Meditation and neuroscience

hairyheretic

Just came across an interesting article on Wired that I thought might interest the folks here .

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html

The Dalai Lama has a cold. He has been hacking and sniffling his way around Washington, DC, for three days, calling on President Bush and Condoleezza Rice and visiting the Booker T. Washington Public Charter School for Technical Arts. Now he's onstage at the Washington Convention Center, preparing to address 14,000 attendees at the Society for Neuroscience's annual conference.

The mood is tense. The State Department Diplomatic Security Service has swept the hallways for explosives. Agents stand at their posts.

The 14th incarnation of the Living Buddha of Compassion approaches the podium, clears his throat, and blows his nose loudly. "So now I am releasing my stress," he says. The audience dissolves into laughter.

The Dalai Lama is here to give a speech titled "The Neuroscience of Meditation." Over the past few years, he has supplied about a dozen Tibetan Buddhist monks to Richard Davidson, a prominent neuroscience professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson's research created a stir among brain scientists when his results suggested that, in the course of meditating for tens of thousands of hours, the monks had actually altered the structure and function of their brains. The professor thought the Dalai Lama would make an interesting guest speaker at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, and the program committee jumped at the chance. The speech also gives the Tibetan leader an opportunity to promote one of his cherished goals: an alliance between Buddhism and science.

But the invitation has sparked a noisy row within the neuroscience community. To protest the talk, some scientists set up an online petition, which was immediately hacked by the pro-Dalai Lama faction. Others are boycotting the event or withholding their conference papers. Still others have demanded - unsuccessfully - time for a rebuttal.

All of which may explain the lama's ailment. "His Holiness' cold is a manifestation of the opposition of some scientists to his coming to the conference," a young Chinese Buddhist explains to me.

The protesters complain that the Tibetan leader isn't qualified to speak about brain science. They fret that he'll draw media attention away from important findings presented at the conference. Worst of all, his presence muddles the distinction between objective inquiry and faith. "We don't want to mix science and religion in our children's classrooms," says Bai Lu, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, "and we don't want it at a scientific meeting."

One of the petition organizers, Lu Yang Wang, is even more blunt: "Who's coming next year?" he asks. "The pope?"

Richard Davidson, 54, is at once a distinguished scientist and an avid spiritual seeker. He became fascinated with meditation in the '60s. As a graduate student at Harvard, he channeled that interest into the study of psychology and neuroscience. In his spare time, he hung out with Ram Dass, Timothy Leary's former LSD research partner turned mystic. Davidson traveled to India for a meditation retreat, then finished his doctorate in biological psychology and headed to the University of Wisconsin, where he now directs the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior.

The Dalai Lama learned of Davidson's work from other scientists and in 1992 invited him to Dharamsala, India, to interview monks with extensive meditation experience about their mental and emotional lives. Davidson recalls the "extraordinary power of compassion" he experienced in the Dalai Lama's presence.

A decade later, he got a chance to examine Tibetan Buddhists in his own lab. In June 2002, Davidson's associate Antoine Lutz positioned 128 electrodes on the head of Mattieu Ricard. A French-born monk from the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Ricard had racked up more than of 10,000 hours of meditation.

Lutz asked Ricard to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion." He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity - brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second - indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.

The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students'. In addition, larger areas of the meditators' brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.

Davidson realized that the results had important implications for ongoing research into the ability to change brain function through training. In the traditional view, the brain becomes frozen with the onset of adulthood, after which few new connections form. In the past 20 years, though, scientists have discovered that intensive training can make a difference. For instance, the portion of the brain that corresponds to a string musician's fingering hand grows larger than the part that governs the bow hand - even in musicians who start playing as adults. Davidson's work suggested this potential might extend to emotional centers.

But Davidson saw something more. The monks had responded to the request to meditate on compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain's ability to produce "attention and affective processes" - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson's study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.

Davidson and his team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2004. The research made The Wall Street Journal, and Davidson instantly became a celebrity scientist.

Not everyone was impressed. Yi Rao, a professor in the neurology department at Northwestern University, dismisses Davidson's study as rubbish. "The science is substandard," he says. "The motivations of both Davidson and the Dalai Lama are questionable."

hairyheretic

Second part .. had to break it up due to size.

As a leader of those opposing the Dalai Lama's speech, Rao criticizes Davidson for being a "politically involved scientist" who engineered the Dalai Lama's invitation to lend scientific legitimacy to Buddhism and press the Chinese government to ease up on Tibet.

But the political critique cuts both ways. Rao is Chinese, as are more than half of the 544 cosigners of the petition protesting the Dalai Lama's lecture. Many in the neuroscience community believe that Chinese opposition to the speech is fueled by the Chinese government's long-running propaganda campaign against the Tibetan leader. "It's pretty transparent," Davidson says.

