Dan Siegel
Brainstorm
January 9, 2014
DRAFT
WEBINAR
DAN SIEGEL DISCUSSING ADOLESCENCE AND HIS NEW BOOK “BRAINSTORM: THE POWER AND PURPOSE
OF THE TEENAGE BRAIN
JANUARY 9TH, 2014
To celebrate the 100th year anniversary of the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of
Toronto and the release of Dan Siegel’s new book, Brainstorm.
Transcribed by Janet Pal
RM= Professor Robert MacFadden
DS= Dr. Dan Siegel
GUEST# = Audience Members
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Dan Siegel
Brainstorm
January 9, 2014
RM: By now we should be beaming out, if I can use that terminology, to at least 1000 people all around
the world and probably more than that because there is a number of groupings within different
organizations of people so, we should be over 1000 people strong with this webinar and I'd like to
personally welcome every single one of you to this webinar. It's an event to celebrate the 100th
anniversary of our Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto. It also coincides
with the celebration for Dr. Dan Siegel's new book, Brainstorm The Power and Purpose of the Teenage
Brain, which, by the way, just became available at least up here in Canada, in the last day or so.
Dr. Dan Siegel is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, he is Co-Director of the
UCLA Mindfulness Research Center and Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. He is also a
practising child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist as well, and he is founder of a field called
Interpersonal Neurobiology and the author of many books and articles. Over the last 5 to 7 years, our
faculty has been engaged in incorporating much of Dr. Siegel's work on neuroscience and mindfulness
into our Master of Social Work curriculum, so it is a special honor to have Dan here to share some of his
new ideas with us today about adolescence. Dr. Siegel will talk for about 1 hour and then there will be a
question and answer period for about 30 minutes. We have, as I mentioned earlier, over 1000 people
registered for this webinar and many of them will be from individual locations seeing it in groups as well.
So, given the magnitude, we are not able to offer chat questions; the complexity of those numbers with
chat questions is rather formidable but, at the end of the presentation, the last 30 minutes we will be
having questions from our live audience here in the webinar room and I hope that should work out well.
I'd like now to turn it over to Dr. Siegel. Welcome.
DS: Thank you, Robert. It is a pleasure to be here with all of you, and I want to thank everyone who was
involved in organizing this wonderful opportunity to connect with you, not only in Toronto, but
throughout the world, and I appreciate the enthusiasm for the idea of looking deeply at adolescence.
What I'd like to do in this framework that we have is really discuss some amazing discoveries that have
come out in the last really 15 years and even more so in the last dozen years or so, about the adolescent
brain, and these remarks will be really focused on all sorts of people. They are certainly focused on
adolescents themselves, they are focused on anyone who cares for adolescents, so that would be, of
course, parents of adolescents, it would be teachers of adolescents, and for any clinician who works
with individuals during this important period of time. What I have found as the book has been just
released is that people realize that the adolescent period is not only important for people in this period
of life, but for anyone who once was an adolescent so, for most of us adults that is true. So, I hope you
will see that these remarks have implications for all sorts of aspects of our lives whether we are caring
for someone or caring for ourselves.
So let's begin with the general idea. The broad statement I like to begin with is that the beliefs we hold
as a culture, as communities, as families, as parents, as individuals, influence how we perceive what is
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front of our very eyes. So we want to begin with that statement because our beliefs are governed by the
stories we carry with us that we often attain from information that we get from those same sources,
from our parents, from our families, from our schools, from communities we live in, from our culture,
and for me, having two children myself in my own family who are just passing their teen years, it
became clear to me in raising them that there were myths that they were being told, there were myths
that we, their parents, were being told about adolescence, that were really misleading and so what I felt
inspired to do was to look at the science of adolescence and see if the science supported the statements
that were being made about the adolescent period, or whether they in fact refuted them, whether we
could debunk these myths with science.
It turns out there are about four or five very important myths that are actually wrong and yet, when you
go to dinner with fellow parents or you meet with other therapists or just speak in community settings,
you find that most people believe these myths and so let me outline them and then what we will do is
examine each one in turn. To do this, we're going to be looking deeply at a field of science called
interpersonal neurobiology, which is an interdisciplinary approach to basically take all of the different
individual disciplines of science, so for example, physics and chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology,
anthropology, and all of the different subdivisions within those, for example in biology, neuroscience,
and bring them together into one perspective and so that approach is through a strategy called
consilience which the author E.O. Wilson writes about, and it is basically an attempt to look at the whole
picture through building blocks created by individual efforts from physics to anthropology. So that's
called interpersonal neurobiology and if that is of particular interest to you, I am the founding editor of a
series of books and we have now three dozen books that explore this as it is applied to various clinical
situations such as trauma or developmental issues or basically just understanding the nature of
psychotherapy. So, we're not going to be dealing with the specifics of interpersonal neurobiology, but
you should know that the comments I am making come from that synthesis of many disciplines into one
framework and so that is the view that we will be talking about.
So, from an interpersonal neurobiology view, we basically take the following assumptions and we're
going to use those to examine the myths of adolescence. The first is to say that the human mind is a selforganizing process that emerges not just from the head and even not just from the body, but actually
emerges from embodied processes as well as relational processes. So we see human mental experience,
the subjective inner core of what goes on with us, things like feelings and thoughts and memories,
hopes, dreams, narratives, intentions, longings, all of the aspects of mental life that you may be familiar
with, we see as related to a self-organizing emerging process that is both embodied and relational. So as
we look at the science of the brain in particular of adolescents, which is really the new discoveries about
the brain, we're going to need to put that in the larger framework of the whole body as well as the
relational world in which the mind arises.
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So let's take a look at that by first starting with one of the myths which is that the period of adolescence
is the same as the teenage years, so the first thing about this myth is that when people become 18 or 19
years of age adults expect them to have stopped their development and be ready to settle down into
some kind of relatively fixed stable identity and a clear notion of what they are going to do in their lives
but research on the brain at least in North American kids, reveals that the brain continues to have some
fundamental changes we will be reviewing that last well into the mid-20s. So the first thing I want to say
is that the word adolescence and the word teenage are not synonyms. The teenage years begin of
course at 13 but the period of change between childhood dependency and adult let's say responsibility
we're going to define as adolescence and this period can begin usually around puberty, the onset of
sexual maturation, but not necessarily. So even puberty and the beginning of adolescence are not the
same necessarily, they can be different, but what marks the change in the brain of an adolescent is the
beginning of a pruning process that some people feel follows an exuberant growth of new synaptic
connections, the basic cells in the brain being neurons and their connections being synapses, and these
synaptic connections are what allow the brain to form its architecture. So when we say that there is an
exuberance, for those researchers who believe that, and it is very controversial, there is a new growth
around 10 or 11 years of age, but whether you believe in the exuberance or not, what everyone agrees
on is that around 11, 12, 13, depending, if it's female it's a little earlier about a year and a half earlier, or
male a little bit later, then what you see is the beginning of a pruning process and this pruning process is
thought to be the onset of adolescent brain changes. For simplicity of course it's happening around the
teenage years so we can call this the teenage brain, and so the teenage brain at this moment is
beginning a process of carving away existing neurons and their connections. Now, this was surprising to
people because you would think the brain would continue to grow but instead it is beginning to cut back
on the connections and the number that are there. So the pruning begins, it's a little bit different timing
and trajectory in females than in males, but ultimately they end up in the same place at the end of
adolescence, but the pruning is followed by and overlapping with another process which is the creation
and laying down of myelin. Myelin makes the connected neurons about 3000 times more effective and
fast in their communication with each other. For those of you who would like to know the details, that is
because the speed of conduction is 100 times faster, the resting period called a refractory period, is 30
times faster, so that is a shorter period that you have to rest, so 30 x 100 is 3000. So you're not only
getting more speed when you have myelinated remaining neurons that are connected, but the crucial
issue is that they are more coordinated with each other and firing in a coordinated fashion is an
outcome of a very important process called integration. So this remodelling of pruning and myelination,
that is what we call it is a remodelling period, extends basically from around 12 years of age to around
24 years of age. So, in terms of our first myth, we can say that the adolescent changes in the brain are
the second dozen years of life, more or less, at least in North American kids. Now, why do I say that?
