carry it.
Okay we're getting close to the elevator.
How does it feel in your body?
- Um, good.
- It does?
So I'm wondering, maybe another day,
could we take that "mind jar" with us
and take a ride on that elevator?
Another day? Or today?
- Um, another day.
- Alright.
What do you think about that "mind jar"?
- Good.
- Do you think that we should leave it at school,
so that if you're feeling angry or upset
that you could maybe shake it?
- Is this brainwashing
(audience laughs)
for good, for a good cause?
- No, I wouldn't say that,
because brainwashing usually requires
that the pesron who is being brainwashed
is not agreeing to this process.
- [Teacher] Breathing in. Breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
- How about today, you can choose one friend,
and we'll all go to the elevator together?
You can bring your snowball.
We can go inside,
- And then what?
- And take a look at the elevator,
and if you want to ride, we can,
if you're not ready, then we won't go on it.
- I'll try it. I'll try to ride it.
- You will?
Alright, my friend.
- Can I go with you then, in the elevator?
- Of course you can.
- I'm the littlest in there.
- And remember, what could the snowball do for you?
- Make me calm.
- Yeah.
Now, if you feel worried, what can you do with the snowball?
- Shake it?
- Shake it up.
Okay now watch this.
How does your mind and your body feel right now?
- Calm.
- Good.
(soaring orchestral music)
- So, if you'd like to learn more about our work--
(applause)
Thank you.
Please go to our center,
and our website is "investigatinghealthyminds.org".
And finally, I just want to acknowledge
the many, many people,
this is just a shortlist of a much larger group
who have played an instrumental role
in making this work possible.
So thank you all again for your attention
and I'm happy to answer questions.
(applause)
Thank you.
Yes, please.
- [Audience member] I have two questions.
I'm not going to be selfish.
You can choose which you answer.
One is: I'm very interested in the "between-ness",
what goes on between you and me,
or this person and that person,
and so it's like the ripple effect of that,
and is there research being done
on that, on how far does this compassion go
between this person and that person?
- Yeah, so it's a great question.
For those who might not have heard it--
- [Audience member] Can you repeat her question?
- I will repeat it.
So, for those who couldn't hear,
the question is about "between-ness",
and whether we have studied what goes on between
a person who may be, for example, expressing compassion
and a recipient.
And, it's a great question,
and I think that it actually represents
one of the best ways of studying compassion.
We've thought a lot about this, that rather than studying
the individual who's supposedly generating compassion,
it might be even more effective to study recipients,
and anyone who has been in the close company
of His Holiness the Dalai Lama,
has gotten a heavy whiff of it.
Many people report that you can really feel his presence
in that way,
and there's a little bit of work that's been done.
We've done some crazy studies where we've had
two individuals, couples actually, in the scanner,
one lying in the scanner, the other outside the scanner,
just touching the person who's in the scanner
in a loving way,
and just simple touch is something that can
dramatically alter the brain's response,
and tremendously reduce anxiety.
So, there are ways of doing this,
and I think over the next five years
we'll see more of this kind of work being done.
So, thank you for the question.
- [Audience member] I had a second question
which had to do with the connection of the "heart-brain"
and the so-called "gut-brain",
are you studying that as well?
- Yes, so we study,
the question was about the connections between
this brain, and the heart-brain, and the gut-brain,
and are we studying that.
Yes, we are.
I have to tell you a story about that.
The very first time I met His Holiness in 1992,
he asked whether I would give a lecture to young monks
in the Namgyal monastery,
which is connected to his residence in Dharamsala,
and that was a trip where we schlepped all this equipment
in the hopes that we'd measure brain activity of people
who were in semi-retreat for the rest of their life,
up in the mountains near Dharamsala,
which was a complete bust,
but we had all this equipment and so we thought that
we really should use the equipment in the lecture,
instead of just giving a dry lecture we'd actually
show the monks how we can record brain activity.
Some of you know the name Francisco Varela,
one of the founders of the Mind and Life Institute.