Still, the broader point of Rao's argument has undeniable force: Davidson's close personal relationship with the Dalai Lama is unseemly. Scientists are supposed to maintain professional distance from individuals and organizations that support their research and have a stake in the outcome. If Davidson were receiving corporate support to study the effects of ice cream on the brain's pleasure centers, he wouldn't hang out with Ben and Jerry. Yet he's frequently seen with the Dalai Lama, whom he clearly reveres.

Davidson bristles at this charge. "I tremendously value my relationship with His Holiness and feel it has benefited my research," he says with a thin smile. "I have no intention of giving it up."

The Dalai Lama's fascination with science dates to his childhood, when young Tenzin Gyatso (his birth name) found a brass telescope that had belonged to his predecessor. For years he has been meeting with leading figures in physics and biology to broaden his understanding. He's still scratching his shaved head over quantum mechanics.

The Tibetan leader believes that Buddhism and science have much in common. Both are investigative traditions that seek to explain reality. He admires the power of the scientific method and has famously stated his willingness to jettison Buddhist doctrines shown by science to be false. However, since much of Buddhist doctrine - reincarnation, for instance - is inherently untestable, many of the Dalai Lama's beliefs remain insulated from scientific critique.

Ultimately, Buddhists and scientists hold very different views of the universe. Buddhists believe that mental and physical realms have an equal claim on reality. That is, mental constructs that science considers imaginary are, to Buddhists, objectively real and perceptible. In contrast, neuroscientists are materialists. The mind can't be separated from the physical circumstances that give rise to it. In this regard, Davidson's views hew to the scientific mainstream. "I believe mind is an emergent property of brain," he says. "Mind depends upon brain." The Dalai Lama has agreed to set this point aside for the time being.

What Buddhism has to offer science is a way to examine consciousness from the inside - though it wouldn't normally be accepted as scientific. Neuroscience approaches the brain the same way Western science views all problems: from an external, objective perspective the Dalai Lama calls "third-person." Buddhist meditation provides an introspective, first-person way to study consciousness; meditators can report their findings to scientists. "If we very precisely look at when a thought arrives, what it does … all that is very empirical," Ricard said in a 2003 radio interview. "If different meditators reproduce the same descriptions," it "has the character of science because it's experimental."

As much as the Dalai Lama enjoys dabbling in science, he has a greater purpose: to alleviate suffering. Buddhism has an extensive toolkit of techniques intended to reduce misery and perfect humanity through quieting the mind and cultivating compassion. The Dalai Lama wants to extract these methods from their religious context and ground them in the science of the brain in the hope that they will be widely adopted.

On this, Davidson and the Tibetan leader agree. Kids take PE, Davidson points out. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if they also attended a class called ME - mental education? The scientific work we're doing is providing one small piece of that larger message."

Standing onstage at the Washington Convention Center, the Dalai Lama clears his throat one last time and addresses the Society for Neuroscience.

If there is a prepared speech, he's ignoring it. For the next 30 minutes, in broken English and through his interpreter, he riffs on his childhood interest in science. "Curiosity is part of my life, part of my self. Look at this body. Some areas have more hair, some less. Why?" He stresses the importance of ethics in pursuit of scientific answers. He's especially concerned that researchers are not paying enough attention to the development of "warmheartedness." Like charity, this quality begins at home. "Come home and be with your wife, your husband, or your children," he beseeches the assembled neuroscientists, "and feel happy!"

A few minutes later, he departs in a swarm of aides and security personnel.

Opponents of the Dalai Lama's appearance fear a breach in the barrier between science and religion. For now, though, brain researchers are staying on their side of the wall. Davidson is the first to admit that his studies haven't proven that compassion is a skill to be cultivated - though clearly he believes it is. "The honest answer is, we don't know," he says, "which is why longitudinal studies are necessary."

Such research is just beginning. Experiments that will follow novices through months of intensive training - the only way to test whether meditation actually changes the brain - are starting up at UC San Francisco and UC Davis. Meditation research is blossoming at a dozen universities, including Harvard and Princeton.

Amid the flurry of Buddhist-inflected inquiry, however, there's a risk that researchers' beliefs and desires will influence the results of their experiments. Already the Mind & Life Institute, an organization cofounded by the Dalai Lama to foster dialog between researchers and mystics, sponsors summer programs that are part scientific discourse, part Buddhist retreat. These programs, Davidson says, are "producing a hybrid discipline of dharma practitioners and scientists." The scientific method is designed to counteract the bias of faith, but adulterating scientific objectivity with a first-person perspective makes it more likely that researchers will see what they want to see.

A few days before the Dalai Lama addressed the Society for Neuroscience, he stood before a similarly eminent crowd at the Mind & Life Institute's 13th annual meeting. The audience of 2,500 consisted mostly of scientists and clinicians, yet the mood was more dharma than Darwin. Sessions opened to the guttural chants of Tibetan liturgical music. Everyone stood and bowed when His Holiness entered the room.