Well, it turns out that culture may in fact shape the timing of adolescence. So if we rewound the clock
and went back about 200 years what we know is that puberty began around 15 or 16 years of age in
girls, a little bit later for boys, and the period between the onset of puberty and settling down for adult
responsibility of work and creating a family was about 2 years later, so the adolescent period 200 years
ago was about 2 years. Now, it goes on some people say for decades, but we know at least it is a dozen
years. Now, if you in the present time asked why is puberty starting so much earlier, we think it has to
do with nutrition, we think it may have to do with other issues, but we don't have a definitive answer.
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Now, some girls are beginning their periods even before the teenage years begin, and this was
something that was very rare a long time ago, and the period before one settles down for adult
responsibilities is extending long past the 18-19 years of age. If we did studies on people from Papua,
New Guinea, where perhaps the culture was isolated, the food was different, we might find in fact that
these adolescent brain changes were actually happening over a shorter period of time. No one has done
that study, but it is an important thing to mention, that culture can shape the timing of brain
development, and the kind of brain development that is unfolding. So, that's just an important thing to
keep in mind. So, number one myth: Adolescence is only during teenage period. That is not true.
Myth number two is something, I don't know if you hear this in Canada or other countries, but in the
United States, a common statement that you hear is that the trouble with teenagers is that they have
raging hormones. Now, I wish I could see you because I want to see whether that is something you have
heard about. In the US, when I say this to large groups of parents, they are all laughing and nodding their
heads. Well, the fact is, that hormones do increase with puberty. Puberty is about the sexual maturation
that comes from maturation of the ovaries and the testicles, and the secretion in the case of the ovaries
of estrogen and progesterone and also some androgens, you also get testosterone in boys, a form of
androgen, and these rises in hormones certainly change your secondary sexual characteristics and they
can change your behaviour as well. But the idea of raging hormones determining changes in feelings and
thoughts and behaviors directly actually does not correlate with what the research shows. What the
research suggests instead is that there are fundamental changes in the architecture of the brain that we
will review now that can explain a lot of the concerning behaviors that we see during adolescence, and
the important thing for an adolescent who is understanding this and the reason why when I wrote this
Brainstorm book, I wanted it to be for adolescents as well as adults, was that there was nothing
available that I could find that could teach an adolescent about their own brain functioning, how their
brain changed. There also was nothing available that I could find for adults to read together with an
adolescent, so together they could have a common conversation about the science of this period of
time. So my hope for the book is that it can actually offer this kind of scientific framework in a very
accessible way, not a lot of scientific jargon, but just direct scientific principles that are applied for
everyday use through stories and through examples and exercises.
So, what happens then in this change is, what do we know, we know that the adolescent period in terms
of what is actually changing and what is going on in the brain, is a time when this remodelling that we
discussed earlier, is happening; that is one thing that goes on. Part of that remodelling is a change in the
way the brain is weighing the pros and cons of experience; the pros being the exciting, thrilling,
rewarding aspects of doing something, the cons being the risks, potential dangers, potential harm. If we
imagine that a balanced way that you would compare the pros and the cons is like this; what happens in
the adolescent brain is that the pros are emphasized and the cons are de-emphasized and so there is a
lot of emphasis, paying of attention, feeling of value and appraisal that it is meaningful for the positive
things, but the negative things are really de-emphasized. The outcome of this is something that the
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scientists call hyper-rational thinking, and hyper-rationality is a strange term, but it is what the scientists
to use to try to say that you are, in a way, rationalizing why I am going to do this thing, look how great it
is to drive 100 mph, oh, I could have an accident but that doesn't really matter, I'm going to drive this
fast. This change is not about ranging hormones. It's not even about another myth, a third myth, which
is that the danger that is involved in the adolescent period is due to impulsivity. While that is true
especially in young adolescents, it turns out that while risk behavior can occur throughout adolescence,
and though the adolescent body is much stronger and healthier than other periods of life so if you get
an infection you can fight the infection with more gusto, the fact is, you are three times more likely to
be injured or even die from a preventable cause and this finding of being three times more in danger
makes parents of course extremely and understandably worried, and adolescents need to understand
that, that this is real risk. It's not just impulsivity, this third myth; it's actually hyper-rational thinking and
one of the changes that happens in the brain that can explain this is a change in the dopamine system.
Dopamine is the chemical that serves many different functions, but the one we're going to look at here
is that it serves as the transmitter for the reward circuits of the brain, so if you do something that is
going to give you a feeling of that was satisfying, that was important, I'm glad I did that, that would be
created by the secretion and the release of dopamine. Now, what happens is adolescence, and there are
different studies that look at different aspects of this, but some studies show that the baseline levels of
dopamine are lower and the release levels are higher. What this can help us understand is that an
adolescent may be prone to feeling restless and bored with just doing the same old, same old thing, and
to get their dopamine released they need to do one of the most important and stimulating kinds of
activities that release dopamine which is novelty. Seeking novelty is a part of adolescence, to try things
in new ways. Now, you can say, well why did nature design this system to change compared to a child's
who may just sponge in knowledge from the world and just be satisfied with things as they are and
come home and be happy to be a home with parents, why is this kind of utziness, this drive, this life
being on fire, why is this happening at this time? And, we'll get to that in just a few moments, but I want
you to think about that as we review a couple of the other myths. Why would nature make pruning
happen, why would nature make this change in dopamine occur, why would this change in dopamine,
the change in the architecture of the appraisal circuits make for this hyper-rational focus on the positive
and de-emphasis on the negative, why would that be helpful?
There is a fourth myth that basically says that adolescence is a really difficult time, that you just want to
get through. It is so painful, it is so hard, you just want to make it through if you can. And while we
pointed out that, you know, risk is there and danger is truly there, so of course you want to survive that,
but what I want to suggest to you is that by viewing adolescence as a period of life or adolescents as
individuals who are just struggling to survive actually makes it so we are imprisoning adolescents into a
view that is extremely negative; it's not empowering and it actually doesn't take advantage of this
tremendous potential that adolescents have. So as we get to the next part of the talk, we're going to
look at why changing the cultural conversation about adolescence is so vital for us to do and it comes
from one person at a time and so when some folks I was meeting with in Vancouver who I know are on
the line, hello to everyone, and I were talking about the Brainstorm approach, and we were talking
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about what could we do in Toronto to connect to these ideas, it was so exciting to think that each of us
has an opportunity to actually change the cultural conversation and in this fourth myth, the idea of let's
just get through adolescence, it really limits our view. As we started today's talk saying that your view
actually shapes what you perceive so your beliefs shape your perception. So if you believe these myths,
you will not only see it in your own mind, but you will evoke it from others around you, other adults who
will perceive adolescents the same way, or adolescents themselves. So this opportunity to change the
cultural conversation is an invitation I want to offer you to think about how can you contribute to
changing the way we view the adolescent period. In this fourth myth what I want to suggest to you is
that there are these fundamental aspects of these brain changes that, if you see them for the downsides
that they have and they each have downsides, you will disempower the adolescent, you will imprison
your own perceptions in a negative view that will just like a vortex keep itself spiralling down and down
and down. So instead of getting this frigid air like the polar vortex we're experiencing in this season right
now, what if we actually turned it around and made it a positive vortex where you could really warm up
the way we view adolescents, which I will suggest to you as based on science is based on an accurate
view.
