Transform Your Mind, Change Your Brain

Remember your old girlfriend or boyfriend that said they’d change for you, or that you thought you could change? Usually doesn’t work out very well. How about a habit you might want to break? Very difficult to quit, isn’t it? Experiences like these tell you that people don’t change particularly easily. But despite experiences like these, we do see some people make transformational changes. But just why do these changes occur sometimes, and in some people, and not others? Is there a method to effect lasting change?

Yes, there is. Dr. Richard Davidson, Director for the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says disorders like depression and anxiety can be changed by training your brain. Davidson is doing pioneering work in the field of neuroplasticity, which says that the brain is malleable, and we can transform our brains with what we think and what we do. He calls this transformation, contemplative practice.

He introduces distinctions among different forms of contemplative practices, which are shown to have different neural and behavioral consequences, as well as important consequences for physical health in both long-term and novice practitioners.

And what’s really fascinating is that there is new research that shows that meditation-based interventions delivered online — yes, we said online — can produce behavioral and neural changes.

Bookstores’ shelves are overflowing with books on what is popularly called “intention,” positive thinking and meditation. There’s something to all that, and brilliant minds like Dr. Davidson’s are starting to explain it all at a deeper level through neuroscience.

Don’t dismiss his talk of the Dalai Lama, meditation, and intention as hocus pocus, and not science. We don’t take breakthroughs in understanding in this field lightly. Epigenetics — the power of our mind to change our very genes — may literally transform the field of health and well-being. We must put the mind back into medicine.

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