What are the limits to objective assessment of subjective experience? Both ways of seeing are hard to combine – as recent posts discussed – but scientific studies keep shrinking the difference between their perspectives.
So much so that the essay below is perhaps out of date, though the gist of what can’t quite be measured still seems as relevant. It reflects on the use of brain scans to map meditative states, and looks at some parallels in psychedelic research. It’s interesting to see what lights up, but making sense of it might be something else entirely…
The essay was written in response to this question, so it also considers the history of how scientific methods came to be prioritised by Asian traditions:
“Assess the factors that led to the engagement with Buddhist meditative practices in western cognitive sciences.”
The first half is attached, with a link to the rest. Many of the themes it discusses also apply to yoga history – from use of science for validation to creation of an “-ism”.
We’re going to be exploring this in The Path of Knowledge, a year-long immersion in yogic traditions that’s just getting started. There’s still time to join us before our first live session on September 29. Reflecting on the past, we’ll get a clearer understanding of contemporary practice, and how that contributes to what happens next.
There’s an overview of what to expect in the introductory video posted below. Click the button to find out more and apply, or email me here if you have any questions.
Read on for the essay!
From the archive1
Meditation and Cognitive Science
By Daniel Simpson
On my first trip to Dharamsala, the Indian home of Tibet’s exiled leaders, a fellow backpacker urged me to read The Tao of Physics. Its mystical hybrid of scientific findings and Eastern teachings sounded dull. Back then, I preferred taking drugs to blow my mind. Who cared if what the Buddha may have said could be compared to quantum theory? As it happened, a group of people down the road: the Dalai Lama had just hosted a conference on this theme with foreign scientists. Their exchange began 10 years earlier, with the inaugural gathering of the Mind & Life Institute.Last year marked the thirtieth. Although these discussions are often intriguing, they appear inconclusive; more like interfaith dialogue than conversion either way. Nonetheless, they have helped spur research on how meditation works, and on the ways it changes brains.
The involvement of Buddhists with science dates back to colonial occupation. Long before Queen Victoria became Empress of India in the 1870s, Christian missionaries denounced Asian religions as unscientific, unlike their own “true faith”, shared by Isaac Newton. Buddhism barely existed as a concept: the term was “constructed”, to quote Donald Lopez, by 19th century Western scholars. Chief among them was Eugene Burnouf, a professor in Paris who never visited Asia but read lots of texts, discerning a “human Buddhism” that “consists almost entirely in very simple rules of morality” and a psychology “of incontestable value for the history of the human spirit.” Hearing this, some Buddhists got inspired: it offered a template for how to define themselves. Sri Lankan modernisers turned Christian criticism upside down, saying Theravada Buddhism was not a religion but “a science of the mind.”
This argument, based on meditative insights found in early Pali texts, distanced Buddhism from ritual. Echoing a Westernised view of the Buddha as social reformer, who challenged Brahmin power like Martin Luther did the Pope’s, Sri Lankans such as Dharmapala critiqued the Buddhism practised in villages as degraded. This appealed to the urban middle classes, whose education in English had instilled Western values yet left them subservient. Effectively, says Richard King, “the colonial discourse of the British became mimetically reproduced in an indigenous and anti-colonial form”. At a debate in Panadura in 1862, Buddhist scholars and monks said it was really Christianity that was riddled with fantastical inconsistencies, and at odds with science. They won hands down. In Geoffrey Samuel’s opinion, the defeated Westerners were “perhaps escapees from oppressive or conflicted Christian backgrounds” and “happy to collaborate in an enterprise which promised both to relativise the Church's claims to authority and to provide a new, more acceptable moral basis for contemporary life”.
The notion of Buddhism as applied mental science spread with lay meditation. Nationalists in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Burma encouraged practice outside monasteries, legitimised with reference to texts that foreign Orientalists had translated. Japanese Buddhism was also reshaped in this Western reflection, as the Meiji Empire flexed its muscles. The latest cross-cultural fusion is the Mind & Life Institute. The brainchild of two Western Buddhists (a neuroscientist and a businessman), it serves as a platform for the 14th Dalai Lama, who has fought since the 1950s to end China’s military occupation of Tibet. Courting Western support, he aims to change the image of Tibet’s esoteric form of Buddhism, which Europeans once scorned as “Lamaism”. Mind & Life provides a vehicle for doing this. Its first proceedings were published with the subtitle: “Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind”.
