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How the Mind Changesthe Brain

A Teleseminar Session with Jeffrey Schwartz, MD

and Ruth Buczynski, PhD

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of

Behavioral Medicinenicabmwww.nicabm.com

How the Mind Changes the Brain �

The National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicinewww.nicabm.com

A complete transcript of a Teleseminar Session featuring Jeffrey Schwartz, MD and conducted by Ruth Buczynski, PhD of NICABM

How the Mind Changes the Brain

Contents:

The Interaction between the Mind and the Brain .................................. 3

What Quantum Physics Can Teach usabout Neuroplasticity ............................................................................... 7

Self-directed Neuroplasticity - How We Can Teach Patientsto Change Their Brains and Their Behaviors ........................................ 15

Why Mindfullness Practices Can Help Patients with OCDChange the Wiring of Their Brains ........................................................ 17

A Four Step Regimen for Treating Patients with OCD ......................... 20

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How the Mind Changes the Brainwith Dr. Ruth Buczynskiand Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz

Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone. I want to welcome everyone to the call tonight. I am Dr. Ruth Buczynski, a licensed psychologist in Connecticut and President of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. People are calling in from all over the United States and from many, many parts of the world. Welcome, we are glad you are here.

This is another of our Wednesday evening calls on the brain and neuroplasticity. We have a great speaker today. Someone who is one of the most eminent thinkers on neuroplasticity, but just before I introduce him, let me just say, welcome again.

Our guest is Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz. He is a physician and the author of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force and also of Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. So, welcome Jeffrey.

Dr. Schwartz: Yes, hi.

Dr. Buczynski: It’s great to have you on the call.

Dr. Schwartz: Nice to be here.

Dr. Buczynski: Jeffrey is a research psychiatrist at UCLA School of Medicine, and he has been studying this for many, many years. As those of you who have been following this work know, the brain has kind of “taken off” in the last few years, but Jeffrey has been studying this for much, much longer. So let’s begin, and to do that, I’d like to start with how the mind changes the brain. What’s the interaction as you see it between the mind and the brain and how does the brain get changed by the mind?

The Interaction between the Mind and the Brain

Dr. Schwartz: I’m happy you’re not starting with one of the easy questions! To really explain that in a way that has scientific credibility, it is important to say a little bit about the background work so I’ll give a very short summary of that.



For quite a few years as you said, starting in the mid-eighties, we started with obsessive-compulsive disorder and in the process of doing that (maybe later in the interview you’ll ask me about that because I can give more details about this research), but the key was getting people to change their understanding of what we had good scientific evidence to believe: that intrusive thoughts and urges, obsessive thoughts, and compulsive urges were caused by a brain problem and very likely to be genetically inherited. And it certainly has turned out in the subsequent years.

So we had people who had what we knew from our prior work in the mid 80s, a brain related problem that was causing these obsessive-compulsive symptoms…their unwanted intrusive thoughts, compulsive urges. I basically had a notion (based on at that time and very strongly influenced by a lot of experience that I had already developed in doing old school classical Buddhist meditation in the Theravada tradition, as well as my upbringing as a Jewish person and even then, to some degree, also being influenced by my understanding of Christianity) that getting people to focus their attention with belief that they are not just what their brain is. It was - my hypothesis – to get them to think and act differently and when they did that, they would change how their brain worked.

So basically, focusing their attention differently changed how their brain worked. And that hypothesis turned out to be substantiated by a series of studies that we did using brain imaging, especially in the early and mid 90s.

By the late 90s, I was really interested in trying to put this on a theoretical foundation, because one of the problems that you have and we still have in getting scientific establishment, scientific elites to believe that people could actually change how their brain works just by focusing their attention differently, and to do this, you have to make a case for something that is basically non-material, which is the focus of your attention.

I mean, your attention is not a material thing. It’s a mental thing and in the accepted – I’ll use the word – dogmas of science, the science of our era deeply believes that all causation is material causation. That if something happens, something material must have caused it to happen.

So if you want to make the case that there are other ways to change the brain that are based on just focus of attention, you have to begin to make the case that non-material

“Basically, focusing their attention differently changed how their brain worked.”



factors can affect material factors. So that’s the backdrop of what you have to have to explain, to begin to answer the question that you asked me in a scientifically meaningful way in our era.

Dr. Buczynski: … I wanted to just ask you because we’ve got a lot of practitioners on the call: What have you found to be the best way to convince patients that their attention affects their brain?