Francisco was with us on that trip,
and so we decided that Francisco would be the guinea pig
and I was putting electrodes on Francisco's head,
and futzing with them,
and we had a bunch of laptop computers
which, in those days, were much larger,
and we finally got out of the way
so that the 200 monks
who were dutifully sitting on the floor
can see what was going on,
and we were displaying Francisco's brain activity
on these laptops,
and as soon as we kind of parted,
and the audience could see what we were doing, they just,
all 200 monks just burst out laughing, hysterically.
(audience laughs)
And I thought, everyone thought from our side,
that they were laughing because Francisco looked funny
with this electrode cap on.
It turns out that's not what they were laughing about.
What they were laughing about
is that we were talking about studying compassion
by putting electrodes on the head
rather than on the heart.
That was a very deep and profound teaching
which took twenty years for us to process.
(audience laughs)
So, we're now doing that,
and it turns out that there are all kinds of
really interesting things that are going on in the body,
and it is very much a mind-brain-body interaction,
and all of those constituents are probably very important.
So, you know,
I could say a lot more technically about what we found, but
the basic message is very much the importance of the body.
Other questions?
Yes, please.
- [Audience member] Yeah, I have two questions.
One was: are things like medications
and communities of faith, and what gets generated
in that kind of a faith-based community.
Have there been studies to show, you know,
are there similar changes in the brain?
I know we've got plenty on medication and things,
but what do you see as similarities and differences there?
- Yeah, it's a very interesting question
about faith-based communities and also medication.
From this kind of perspective,
to the best of my knowledge,
there have not been any studies of faith-based communities.
There are psychological studies of faith-based communities,
and certainly some of the questionairre measures,
the self-report measures,
change in a way that is similar.
We don't know, though,
what the effects on the brain might be.
These days, the way neuroscientists think,
we really see the brain as this organ of plasticity,
and there once was a time when,
if you talked about things in the brain,
people assumed that you were talking about
fixed kinds of qualities,
but we now understand that our social worlds and culture
gets under the skin and transforms the brain.
So it's quite possible that faith-based communities
have effects which might be similar.
Medications are obviously a whole other thing,
and a lot depends upon the kind of medication,
and in general I think it's fair to say
that the changes that you see
with behavioral interventions in general,
meditation being one, but also with cognitive therapy,
the changes that you see in the brain
are changes that are more enduring
than any change that you see with medication.
And one of the things that I tell my students
is that the best way to produce
a specific biological change in the brain
is through non-pharmacological methods,
because when you give a person a medication
it's such a blunt instrument,
it affects so many different systems
in the brain and the body, that's why there are side effects
and I think most people would agree
that the side effects of meditation are much less severe
than the side effects of most medications.
- [Audience member] Thank you, again,
and now just kind of the second question was
how long do you see the gains lasting?
When you look at those studies
and you're finding that the brain's changed,
how long would you say,
if there was no other practice introduced,
how long would say those--
- Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and
pardon me for saying this,
I mean I said the same thing myself,
but it's such an American question.
(audience laughs)
And you're American, so am I, I asked the same question.
The honest answer is this: We don't know.
But, it's very, very likely
that the ffects are not going to endure
if the practices are not continued,
and it's kind of like asking, if a person were to
undergo an intensive physical exercise regime
and get a personal trainer for a month,
and really get in tip-top shape,
and then not do any physical exercise again,
how long are the effects going to last?
Well, probably not that long.
And the same, I think, is true with this.
Sure. Any other questions?
Yes, in the back, please.
- [Audience member] Thank you for coming here.
I'm curious about the studies being done
with longer-term practitioners, or more concentrated...
Sorry, can you hear me?
- Little bit louder, please.
- [Audience member] Sorry. Your studies where you
look at longer-term practitioners,
there are a couple of things that always jump out at me,
and this question about whether
it's only people who come from a monastic tradition,
versus people who are home followers,
and then if you're doing studies of people
who are not in a monastic tradition,
there is this piece of economics of being able to take part
in a longer-term study,
and so I wonder how you deal with that question of class,
and economic pressures, when perhaps the studies
are really only engaging people
who either have a monastic lifestyle, or have the privilege
of being able to take part in this study.
