Well-being is a skill … and we have a moral responsibility to act (Rich Davidson)

Last Sunday I attended a talk by Richard Davidson, who is one of the thought leaders in the field of affective neurosciences focussing on understanding anxiety, stress and depression. Having already listened and spoken to world’s thought leaders and change makers such as Dan Goleman, Muhammad Yunus, Dan Siegel, Paul Polman, I was very keen to learn from and enjoy the wonderful presence of another master. In a nutshell, the content was nice, but not mind-blowing (in particular, I find the framework of well-being not convincing). And so it was a great opportunity for me to practice letting go of my high expectations and cultivate appreciation and gratitude for the tens of thousands of work hours he and numerous others had spent over the past decades for us humans to understand how we can best make use of our brain gift. He was also generous to show some appreciation for the work I'm doing.

Please enjoy reading and share your thoughts or questions that come up with me. Thank you!

Davidson’s life mission: After meeting the Dalai Lama in 1992, Richard Davidson decided for “the” assignment for the remainder of his life: take the ancient practices of Eastern contemplative meditation (in particular kindness and compassion), investigate their benefits with the rigorous empirical tools of modern science and make accessible to the world the techniques that have survived the scientific litmus test. He believes that for scientists like him, gathering data in the lab alone is no longer sufficient. For him, the root cause of current problems in the world (depression, suicide, climate change) is in selfishness & greed. He sees a moral responsibility to act and inspire action! For he and his team, this is about designing and running mindfulness programs for pre-school children, police officers and teachers.

Key message to the audience: We need to take more responsibility of our brains, and we do so by training our minds. We can transform the world by transforming minds. When we transform minds, we are changing our brains. And these changes can be of enduring nature. Acting should also come from a place of joy, not of fear. Davidson argues that even Martin Luther King said: I have a dream… not I have a nightmare… What is important about the practice of meditation: Make it relevant to your everyday life, so that you can enjoy its benefits beyond one-off experience.

Insights from research:

• Plasticity in Epigenetics (nature vs nurture): We are all born with a certain set of DNA, that is mostly stable throughout our lives. However, each gene has a little “volume control” - and the extent to which a gene is turned on or off is influenced by our emotions, the collective actions in our environment. Experience shapes our epigenetic manifestation.
• Bidirectional communication between body and brain: According to Davidson, the most powerful pharmaceutical on the planet is food. Our guts have nervous systems that communicate to the brain (and vice versa). Studies have shown correlation between prevalence of autism and gut disorders; some newer studies even suggest that radical alteration of diet can improve well-being for some children with autism. In general, it is known that chronic diseases cause inflammation in the body, and this inflammation will influence the state of the brain, our experience, and even our behaviors.
• Innate Goodness (nature vs. nurture again): We come into the world with the propensity for kindness and altruism, but we need to nourish this capacity (e.g., by compassion meditation), else it goes away. Hamlin et al., 2011, PNAS, have shown two animated videos with elephants to six month old babies. In one video, the animal was a selfish, mean elephant. After showing the videos, researchers gave the animals to children to choose - and 95% of the babies would reach for the animal that was helpful, not the one that was mean!
• Well-being is a skill: While innate, it’s a quality that needs to be nourished. This can be done by simple practices of meditation. Davidson has designed a well-being framework that consist of four elements awareness (“mindfulness”), insight, connection and purpose.
• Awareness: marked by high variation in its subcomponents and across people. One of the most thoroughly researched subcomponents is meta-awareness, which is the skill to know what our mind is doing. One example would be watching a movie. When you have meta-awareness, you will still be aware of your environment while watching a movie, like the space you are in, the chair you are sitting on, etc. (that is: you are not fully absorbed by the movie or “in the zone”). Meta-awareness is a prerequisite to learn; because in order to correct an error, we would first need to know that we made it. Research has found that an average adult spends 47% of their waking time not aware what they are doing. Meditation can help cultivate meta-awareness.
• Connection: skill to build harmonious relationships. Studies have shown that less than 10 hours of compassion or kindness meditation practice over a course of several weeks can already have measurable impact on the brain and promotes prosocial behavior.
• Insight: describes the narrative that we have in our minds about ourselves. It manifests in the dialogue inside us about ourselves that might lead to great suffering (depression), when we do not make ourselves aware of the insubstantiality of these thoughts or of the concepts of ourselves. Practicing meditation can help to reduce the “stickiness” of our thoughts and emotions from past or future to the present moment.
• Purpose: Skill to see my “true north”, the direction of my life. According to research, having a sense of purpose is the single most significant predictor of longevity. A practice to cultivate this skill is to ask yourself daily: “What if today was the last day of my life?”
• ROI on mindfulness: James Heckman, economist and Nobel Prize laureate in 2000 showed that interventions to improve emotional intelligence of pre-school children (birth to five years old) has on average achieved an ROI of 13% by the time the child was 20 years old.
• Meditation slows rate of brain ageing: Mingyur Rinpoche, Tibetan monk with more than 60,000 hours of meditation practice, enjoys slower than average brain ageing.
• Social impact of meditation: Compassion meditation practice can help to reduce fear (which contracts awareness and leads to restriction in attentional fields) and implicit bias. In US, implicit bias is one of the key drivers for achievement gap in academic performance between whites and non-white students. Researchers believe this is due to the unconscious bias in the way that teachers teach their students. In police decision-making, meditation is believed to help improve split-second decisions from implicit bias, that have been viewed as a driver for wrong decisions with at times fatal consequences.
• Current topic of Davidson’s research: There are some types of meditation (like compassion meditation) that reduce inflammation in the body. It is known that neural inflammation in the brain is the driver of variation for the severity of symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. What Davidson and his team are currently trying to understand is in which way meditation can actually influence neural inflammation.

By the way - if you want to learn more about mindfulness, come join our conference March 30, in Munich: Mindful Entrepreneurship Conference