During one presentation, Duke University professor of medicine Ralph Snyderman paused to tell His Holiness, "This is one of the most wonderful moments of my life, being here with you." It was a touching gesture. It also crystallized the dilemma. Scientists can try to test the validity of the Dalai Lama's first-person perspective. But if they allow reverence for him to cloud their judgment, they will cease to be scientists and take rebirth as something quite different: acolytes.

Asiaprod

hairyheretic wrote:

Second part .. had to break it up due to size.

hairyheretic
Nice post. I remember reading this when it came out and all the uproar that ensued.
I have to be honest and say that I believe it, but then I have first hand experience of this. I have been performing Buddhist meditation and chanting for nearly 20 years now. I would not continue to do this unless I felt something from it. I have nowhere near the ability to operate on the levels these monks can.
I have experienced precognition, the ability to cure minor ailments. the ability to change the course of events after they have happened. I know that my faith plays the major role in this. I know that I cannot offer conclusive proof. All I can say is I do believe that there are vast untapped power to the human mind, and with practice we can achieve far more than we believe we can.
What are your feelings on the issue.

hairyheretic

Asiaprod wrote:

I have experienced precognition, the ability to cure minor ailments. the ability to change the course of events after they have happened. I know that my faith plays the major role in this. I know that I cannot offer conclusive proof. All I can say is I do believe that there are vast untapped power to the human mind, and with practice we can achieve far more than we believe we can.
What are your feelings on the issue.

I'm not familiar enough meditation to know really. I used to do it a while back, but not that much. Had one quite odd experience doing it that I was never able to duplicate.

As for the other stuff .. I read the runes, and while not precognition, it is divination, and something I've done successfully on a number of occasions.

I also do reiki, which you may or may not be familiar with. Its an energy healing.

I reckon theres a lot more out there than we're currently aware off.

Asiaprod

hairyheretic wrote:

I'm not familiar enough meditation to know really. I used to do it a while back, but not that much. Had one quite odd experience doing it that I was never able to duplicate.

Imagine what some of those monks experience.

As for the other stuff .. I read the runes, and while not precognition, it is divination, and something I've done successfully on a number of occasions.

That is something I would love to hear more on. I have looked in to I Chin and the Tarot cards. I believe ther is a wealth of wisdom to be leared from these methods. Any pointer you can give me on runes?

I also do reiki, which you may or may not be familiar with. Its an energy healing.

Yep, know that one too. I am into the real original aromatherapy from china, along with accupuncture and chinese medcine.

hairyheretic

Asiaprod wrote:

Imagine what some of those monks experience.

Well, I'll tell you what I came across .. maybe its something you've experienced yourself.

When I was meditating, I would just clear my mind of everything. No thoughts (harder than it sounds of course ), just emptyness. After what I think was maybe a half hour (this occured 8 or 9 years ago, so I'm a little fuzzy on details) I began to get the feeling of something just beyond me .. from the corner of your mental eye if you will. If I kept my mind still it came closer, but if I tried to 'see' or concentrate on it, it skittered away again.

After a little while I had too many thoughts intruding and lost it. When I went to stand up, my body felt a lot heavier than usual .. only for a minute or two, but definately heavier.

Every come across anything like that?

Asiaprod wrote:

That is something I would love to hear more on. I have looked in to I Chin and the Tarot cards. I believe ther is a wealth of wisdom to be leared from these methods. Any pointer you can give me on runes?

Hard to say where to start. There are three different sets of runes .. the Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark and Anglo Saxon futhark. I use the elder set myself.

I can give an explanation of how I read and what I feel about how the runes work, but we might want to move that to a thread in the paganism forum perhaps.

Asiaprod wrote:

Yep, know that one too. I am into the real original aromatherapy from china, along with accupuncture and chinese medcine.

I saw something on accupuncture the other day. I think it was just the tail end of an advert for an upcoming show, but it was showing someone going in for heart surgery, and rather than normal anasthetic, they were using accupuncture (I think). Unfortunately I don't know what the show was, or any more about it.

I wouldn't be very familiar with chinese medicine or aromatherapy.

cousin_borat

Good post HairyHeretic.

This may be of interest to you. The Dalai Lama gave a number of talks in Stanford recently among them was a talk with neuroscientists and Buddhist academics on craving and human suffering as well as another talk on Meditation and Non Violence. They can be downloaded as podcasts only with I-Tunes. Apple has recently formed a partnership to broadcast lectures from stanford.

