We're talking to some degree about mind-body medicine here, right? We're talking about the power of the mind to alter the body, and I'm sure there are some scientists who would say, this isn't real science. I mean, have you run up against it? that in some circles? I mean, to be honest, I think most scientists today would agree that there are certain kinds of evidence now, which I would say is incontrovertible evidence.
I mean, we now know. that there are certain psychosocial factors, for example, which can influence the course of certain physical illnesses. The data are absolutely bulletproof and compelling.
You know, you take an asthmatic and put an asthmatic in a stressful situation, and you will find an exacerbation of lung inflammation. And it could be measured objectively. I mean, that's a fact.
And when you begin to look at that and you then say, well, if that's really true, then the mind has to be involved. Because how else are those psychosocial influences from the world getting under the skin and actually influencing eosinophil infiltration in the lung, inflammatory responses in the lung? There is no other way other than through the mind and the brain.
And I think that this... kind of recognition has led to an increasing openness and we now have the scientific tools to begin to study the mechanisms through which these kinds of influences may occur and if they occur on the deleterious side then they certainly invite the possibility that training the mind and changing one's relationship to these ruminations and to external stresses, that we can actually produce the flip side, if you will, and use the mind for beneficial purposes. The fact of neuroplasticity is silent with respect to whether it's good or bad.
It's both. And if we take advantage of plasticity and use it, if you will, for promoting... virtuous qualities, then it can be in the service of positive change.
I'd just like to piggyback on that and say that, you know, it's not just neuroplasticity. The science of the mind-body connection has evolved to the point where we now also understand what we used to think of as our chromosomes, our genetic inheritance, is no longer fixed. How our genes get expressed has everything to do with what we do, how we behave, what we eat, how intimate our relationships are.
how we feel about ourselves, how much we exercise. So virtually everything that we're doing is in some way or another influencing the genes that get expressed and many of the genes that are expressed under stress and so forth are inflammatory genes. They are genes that seem to be at the bottom of a whole lot of different kinds of chronic illnesses that people usually talk about as lifestyle related illnesses and that would also be cancer and there's some very interesting evidence about that and there's also the The tips of all of our chromosomes are capped with these shoelace-type things called telomeres. And they shorten every time the cell divides.
Those telomeres shorten some. And there's an enzyme that builds them back up. Under stress, the telomere...
degrade much faster. And there have been studies, in fact, Liz Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for this in 2009 for the discovery of telomeres and telomerase. But out of her lab, there have been studies of people with very severe chronic stress that's not going to go away because it has to do with parenting children with very chronic diseases, that while the stress can actually degrade and accelerate the telomere degradation rapidly, how you... choose to be in relationship to your stress, the stressful conditions, can actually build the telomeres back up. So we're in this dynamical flow, mind, body speaking to each other, and just to say the science is still in its infancy, but I have not actually heard from anybody in a very long time deep skepticism expressed about the validity of the mind-body connection to the scientific evidence behind it.
Yeah, and I've just said... say from a kind of different perspective, not so much the mind-body side of things, but from the cognitive augmentation field, how is it that we might be able to train the brain using other techniques? So, for example, computer-based training. I mean, many of you might have heard of like BrainAge or PositScience.
These are like Lumosity. I mean, these are now publicly available for, you know, for profit. possibilities for how people can train their own minds.
So from that side of things, I mean, it's not that surprising. This sort of fits under that category. It's a different way to think about cognitive augmentation. So I don't know. It's also like a convergence of that happening around the same time that a lot of the mindfulness training studies and the study of their impact on the brain are happening.