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. This is the function by which the brain is continually modified through the 150 trillion cell-to-cell synaptic connections that are made in response to your everyday experiences.

One main point that I hope you take home today is that not only are they contributing to your self-identity, but they are continually changing your brain. 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 yourself 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.

Download Transcript