Center for Healthy Minds

In Dharamsala, India, Richard Davidson meets the Dalai Lama.

"His Holiness challenged me and asked why we were not using the tools of modern neuroscience to study qualities such as kindness and compassion rather than negative qualities of mind such as depression and anxiety. I had no good answer, and on that day, I made a commitment to His Holiness and to myself that I would do everything within my power to help place these positive qualities on the scientific map.”

Along with colleague Steve Sutton, Richard Davidson publishes a review paper in the journal Current Opinion in Neurobiology calling on the scientific community to support and increase collaborations in the growing field of affective neuroscience, an area that examines how the neural structure and activity in the brain influences a person’s emotion and mood.

With colleagues, scientists in the lab including Chris Larson begin studying “startle responses” by measuring a person’s reaction to a sudden stimulus. Researchers assess responses to such stimuli in order to probe other ongoing emotional processes. Research has demonstrated that during negative emotions, startle magnitude is larger. Since startle responses are very short-lived, we can introduce startle “probes” at different latencies in an ongoing stream of information processing and in this way, characterize the time course of emotion very precisely.

The lab welcomes Tibetan Buddhist monk and long-term meditator Matthieu Ricard and leads the first experiment in the world to use fMRI imaging and EEG techniques to look at meditation’s impact on the brain in long-term meditation practitioners.

In a groundbreaking paper published in the journal Science, Richard Davidson is part of a team to discover that placebos may alter the experience of pain in a person’s brain.

Center scientists Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson are the first to discover that meditation can increase gamma oscillations in the brain, which are key markers of neuroplasticity. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents the first time the journal features an article on meditation, ushering in a new era and the beginning of the field of contemplative neuroscience.

Center experts and collaborators discover that individuals with autism experience less activation in the fusiform gyrus – a part of the brain related to facial recognition – and increased activation in the amygdala, an area of the brain related to emotions, especially fear. The findings, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, are the first to examine how gaze fixation affects activity in the brain in individuals with autism.

The Center for Healthy Minds, first named the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, is founded at the Waisman Center, UW–Madison. With the support of generous donors and community members, the Center expands the Lab of Affective Neuroscience’s scope to include applied research on well-being outside of the lab in classrooms and the workplace.

Center Scientist Cory Burghy and others publish findings in Nature Neuroscience suggesting that early life stress affects girls differently than boys. The study shows that early life stress in girls predicts levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which may lead to increased anxiety and depressive symptoms in adulthood.

Former Center Graduate Student Helen Weng and collaborators discover that compassion training, performed for two weeks for 30 minutes per day in novice meditators, alters the brain in key areas and results in an increase in pro-social and altruistic behavior.

Center scientists author a feature article in a special issue of Scientific American on the science of meditation, examining how ancient contemplative practices can influence the mind, body and well-being.

Healthy Minds Innovations, Inc. an external, affiliated non-profit dedicated to supporting the mission of the Center for Healthy Minds, was founded. The non-profit takes the discoveries and insights gleaned from Center research and transforms them into tools and services – as well as helps manage events and public speaking engagements for the Center.

Through forward-thinking investments by the Center’s community and longtime University of Wisconsin–Madison supporters John and Tashia Morgridge, the Center raises funds to recruit nine new endowed faculty members to launch an interdisciplinary approach to studying well-being through a variety of disciplines such as neuroscience, women’s health, education, contemplative studies and economics.

Larissa Duncan joins the Center for Healthy Minds as a new faculty member. Duncan studies the biological and psychological pathways through which secular, contemplative practices may support child and family well-being and improve health equity. A study from Duncan and her colleagues found that mindfulness training that addresses fear and pain during childbirth improves childbirth experiences and lessens depression symptoms both during pregnancy and the early postpartum period.

John Dunne joins the Center as the Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities. Dunne's work focuses on Buddhist philosophy and contemplative practice, especially in dialog with cognitive science. A prolific author, he publishes on a range topics, from technical works on Buddhist epistemology to broader works on the nature of Buddhist contemplative practices such as mindfulness.

