Buddhist Monks Help Scientists Study the Brain and the Human Mind in Scientific Experiments
(1) Monks help scientists study brain.
Buddhist monks from South Asia have been giving scientists an insight into the workings of the human brain.
The Dalai Lama and some monks took part in experiments as test subjects conducted by western scientists at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during their tour of the US. The conference was part of an ongoing experimental project.
"If you're a Western scientist investigating the mind, does it make any sense to you to have what we're calling the Olympic athletes of mental training on your research team?" quoted Dr Ingle of the Mind and Life Institute.
This is from the Buddhist News Network.
http://www.buddhistnews.tv/current/monks-mind-study-270903.php
(2) Report on the conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involving the Dalai Lama and some monks as test subjects in experiments conducted by western scientists as part of an ongoing experimental project.
In the United States, most encounters between scientists and religious leaders are over hot-button issues like stem cells, cloning, abortion and evolution, and they tend to be highly acrimonious. But the subject of last weekend's meeting, comparing Buddhist and scientific views of how the human mind works was intended to be collaborative rather than contentious.
As the Dalai Lama stressed when he opened the conference, the scientific and the Buddhist traditions have a lot to learn from each other. The Western scientific ability to measure, describe and explain the physical world, he said, is infinitely more advanced than anything in Tibetan Buddhism. But after 2,500 years of training the mind through meditation and other practices, Buddhists have a lot to offer modern science, too. "Western psychology, compared to Buddhism, is still very young," he said. "Like a baby."
For the Buddhists, centuries of thinking about the mind are contained in a tradition called the Abhidharma, which sees the mind and the body as interconnected in a way Western science is only now beginning to accept. Central to the Abhidharma is the belief that the mind and emotions can be changed by meditation and other introspective practices that have no necessary connection to religion. Neuroscientists have also concluded that the brain is more "plastic" than was long believed, that its circuitry can be changed by outside, as well as inside, events.
Jerome Kagan, a top psychologist at Harvard and a member of the prestigious national Institute of Medicine, was also asked to assess the possible benefits to science of meditative Buddhism. "I do believe that trained introspection can reveal subtleties of perception and feeling that no other current scientific method can discover," he told the audience. But he also said that "no individual using introspection would be able to discover that one area of the brain is more active when we see a robin fly from a tree, while a different one is active when we notice it has a red breast." The insights of Buddhism, he said, are no more valid or true than the insights of science.
Lander also said the ethical nature of Tibetan Buddhist thinking can run counter to scientific practice. He explained how a colleague had asked the Dalai Lama if it is wrong to kill animals in laboratory experiments. The reply was that killing is wrong, but there can be overriding benefits. But most important, the Dalai Lama said, was "what was in the heart" of the person doing the experimenting -- a very non-Western, non-scientific consideration.
What he has found using advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology and other brain scanning has convinced him that the Buddhists are on to something. At the conference, Davidson revealed new findings that tentatively showed that six monks, when asked to meditate on compassion, had identifiable and intense electrical activity in the same small part of the brain. "The issue here is that with purely mental practice, we are seeing the brain responding to emotional stimuli and being transformed," Davidson said. "This is very close to what Buddhists say they can do, which is to regulate their emotions through meditation."
Davidson also reported about his experiments on one of the men facing him across the MIT stage, a French-born practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism named Matthieu Richard. A trained molecular biologist as well as a highly trained monk; Richard has been working with Davidson for several years and has allowed himself to be regularly tested and scanned. As reported by Davidson at the meeting, an MRI test of Richard showed the highest level of activity ever recorded in the area of the brain (behind the right side of the forehead) associated with positive emotion. To further make his point, Davidson showed a picture of Richard emerging from three (usually gruelling) hours in an MRI tube, beaming.
"These are the Olympic athletes of mental and emotional achievement," Davidson later explained. "It's very, very exciting to think what we can learn from them and help other people."
This is from the Buddhist News Network.