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.”

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.

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.

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.