Dr. Schwartz: …That’s an interesting cultural question because it turns out that convincing regular people, convincing sufferers, convincing people who aren’t, you know, trained in the culture of science is not difficult because people intuitively, we all intuitively believe, in fact, that materialism is not a philosophy that people really believe.

I mean that’s one of the deep ironies….scientists don’t believe it when they walk out of their laboratory…nobody lives like they believe it. Everybody believes that they have a capacity to focus their attention and how they focus that attention makes a difference in how they live their lives.

And I mean at some level, that’s going to involve biology. So the clinical side has never been difficult in that way, but I won’t deny that having brain images – I mean this is back in the day…I mean brain images have always been a powerful thing for people to be convinced by. I mean even in the early days.

Now it has been around for so long…there are now whole scientific studies that you can use to convince people of things that “don’t make any sense” by showing them brain imaging.

Brain imaging is convincing in ways that are problematic, actually. But it turns out that – this is back like I am saying in the late 80s, when you could show people brain imaging…this entire story is actually told in the introduction in chapter two of my book The Mind and the Brain. Not that I am trying to give a plug for the book, per say, but I mean if you want to know the story, it’s in that book of how it all happened.

Dr. Buczynski: Go ahead and tell us.

“So if you want to make the case that there are other ways to change the brain that are based on just focus of attention, you have to begin to make the case that non-material factors can affect material factors.”



Dr. Schwartz: Here’s the point: you could show someone a picture that said…this isn’t really your thought; it’s just your brain that is causing that thought. That brain picture makes it easier for them to believe: “Hey, this isn’t really me. It’s an obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

It becomes extremely helpful and important to get the person who basically knows that this bothersome intrusive thought and urge is not really them. They know it is not really true. The problem is that it is so bothersome, and you can use this brain information to explain to people why it is so bothersome and even more important, why it doesn’t go away. Of course, part of the reason why it is so bothersome is that it doesn’t go away.

Dr. Buczynski: Right.

Dr. Schwartz: So then you can get people to begin to get a firmer grasp on this true fact that “this isn’t me. It’s just my brain or it’s just this condition, OCD, that’s causing this to happen.” And that helps them to understand what it is and that helps them to focus their attention differently.

With OCD patients, for example, and for other anxiety, depression issues, that kind of information can really be helpful and the reason why it is helpful is that it enhances people’s ability to not identify with the thoughts and feelings they are having that are causing them problems. Now obviously, you can use cognitive techniques to enhance that, and then you get basically a positive synergy between the brain imaging and the cognitive training, but what you don’t get is people saying, “Well, how can I change my brain with my mind?”

Well, you get that to some degree, but once you say, “Well, we have done these scientific experiments, you know, and you can do it. Here are the pictures.” I mean, that’s why I put the pictures on the back of the book Brain Lock, to show people, well, you know, actually these studies have been published. You can do it. Then, they believe it fairly readily and I guess that’s one of the take home messages we have been using lately, just in the last couple of years.

“There are now whole scientific studies that you can use to convince people of things that ‘don’t make any sense’ by showing them brain imaging.”

“Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t act on everything you feel.”



I have never actually put this in any of the books yet. I am working on another one right now, actually, with the Chief Resident in Psychiatry, Rebecca Gladding, who just finished last year. I am very fortunate to have an extremely good co-author…she was, in fact, my co-therapist for the OCD group for over a year during the latter part of her psychiatry residency and so one of the phrases that we started to use that actually came from people in the group itself is this: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

That actually is a good one-liner, you know. I mean, it’s like a bumper sticker. It’s actually very helpful…a way of thinking that your brain sends you the information, but you need an evaluative function of your mind to say whether it is true or not is a very good way of thinking. Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t act on everything you feel. There is – you know – there was one false thing that came out of the �0s and there were many false things that came out of the �0s, but maybe the most false thing that came out of the �0s was this line, “If it feels good, do it.” Not a good idea, actually.

Dr. Buczynski: I want o get back to OCD, but before we do I want to travel around a little bit before we delve down into that more and you have written a little bit about quantum physics and what quantum physics teaches us about neuroplasticity. Can we...?

What Quantum Physics Can Teach Us about Neuroplasticity

Dr. Schwartz: Yes, but now we are back to the order that I thought that we were going to use in the first place…that’s the question we need to address before I can answer your first question.

Dr. Buczynski: This is my fault entirely. I’m sorry.

Dr. Schwartz: I mean it’s all right. It’s not an issue of fault…How could you possibly know that? But we want to answer a very difficult question within a rigorous scientific context…I want the listeners to really be aware of this. I mean, you can be acting within a rigorous scientific context which we are very much doing and making very concerted efforts, too – when we use this quantum approach to understand how the mind can change the brain and still be very much at odds with the scientific establishment.

