Dan Siegel talks about Mindsight with the folks at the Dalai Lama Center. His book (one of many) is Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Here is a little background on Siegel's Mindsight approach to rewiring the brain, from his website.
And so now, here is your feature presentation.What's Mindsight?
"Mindsight" is a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel to describe our human capacity to perceive the mind of the self and others. It is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, integrate the brain, and enhance our relationships with others. Mindsight is a kind of focused attention that allows us to see the internal workings of our own minds. It helps us get ourselves off of the autopilot of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses. It lets us “name and tame” the emotions we are experiencing, rather than being overwhelmed by them.
"I am sad" vs. "I feel sad"
Mindsight is the difference between saying “I am sad” and “I feel sad.” Similar as those two statements may seem, they are profoundly different. “I am sad” is a kind of limited self-definition. “I feel sad” suggests the ability to recognize and acknowledge a feeling, without being consumed by it. The focusing skills that are part of mindsight make it possible to see what is inside, to accept it, and in the accepting to let it go, and finally, to transform it.
Mindsight: A Skill that Can Change Your Brain
Mindsight is a learnable skill. It is the basic skill that underlies what we mean when we speak of having emotional and social intelligence. When we develop the skill of mindsight, we actually change the physical structure of the brain. This revelation is based on one of the most exciting scientific discoveries of the last twenty years: How we focus our attention shapes the structure of the brain. Neuroscience has also definitively shown that we can grow these new connections throughout our lives, not just in childhood.
What's Interpersonal Neurobiology?
Interpersonal neurobiology, a term coined by Dr. Siegel in The Developing Mind, 1999, is an interdisciplinary field which seeks to understand the mind and mental health. This field is based on science but is not constrained by science. What this means is that we attempt to construct a picture of the “whole elephant” of human reality. We build on the research of different disciplines to reveal the details of individual components, while also assembling these pieces to create a coherent view of the whole.
The Mindsight Approach Exists Within the Field of Interpersonal Neurobiology
Under the umbrella of interpersonal neurobiology, Dr. Siegel’s mindsight approach applies the emerging principles of interpersonal neurobiology to promote compassion, kindness, resilience, and well-being in our personal lives, our relationships, and our communities. At the heart of both interpersonal neurobiology and the mindsight approach is the concept of “integration” which entails the linkage of different aspects of a system—whether they exist within a single person or a collection of individuals. Integration is seen as the essential mechanism of health as it promotes a flexible and adaptive way of being that is filled with vitality and creativity. The ultimate outcome of integration is harmony. The absence of integration leads to chaos and rigidity—a finding that enables us to re-envision our understanding of mental disorders and how we can work together in the fields of mental health, education, and other disciplines, to create a healthier, more integrated world.
The Mindsight Institute
Through the Mindsight Institute, Dr. Siegel offers a scientifically-based way of understanding human development. The Mindsight Institute serves as the organization from which interpersonal neurobiology first developed and it continues to be a key source for learning in this area. The Mindsight Institute links science, clinical practice, education, the arts, and contemplation, serving as an educational hub from which these various domains of knowing and practice can enrich their individual efforts. Through the Mindsight Institute’s online program, people from six continents participate weekly in our global conversation about the ways to create more health and compassion in the world.
Want to Know More?
For further reading, see Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation and Dr. Siegel’s other books, including The Mindful Brain and The Mindful Therapist. And please visit our website for upcoming events and classes, including our Mindsight Online Courses.
Mindsight: Brain Science and Transformation for You and Your Relationships
May 19, 2011
Dr. Siegel discusses Mindsight with the Dalai Lama Center.
Every one of us possesses an armory of instincts which keep us alive. We are often barely aware of them, but they act every day to protect us from danger and keep us fit and healthy.
I don’t know what happened between those two, but I felt bad for the guy. Seeing him cry so openly in public hurt me, in a small way. And when the slap connected with his wet cheek, the loud clap stung my face in a phantom sort of way. All that insult-to-injury—it hurt.
The scanning room at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research is small, a bit like a cage. With only a row of computers and a few focused but tired graduate students toiling away on spreadsheets, it’s what I imagine a human terrarium might look like. And on the other side of the room’s single window is a large, round, glowing machine that looks like it could become self-aware at any minute and start sealing out oxygen and talking in a sinister, monotonous voice.
The setup is pretty simple. Bruneau’s subjects lie in the fMRI scanner while short, 60-word stories appear before their eyes. The stories tell quick tales of another in emotional or physical pain—nothing too extreme. As a subject reads over the stories, a prompt appears after a few seconds asking her: How much compassion do you feel? She rates from 1 to 5, depending on the intensity of her admitted experience. Images of the subject's brain (the fMRI measures blood flow, so the more active regions register on the images) are finally sent back to Emile, who watches from his computer.
Bruneau discovered with the first experiment what appeared to be concrete anatomical structures in the brain that responded to physical and emotional pain in others. As he monitored the young Israeli woman in the scanner, he pulled up some of the results from his previous experiments to show me what he meant.
These conflict-rooted empathy experiments haven’t been running too long yet, and he’s yet to dig into the imaging data, but Bruneau has a few expectations, a few questions. For instance, how do members of these conflict groups experience empathy?
"One of the strengths of neuroimaging is that you can get a quantitative measure of the activity in different regions, and that's kind of what we're relying upon," Bruneau said.
Bruneau and his supervisor, Rebecca Saxe of Saxelab, both believe that this skepticism has all but died off, and that the whole localization versus network-distribution battle is moot.
Even if localizing specific brain functions is at some point wholly agreed upon as a worthwhile endeavor, fMRI scanning has its critics, too. Perhaps the most colorfully demonstrated argument against the efficacy and reliability of these scanners came about in October 2010. Researchers stuck a dead salmon in an fMRI, asked him questions about human emotions, and measured his response. That is to say, the dead salmon had brain activity show up in his scans. The dead fish had thoughts on human emotion.
There’s clearly a debate, and probably no end to it in the near future. Matters of the brain are tricky business. I’m no neuroscientist, just a hobbyist, but both sides of the argument seem well-reasoned, well-researched, and well-intending. While it’s exciting to see those brain scans that Bruneau brought up on screen, there’s also something oversimplified about it all.
As I sat in my corner and watched Bruneau conduct his experiment, I saw one of the prompts flash on a screen near the neuroscientist. It read:
About the Author: Kristina Bjoran is a student in MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing, where she writes about technology, environmental studies, and nonhuman animal intelligence. During her down time, she volunteers with animal shelters, writes for nonprofits, and dabbles in photography and skydiving. Follow Kristina on 
