The Neuroscience of Meditation?

[logisticslad]

The Dalai Lama spoke yesterday at my conference on The Neuroscience of Meditation. He spoke in a packed room that was limited to 7000 that required audience members to pass through metal detectors to enter. While I was supposed to meet up with grendelgongon there, I got sidetracked by my students and then it was too late to get in. So I watched the talk in one of the many overflow rooms. Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of it. He was clearly delighted to be here speaking to us, but he rambled a lot and didn't seem to have much to actually say. His message seemed to be that buddhism uses meditation to explore the fabric of internal reality and that neuroscience does the same through different methods and that that is a good thing. The most interesting part for me was when he was asked how he reconciled the buddhist idea of respect for all life with animal research. He came out in favor of the research. That made me feel much more positive about the event. There had been a vocal minority of neuroscientists opposed to his invitation to speak because they felt that a religious figure had no place at this venue. I didn't agree, and after hearing him speak, I still think it was appropriate to invite him even though he didn't have all that much to say about science.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I read a book a couple of years ago about what happens in people's brains when they have meditative or religious experiences. Sadly, for me, the author eventually diverged from research and concluded that the reason why people have religious experiences is because there's a god that gives them out.

[grendelgongon.livejournal.com]

I thought the coolest thing was that he was so non-dogmatic on the idea of outside, physical interventions to help change/adjust mentality and that he even had criteria for better and worse interventions (maintain intellect and awareness = good, dull same = bad.) from his perspective.

I agree about the rambling being frustrating though.

And apparently being a scientist doesn't equal being polite and/or the Dalai Lama is a neuroscience rock star. About 10 minutes before the doors opened, a crush of people came and obliterated the line, most of them cutting past what was obviously a line of people waiting and just pushing up to the front, reminding me that even crowds of smart people are dumb and obnoxious. (Though rude pushing to get to see a talk on meditation just strikes me as the frozen limit.)