Overkill in techno-aids for 'Mens Sana in Corpore Sano'

None of us would argue with the 'sound mind in a sound body' injunction from Juvenal’s Latin satires (~100 AD), a goal that can be accomplished by diligent pursuit of a few simple activities. Two NYTimes articles note how modern technology manages, for a profit, to vastly encumber that pursuit.

With regard to 'sound mind,' Gelles notes:

The other morning, I woke up and brewed a cup of Mindful Lotus tea ($6 for 20 bags). On the subway, I loaded the Headspace app on my iPhone and followed a guided mindfulness exercise ($13 a month for premium content). Later in the day, I dropped by Mndfl, a meditation studio in Greenwich Village ($20 for a 30-minute class)...There are more than two dozen mindfulness apps for smartphones, some offering $400 lifetime subscriptions. The Great Courses has two mindfulness packages, each with a couple of dozen DVDs for $250. For an enterprising contemplative, it’s never been easier to make a buck...On a recent trip to Whole Foods, near the kombucha, I came across a new product from the health food maker Earth Balance: a dairy-free mayonnaise substitute called Mindful Mayo ($4.50 a jar). Then, in line, I picked up a copy of Mindful magazine ($6)....With so many mindful goods and services for sale, it can be easy to forget that mindfulness is a quality of being, not a piece of merchandise

...with so many cashing in on the meditation craze, it’s hard not to wonder whether something essential is being lost...Increasingly, mindfulness is being packaged as a one-minute reprieve, an interlude between checking Instagram and starting the next episode of “House of Cards.” One company proclaims it has found the “minimum effective dose” of meditation that will change your life. On Amazon, you can pick up “One-Minute Mindfulness: 50 Simple Ways to Find Peace, Clarity, and New Possibilities in a Stressed-Out World.” Dubious courses promise to help people “master mindfulness” in a few weeks.

More often than not, however, the people I know who take time to meditate — carefully observing thoughts, emotions and sensations — are sincere in their aspirations to become less stressed, more accepting and at least a little happier.

Hutchinson discusses the greater than billion dollar market for body fitness aids (which are not used by more than half their buyers six months after their purchase) suggesting:

...a more fundamental question about our rapid adoption of wearable fitness tech: Is the data we collect with these devices actually useful?...Last September, in The British Journal of Sports Medicine, Australian researchers published a review of studies that compared subjective and objective measures of “athlete well-being” during training. The objective measures included state-of-the-art monitoring of heart rate, blood, hormones and more; the subjective measure boiled down to asking the athletes how they felt. The results were striking: The researchers found that as the athletes worked out, their own perception registered changes in training stress with “superior sensitivity and consistency” to the high tech measures...running with a GPS watch “slackens the bond between perception and action.” In other words, when you’re running, instead of speeding up or slowing down based on immediate and intuitive feedback from your body and environment, you’re inserting an unwieldy extra cognitive step that relies on checking your device as you go.

On the positive side:

Health researchers also want to use your tracked data to figure out what works in the real world to improve health and fitness, rather than testing theories in the artificial conditions of the lab. An analysis of in-the-wild data from 4.2 million MyFitnessPal users, for example, recently yielded unexpected insights into the habits of successful weight-losers compared with unsuccessful ones: They ate nearly a third more fiber, and 11 percent less meat. And the dietary changes the successful dieters made between 2014 and 2015 bucked broader trends: They consumed more grains, cereal and raw fruit, but fewer eggs.

As prosaic as it sounds, this is the greatest promise of the wearables revolution. Once the novelty of tracking your exercise habits wears off, knowing how many steps you took today or what your resting heart rate was yesterday soon loses its interest. But together, 100 million of us wearing wristbands could uncover some truly valuable insights into what works to make us healthier and fitter.

Perhaps the most effective and simple way to increase aerobic fitness: use a jump rope!

A mindfulness meditation intervention enhances connectivity of brain executive and default modes and lowers inflammation markers.

