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Saturday’s Mind & Life Summer Research Institute continued with presentations from top-tier scientists and contemplative scholars. The First Morning Session featured Adele Diamond, Ph.D., Possible Ways to Prevent or Remediate Executive Function Deficits during Childhood, Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood.

Adele explained that “executive functions” refer to the cognitive control abilities dependent on prefrontal cortex such as selective attention and self-regulation. These abilities are amenable to training and practice throughout life. They are also particularly susceptible to disruption by stress, lack of sleep, loneliness, or lack of exercise. Conversely, what nourishes the human spirit, it turns out, is also best for the exercise of executive functions.

“You can teach anything at any age,” Diamond said, “if you teach it in an age-appropriate way. The activities you make people do may be less important than how you are with those people.”

The Second Morning Session, Adolescent Neurodevelopment and its Relationship to Behavioral Risk and Vulnerability, by Monique Ernst, M.D., Ph.D., that investigated adolescent emotions and their impact on behavior.

“Adolescence is a time of passion and idealism,” said Ernst, “and yet, the skills to harness these strong feelings are still developing. Understanding how brain development sets the stage for this cognitive-emotional-social landscape of adolescence will provide clarity on how to shape the environment and formulate strategies to keep youths safe. The hope is to turn these neurobiological determinants into opportunities rather than vulnerabilities.”

“I think neuroscience can be very helpful and hasn’t realized its potential yet,” Ernst said of the neuroscience as a field. “We are beginning to understand what we are finding with fMRI, beginning to understand how the brain works, and now we can focus on a new era when we can really ask the right questions.”

The First Afternoon Session featured Torkel Klingberg, Ph.D., who discussed Computerized Training of Working Memory in Children with ADHD.

“Working memory is the ability to keep information in mind for a brief period of time, typically a few seconds,” Klingberg said. “In daily life, we use working memory to remember plans or instructions of what to do next, and for controlling attention. Deficits in working memory is a key deficit in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).”

Klingberg and collaborators have developed and tested a computerized method for training working memory. Several studies have shown that working memory can be improved by training, and that this decreases the symptoms of inattention. Training of working memory increases brain activity in frontal and parietal regions, and affects the number of dopamine receptors in brain. This indicates training-induced plasticity in the neural systems underlying working memory. Training of working memory might thus be a non-pharmacological way to address the key cognitive function of ADHD and thereby significantly and sustainably reduce the inattentive symptoms of this disorder.

A Closing Panel of moderators included comments, thoughts and observations about the week.

Rob Roeser, Ph. D., expressed his deep gratitude and appreciation to Adam Engle and Richie Davidson for shepherding the work, and also said he had been thinking about what it meant to be a good teacher. “The ability to have humor and keep it light are important aspects,” he said, “along with the capacity for deep listening, love and humility; patience, precision and the ability to communicate sublime ideas to people from a myriad of backgrounds.”

Mark Greenberg, Ph.D., said that the most interesting points to him were the discussions about calmness, clarity and kindness and the value of neuroscience in understanding these concepts. “Investigation is still relatively primitive, and we could move forward more on the observational side. There are almost no studies on how contemplative practices, broadly conceived, affect how we interact with each other, which would be very interesting.”

Sharon Salzberg said, “It has been a tremendous week; it has been fantastic being together. I wanted to give a shout out to Jon Kabat-Zinn, not only to his personal genius but also to him as a translator of these practices. A gathering like this is a tribute to that. I also want to acknowledge Will [Kabat-Zinn] because so much of this work is, as Will said, like planting a seed, and we don’t know how or when it will grow.”

Philip Zelazo, Ph.D. said he was very struck by the prospects for understanding our human nature. “We are in an exciting time,” he said. “There is a lot of emphasis I see here on taking a holistic view of human beings, integrating the cognitive, emotional and neural level, and it seems to me that the work we do here has the potential of bringing that holistic view into the research. We have the potential to do good work that helps people not only develop good interventions but also to use these interventions to investigate the patterns and causality in the way that we manifest ourselves.”

Linda Lantieri, M.A., expressed her gratitude for the Garrison Institute and her “incredible awe at the flow of the week,” she said. “This has been a beautiful expression of lots of different things that have created something that is more than the sum of its parts.”