Some aspects of the Dalai Lama’s worldview seem more malleable than others. Although revered as a voice of non-violence, he declined to condemn the invasion of Iraq in 2003, deeming it “too early to say” if pre-emptive war on a falsified pretext was a bad thing, presumably mindful, says Bernard Faure, of “the risk of offending his allies in the United States government”. As casualties mounted, he stuck to his guns, declaring: “At least the motivation is to bring democracy and freedom”. Only late in 2006 did he concede: “things not very positive” with “too many killings”. Realpolitik guides his thinking about a successor. He has suggested there might not be one, having devolved his political role to an elected leader. China, meanwhile, plans to divine his reborn form by traditional means within its borders. As Lopez notes: “The implication of politics in the discourse of Buddhism and science has been ironically clear in recent years.”
In conversations with scientists, traditional views are less negotiable, despite suggestions to the contrary. “One fundamental attitude shared by Buddhism and science is the commitment to deep searching for reality by empirical means,” the Dalai Lama writes, “and to be willing to discard accepted or long-held positions if our search finds that the truth is different.” This has limits. At the first Mind & Life symposium, the physicist Jeremy Hayward said: “scientists take the view that consciousness arises from a material cause,” to which the Dalai Lama countered: “Buddhists cannot accept this.” Recalling the method by which he is said to have reincarnated, he asked participants to: “Imagine a person, a Tantric practitioner who actually transfers his consciousness to a fresh corpse,” clarifying that “in this case, you see, he has a completely new body but it's the same life, the same person.” A footnote underlines that “His Holiness in fact appears to have meant that consciousness is transferred by meditative practices” as opposed to suggesting “there is a brain transplant”.
This fundamental difference has dogged proceedings ever since. In 2005, 544 brain researchers signed a petition urging the Society for Neuroscience to disinvite the Dalai Lama from its annual meeting. “We’ll be talking about cells and molecules,” objected Jianguo Gu at the University of Florida, “and he’s going to talk about something that isn’t there.” In response, one of Mind & Life’s translators, Alan Wallace, called the petitioners “zealots” and emphasised many had Chinese ancestry. The Dalai Lama “has said time and again that he would reject the Buddhist assertion of reincarnation if positive scientific evidence is produced that refutes it,” Wallace protested. “Are mainstream scientists equally empirical and rational, allowing them to give a fair hearing to evidence and reasoning that are inconsistent with their materialistic assumptions?” At Mind & Life events, at least, they hold their tongues.
In Geoffrey Samuel’s assessment, “much of what happens in this process is less a dialogue between equal systems of thought than an assimilation of the more ‘acceptable’ elements within Tibetan and Buddhist thought into an essentially Western context”. One Mind & Life scientist, Richard Davidson, has bent over backwards to avoid causing offence while defending materialism. He acknowledges being asked “sharply but respectfully” by the Dalai Lama to “distinguish between that which has been empirically confirmed and that which is simply assumed and has become part of our theoretical and conceptual dogma.” Yet he feels obliged to note that “certain scientific assumptions are themselves based on well-established principles,” adding (via the circumlocution “some would say”) that: “the dependence of mind on brain is one such assumption that has been subjected to countless empirical tests, and each and every one of them has provided support for this general claim”.
As the Dalai Lama sees it, science can never answer every question. Its remit is the first of the Buddha’s Noble Truths: that life leaves us unsatisfied. Science “examines the material bases of suffering,” he writes, “for it covers the entire spectrum of the physical environment – ‘the container’ – as well as the sentient beings – ‘the contained’.” A subsidiary focus is mental, “the realm of psychology, consciousness, the afflictions, and karma,” where “the second of the truths, the origin of suffering” is located. Yet “the third and fourth truths, cessation [of suffering] and the path [to attain it], are effectively outside the domain of scientific analysis in that they pertain primarily to what might be called philosophy and religion”.
BRAINS IN HATS
This outlook has led to a focus on cognitive science, as ways to scan brains get more revealing. Of course, scoffs Samuel: “no amount of brain-scanning of meditating yogis will either prove or disprove Mādhyamika philosophy”; or whether the Buddha foretold relativity, quantum physics or Big Bang theory. Neuroimaging spawns papers in journals and wide-eyed reporting, as when Matthieu Ricard, a French Buddhist monk, was dubbed “the happiest man in the world” on account of activity observed in his left prefrontal cortex.Ricard thought this “flattering”, an interviewer wrote, “given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology”. The title stuck.