- Thank you for the questions.
They're very important questions.
I'll repeat the questions.
There were several questions.
One relates to whether all of the subjects who were subjects
in our long-term practitioner studies were monastics,
secondly, how do we deal with the question of class,
because in order to undertake
that kind of extensive practice,
an individual needs to have some financial means
in order to do that.
So, that was basically the question.
There are studies of long-term practitioners
at this point in time,
about half of them are monastics,
and half of them are from a lay community,
so they're not all monastics.
We do not find any systematic differences
between the monastics and non-monastics
in terms of their brains or other things that we measure.
With regard to the issue of economics:
You know, it's a great question, it's a hard question,
and I don't have a great answer,
other than to say that
for many of these individuals,
they have voluntarily committed themselves to a life of
very modest means.
I mean, the monastics are, for all intents and purposes,
quite poor,
and they don't take any income,
and so they just live
on the basis of what people give them
for basic sustenance.
But it is true,
that you certainly, I mean, individuals
who are in a situation of economic strain,
are not going to go and undertake something like this,
and so I think that there's no question
that we need to do everything we can
to work on many different levels simultaneously.
This is one, it's certainly not the only one.
So, you know, there's more I can say,
but it's a complicated problem
and I appreciate you raising it.
Yes, please.
- [Audience member] Could you talk about
the impact on the classroom experience
because of the training of the teachers?
With the increase in pro-social behavior in the classroom.
- So the question's about the impact on the classroom
behavior of training the teachers.
We're getting measures of that,
and what we're able to see
in the data that we've collected so far,
is that, by and large, there are very siginificant changes
that we see in the classroom.
The teachers, those who've gone through the training,
have really appreciated it
and have valued it tremendously,
they have felt it's been hugely beneficial.
There are a couple of schools in Madison,
we made the decision,
actually this is apropos of the last question,
to work in the schools in Madison that are the lowest,
have families with the lowest income of any of the schools,
and the most diversity.
In one school that we're working in,
70% of the families qualify for food stamps,
and this is a school where there's been a history of,
it's an elementary school, there's been a history of,
it's been the school that,
before we did any work in the school,
it had the highest suspension rate
of any elementary school in Madison,
and it's now moved to actually having a suspension rate,
this past year and the year before,
I think in one of those years
there was a single suspension,
and last year, this current year, there was zero.
And the whole culture of the school has changed.
In part, the principal has embraced this,
and she has gone through the training herself,
and she's really made it a central mission of her's
to bring this to the entire school,
and this is a public school.
And so, I think that there is tremendous possibility here,
but I also think that we're not going to be able
to implement these kinds of programs,
on a wide-scale basis,
unless we have much more evidence.
The federal officials
who set policy in these areas
are not going to pay attention to these pilot studies.
They're going to want to see something much more substantial
which is something that we hope to move toward.
I should also mention one other thing in passing,
and that is that we've recently gotten a grant
from the Gates Foundation to develop apps for tablets
for middle school kids,
and we've developed an app to cultivate mindfulness
and another app to cultivate empathy and pro-social behavior
in the hopes that we can make games that are actually
as interesting to play as other games
and that may actaully serve some beneficial purpose,
and so we're now evaluating these games
in a formal scientific evaluation,
and if they are shown to be beneficial
we hope to disseminate them very widely.
Yes.
- [Audience member] That was a preschool classroom
that we saw?
- It was.
- [Audience member] And how many years back was that filmed?
- Three years ago.
- [Audience member] And it was only in Madison
that this happened?
It hasn't spread to the whole state?
- No it has not.
It's being done in a couple of other cities
within Wisconsin,
and a couple of other places in the country
that we've given our curriculum to.
But very selective.
Yeah, and I'm mindful of time,
I know that people have to leave at nine,
and so I'll stick around,
and let me just thank you all,
and I appreciate your attention and good questions.
Thank you.
(applause)