Multi-tasking, Meditation, and Contemplative Practice, Pt. 2

Dialogue 18|Session 2

Multi-tasking, Meditation, and Contemplative Practice, Pt. 2

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Overview

The subjective phenomena commonly experienced by novice and intermediate practitioners during Shamatha meditation and other related types of contemplative practice suggest that they may be understood in terms of theoretical concepts and empirical results drawn from scientific studies of human multi-tasking. Perhaps practitioners routinely engage in multi-tasking during their meditative sessions; while one of their tasks involves doing the meditation itself, another probably involves performing “the task of life”, which is perpetually underway and entails many on-going mental activities such as retrospecting, evaluating, imagining, planning, daydreaming, self monitoring, and so forth. Becoming a skilled practitioner who is better able to maintain focused attention, to dispel the fog of mind wandering, and to transcend mental distractions would then depend on developing new task-scheduling strategies and mechanisms of cognitive control whereby meditation evolves to be a primary task and “the task of life” ceases to be even a background secondary task.

What have cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists discovered about the nature of multi-tasking relevant to these considerations and prospects? Specifically we will consider the inefficiencies of multi-tasking, the components of human information processing that underlie them, the roles played by alternative types of scheduling strategies, the contributions due to various types of working memory, and the sources of individual differences in these related realms. It will be explained how this analysis may dovetail closely with some classical Buddhist accounts concerning stages of skill acquisition in Shamatha meditation, and with principles of optimal “cross-training” in a variety of contemplative practices to maximize the rate at which meditative skill is attained. Questions to be discussed include: do any Buddhist sutras or other scriptures discuss the topic of multi-tasking? If so, what do they say about it? Do any of the major traditional types of Tibetan Buddhist meditation require or encourage multi-tasking while they are being practiced? Can certain types of meditation enable people to become better at multi-tasking? If so, in what ways?


  • Dialogue 18
    14 sessions
  • Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

David Meyer

David Meyer is a faculty member of the Cognition and Perception Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A mathematical psychologist and cognitive scientist, he received his Ph. D. from Michigan and subsequently worked for almost a decade as a Member of Technical Staff in the Human Information Processing Research Department at the Bell Telephone Laboratories before returning to academe. His teaching and research - sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, and Office of Naval Research - have dealt with fundamental aspects of human perception, attention, learning, memory, language, movement production, multitasking, executive mental control, human-computer interaction, personality and cognitive style, cognitive aging, cognitive neuroscience, mathematical models, and unified computational theories. Numerous reports of this research have appeared in books and journals such as Science, Psychological Review, Cognitive Psychology, Memory & Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Journal of Memory and Language, and volumes of the Attention and Performance symposium series. After completing their doctoral degrees, Professor Meyer's many graduate students have taken professional positions at major universities and research institutions throughout the U.S. and abroad. For his diverse scientific contributions, Prof. Meyer has been elected as a Fellow in the Society of Experimental Psychologists, American Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, and American Association for The Advancement of Science. The American Psychological Association has honored him with its Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. His professional activities have also included extensive service on journal editorial boards, government review panels, and international administrative committees.

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