With the support and generosity of UW–Madison, the Center expanded to become an administrative center under the College of Letters & Science and moved to its new home on West Washington Avenue. The move follows a number of gifts from donors to support the Center's growing scientific faculty and staff.

The space also houses the Center's newly-founded non-profit Healthy Minds Innovations, dedicated to cultivating well-being and relieving suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind.

The Center for Healthy Minds releases the Kindness Curriculum for free to the public. More than 25,000 people have signed up to receive it globally. Educators and parents can access a free copy in Spanish or in English.

In collaboration with Richard Davidson and other scientists around the country, the American Heart Association releases a first-ever statement on meditation, saying that “studies of meditation suggest a possible benefit on cardiovascular risk, although the overall quality and in some cases quantity of study data is modest.”

The statement is significant because it represents the first time that a professional medical society issued a consensus statement recommending meditation as a treatment option for a medical illness.

Center collaborator Helen Weng publishes a study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology suggesting that as little as two weeks of compassion meditation training – intentionally cultivating positive wishes to understand and relieve the suffering of others – may reduce the distress a person feels when witness another’s suffering.

In 2018, Healthy Minds Innovations pilots Healthy Minds @Work, a well-being program for the mind, based on science and designed for life at work. The training program teaches simple, always-accessible skills to develop personal well-being that permeates all aspects of life, creating a more focused, compassionate culture at work and beyond.

Simon Goldberg joins the Center for Healthy Minds as an assistant professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology. Goldberg uses tools drawn from psychotherapy research to better understand the therapeutic processes and outcomes of mindfulness and meditation-based interventions. He has collaborated on several randomized trials of contemplative interventions with Center staff and has conducted systematic reviews and meta-analyses of mindfulness-based interventions. Goldberg is also interested in therapist characteristics that relate to patient outcomes in psychotherapy, including interpersonal skills and empathy.

Findings from the Center for Healthy Minds suggest that expectant mothers' mental health may influence the white matter development in the brain of her child.

Melissa Rosenkranz joins the Center for Healthy Minds faculty as a Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Neuroscience and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. Rosenkranz is interested in the neural-immune and biochemical mechanisms by which individual differences in response to emotion alter resilience to and the progression of disease. Rosenkranz is also interested in the impact of meditation practice on emotion response and, subsequently, on the neural-immune and biochemical mechanisms underlying resilience or vulnerability to disease.

The Loka Initiative, a new interdisciplinary collaboration among UW–Madison programs and is housed in the Center for Healthy Minds, launches with a two-day symposium. The mission of the Loka Initiative is to support faith-led environmental and climate efforts locally and around the world by helping build capacity of faith leaders and culture keepers of indigenous traditions, and by creating new opportunities for projects, partnerships, and public outreach.

In 2020, staff created a sustainability committee and sought certification through the UW-Madison Office of Sustainability's Green Office Program. The bronze certification focuses on waste and recycling, so Center's staff updated procedures for composting, extra recycling, printing double sided, etc for implementation at the Center for Healthy Minds office at 625 W. Washington Avenue.

PBS Wisconsin Education’s project Kindness in the Classroom won the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement for Informational/Instructional Programming. The video series focuses on implementing the Center's Kindness Curriculum – a free 24-lesson mindfulness guide designed for PreK-K classrooms.

Researchers at the Center for Healthy Minds introduce a new framework based on scientific evidence that suggests that well-being can be thought of as a set of skills that people can learn through practice in daily life.

Findings from researchers at the Center for Healthy Minds and the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison suggests that a fully remote program administered on smartphones can also produce some of the benefits of in-person mindfulness interventions, including a reduction in symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress and an increase in feelings of social connection.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison has received a $2.5 million four-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a research network on the plasticity of well-being and to develop innovative measures of the key pillars of well-being. Faculty and experts from the Center for Healthy Minds are leading the effort.

The Center for Healthy Minds formed an Equity Advisory Council, an external body of world class scholars and practitioners who are invited to provide advice to the Center's community on all facets of work through the lens of equity, inclusion and diversity.