The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being

"Dan Siegel, its author, is a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. This is a book that focuses on the neuroscience of mindfulness. I think the neuroscience of mindfulness is very much in its infancy, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there, a lot of claims that aren’t yet substantiated; there’ll probably be better books coming along in the future. But for now, I find this a very good book. Siegel gives a detailed account of the workings of the brain that’s quite accessible. He has a lovely model of the brain using your hand: you can clasp your hand in a fist and the palm is the brainstem, the thumb is the limbic region, and the curved fingers are the cortex. This really helps you to visualise the brain. He’s really trying to investigate how mindfulness works in the brain. One of his main themes is how mindfulness seems to strengthen the middle prefrontal cortex area, which is responsible for integrating a lot of different networks in the brain, and how it helps us to be more reflective and aware through strengthening that area of the brain. Siegel also gives a good account from his own experience. He goes on a retreat, as Ruby Wax does, and tries to bring a first-person account of this and what he thinks was going on in his own brain. Yes, we can learn a lot. The most important thing is integrating mindfulness into daily life. But when we go on retreat, we have a much deeper experience of the mind actually slowing down. We take away all the stimuli, all the busyness of daily life. We strip the world down to very simple things like having breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sitting on our bottom doing meditation. What we find in this situation is a lot of the busyness of the mind tends to settle. It’s a bit like if you shook up a jar of water with some debris in it, so that’s the way we are normally. We’re very busy and agitated, and we have a lot of debris floating around in the water. When that jar is placed somewhere and left quietly, the debris can settle, and you have clearer water. It’s the same with mindfulness: if you spend hours each day just sitting, mindful of your breath, and paying attention to thoughts, you’ll begin to get an insight into how the mind works, because it slows down and you are able to see more clearly the way the thoughts arise and dissolve, the way the emotions arise and dissolve, and so on. Yes, definitely. There’s been a big backlash recently. Mindfulness has become very popular very quickly, perhaps rather too quickly. There have been too many claims for it that have not been substantiated by the evidence. We need to move into a phase where we’re looking more carefully at what the real evidence is and at the experimental design of the studies, whether they involve control groups, and so on. We need to be careful that we’re not using selective evidence from neuroscience. There’s definitely been a backlash, and I think that this will also calm down, and then we’ll start to be able to look at mindfulness more realistically where it’s not just about ‘mindfulness will fix everything’ or it’s not just about ‘mindfulness is dangerous’ or ‘just a fad’, but actually it becomes part of the culture, in the same way that physical exercise has done. Probably some decades ago, we got physical exercise naturally and we didn’t really have to think so much about jogging or going to the gym. Now we take for granted that jogging, and yoga, and going to the gym are part of the culture. It is similar with mental training."