so uh in the short time that I have with you guys staying I this is Richie unplugged no slides I love it uh I'm going to just say a few words about well-being is a skill that's the title and that's the conclusion well-being is a skill and all of the work that we and other colleagues have been doing leads us inevitably to this Central conclusion I'd like you to come away with the view that well-being is fundamentally no different than learning to play the cello I'm saying that because of my dear friend Cliff sarin who's here in the audience and uh uh it brings wonderful memories of Barbara uh and well-being if it's practiced and I love what Scott Ken said in the introduction about practice practice is such a key element here and uh if one practices the skills of well-being one will get better at it so what do we mean by well-being and this is really what I'd like to focus these remarks on I'd like to share with you what I consider to be four neuroscientifically validated constituents of well-being each of the these four has received serious scientific attention each of these four is rooted in neural circuits that we know something about and each of these neural circuits exhibits plasticity and so we know that if we exercise these circuits they will strengthen and they will provide the substrate for enduring change which can help to promote higher levels of well-being so what are these four constituents the first we call resilience and we Define it in a very specific way resilience is the rapidity with which you recover from adversity some people recover slowly and other people recover more quickly and it turns out that we can measure very specific parameters in the brain that relate to the time course of different circuits coming back down to Baseline and that time course is critical for understanding resilience and we know that individuals who show a more rapid return to Baseline in certain key neural circuits have higher levels of well-being and are protected in in many ways from the adverse consequences of life's slings and arrows so to paraphrase the bumper sticker stuff happens uh and we cannot buffer ourselves from that stuff but it really is about how we recover from that adversity and resilience is a key attribute that is specifically focused on this parameter of recovery Recent research that we've conducted in our lab very new work that's not yet published asks the question whether these specific circuits in the brain that I'm referring to can be altered by systematic practice in simple mindfulness meditation practices and what we found is that this circuit that's so key to resilience can be modulated however this is a circuit that turns out to need several thousand hours of practice before you see real change in this circuitry so unlike other constituents which I'll talk about from the data that we have it's going to take a while before resilience is actually impacted so it's at about uh 6 or 7,000 hours of practice cumulatively that we begin to see modulations of resilience so it's not something that is going to happen quickly but this is a motivation and inspiration to keep practicing so the second constituent of well-being is in many ways the flip side of the first one and it is something that we call Outlook and it specifically refers to positive outlook the ability to see the positive in others the ability to savor positive experiences the ability to see another human being as a human being that has qualities of innate basic goodness the ability to recognize those qualities in others and we know something about this circuitry in the brain which underlies this quality of Outlook and we also know that for example in individuals who suffer from depression they show activation in this circuitry but it doesn't last this activation is very transient and so again this is a specific constituent of well-being that shows extended activation over time in these circuits and here's a case where Research indicates that simple practices of loving kindness and compassion meditation May alter this circuitry quite quickly unlike resilience where we can get effects after a very very modest dose of practice if you will so we published a paper a couple of years ago which was a randomized control trial among individuals who've never meditated before and we randomly assigned them to one of two groups one group received a secular form of compassion training and a second group received cognitive reappraisal training that came from cognitive therapy so when participants signed up for this study they signed up for a study where they were told that they were going to be taught one of two strategy IES to cultivate wellbeing and they were randomly assigned to one of these two and it we scan people's brains before and after two weeks of training and what we saw is that in the compassion group circuits in the brain that are important for this positive outlook were strengthened over the course of this two-e training so just 7 hours of training they got 30 minutes a day of practice for two weeks and not only did we see changes in the brain but these changes in the brain actually predicted pro-social behavior and I'll come back to the pro-social behavior in a moment so the third constituent of well-being is something that we don't normally think about as a constituent of well-be although in this audience with this um focus for the day's event uh it should it shouldn't be that surprising and the third constituent is attention so to paraphrase a subtitle of a very important article that was published a number of years ago by a group of social psychologists at Harvard to paraphrase the subtitle a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind a Wandering mind is an unhappy mind so what they did in this particular study is they used smartphones to query people as they were out and about in the real world and they asked them essentially three questions the first question was just check off on a list of activities what are you doing right now the second question was where is your mind right now is it focused on what you're doing or is it focused elsewhere and the third question was how happy or unhappy are you right now at this very moment and what they found in this study was that and this was in a large sample of adults in America they found that on average 47% of an adult's waking life is spent not paying attention to what they're doing 47% of the time folks I'm convinced that we could do better can you envision a world where that number actually goes down a little so instead of 47% maybe we can turn down the distractability even 5% imagine what the impact that might have on productivity on being able to be present in showing up in the way that Scott was describing in his beautiful introduction being present with another person deeply listening this quality of attention is so fundamentally important William James in his very famous two volume Tome which was written in 1890 he has a whole chapter on attention and he said in that chapter on attention The Faculty of voluntarily bringing back back a Wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment character and will and he went on to say that an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence and then the next sentence in the book is but it is easier to Define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about I think if William James had more contact with the contemplative Traditions he would have instantaneously seen these as vehicles for educating attention so the fourth constituent of well-being that's been neuroscientifically validated or investigated if you will is generosity there are now a plethora of data showing that when individuals engage in generous and altruistic Behavior they actually activate circuits in the brain that are key to fostering well-being and these circuits get activated in a way that shows more enduring activation than other kinds of positive incentives and so these four constituents resilience Outlook attention and generosity all have been investigated neuroscientifically and the circuits that are important to each of these exhibits plasticity and therefore we understand that it can be shaped through training and through experience and one of the invitations in all of this work and I think a central theme that we'll run through this whole day is that we can all take responsibility for our own minds our brains are constantly being shaped wittingly or unwittingly most of the time our brains are being shaped unwittingly and we have an opportunity to take more responsibility for the intentional shaping of our own minds and through that we can shape our brains in ways that would enable these four fundamental constituents of well-being to be strengthened so these are the kind of data that lead us to this inevitable conclusion that well-being is indeed a skill and so I will end here and I thank you all for your attention