The Mindful Brain Reflection and Attunement in the

Cultivation of Well Being (Norton Series on Interpersonal

Neurobiology)

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 All illustrations are the property of the author, unless noted otherwise. To
contact the author, please visit mindsightinstitute.com. “The Mindful Brain”
is a trademark of Mind Your Brain, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 by Mind Your Brain, Inc.

All rights reserved

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write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Siegel, Daniel J., 1957-

The mindful brain: reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-
being / Daniel J. Siegel.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06870-2
1. Psychophysiology. 2. Awareness. I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Psychophysiology. 2. Brain—physiology. 3. Mind-Body
Relations (Metaphysics) 4. Mind-Body and Relaxation Techniques. WL 103
S5712m 2007]

QP360.S485 2007
612.8—dc22 2006030093

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells St., London
W1T 3QT
TO CAROLINE
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface

PART I
MIND, BRAIN, AND AWARENESS
1. A Mindful Awareness
2. Brain Basics

PART II
IMMERSION IN DIRECT EXPERIENCE
3. A Week of Silence
4. Suffering and the Streams of Awareness

PART III
FACETS OF THE MINDFUL BRAIN
5. Subjectivity and Science
6. Harnessing the Hub: Attention and the Wheel of Awareness
7. Jettisoning Judgments: Dissolving Top-Down Constraints
8. Internal Attunement: Mirror Neurons, Resonance, and Attention to
Intention
9. Reflective Coherence: Neural Integration and Middle Prefrontal
Function
10. Flexibility of Feeling: Affective Style and an Approach Mindset
11. Reflective Thinking: Imagery and the Cognitive Style of Mindful
Learning
PART IV
REFLECTIONS ON THE MINDFUL BRAIN
12. Educating the Mind: The Fourth “R” and the Wisdom of Reflection
13. Reflection in Clinical Practice: Being Present and Cultivating the
Hub
14. The Mindful Brain in Psychotherapy: Promoting Neural Integration

Afterword Reflections on Reflection

Appendix I Reflection and Mindfulness Resources
Appendix II Glossary and Terms
Appendix III Neural Notes