Creswell et al. recruited 35 stressed-out adult job-seekers, getting half to participate in an intensive three-day mindfulness meditation retreat while the other half completed a three day relaxation retreat program without the mindfulness component. Brain scans and blood samples were obtained before and four months after the program. The result was that mindfulness meditation correlated with reduced blood levels of interleukin-6, a marker of stress and inflammation, and increased functional connectivity between the participants’ resting default mode network and areas in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex important to attention and executive control. Neither of these changes were seen in participants who received only the relaxation training. The suggestion is that the brain changes cause the decrease in inflammatory markers. Here are some clips of context from their introduction:

Mindfulness meditation training programs, which train receptive attention and awareness to one’s present moment experience, have been shown to improve a broad range of stress-related psychiatric and physical health outcomes in initial randomized controlled trials...recent well-controlled studies indicate that mindfulness meditation training may reduce markers of inflammation (C Reactive Protein, Interleukin-6 (IL-6), neurogenic inflammation) in stressed individuals.

One possibility is that mindfulness meditation training alters resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) of brain networks implicated in mind wandering (the Default Mode Network, DMN) and executive control (the Executive Control Network, EC), which in turn improves emotion regulation, stress resilience, and stress-related health outcomes in at-risk patient populations.... a cross-sectional study (N=25) showed that advanced mindfulness meditation practitioners had increased functional connectivity of a key hub in the default mode network (DMN) (i.e., posterior cingulate cortex) with regions considered to be important in top down executive control (EC) (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal ACC), both at rest and during a guided mindfulness meditation practice. This coupling of one’s DMN at rest with regions of the EC network may be important for emotion regulation and stress resilience effects, as greater activation and functional connectivity of EC regions, such as the dlPFC, is associated with reduced pain, negative affect, and stress.

Here we provide the first experimental test of whether an intensive 3-day mindfulness meditation training intervention (relative to a relaxation training intervention) alters DMN connectivity and circulating IL-6 in a high stress unemployed job-seeking community sample. IL-6 is an established clinical health biomarker that is elevated in high stress populations and is associated with elevated cardiovascular disease and mortality risk... unemployment is a well-known chronic stressor that can foster a loss of control, helplessness, and financial setbacks, and unemployment is associated with elevated inflammation. Building on initial cross-sectional evidence (17), we hypothesized that mindfulness meditation training would increase rsFC between the DMN and regions implicated in attention and executive control (dlPFC and dACC). Moreover, we tested whether mindfulness meditation training (relative to relaxation training) decreased circulating IL-6 at 4-month follow up, and whether pre-post intervention increases in DMN-dlPFC rsFC mediated IL-6 improvements at 4-month follow-up.

Mindfulness meditation and pain reduction.

An interesting analysis from Zeidan et al.:

SIGNIFICANCE

Recent findings have demonstrated that mindfulness meditation significantly reduces pain. Given that the “gold standard” for evaluating the efficacy of behavioral interventions is based on appropriate placebo comparisons, it is imperative that we establish whether there is an effect supporting meditation-related pain relief above and beyond the effects of placebo. Here, we provide novel evidence demonstrating that mindfulness meditation produces greater pain relief and employs distinct neural mechanisms than placebo cream and sham mindfulness meditation. Specifically, mindfulness meditation-induced pain relief activated higher-order brain regions, including the orbitofrontal and cingulate cortices. In contrast, placebo analgesia was associated with decreased pain-related brain activation. These findings demonstrate that mindfulness meditation reduces pain through unique mechanisms and may foster greater acceptance of meditation as an adjunct pain therapy.

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness meditation reduces pain in experimental and clinical settings. However, it remains unknown whether mindfulness meditation engages pain-relieving mechanisms other than those associated with the placebo effect (e.g., conditioning, psychosocial context, beliefs). To determine whether the analgesic mechanisms of mindfulness meditation are different from placebo, we randomly assigned 75 healthy, human volunteers to 4 d of the following: (1) mindfulness meditation, (2) placebo conditioning, (3) sham mindfulness meditation, or (4) book-listening control intervention. We assessed intervention efficacy using psychophysical evaluation of experimental pain and functional neuroimaging. Importantly, all cognitive manipulations (i.e., mindfulness meditation, placebo conditioning, sham mindfulness meditation) significantly attenuated pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings when compared to rest and the control condition (p less than 0.05). Mindfulness meditation reduced pain intensity (p = 0.032) and pain unpleasantness (p less than 0.001) ratings more than placebo analgesia. Mindfulness meditation also reduced pain intensity (p = 0.030) and pain unpleasantness (p = 0.043) ratings more than sham mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness-meditation-related pain relief was associated with greater activation in brain regions associated with the cognitive modulation of pain, including the orbitofrontal, subgenual anterior cingulate, and anterior insular cortex. In contrast, placebo analgesia was associated with activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and deactivation of sensory processing regions (secondary somatosensory cortex). Sham mindfulness meditation-induced analgesia was not correlated with significant neural activity, but rather by greater reductions in respiration rate. This study is the first to demonstrate that mindfulness-related pain relief is mechanistically distinct from placebo analgesia. The elucidation of this distinction confirms the existence of multiple, cognitively driven, supraspinal mechanisms for pain modulation.