It remains unclear what such things teach us. Not all Buddhists meditate, but some have done so for more than 2,000 years. Others have compiled extensive texts on theory. Something must have occurred behind their eyes, and it seems less arcane when displayed on screens. However, as the philosopher Jay Garfield notes: “Despite all of the glitzy powerpoints and breathless rhetoric” from fellow Mind & Life participants, “neuroimaging results are much ado about what we all should have known already”. Basically, “pictures show that the brain does something when the mind does something”. Similarly, publishing: “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging” cannot communicate what acid feels like. The Guardian said: “lots of orange,” referring to snapshots of the scans. Even if science were to map every state known to expert meditators, we would still need to practice ourselves, unless someone made drugs that induced the effects, which may include many not seen by a scanner.
Another source of confusion is internal. As Garfield reminds us, brains have filters, and a lot of what they do is unconscious. “At a more fundamental level – the deeper, non-introspectible level,” he writes, “information is cognitively available” but “actively suppressed before reaching surface consciousness”. Hence, even the most skilled meditators cannot perceive unfiltered truth, such as gaps in our vision that the brain fills in. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” mused William Blake, “every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Yet to dwell in that state might have drawbacks. It could be hard to do ordinary tasks if we “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Hallucinogens can feel overwhelming; the orange in LSD scans means more parts of the brain do visual processing, though this is often a dream-like “seeing with eyes-shut”. Although the mind senses more stimulation, cortical activity drops and other networks show “decreased connectivity”, correlating to “ego-dissolution” and “altered meaning”. Direct perception can be both misleading and enlightening. Or as a tripping Dutch hippie once told me: “Life is an illusion, choose a nice one.”
What scientists study depends on equipment. To generate data their peers might approve, something has to be measured. For meditation, this began with electroencephalography (EEG), which first recorded brain oscillations in 1929, and found rhythmical patterns in sleep and such conditions as epilepsy. Observing neuron synchrony across different brain parts, researchers identified slower alpha and theta waves (4-13 Hz) and faster beta and gamma frequencies (above 15 Hz). By the 1950s, portable machines allowed for fieldwork. Early teams looked at Indian yogis in samādhi, defined as a state in which “the perfectly motionless subject is insensible to all that surrounds him and is conscious of nothing but the subject of his meditation”. The results were striking: accelerated alpha activity, especially in experienced meditators, whose faster rhythms fell in frequency and amplitude, with generalised beta and gamma waves in deep concentration. Others in Japan did related work with Zen practitioners. Findings are hard to compare, but suggest high-amplitude gamma waves could indicate states of clarity, and that “alpha/theta oscillations during Zazen or Samadhi practices differ functionally from the alpha/theta activity during a relaxed non-meditative state”.
The same cannot be said for what the Beatles learned in India, from the self-styled Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His Transcendental Meditation (TM) became a popular fad and was studied in depth in the 1970s. Although its goal is an elevated state called “cosmic consciousness”, it seems straightforward: sit down, shut your eyes and repeat a sound, without trying to concentrate. Or as John Lennon put it, before being taught: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...” This lyric was borrowed from a book about LSD, which claimed to be based on an ancient Buddhist text, although The Tibetan Book of the Dead was the work of a Theosophist from New Jersey, combining manuscripts he got in Darjeeling with teachings from Egypt. TM mantras sound equally dubious. They currently cost $1,500, yet a review of historical studies finds: “Other relaxation techniques have led to the same EEG profile,” while “the initial claim that TM produces a unique state of consciousness different from sleep has been refuted.” A filmmaker got himself scanned while reciting his mantra, and again while repeating a random German word, which relaxed him more.
Early research on TM’s effects was mostly positive, which helped the Maharishi build a business empire. The most rigorous study appeared in 1975, using a randomised double-blind process with a placebo. Control participants got TM instructions, but no mantra: after six months of practice they were just as relaxed as TM meditators. The organisation continued unfazed, churning out its own studies. As for its claims to spread peaceful vibrations with “yogic flying” (cross-legged hopping on mattresses), its biggest donor has doubts. After giving TM more than $100 million, the publisher Earl Kaplan called it the “biggest spiritual scam in modern history,” hawking a “mechanical and repetitive” technique “which leads to brain washing.” Before leaving, he proposed hiring a team of devoted practitioners to change the world. “I said: ‘Maharishi, why don’t we just put a 10,000-group in place? I’ve donated enough money to support a group like that in India, and with 10,000 people you’ve been saying there would be world peace, right away’. Then he looked at me and he said: ‘Earl, I have no idea if a 10,000-group would create world peace. We would have to create that group and see what effects it would have’...”
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