[Applause]
how many of you have been in a really
stressful situation and you’ve struggled
to stay calm and focused can you try and
get back to that place maybe it was a
car accident or a fight with someone you
love or maybe a really big exam at
school let’s go there that feeling in
your chest and the way your brain
doesn’t work quite right are you with me
okay
there are millions of kids like this
they feel like that every single day
these kids live in poverty and with
poverty comes trauma and trauma create
stress and stress means your brain
doesn’t work quite right these kids go
to school and they feel like you felt in
your stressful event and they try to
learn but often they can’t and all the
foreign aid money that goes into
building schools and providing education
for these kids it may not help them
there are millions of other kids in the
world who also feel like this ten
percent of children in many
industrialized countries they’re
diagnosed with ADHD or anxiety these
kids are stressed out and they have a
hard time learning people who feel like
this adults children they are everywhere
maybe one of them is sitting right
beside you or maybe you live with one of
them or maybe you are one of them
this little boy was one he’s my son I’d
like to share with you something that we
did that helped these kids learn how to
calm down and focus and it involved a
pinwheel like this one let’s check in
how are y’all feeling
are you calm and focused if you are
let’s go back to that stressful event
try and remember in the middle of it
your chest the way all that adrenaline
is rushing and your head is so fuzzy can
you get there got it okay now I want you
to imagine you’re holding a pinwheel
like this one every one arm up you can
close your eyes it makes you more
comfortable what I want you to do is
take a deep breath and blow on the
pinwheel and imagine it spins here we go
and again I want you to take a deep
breath and blow and imagine it spins one
more time blow it spins now how do you
feel any better if you do you use your
body to change or regulate your brain
state you did something we call
self-regulation
maybe you regulated your feelings a
little bit calm down after I stressed
you out maybe you regulated your
thoughts a little you focused on the
pinwheel and your breathing instead of
the car accident for many people
self-regulation is really difficult and
here’s why self-regulation requires that
we use our prefrontal cortex that’s the
rational part of our brain here it deals
with attention and organization and
planning it has to regulate our amygdala
here these are our LARM centers this is
like anxiety and fear the part of the
brain that keeps us alive it’s pretty
hard to override self-regulation is
tough on a good day for children it’s
even harder the development of
children’s prefrontal cortices happens
slowly for a child it won’t be fully
functional until they’re 25 years old
and this explains everything about my
teenager’s behavior kids that have
suffered trauma or have challenges with
attention and anxiety the development of
their prefrontal cortex is either
different or delayed so these kids are
not yet good at overriding these big
emotions like anxiety and they’re not
very good at focusing their attention
yet but the good news is just like we
can train our bodies we can train our
brains but the bad news is teaching
young kids to do this it’s really hard
self-regulation is invisible and it’s
just not in the curriculum for most
schools I think that for many of these
kids teaching them to self-regulate is
more important than teaching them to
read and write if we want these kids to
get an education we developed a brain
computer application to help children
learn to self-regulate like many
innovative projects this one started
with a complete coincidence and me
taking a leap it started when I’ve been
asked to do a design workshop with young
children at a computer conference in
Nepal I’d never been to Asia never
worked with young children and a
different culture I didn’t speak Nepali
but I took that leap and I got on a
plane and I found myself on the way to
Kathmandu but that’s not the leap it got
worse so after the conference I decided
to go on vacation I went to ecotourism
town called pokhara it’s incredibly
beautiful it sits at the foothills of
the Himalayas and it’s also impoverished
Nepal is one of the poorest countries in
the world and there I met a friend of a
friend for lunch her name is Leslie
chessick and she’s a trauma therapist
she volunteers for an organization
called Nepal how society they run this
amazing therapeutic school for kids
living in poverty young girls they’ve
done some incredible work there these
kids even though they may not look like
it these kids have suffered more trauma
than most of you can even imagine Nepal
was at Civil War for a while some of
these kids have seen their parents or
their relatives shot right in front of
them many of them have suffered sexual
abuse these are little girls they’re
malnourished and most of them are beaten
repeatedly all of that trauma it shuts
down the development of their prefrontal
cortex so the kids were healing and they
were learning at the school but
was slow and hard work and as I listen
to Leslie talk about these kids I
started to get stressed my amygdala
started firing
I felt so anxious and not because I
could imagine what these kids had been
through but because of my own son I have
a son who was so stressed out at school
that he couldn’t learn and I knew and I
know what it feels like to sit outside a
grade one classroom every day and wonder
how many minutes are going to go by
before he comes out of that classroom in
tears or an anger and says take me home
I’m done every day my son went to
elementary school I felt like I was
trying to save his self-esteem I was
fighting to create a positive future for
