1 00:00:00,450 --> 00:00:05,700 When people train in mindfulness, what we see is the brain patterns changing. 2 00:00:05,700 --> 00:00:11,190 One thing that happens, for example, is the insula, which are part of the the neocortex, 3 00:00:11,190 --> 00:00:15,150 which is associated with empathy, with experiencing your body as it is, 4 00:00:15,150 --> 00:00:22,530 rather than as it were, getting to stories about the body that that begins to uncouple with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. 5 00:00:22,530 --> 00:00:32,340 Now, that part of the cortex is very much associated with what you might call the narrative aspect to the self that is language image is generating. 6 00:00:32,340 --> 00:00:34,770 So, as it were, stories about the self. 7 00:00:34,770 --> 00:00:45,060 And if these uncouple what people are able to experience and what we see happening, the brain is the ability to activate the compassion centres, 8 00:00:45,060 --> 00:00:53,160 as it were, without activating the stories which often turn into overthinking or rumination as people experience it. 9 00:00:53,160 --> 00:00:58,230 For people who are suicidal, when they get depressed, they can recover really quite well. 10 00:00:58,230 --> 00:01:07,080 But then if a small amount of mood catches them unawares, not only do they start blaming themselves and so on, but they get a lot of tunnel vision. 11 00:01:07,080 --> 00:01:11,280 In other words, they can't see solutions to their problems. 12 00:01:11,280 --> 00:01:16,890 And this happens very rapidly. We've shown in our laboratory work that it can happen in 10 minutes. 13 00:01:16,890 --> 00:01:23,490 We can use the Electro and SAFTA programme to measure the patterns in people's brains when their mood starts to go down. 14 00:01:23,490 --> 00:01:29,250 What happens is that you begin to see a neural signature in the brain that was there from long evolution. 15 00:01:29,250 --> 00:01:38,730 And as it were, correlated with running away from predators. Now this system switches on when we're trying to avoid even our own thoughts. 16 00:01:38,730 --> 00:01:44,500 So if you get a suicidal thought, you don't like it. What you do is try to avoid it and just makes the situation worse. 17 00:01:44,500 --> 00:01:51,270 Worse by David Kressler in the United States has found that if people are not mindful, then the amygdala, 18 00:01:51,270 --> 00:02:00,590 the part of the brain underlies fight and flight, the evolutionary old part of the brain that that tends to be chronically overactive. 19 00:02:00,590 --> 00:02:07,770 And what happens during mindfulness practise is it tends to dump fat down, tends to naturally inhibit as you learn mindfulness. 20 00:02:07,770 --> 00:02:14,970 And that means that people are less likely to be, as it were, constantly stressed, rushed off their feet. 21 00:02:14,970 --> 00:02:20,190 But also, they're less likely to respond to their own negative thinking, which, 22 00:02:20,190 --> 00:02:24,900 when people aren't mindful, tends to trigger these fight and fight responses. 23 00:02:24,900 --> 00:02:29,550 We've been working now on this for eight and a half years and even worked before that. 24 00:02:29,550 --> 00:02:37,050 That showed that mindfulness actually reduces the risk of depression by half in people who are the most 25 00:02:37,050 --> 00:02:43,140 recurrent depressed people with three or more episodes that many other treatments had failed to treat. 26 00:02:43,140 --> 00:02:50,130 We also know that it's as good as antidepressants in doing that. Now, one thing that we didn't know eight years ago is that repeatable. 27 00:02:50,130 --> 00:02:58,110 And we found it is repeatable both in our lab and in labs around the world, in lots of different countries have found the same result. 28 00:02:58,110 --> 00:03:01,800 And that's very confident because what can be very frustrating in the field of psychological 29 00:03:01,800 --> 00:03:06,720 research is if you have one exciting result which doesn't replicate the next time you do a trial, 30 00:03:06,720 --> 00:03:12,240 actually, we find now in six different trials with almost 600 patients done right across the world, 31 00:03:12,240 --> 00:03:19,830 that actually those results hold up those initial spectacular results, actually, which we were totally surprised by at the time. 32 00:03:19,830 --> 00:03:34,854 Well, actually, they're no longer surprising.