So what do we know if the myth that adolescence is a time to just get through is not true, what do we
know about it? Well, to address this myth, I'd like to examine the brain in a little more detail and I'd like
you to take your hand and fold your thumb in the middle like this and fold your fingers over the top and
this is a pretty handle model of the brain that would be situated in your head like this and we're going to
review the parts of the brain so you can understand from a neuroanatomy point of view what these
structural changes really mean. So, taking your brain, let's lift up the fingers and lift up the thumb, and
then notice that in this brain just orienting again and putting it back together, you would have the face
in front of your knuckles here, the back of the head would be the back of your hand, and the spinal cord
would be represented in your wrist. If you lift up your fingers and lift up your thumb, this would be
basically the deepest part of the brain, the brainstem, in the palm. The brainstem is responsible for basic
things like regulating the physiology of your intestines, your heart, your respiratory system; it is also
responsible for the fight-flight-freeze response of the nervous system when we are reactive and even
the way we collapse, we have a fainting system. Okay, so that is the brainstem, a very old system of the
brain. If you put your thumb over, this is the limbic area. The limbic area, there would be two of them to
be a perfect model, left and right, the limbic area has some major functions and I will just name them
briefly. It works with the brainstem and the body proper, the signals from the body, the brainstem and
the limbic area, create emotion. It works with the brainstem to motivate us, so motivation. It has the
systems within it to appraise the significance of things and when it appraises something as important, it
orients attention toward that thing, it then focuses attention, it then senses is it good or bad, if it's good,
who do I get more of it, if it's bad, how do I get less of it, so appraisal is very important when it comes to
understanding that shift in hyper-rational thinking, where you are appraising through this system what is
exciting and de-emphasizing the appraisal of the negative parts of a choice. You also have different
forms of memory mediated in the limbic area, so the hippocampus is here and the amygdala, but you
also have the creation of attachment relationships, something also that you will see in a moment,
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changes a lot during adolescence. When we get to our fifth myth, you'll see that. Okay, if you bend your
fingers over the top, this would be the cortex, the outer layer of the brain, and this is part of the brain
basically makes maps, so the back of the brain in a very general way is making maps of the outside
world. This middle part here is for making maps of the body itself, what you feel when you touch things
and the position of your body. From the second to last knuckles forward is your frontal lobe and this is
where you're able to mediate maps of thought and in particular in the front of the frontal lobe called the
prefrontal cortex just behind your forehead, you make maps of other minds, what I call mindsight maps,
so I have a mindsight map of me, I have a mindsight map of you and what you may be thinking during
this seminar, and a mindsight map of we, what does it mean to be all of us trying to change the cultural
conversation around adolescence. So, a mindsight map of me, a mindsight map of you, and a mindsight
map of we. This roughly correlates to the idea of insight into myself for a mindsight map of me, empathy
for another person or a mindsight map of you, and for morality it is the mindsight map of we, and these
are maps that are laid out here and this area connects to lots of other regions, but we're using this
symbolically, as a very integrative area, as you will see. So these mindsight maps also correlate with how
we map out time, past, present, future, and you'll see this is an area of the brain that is linking widely
separated and differentiated areas to each other and that process of linking differentiated areas is called
integration. Integration from an interpersonal neurobiology point of view is the basis of health and
when you develop integration of the brain you make mindsight possible, seeing the mind of self, other
and togetherness or morality. You also can regulate the body as you will see. So if you lift up your fingers
and put them back down, notice that this area in particular, the middle two fingernails, the prefrontal
region, is going to connect the cortex, the limbic area, receive input from the brainstem, it actually
receives direct input through an area called the insula up into the prefrontal cortex, so the body, and it
is even making maps of signals from other people, so the social world, the somatic world, the brainstem,
the limbic area and the cortex, those five independent sources of energy and information flow are
coordinated and balanced by this prefrontal region. So when we say it is an integrative area that is what
we mean; it is literally linking differentiated parts together to create many, many functions, including
insight, empathy, morality, self-regulation, self-understanding through connecting past, present, future
as Endel Tulving in Toronto has coined the term mental time travel.
Okay, so this area is all developing throughout adolescence. What we're going to review now is we're
going to review four fundamental elements that happen as this whole structural system changes and if
you had to say beyond remodelling, which consists of the pruning and the myelination, what is the
remodelling really creating? What the scientists say is that the ultimate outcome of adolescent brain
changes is integration. Integration is what those changes are all about. Integration is the movement of
the adolescent brain to differentiate itself through pruning and link itself through myelination. So that is
what the remodelling is all about. In the Brainstorm book, I give these mindsight exercises that say to
the adolescent or the adult reading it, since integration is likely the basis of health, of creating harmony
in your physiology and harmony in your relational world, there are a whole bunch of books including The
Developing Mind, Mindsight, The Mindful Brain, The Mindful Therapist, all of these books, The Whole
Brain Child, Parenting From the Inside Out, all of those books basically apply these principles of
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integration in different settings. Here, for the adolescent and adults in adolescents' lives, what I wanted
to do is offer exercises that said to the adolescent, look, if your brain is on a pathway from 12 to 24 to
become more integrated, what if someone offered you exercises that you could do to create more
integration in your brain, and so I invite them after giving them the groundwork of why this would be a
good idea, to consider that the study of neuroplasticity shows that you can actually focus your attention
in a way that drives energy and information through the nervous system - I call it SNAG: Stimulate
Neuronal Activation and Growth - this snagging of the brain can be intentional and if you snag the brain
toward integration you are actually purposefully creating a stronger brain and I invite the adolescent
who is experiencing the Brainstorm approach throughout the book and I will just show you, here is what
the book looks like, but I just wanted to show you for the adolescent who is reading it, you can kind of
see I think these gray areas here divide the book up; there are only four parts and the parts are only
about 40 or 50 pages long, and then once they read that short little book-like area they get to these gray
pages and they have exercises, mindsight exercises, so when they look at the edge instead of feeling
overwhelmed, you can kind of see it, they can say, okay, I have four little books to read and then a
bunch of fun exercises I can do, because I was concerned that they would see a book and say, Oh, I
would rather just see a 2-minute video on YouTube or something, so I wanted to make it accessible for
them and that was our way of doing it. I also say in the beginning of the book that they can do this in any
order they want. They can read the beginning and then go to part 4 and then read part 2 and part 3,
however they want to do it, they can actually make it their own.