Note: In the sham mindfulness training, conditions were identical to mindfulness training session, but subjects were told just to close their eyes and take a deep breath 'as we sit here in meditation' every 2-3 min. They were not given the specific mindfulness-based instructions to pay attention to the breath, acknowledge arising thoughts, feelings, and/or emotion without judgment or emotional reaction, and simply return attention back to the breath. In the placebo training/conditioning sessions, participants were told they were participating in the trial of a new topical local anesthetic (actually petrolatum jelly) being tested for reducing pain after multiple applications. In all of the conditions, pain was induced by local heating of the skin.

Increased false-memory susceptibility after mindfulness meditation

From Wilson et al.:

The effect of mindfulness meditation on false-memory susceptibility was examined in three experiments. Because mindfulness meditation encourages judgment-free thoughts and feelings, we predicted that participants in the mindfulness condition would be especially likely to form false memories. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness induction, in which they were instructed to focus attention on their breathing, or a mind-wandering induction, in which they were instructed to think about whatever came to mind. The overall number of words from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm that were correctly recalled did not differ between conditions. However, participants in the mindfulness condition were significantly more likely to report critical nonstudied items than participants in the control condition. In a third experiment, which tested recognition and used a reality-monitoring paradigm, participants had reduced reality-monitoring accuracy after completing the mindfulness induction. These results demonstrate a potential unintended consequence of mindfulness meditation in which memories become less reliable.

Brain correlates of loving kindness meditation.

Garrison and collaborators extend their work on brain correlates of meditation practice, noting again a central role for the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (for previous posts in this thread, enter "Garrison" in the MindBlog search box in the left column).

Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as “may all beings be happy,” to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal during loving kindness meditation. We next used a relatively novel approach, the intrinsic connectivity distribution of functional connectivity, to identify regions that differ in intrinsic connectivity between groups, and then used a data-driven approach to seed-based connectivity analysis to identify which connections differ between groups. Our findings suggest group differences in brain regions involved in self-related processing and mind wandering, emotional processing, inner speech, and memory. Meditators showed overall reduced BOLD signal and intrinsic connectivity during loving kindness as compared to novices, more specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu), a finding that is consistent with our prior work and other recent neuroimaging studies of meditation. Furthermore, meditators showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and the left inferior frontal gyrus, whereas novices showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and other cortical midline regions of the default mode network, the bilateral posterior insula lobe, and the bilateral parahippocampus/hippocampus. These novel findings suggest that loving kindness meditation involves a present-centered, selfless focus for meditators as compared to novices.

The immensity of the vacated present.

The title of this post is a phrase from a recent essay by Vivian Gornick, "The cost of daydreaming," describing an experience that very much resonates with my own, and that I think is describing her discovery and way of noticing the distinction between our internal mind wandering (default mode) and present centered outwardly oriented (attentional) brain networks (the subject of many MindBlog posts). On finding that she could sense the start of daydreaming and suppress it:

...the really strange and interesting thing happened. A vast emptiness began to open up behind my eyes as I went about my daily business. The daydreaming, it seemed, had occupied more space than I’d ever imagined. It was as though a majority of my waking time had routinely been taken up with fantasizing, only a narrow portion of consciousness concentrated on the here and now...I began to realize what daydreaming had done for me — and to me.

Turning 60 was like being told I had six months to live. Overnight, retreating into the refuge of a fantasized tomorrow became a thing of the past. Now there was only the immensity of the vacated present...It wasn’t hard to cut short the daydreaming, but how exactly did one manage to occupy the present when for so many years one hadn’t?"

