[Buddha-l] Buddha on the Brain

[d f tweney]

The latest issue of Wired magazine has a story on the controversy 
stirred up by the Dalai Lama's appearance at a recent conference on 
neuroscience:

Buddha on the Brain
The hot new frontier of neuroscience: meditation! (Just ask the Dalai Lama.)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.02/dalai.html

In short, the Dalai Lama has forged some partnerships with prominent 
neuroscientists to investigate the science of the mind, using a 
combination of meditation as well as contemporary scientific tools like 
MRI scanning. This work has produced some interesting results. For 
instance, meditating monks are able to change their brain wave 
signatures in remarkable ways -- producing patterns not seen outside of 
anaesthesia, for instance. Richard Davidson and Matthieu Ricard are some 
of the prominent westerners involved in this work. Another scientist, 
Daniel Goleman, has some detailed accounts of this research in his book 
"Destructive Emotions."

But it's controversial: Other neuroscientists point out that cozying up 
to religious figures might impair the ability of a researcher to do 
objective science. (It's no coincidence that about half of those 
scientists who filed a protest are Chinese -- so there's a political 
dimension to this story too.)

--dylan.

-- 
Dylan Tweney   writer/editor

dylan at tweney.com
mobile: (650) 483-2896
http://dylan.tweney.com