So integration is what this brain is all about. So let's review these four elements that really are the
fundamental things that combat the myths and this myth of this being a period that you just have to get
through is especially debunked by looking at this essence. So what is the essence of adolescent brain
changes. For those of you who have been my colleagues along this journey of interpersonal
neurobiology, you probably know I have a kind of a problem that I should tell you about. I'm kind of
addicted to acronyms. So, in The Mindful Therapist, I made the whole book an acronym, so that was a
problem, but it didn't solve my problem. So in this book I was writing it and I was thinking how in the
world is anyone going to remember this stuff, so I said, well, and then I realized oh my God, these four
things spell a word and it was amazing because the word was a concept and the concept is what is the
essence of adolescence, so if you take this word ESSENCE and you divide it into four parts, this is what
you get: In the brain, you get this huge input of the body, the brainstem and the limbic area upward into
the cortex more than you get in childhood or adulthood. Let's just call that an Emotional Spark. Now
let's look at the pros and cons of the Emotional Spark. The downside of having an Emotional Spark is life
can be new and intense and unpredictable and you can be moody and you can let your emotions run
through all of the different ways you are throughout the day, so different parts of the day you're
different ways, that's not true with everyone, but for many adolescents that can happen. Now, at the
extreme, of course, it is a lot of storminess, but in more subtle ways it is just the sense that you can't
exactly predict where you are going to be. That's the downside of the Emotional Spark. What is the
upside. The upside is that you are filled with passion, you are filled with a sense of vitality, you care
about things. This is where a sense of being alive comes from. So let's hold onto that and let's just name
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that Emotional Spark. Number 2 = SE. What do you think that could be? Well, the adolescent is actually
driven to push away from parents and move toward peers, which actually brings up the fifth myth,
which is that to be growing well, an adolescent needs to push against all adults. Well, that's not true. It
is true that adolescents need to push away from their parents to minor degrees or major degrees, but
having some kind of nonparental adult figure in an adolescent's life is a very, very important part of
what adolescence is and yet often, not always but often, in our modern culture, we don't have rights of
passage or ways where having a reliable trustworthy nonparental adult in the adolescent's life besides a
teacher who is grading them is really available. Someone who is with them across the years. This is
actually rare, it happens, but it is rare. So I want to urge us to consider with this fifth myth we do not
really need to support a culture that totally isolates adolescents from adults, they don't need to be
completely independent. They need to push towards independence from their parents for sure. So one
of the things that happens is, and this is the SE, it stands for Social Engagement, there are many reasons
that the adolescent needs to push toward peers rather than parents and one of those reasons we
believe is that as you get ready to leave the nest, you have the Emotional Spark that is giving you the emotion, that is a sense inside of you that evokes motion to get yourself moving, you've got the Social
Engagement which is basically the limbic area changing in a way where instead of going to your parents
to be soothed when you are distressed, that is what an attachment figure does, you are now going to
your friends for that, and that is a necessary change in the attachment system. This Social Engagement
has downsides and upsides. What are the downsides? The downsides are that peers can feel so
important that peer pressure can make you do things that you actually don't really want to do, and you
can cave in to negative influences from your peers. What are the upsides? Supportive relationships are
found in research across many, many disciplines to be the number one factor of our medical health, of
our mental health, of our longevity and even of our happiness, so this is a time when adolescents can
learn to really connect deeply with their peers and not their parents. It is a way of getting ready to leave
the nest and, in fact, this adaptive view of adolescence is a very helpful way to think about all of these
deeper mechanisms that debunk the myths.
So that is Social Engagement. ES is Emotional Spark, SE is Social Engagement. We've seen the down
sides and up sides to both of those. What is the N? The N is Novelty-seeking. Novelty, things that are
new, we've seen is really something you are drawn to when your dopamine release is so much higher
and your dopamine baseline is lower, you want to try something new. The best thing to secrete
dopamine is novelty. Now, why would nature design a change in the brain like this? Well, because to
seek novelty is something you need because if you are just comfortable with the familiar, you just stay
at home. I mean, picture this: The sun is rising. You get up and you yawn. Someone who loves you more
than anyone in the world comes and kisses you on the forehead, and says, "Darling, what can I make you
for breakfast," and you say, "Dad (or Mom), I'd like this, I'd like that", and they go downstairs and they
make your breakfast for you, you get out of bed, you get dressed, you go down and they've laid out this
delicious breakfast for you, you get on your shoes, you go out to school, you play at school, you come
home, you get this delicious lunch, you take a nap, you then rest, you feel good, you get up, maybe play
some music and dance around or go outside and play, and then it's time for dinner and someone says
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"Darling, what would you like for dinner?" and they make you dinner, and then soon it's time to watch a
little TV, and then you watch some TV and then you get a little sleepy and then someone gives you a
bath and scrubs you down, maybe they give you a massage in bed, they sing you a song, they read you a
story, and you fall asleep. Now, if the brain didn't change, and I know not every child has that, boy, we
all wish every child would have that kind of security of homelife, right? But, just having that picture in
mind, if the brain didn't change, who would ever want to leave that situation? You would have to have a
whole different mind and nature gives us a different mind by changing dopamine, by making us hyperrational, in a way you're going to see in a moment. So, you're driven to be restless with the familiar. The
familiar is predictable, it's certain and it's safe. What could you change a brain to do that would make
you long for the unfamiliar, feel okay with the uncertain, go with really what is not safe, because out
there where you can't predict things, it is unsafe, it's dangerous. So nature has to make it so Noveltyseeking drives the adolescent to leave the familiar home and when we see that the changes in the brain
support that, you can understand the up side of Novelty-seeking is preparing you to be comfortable with
the unfamiliar. What is the downside? The downside is that this dopamine change means that other
things can pull on your dopamine release, risky behaviour, danger, substances of abuse that lead to
dopamine secretion. This is why addiction is so prevalent in its onset during adolescence because of
these changes in dopamine. We need to also say that because of the pruning process that happens we
believe that either genetically created vulnerable circuits or experientially created vulnerable circuits
may be revealed and made worse during the pruning process, so that as you carve away the circuitry
you may carve away as you're genetically programmed to do, a vulnerable circuit that when carved
becomes an inadequately supplied circuit, and so you are unable to regulate your feelings or regulate
your thoughts, so this is why the major psychiatric disorders, anxiety disorders, thought disorders, mood
disorders, all have their onset primarily during adolescence and this is a huge, huge issue we think is
related to this pruning process that may in fact be exacerbated by stress, so in an interpersonal
neurobiology point of view, we feel that integration when it is impaired is the cause, whether it is
experiential or genetic or due to other things, toxins or whatever, we believe integration when it is
present is health and integration when it is absent is disorder, and when integration is absent you see
either chaos or rigidity, and when you look at the DSM, whatever number you want to look at, every
symptom of every syndrome in the DSM can be seen through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology as
being chaos, rigidity or both, and in the disorders that have been examined like people with
schizophrenia or people with manic depressive illness or people with autism, those are nonexperientially related disorders, or in the experientially-related disorders like severe trauma or in this
form of abuse or neglect, you see impairments to integrative fibers in all of those situations whether it is
from non-experiential causes or experiential causes. So, integration, we believe, is the basis of health,
impaired integration which may be made worse during the adolescent period leads to chaos or rigidity
and that is why we need to be really open to reframing not only the DSM, but seeing this pruning
process as something we can do something about, so when I wrote the Brainstorm book, I realized that
some people reading this book might be 12, 13 or 14 years of age, and what if we gave those individuals
exercises that increased the integrative fibers of the brain, in particular the prefrontal fibers or the
corpus callosum or the hippocampus, these are the three major areas, prefrontal, corpus callosum,
hippocampus, that either link the whole shebang together as we saw, cortex, limbic area, brainstem,
body and social world for prefrontal, corpus callosum linking the differentiated left and right side of the
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brain, hippocampus linking extensive elements of implicit memory that are both on the left and right
side with various parts of the brain. Those three areas, by the way, are the areas that are not growing
well or perhaps even damaged, with abuse and with neglect, and so what if we offer just as a
preventative measure, everyone, so you don't have to do any screening, if we just had everyone learn
integrative processes that could potentially strengthen the integrative fibers of the brain. That is the
idea of these mindsight exercises, they are integrative processes that would SNAG (Stimulate Neuronal
Activation and Growth) of integrative fibers.