References
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Words cannot fully express the gratitude I feel toward the many people
along this journey to explore the mind and understand mindfulness. My
colleagues at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, including Sue
Smalley, Lidia Zylowska, Sigi Hale, Shea Cunningham, Deborah
Ackerman, David Creswell, Jonas Kaplan, Nancy Lynn Horton, Diana
Winston, and others, have been a great source of inspiration and learning.
Peter Whybrow, our director at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and
Human Behavior, has been of great support in bringing mindfulness into
that academic setting. At the Foundation for Psychocultural Research
(FPR)/UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development, I am fortunate to
be a part of a team of scholars dedicated to crossing the usual boundaries
separating disciplines and am thankful to Robert Lemelson of the FPR and
to my co-principal investigators there, Patricia Greenfield, Mirella Dapretto,
Alan Fiske, and John Schuman, for our ongoing collaboration. Marco
Iacoboni has also been a fabulous colleague with whom I have been able to
share clinical ideas about the mirror neuron system and collaborate on
educational programs for therapists in this emerging area.
At the Mindsight Institute, Erica Ellis has been extremely helpful in
administering our educational program and working closely with me on
finalizing the references and copyedited text. Those fellow therapists who
study interpersonal neurobiology with me at the Institute are a continual
source of intellectual stimulation and challenge, and they have been an
important sounding board in helping to translate these intricate ideas about
the mindful brain into an accessible and hopefully useful form for others. I
am especially thankful for the collaboration of the members of GAINS, the
Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies.
I appreciate the ongoing professional collaboration with Allan Schore
and Lou Cozolino, and I thank Lou for his permission to use the wonderful
drawings of the brain from his excellent book, The Neuroscience of Human
Relationships (2006). MAWS & Company created the artwork for Figures
4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 6.1, and 14.1, and I am grateful for how clearly those drawings
are able to express my ideas about mindful awareness.
A vital source of inspiration are my patients, whose courage to face the
direct experience of memory and emotion, of trying to find a way beneath
the restrictive personal identities that have enslaved them for so long,
continues to give meaning to my professional life in these many years of
practice.
As this exploration of mindfulness has unfolded, Rich Simon organized
a meeting at his annual Networker Symposium gathering in which he
brought together Diane Ackerman, Jon Kabat-Zinn, John O’Donohue, and
me. It was love at first insight, and the varied relationships among each of
us has continued to grow in marvelous ways. Our Mind and Moment
meeting in February, 2006 was a pinnacle of my educational journey, and I
am profoundly grateful to Diane, Jon, and “O’John” for our time together.
In learning about mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn encouraged me to dive
deeply into direct experience and guided me to the Mind and Life Institute’s
gathering of scientists to sense first-hand a week of silence. I’m grateful for
his suggestions and appreciative of Adam Engle, chair of the Mind and Life
Institute, and to Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and the other faculty
of the Insight Meditation Society who hosted that transformative event.
In the writing of the book itself, it has been extremely helpful to have
the insightful comments from a number of individuals who read earlier
drafts and gave important feedback on the voice of the book itself. These
individuals include Diane Ackerman, Erica Ellis, Bonnie Mark Goldstein,
Daniel Goleman, Susan Kaiser-Greenland, Jack Kornfield, Lynn Kutler,
Rich Simon, Marion Solomon, and Caroline Welch.
Rich Simon not only read this and other manuscripts of mine, but he has
served as a comrade-in-arms in facing the challenging task of writing a
first-person account for a professional audience while at the same time
exploring the science of the mind with rigor and clarity. He is both a social
feng shui master, as the experience of his now thirty years of running the
Psychotherapy Networker reveals, as well as a brilliant editor with vision
for the larger issues between and beyond the lines of the text. I thank him
for his vital support.
 I was very fortunate to be able to rely on a number of individuals’
expertise on mindfulness and on the brain to check on various details of the
science and explorations in the book. Jack Kornfield and Dan Goleman
made helpful clarifications and I thank them for their thoughtful comments
on the text. Ellen Langer was a pleasure to engage with in examining ideas
about mindful learning and mindful awareness. I am grateful for her
insights and her willingness to take the time to go over a wide array of
issues in our discussions. Richard Davidson was also of great support in
reviewing certain aspects of brain research as they relate to his important
contributions in the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience. His
wisdom and kindness are greatly appreciated.
I am also deeply appreciative of David Creswell, Susan Kaiser-
Greenland, Sara Lazar, and Lidia Zylowska for sharing their unpublished
research data with me to include in this text. Their genorosity has enabled
this theoretical synthesis and conceptual integration about the relational
nature of the mindful brain to offer cutting-edge knowledge in this exciting
field.
I’d also like to thank Andrea Costella and Deborah Malmud for
shepherding this unusual project with professional perseverance. This book
is not a typical text in that it synthesizes deep personal experience with
scientific analysis. I am grateful that they supported the project and helped
it come to life. Deborah Malmud has also been a pleasure to work with in
my capacity as the Series Editor for the Norton Series on Interpersonal
Neurobiology, and I am grateful for her clear thinking about how to bring
this emerging interdisciplinary view into the academic, professional, and
public worlds.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife and children for their never-
ending support of my whacky ways and my passion for this work. I feel
deeply grateful to watch the reflective emergence of my two adolescents
who continually challenge me to be fully present in our lives. I have been
fortunate to be able to explore these evolving ideas regularly with my wife
who has taught me so much about mindfulness. Her insights have been
extremely helpful in trying to make the mindful brain come alive on these
pages.
 PREFACE

Welcome to a journey into the heart of our lives. Being mindfully aware,
attending to the richness of our here-and-now experiences, creates
scientifically recognized enhancements in our physiology, our mental
functions, and our interpersonal relationships. Being fully present in our
awareness opens our lives to new possibilities of well-being.
Almost all cultures have practices that help people develop awareness
of the moment. Each of the major religions of the world utilizes some
method to enable individuals to focus their attention, from meditation to
prayer, yoga to tai’chi. Each of these traditions may have its own particular
approach, but they share a common desire to intentionally focus awareness
in a way that transforms people’s lives. Mindful awareness is a universal
goal across human cultures. Although mindfulness is often seen as a form of
attentional skill that focuses one’s mind on the present, this book takes a
deep look at this type of awareness through the perspective of mindfulness
as a form of healthy relationship with oneself.
In my own field of studying interpersonal relationships within families,
we use the concept of “attunement” to examine how one person, a parent,
for example, focuses attention on the internal world of another, such as a
child. This focus on the mind of another person harnesses neural circuitry
that enables two people to “feel felt” by each other. This state is crucial if
people in relationships are to feel vibrant and alive, understood, and at
peace. Research has shown that such attuned relationships promote
resilience and longevity. Our understanding of mindfulness can build on
these studies of interpersonal attunement and the self-regulatory functions
of focused attention in suggesting that mindful awareness is a form of
intrapersonal attunement. In other words, being mindful is a way of
becoming your own best friend.
 We will explore how attunement may lead the brain to grow in ways
that promote balanced self-regulation via the process of neural integration,
which enables flexibility and self-understanding. This way of feeling felt, of
feeling connected in the world, may help us understand how becoming
attuned to oneself may promote these physical and psychological
dimensions of well-being with mindful awareness.
Turning to the brain can help us see the commonality of mechanisms
between these two forms of intra-and interpersonal attunement. By
examining the neural dimension of functioning and its possible correlation
with mindful awareness, we may be able to expand our understanding of
why and how mindfulness creates the documented improvements in
immune function, an inner sense of well-being, and an increase in our
capacity for rewarding interpersonal relationships.
I am not a member of any particular mindful awareness tradition, nor
have I had formal training in mindfulness per se before taking on this
project, so this book will be a fresh look, without presenting only one
specific form of mindfulness. This will be an exploration of the overall
concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness can be cultivated through many means
from experiences within attuned relationships, to approaches in education
that emphasize reflection, to formal meditation.

