When people train in mindfulness, what we see is the brain patterns changing.
One thing that happens, for example, is the insula, which are part of the the neocortex,
which is associated with empathy, with experiencing your body as it is,
rather than as it were, getting to stories about the body that that begins to uncouple with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
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.
So, as it were, stories about the self.
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,
as it were, without activating the stories which often turn into overthinking or rumination as people experience it.
For people who are suicidal, when they get depressed, they can recover really quite well.
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.
In other words, they can't see solutions to their problems.
And this happens very rapidly. We've shown in our laboratory work that it can happen in 10 minutes.
We can use the Electro and SAFTA programme to measure the patterns in people's brains when their mood starts to go down.
What happens is that you begin to see a neural signature in the brain that was there from long evolution.
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.
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.
Worse by David Kressler in the United States has found that if people are not mindful, then the amygdala,
the part of the brain underlies fight and flight, the evolutionary old part of the brain that that tends to be chronically overactive.
And what happens during mindfulness practise is it tends to dump fat down, tends to naturally inhibit as you learn mindfulness.
And that means that people are less likely to be, as it were, constantly stressed, rushed off their feet.
But also, they're less likely to respond to their own negative thinking, which,
when people aren't mindful, tends to trigger these fight and fight responses.
We've been working now on this for eight and a half years and even worked before that.
That showed that mindfulness actually reduces the risk of depression by half in people who are the most
recurrent depressed people with three or more episodes that many other treatments had failed to treat.
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.
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.
And that's very confident because what can be very frustrating in the field of psychological
research is if you have one exciting result which doesn't replicate the next time you do a trial,
actually, we find now in six different trials with almost 600 patients done right across the world,
that actually those results hold up those initial spectacular results, actually, which we were totally surprised by at the time.
Well, actually, they're no longer surprising.