Meditation and the Brain | Dr. Stixrud & Dr. Travis

I want to welcome you all this evening to this scientific presentation on Transcendental Meditation, Behavior, and the Brain. It's been a long time coming. I've been meditating for 45 years, and I have been teaching Transcendental Meditation for 42 years. And I think anyone who's been meditating, how many people here do some form of meditation? That is almost everybody. The interest in meditation has been, you know, steadily not moving much for decades. And oh, you meditate, that's nice, I'm sorry to hear it. For decades almost, even though in Transcendental Meditation millions of people had learned it over the years, nonetheless, it hadn't hit the mainstream. And just in the last year or two, I think, wouldn't you say, there's been just a spike of interest in meditation in general, and specifically Transcendental Meditation? And I think there's three main reasons. One, the problem of stress has become so acute, so severe, so chronic, so toxic, and everyone is aware of it. Two, conventional approaches have proven largely ineffective to address the problem. You can't take a pill to prevent toxic stress or trauma. And you can't take a pill to cure it. You can mask it. And third, science. The amount of research on meditation in general, published, peer-reviewed research in top referee journals on meditation in general and Transcendental Meditation, is so significant and so dramatic and the voices of medical leaders in society saying meditation in general and Transcendental Meditation, useful tool to prevent and address the problem of stress, it's a useful tool, has been a game-changer. We often think of meditation or Transcendental Meditation as maybe a luxury for people who have the time to meditate, the resources to meditate. Well, I represent the David Lynch Foundation, and that's a non-profit organization established 10 years ago by the great film director, David Lynch, to do something different, to raise the funds to bring Transcendental Meditation to at-risk populations, to individuals who never in their day would have the time or the resources or the access to learn a tool that can markedly address the problem of stress. And I just want to say, there's a stress spectrum. There's the stress that we experience, caught in the FDR, the cold weather, for those of you who are watching the video, the very cold weather in New York City. And there's a spectrum to toxic stress and then trauma and post-traumatic stress. And we are looking tonight at a tool, Transcendental Meditation, we're looking at the research and we're looking at the clinical applications of the tool that is addressing that problem of toxic stress and trauma and regular daily stress in what I think and what research shows a very significant way. Think about it. It's not a pill, it's not a piece of equipment, it's just information, a teacher giving some information to a person and they can access a level of calm that already exists within every human being, quite transformational. I'm going to give a quick definition so we know what we're talking about. Many of you already know what Transcendental Meditation is, some don't. We're talking about a very simple technique that anyone can learn, done 20 minutes twice a day, and here's the key, not a religion, not a philosophy, not a change in lifestyle. I'm a very skeptical person, people who know me. Don't go for new age stuff. And that's the beauty of this, that it's a human being practice. Dr. Fred Travis is a distinguished neuroscientist and pioneering researcher in the study of meditation, consciousness, and the brain. Dr. Travis has authored more than 70 papers and conference presentations that investigate the relation between brain patterns, conscious processes, states of consciousness, and Transcendental Meditation. He currently serves as the director of the Center for Brain Consciousness and Cognition at Maharshi University of Management. It has been the work of many top scientists, cardiologists, neurologists, brain researchers like Dr. Travis, that has helped create this phase transition. But Dr. Fred Travis has been at the forefront for over 40 years. Please welcome Dr. Travis and also the person who's going to have her brain waves shown live, his daughter, Dariana, who just came from New Hampshire. So please welcome Dr. Travis and Dariana. Good evening. Thank you for the kind introduction, Bob. Tonight I'll be talking about meditation, transcending, and the brain. First about meditation. Meditations can be seen to fall into three categories. Focus attention, open monitoring, automatic self-transcending. Focus attention, it's concentrating, mind control, mental control. And when you concentrate, you see a very fast wave. It's called gamma, E-E-G. Gamma is reported in meditation such as Zen, Qigong, compassion meditation, Vipassana meditation. Second category, open monitoring. This is any meditation that involves dispassionate observation of breath, emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations. Attention to internal experiences are associated with another brain wave. It's called theta. It goes up and down five to seven times per second. And theta is reported during mindfulness meditation, Kriya Yoga. The third category is automatic self-transcending. This includes any meditation that transcends its steps of practice. These meditations start with thinking and end up with pure self-awareness or pure consciousness without thoughts, feelings, or sensory