“We use this quantum approach to understand how the mind can change the brain and still be very much at odds with the scientific establishment.”

How the Mind Changes the Brain 8


And the reason for that is because there is not good agreement at all in the scientific establishment about what the meaning of quantum mechanics is. Quantum mechanics is the interpretation of…quantum mechanics is a very controversial area and so I’ve been working with a physicist named Henry Stapp for about a dozen years now.

Dr. Buczynski: Would you say the last name again? Henry...

Dr. Schwartz: Stapp. So there is a whole bunch about Henry and the mind and the brain and you could look him up on Wikipedia. In fact, I would advise you to – I mean his page on Wikipedia is helpful because on the bottom of his page is a link to all the papers that he has written. He is extremely good about that. He’s at UC Berkeley. He’s at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Henry Stapp…Again, if you put Henry Stapp into Wikipedia, you’ll get his page and then on the bottom of it there is a link to all his papers.

I guess that I will add in that I have a website, too, that is not as complete as Henry’s. It’s almost as complete as Henry’s, but it has more of a lay orientation and that can be reached by going to jeffreymschwartz.com.

So anyway, when I was doing this work with Henry, the big advantage – and there are many big advantages to working with Henry, but one of them is that he worked closely with two of the main founders of quantum mechanics: Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli.

Henry, who is now about to turn 8�, is very close to the original, orthodox and still the only interpretation of quantum mechanics that actually gets used in the real world. I’m begging the question entirely of what we mean by the real world, but I mean when scientists go to their laboratories, and you know, use quantum mechanics which they do every day, all the time. This is how all scientists who do electronics work, you know, use quantum mechanics.

And when they do, they are using the orthodox quantum mechanics of basically Heisenberg, Pauli, Max Born, and a handful of the other great founders.

So, working with Henry, who has completely mastered over many, many decades that approach to doing quantum mechanics, is a big advantage because it puts us on the firm ground of being able to claim that Yes, this is really rigorous science that we are using.

But I still want to contextualize for the listeners, that even so, when you start to apply quantum mechanical reasoning to things that are outside of the kinds of things that



electrical engineers do or very serious theoretical physicists do, etc., you get into very big disagreements about how to apply the understandings of quantum mechanics to the reality that comes outside of very, very technical and scientific questions.

So when we started to use that kind of reasoning to apply it to the relationship between the mind and the brain, I’m just trying to contextualize for people why you haven’t…well yes, it actually was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. And yes, there actually was an article in

the New York Times about it…so it’s not like we didn’t get decent media coverage…but the scientific establishment is very committed to pre-quantum materialist thinking and so there is a real cultural resistance especially at the level of biology and even more specifically at the level of neuroscience, which are the fields we are operating in.

But I imagine most of the listeners have heard that in the field of evolutionary biology, there are applications of Darwinism that are basically materialism applied. So at the level of establishment science, especially in the biological sciences, but not only in the biological sciences, there is a real commitment to materialism and pre-quantum thinking even though quantum mechanics has been an established scientific truth, as much as you can use the word truth in science for over a century now.

So yes, there is this very, very important cultural mismatch and one of the ways that mismatch really expresses itself is through this question: how do you apply quantum mechanical reasoning to biology? And now I will actually answer the question you asked me.

Dr. Buczynski: Okay.

Dr. Schwartz: .…but I will also say that that little editorial I just gave is in many ways as important as the answer to the question. Because it helps you understand why the answer to the question which sounds like common sense to most people is still considered very, very controversial inside the scientific establishment.

Well, there is a well recognized law in quantum physics. The law itself is not controversial. How to apply the law can get controversial. But the law itself is not controversial and that law is called Quantum Zeno Effect and of course, Henry knew about this. I did not. Actually, I know not that much about quantum mechanics. Henry

“The way you observe reality actually influences how the reality itself expresses itself.”



is not great on the brain and I’m certainly not great on quantum mechanics, but it just goes to show you when you put two people who know quite a bit about their relative subject matters together, you can get real interesting things happening.

So when Henry and I, over years, and this took years of working together and working things out and discussing things and starting to write…really started to think seriously about what I was doing with the obsessive-compulsive disorder patients, he actually came to the realization that this Quantum Zeno Effect could actually explain what I was doing to get the patients to change their own brains. By focusing their attention differently, using understanding, cognitive understanding, they had the awareness to understand that, “This is not me. This is my brain. Let me focus my attention differently.”

