Professor of clinical psychiatry Daniel Siegel presents Mindfulness and Neural Integration at TEDxStudioCityED Conference (Transcript)
Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Mindfulness and Neural Integration by Daniel Siegel, MD at TEDxStudioCityED
TRANSCRIPT:
Thank you. Good morning, that was beautiful.
You know, right before Fred Rogers died, his team had actually contacted me to try to present the case for why television should keep at the pace of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. And so we were about to plan that whole thing and then he passed away. But it was an amazing thing to think about the generations of people that have learned to understand their feelings, to make them mentionable and manageable.
What I’m going to talk to you today is about how schools can combine with technology in the way of promoting self-regulation. So I’m going to do this with no slides, but with one model of the brain. So if you reach under your chairs, glued underneath there you’ll find, if you reach in there, pull out your hand and take your hand model there, and put your thumb in the middle, and put your fingers over the top. And this is a very — my daughter never wants me to say this but — a handy model of the brain. And it’s oriented like this.
And we’re going to talk about the connection among three things. We’re going to talk about this brain that’s in your head, that has the face over here, and has a top of the brain, the lower parts of the brain. The part of the brain connected to the whole body comes through the spinal cord, in addition to some other ways.
And so this brain sits in your body — we’re going to talk about the brain and the body. We’re also going to talk about the mind, which is different from the brain. And we’re going to talk about the mind and its connection to the brain and the body.
Then we’re going to talk about the third thing, which is, we’re going to talk about relationships. So those three things we’re going to cover today: talking about relationships, the mind, and the brain.
When you really think about this for a while, you can come up with some fascinating ways where you can understand how, for example, Mr. Rogers’ television show experienced by a young child within a family setting could actually promote something called self-regulation. And so we’re going to have to talk about what is regulation, and we’re going to even have to address the question of what is the self.
So for me, whenever we use a word, we need to make sure we understand what we mean by it, so we have a shared understanding if we’re going to do something about it.
So, how did Mr. Rogers create the experience where kids can learn that feelings are mentionable and they’re manageable? How did he do that?
Well, when you think about how he did it, you come up with this really fundamental way that schools, in fact, can embrace the wisdom that Mr. Rogers had for all of us, and teach not only reading, writing, arithmetic — very important 3 Rs — but another 3 Rs I’m going to suggest to you, which are the core of my talk, which is reflection, first extra R, relationships, the next R, and the third one is resilience.
Because when you build a certain kind of approach to reflection, kids actually develop the capacity to mention their feelings and to then be able to manage them, exactly what Mr. Rogers said we ought to be able to do. And that’s the basis of emotional intelligence actually, and it’s the basis, as you’ll see in a moment, of social intelligence, because when you understand your own feelings and learn to manage them, you actually can understand other people. It’s actually incredible. So, this reflective ability is something schools can teach. That’s the next R.