perception. Alpha 1 E-E-G is reported when awareness is turned within, is silent, alert. Alpha 1 is reported during Transcendental Meditation. Also a 45-year case study of a Qigong master. The Qigong master developed automaticity through extensive practice. In contrast, automatic transcending is built into the Transcendental Meditation program so that people report pure consciousness experiences after a few days of practice. This is getting into the second point of my talk, transcending, pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is fundamentally different than customary waking experiences. Waking experiences can be summarized as subject observing object. You right now are the subject observing me as the object. You can reflect on what I'm saying. You can reflect on what you're seeing. Pure consciousness is a different kind of experience. It transcends the customary structure of waking experience. We could say pure consciousness is subject observing subject. Intellectually this is true. However, more accurately, pure consciousness is pure self-awareness. Our individual mind identifies with its inner nature and becomes that state. So let's look at the brain model of pure consciousness. This is my third point. Here's the brain. Person's looking to the right. The center of the brain is called the thalamus. It's a red oval you see there. A researcher stained the thalamus and found two different types of nuclei. One type received sensory information, sight, hearing, touch, taste. Feedback loops between these nuclei in the cortex develops a neural picture of objects in the world. That's where Daryana, my daughter, and I are in your brain. The other type of nuclei receive internal stimulation up the brain stem. These also create feedback loops in the determined levels of wakefulness. This is our customary experience. You're awake. There's content. You're having waking experience. Transcending systematically decreases the content. Thoughts are transcending, revealing the state of consciousness or pure wakefulness that is already there. Wakefulness circuits. You could say the content of this experience is emptiness because there's nothing there. No phenomenological content is there. Or you could say that the content of this state is wakefulness itself. It's self-awareness, full and free from relative experience. This brain model supports the brain waves seen during pure consciousness experiences. It takes 100 milliseconds for one loop to go up and back. So in a second, it goes up and down 10 times. And what this does is leads to a 10 cycle per second wave, the alpha 1 wave that we've talked about. Here we have brain waves seen during transcendental meditation practice. X-axis is time. Each column is a second. The Y-axis contains 32 points on the scalp where we recorded EEG. Count the wave at the bottom. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. It's those wakefulness circuits. Notice they're throughout the brain because when the mind settles down, so the brain settles down to its ground state. It's a state where we're not doing or thinking, but just being. In addition, notice the waves are going up and down together. Look at the two waves in the bottom line. You see the rising and falling, very similar. This is something called coherence. And another way to picture this is this way. The top row are the top of the head, the bottom row is the front of the head. The dots that you see are places that we record brain waves. There's a line between dots if those parts of the brain are coherent, 80% or more. What coherence means is that those parts of the brain are working together in whatever the task is. Now notice the coherence is in this alpha 1 frequency. It's very high in the front of the brain as the part of the brain that's central for executive processing, for impulse control, for sense of self. And we see this high frontal coherence spreads throughout the brain. This side presents blood flow patterns during transcendental meditation. The red color indicates higher blood flow. And notice it's in the front of the brain, the executive system. The blue color indicates decreased blood flow. This is the brain stem, cerebellum. This is a part of the brain that revs you up. This is a part of the brain that got you out of the house into the cold. Now, lower blood flow in these brain areas leads to the experience of silence, of calm. And at the same time, higher blood flow in the front leads to alertness. It's a unique state of restful alertness. And the benefits of contacting pure consciousness is the brain begins to integrate the restful alertness of pure consciousness into daily life. You're transforming the inner nature of the mind. It's like dyeing a cloth. You put a cloth in dye, it comes out saturated in color. You put it in the sun, a little bit stays. You put it back into the dye, back into the sun. And what happened, gradually, the color becomes vast. Similarly, by transcending and coming into activity, you bring the restful alertness of pure consciousness to support each day, greater success. I'll just review three lines of research, and then my colleague and friend Dr. Sticks will go more deeply into the applied benefits. This random assignment research was done with 10 to 14-year-olds. We used a brain measure of attention deficit hyperactive disorder, a theta EEG over beta EEG. At baseline, both groups had high levels of ADHD symptoms, that's on the left. One group were trained in transcendental meditation, that's