And what the Quantum Zeno Effect says is when you observe something repeatedly; you actually stabilize the thing that is being observed….I mean one of the basic things about quantum mechanics that is very, very strange is that the way you measure something affects what you are measuring; it affects how actual physical reality expresses itself. That’s obviously the deep sort of difference.

I mean that is one way of understanding the deep difference between the quantum mechanical understanding and the materialist understanding or the Newtonian understanding, which is in quantum mechanics. The way you observe reality actually influences how the reality itself expresses itself.

One of the laws…I also want to be careful again, with your listeners. That does not mean (capital N, capital O, capital T) that your mind creates reality. So if there’s anybody out there saying, “Quantum mechanics says your mind creates reality,” stop saying that. That’s a bad mistake. Quantum mechanics does not say that. Just getting that clarified is worth doing a whole interview.

Quantum mechanics does not say that your mind creates reality, but it does say that your mind and the way the choices that you make about what you focus your attention on

“What the Quantum Zeno Effect says is when you observe something repeatedly, you actually stabilize the thing that is being observed.”

“This Quantum Zeno Effect could actually explain what I was doing to get the patients to change their own brains.“



influences the way the reality manifests itself. So, the Quantum Zeno Effect says that when you observe very intently, you stabilize the thing that you are observing.

And when you apply that principle to the relationship between attention and the brain, you get this very, very useful statement which is now well-grounded in a real scientific law, the Quantum Zeno Effect: when you focus your attention, you stabilize the brain circuitry that is being used when you are focusing your attention. That is the principle that allows you to change your brain by focusing your attention differently.

Your brain is doing things and I’m more than happy to say, as a classical neuroscientist would say, that the vast majority of what we experience is just caused by the brain doing what the brain does in a way that is quite consistent with a materialist way of thinking. So the vast majority of what happens most of the time is reasonably well understood, quite well understood, you might even say by a materialist worldview.

But where that breaks down is when you want to use choice and especially quality of attention and how you focus your attention to explain the fact that how you focus your attention can change how your brain is working. And that of course, became very important in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder and has applications to all kinds of other things, both in mental health and outside of mental health. And that includes heart disease and on and on because if you understand things differently and use a cognitive understanding to put things in a different context, and then focus your attention differently, based on that understanding, you will change how your brain works. (And that means changing how your brain works) from the way it was working before… when it was causing you difficulties.

And it doesn’t take that long…I mean it starts to change, I would say, in days, and certainly in weeks and months. You can get significant changes that now make your brain work with you instead of against you, relative to all different kinds of factors and habits, you know, of which obsessive-compulsive thinking is one model that is pretty easy to understand.

“When you focus your attention, you stabilize the brain circuitry that is being used when you are focusing your attention. That is the principle that allows you to change your brain by focusing your attention differently.”

“Quantum mechanics does not say that your mind creates reality, but it does say that your mind and the way the choices that you make about what you focus your attention on influences the way the reality manifests itself.”

How the Mind Changes the Brain 1�


Your brain is doing something. It’s causing you to have an intrusive thought. You then say, “This thought isn’t me. This is just my brain. This is just OCD.” You focus your attention differently. You don’t wash your hands again. You don’t check the door again.

You start doing that regularly because you understand that that urge is just your brain sending you a false message. It’s just your OCD and when you do that regularly, low and behold the circuit itself starts to change and the bothersome urge to check again and wash again starts to go down. That is the principle over �0 years now that we have been using for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it has a lot of other applications. Now that, finally, after my long-winded, professorial, wordy, prolix presentation, is the answer to the very first question you asked, I think.

Dr. Buczynski: Quantum physics, yes. Now we’ll get more into OCD treatment in a moment, but since you brought up the issue of it having other applications, let’s explore that for a minute because we have people on the call who come from a wide range of professions. We certainly have psychiatrists and psychologists and other mental health people on the call, but we also have many others who represent a wide range of other specialties as well as pharmacists and physical therapists. So thinking about this application...

Dr. Schwartz: When you mention pharmacists, I can think of some really fast applications. On the website, jeffreymschwartz.com, at the bottom there is a link to a talk I gave at UCC San Francisco with Henry Stapp, so you can watch a whole two hour talk that we gave on this, and in that talk near the end, there was a question from a cardiology research person. So let me just say one fast application would be in things like hypertension, or things like even at the level of cardiac arrhythmias, and I would say even at the level of atherosclerotic plaque formation.

