[Buddha-l] buddhism and brain studies

[Jamie Hubbard]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> That is a much more charitable interpretation than the one I would give.
> What I am inclined to say is that what the experiment illustrates is the
> penchant of psychologists to perform experiments that give us blinding
> insights into the obvious.
>
>   
I am team-teaching a course with a psychologist at the moment, and I 
must say that I often feel this way-- I tend to think of it as the "Bill 
Murray response" (at the beginning of Ghostbusters)-- that is, they just 
like to inflict twisted pain on college students (unless they are 
pretty). My colleague's explanation is that they need hard data, even to 
demonstrate the obvious. As such, he is quite skeptical of the usual 
studies done in the field of "positive psychology," typically dismissing 
them as "subjective accounts with no verifiability." So while "change 
your mind, change your brain" seems obvious to me, the whole blather 
over neuro-plasticity really does have everybody hot and bothered, 
doesn't it?

Given our different approaches, then, one of the fun subjects we keep 
dealing with is the huge gap between the widely reported high levels of 
"happiness" (contentment, satisfaction, whatever) at all distributions 
of income, national/ethnic origin, gender, physical health, and the 
like, together with the idea of the "happiness set-point," versus the 
Buddhist pronouncement on the universal pervasiveness of dukkha. 
Interestingly, he tends to dismiss the studies showing people to be 
generally pretty satisfied as subjective reporting and hence unreliable 
whereas I tend to accept the studies--and my personal experience of the 
folks around me (other than American Buddhists)-- and thus dismiss the 
Buddhist diagnosis as simply false (at best) or a religious "bait and 
switch" at worse (agreeing with HHDL that everybody wants to be happy 
and avoid suffering is easy, but is really a slippery slope to shaving 
your head and leaving your "loved ones" behind). The "happiness" of the 
positive psych folks is not at all the same as the "awakening" or 
"dukkha-nirodha" of the Buddhists. Obviously we need to set up a 
well-funded "Institute of Happy Consciousness Studies" in order to 
figure it all out. . .maybe some penguins. . .

In any case. To return to the truly scientific realm of anecdotal 
reporting, among the many Zen communities we have around here I used to 
often hire a few of the monks as "handy monks" to help out with painting 
and other stuff (helping them to fulfill their "day without work is a 
day without food" ethic while garnering merit for myself along the way). 
I long ago learned to *never* hire them within one week of any kind of 
sesshin-- they tended to drive their cars off the roads, knock over 
paint buckets, and other sorts of things that convinced me they just 
weren't responding to the outside world in a normal way. . . well, at 
least not in the way that I wanted.

Jamie