the solid blue line. And you notice the severity of attention deficit hyperactive disorder started to go down. The middle, three months, now the control group learned, and so both groups are practicing TM. We notice that both groups, this marker of ADHD has dropped. The experience of pure consciousness gives a new basis of living life for people with post-traumatic stress disorder. Research reports that TM practice leads to substantial reductions in PDS symptoms in Vietnam vets and Iraqi vets. The research shown here reports the effects of transcending on refugees, African refugees. And what we see is that in 30 days practice of transcendental meditation, their PDS symptoms went to non-symptomatic and remained low. The last random assignment study I'd like to look at is college students. These aren't, it's not a clinical group, but they're dealing with a great deal of stress. This is looking at brain integration, and frontal alpha coherence is a key measure, part of that measure. At baseline, both groups were similar, that's the two bars on the left. Then the subjects in the TM group, the blue column, were trained in transcendental meditation. The control group just did their usual college activities. Now the post-test was three months later, and those are the two bars on the right. Post-test was just before finals week, huge stress for the student. Staying up late, fatigue reduces vigilance, it reduces ability to learn, stress. And what we're seeing here is what is a functioning of the brain in a very stressful situation. We see those people who've been transcending for the three months, they actually have higher levels of brain integration. They didn't perceive finals week as stress, they perceived it as challenge. The inner nature of the mind has changed, and so they were able to perceive the situation and deal with it in a much more effective way. By changing your inner nature, you can begin to see problems as challenges rather than as stresses. The students trained in transcendental meditation also had greater reductions in negative personality traits, that's the first three set of bars. And greater improvements in positive personality traits, the last four sets, including better emotional behavioral coping. So now let's look at EEG in real time. So what we're seeing is Daryana's EEG from the two frontal leads. These are the two leads you see in the first two rows. And it's from the left and right side. We're looking at the brain, front of the brain, cuz that's where the major changes occur during TM practice. Now, this is what your brain looks like when 150 very intelligent people are looking at you. And what you notice is the bottom line, which is looking at coherence, is highly variable. It goes from, at the very bottom of that row, is zero coherence, up to the top, which is perfect coherence. And coherence, again, is how different parts of the brain are working together. In this case, it's the frontal areas of the brain. Okay, so we'll have Daryana close her eyes. And before she does that, I'm gonna have you tell me when she starts TM. Not now, but when we go through it again. So you can close your eyes and start your TM practice. Thank you, Daryana, so you can sit easily. Stop meditating, open your eyes. Are you ready for your task? Here we go. That is very highly variable coherence. That's a healthy brain, by the way, it's okay. Has she started meditating yet? Yeah, this is the alpha coherence on the right. The alpha waves that we talked about, and we see the coherence is very high. If you're following a lot of the clicks, you'll notice that the coherence go down for a bit. It's very natural, because TM, transcendental meditation doesn't mean you go into a trance. But rather, attention is going within, you're transcending. And if something is outside, it goes out again. As it goes out, attention goes down. As you put your attention in, attention goes back. Good, so back to my PowerPoints and my final slide. Thank you, Daryana. So transcending leads to a distinct experience of pure consciousness that transforms the inner nature of the mind, and so provides a new platform for living life. Thank you very much. Dr. Bill Stixrud is a leading clinical neuropsychologist and director of the Stixrud Group, a Washington DC-based group practice specializing in the neuropsychological assessment of children, adolescents, and adults with learning, attentional, social, and or emotional disorders. Dr. Stixrud lectures frequently on neuropsychological assessment, learning and executive disorders, brain development, motivation, and the effects of transcendental meditation, stress, sleep deprivation, and technology overload on the brain. Dr. Stixrud is, we're also fortunate to have him, he has a one-year waiting list for his Silver Spring, Maryland, practice for adolescents to see him. Please welcome Dr. Bill Stixrud. So it's true, I'm a clinical neuropsychologist, and for the last 30 years I've made a living by testing kids who have learning issues or attention problems or autism or emotional problems, and it's a fantastic job, in part because it's interesting and fulfilling, and in part because I love the answers that kids give me to questions. I've been following this boy for some years who, I saw him first when he was five, and he's now a young adult and doing extremely well. But what I remember most when he was five, I asked him the first question from a test of vocabulary. I said, what's a cow? And he said, I can't believe you don't