Transcript

Thank you. We are all born with a brain that has 86 billion neurons. And throughout our life, we make relatively few new neurons. In fact, we lose about 2 billion neurons throughout the course of our lifetime. So you may wonder if we're losing billions of neurons, and we're not making a lot of new neurons, what's changing in the brain to support all those mental habits and behaviors that make up our self identity? Well, the answer is activity dependent plasticity. 

 And they're strongly influencing your health and longevity. I hope to also demonstrate that a systematic form of mental training involving meditation can potentially transform your self and your mental habits in a positive way. In 2002, I was a graduate student in cognitive neurosciences, that was me, I was studying the brains of rats to better understand the neural circuitry of learning and memory, memory.