{"id":85123,"date":"2019-01-25T13:24:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T20:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=85123"},"modified":"2019-01-25T13:24:21","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T20:24:21","slug":"neuroscience-has-a-lot-to-learn-from-buddhism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/01\/25\/neuroscience-has-a-lot-to-learn-from-buddhism\/","title":{"rendered":"Neuroscience Has a Lot To Learn from Buddhism"},"content":{"rendered":"

MATTHIEU RICARD<\/a><\/span>WOLF SINGER\u00a0Courtesy The Atlatic.com<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

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Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the transformations that occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a new book titled\u00a0Beyond the Self<\/em><\/a>, two friends\u2014Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist\u2014engage in an unusually well-matched conversation about meditation and the brain. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt.<\/p>\n
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Matthieu Ricard<\/strong>:\u00a0<\/strong>Although one \ufb01nds in the Buddhist literature many treatises on traditional sciences\u201d\u2014medicine, cosmology, botanic, logic, and so on\u2014Tibetan Buddhism has not endeavored to the same extent as Western civilizations to expand its knowledge of the world through the natural sciences. Rather it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2,500 years and has accumulated, in an empirical way, a wealth of experiential \ufb01ndings over the centuries. A great number of people have dedicated their whole lives to this contemplative science.<\/p>\n

Modern Western psychology began with William James just over a century ago. I can\u2019t help remembering the remark made by Stephen Kosslyn, then chair of the psychology department at Harvard, at the Mind and Life meeting on Investigating the Mind,\u201d which took place at MIT in 2003. He started his presentation by saying, I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n