Okay, so, coming back to our ESSENCE, we have Emotional Spark, this increase in emotionality, we have
Social Engagement, this move toward peers, we have Novelty-seeking, this movement toward new
things. What is the CE? The CE is Creative Explorations. The mind of an adolescent is looking to
experience problem solving, perceptions, ways of understanding the world in new ways. There are all
sorts of architectural changes in the cortex that are basically getting ready to imagine a new world. Now,
what are the upsides and downsides of creative explorations? Are there any downsides? Well, yes. Your
body is changing so much during adolescence, your mind is changing so much as you consider different
ways of feeling, because the mind the way I use it about feelings, about bodily sensations, it's about
relationships, it's about thought, it's about problem solving, it's about creativity, I use the mind for all
that is related to subjective experience and consciousness. I never say mind and heart, I might say head
and heart, but I would never say mind and heart, because to me, everything about the heart is already
subsumed under the term mind, so the adolescent mind is ready to consider a new world and the
downside of that is that it can be very disorienting. You know, you've grown up in an adult world and
now your mind is considering new things and maybe you just don't buy into what you were told is the
way things should be and so this can lead to a feeling of distress, anxiety, confusion, identity confusion.
It can lead to all sorts of issues that happen during the adolescent period. That is the downside of
Creative Explorations is that your mind is not just accepting the status quo. So what is the upside? The
upside for both the individual and for the human family includes this sense that you can have an
innovative mind. You can actually see beyond the status quo, so for an individual it means you can have
the excitement of imagining a new world that doesn't even exist yet and creating it, and so this is where
we find that the innovations that happen in art, in music, in science and technology, all emerge from the
adolescent mind, it's a wonderful gift of courage and creativity, and yet we don't really explore it that
way, sometimes adults just say "Oh my, this adolescent is just in teen rebellion," or "Oh, they're just
immature, it's just a period of immaturity they've got to get through," and as we've seen, as we've
explored those myths, those are imprisoning viewpoints. Instead, I believe very deeply that the Creative
Explorations that are part of the ESSENCE of the adolescent mind, the Emotional Spark that gives a sense
of vitality and energy, the Social Engagement that looks for collaboration and connection, the Noveltyseeking that allows you to feel comfortable with the unfamiliar and brave out into the uncertain and
often risky and dangerous, the Creative Explorations that give you the frame of mind to explore new
vistas, this is the ESSENCE of adolescence. So, as I was writing the Brainstorm book, I said, "Whoa. We've
been giving adolescents a bad rap!" and when I think about my own adolescents, not when I was a kid,
although when I was a kid too, but my own kids who are now adolescents and in their 20s, I thought,
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you know something, this is a period of time not to just get through, it's a period of time to actually
cultivate and cultivate well, not only when you're an adolescent which you can see if you reframe
adolescence, in middle school and high school, how helpful this would be, but when you turn to a
different kind of study, the study of neuroplasticity, of how the brain changes and responds to
experience and as you know from the beautiful book from your Toronto colleague, Norman Farb, The
Brain That Changes Itself, that's not Normal Farb, that's Norman Doidge; the other Norman, the
wonderful work of Norman Farb, when you see the work that you can do with Norman Farb's work of
how you focus your attention mindfully, but with Norman Doidge's wonderful work on The Brain That
Changes Itself, you can see that the brain is changing throughout the lifespan. If you had to take the top
four factors that you, if you're an adult, can focus on to keep your brain growing throughout the lifespan
and in particular growing in an integrative way throughout the lifespan, they would be: An Emotional
Spark - keep a passion in your life, hold on to what matters to you, get in the flow of those things, really
allow yourself to feel that something is real, that it matters to you, and you can dive into it with gusto,
that is the Emotional Spark, but how many adults do you know who have lost that and feel their life is
just bland and not captivating them and they feel the same thing is going on over and over again, it's the
Emotional Spark they've lost. And how about Social Engagement? How many adults do you know that
keep their relationships alive, yet every study even of the brain's changes, show that supportive
relationships are what keep a brain growing and healthy and keep all of our body healthy. Supportive
relationships are the number one thing for mental wellbeing and happiness. Yet, how many adults do
we know that in fact have stopped cultivating their relationships, their social networks? Many people.
And you know that they don't have as vital a life because of that. So, we have Emotional Spark, we have
Social Engagement, as part of ESSENCE, what's the N? Novelty-seeking. How many times do we get used
to the familiar as adults and just get things happening, so status quo becomes what we try to do
because we're so busy, we're so inundated, we're so overwhelmed, we've got too many emails to do,
and we just want to have the same old, same old. Now there is a nice thing about the familiar, but the
brain actually thrives on novelty. So, how do we actually keep this alive because we need to do that.
Well, the Novelty seeking of adolescence is built in there and yet so often what happens is people say
"Just get over your adolescence and stop it," and yet the Emotional Spark, Social Engagement and
Novelty Seeking, are things we need to keep alive. How about the CE, Creative Explorations. If we could
invite adults and I hope that the adults who read the Brainstorm book will be inspired by the discussion
of adolescents and it's going to be fascinating to see if we can in fact shift this cultural conversation
about adolescence, because everyone is going to win. The adolescent will win because they can be
empowered in all sorts of ways that we'll talk about briefly next, and the adult can get back their
Creative Explorations, they can get back their Novelty-seeking, they can get back their Social
Engagements, they can get back their Emotional Spark. So for Creative Explorations what happens?
People just get into a job usually and they do it over and over and over again and they aren't allowing
their mind to expand its way of thinking about things and drive energy and information through the
brain in new ways. So, unfortunately, what happens then is the brain gets bored and when it is not
stimulated with novelty and not exploring things in new ways, it doesn't continue to grow in the robust
ways that it could. So people begin to age because their mind gets old when in fact you can keep your
mind young. Even the beautiful work of Ellen Langer looking at Counterclockwise of putting people in a
situation when they were younger, they have younger mental functions, and in just this ESSENCE view,
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we can actually take this on and I can say writing this book was the most difficult book that I have ever
written, for many reasons. One of the main reasons was - and now I know why it doesn't exist - to write
a book that an adolescent could read and an adult could read, the same book, it doesn't exist and now I
know why, it was so hard to try to get the wording just right and I am sure some adults will be alienated
because it's too accessible and some adolescents may feel it's not something they want to do because
an adult wrote it, or something, I don't know. You can't please everybody, but what I really wanted to do
and I sent it out to teenagers and adults and got their feedback, rewrote it, sent it out again, rewrote it,
sent it out again, and what I am so excited to see may happen is if it increases the empowerment of the
adolescent, if it increases the empowerment of the adult to recapture their adolescence, if it actually
improves the communication across generations.