know that. So tonight, I'm going to talk to you about TM and the teenage brain. And what I'm going to focus on is, how is the teenage brain different from an adult brain? And why do adolescent brains desperately need meditation? And how can TM prevent and treat the kinds of problems that are so absurdly prevalent in young people these days? So the first thing I want to tell you, I want to focus on a couple of brain structures and chemicals for our purposes. Fred talked about the prefrontal cortex, and that's a big part of our story. And I also want to tell you about the amygdala. How many know the amygdala? So the amygdala is part of the brain's threat detection system. And the amygdala is sensitive to emotional context of experience, but it's really sensitive to anything that's potentially threatening. So fear, anger. And when the amygdala senses threat, it will start your fight or flight response, your stress response. And when you're in your right mind, what happens is your prefrontal cortex will regulate the rest of the brain. It'll guide your thinking and behavior, and it'll regulate the amygdala. It'll calm the amygdala down. And when you're stressed, what happens is the amygdala is regulating the rest of the brain. And so one of the first points, the major point about adolescent brain is that this prefrontal cortex is very slow to mature. We know that the cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex aren't mature until 25 plus minus 3. The emotional regulation functions aren't mature until 32 plus minus 3. So those of you who have immature boyfriends, I mean, there's still hope. But I will say, I lecture about the most useful stuff I've learned about kids' brains, and this is the number one thing. Because it's so encouraging. It gives people hope. People whose kids are struggling, they're struggling when they're 16, to tell them they're going to have a different brain when they're 18 or 20 or 24. And as this cortex matures, what happens is not only does it become more mature in the way it functions, it comes online and it starts to do stuff that it didn't used to do. So if I showed you a picture of somebody experiencing fear, what activates in your brain is a little bit in the amygdala, because the amygdala senses the fear, but a lot in the prefrontal cortex. You show a 16 or 17-year-old a picture of somebody who's afraid, and they have trouble judging what the emotion is, and what activates in their brain is largely the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex doesn't activate very much to do that. It comes online. And it progressively comes online. And so much of the transition between being a kid and being adult is this unfolding of the prefrontal cortex. And what I'm concerned about is that so many kids that I see, and whether they're poor, whether they're rich, whether they're smart, whether they have learning issues, and you can be smart and have learning issues too, but they're so stressed. And I worry that they may not be developing healthy prefrontal cortex. And the second point I want to make about the adolescent brain, the second thing that's different, well, let's just say, this is just a slide that illustrates this idea that this is how the purple is the more mature. And you can see how dramatically more purple there is at age 20 than there is at age 12. And this study didn't go past age 20, but if you go past age 20, it becomes even more dramatic. Now, the second major thing about a teenage brain is that there's changes in the brain's reward system. And what I'm talking about is these deep centers in the brain that send the neurotransmitter dopamine to the rest of the brain. And dopamine, if you think about it, it's the power switch. It's the energy source. Dopamine is what you have in your brain when you're excited about something, when you're motivated about something, when you're anticipating something cool happening. You have high levels of dopamine. And what happens in teenagers is that they have particularly high levels of dopamine to anything that's rewarding. So anything that's pleasurable. So if you have teenagers involved in a gambling kind of situation where they can win money and they have these huge spikes in dopamine compared to adults, the idea of winning the money, it's just so much more pleasurable. It's more exciting. If you just give them sugar water, you see a bigger spike in dopamine. And the main thing is that the thing that's most rewarding for teenagers is other teenagers. From an evolutionary point of view, that teens want to spend more time with other teens and they laugh together louder than we laugh and that life is more exciting in some ways. Life is harder in other ways. But it's this change in the dopamine and this immature prefrontal cortex that places teenagers at risk for being impulsive and for addiction. And I may talk a little bit more about those things. Now, another point I want to make about this adolescent brain is that it's incredibly powerful, creative, adaptive. Neanderthals, it turned out, didn't have adolescence. They're kind of mature by the time that they were 10. And people think that humans had an evolutionary advantage because we had adolescents who can explore, who want to take risks, who will go out and look over the other side of the mountain. And it's incredibly powerful. I heard an interview with Bob Dylan where he's asking, could you write the kind of songs you wrote when you're 20 now? He said, are you kidding? Where'd that come