Live Event with Scientist Norman Farb
Making Sense in Today's World
I’m thrilled to host our first (free) live event this Friday: a webinar featuring renowned researcher Norman Farb, Ph.D. Norm and I will explore his foundational discoveries in mindfulness and interoception and discuss their implications for emotional health in today’s rapidly changing, volatile world. We’ll dedicate time at the end for a live Q and A session.
To register for the webinar (it’s free!) and to view and download the audio and video afterward, please click the button on this resource page and sign up via Zoom. (Please also bookmark the page, which I’ll keep live at least through 2025; you’ll be able to find and download the audio and video here.)
Why Norm’s Work Matters
Before Friday’s event, I’d like to highlight why Norm’s work is so impactful, particularly now.
Norm isn’t just a contemplative scientist; he's also a longtime practitioner of yoga and mindfulness, granting him a uniquely integrated perspective on his research. He's exceptionally skilled at translating complex scientific insights into accessible language for each audience—a skill I deeply admire and strive to develop.
It's no exaggeration to say that Norm’s work changed the course of my own. Prior to meeting him, I was tracking what I called “embodied awareness” in my public classes, private sessions, and teacher training. Our paths crossed when someone thoughtfully handed me Norm’s card after a conference class I taught in Toronto in 2012.
When I reached out, Norm responded with characteristic warmth and generosity. We met in person for the first time in April 2013, just ten days after the Boston Marathon bombings shook my hometown and reverberated nationally. Our conversation initially centered around his groundbreaking research with Zindel Segal, revealing how mindfulness alleviated depression symptoms not merely cognitively, but also through the participants' embodied experiences.
We talked about Norm’s groundbreaking study, with Zindel Segal, which showed that mindfulness improved symptoms of depression not just in the brain, but in the felt experience of the study participants.
At the end of our lunch, Norm shared something that really electrified me. “The mindfulness stuff is cool,” he said, “but I’m exploring something else you might find interesting: interoception.”
Discovering that there was an established scientific term—and an entire research field—for the very phenomenon I had identified as central to emotional transformation profoundly impacted my study, teaching, writing, and private work.
It catalyzed a deeper look into an element of my first book: mindful awareness of the body.
That day marked the beginning of both a valued friendship and meaningful professional collaborations. We co-created a bi-monthly global gathering for interoception researchers. And we received a grant from the Mind and Life Institute to form a collaborative think tank examining embodiment and social justice with contemplative practitioners and scientists.
And in 2022, together with esteemed colleagues Charlotte Sahyoun and Kimberly Hagan, Norm and I and several other researchers collaborated to publish a randomized control trial comparing the benefits of power yoga to the fascia-centered therapeutic system I’d created and taught for years. (You can read and download the full study here.)
Norm’s Work on Depression + the Body
Norm’s influential 2010 study, "Mindfulness Alters the Neural Expression of Sadness," reinforced earlier findings that mindfulness supports emotional regulation. But crucially, it was the first to illuminate the mechanism by which this happens.
Initially, Norm and Zindel aimed to demonstrate that the mental aspects of mindfulness were responsible for improving the long-known mental aspects of depression, aligning with cognitive-behavioral therapy models.
However, the data led them in a surprising new direction.
Negative, self-referential thinking (the kind associated with heightened activity in the brain’s default mode network) is typical during sadness. In fact, we all experience an uptick in default mode activity when we’re upset.
But Norm’s study showed that people with depression are unique. During distress, they experience reduced activity in the brain’s body-sensing regions.
In other words, as Norm and Zindel describe in their book, what characterizes the experience of sadness in people with depression is the absence of embodied feelings and the presence of numbness, isolation, and avoidance—a kind of low-key dissociation.
And this numbing of sensation made their depression worse.
In contrast, participants trained in mindfulness learned to pay attention to moment-to-moment feelings in the body, and to see them as passing states of awareness—a kind of leaning in to difficult feelings.
This sensory awareness improved their subjective sense of well-being.
And, as multiple other studies show, people with depression have difficulty receiving signals that come from their bodies, and find it hard to trust these signals when they do receive them.
In 2022, Norm and colleagues extended these insights in a novel study showing that depression also correlates with deactivation not just in the brain’s interoception centers but in regions relating to proprioception and the brain’s maps of the body. (For more on those body maps, see this article.)
Norm’s early findings challenged the dominant paradigm in contemplative science which centered mental interventions and marginalized bodily ones. They paved the way for groundbreaking research on the role of embodied interventions for emotional health.
How can we practically apply these discoveries to enhance our lives today? Why does integrating sensory awareness into daily practice matter?
Join Norm and me this Friday as we delve into these compelling questions and more.
Additionally, I highly recommend Norm and Zindel’s accessible and insightful book, which beautifully combines science and practical strategies for emotional well-being.
Sources:
And in 2022, together with beloved colleagues: Eusebio, J., Forbes, B., Sahyoun, C., Vago, D. R., Lazar, S. W., & Farb, N. (2022). Contemplating movement: A randomized control trial of yoga training for mental health. Mental Health and Physical Activity, 23, 100483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mhpa.2022.100483
The novel 2010 study, entitled “Mindfulness Alters the Neural Expression of Sadness”: Farb, N. A., Anderson, A. K., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., & Segal, Z. V. (2010). Minding one's emotions: mindfulness training alters the neural expression of sadness. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 10(1), 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017151
And, as Norm and colleagues also showed in a companion study in 2022: Farb, N. A. S., Desormeau, P., Anderson, A. K., & Segal, Z. V. (2022). Static and treatment-responsive brain biomarkers of depression relapse vulnerability following prophylactic psychotherapy: Evidence from a randomized control trial. NeuroImage. Clinical, 34, 102969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2022.102969