Obviously on one level, it’s common sense. You change your life style. You are going to eat differently. You are going to get less atherosclerotic plaque formation so you don’t have to get too fancy with the quantum stuff as the same principles could be used to explain what is happening there. But when you get at the level of cardiac arrhythmias, it’s much more straightforwardly like the example I am using for obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s well-known that atrial fibrillation and I’m no cardiologist, but…atrial fibrillation is, I think, a pretty straightforward example of all other kinds of basic cardiac arrhythmias, many of which – clinicians if I am wrong will hopefully find a way of

“You can get significant changes that now make your brain work with you instead of against you.”



correcting me, but I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that there is a relationship between stress, anxiety, mental state, and how various kinds of cardiac arrhythmias clinically manifest themselves.

So right away, I mean if you can apply these same techniques and then obviously blood pressure is straightforwardly true, too. I think everybody knows there is a relationship

between your mental state and what happens to your blood pressure. So the same exact reasoning applies. All these same quantum principles apply to the heart and every organ as well as to the brain and obviously when you are talking about mind/heart relations, you have a nervous system there too.

And if you focus your attention differently, if you kind of calm yourself down, if you do relaxation exercises, if you practice – if you do the kind of stuff that Herb Benson at Harvard has been doing for decades himself, you know the relaxation response, I mean all – in fact, he published a paper last year or the year before in which he showed that the genetic expression for various kinds of heart related function changed in people who did the relaxation response regularly and they published that in the Public Library of Science which is a very prestigious place. So that was very well done research.

Again, you can see that especially if you start talking about blood pressure. You start talking about cardiac arrhythmias and then people who are really clinically adept can expand out beyond that. It still gets in – this theoretical point that I am making – it gets right to the heart of the issue. How does what you are doing with your mental attention, relaxing, calming yourself down, talking your way through it…why does that influence your blood vessels or the diameter of your blood vessels? Why does that affect the rhythm in your heart? I mean, that question is a very fair scientific question and this kind of reasoning explains how it could happen.

So it’s a general principle for understanding the relationship between mind and body in terms of how focus of attention can stabilize certain kinds of biological responses. And that has a lot of clinical applications.

At the level of panic attacks, it’s straightforward and with all kinds of anxiety related issues, this stuff really applies. But since you mentioned pharmacists, there’s something that I’ve never really been able to pursue in a systematic way, but I’ve certainly tried to encourage colleagues to do it. A few have, more in Europe than here, and it’s the issue

“When you focus your attention differently, you change your brain and you need less medication.”



of when you use these kinds (of approaches) like cognitive focusing; cognitive enhanced understanding of the relationship between what you think, how you focus your attention, and what your brain does.

Again, this takes me to OCD as a classic example in using these kinds of principles. Most cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder, even in my own practice, and I am not a big, huge fan of using medications, but I’m more than happy to use them and I find them as helpful and even necessary in a lot of cases so probably two thirds to three quarters of the people I treat are on medication at some time because they need medication to be able to apply these cognitive principles that I am talking about.

The symptoms themselves are too intense for them to be able to use the cognitive approach without having some medication to have some decrease in the bothersome-ness of it. But here’s the key point. After the medication has created a circumstance that enhanced their capacity to use cognitive approaches, enhancing their ability to redirect their attention more effectively, then the brain changes, which it should.

And I have a very large amount of anecdotal data that says how this allowed people to decrease the amount of medication that they needed so that there is a direct relationship between using medication to create a circumstance where people can use cognitive understanding more effectively and focus their attention more adaptively. It’s all about changing your brain, using that enhanced understanding and focusing attention consistently in a different way.

Re-labeling, re-attributing…it’s not me, it’s my brain…these are the refocusing steps in my book, Brain Lock. Then when you change your brain, you need less medication. So you can actually decrease the dose of medication. There is a direct relationship between pharmaceutical management and these techniques. You use the pharmacy to help people create

“There is a direct relationship between pharmaceutical management and these techniques.”

“It’s a general principle for understanding the relationship between mind and body in terms of how focus of attention can stabilize certain kinds of biological responses. And that has a lot of clinical applications.”



a circumstance where they can focus attention more effectively. When they do, they change the biology, which means you need less medication. Of course, that would apply to hypertensive medication too.

I mean…yes there are important principles here.

Dr. Buczynski: Great, let’s before we go back to OCD, let’s talk a little bit about self-directed neuroplasticity. You wrote about that in your book and it’s a fascinating idea. Tell us more about how we can help patients...

