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Sunday, March 21, 2010

A Dan Siegel Festival - Articles and Podcasts

I have all these tabs open that I have been reading and listening to, so I thought I'd share them with those of you who are interested in Siegel's brand of attachment psychology, mindfulness work, and interpersonal neurobiology.

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First up, a great podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell at the Brain Science Podcast in which Siegel talks about his book, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being.

Brain Science Podcast #44: Meditation and the Brain

Posted on August 22nd, 2008 by Ginger Campbell, MD

Daniel Siegel, MD

In Episode 44 of the Brain Science Podcast I talk with Daniel Siegel, MD about meditation and the brain. Dr. Siegel is the author of several books including The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being. In this interview we review the scientific evidence about how mindfulness meditation changes the brain, both in terms of short term activity and in terms of long-term structural changes. The evidence is convincing that a regular mindfulness practice can be an important element of brain health.

Listen to Episode 44 of the Brain Science Podcast

Episode 44 Transcript (PDF)

Show Notes and Links:

Daniel J Siegel, MD:

Scientists and writers mentioned in Episode 44:

More information about meditation:

Note: Insight Meditation is based of vipassana meditation, the mindfulness practices of Theravada, the oldest branch of Buddhism. Insight Meditation is easily adapted to secular purposes because it not based on beliefs or dogmas. The most well-known secular form is called mindfulness meditation, which begins with a focus on breath awareness and then advances to developing compassion for oneself and others.

Researchers are studying people who practice other types of mediation also. Richard Davidson has focused his work on the study of Tibetan Buddhist monks. Their practice emphasizes the development of compassion.

*I discussed the therapeutic use of mediation with Delany Dean, PhD in Episode 20 of Books and Ideas.

Listen to Episode 44 of the Brain Science Podcast

Episode 44 Transcript (PDF)

In this podcast, Siegel mentions the nine middle prefrontal cortex functions, all of which are reinforced through mindfulness meditation (intrapersonal attunement) and eight of which are a part of healthy secure attachment when we are infants (interpersonal attunement). So Siegel argues, convincingly, that mindfulness practice can "repair" attachment failures.

Anyway, here are the nine middle prefrontal cortex functions that he mentions in the podcast (and in the book):
Body Regulation:
 Body Regulation is achieved by the Autonomic (automatic) Nervous System. This system generally works without conscious control and regulates functions like heart rate, breathing, digestion, vascular tone, inflammation and immune response etc.

Attuned Communication:
 Attuned Communication is defined as the coordination of input from another mind with the activity of one’s own, a resonance process involving these middle prefrontal areas. This is distinct from other resonant functions such as those achieved by the mirror neurons in the motor cortex that automatically interpret the motor actions of another as one’s own.

Emotional Balance:
 Emotional Balance in this context is defined as being able to balance between rigidity and chaos. In other words, being able to keep from being overwhelmed or becoming inflexible in one’s emotional response.

Response Flexibility:
 Response Flexibility is the capacity to pause before action. Such a process requires the assessment of ongoing stimuli, the delay of reaction, selection from a variety of possible options, and the initiation of action.

Empathy (Mindsight):
 Empathy is defined as conscious awareness and sensitivity to the mind of someone else. It is the putting of oneself in someone else’s shoes.

Insight, or self-knowing awareness:
 Insight links the past, present and future. The middle prefrontal cortex has input and output fibers to many areas. Insight means integrating cortical representation of autobiographical memory stores and limbic firing that gives emotional texture to the emerging themes of our present awareness, life story, and image of the future.

Fear modulation:
 Fear can be modulated from the middle PFC via neurons that enervate the amygdale, a limbic structure that registers threat and opportunity. These neurons can release calming neurotransmitters (GABA) and can be consciously reprogrammed.

Intuition:
 Intuition in this context means registering the input from neurons from the heart and gut. In other words, respecting one’s gut feeling.

Morality:
 Morality in this context means the ability to think of the larger social good and enact those behaviors, even when alone.
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Here is a review of the book (The Mindful Brain) from The Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry:
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This article from Salon looks at Siegel's ideas on how mindful parenting - and understanding how our emotional states impact our children - can help us be better parents.

The neuropsychology of the playground - Psychiatrist Dan Siegel explains how understanding the complexities of your own brain chemistry can make you a better parent.

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Finally, here is an article (PDF) by Siegel from Psychiatric Annals 2006 (May/June):
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.

Overview

In this article the principles of an interdisciplinary approach to psychotherapy called “interpersonal neurobiology” will be summarized with an emphasis on neuroscience findings regarding the mirror neuron system and neural plasticity. Interpersonal neurobiology is a “consilient” approach (1) that examines the independent fields of knowing to find the common principles that emerge to paint of picture of the “larger whole” of human experience and development (2). Interpersonal neurobiology attempts to extract the wisdom from over a dozen different disciplines of science to weave a picture of human experience and the process of change across the lifespan.

The perspective of “interpersonal neurobiology” is to build a model within which the objective domains of science and the subjective domains of human knowing can find a common home (3). An interpersonal neurobiology approach to psychotherapy draws on the basic framework of this interdisciplinary view in exploring the ways in which one individual can help others alleviate suffering and move toward well-being. The central idea of interpersonal neurobiology is to offer a definition of the mind and of mental well-being that can be used by a wide range of professionals concerned with human development.

The Mind:

A Definition – The mind can be defined as an embodied process that regulates the flow of energy and information. Regulation is at the heart of mental life, and helping others with this regulatory balance is central to understanding how the mind can change. The brain has self-regulatory circuits that may directly contribute to enhancing how the mind regulates the flow of its two elements, energy and information.

Mind Emergence – The mind emerges in the transaction of at least neurobiological and interpersonal processes. Energy and information can flow within one brain, or between brains. Naturally other features of our world, nature and our technological environment, can also impact on how the mind emerges. Within psychotherapy, we can see that relationships with another person profoundly shape the flow of energy and information between two people, and within each person.

Mind Development – The mind develops across the lifespan as the genetically programmed maturation of the nervous system is shaped by ongoing experience. We now know that about one third of our genome directly shapes the connections within our brains (4). Though genes are extremely important in development, we also know that experience shapes our neural connections as well. When neurons become active they have the potential to stimulate the growth of new connections among each other. With one hundred billion neurons and an average of ten thousand synaptic connections linking one neuron to others, we have trillions of connections within our brains. These synaptic linkages are created by both genes and by experience. Nature needs nurture. Experience shapes new connections among neurons by how genes are activated, proteins produced, and interconnections established within our spider-web like neural system.

Mental Well-Being – An interpersonal neurobiology view of well-being states that the complex, non-linear system of the mind achieves states of self-organization by balancing the two opposing processes of differentiation and linkage. When separated areas of the brain are allowed to specialize in their function and then to become linked together, the system is said to be integrated. Integration brings with it a special state of functioning of the whole which has the acronym of FACES: Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized, and Stable. This coherent flow (5) is bounded on one side by chaos and on the other by rigidity (6). In this manner we can envision a flow or river of well-being, with the two banks being chaos on the one side, rigidity on the other. One way of viewing the symptoms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (7) for psychiatric diagnoses is as manifestations of rigidity or of chaos. This flow of well being can be seen to reveal the correlations among an empathic relationship, a coherent mind, and an integrated brain as three points on a triangle depicting well-being.
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