An interview with Research Psychologist Matt Hirshberg

Part Two of Two

According to Mental Health America’s August 2024 report on the State of Mental Health in America:

“The nation’s youth continue to present cause for concern. One in five young people from ages 12-17 experienced at least one major depressive episode in the past year, yet more than half of them (56.1%) did not receive any mental health treatment. More than 3.4 million youth (13.16%) had serious thoughts of suicide.”[1]

What tools are available to help teens cope?  Matt Hirshberg is a research psychologist with the Center for Healthy Minds. In my second interview with him, we discuss his research into innovative techniques designed to improve teen mental health.

Dale Kushner: As a research psychologist who studies well-being, what models would you suggest parents teach their children for better mental health? Did your research yield any practical advice for parents or teachers of teens?

Matt Hirshberg: Step number one is for parents to take good care of themselves. It is no surprise that adolescent mental health has been declining alongside adult mental health. The best first thing a parent can do is try and be a good model – this means being honest about one’s own wellness and struggles, and modeling adaptive approaches to working with our challenges. A really important point is that we don’t have to be perfect or perfectly happy to be good models for our kids; we just need to be honest and embody useful ways of working with the challenges that life inevitably throws at us.[2]

DK: Why do you think it would be more useful to focus on “teenage flourishing” rather than “teenage mental health”?

MH: I’m not opposed to talking about teenage mental health, but flourishing includes mental health, and more. I like flourishing because it is not defined – mental health flourishing for each person will differ based on their interests and proclivities; it means each person gets to choose what brings them the greater meaning and purpose in life – choice and agency are important for everyone, but particularly so for teens.

DK: One of your important studies investigates mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) in pre-teens.[3]  As a researcher, how do you define mindfulness and mindfulness-based interventions (MBI)?

Matt Hirshberg: The intervention we are studying includes mindfulness, but also many other contemplative techniques that we believe are associated with well-being.

Mindfulness is most commonly defined as paying attention, on purpose, to the present moment, with an attitude of acceptance or non-judgment. In my view, a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) is an intervention that includes training in contemplative techniques intended to strengthen mindfulness.

There is debate in the field, though, about how to define these interventions. At the moment, the most prevalent view is that MBIs must primarily focus on mindfulness meditation practice. I don’t agree with this view, in part because there is not strong evidence linking the amount of formal meditation practice with positive outcomes.

There is increasing evidence that relatively little practice combined with training in contemplative mindsets can result in robust positive impacts.

Especially for youth, who are not likely to practice a lot of meditation, I believe it is critical to structure contemplative or meditation interventions around introductions to a variety of contemplative techniques and contemplative mindsets.[4]

DK: Can you explain why you focused on pre-teens?

MH: I am actually focused on teens, and high-school teens, because I think that it is around puberty that we develop the cognitive competencies to engage in a serious way with meditation practice.

There is accumulating evidence that late childhood is a period amenable to mindfulness-based intervention, but the evidence is equivocal about pre-teens in general, and there is strong evidence that if the implementation approach to pre-teen MBIs is not developmentally appropriate (e.g., if classroom teachers have only limited training teaching mindfulness in their classrooms), MBIs may be harmful for some kids (or at least not helpful).

I have chosen to study a broader framework of meditation-based interventions because mindfulness is just a small sliver of contemplative techniques and is focused on cultivating a narrow set of skills. There are other techniques and skills that may be helpful to teens.

In addition, the intervention I am studying includes a roughly equal amount of contemplative mindset training, which we believe is an important component of how these interventions support improved well-being.

DK: What are the critical developmental periods in late childhood? Do these critical periods occur across race, class and gender?

MH: I don’t think that there is much evidence that critical development periods differ by demographic or cultural factors. Adolescence is a second very critical period of brain development, when the brain starts to integrate longer range connections between regions and increases in efficiency.

Part of this process is called pruning, which eliminates connections between neurons in the brain that are not regularly utilized. The high level of plasticity during this time has led many researchers to speculate that if we could engender positive habits of mind and behavior during adolescence, the underlying function and structure of the brain would be shaped to accommodate these positive habits.

DK: What are “social competencies” and “social emotional learning”? How do they differ from cognitive learning?