If you start here http://itunes.stanford.edu/ you will be able to get the lectures

Asiaprod

hairyheretic wrote:

Well, I'll tell you what I came across .. maybe its something you've experienced yourself........snip.....began to get the feeling of something just beyond me .. from the corner of your mental eye if you will. If I kept my mind still it came closer, but if I tried to 'see' or concentrate on it, it skittered away again.

Yeah, that is a bummer that one. I am not realy sure how to describe what was going on since it really is applicable only to you. It was obviously of relivence, since it happened. We talked earlier of divination and this is basically what you experience. It was in response to what ever was subconsiously on your mind at the time. I suspect you were going through some serious issue in your life and the meditation made you receptive. If you had been able to increase your effort to meditate at that time I suspect you would suddenly have been hit with a very clear insight to the issue, and possibly a solution. It has to come itself, if you try to focus on it you loose it. Also, we say that when one meditates or chants sincerly all the buddhas line up behind you. This is why many people report an eerie feeling like someonething is watching over their shoulder. For me, the more common occurence was I would suddenly really lock on to the sound of my own voice and I would hear crytal clear the sound af a temple bell. Just one long peal and the and all sense of peripheral vision would just fade out leaving my vision locked solidly on my Mandala. All very mystical I know. Maybe , since you have proved you receptiveness before, you should think about taking up meditation again. It is benificial to all, irrespective of creed or religion.

[SIZE=+0]I will check out the Elder Futhark ruins and get back to you.[/SIZE]

Re accupuncture, it is very common in China to see people having all kinds of minor surgery while under the influence. I would hesitate myself to do anything as complicated as heart surgery. But then the mind is an amazing organ. I have an experience with meditation that probably highlights this. Judge for yourself, every word is true.
One morning when I rushing to make breakfast I stupidly boiled a whole kettle of water and placed it on top of the fridge as I only had a single ring burner in the flat and I wanted to boil some eggs. It was one of those old american style fridges where the door is not flush with the front so a portion of the top actually forms the top of the door, and you guessed it, I put the kettle on the edge, thats half on the flat top and half on the top of the door. Without thinking I pulled open the door to get the eggs and pulled the entire pot of boiling water down on my hand an wrist It is no lie to say that at that moment my mind just went blank with shock. Reactivley, I stuck my hand and wrist under the cold tap and just started to chant under my breath while at the same focusing on feeling no pain. I refused to even look at my hand. After 5 mins still chanting and refusing to look at the hand, I stuck it in my pocket. I walked around the house for about 1 hour, keeping up the chanting and refusing to acknowledge I even had a hand. When I finally took my hand out of my pocket, as true as i am writing this, there was not a mark on the hand. Nothing. This was boiling water. The hand was red and felt stiff, but I had no problem in using it. The girl friend at the time, who was convinced we were about to set of for the day to the nerest hospital. Could not believe it, neither could I. That to me was proof.
True story.

hairyheretic

Asiaprod wrote:

It was in response to what ever was subconsiously on your mind at the time. I suspect you were going through some serious issue in your life and the meditation made you receptive.

I know I went through a fairly rough period around then ... I don't recall exactly where this incident fitted in to that time though, so couldn't tell you what was on my mind then, consious or otherwise.

Asiaprod wrote:

If you had been able to increase your effort to meditate at that time I suspect you would suddenly have been hit with a very clear insight to the issue, and possibly a solution. It has to come itself, if you try to focus on it you loose it.

Possibly.

Asiaprod wrote:

Also, we say that when one meditates or chants sincerly all the buddhas line up behind you. This is why many people report an eerie feeling like someonething is watching over their shoulder.

Can't say I've ever experienced that, but I've not done all that much meditation ... did a bit in my martial arts, but that was normally just a few minutes (or less) at the end of a class. I would also meditate briefly before I do a rune reading .. again, only for a minute or two, long enough to still my mind and focus it on the reading.

Asiaprod wrote:

Maybe , since you have proved you receptiveness before, you should think about taking up meditation again. It is benificial to all, irrespective of creed or religion.

Perhaps. Finding the time to do it would be the problem though (yeah, the eternal story .. not enough time).

Asiaprod wrote:

I will check out the Elder Futhark runes and get back to you.

The reason I use those is
1 - they're (to my knowledge) the oldest form
2 - they're the set I started with.

I've not tried any of the others, but using this set feels right to me.

Do you want me to start a runes thread in the paganism forum, or would you prefer to take this up privately?

Asiaprod wrote:

True story.

Its certainly interesting. I've seen a few unusual things myself. When I was doing my martial arts (I'm a few years out of training at present), my sensei also taught some of us kuatsu, which is a way of using the bodies energy field for healing. By pressure on a series of pressure points on the arm, for example, you can effectively turn off the pain receptors. He did this, then popped a finger out of joint, wiggled it around and put it back.

It was quite facinating, and something I had intended to learn more off. If I do manage to get back into training, I intend to see if I can find out more on this as well.