X-Message-Number: 22517
From: "mike99" <>
Subject: FWD: Dalai Lama meeting at MIT on neuroscience
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 13:53:32 -0600

Dalai Lama visit provides a subject for scientists
By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff, 9/12/2003

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of an ancient religion, arrives in Boston
today with a surprising goal: changing the field of neuroscience.


For more than 15 years, the Dalai Lama has been inviting small groups of top
Western scientists to his Himalayan home for private discussions about
science and its potential links to Buddhist thought. At an MIT auditorium
tomorrow, the Tibetan leader will begin presiding over two days of intense
discussions -- the first ones open to the public -- aimed at understanding
what happens inside the meditating brain, and what it can reveal about the
broader workings of the human mind.

Though many Western researchers are skeptical about working with a man who
believes in reincarnation and was chosen for his position based on a vision
in a lake, the MIT conference quickly sold out to an audience of about 1,200
people, mainly scientists, and racked up a waiting list of 1,600.

The conference is designed to bring scientists and Buddhists together to
devise experiments that explore the unusual abilities of Buddhist monks and
others trained in meditation, with the goal of better understanding what the
brain can accomplish when carefully focused.

Top scientists say they have come to view meditation as an increasingly
important area of research and are thrilled at the Dalai Lama's promise to
send substantial numbers of Buddhist monks to Western laboratories, where
their brains can be studied with the latest scanning equipment.

"This is opening a secret body of rich knowledge that we have not had access
to," said Marlene Behrmann, who is speaking at the conference and is a
professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. "It is a watershed."

Scientists who have met the Dalai Lama say they have been struck at his
openness to science. He has said he has been interested in science since he
was a boy, when he took wristwatches apart and put them back together.

His presence at the conference, said scientists who have met him, seems a
genuine effort to bring together science and the 2,500-year Buddhist
tradition in a productive new way -- while also making a political point
about his religion.

"It is too easy for people to imagine that Tibetan Buddhism is some far-off
ancient religion," said Eric Lander, the noted MIT genomics researcher, who
traveled to the Dalai Lama's home in exile in Dharamsala, India, for a
meeting last year. "It sends a very important message to say that Tibetan
Buddhists are not in the least reluctant to talk to scientists, even
scientists who do not agree with them."

Prominent Western scientists have already begun to find that meditation can
have a profound effect on the brain and the body. This month, University of
Wisconsin professor Richard J. Davidson published a paper showing that
people who meditated were able to mount a stronger fight against the flu --
suggesting that teaching the technique could help boost their immune
systems.

Meditation, his study showed, appeared to moderate the activity of a part of
the brain, the right prefrontal cortex, associated with negative emotions
like anger and fear. The meditators who experienced the greatest reduction
of activity in this area, the study showed, created the most antibodies to
fight the flu.

This weekend's conference, called "Investigating the Mind," is not primarily
focused on the health effects of meditation. It is organized around three
broad topics -- attention, emotion, and mental imagery -- that are active
areas of research in brain science and which might benefit from the
participation of highly trained Buddhists.

Mental imagery is a vital question to scientists for its close links to
thinking and memory. One cannot remember the location of a parked car, for
instance, without such imagery.

Buddhists claim to be able to do things that directly contradict the
findings of Western scientists, said Stephen Kosslyn, a leading expert on
mental imagery who is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In
studies of Western subjects, Kosslyn has found people can't hold onto a
detailed mental image, and take time to put the pieces of such an image
together. Buddhists, however, say they are able to hold a rich image in mind
for minutes at a time, and to conjure up a complex image practically
instantly, a process, he said, they describe as "like a fish leaping from
water."

Kosslyn, who is participating in the conference, said that he is skeptical
of those claims, but that a collaboration with Buddhist monks would yield
useful information about the brain.

"From my perspective, these are like the virtuosos of mental imagery," he
said. "They show what mental training can achieve."

At the heart of the conference, which is cosponsored by the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at MIT, will be three sessions where the Dalai
Lama, joined by a panel of prominent scientists and Buddhist scholars, will
discuss ways to collaborate on future research. The goal, say conference
organizers, is to devise a specific research program, including experiments.
The Mind and Life Institute will help find funding for experiments from
individual donors and foundations, with the hope that the National
Institutes of Health will begin to fund projects as well if the research
goes well.

The Dalai Lama has not made any specific promises about how many people
might participate in experiments, according to Adam Engle, the chairman and
co-founder of the Mind and Life Institute, which has been fostering
scientific exchanges with the Dalai Lama since 1987 and is cosponsoring the
conference.

Such a project could hold the potential to expand the field of neuroscience,
suggesting whole new areas of study. Davidson, for example, has embarked on
a research program to study compassion, an emotion that is a central concept
in Buddhist psychology, but which Western science has largely ignored. If
the Buddhists are correct, then Western researchers have missed an important
part of the brain's emotional machinery, one whose cultivation could have
profound effects on society.

"We want to place compassion center stage as a focus of legitimate
scientific inquiry," said Davidson. "These guys can turn it on at will."

For the Buddhists involved in the conference, the work is partly motivated
by curiosity. Understanding the true nature of the universe is a fundamental
tenet of Buddhism.

"Religions as a whole are prone to ossification and dogmatism," said B. Alan
Wallace, a scholar at the Mind and Life Institute and president of the Santa
Barbara Institute. A lively interaction with modern science, he said, "may
really help rescue Buddhism from this tendency."

The Dalai Lama has also told the scientists involved in the conference that
he hopes the research will yield techniques that everyone, Buddhist or
otherwise, can use to lead lives where positive emotions outweigh negative
ones. Buddhists believe that humans are prone to suffering because their
minds are overly focused on negative emotions.

By joining with the Buddhists, brain scientists could transform the inner
world the way science and technology has already transformed the outer
world, according to Tendzin Choegyal, the Dalai Lama's younger brother.

"I think this [conference] is very significant in mankind's pursuit of
happiness," Choegyal said.

Gareth Cook can be reached at 

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