THE NEED
We are in desperate need of a new way of being—in ourselves, in our
schools, and in our society. Our modern culture has evolved in recent times
to create a troubled world with individuals suffering from alienation,
schools failing to inspire and to connect with students, in short, society
without a moral compass to help clarify how we can move forward in our
global community.
I have seen my own children grow up in a world where human beings
are ever more distant from the human interactions that our brains have
evolved to require—yet are no longer part of our inherent educational and
social systems. The human connections that help shape our neural
connections are sorely missing in modern life. We are not only losing our
opportunities to attune to each other, but the hectic lives many of us live
leave little time for attuning to ourselves.
 As a physician, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and educator, I have been
saddened and dismayed to find so absent from our work as clinicians a firm
grounding in the healthy mind itself. After asking over 65,000 mental health
professionals face-to-face in lecture halls around the world if they had ever
had a course on the mind, or on mental health, 95% replied “no.” What then
have we been practicing? Isn’t it time for us to become aware of the mind
itself, not just to highlight symptoms of illness?
Cultivating an experiential understanding of the mind is a direct focus
of mindful awareness: We come not only to know our own minds, but to
embrace our inner worlds and the minds of others with kindness and
compassion.
It is my deepest hope that by helping each other attune to our minds we
can move ourselves and our culture beyond the many automatic reflexes
that have led our human community down such destructive paths. The
human potential for compassion and empathy is huge. Realizing that
potential may be challenging in these troubled times, but perhaps it may be
as direct as attuning to ourselves, one mind, one relationship, one moment
at a time.

THE APPROACH
Mindfulness is a very important, empowering, and personal internal
experience, so this book will of necessity blend personal ways of knowing
along with external visions from science about the nature of the mind. This
is both the challenge and the thrill of the writing, and I have set out to
integrate the subjective essence of mindful awareness while providing
objective analyses of direct sensory experience and research findings along
with practical ways that these experiences, ideas, and research findings can
be applied.
Being clear about these different ways of knowing is extremely
important as we go forward: subjective experience, science, and
professional applications are three separate entities in the body of
knowledge that we will need to maintain as distinct dimensions of reality
for this integrative effort to be valid and useful. Premature blending of these
three elements can lead to erroneous conclusions about subjectivity,
misinterpretations of science, and misapplications of these ideas to clinical
practice and education. By presenting these ideas, experiences, and research
findings first, we will then be ready to “cleanly” apply their synthesis to the
important work of helping others learn, grow, and alleviate suffering. If we
mix them too soon for the sake of getting to “the practical,” we run the risk
of confusing the ways we have come to build our vision of the mind and
moment.
To achieve this goal of clarity in ways of knowing, the book is divided
into four parts. An introductory section offers an overview of mindful
awareness and examines why turning to the brain is helpful in illuminating
the nature of the mind itself. In the second section we will explore direct
experiences and see the immediacy of the moment that retrospective
analysis from others can only hint at from a distance. The purpose of these
experiential chapters is to explore the essence of mindfulness and what may
get in its way, and keep us from being present in our own lives. We will
explore how this form of being aware can be achieved through intentional
training that disentangles the mind from automatic intrusions.
In the third section we explore various facets of the mindful brain that
emerge from these experiential immersions and from the insights of the
scientific and professional literature. We will integrate the lessons learned
from direct experience with a review of existing research on the brain and
the nature of the mind. This synthesis will attempt to weave the subjective
and objective dimensions of understanding our lives.
In the fourth section we will reflect further on the implications and
applications of these mindful brain perspectives on education, clinical work,
and the discipline of psychotherapy itself. These applications will build on
what came before as we link subjectivity and science with practical
applications in daily life. This section will offer some initial ideas about
how to integrate these concepts about internal attunement into practical,
everyday usage of mindful awareness in our professional and personal
endeavors.