The last thing I want to say and then we'll open up for questions, when I was meeting in British Columbia
I had the opportunity to speak to a whole school district and I also had the opportunity to meet with
people who were overseeing the province's educational system, and also in the United States, I've been
able to meet with superintendents and principals and whole schools, the students, the parents, the
teachers, and people are frustrated with the experience of middle school and high school is the
feedback I'm getting in general, and I said to them, "Well, how much of the educational program honors
this incredible period of courage and creativity?" and I talked about ESSENCE, Emotional Spark, Social
Engagement, Novelty-seeking and Creative Explorations, and basically, the people I talked to said it
rarely happens that this is honored. So I said, "What if, just as an example, you designed a curriculum
which honored the ESSENCE, by saying let's say to a middle schooler all the way through to the end of
high school, look, here's the deal. You're not just a child with more years of life, you're an adolescent
and we know about changes in the brain in adolescence, so here's how we're going to organize this to
really focus on you at this age. We're going to let you have a choice of which world problem you're going
to deal with." Lay out seven world problems, food, water, air, climate change, violence, mistreatment of
minorities, of children, of women, all sorts of problems you could lay out, the world has lots of
problems, you lay them out there and you say, "What do you feel in your heart right now for the next 2
months you want to work on?" So that is the Emotional Spark, what do you care about. The SE, Social
Engagement, let's have you collaborate with your fellow students rather than just compete with them. If
you have a competitive streak, that's great, let's compete with the world's problems in a collaborative
way so that when you beat the world's problems, everybody wins. This is the opportunity that we have
here. Novelty-seeking, we're going to do this curriculum in a new way. Every day you come in you're
going to deal with your problem, healthy water for the planet, let's really look at that. Let's have you
really explore things in new ways, that's the Novelty-seeking. Creative Explorations, we need to admit
that we adults who are handing the world over to you have not done a very good job giving you a
peaceful, healthy place. We accept that. We don't have the answers. So, we as your teachers in this
classroom, in this school, are going to serve as consultants and you are going to be able to creatively
explore in whatever ways come to you, ways of solving these problems. You can come to us as
consultants but we're just adults, we don't have the answers, and we respect your drive to push away
from what adults do, that's fine, but you may find that there may be certain adults who have certain
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expertise on water science or public policy or all sorts of things, that may be helpful for you in your
efforts to collaboratively solve this problem, and we'll make those experts and expertise available to
you. I bet you that if you engaged adolescents this way, instead of having what people say are
unfocused behavior, disinterested, apathetic, all of these things people describe, I bet you that you
would empower adolescents to not only have a more meaningful time during this period of education
but I bet you the world would benefit because we would be tapping into a whole generation's courage
and creativity and we may just solve some of these world problems together. So that is why I feel so
strongly that this needs to be a change in the cultural conversation. Certainly this will help, I hope, an
individual go through adolescence better and help a family communicate better, it can help even an
adult recapture their essence. That is all really, really important and fantastic. In addition to those
important things I think we can work together to change in our educational systems, to change in our
cultural values, to change in our cultural conversations, the ways that we approach the adolescent
period and really see the ESSENCE of adolescence for what it is, a time of incredible potential, of
creativity and of courage we all could be inspired by.
So thank you so much for your kind attention. I see we're now at the time for questions and responses,
so I want to thank you for your attention and I look forward to connecting with you now in our
discussion and in the future, and please let me know how this adolescent approach goes for you. Thank
you so much.
RM: Thanks Dan. I’m going to busy trying to find my inner adolescent, I can tell you, after that. We have
some people who want to ask some questions, so could those people come up. Sherry, do you want to
start off?
Guest 1: Hi Dan.
DS: Hi there, how are you?
Guest 1: I’m well, how are you?
DS: I’m great, thanks.
Guest 1: Nice to see you in the virtual world. So I’m not sure where I should be looking exactly. Oh, I’ve
got it. Okay, so I can’t really look at you, but you’re in my periphery. Once again, thank you so much for
just this paradigm-shifting work and seeing adolescents in such a different way.
DS: You’re welcome.
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Guest 1: I’m curious, just being someone who works a lot with parents as well, how important you see
the parents doing a certain level of work towards integration, that’s one question, not just the
importance, but in particular, which is my interest, particular kind of daily practices to help parents to
not only cultivate these qualities but to cultivate kind of the qualities to support the adolescent moving
through change and uncertainty, and particular practices for kids, for adolescents, as well, to I guess
tolerate the uncertainty of that changing period that is happening so rapidly in their bodies and their
brains.
DS: Yes. Beautiful questions. Thank you so much. I know your beautiful work on presence is a helpful
way of thinking about this too. The book Parenting From the Inside Out that I wrote with Mary Hartzell is
a guideline for parents to explore their own past and to use the research findings on attachment that
the most important predictor that we can find in research that determines a child’s security of
attachment is how a parent has made sense of their own childhood and, with that in mind, I think a
parent reading this book needs to have the companion piece of Parenting from the Inside Out to be able
to do that, and I refer to that in the book a little bit, but there is a section in this book, Brainstorm, about
attachment that does refer to that and I decided, this was a controversial issue in general among people
who were involved in thinking about the book, whether to include an attachment section but I chose to
include it because I felt it was really important for an adolescent and the parent of an adolescent for just
the reason you are talking about, to understand their own history and then there are steps to take to
really deal with that. Throughout the book in those gray pages I pointed out there are exercises for the
adolescent and the adult to do to be present, in fact, the last section of the book after you’ve done
those exercises is all about being present for what is, and that presence, you can call it mindfulness, you
can call it reflective capacity, all of these things you can call it, but the idea is that you are present for
what is happening as it is happening, allows the relationship I think between the parent and the
adolescent to really flourish. It’s going to be really interesting to see, there is no book where both the
parent and the child are reading it like this, I mean, we did a little bit of this in Whole Brain Child, Tina
Bryson and I, but this is an entire book, and I know some people said, why don’t you write the odd pages
for the adults and the even pages for the children, so you don’t have to worry about making one
conversation, make it two, but I really thought it should be one conversation, and we’ll see. It’s going to
be really interesting to see if this actually is taken on in families where both sides of the generational
divide can work it out, but it is exactly what you’re saying; the parent really needs to do their own inner
work. The challenging thing about attachment in this age group, of course, is that the adolescent is old
enough to think about it being suboptimal, but they are still living at home with their parents, so I tried
to do that as gingerly and diplomatically and supportively as I could, knowing that the parent would be
reading this, the adolescent who is the child of that parent would be reading it, and how to actually give
people the spaciousness to say, wow, you know, I maybe didn’t do what I really wanted to do as a
parent, can I course correct and so, of course, the good news from attachment research is that it is
never too late to course correct. So thank you, thank you for your question.
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Guest 1: Yes, just to add to that, the challenge as parents, it’s like one more thing for an adolescent to
do without the parents realizing the value and importance of doing that inner work so that it is easier to
not only monitor but to guide.
DS: Yes, well, the good news, as you know, and I try to make it clear in the book is that rather than think
of it as one more thing to do, this is THE thing to do to develop an inner presence that makes everything
else really easier to do, so it’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Guest 1: Thanks.
DS: Thank you.
RM: Anybody else like to come up?