Then, after a period of time:

...I became aware, after a street encounter, that the vacancy within was stirring with movement. A week later another encounter left me feeling curiously enlivened. It was the third one that did it. A hilarious exchange had taken place between me and a pizza deliveryman, and sentences from it now started repeating themselves in my head as I walked on, making me laugh each time anew, and each time with yet deeper satisfaction. Energy — coarse and rich — began to swell inside the cavity of my chest. Time quickened, the air glowed, the colors of the day grew vivid; my mouth felt fresh. A surprising tenderness pressed against my heart with such strength it seemed very nearly like joy; and with unexpected sharpness I became alert not to the meaning but to the astonishment of human existence. It was there on the street, I realized, that I was filling my skin, occupying the present.

Transcranial direct current stimulation increases propensity to mind-wander

Alelrod et al. show that stimulation of the frontal lobe areas involved in our attentional network increase mind wandering associated with our default mode network (see previous posts here and here for discussion of these networks).

Humans mind-wander quite intensely. Mind wandering is markedly different from other cognitive behaviors because it is spontaneous, self-generated, and inwardly directed (inner thoughts). However, can such an internal and intimate mental function also be modulated externally by means of brain stimulation? Addressing this question could also help identify the neural correlates of mind wandering in a causal manner, in contrast to the correlational methods used previously (primarily functional MRI). In our study, participants performed a monotonous task while we periodically sampled their thoughts to assess mind wandering. Concurrently, we applied transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). We found that stimulation of the frontal lobes [anode electrode at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), cathode electrode at the right supraorbital area], but not of the occipital cortex or sham stimulation, increased the propensity to mind-wander. These results demonstrate for the first time, to our knowledge, that mind wandering can be enhanced externally using brain stimulation, and that the frontal lobes play a causal role in mind-wandering behavior. These results also suggest that the executive control network associated with the DLPFC might be an integral part of mind-wandering neural machinery.

Breath counting as an objective behavioral measure of mindfulness.

Another fascinating piece of work from Richard Davidson's group at the University of Wisconsin, evaluating breath counting as a potential objective and rigorous behavioral measurement of mindfulness. (The technique of indexing mindfulness of breathing by breath counting is referenced as early as 430 AD.) A provisional PDF of the article describing four different studies evaluating this approach can be downloaded from the link.  I recommend that you read the discussion section.  For those who want just the bottom line, here it is from the abstract. They found:

...skill in breath counting associated with more meta-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood, and greater non-attachment (i.e. less attentional capture by distractors formerly paired with reward). We also found in a randomized online training study that 4 weeks of breath counting training improved mindfulness and decreased mind wandering relative to working memory training and no training controls.

The procedure followed was very straightforward:

We instructed 120 participants to “be aware… of the movement of breath” and count their breaths from 1 to 9 repeatedly. With breaths 1-8 they pressed one button, and on breath 9 they pressed another, measuring counting accuracy. Every ~90 sec (60-120 sec range) experience sampling probed state mind wandering and meta-awareness, respectively, with 2 6-point Likert scales, “just now where was your attention? [completely on-task / off task]” and “how aware were you of where your attention was? [completely aware / unaware].” Participants were then probed for their count.

Here is their abstract:

Mindfulness practice of present moment awareness promises many benefits, but has eluded rigorous behavioral measurement. To date, research has relied on self-reported mindfulness or heterogeneous mindfulness trainings to infer skillful mindfulness practice and its effects. In four independent studies with over 400 total participants, we present the first construct validation of a behavioral measure of mindfulness, breath counting. We found it was reliable, correlated with self-reported mindfulness, differentiated long-term meditators from age-matched controls, and was distinct from sustained attention and working memory measures. In addition, we employed breath counting to test the nomological network of mindfulness. As theorized, we found skill in breath counting associated with more meta-awareness, less mind wandering, better mood, and greater nonattachment (i.e. less attentional capture by distractors formerly paired with reward). We also found in a randomized online training study that 4 weeks of breath counting training improved mindfulness and decreased mind wandering relative to working memory training and no training controls. Together, these findings provide the first evidence for breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness.

Having 'no self' as self transcendence, or spirituality.

I've finally read another item in my queue of potential posts, an interview by Gary Gutting of Sam Harris, whose most recent book is titled "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. " I recommend the article to philosophically inclined MindBlog readers. Harris takes deities and religion to be nonsense, but argues that spirituality (probably the foundation of many religions) is a noble pursuit. The following clip is Harris on contrasting the claims about mind and cosmos made by science and religion:

There is a big difference between making claims about the mind and making claims about the cosmos. Every religion (including Buddhism) uses first-person experience to do both of these things, but the latter pretensions to knowledge are almost always unwarranted. There is nothing that you can experience in the darkness of your closed eyes that will help you understand the Big Bang or the connection between consciousness and the physical world. Look within, and you will find no evidence that you even have a brain, much less gain any insight into how it works.

