Excellent TED talk on the neuroscience behind mindfulness techniques used in yoga and other contemplative movement traditions. Implications for treatment of chronic pain and depression discussed. Dr Catherine Kerr is a Harvard trained neuroscientist and director of Translational Neuroscience at Brown University. Here is an extracts from the talk: “Mindfulness is protective against depression. It reduces negative thoughts. How does a practice that begins with paying close attention to the body reduce negative thoughts? I arrive at this question in an unusual way. I had a health crisis a long time ago and I became interested in body-based mind-body therapies like tai chi and yoga. I found them really helpful. It turns out when you pay close attention to your body, or to your breath, you are actually learning how to use your attention to control the sensory volume knobs in your brain. You can control how loud the sensation is, or you can turn the volume up or turn the volume down. How does the volume knob system work? It actually involves a structure that sits underneath the cortex, called the thalamus, and the thalamus is the gatekeeper for the cortex. Basically there’s a loop that connects the thalamus and the cortex, creates an oscillating rhythm that pulses ten times per second, and this pulsing rhythm is called the alpha rhythm. So it turns out you can use your mind to regulate the height of the alpha wave in a really fine-grained way. You can use your mind to regulate this mechanism. If you weren’t able to do this you would be flooded with sensations, with extra sensory inputs. We know that in chronic pain the attentional system can be very inflexible because processing resources are biased towards the pain sensations. And in depression, even in people recovered from depression, the sensory attentional system can be inflexible because attentional resources are consumed by negative preoccupations and thoughts and worries. The main thing is that in depression, chronic pain and other situations, people are not able to process the sensory world in real time. This ability to respond to immediate context is so important for well-being. The beautiful thing about attending to the body is that when we do this we are both the observer and the observed. And it may be that in mindfulness what you’re learning is how to feel your mind and attention. You feel the quality of your mental focus–does it jump around or is it steady. From the philosophical perspective you might say that this mindful curiosity about body sensations is neither mind nor body, but is actually right at the mind-body interface.”
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 07:03:00 +0000
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