Self-directed Neuroplasticity - How We Can Teach Patientsto Change Their Brains and Their Behaviors

Dr. Schwartz: Well that’s a – actually everything I have been saying for this entire time is basically just a - manifestation of that principle…it’s just a term. Self-directed neuroplasticity simply is describing what I have been talking about. I mean, you’re in classical studies of neuroplasticity. It’s the change in the environment that causes the brain to change.

So there is a huge amount of work on that that’s been done on invertebrates, right? You can do it in fruit flies, obviously you know, somebody won a Nobel Prize for doing it in snails. So with every invertebrate – you can practice – you can very systematically show principles of neuroplasticity. But human beings are, in my very, very strong opinion, intrinsically different from fruit flies and snails although even that statement is controversial among the scientific establishment.

They do not believe that human beings are intrinsically different from fruit flies and snails, but I do, and I am sure that most of our listeners do and because of those intrinsic differences, human beings have the capacity to introspect, know what they are thinking, know what they are feeling, and change, as I have been describing, their perspective on it when they focus their attention differently. When you do that, you change how the biology works and how your brain works and that is self-directed neuroplasticity.

An invertebrate can’t do that. But human beings can with the proper training and with the proper contextualization. One of the things I have been saying for a long time, and I say it very assertively in The Mind and the Brain and just as assertively in a more easy

“When you change how the biology works and how your brain works, that is self-directed neuroplasticity.”



to understand way in my book, Dear Patrick, is one of the problems with the scientific materialist worldview as it applies to the practice of medicine, is when you believe and communicate both explicitly and implicitly, that people are nothing but machines, you undermine their capacity to believe that they have the ability through understanding and focused attention to change their own biology.

Dr. Buczynski: Right, yes.

Dr. Schwartz: And it creates this sort of mythology that some people find extremely beneficial to their bank accounts that only we, the experts, can change your broken machinery, but that’s based in a worldview that should have passed by a long time ago, but maybe the statement I just made helps explain why it didn’t pass by a long time ago.

Dr. Buczynski: From reading some of your book, I got a sense from your biography that when you were in medical school, you were kind of studying two separate themes that you’ve now brought together: one theme being Buddhism and the other theme being the mind and the nature of the mind.

Dr. Schwartz: That’s true. I would like to contextualize that in some way, you know, with sort of prior and subsequent developments. I mean, you can’t leave out of that statement, the importance of being Bar Mitzvahed as an Orthodox Jew. I mean, that was an absolute, critical beginning… I will also throw in kudos to Bob Dylan, just because of his wonderful effect on my adolescent self-awareness.

Dr. Buczynski: Yes, mine too.

Dr. Schwartz: And Bobby Zimmerman really had a positive effect on me…and then, going forward, I got very interested in the poetry of William Butler Yeats, in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and in the philosophy of David Hume and let’s just say by God’s will and a combination of circumstances, I came to see that this practice from the East, you know, the Asian part of the world had a lot to offer and for �0 years, I pursued it very assiduously. So I became very, very, very involved in the practice of …Theravada meditation based in Pali text – that’s the language of classical Theravada Buddhism in a Sanskrit dialect called Pali…and there is no question that that study of mindful awareness

“...when you believe and communicate both explicitly and implicitly that people are nothing but machines, you undermine their capacity to believe that they have the ability through understanding and focused attention to change their own biology.”



and that study of classical pre-Christian Buddhist beliefs which were mostly written down in the early post-Christian era, influenced me a lot.

So that’s important and it is definitely true that the philosophy of mindfulness is very, very well explicated in those texts that come from an oral tradition that is certainly several hundred years before Christ. So I mean, I would never, ever deny or undermine the importance of that in my development, but I will also say that in – partly because of how that’s been applied in our culture where you know I will be candid, I mean, there are those who try on some level to separate the mindfulness component of the Theravada teachings from the just as critical moral teachings.

I mean Gautama Buddha was extremely assertive about how critical it was to practice what is called Pali phala or morality and it’s the same exact morality that you get in the Judeo-Christian tradition. You can’t practice – you cannot practice mindfulness meaningfully without a life that is dedicated to the practice of these moral principles. For whatever reason, and it’s complicated, but I will simply say that the culture of mindfulness and the culture of Buddhism …morality…is very prominent in the canonical texts. (There’s disagreement over) how critical the moral element is to the practice of mindfulness…and that has caused problems among Buddhists…especially in America. Dr. Buczynski: Jeffrey, have you had success working with mindfulness with OCD patients, I mean, are they receptive to mindfulness?

