It was spring 2005. I was sitting in a large audience at the XIII Mind and Life Dialogue in Washington, D.C., listening to different scientists converse with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and wondering what to do. I was in the second year of my residency training in psychiatry and had recently declared to a …
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Mindfulness and Depression
Yucca brevifolia. I was practicing walking meditation among them in Joshua Tree National Park in the winter of 2010 while co-leading a residential five-day retreat workshop on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) with Zindel Segal. With the 30 clinicians attending, we shared the principles and practices of MBCT to prevent depressive relapse and invited them to …
Strengthening Attention
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to …
Rahil Rojiani
Dr. Rahil Rojiani (they/them) is a queer, genderfluid, South Asian Ismaili Muslim, and a fourth year psychiatry resident at Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School. Rahil’s contemplative practices are informed by their Muslim faith, secular mindfulness traditions, and multiple Buddhist lineages, starting at Brown University where they majored in Contemplative Studies—a multi-disciplinary study of …
On the Path to Belonging at the 2022 Summer Research Institute
Against a backdrop of daunting polarization, violent conflicts, rising authoritarianism, and mounting climate chaos, Mind & Life’s 2022 Summer Research Institute (SRI) engaged participants in an audacious inquiry: What is the role of the human mind in creating today’s divisions, and how can our minds transform to create a more connected world? From June 6-10, …
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A Tribute to 2021 Service Award Recipients Bobbi Patterson and Elissa Epel
“What’s happening at Mind & Life is very heart-enriching: it is holding to its roots in the neuroscience conversation and more fully engaging current issues,” says Mind & Life Steering Council member Barbara (Bobbi) Patterson. “Contemplative practices, and this knowledge of neuroscience and of ancient traditions, can bring such richness to the questions of our …
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Norm Farb: Strategies for Coping with Today’s Stress Epidemic
With cascading emergencies from the pandemic to war in Ukraine to the climate crisis now fueling a stress epidemic, social neuroscientist Norm Farb has a lot to say—and a lot on his plate—from ongoing research to co-authoring a new book. “A lot of us are spending our free time absorbing more threat signals,” says Norm, …
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Carolyn Parkinson
Carolyn studies how the human brain tracks and encodes information about its social environment and how this information shapes our thoughts and behavior. She received her B.Sc. from McGill University and her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College before becoming an Assistant Professor at UCLA in 2016, where she is the Bernice Wenzel and …
Lionel Newman
Lionel is a PhD student in the Cognitive Modeling research group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and received my master’s degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. His research contributes to the recent shift in social neuroscience away from investigatingsingle, isolated brains, and instead exploring brain, behavior, and …
Robin Nusslock
I am an Associate Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University where I direct the Affective & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory. My research program uses the tools of human neuroscience to study how the brain creates emotion and how these brain systems are implicated in health and well-being. I also study how stress affects the emotional brain, …