him empathy is an amazing force because
my prefrontal cortex thought I was on
vacation but instead what happened is I
said to Leslie I want to help with my
son we used different kinds of things to
help him learn to self-regulate it was a
process but one of the things that was
really successful were some simple
biofeedback games I’d found a game we
had to calm himself down he had to
control his heartrate to make these blue
dancers slow down in their dance and he
got really good at that I realized how
powerful these tools were it was late
one night he just had a horrible day at
school this is a really bright kid so
his mind it’s going round and round I
cannot get him to sleep he’s overtired
and I said to him do you remember what
it felt like in your body when you
slowed down the blue dancers can we give
that a try
sure mom he was asleep in minutes at
eight years old he had learned to
self-regulate without the computer
application and so as Leslie was talking
about these little girls at the school I
had this crazy idea and I wondered like
could I design a brain computer system
for these kids that might work I knew I
couldn’t use heartrate it’s not very
reliable and when kids are moving around
it doesn’t work these kids can’t sit
still but we now have a technology that
can measure brainwaves
for $99 we can get a headset that looks
like this one and it can tell us if a
child is calm or anxious and it can tell
us if a child is focused or distracted
and we wrote a program so it could send
that information to a tablet like an
iPad and the iPad can display that
information about what’s going on in the
child’s brain this kind of system is
called a brain computer application and
we can see what’s happening in our
brains it’s called
neurofeedback if we want to learn to
self-regulate it turns out neurofeedback
is a really great way to do it it’s like
having a coach right inside your head
and the coaches yeah that’s right you’re
doing it right or nope not quite try
this so as I talk these ideas over with
Leslie she was incredibly positive about
it so I went home to Canada and I pulled
together some funding and a small group
of students that I hand-picked from
Simon Fraser University and we built the
first version of mindful the system is a
brain-computer application that means
the tablet is controlled by your
brainwaves uses neurofeedback
runs on an Android tablet it’s portable
it’s solar powered and it was built for
children who had never used a computer
who had not yet learned to read or write
who didn’t speak English
who had developmental delays and
behavioral challenges was an easy design
problem to solve it was the first of its
kind there are two main ideas that were
really important as we created mindful
so the first was that I needed to forget
everything I had learned designing
software for children over the last 20
years seriously Leslie gave me a book
and it was called crazy like us and it
talked about how people come to a new
culture and they want to help and they
bring all their assumptions about what’s
going to help this group of people and
they’re almost always wrong because
cultures are different and I saw an
example of
at the school when they gave me a tour
through so there was a sand tray like
this it’s used for play therapy and the
idea is that the kids take the little
animals and they talk about what’s
happened to them and they act out the
trauma and it’s a healing process except
for it wasn’t working at all in Nepal
cows have these big ferocious horns
they’re sacred in Hindu culture which
means they’re not always penned in they
wander through the streets and it’s
scary for me let alone these little kids
dogs roam in feral packs and bite
children and to the south there’s a
jungle that still has Tigers in it so
for these kids animals are not safe and
they hadn’t grown up on Disney so
animals definitely don’t talk I took
this picture to remind myself in Nepal
cows don’t talk they just walk into
people’s houses instead of relying on my
assumptions about what might work or
might not work Lesley and I spent a
great deal of time with the kids we
tried to understand their world I took
pictures I took photographs I brought
all that home with me and it was
critical for me to be able to create
neural feedback games for these kids
that they would understand that was
based on things that were familiar in
their world so that was the first really
important thing the second important
thing was my solution to the problem of
how am I going to teach these kids how
to self-regulate no idea and then I had
a moment when I realized that all
children already know how to be relaxed
and focus their attention
this little boy when he blows on the
pinwheel just like you just did he calls
his body and he focuses attention on the
pinwheel I just had to figure out how to
get kids to practice this repeatedly
over and over and over again so it would
get easier for them maybe semi-automated
it a little bit and so when they were in
a stressful situation or they were in a
noisy classroom they would be able to
self-regulate better this is how mindful
works
we tell the child what they need to do
we play an animation on the tablet and
this one it shows the girl she’s blowing
on the pinwheel the pinwheel spins the
girl leaves the screen and leaves the
pinwheel behind and it’s the child to
turn they blow on the pinwheel on the
tablet their body shifts a little bit
they calm down their brainwaves follow
the headset picks that up and it sends
it to the tablet and a programmer II
wrote makes the pinwheel spin each time
they can do this for a short period of
time they are in a token the jar stores
tokens just like its stores rice in
their houses where they live repetitive
practice is key so you need to collect
tokens there’s a series of games and
another one you have to stay calm for a
longer period of time to land this