MH: Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a bit of a misnomer because the competencies included in SEL include cognitive competencies. SEL sort of arose in opposition to an educational agenda that myopically focused on standardized metrics of learning, but what it is pointing to is a whole-child approach – the understanding that for adults to live happy, meaningful, socially productive lives, they need to be socially, emotionally, educationally, and physically well.

DK: What is “executive function” and why is it important in pre-teens?

Technically, executive functions (EFs) include executive attention and inhibitory control (being able to control what we attend to), working memory, being able to hold in mind and manipulate information, and cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adaptively switch between different sorts of tasks or instructions. EFs are important for everyone, but these competencies rapidly develop during the pre-teen/teen stage and reach adult levels. EFs are critically important for school as well.

DK: Can you extrapolate the results you found in pre-teens to adults? In terms of brain plasticity, is it never too late? Is the adage, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” untrue?

MH: It is never too late. Studies have shown significant brain plasticity based on changes in the behavior of individuals in their 70s. It is also the case that well-being on average rises and reaches its apex during senescence, which may have something to do with a more informed perspective on life’s challenges and changes. Everyone is capable of positive change!

[1] Mental Health America, The 2024 State of Mental Health in America  (August 2024)

[2] See also “Parents Under Pressure: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Mental health & Well-Being of Parents” August 2024

[3] Flook, L., Hirshberg, M. J., Gustafson, L., McGehee, C., Knoeppel, C., Tello, L. Y., Bolt, D. M., & Davidson, R. J. (2024). Mindfulness training enhances students’ executive functioning and social emotional skills. Applied Developmental Science. 1–20

[4] Hirshberg, M., “Meet Adolescents Where They Are: A Model for Effective, Universal Contemplative Interventions in Schools,” Scispace, May 22, 2023.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at Transcending the Past.

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “What You Need to Know about Personal and Group Forgiveness,” Part One of my interview with Matt Hirshberg, “Mindfulness for Women: Confronting and Overcoming ‘Othering’,” and “Can Mindfulness Bring About Real Change?”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.

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My husband and I used to joke that together we had a complete brain. He was the scientist, a man of logical and rational thinking. I was the artist, habitual dweller in the land of reverie, seeker of mysteries and mysticism. We identified ourselves in this neatly dualist way, and neuroscience seemed to reflect our conclusions.

Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain became a massive bestseller in the early 1980s. It popularized the idea that our brains are divided into right and left hemispheres and that each half is responsible for different and opposite functions.

Her book maintained that the right hemisphere was responsible for intuitive, impressionistic, dreamy, “feminine” functions while the left hemisphere was the more rational, here-and-now, “masculine” side of the brain.

This model replicated how my husband and I experienced the world. We perceived and evaluated situations differently. We used contrasting models to solve problems, and arrived at distinct conclusions and solutions. He relied on facts and proof; I inclined toward suppositions that questioned accepted knowledge. Cause and effect offered him clear answers. Cause and effect bored me. I liked to spin off possibilities. He liked B to always follow A. I liked to see what would happen if D followed A—and B disappeared completely! The majority of people we knew, as well as Western culture in general, shared my husband’s preferences. Some of our worst arguments resulted from the ways our apprehension of truth diverged.

Over the past decades, science has advanced our understanding of how the brain functions, and we can now say that any creative, thoughtful endeavor requires the use of our complete brain, the parts that order reality as well as the regions of emotion, memory, and ancestral wisdom. The ubiquitous yin-yang symbol above health food stores and yoga studios conveys the idea of opposition and interdependence within a container that comprises a whole.

Originating in China in the 3^rd century BCE, the yin-yang symbol was an outgrowth of a philosophy and cosmology that saw all things existing as inseparable and contradictory. The two opposites, yin and yang, represented two opposing energies that attract and complement each other, neither pole being superior to the other. To achieve harmony in mind, body, spirit and in the greater world, the two elements must be in balance. When the two were out of balance, catastrophes such as floods, plagues, and other disasters could occur.

The balancing of yin and yang is a potent visual reminder of how differences can exist within wholeness. Looking deeply into the symbol, we can see our mind/brains as the outer circle and the black and white representing differing aspects contained within.

