Cognitive control is defined as the ability to act (or think) in accord with intention. These were once taboo topics within the biobehavioral sciences. However, with the rise of cognitive science and new developments in brain behavior research, the phenomena of attention and cognitive control have, over the past three decades, become central and burgeoning areas of research.

What can modern science learn from Buddhist’s rich and virtually untapped database of phenomenological observation? What can traditional Buddhism learn from us?

Western psychology tends to be concerned with the valance (“positive,“ “negative”) of an emotion, while Buddhism tends to emphasize the wholesomeness or not of a particular emotional experience. Buddhism insist that emotions can be regulated with cognitive strategies, while Western psychology has tended to assume that emotions are exactly that part of human mental life …

Continue reading “Emotion”

In this final session, we are interested in putting together the pieces: in understanding how both traditions understand the functional interrelations between attention, imagery, and emotion; and, more broadly, what each tradition understands the “mind” to be, and on what empirical basis.