“One of things that I have seen this week is the importance of the interconnectedness of the various fields. If we are not connecting with each other and communing with each other, progress will not happen as quickly as it can. And in the act of doing this together, our action is addition to the bank of doing this in the world – these acts are very cumulative and this gives us great hope.

David Vago, Ph.D., said, “What happens here is a little bit of magic. We are all these magic beans in a garden. You may leave Garrison tomorrow and you may take some of this into your own practices, but no matter what, those beans that you all are have been planted in this collected garden. We all know what a flourishing plant looks like, and what we are trying to cultivate between us all are flourishing humans.”

Diego Hangartner, Pharm.D., said, “One of the things that, as an organizer, you feel at the end of a week like this is a sense of gratitude. We are extremely fortunate to be able to interact with each other. Who would have thought 15 years ago that someone from education would be speaking with a neuroscientist and bring in a Geshe from India and a Rinpoche from Nepal to create something that everyone can relate to and associate with?”

Offering a comment, Gesha Dorji Damdul said, “Thank you very much; this is a very rich conference. I consider what is His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s vision? One, it is from this conference that we bring about a change in ourselves to learn something. But this is not sufficient according to His Holiness. His vision is to share it; to let it be shared by all others who are not privileged, and his vision is to bring about such an interaction into the mainstream of the education system so that this will go everywhere in the world and so that every child will have an opportunity and bring about a better future. With this we can expect a real world peace.”

Adam Engle, co-founder and CEO of Mind & Life closed by saying that the Summer Research Institute and the Francisco J. Varela Awardees are the future of Mind & Life and the change agents in the culture. “This is not about scientific research, that is grist for the mill,” he said. “What we are really trying to do is create a revolution for humanity in the world. We have created a societal myth in the U.S. that if you have any dissatisfaction you can change that by manipulating it, especially cognitively and especially by buying something. In the process we have developed modalities where we are not cultivating inner resources and because most live in cities we are not connected to nature. So in effect what we are trying to do here is to cultivate inner resources to become whole human beings, and by understanding the true nature of interdependence and connectedness we can work toward the change we need on the planet.”

“The basis of science is skillful means,” Engle said. “Let’s investigate the whole mind to see how it really works. The people who have been looking at the mind for thousands of years are the contemplatives. They have the understanding and the means but their distribution is limited. The big-picture goal here is that everyone has culturally and age-appropriate tools for metal fitness.”

A final Afternoon Session was given by Geshe Dorji Damdul, who introduced the Lojong practice. In essence, he shared that in order to cultivate true happiness, one must have compassion and empathy, and this comes from practicing certain understandings including no blame and causes and conditions. He suggested to the audience the text, How to See Yourself as You Really Are, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand: A Concise Discourse on the Path to Enlightenment, by Kyabje Pabongka as appropriate reading to further explore this subject.

The evening featured another Data Blitz by Varela Awardees:

1. Kevin Bickart, Amygdala Volume and Social Network Size in Humans

2. Jessica Creery, A Psychosocial-Educational Intervention for Alzheimer’s Patients and their Caregivers: Preliminary Findings

3. Tim Gard, Regulation of Emotion and Cognition during Mathematical Problem Solving: the Effects of Yoga in an Indian Sample Research Institute

4. Tamar Mendelson, Feasibility and Preliminary Outcomes of a School-Based Mindfulness Intervention for Urban Youth

5. Carolina Menezes, The Relationship Between Meditation and Psychological Well-Being

6. Natalie Rusk, Engaging Students in Reflection on Emotion Regulation Strategies

7. Valerie Saxton, Assessing the Relationship between Mindfulness and Distress Tolerance

8. R. Gina Silverstein, The Role Of Mindfulness In The Treatment Of Female Sexual Dysfunction

9. Ming-Wen Wang, The Huai-Nang Zen Theory and Practice on the Emotionally Disturbed

10. Roisin O’Donnell, The Effectiveness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction as an Intervention Among Middle-Aged and Older Family Caregivers of Persons with Neurocognitive Disorders

11. Marjorie Woollacott, Impact of Concentrative Meditation Practice on the Ability to Override Attentional Capture

The evening ended again with meditation and silence.

The following morning, participants gathered for breakfast together and goodbyes. Many, many new and old friendships and collaborations were ignited over the week, and all left in good spirits and inspired by the breadth and depth of both information and community.

See you again next year!