paraglider this is a really familiar
sight to these kids they live in an
eco-tourism hub where trekkers wait for
their tourism paraglide down it’s really
relaxing watching them okay we are going
to see how this works
Levi it is no small thing to be calm on
this stage but what we’re going to see
is Levi demonstrate the paraglider game
there’s one token let’s see if you can
do it again
well done thank you mindful is a series
of games they all use neurofeedback and
they’re all based on activities that are
familiar to these kids they make
invisible brain processes visible in
ways that kids can understand
two years later we went back to Nepal to
test it out
we ran a field study at the school with
22 little girls over three months
first Leslie went ahead she taught some
of the counselors how to use the system
and they taught each other
my son Levi came with me and he taught
the kids how to use the system we split
the kids into two equivalent groups and
the counselors worked individually with
the first group practicing over six
weeks and then the second group we
assessed all of the children before we
started the study how their ability to
calm down pay attention all of the
children after the first group went and
all of the children after the second
group went and here’s what we found out
all of the kids improved their ability
to self-regulate in a variety of
situations on the playground in the
classroom when there was something
disruptive and they also got better at
paying attention so it worked
I was totally stunned I actually never
thought the project would work so it was
fantastic but there was something even
better and I’ll show you this little
line here so the kids in Group one got
better doing mindful and then these kids
got better doing mindful these kids
weren’t using mindful anymore and when
we assess them at the end they continued
to improve remember my son at bedtime
these kids learn how to self-regulate in
six weeks and they could do it without
the app in their classroom this is
really important because it means that
one tablet in the headset can help an
entire school of kids we have now built
two more versions of mindful four
completely different groups of kids
if we see this kind of positive result
continue I’ll feel more comforted that
we can help lots of kids there are over
1 billion children that live in poverty
for not much more than the cost of an
iPad we can have mindful in every school
imagine how much more effective foreign
aid could be if these schools also
taught children how to self-regulate
imagine if every child who struggled
with anxiety and attention in our
schools here had a chance to get better
at self-regulating imagine the kinds of
dalts these kids could grow into I
actually have a really good idea about
that because I know one of them now I
want you all of you to imagine what your
life could be like if you got better at
self-regulating thank you
[Applause]
how many of you have been in a really
stressful situation and you’ve struggled
to stay calm and focused can you try and
get back to that place maybe it was a
car accident or a fight with someone you
love or maybe a really big exam at
school let’s go there that feeling in
your chest and the way your brain
doesn’t work quite right are you with me
okay
there are millions of kids like this
they feel like that every single day
these kids live in poverty and with
poverty comes trauma and trauma create
stress and stress means your brain
doesn’t work quite right these kids go
to school and they feel like you felt in
your stressful event and they try to
learn but often they can’t and all the
foreign aid money that goes into
building schools and providing education
for these kids it may not help them
there are millions of other kids in the
world who also feel like this ten
percent of children in many
industrialized countries they’re
diagnosed with ADHD or anxiety these
kids are stressed out and they have a
hard time learning people who feel like
this adults children they are everywhere
maybe one of them is sitting right
beside you or maybe you live with one of
them or maybe you are one of them
this little boy was one he’s my son I’d
like to share with you something that we
did that helped these kids learn how to
calm down and focus and it involved a
pinwheel like this one let’s check in
how are y’all feeling
are you calm and focused if you are
let’s go back to that stressful event
try and remember in the middle of it
your chest the way all that adrenaline
is rushing and your head is so fuzzy can
you get there got it okay now I want you
to imagine you’re holding a pinwheel
like this one every one arm up you can
close your eyes it makes you more
comfortable what I want you to do is
take a deep breath and blow on the
pinwheel and imagine it spins here we go
and again I want you to take a deep
breath and blow and imagine it spins one
more time blow it spins now how do you
feel any better if you do you use your
body to change or regulate your brain
state you did something we call
self-regulation
maybe you regulated your feelings a
little bit calm down after I stressed
you out maybe you regulated your
thoughts a little you focused on the
pinwheel and your breathing instead of
the car accident for many people
self-regulation is really difficult and
here’s why self-regulation requires that
we use our prefrontal cortex that’s the
rational part of our brain here it deals
with attention and organization and
planning it has to regulate our amygdala
here these are our LARM centers this is
like anxiety and fear the part of the
brain that keeps us alive it’s pretty
hard to override self-regulation is
tough on a good day for children it’s
even harder the development of
children’s prefrontal cortices happens
slowly for a child it won’t be fully
functional until they’re 25 years old
and this explains everything about my
teenager’s behavior kids that have