from? It came from an adolescent brain. It came from a brain that's not fully mature. And at the same time, the adolescent brain is vulnerable. And it's vulnerable to the effects of chemicals. It's vulnerable to alcohol. It's more vulnerable than the adult brain to the effects of drugs. And it's more vulnerable than the adult brain to the effects of stress hormones. So we know that adolescents, because they're more vulnerable, they're really stressed. And especially when they learn to drive. And we know that stress affects the developing brain more than it does the mature brain. And that stress can change the developing brain in a way that can have long-term effects. And so, and it turns out that kids these days are really stressed. That there is a recent study of the American Psychological Association found that teenagers now report similar levels of stress to adults. And there's a woman at the University of San Diego State by the name of Jean Twenge who had the brilliant idea to study responses to this personality inventory, the MMPI, of people who, young people, older adolescents and people in their early 20s who completed this thing in the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s. What she found was that contemporary kids, kids in the 2000s, were five to eight times more likely to report the symptoms of anxiety disorder or depression, major depression, than people were, than young people were at the height of the Great Depression or during World War II. And why might this be? There's a lot of hypotheses. Some have to do with the incredible level of sleep deprivation that young people experience. Some people think it has to do with the increased academic pressure and competition, the fact that the kids don't play very much. Certainly, there's a lot of speculation about the effects of 24-7 use of technology. It's a little frightening to know that the more time kids spend in front of a screen, the more attention problems they have, the more behavior problems, the more psychological problems, the more physical health problems. And this vulnerability to stress, it's a big deal in many ways, and not least of which is that one of the major tasks of being a teenager and an adult is learning. And we know that when you're stressed, I mean, you have the experience yourself, it's hard to pay attention. It's very hard to pay attention to something other than what you're stressed about. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes sense, because if you're attacked by a predator, it wouldn't make much sense to focus on something else. It wouldn't go well. The deeper parts of our brain that do the stress response, they don't know the difference between being late for work and facing a predator. So, it's just the way our brains work. We evolve that when we're stressed, we respond instinctively. We aren't supposed to learn. We aren't supposed to evaluate information. We aren't supposed to commit complex things to long-term memory and retrieve it easily, and we can't. And so, Amy Arnston, who is a major stress university at Yale, says the prefrontal cortex, it's the Goldilocks of the brain. What she means by that is that the prefrontal cortex depends on a very delicate balance of the neurotransmitters that run it, basically dopamine and norepinephrine. And without this balance, it's hard to focus. It's hard to think clearly. And what happens when you're stressed is your levels of dopamine and norepinephrine just skyrocket. Your brain gets flooded with these chemicals, and you can't function. The question and answer, if you think to, ask me about my experience as a student at University of California, Berkeley. I have an interesting story about this. So, it's not surprising. I've been following people's attempts to apply brain research to education for 40 years now. And by far, the most common implication from brain research to education is this, is that the optimal internal state for learning is relaxed alertness. Because you have to be focused, you have to be alert, but you can't be stressed. And we know, too, that the optimal educational environment is characterized by high challenge, low threat. That we're bored if we aren't sufficiently challenged. But if we're threatened, our brain doesn't work. And so, TM. Let me talk to you a little bit about TM. What we know about TM in relation to learning is that it seems to do to the teenage brain about what it does to the adult brain. In other words, if young people meditate, it works. And Fred's studies of middle school students, of college students, find that you see these changes in the electrical activity of the brain that allow for better concentration. That when you're less stressed, you can focus better, you can resist distraction better. And when you have this increased coherence in brain functioning, you can organize your thinking better. Your sense of priorities is better. You can integrate information better. You see a larger perspective. So there's a lot of evidence now that TM, including these things, the improved learning, school performance, a lot of evidence, this faster processing speed, higher nonverbal intelligence, this improved executive functions. And in my field, the executive functions, which include planning and organization and the ability to inhibit and the ability to be flexible, are considered much better predictors of how you do in life than IQ. And this is a big deal. And the fact that by organizing the brain, by this experience of transcendence, improving