However, one can discover specific truths about the nature of consciousness through a practice like meditation. Religious people are always entitled to claim that certain experiences are possible — feelings of bliss or selfless love, for instance. But Christians, Hindus and atheists have experienced the same states of consciousness. So what do these experiences prove? They certainly don’t support claims about the unique divinity of Christ or about the existence of the monkey god Hanuman. Nor do they demonstrate the divine origin of certain books. These reports only suggest that certain rare and wonderful experiences are possible. But this is all we need to take “spirituality” (the unavoidable term for this project of self-transcendence) seriously. To understand what is actually going on — in the mind and in the world — we need to talk about these experiences in the context of science.

In the interview Harris gives one of the nicest and most simple expositions of how our sense of self can be an illusion that I have seen. It is a response to Gutting's question:

You deny the existence of the self, understood as “an inner subject thinking our thoughts and experiencing our experiences.” You say, further, that the experience of meditation (as practiced, for example, in Buddhism) shows that there is no self. But you also admit that we all “feel like an internal self at almost every waking moment.” Why should a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience of no-self trump this almost constant feeling of a self?

Harris:

Because what does not survive scrutiny cannot be real. Perhaps you can see the same effect in this perceptual illusion:

It certainly looks like there is a white square in the center of this figure, but when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled. Can we know that the black shapes are more real than the white one? Yes, because the square doesn’t survive our efforts to locate it — its edges literally disappear. A little investigation and we see that its form has been merely implied.

What could we say to a skeptic who insisted that the white square is just as real as the three-quarter circles and that its disappearance is nothing more than, as you say, “a relatively rare — and deliberately cultivated — experience”? All we could do is urge him to look more closely.

The same is true about the conventional sense of self — the feeling of being a subject inside your head, a locus of consciousness behind your eyes, a thinker in addition to the flow of thoughts. This form of subjectivity does not survive scrutiny. If you really look for what you are calling “I,” this feeling will disappear. In fact, it is easier to experience consciousness without the feeling of self than it is to banish the white square in the above image.

Mindfulness and corporate America’s bottom line.

New Republic senior editor Evgeny Morozov writes a piece called “The Mindfulness Racket”. (I have been working on a brain/mind web lecture on the mindfulnesness / attentional / default / upstairs / downstairs themes, but the deluge of articles in these area is beginning to make me feel like I'm carrying coals to Newcastle.) Some edited clips from Morozov's article:

Mindfulness on the cover of Time magazine...Huffington publications’ stress-tracking app named “GPS for the Soul”…”digital sabbath”…”digital detox”…In essence, we are being urged to unplug-for an hour, a day, a week - so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction..In our maddeningly complex world, where everything is in flux and defies comprehension, the only reasonable attitude is to renounce any efforts at control and adopt a Zen-like attitude of non-domination.

Huffington hopes that the pursuit of mindfulness can finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism…”So yes, I do want to talk about maximizing profits and beating expectations - by emphasizing the notion that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for corporate America’s bottom line”…

But couldn’t the “disconnectionists”…pursue an agenda a tad more radical than “digital detoxification”? Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic complains “Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems of our time just as any individual’s local, organic dietary habits don’t solve global agriculture’s issues.”

…why we disconnect matters: We can continue in today’s mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity, or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration distraction complex that is Silicon Valley. The former approach is reactionary but the latter can lead to emancipation, especially if such acts of refusal give rise to genuine social movements that will make problems of time and attention part of their political agendas - and not just the subject of hand-wringing by the Davos-based spirituality brigades…. We must be mindful of all this mindfulness.