suffered trauma or have challenges with
attention and anxiety the development of
their prefrontal cortex is either
different or delayed so these kids are
not yet good at overriding these big
emotions like anxiety and they’re not
very good at focusing their attention
yet but the good news is just like we
can train our bodies we can train our
brains but the bad news is teaching
young kids to do this it’s really hard
self-regulation is invisible and it’s
just not in the curriculum for most
schools I think that for many of these
kids teaching them to self-regulate is
more important than teaching them to
read and write if we want these kids to
get an education we developed a brain
computer application to help children
learn to self-regulate like many
innovative projects this one started
with a complete coincidence and me
taking a leap it started when I’ve been
asked to do a design workshop with young
children at a computer conference in
Nepal I’d never been to Asia never
worked with young children and a
different culture I didn’t speak Nepali
but I took that leap and I got on a
plane and I found myself on the way to
Kathmandu but that’s not the leap it got
worse so after the conference I decided
to go on vacation I went to ecotourism
town called pokhara it’s incredibly
beautiful it sits at the foothills of
the Himalayas and it’s also impoverished
Nepal is one of the poorest countries in
the world and there I met a friend of a
friend for lunch her name is Leslie
chessick and she’s a trauma therapist
she volunteers for an organization
called Nepal how society they run this
amazing therapeutic school for kids
living in poverty young girls they’ve
done some incredible work there these
kids even though they may not look like
it these kids have suffered more trauma
than most of you can even imagine Nepal
was at Civil War for a while some of
these kids have seen their parents or
their relatives shot right in front of
them many of them have suffered sexual
abuse these are little girls they’re
malnourished and most of them are beaten
repeatedly all of that trauma it shuts
down the development of their prefrontal
cortex so the kids were healing and they
were learning at the school but
was slow and hard work and as I listen
to Leslie talk about these kids I
started to get stressed my amygdala
started firing
I felt so anxious and not because I
could imagine what these kids had been
through but because of my own son I have
a son who was so stressed out at school
that he couldn’t learn and I knew and I
know what it feels like to sit outside a
grade one classroom every day and wonder
how many minutes are going to go by
before he comes out of that classroom in
tears or an anger and says take me home
I’m done every day my son went to
elementary school I felt like I was
trying to save his self-esteem I was
fighting to create a positive future for
him empathy is an amazing force because
my prefrontal cortex thought I was on
vacation but instead what happened is I
said to Leslie I want to help with my
son we used different kinds of things to
help him learn to self-regulate it was a
process but one of the things that was
really successful were some simple
biofeedback games I’d found a game we
had to calm himself down he had to
control his heartrate to make these blue
dancers slow down in their dance and he
got really good at that I realized how
powerful these tools were it was late
one night he just had a horrible day at
school this is a really bright kid so
his mind it’s going round and round I
cannot get him to sleep he’s overtired
and I said to him do you remember what
it felt like in your body when you
slowed down the blue dancers can we give
that a try
sure mom he was asleep in minutes at
eight years old he had learned to
self-regulate without the computer
application and so as Leslie was talking
about these little girls at the school I
had this crazy idea and I wondered like
could I design a brain computer system
for these kids that might work I knew I
couldn’t use heartrate it’s not very
reliable and when kids are moving around
it doesn’t work these kids can’t sit
still but we now have a technology that
can measure brainwaves
for $99 we can get a headset that looks
like this one and it can tell us if a
child is calm or anxious and it can tell
us if a child is focused or distracted
and we wrote a program so it could send
that information to a tablet like an
iPad and the iPad can display that
information about what’s going on in the
child’s brain this kind of system is
called a brain computer application and
we can see what’s happening in our
brains it’s called
neurofeedback if we want to learn to
self-regulate it turns out neurofeedback
is a really great way to do it it’s like
having a coach right inside your head
and the coaches yeah that’s right you’re
doing it right or nope not quite try
this so as I talk these ideas over with
Leslie she was incredibly positive about
it so I went home to Canada and I pulled
together some funding and a small group
of students that I hand-picked from
Simon Fraser University and we built the
first version of mindful the system is a
brain-computer application that means
the tablet is controlled by your
brainwaves uses neurofeedback
runs on an Android tablet it’s portable
it’s solar powered and it was built for
children who had never used a computer
who had not yet learned to read or write
who didn’t speak English
who had developmental delays and
behavioral challenges was an easy design
problem to solve it was the first of its
kind there are two main ideas that were
really important as we created mindful
so the first was that I needed to forget
everything I had learned designing
software for children over the last 20
years seriously Leslie gave me a book
and it was called crazy like us and it
talked about how people come to a new