This symbology mirrors how the old reductive models of left brain/right brain have needed updating. According to more recent research, the two brain hemispheres have differences but don’t function as independently of each other as previously thought. They differ in size and shape and in the number of neurons and neural size. They differ in their sensitivity to hormones and pharmaceutical agents and other ways as well, but the most significant difference lies in the type of attention they give the world. The hemispheres house different sets of values and priorities. As he describes in The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist, a research psychiatrist, believes that over time “there has been a relentless growth of self-consciousness (left brain) and a shift away from a reliance on right brain values (more interconnected, humane and holistic.) In the new 2019 edition, he chillingly writes:

“If I am right, the story of the Western world is one of increasing left brain hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the keynote. Instead, we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles toward the abyss.”

In a dialogue with Dr. Jonathan Rowson of the RSA’s Social Brain Centre, Dr. McGilchrist explained how the brain hemispheres function differently, though each is involved in everything we do. “For each hemisphere has a quite consistent, but radically different, ‘take’ on the world. This means that, at the core of our thinking about ourselves, the world and our relationship with it, there are two incompatible but necessary views that we need to try to combine. And things go badly wrong when we do not.” Note how similar this understanding is to the ancient Taoist cosmology of the necessary balance between yin and yang.

McGilchrist and others speak of how left-brain dominance over right-brain function has led the West to drift toward a reliance on abstract, de-contextualized thinking over a more intrinsic, fluid, reflexive thought process. As a contemporary example, we could say that our reliance on and false belief in algorithms to predict human behavior in industry, government, education, and science, and our institutionalization of metrics to assess accountability come at the expense of such human values as intuition and trustworthiness.

As humans, we may applaud ourselves for being a rational, thinking species, but growing scientific knowledge reveals us to be fundamentally a social species that needs and is molded by social interaction. Our behavior may, in fact, be based less on thought than on habit.

If McGilchrist and his colleagues are correct, their research has wide relevance for how we face the existential challenges of our time. Algorithms and abstract formulas predict the impact of climate change, yet too many of our leaders ignore the lived experience of hotter summers, wetter springs, and how quickly forests and coral reefs are disappearing. Teachers have testified about the recent phenomena of students’ inability to read human faces, pay attention, and empathize. And we are just beginning to see how cell phones, the Internet, and digital devices are adversely affecting our brains.

But good news comes from studies of brain plasticity. While unhealthy trends in society do not yet seem to have altered our brains in major structural ways, the question remains: can we, as a society, reverse the negative trends already in motion? The work of Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist I have mentioned in a previous blog, “‘Let It Go!’ More Than a Song Title, the Motto for Our Age,” offers hope and concrete ways to enhance well-being through meditations aimed at coping with difficult mind states such as depression, hyperactivity, or anxiety.

Dr. Davidson offers “mindfulness meditation” as an example in The Emotional Life of Your Brain:

“The term ‘mindfulness meditation’ refers to a form of meditation during which practitioners are instructed to pay attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally.  The process of learning to attend nonjudgmentally can gradually transform one’s emotional response to stimuli such that we can learn to simply observe our minds in response to stimuli that might provoke either negative or positive emotion without being swept up in these emotions.  This does not mean that our emotional intensity diminishes.  It simply means that our emotions do not perseverate.  If we encounter an unpleasant situation, we might experience a transient increase in negative emotions but they do not persist beyond the situation.”

Another researcher, the psychiatrist Dr. Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain That Changes Itself, offers case histories of almost miraculous transformative cures of those afflicted with pain, cerebral palsy, phantom pain syndrome, and other brain-related maladies through the use of specific brain exercises. For instance, he describes the case in which Dr. V.S. Ramachandran successfully removed an amputee’s phantom pain by “rewiring his brain map” through the use of a “mirror box” that made the patient seem to see his phantom limb in the box before him. While the “cures” Dr. Doidge describes may be rare cases, brain plasticity is not a hoax. Moreover, this may indeed be a crucial time in the history of our species and our planet for us to embrace and consciously activate all aspects of our brains; most importantly, those previously untapped aspects that allow us to understand and access the transformative powers available within us.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

 

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