Wellbeing is a skill: Perspectives from contemplative neuroscience

Series: Sage seminar series
Speaker: Richard Davidson
Title: Wellbeing is a skill: Perspectives from contemplative neuroscience

(Note: I have only linked the references - I still need to read through the papers and reports.)

Key takeaways:

• Loneliness, isolation and a decreasing mental health is a growing problem that needs to be tackled. Evidence provided:
  • Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation (US Surgeon General’s advisory, 2023) - reduced social time and connections with others
  • Social media and youth mental health (US Surgeon General’s advisory, 2023) - average 3.5h spent on social media (and not overall screen time)¹
  • World happiness report, 2025 - a decreasing level of happiness in the last decade
• Well-being and life expectancy are correlated (and maybe causally linked): Evans and Soliman, 2019
• Well-being is a skill that can be learned! A training-based framework is provided with focus on four pillars of a healthy mind (Dahl et al, 2020):
  • Awareness:
    • Attentiveness to thoughts, feelings and sensations, and a meta-awareness of where attention is being pulled towards (by specific emotions or cues).
    • Mediation, mindfulness techniques increase awareness and meta-awareness.
    • Brain scans of a Tibetan monk, who practiced mediation for at least 60000 hours, showed the brain aging much slowly (than a normal person): Adluru et al, 2020
  • Connection:
    • Being part of supportive relationships and caring interactions - a sense of kinship towards other people.
    • Appreciation, gratefulness, kindness and compassion improve sense of connection with others.
    • Compassion training (and mediation) had clear effects on well-being.
  • Insight:
    • Self-knowledge about ones emotions, thoughts, etc and a good understanding of one’s sense of self.
    • Seems to be linked to resilience - people with strong sense of self (expert meditators) recovery better from negative events: Lutz et al, 2013 (very cool experiment and surprising results - low anticipation and quick return to baseline in expert meditators)
  • Purpose:
    • A sense of clarity about one’s core values and motivation (and the ability to apply it in daily life).
    • This is a very important attribute for longevity (e.g. correlations between purpose and longevity in people > 65, controlling for other health related factors).
    • The speaker linked it as a big picture “view” of the world and how you fit into it (from Buddhist philosophy). Meditation and action (awareness, insight and connection) is application of this view and training yourself to fit into it better.
• Evidence based healthy minds program
  • Free app for applying the above training framework - https://tryhealthyminds.org/meditation-app
  • More information on the science - https://centerhealthyminds.org/
  • Non-profit implementing the ideas - https://hminnovations.org/

Notes:

• Lot of new, big data experiments are being carried out through the healthy minds app + collaboration with schools etc.
• Use of video logs and dried blood spots to get more data into the effect on the above framework on well-being.
• Transcranial Electrical Simulation using Temporal Interference (tES-TI) seems like a cool technique.² It is non-invasive yet highly specific deep brain stimulation.

Footnotes

1. I liked a quote by the speaker: we are all part of a grand social experiment without our informed consent ↩

2. Methods paper describing the approach (I think, need to read it) ↩