culture and they want to help and they
bring all their assumptions about what’s
going to help this group of people and
they’re almost always wrong because
cultures are different and I saw an
example of
at the school when they gave me a tour
through so there was a sand tray like
this it’s used for play therapy and the
idea is that the kids take the little
animals and they talk about what’s
happened to them and they act out the
trauma and it’s a healing process except
for it wasn’t working at all in Nepal
cows have these big ferocious horns
they’re sacred in Hindu culture which
means they’re not always penned in they
wander through the streets and it’s
scary for me let alone these little kids
dogs roam in feral packs and bite
children and to the south there’s a
jungle that still has Tigers in it so
for these kids animals are not safe and
they hadn’t grown up on Disney so
animals definitely don’t talk I took
this picture to remind myself in Nepal
cows don’t talk they just walk into
people’s houses instead of relying on my
assumptions about what might work or
might not work Lesley and I spent a
great deal of time with the kids we
tried to understand their world I took
pictures I took photographs I brought
all that home with me and it was
critical for me to be able to create
neural feedback games for these kids
that they would understand that was
based on things that were familiar in
their world so that was the first really
important thing the second important
thing was my solution to the problem of
how am I going to teach these kids how
to self-regulate no idea and then I had
a moment when I realized that all
children already know how to be relaxed
and focus their attention
this little boy when he blows on the
pinwheel just like you just did he calls
his body and he focuses attention on the
pinwheel I just had to figure out how to
get kids to practice this repeatedly
over and over and over again so it would
get easier for them maybe semi-automated
it a little bit and so when they were in
a stressful situation or they were in a
noisy classroom they would be able to
self-regulate better this is how mindful
works
we tell the child what they need to do
we play an animation on the tablet and
this one it shows the girl she’s blowing
on the pinwheel the pinwheel spins the
girl leaves the screen and leaves the
pinwheel behind and it’s the child to
turn they blow on the pinwheel on the
tablet their body shifts a little bit
they calm down their brainwaves follow
the headset picks that up and it sends
it to the tablet and a programmer II
wrote makes the pinwheel spin each time
they can do this for a short period of
time they are in a token the jar stores
tokens just like its stores rice in
their houses where they live repetitive
practice is key so you need to collect
tokens there’s a series of games and
another one you have to stay calm for a
longer period of time to land this
paraglider this is a really familiar
sight to these kids they live in an
eco-tourism hub where trekkers wait for
their tourism paraglide down it’s really
relaxing watching them okay we are going
to see how this works
Levi it is no small thing to be calm on
this stage but what we’re going to see
is Levi demonstrate the paraglider game
there’s one token let’s see if you can
do it again
well done thank you mindful is a series
of games they all use neurofeedback and
they’re all based on activities that are
familiar to these kids they make
invisible brain processes visible in
ways that kids can understand
two years later we went back to Nepal to
test it out
we ran a field study at the school with
22 little girls over three months
first Leslie went ahead she taught some
of the counselors how to use the system
and they taught each other
my son Levi came with me and he taught
the kids how to use the system we split
the kids into two equivalent groups and
the counselors worked individually with
the first group practicing over six
weeks and then the second group we
assessed all of the children before we
started the study how their ability to
calm down pay attention all of the
children after the first group went and
all of the children after the second
group went and here’s what we found out
all of the kids improved their ability
to self-regulate in a variety of
situations on the playground in the
classroom when there was something
disruptive and they also got better at
paying attention so it worked
I was totally stunned I actually never
thought the project would work so it was
fantastic but there was something even
better and I’ll show you this little
line here so the kids in Group one got
better doing mindful and then these kids
got better doing mindful these kids
weren’t using mindful anymore and when
we assess them at the end they continued
to improve remember my son at bedtime
these kids learn how to self-regulate in
six weeks and they could do it without
the app in their classroom this is
really important because it means that
one tablet in the headset can help an
entire school of kids we have now built
two more versions of mindful four
completely different groups of kids
if we see this kind of positive result
continue I’ll feel more comforted that
we can help lots of kids there are over
1 billion children that live in poverty
for not much more than the cost of an
iPad we can have mindful in every school
imagine how much more effective foreign
aid could be if these schools also
taught children how to self-regulate
imagine if every child who struggled
with anxiety and attention in our
schools here had a chance to get better
at self-regulating imagine the kinds of
dalts these kids could grow into I
actually have a really good idea about
that because I know one of them now I
want you all of you to imagine what your
life could be like if you got better at
self-regulating thank you
[Applause]
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