Why Mindfulness Practices Can Help Patients with OCDChange the Wiring of Their Brains

Dr. Schwartz: Oh yeah, I mean you know it was easier �0 years ago when it wasn’t all mired in these cultural issues that I was just referring to because I mean obviously anybody can take a copy of Brain Lock, that was published in 199� or something like that, and the work that went into it was 10 years before that and the book is dedicated to my grandfather, Harry Weinstein and Mahāsi Sayādaw, who is widely acknowledged as one of the great figures of 20th century Theravada Buddhism and a person who was instrumental in bringing my fullness to the West.

And back then, you know, you could teach the principles of mindfulness. It didn’t have to get all wrapped up in to this cultural sort of struggle and you didn’t really even have to talk about Buddhism which was fine by me and yeah, teaching mindfulness to people with OCD was not hard.



…The point that has become particularly interesting to me lately is you can do it within a Christian context just as easily. And as a matter of fact, there are certain advantages to doing it in a Christian context because actually the single biggest difference is (and I guess we are getting near our ending time and this is a good place to close, or begin to close) is in Buddhism, in Theravada Buddhism, when you are practicing this mindful awareness, you are basically there sort of on your own.

I mean, you know, there is no self, obviously that is one of the basic principles that you are trying to work to understand is that any concept of the self is illusory. I mean that is one of the basic principles of Theravada Buddhism and you are basically sitting there trying to use a form of focused attention to penetrate into the unsatisfactory constantly changing selfless nature of reality. Obviously you can do it at a much, much more attenuated level in ways that become very, very helpful for understanding that “this isn’t me…it’s my brain.” I mean, it gets into that very clinically useful notion of “this is not me. I’m not my thoughts.”

And a huge advantage of applying the very same reasoning within a Christian context is that you now have a helper. I mean, you have inside of you a Holy Spirit, that was represented in the real world by a human being, Jesus Christ, who is now inside of you as a Holy Spirit, and he functions as a helper, as a comforter, an advocate, a counselor, an encourager, a strengthener, a friend. All of these things are textually based and you can use the same exact quality of mindful awareness that the Pali canonical Theravada texts talk about, but now you are not doing it all alone. You have a helper. And to me this is something...

Dr. Buczynski: I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of our listeners are Christian or have Christian patients who may see mindfulness or especially if they think of it as Buddhism as something outside of or foreign or whatever, but to put it in a Christian context or Jewish context would be very useful for certain kinds of patients who want to – who need a context that’s comfortable for them.

Dr. Schwartz: There are and that’s a very large number of people.

Dr. Buczynski: It certainly is.

Dr. Schwartz: I just want to also say, that once you say it’s in a Christian context for these kinds of reasons, it almost by definition (and I won’t get into a theology issue now) puts it in a Jewish context as well because the Christian context is very, very, very intimately related to the Jewish context especially in these kinds of issues of how the mind works and what morality is etc.



So yeah, I mean. I really like to stress the point. Among elites, I mean, you know, it’s as if mindfulness is just some secular thing. But mindfulness is not a secular thing. Mindfulness is part of a religious cultural tradition, and that religious cultural tradition is Buddhism, which is the religious cultural tradition of a very significant part of Asian civilization.

And that’s all well and good, but it’s not secular and I strongly believe that if you really think that mindfulness is a good thing and we live in a country where the vast majority of people are Christian and Jewish, you want to put that mindfulness in a context that’s Christian and Jewish. (Why does there need to be) all this constant banging away that it doesn’t really have moral principles intrinsic to it? That’s a false statement.

Mindfulness very much has moral principles intrinsic to it. The founder, and discoverer of it, was extremely assertive that you can’t practice it effectively without having moral principles. It is very much judgmental.

It is making judgments about the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of the thoughts and feelings that you are having. It is not secular. I mean, you know there is a lot of nonsense that has gone down around what mindfulness is and what elites are trying to make believe it is that they are creating. Like right now, as we speak, it’s completely a historical and so...

Dr. Buczynski: So very briefly, before we...

Dr. Schwartz: Hope that was assertive enough for all the listeners so they know that I really believe that. I’m so passionate about it.

Dr. Buczynski: I think they got the idea that you care about this.

Dr. Schwartz: Very good, I’m glad for that.

Dr. Buczynski: Very briefly, can we just go over a four-step regimen for treating patients with OCD?

“Mindfulness very much has moral principles intrinsic to it. ”

How the Mind Changes the Brain �0


A Four Step Regimen for Treating Patients with OCD

Dr. Schwartz: Sure, that’s good, I mean, I really like that this circle has come full turn. I thought that was going to be the first question, but okay. So it works really just as well as the last question, too.