INTERPERSONAL NEUROBIOLOGY
Understanding the deep nature of how our relationships help shape our
lives and our brains has been a passion driving my professional life. Since
the early 1990s, I have been involved in trying to create an interdisciplinary
view of the mind and mental health (Siegel, 1999). The perspective of
interpersonal neurobiology embraces a wide array of ways of knowing,
from the broad spectrum of scientific disciplines to the expressive arts and
contemplative practice. We will be applying the basic principles of this
approach to our exploration of mindful awareness.
Interpersonal neurobiology relies on a process of integrating knowledge
from a variety of disciplines to find the common features that are shared by
these independent fields of knowledge. Much like the fable of the blind men
and the elephant, each discipline examines a necessarily focused and
limited area of the elephant, of reality, in order to know that dimension
deeply and in detail. But to see the whole picture, to get a feeling for the
whole elephant, it is vital that we try to bring different fields together.
While each blind man may not agree with the perspective of the other, each
has important contributions to make in creating a sense of the whole.
And so we will be using this integrative approach to bring together
various ways of knowing in order to understand mindfulness in perhaps a
broader way than any single perspective might permit. At the foundation we
will be trying to combine first person knowing with scientific points of
view. Beyond this important subjective/objective marriage, we will
combine insights from neuroscience with those of attachment research. This
approach will enable us to consider how the fundamental process of
attunement might be at work in the brain in states of interpersonal
resonance and the proposed form of intrapersonal attunement of
mindfulness.
Turning to the brain and attachment studies is not meant to favor these
two fields over any others, but rather to use them as a starting point. A
variety of fields will come into play as we examine the research on
memory, narrative, wisdom, emotion, perception, attention, and learning
along with explorations that go deeply into internal subjective experience.
I love science and am thrilled to learn from empirical explorations into
the deep nature of ourselves and our world. But I am also a clinician,
steeped in the world of subjective experience. Our internal world is real,
though it may not be quantifiable in ways that science often requires for
careful analysis. In the end, our subjective lives are not reducible to our
neural functioning. This internal world, this subjective stuff of the mind, is
at the heart of what enables us to sense each other’s pain, to embrace each
other at times of distress, to revel in each other’s joy, to create meaning in
the stories of our lives, to find connection in each other’s eyes.
 My own personal and professional interest in mindfulness emerged
recently in an unexpected way. After writing a text exploring how the brain
and relationships interact to shape our development, I was invited to offer
lectures at my daughter’s preschool about parenting and the brain. After
creating some workshops for parents, the preschool director, Mary Hartzell,
and I wrote a book in which we placed “mindfulness” as our first grounding
principle. As educators we knew that being considerate and aware, being
mindful, was the essential state of mind of a parent (or teacher or clinician)
to promote well-being in children.
After our book was published, numerous people asked how we came to
teach parents to meditate. This was a great question since neither Mary nor I
is trained to meditate nor did we think that we were “teaching meditation”
to parents. Mindfulness, in our view, was just the idea of being aware, of
being conscientious, with kindness and care. What we actually taught them
was how to be reflective and aware of their children, and themselves, with
curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love.
I am continually learning from my patients and from my students,
whether they are parents or high school students, therapists or scientists.
These questions about mindfulness and parenting inspired me to examine
the existing research in the growing field of mindfulness-based clinical
interventions. What struck me in learning about this area was that the
outcome measures for its clinical applications appeared to overlap with the
outcome measures of my own field of research in attachment: the study of
the relationship between parents and children.
This overlap of the ways in which well-being and resilience were
promoted by secure attachment and by mindful awareness practice was
fascinating. This similarity also dovetailed with the functions of a certain
integrative region of the brain, the middle aspects of the prefrontal cortex. I
became intrigued by this convergence and was eager to learn more about
the fascinating field of mindfulness. The outcome of this journey to explore
these ideas, experientially and conceptually, is this book on the mindful
brain.
This book is for people interested in knowing more about the mind and
how to develop it more fully, in themselves and in others. These ideas may
be especially useful for those who help others get along and grow, from
teachers and clinicians to mediators and community leaders. Each of the
people in the broad spectrum of these life roles is crucial in helping foster
well-being in our human society.
With this exciting view of integrating ideas among the worlds of
relationships, brain, and mind, I dove into direct experience within the
depths of the mind. I invite you to come along with me as we explore the
nature of mindful awareness that unfolded, moment by moment, in this
mind-opening journey of discovery.
THE MINDFUL BRAIN
 PART I

MIND, BRAIN, AND AWARENESS