DS: I think maybe people are shy to be in front of 1000 people.
Guest 2: Hi, I very much enjoyed your talk. As a social worker who works with children and families in
children’s mental health, I have a question around gender, and whether you have any thoughts about
gender differences in adolescence and different approaches specifically to young men and young
women around integration, moving towards greater integration from a neural perspective.
DS: Yes. It’s a great question, thank you very much for it. Let me say a couple of broad things first. If we
put a person in a scanner and made a structural image of the inside of their head, their brain, and
showed it to a scientist, it would be impossible to tell whether that is a female brain or a male brain. If
you showed a functional way the brain was operating under a certain challenge for example, it would be
impossible to tell if that is a male brain or a female brain. When you talk to scientists who study the
brain, they are often very upset about the mass media generalizing in these extreme ways about the
difference between the male brain and the female brain and say it is not consistent with the science. So,
as a clinician myself, I find sticking with the science is very helpful and avoiding the generalizations that
are out in the mass media is really important to do. Now, that being said, as I mentioned earlier, the
timing of let’s say the onset of puberty is different in males and females and that is more a bodily thing,
but there is a difference in the pathway of pruning and myelination in terms of the timing of when
pruning has its major timing and the myelination has its major timing, it’s a little bit earlier in females
and in males it’s a little bit later, but ultimately, as the scientists tell us, they get to the same place. So
while the timing and trajectory can be different, the pathway is very different. I think the differences are
more about culture, you know, in the Center for Culture, Brain and Development I used to run at UCLA
when it existed, with my colleagues, we ran it together, we were very concerned about the
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generalizations about female/male differences being thought of as innate rather than as culturally
induced. There is no question about it, if you’re living in a society as a female where females are looked
down upon and you’re not supposed to assert yourself, as Mary Pipher beautiful talks about in Reviving
Ophelia, your experience as a female will be different. But that is true too if you have black skin and
you’re looked down upon for having black skin. I mean these are all the cultural attitudes that take away
the dignity of your own individual integrity, and so we do need to understand that culture creates
changes in the way the brain functions and so we need to understand that not so much because it’s
female but because there may be certain attitudes. So when my daughter, for example, was in school,
she was in advanced calculus, she was the only female in the class. We raised her to think she could do
anything her brother could do, so when her friends who were girls in school were shocked that she took
advanced calculus she said “Why wouldn’t I take it?” and they said “How can you do it, you’re a girl?”
She could do it because she believed she could do it. We know from studies of classrooms, if a teacher
doesn’t believe a student can do something, they won’t perform well on that thing often. So, we pick up
the beliefs, this is actually related to why I think it is so important that we change the cultural
conversations about adolescence. If you view adolescence as, you know, raging hormones, you’ve just
got to get through it, there’s nothing good happening, it’s a period of immaturity, all of these myths that
we’ve debunked, you’re going to create exactly what you think is there, and I think we have the
opportunity, literally all of us listening right now, have the opportunity to change the cultural
conversation around adolescence, change the structures of schools that can actually honor this ESSENCE
of adolescence in ways that can be really, really helpful for everyone.
Guest 2: Thanks.
DS: Thank you.
RM: Any other questions?
Guest 3: Hi Dan. Thank you.
DS: Hi there.
Guest 3: I was fascinated with how you were talking about attachment and how it could be repaired
with the mindfulness and I am interested to know now if we can go back and repair our own inner
adolescent with these exercises that you’re suggesting.
DS: Yes. What a great question. You know, I think part of that question to start out with that I think is so
important to try to articulate is adolescence is a period that kind of sets us on our course for the rest of
our lives, you know, and so if someone feels like their emotions which were sparky when they entered
adolescence are not their friends but their foes, they may shut down their own access to their own
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bodily experience, to their own deep emotional resonance with their body and also with other people,
so they lead a more disconnected life that they follow for the rest of their life. If they feel like Social
Engagement was filled with rejection and they isolate themselves because they really, really needed soul
mates and couldn’t find them in middle school or high school, and then they set themselves on the path
of not seeking them out, they will be very isolated. In terms of Novelty, if this drive to novelty was filled
with fear and parents didn’t provide the kind of launching pad that secure attachment provides, you
may actually freak out at your own drive for novelty, so then you kind of become anxious and withdraw.
For Creative Explorations, you may turn toward society to give you the rules on how things should be
because when you felt so open, when your adolescent mind was so open to thinking about things in new
ways it was really scary, then you literally just look to others to know what reality is all about. Now, that
being said, you can see that the ESSENCE of adolescence for that person was kind of terrifying and they
didn’t have the experience of it being a good thing, so that person would want to get rid of it, and so
you’re asking the question, okay what if we’re working with that person as an adult who is 40 years of
age, can we, and just to use the word ESSENCE, you could use the word inner adolescent, that’s
beautiful, but if you don’t want to use the concept of inner adolescent, you could at least use the word
ESSENCE. So, if you say is the ESSENCE, is life’s ESSENCE – Emotional Spark, Social Engagement, Noveltyseeking and Creative Explorations – can you get the ESSENCE back in an adult, and I believe you can.
Even if you look at the Mindsight book there is the case of Stuart, before I had the acronym ESSENCE, he
had an attachment which was avoidant, he was 92 when he started therapy, he is actually still alive and
he is doing great I want to report to everyone, many, many years later, and he got the ESSENCE, I didn’t
have that phraseology, I didn’t even have the concept until writing this book, but when I think about
Stuart, and I’ll have to reread the chapter, but when I think about him as an actual patient, an actual
person, he really did reclaim his ESSENCE, probably in a way I shouldn’t use the word reclaim, he found
an ESSENCE in his life that he never really had before; maybe he had it before he was 3, and for various
reasons it went away. So, I think you can, and I think, I hope my acronym addiction isn’t offending
anybody, but I think the acronym is actually pretty useful to think about the core aspect of living a full
life and I think we can support our clients, our patients, our friends, our families, our spouses, our
neighbors, we can do that. I’ve got to tell you, while this is the most difficult book I have ever written,
and I don’t know what this says about my other books, but I am having more fun talking about this book
than any other book, and I am kind of surprised about it. It’s so new, but I am having a blast doing this
because what happens, like even now as I see your face, I feel like there is some ESSENCE in all of us that
needs to be supported by each other and kindled so life can be lighter and more dance-y and more full
of music and more full of passion, and in a way, and we don’t need science to do this, but in a way, this
is a scientific justification of becoming playful.
Guest 3: Right, right. It somehow feels like it stands on the shoulders of the attachment work.
DS: Yes, well, I am an attachment researcher, so I can only have an identity on who I am, and I think
when the suggestion was made to me by someone reading the manuscript to remove the attachment
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section from this book because it will be too difficult for an adolescent living at home to have their
parent realize they may not have done a great job, and for the adolescent to realize that, I really thought
about that for a long time. I actually was up in Canada when this came through, I was on PEI, Prince
Edward Island, and, wow, I thought about it, because the last thing I wanted to do was make things bad
for the reader, whether it is an adolescent or an adult, you know, but I asked my hosts there in PEI,
maybe they are on the line right now, and I did a lot of walking, I did a lot of swimming, and a lot of
thinking about it, and I thought, you know, it’s got to be able to be presented somehow that it is a big
hug, that it’s a big supportive, saying look, whatever happened, happened, it’s never too late to make a
repair, and if we understand together the nature of attachment from the science of attachment, we can
support each other in forgiving and moving toward a better way of connecting, so I left it in and when
you read it, let me know what you think because it was tough to really listen to people saying “Please
remove it, please remove it,” and I said, “You know, I don’t think so, I think it really needs to be there.” I
hope I made the right choice.
