Tamara Russell

Neuroscience researcher and Martial Arts specialist (United Kingdom) who took part in the conference 02: Stories for Healing? and 04: Storytelling: the Business of All? https://youtu.be/2E11pNjPUmo en français Dr. Tamara Russell is a neuroscientist, author, clinical psychologist, martial arts expert and leading Mindfulness Innovator. She has helped people all around the world transform their lives using her ground-breaking applied mindfulness techniques that are designed with the brain in mind. These applied translational neuroscience tools allow everyone the chance to make better decisions in line with their core values and live well. With two PhDs and a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu, Tamara's work integrates mind, brain and body in a totally unique approach to well-being and thriving that combines movement, neuroscience and creativity. Her three applied mindfulness programs include Body in Mind Training, Tools to Transform and The Dragon Way to Mental Wealth (and for Families and Young People - What Colour is Your Dragon?). Tamara is involved in international research investigating how mindfulness changes the structure of the brain. She lectures in Neuroscience and Mindfulness at Kings College London.  Tamara is the Founder and Co-Director of a not for profit organization The Mindfulness Centre of Excellence. This organization was founded in 2011 after sharing the stage with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Sao Paulo Brazil at a Symposium exploring how ancient contemplative technologies can inform the challenges of modern living. Tamara is the author of three books “Mindfulness in Motion”, “#whatismindfulness”, and “What Colour is Your Dragon?”. — an interview by Vassili Silovic, Writer and Director of documentary films, recorded at Les Champs Libres (Rennes) in December 2023 in the framework of the serie "What stories for our time?". Tamara Russell « Finding the words, through the body »  Train the brain, as well as the body. I suppose people to have the experience that I had, when I first saw a brain in a jar, it's kind of a really interesting moment to think: "wow, this is one part of this Powerhouse of what it means to be a thinking feeling creating human being". And it's this crazy thing that we really know not very much about. Of course, there's been a lot of advances over the last decades and particularly with the Advent of neuro-imaging techniques where we can study the live brain. But there's still so much that we don't know and Consciousness is another topic as well. Do we overestimate or underestimate our brain?Probably both... We overestimate in terms of believing what our brain tells us, which can be problematic in many cases, but we underestimate its potential and particularly the potential that can come from training it. We think about going to the gym and training our bodies. I mean we're obsessed with going to the gym and training our physical body. But we don't really do very much to train our brain. Stimulate attention. I think there are multiple ways that you can train the brain. And, for me, the place where I'm most interested in training the brain is, training the attention networks of the brain. This is particularly important in our modern culture, where our attention is really hijacked by multimedia, by the pace of life, and it's news to many people that we can train various faculties of our attention. So, we can train ourselves to notice how the aperture of our attentional focus narrows and widens, and we can then use that function more flexibly knowing when is it important for me to really narrow the focus, when is it important for me to really widen the focus, just like we do with the eye or with a camera. "Zooming in" vs. "Zooming out". When we're working particularly on creating there is this movement where we might really zoom in. And we might really want high quality sustained focused attention.