The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

This is actually a post about mindfulness, in reaction to Dan Hurley's article describing how contemporary applications of the ancient tradition of mindfulness meditation are being engaged in many more contexts than the initial emphasis on chilling out in the 1970s, and being employed for very practical purses such as mental resilience in a war zone. It seems like to me that we are approaching a well defined technology of brain control whose brain basis is understood in some detail. I've done numerous posts on behavioral and brain correlates of mindfulness meditation (enter 'meditation' or 'mindfulness' in MindBlog's search box in the left column). For example, only four weeks of a mindfulness meditation regime emphasizing relaxation of different body parts correlates with increases in white matter (nerve tract) efficiency. Improvements in cognitive performance, working memory, etc. have been claimed. A special issue of The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience discusses issue in the research.

Full time mindfulness might be a bad idea, suppressing the mind wandering that facilitates bursts of creative insight. (During my vision research career, my most original ideas popped up when I was spacing out, once when I was riding a bike along a lakeshore path.) Many physicists and writers reports their best ideas happen when they are disengaged. It also appears that mindfulness may inhibit implicit learning in which habits and skill are acquired without conscious awareness.

Obviously knowing whether we are in an attentional or mind wandering (default, narrative) modes is useful (see here, and here), and this is where the title of this posts comes in. To note and distinguish our mind state is most effectively accomplished with a particular style of alertness or awareness that is functioning very soon (less than 200 milliseconds) after a new thought or sensory perception appears to us. This is a moment of fragility that offers a narrow time window of choice over whether our new brain activity will be either enhanced or diminished in favor of a more desired activity. This is precisely what is happening in mindfulness meditation that instructs a central focus of some sort (breathing, body relaxation, or whatever) to which one returns as soon as one notes that any other thoughts or distractions have popped into awareness. The ability to rapidly notice and attend to thoughts and emotions of these short time scales is enhanced by brain training regimes of the sort offered by BrainHq of positscience.com and others. I have found the exercises on this site, originated by Michael Merznich, to be the most useful.  It offers summaries of changes in brain speed, attention, memory, intelligence, navigation, etc. that result from performing the exercises - changes that can persist for years.

A book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last 15 years is "The 200 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "Guide" section of some 2005 writing, and actually in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering - or at least inhibiting - self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed. Here we are talking mechanics during the time period is when all the limbic and other routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually can start-up. The suggestion is that you can short circuit some of this process if you bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a reaction or behavior is becoming resident, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so, I think I'll do something else instead.”

"The 200 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’ cycle several times, the actual execution  bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. Also, I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways.

On well-being - An orgy of good energy last week in Madison, Wisconsin.

In spite of slightly flippant title for this post, I really do believe this is good stuff. The Dali Lama paid a two day visit to Madison Wisconsin last week, as part of his current world tour “Change Your Mind, Change The World,” speaking at a number of different venues (all under high security screening) under the sponsorship of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the Global Health Institute, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My colleague Richard Davidson, who was central in arranging his visit, is doing an amazing job of bringing to the general public neuroscientific and psychological insight into well-being and happiness. (side note: Davidson contributed to a brain imaging seminar I organized for the graduate Neuroscience program in the 1980’s.) An example his public outreach is this recent piece in The Huffington Post.

The point that I find most compelling, and it certainly resonates with my own experience, is the hard evidence that kindness and generosity are innate human predispositions whose exercise is more effective in promoting a sense of well being than explicitly self-serving behaviors. (Of course, this message has been a component of the major religious traditions for thousands of years.) There is accumulating evidence that kind and generous behavior reduces inflammatory chemistry in our bodies.

I have used the tag ‘happiness’ and 'mindfulness' (in the left column) to mark numerous posts on well-being over the past seven years. Right now my queue of potential posts in this area has more items that I will ever get to individually. So...I thought I would just list a few of them for MindBlog readers who might wish to check some of them out:

On happiness, from the New York Times Opinionator column.

A 75-year Harvard Study's finding on what it takes to live a happy life. 

A brief New York Times piece on mindfulness.

How your mind wandering robs you of happiness. (also, enter ‘mind wandering’ in the blog’s search box)

Is giving the secret to getting ahead.

On money and well being.

A review - Mindfulness meditation and our brain's default versus attentional networks.

I've been doing some homework on potential topics to work up into a lecture, one of them being brain correlates of various meditative, attentional, or default mode states. The vocabulary used is sometimes contradictory between papers, but two categories emerge. One uses terms for thought like default, narrative focus, phenomenal, social reasoning, theory of mind, baseline setting, self referential, introspective, and stimulus independent. The contrasting descriptors are attentional, direct experience, experiential focus, task positive network, physical cause/effect reasoning.