the way the brain functions, improving executive functions, it's really a big deal from a learning point of view. And from a mental health point of view, people are talking about an epidemic of mental health problems in adults and in young people as well. In addition to the anxiety and depression, there's unprecedented levels of chemical use and sleep disorders and self-cutting and self-burning and chemical problems. And the experts in child mental health say that a lot of this stuff, maybe most of it, can be prevented because these problems are all stress-related problems. And that if you look, if you do a functional imaging of brains of adolescents and adults who have anxiety disorders or depression, what shows up more consistently than anything else is a hyperactive amygdala, an amygdala that is bigger, stressed. When you're stressed for a long time, your amygdala gets bigger. It gets more reactive. You look at somebody who's been traumatized or somebody who's really stressed and their amygdala lights up like a Christmas tree. These are stress-related disorders. And you can just take stress chemicals, stress hormones and inject them to a rat and a rat will start, it doesn't start to cry or anything, but it gets lethargic and it looks depressed. So these things are stress-related problems. And these things, what happens is that, as I said before, that stress affects the teenage brain more. And so what happens, if a kid gets depressed, say at age 14 who'd never been depressed before, and the average age of onset now of depression is 13. It used to be 42. But if it gets depressed, the idea, people are saying that it scars the brain, that it makes some changes in the brain that even if it gets better, still may be more pessimistic, still have more sleep-related problems. And what we know about TM, there are no studies of clinical populations, except for a couple studies of ADHD, but there's no studies of kids who have anxiety disorders or depression. But there are several studies in adolescents, including middle school, high school and college, that show significant reductions in anxiety, particularly trait anxiety. So people who tend to be chronically anxious that experience significant reductions in anxiety. One of the really important things from my point of view is there's also a significant reduction in emotional reactivity. That people don't respond in maladaptive ways to emotional upset if they meditate. And when I talk with kids, one of the things I really emphasize with them, because I see a lot of vulnerable kids, is the need to build their stress tolerance, their ability to manage themselves in stressful situations so they don't quit or they don't freak out. And I think that one of the interesting things here is that we also see, again, there's no studies of teenagers or young adults who are depressed, but we do see in several studies improvement in mood, where people start to be more positive, they report greater happiness, less negative mood. And part of it has to be that it improves sleep. And as somebody who thinks a lot about how do we help teenagers who are profoundly sleep deprived get more sleep, that some of this has to do with the fact that one of the things that shows up in several studies, and including these new studies on post-traumatic stress, is how quickly meditation helps to normalize sleep. And there's great promise here for teachers. There's some beautiful new evidence about dramatic reduction in teacher stress and burnout. And there's a really promising evidence that TM can be an important tool for helping kids with autism. And I have to say, I love working with kids with autism. I was testing one a couple of weeks ago who's 10, and she looked behind me and she saw a picture of me in a tuxedo and my daughter in a wedding gown. She says, you got married? I said, yeah, I did 37 years ago. And I said, that's me and my daughter. She said, you married your daughter? But my friend and former colleague, David Black, and Norman Rosenthal, who figured out seasonal affective disorder, and along with Bobby Roth, wrote arguably the best existing book on TM, have done very interesting pilot work on autism that I will tell you more about. And the last thing I want to tell you, I'll tell you a story about this later. I'm completely in the tank for the David Lynch Quiet Time programs. The research on it is showing where kids are meditating twice a day in school, is showing improvement in all kinds of important areas. And I'll tell you about some of my own experiences in the question and answer. And the last thing I'll say is that because of the reward, because teens are so rewarding to each other, what I'm focusing on now in my own work is trying to get kids in schools to meditate together, developing meditation clubs, or even meditation buddies, having schools develop study halls where kids can meditate. Because teenagers, they typically don't want to do stuff that other kids aren't doing. And the brilliance of these David Lynch school programs is that everybody's doing it. And I ask kids when I see all kinds of anxious, unhappy kids, and I said, what has anybody told you about how to prevent stress or how to make yourself feel better when you're really stressed? And I don't have one kid in 100 who has anything useful to say. And it seems to me that given what we know about what TM can do to improve the lives of young people, I think it's cruel not to teach it to them, at least give them the chance to do it.