Transcript

I like to spend the little time we have today just introducing you to the theme of the book, which is really the theme that I've spent my life on as a professional scientist, and tell you the story that led to this work, and give you little tidbits as we go along, probably the most important characteristic of emotion when we interact in our daily lives with those around us. The characteristic that is so salient is that people differ in how they respond to life slings and arrows. Some people in response to adversity decompensate rapidly and have a very difficult time recovering. Other people in response to the same kind of adversity are quite resilient, and they're able to overcome these obstacles with great facility.

That question has really been the question that has motivated my entire career, and the book is a summary of 35 years of research that delineates different characteristics of the brain and behavior that impact how and why a person may respond differently to emotional challenges that he or she might confront the and that's the first part of the book. The second part of the book is about how we can change these emotional styles if they're not suiting us for whatever reason. And this is where the work that I've done in the area that I call contemplative neuroscience has been particularly important because strategies that we can derive from the contemplative traditions could be useful in helping us to change brain circuits that underlie these emotional styles, and in turn, to change the patterns of emotional responding themselves. So I will introduce you to those topics today, and I'll end with some of our very recent work on the application of some of these strategies to very, very young children, where we have the opportunity to cultivate positive habits of mind in preschool children who are still in a very formative period of their development. So with that as an introduction, and I don't know if you need me to stay still, okay, I can wander good.