This cooks down roughly to distinguishing between brain networks whose primary activity occurs during internal narrative focus versus those activated during direct attentional experience.

In reviewing previous mindblog posts on the default network I come up with a partial bibliography of reviews and experiments, and thought some readers might find it useful, a list in no particular order, with brief notes:

Reciprocal repression (mutual inhibition) between networks - nice graphics  - some muddying of definitions

Relationship of this mutual inhibition to mindfulness meditation , which notes Farb et al., 2007

Review (NYTimes) on power of concentration - mindfulness training causing increased connectivity in attentional and default networks. 

Review with graphics of MRI of default network activated by autobiographical memory, envisioning future, theory of mind, moral decision making. 

Tierney - virtues of a wandering mind.  (context, larger agenda, creativity)

Review of varieties of resting state activity

Change between operating systems during eyeblink.

Different components of default mode active in different kinds of memory.

Mental time travel and default network.

Synchronization of both modes between individuals.

Default network can be realized by multiple architectures (split brain patients).

Default network as underpinning of cerebral ‘connectome‘  - good graphic.

Development of human default network from being sparsely functionally connected at 7-9  years.







Default mode in Chimps and Monkeys

Association of default network with midline structures.

Mindfulness training improves working memory and cognitive performance while reducing mind wandering.

Yet another study, by Mrazek et al., on the salutary effects of mindfulness:

Given that the ability to attend to a task without distraction underlies performance in a wide variety of contexts, training one’s ability to stay on task should result in a similarly broad enhancement of performance. In a randomized controlled investigation, we examined whether a 2-week mindfulness-training course would decrease mind wandering and improve cognitive performance. Mindfulness training improved both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity while simultaneously reducing the occurrence of distracting thoughts during completion of the GRE and the measure of working memory. Improvements in performance following mindfulness training were mediated by reduced mind wandering among participants who were prone to distraction at pretesting. Our results suggest that cultivating mindfulness is an effective and efficient technique for improving cognitive function, with wide-reaching consequences.

(The GRE is the Graduate Record Examination meant to test cognitive capacity of graduate school applicants. Readers interested in the details of the experiment, performed on the usual batch of ~50 college undergraduates, can email me.)

Impersonating your younger self makes your body physiologically younger - a rediscovered post.

For several years I've been trying to find or recall a MindBlog post or an article read, and couldn't come up with it. A blog reader sent an email recalling it, and I couldn't find it. FINALLY, on doing a string search in this blog (for 'mindfulness') I found it, an August 2010 post that I had given the misleading title of "The Psychology of Possibility." It referenced an article in Harvard Magazine on the work of Ellen Langer (1,2,3). Some of her early work is fascinating, and the post is worth repeating here:

An interesting article in the Harvard Magazine describes the life work of Ellen Langer, her demonstrations that our social self image (old versus young, for example) strongly patterns our actual vitality and physiology, her work on Mindfulness, unconscious processing, etc. I recommend that you read the article. Here are some clips from its beginning that hooked me (I actually did my own mini-repeat of the experiment described, a simple self-experiment of pretending that I had been transported back in time to 40 years ago, and convinced myself I was experiencing some of the effects described)...

In 1981, early in her career at Harvard, Ellen Langer and her colleagues piled two groups of men in their seventies and eighties into vans, drove them two hours north to a sprawling old monastery in New Hampshire, and dropped them off 22 years earlier, in 1959. The group who went first stayed for one week and were asked to pretend they were young men, once again living in the 1950s. The second group, who arrived the week afterward, were told to stay in the present and simply reminisce about that era. Both groups were surrounded by mid-century mementos—1950s issues of Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, a black-and-white television, a vintage radio—and they discussed the events of the time: the launch of the first U.S. satellite, Castro’s victory ride into Havana, Nikita Khrushchev and the need for bomb shelters.

...Before and after the experiment, both groups of men took a battery of cognitive and physical tests, and after just one week, there were dramatic positive changes across the board. Both groups were stronger and more flexible. Height, weight, gait, posture, hearing, vision—even their performance on intelligence tests had improved. Their joints were more flexible, their shoulders wider, their fingers not only more agile, but longer and less gnarled by arthritis. But the men who had acted as if they were actually back in 1959 showed significantly more improvement. Those who had impersonated younger men seemed to have bodies that actually were younger.