Speaker Biography

Brian L. Ackerman

Meditation and Mindfulness training and Services,USA

Title: The Brain’s Evolution Toward Mindfulness

Brian L. Ackerman
Biography:

Brian L. Ackerman MD a Harvard Medical School Psychiatrist who is the Director of Meditation and Mindfulness training and Services and the Thrive Behavioral Health Program at the Kent Center in Rhode Island, 

Abstract:

Brain model to help us understand how to use the best part of the brains, our neo-cortex and pre-frontal cortex to restrain and understand better what emanates from another part of our brains: the Amygdala and Limbic system. Dr. Ackerman will suggest that because all human beings have an Amygdala and Limbic system, all human beings suffer from limbic dysregulation, and that our so called normal brain is itself disordered.

 

Dr. Ackerman is having great success with this new treatment modality that seeks to help patients and staff alike become more interested in themselves by learning, in greater detail, how their brain works and the resultant two levels of mind: upper and lower, which leave every human being divided.

 

Dr. Ackerman posits that the evolution of the brain from mammalian to human changed in such a way as to allow humans to think abstractly.  This capacity for abstraction, allows us both to have ideas and then beyond this to ponder further which of these ideas are useful and constructive, and which are not. Dr. Ackerman will go on to propose that because humans are the only species who can be aware of their own thoughts, that this particular facility; not our thinking per se, but our ability to meta-think: think about what we think, puts human beings in the driver’s seat of their own evolution.  We have the ability to train ourselves to ‘naturally select’ our best thoughts, feelings, moods, and impulses, and behaviors while learning with mindfulness to develop our capacity to free themselves from all that is counterproductive.