So, there are these four steps and in fact, if you go to the website, it’s my website, but there is another one that I really like which is a charity that I’m one of the founders of and ambassador for. It’s the charity, OCDUK in Britain, (ocduk.org). There’s a free manual and there is also a video that you can get through my website or on that website of me giving a �� minute talk about these four steps for treating OCD.

(And here’s a brief overview.) You re-label. You basically say, “This is not my desire to wash my hands, and hence this is an obsessive-compulsive symptom. Why am I having it? Why does it bother me so much?”

You reattribute and you say, “The reason why this bothers me so much, the reason why this is so intrusive is because it’s my brain sending me a false message. It’s an actual medical condition, obsessive-compulsive disorder that is causing me to have this.”

So with those first two cognitively oriented questions, the first two steps, you answer: “What is this that’s bothering me? It’s not a feeling that tells me to wash my hands. I’m not making sure that the door is locked. It’s a compulsive symptom and why does it keep bothering me because I have already washed my hands a couple of times and checked the door a couple of times, so I really shouldn’t need to do it again. So why do I feel like I need to do it again? And the answer to that is because this is an OCD symptom that is caused by a biological issue that is making me feel something that isn’t true. It’s not me. It’s my OCD.”

And then you use that awareness to focus your attention differently and then get out of the house. Move away from the sink. All the various ways – I’m obviously giving a very simplified form of this now, but those two basic symptoms are very common and these are basic words of advice about just how to handle those two core symptoms.

“This is an OCD symptom that is caused by a biological issue that is making me feel something that isn’t true. It’s not me. It’s my OCD. ”

“Re-labeling, re-attributing…it’s not me, it’s my brain…these are the refocusing steps .”

How the Mind Changes the Brain �1


And when you do that regularly, apply your understanding that this is OCD…that it is caused by a disorder and it’s a problem that is not me, then I don’t have to listen to it. I’m not going to listen to it, and it’s false. You focus your attention differently, based on that understanding.

And actually through that focus of attention, you start to change how your brain works and when you do that, it becomes less bothersome and you start to revalue the whole experience of feeling the symptoms. So now after you have practiced for a while, refocusing your attention, when you feel this feeling, you revalue it. You very quickly now go, “That’s OCD. I know it has no value. I’m not listening to it.”

As I said a little earlier, medication can help this process happen and when it does happen, you need less medication because by focusing your attention differently, you literally are changing how your brain works, which requires less medication.

Dr. Buczynski: You know I’m afraid we’re out of time, but this has been a fascinating journey. We’ve been kind of all over the place and as you said full-circle. Participants, all of you, I just want to mention that in a few minutes you will be getting an email from me. I just have to finish it up and get the engineer to help us get it out.

In that email, I am going to give you a few links. One of those links will be to the comment board and I’d like you to go to the comment board and talk about how you are going to apply what you’ve heard tonight. What will you do differently tomorrow with your patients as a result of what you have heard tonight?

But in addition to that, I am going to give you a link to Jeffrey’s two books. The Mind and the Brain, which is subtitled, Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, and also his book on OCD, Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. So I will give you the links to both of those. I’ll connect it to Amazon, that’s probably about the best place that you could buy them. I’m not pushing you to buy the book. You can go to the library and find it there, but these are excellent resources. I just want to help you connect to them.

“After you have practiced for a while, refocusing your attention, you very quickly now go, ‘That’s OCD. I know it has no value. I’m not listening to it. ‘”

How the Mind Changes the Brain ��


But do join our community and be part of the comment board and tell us how you are going to use what you have learned tonight and thank you for being on the call. We’ve had people from all over the world so thank you very much for being on the call and Jeffrey, a special thank you to you.

Thank you for your life’s work. You’ve done so much and looked at this in such an honest and open way and thank you for all of the discoveries and the novel way in which you’ve joined with other scientists to look…outside of the medical box to join their ideas with yours. Thank you for your work.

Dr. Schwartz: Well thank you. It’s always nice to have listeners and if there is an evangelical zeal in it, it’s because there is an evangelical zeal. So thanks for listening.

Dr. Buczynski: Thanks very much and good night everyone.

Dr. Schwartz: Goodnight.

��



About The Speaker:Jeffrey Schwartz, MD is a psychiatrist and researcher in the field of neuroplasticity and its application to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Dr. Schwartz received a bachelors with honors in philosophy and then pursued a career in the medical sciences. He is currently an associate research profes-sor of psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. He is also the overseas am-bassador/patron for the UK’s national Obsessive-Com-pulsive Disorder charity, OCD-UK.

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