I really pursued in a more scientifically rigorous way, “What does happen when you change the focus of your attention and, do things to modulate, moderate, the quality of attention that you are using? How does this change your brain? How does that all work?”

Welcome, beloved viewers, to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. Today’s program features Part 2 of our interview with neurobiologist and researcher Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz of the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, USA.

Dr. Schwartz, who graduated with honors in philosophy from the University of Rochester, USA, has published nearly a hundred academic articles in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry as well as several books, and is well versed in Buddhist philosophy, specializing in the concept of mindfulness or conscious awareness. He studies the influence of mindfulness on brain function and is an expert in self-directed neuroplasticity or the mind’s ability to purposefully reorganize neural pathways in the brain.

Dr. Schwartz is best known for his four-step method of treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a condition characterized by unwanted thoughts or obsessions and repetitive behaviors. For example, some OCD sufferers fear germs so much that they engage in constant, excessive hand washing.

What originally got you interested in obsessive- compulsive disorder and the science of the brain?

We actually stumbled on the study of obsessive-compulsive disorder way back in the 1980s when it was thought to be a very rare condition, and we just thought it was interesting. And it turned out that it was a lot more common than we thought, and then as I've described in some of my writings, when I started to see how obsessive-compulsive disorder manifested itself in people who suffer from it, by which I specifically mean they're getting these urges to watch and check. They're getting these terrible feelings; they're getting these intrusive, bothersome thoughts telling them that they're no good, telling them terrible things that they know do not make sense, that they know are not true.

I realized that this gave me an opportunity to study this interface between the mind and the brain, because we had done these positron emission tomography brain imaging studies that show there was something going on in the brain. And specifically in the bottom of the front of the brain, right above the eye sockets, a part of the brain called the “orbital frontal cortex” and this is basically, among other things, an error-detection circuitry in the brain and it's overactive.

So we were seeing that people who had obsessive-compulsive disorder had an overactive error-detection circuitry, but they realized that the way they were thinking and feeling didn't make sense so this enabled me to say, “Well, the reason why you're feeling like everything is wrong is because your brain is sending you a false message.”

And because of the nature of the condition, not every condition leaves the people who suffer from it with as clear an awareness as obsessive-compulsive disorder does, but most people with obsessive-compulsive disorder can go, “Yes, I can see how that makes sense. My brain is sending me a false message.”

And when I saw that people could really take that, use it, work with it, it gave me a tremendous opportunity to study the relationship between attention or the mind and the brain and then we were fortunate to be able to show that when people did that it changed how their brain worked, and that enabled us to basically have a whole lot of scientific work going forward and write books about it, etc.

The Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, also known as the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, states, “As a man thinks, so is he.” Similarly, Dr. Schwartz says that paying attention to our thoughts and purposely focusing our minds can lead to great transformations.

These techniques of mindfully refocusing your brain, can you give us some examples of how the average person can use this?

In the work that I did with Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “The Aviator,” trying to help an actor portray a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder, you can actually do it in reverse. And, of course, that’s relevant to any person, which is that you form an image in your mind of a way you’re wanting to portray yourself and then focus your attention in ways that are consistent with achieving the goal of presenting yourself in that way.

That principal obviously applies to regular people, to any person. If you form an image in your mind of how you want to behave, you can become that, and on top of that the science that we’ve done has shown that you change your brain in the process of doing that, so that the brain actually evolves to become the image that you’re portraying.

And in Leo DiCaprio’s case, in becoming a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it took months for him to fully get out of it, because it took months for him to sort of develop the process of getting into it. So this kind of focus of attention in some significant way changes who you are, changes your inner chemistry; so it's powerful stuff.

When Science and Spirituality returns, Dr. Schwartz will discuss his spiritual journey and how it has informed him in developing pioneering psychiatric theories. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality, where we’ve been speaking with neurobiologist Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz from the US about consciously using the mind’s power to transform our brains and ourselves. Dr. Schwartz now discusses how his spiritual life informs his scientific work.

I was a person of faith from the very beginning. To quote the great gospel singer, Dorothy Love Coats, “I got my religion when I was very young.” I'm a Jewish person and I was orthodox. I was very serious about it. But then in my later adolescence, I started to sort of fall away as adolescents do, but then in my early 20's, I became very, very interested in classical Buddhism.

So for 30 years, I was a very, very serious practitioner of classical Buddhism in what's called the “Theravada,” which means “the teaching of the elders.” So from that, I learned a lot about the practice of mindfulness and the practice of “Vipassana,” which tends to be translated as the word, “insight,” the very word we were using before about helping people with OCD, and that turns out to have been a clue for me about how to do this therapy.

According to Nyanaponika Thera, a Buddhist monk of the Theravada school, a key element of Insight Meditation is directness of vision or “bare attention,” meaning gaining direct knowledge through meditation, which is different from the inferential knowledge obtained through study and reflection. In developing insight through meditation, practitioners view their physical and mental processes directly, independent of abstract concepts or emotional evaluations, thus allowing them to reach “reality.”

So I practiced very seriously what's called “Insight Meditation” for three decades and then in the last couple of years, for a lot of reasons, a lot of which I think have to do with the influence of God on a person through their life, I really did come to see Jesus Christ as a critical part of my life and became baptized. To quote another philosopher, who I’m very, very involved in studying for the last few years, Soren Kierkegaard the great Danish Christian existentialist, what we’re really trying to do is become the people God wants us to be.

What we are trying to focus our attention on and the self that we are trying to become is the self that through God’s effect on us we come to know that’s where we want to go. And you can see that everything we were saying here about how focused attention changes your brain is very compatible with that, because you’re basically forming a view of the self, you are, through prayer and meditation, coming to see what God wants you to be. You are focusing on it.

Epigenetics is the study of how our environment and lifestyle can transform the way our genes are expressed, and Dr. Schwartz says that evidence from this field further indicates that we’re beings whose lives are not solely dictated by the physical structure of our brains.

You have genetically inherited patterns of brain activity, there is no question about that. That is completely non-controversial, but even with your genetically inherited patterns of brain activity, and no question left to their own devices, those genetically inherited patterns of brain activity are going to have very, very large effects on how you live your life. However, if you realize that you can transcend, you can go beyond those patterns of brain activity through the power of your attention, and through focusing your attention more wisely, you can change the expression of those genes.

So your patterns of genetic inheritance don’t determine what you are, because how you live, the cultural environments you immerse yourself in, the beliefs of the people around you, how you interact with those people, the degree of your faith, the philosophers that you read and expose yourself to, all of these things lead to differences in the way you focus your attention, which have direct effects on how your genes express themselves. There’s a whole new field that has grown up in the last few years called epigenetics, which to a significant degree is about these environmental effects on how the genes are expressed inside of an organism.

So, these kinds of cultural environmental belief-related effects that influence how we focus our attention, have very large potential effects on how your genes express themselves, and that is going to influence how proteins get synthesized and how enzymes act and how your neurochemicals are basically working together and the take-home message is, “If you believe that you don’t have the power to do any of that, you are not going to do it.” So we need to have a culture where people are encouraged to realize, “You have a lot of power over what you can do with your biology.”

We sincerely thank Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz for offering his insights on the biology of the brain and how it interacts powerfully with mindfulness to shape our lives. We wish him the very best in his future research in this field and in developing therapies for his patients.

For more details on Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, please visit Books by Dr. Schwartz are available at

Coming up next is Words of Wisdom after Noteworthy News here on Supreme Master Television. May your life be blessed with God’s love, comfort and light.