Guest 3. Good. Thank you. Goosebumps about your work.
DS: Oh my pleasure, thank you.
Guest 4: Hi there, Aron Shlonsky, University of Toronto.
DS: Hi there.
Guest 4: Hi.
DS: Oh, Happy Birthday, by the way.
Guest 4: I’m sorry?
DS: Happy Birthday for the university department.
Guest 4: Oh yes, we’ve been around a bit. So, I guess the question I have is more applied. I see this work
and work on mindfulness as breaking a lot of new ground and we’re discovering a lot of stuff. At the
same time, I see a disturbing trend in a sense with this and almost anything else that is a new discovery
in the field of people taking it forward and basing whatever they do on some random quote, you know,
“Hey, Dan Siegel said this, and therefore I’m going to develop an entire program that does X and I’ll use
the scientistic explanation” and all of a sudden maybe I have people saying well you know children in
foster care really need some sort of an intervention that looks like something that we would kind of
behaviorally look at and say you know that’s probably not a good idea and I have seen this time and
time again, for instance in the trauma-based movement, which has legs in terms of kids being
traumatized and having effects but also some of the things people come up with are just crazy. Or
maybe I’m wrong and they’re not crazy, but I’d sure like to see them tested rigorously. So I guess my
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question is, how do you experience that, and what do you say to either curb that or maybe you don’t
worry about it, and then kind of on top of that, are you or other people thinking about testing these
ideas and kind of what’s on the front burner in terms of testing this confluence of brain, and I don’t even
want to say they are different, but social science and neuroscience and everything science. Thanks.
DS: Yes. Thank you. That is a wonderful question. I really want to underline the importance of this idea
of something being scientistic, that is, you know, the scientism meaning ism being a belief, that we
would believe in something because someone says it is scientific, so I think it is a really important
question. For me, I’ll start with a very general statement which is, I first trained in medicine in the late
1970s and my scientific professors were practicing medicine where they never looked at the mind of the
patients, they just treated patients like they were bags of chemicals and I dropped out of school and
actually traveled across Canada back in 1980 because I just didn’t want to become like them. I had been
trained in college as a suicide prevention service worker, as well as working during the day as a
biochemistry person looking for why salmon could go from freshwater to saltwater and survive, but I
always felt like there must be some mechanism of enzymes that allowed the salmon to survive that had
some parallel to the mechanism of a suicide prevention phone worker tuning into the emotional state of
the person calling in in a crisis that would make the difference between whether they lived or died. So
when I went to medical school I thought I would find likeminded professionals seeking similar questions
to be answered but it wasn’t anything like that so I dropped out. Anyway, after deciding not to be a
salmon fisherman on Vancouver Island I realized I was really interested in the mind. Now, you may know
that back in 1980, we didn’t really have a term like theory of mind or anything like that that was around,
it just started in 1978-79, but for me, even though it wasn’t part of the science, I felt like seeing the mind
had to be important if it is what allowed a person to survive in a suicidal crisis, but there was no science
to support it, but it allowed me to go back to medical school, I made up this term mindsight which is the
word just for how we see the mind, and back in 1980-81, it helped me go back to school and even
though my professors didn’t change, I had this life preserver that told me that I really needed to not
become like these mindsightless professors. Over the years when I went into pediatrics and then started
in psychiatry, this is now 30 years ago, I was trained as a biochemist, I became trained as an attachment
researcher through the National Institute of Mental Health, I was always wanting to be super careful of
taking what scientists said as gospel and so as a clinician I would just try to do what seemed to help my
patients and over the years I was teaching them mindsight skills and never telling anyone I was doing it,
but they seemed to get better, so I was really interested in why that would be the case and
interpersonal neurobiology basically was born in the 1990s by a real interest in asking the question “If
you combine all the fields of science together, physics and math, chemistry and biology, psychology and
sociology, anthropology and linguistics, everything, could you come up with new views of reality that
were based on science but were consistent with all of the disciplines of science.” So when I wrote The
Developing Mind, it was an effort to make interpersonal neurobiology laid out as a textbook and when I
did the revision of that book I had 15 interns working with me and I said “Prove that these ideas are
wrong so we can write another book. It will be more interesting to write another book than just revise
an old one” and they were like shocked. What we did was we found in fact that many of the ideas
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continued to be not only upheld but even some of the hypotheses turned out to be true, like that
integration when it is missing is associated with psychopathology; that wasn’t known in the 1990s, it was
proposed. So, this idea of let’s say integration leading to wellbeing, it’s a hypothesis, it has supportive
evidence, I have written The Developing Mind 2nd Edition to support that hypothesis, people have done
research exploring the idea, supporting it, but I don’t do empirical research anymore. When we wrote
The Whole Brain Child just recently it was all based on parents learning to make parenting interventions
that led to an increase in integration. Now, this is not scientific data, we’ve had about 100,000 people
use the book and many of them send us emails with incredible results and they are in the frontlines
about how these techniques work. Now, someone who wants to do a controlled double-blind study can
do it, I wish they would. Some of the things we offer like the wheel of awareness have been studied and
preliminary studies show that it leads to excellent changes in all sorts of functions, but it comes from not
just one science but over a dozen different disciplines of science, and so I feel really comfortable as a
clinician basing educational efforts of what I teach therapists and what I teach parents and what I teach
teachers to do based on this synthesis of science. But I definitely think, and I am an incredibly doubtful
person, I am always doubting everything, so I think it is really important to be doubting the truth of
something, and also especially in terms of your question about application to really make sure that
we’re not doing harm and that what we do actually is working and I’m very happy to say that the ideas
are laid out there as scientifically consilient ideas, that is they are drawn from many different disciplines
of science, and that is where they come from, and when people apply them in their everyday life or in
their educational life or in their clinical life, they seem to be extremely effective at bringing helpful
change and helpful effects in an educational setting, so I feel really good about it, and if there is
someone getting a PhD and wants to study these things in a controlled way, that is beautiful. I would
welcome that.
RM: Okay, Dan. You know what, we’re at the end of an hour and a half, and I want to thank you so
much, and thank others as well in the webinar room here and those out in the ether if I can put it that
way, the digital world, thank you for joining us for this webinar. Thanks Dan for so many really
interesting ideas and applications that flow from these. I’d like also to thank the Director of Applied
Mindfulness Meditation whom you know, Michele Chaban, for having this idea. It was the kernel of her
thought that started her connecting with you, Dan, and just unfolded this whole thing in just a
remarkable way. We are so proud of the work she has been doing.
DS: Yes, thank you Michele.
RM: Yes, absolutely.
DS: We had quite a time in Vancouver, I’ve got to say, initially thinking about these kinds of things.
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RM: Yes. And also thank you to our Dean, Fay Mishna, for supporting the event, to others like Denise Ing
for handling much of the organization, especially to Jim Moore and Scott Hollows from OISE that hold
the Humpty Dumpty together again in terms of technology. So, we’re really appreciative of that. Once
again, thanks to all. We’ll be finishing now. Thank you, Dan.
DS: Great. Thank you, Robert. Thank you everyone.
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