Integration & Final Reflections - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 11|Session 4

Overview

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.

Differences and methodology will be critical to this discussion. Buddhism as a mode of inquiry is characterized by highly disciplined practices of introspection or “first person” methodologies. Western biobehavioral science as a mode of inquiry is characterized by no less disciplined practices of external or “third person” observation, especially using instruments. Are these differences complementary or more fundamentally at odds with each other?

Motivation will also be critical to this discussion. Buddhism and Western science are both committed to empirical investigations of the mind, but for reasons that are embedded in apparently quite different ethical and philosophical traditions.

What kind of cross-cultural exchange on how the mind works, now and in the future, is best suited to advance what is most compelling intellectually and ethically within both traditions of inquiry?

Dialogue 11
4 sessions
September 14, 2003
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Anne Harrington, PhD, is Professor and Acting Chair of the History of Science at Harvard University, specializing in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind and behavioral sciences. Professor Harrington received her PhD in the History of Science from Oxford University, and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London, and the University of Freiburg in Germany. For six years, she co-directed Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. She also was a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. Currently she serves on the Board of the Mind and Life Institute. She is also a former founding editor of Biosocieties, a journal concerned with social science approaches to the life sciences. Professor Harrington is the author of three books: Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain (1987), Reenchanted Science (1997) and The Cure Within; A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2008) She has also published many articles and produced a range of edited collections including The Placebo Effect (1997), Visions of Compassion (2000), and The Dalai Lama at MIT (2006). She is currently working on a new history of psychiatry, The Suffering Mind, and developing a new project concerned with how culture shapes illness experiences. Other research interests include the history of scientific interests in the "inner world" of brain disorder; and the origins and larger significance of current visions of partnership between Buddhism and science.

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Arthur Zajonc, PhD, was professor of physics at Amherst College from 1978 to 2012, when he became President of the Mind & Life Institute. His research has included studies in electron-atom physics, parity violation in atoms, quantum optics, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between science, the humanities and the contemplative traditions. He has also written extensively on Goethe’s science work. He is author of the book: Catching the Light, co-author of The Quantum Challenge, and co-editor of Goethe’s Way of Science. In 1997, he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama. He organized the 2002 dialogue with the Dalai Lama, “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life,” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” Mind and Life dialogue in 2003, the proceedings of which were published under the title The Dalai Lama at MIT. While directing the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Arthur fostered the use of contemplative practice in college and university classrooms, and he continues to speak around the world on the importance of contemplative pedagogy. Out of this work and his long-standing meditative practice, Zajonc has most recently authored Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love. He has also been General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, a co-founder of the Kira Institute, president of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute.

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B. Alan Wallace is president of The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the ahilosophy of science, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religious Studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, 13 authored, and contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion.

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Eric Lander a geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, is a member of the Whitehead Institute and the founder and director of the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, one of the world’s leading genome centers. He is one of the driving forces behind today’s revolution in genomics, the study of all the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. Dr. Lander has been one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project. He is also professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Under Dr. Lander’s leadership, the Center for Genome Research has been responsible for developing most of the key tools of modern mammalian genomics. The Whitehead Center led the effort to develop genetic and physical maps of the human and mouse genomes, providing a critical foundation for both genome sequencing and the study of disease genetics, and made the largest contribution to the international project to sequence the human genome, producing about 30 percent of the total sequence. In addition, the Center launched a revolution in the study of genetic variation and its application to understanding human disease and led a collaborative effort to identify more than 1.5 million sites of common genetic variation in human beings. It also organized the ongoing effort to sequence the mouse genome. The Center has made these tools immediately and freely available to the scientific community, with the aim of accelerating progress in biomedical research. Dr. Lander earned his B.A. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1978 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Oxford University in 1981. In addition to his work in biology, he was an assistant and associate professor managerial economics at the Harvard Business School from 1981 to 1990. Dr. Lander was named a Rhodes Scholar in 1978 and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987 for his work in genetics. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1997, the U.S. Institute of Medicine in 1998, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, and has served on many advisory boards for governments, academic institutions, scientific societies, and companies.

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Evan Thompson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University shere he holds a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind. He received his B.A. from Amherst College in Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He has published numerous articles in cognitive science, phenomenological philosophy, the philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of mind. Professor Thompson held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is a member of the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences, and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mind and Life Institute. In 2003 he was a visiting Maître de Recherche at the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (CREA), at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

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Georges Dreyfus is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of religion from the University of Virginia. His dissertation, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology in Buddhist Tradition, was done under the direction of Paul Jeffrey Hopkins. He serves as the co-chair for the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion and is also a member of their Steering Committee. His languages of specialization include Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pali. He has published 5 books, including Tibetan Interpretations (1997) and The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (2002), and many articles. He was the recipient of a Foreign Language Area Study Fellowship in 1988-89, a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 1989-90, and a National Endowment for the Humanities award in 1994-95.

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Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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Jerome Kagan is Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a member of the Board on Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Research at the Institute of Medicine. He received a B.S. in Psychology at Rutgers University, an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Biology and Psychology at Harvard University. The focus of Dr. Kagan’s research for the past 20 years has been the relation between the infant temperamental qualities of high and low reactivity and the subsequent development of variation in mood and behavior that has come be called inhibited and uninhibited. Summaries of his work appear in “Change and Continuity in Infancy” (1971) and “The Second Year” (1981). During the late 1970’s, with Richard Kearsley and Philip Zelazo, he conducted a study on the effect of daycare on young infants. One of the important findings of this work was the recognition that some infants were temperamentally prone to be timid and fearful. This observation was one source of motivation for his research. The results of this project were published in “Infancy: Its Place in Development” (1978). Dr. Kagan has also published numerous articles and books, including Galen’s Prophecy (1994), Three Seductive Ideas (1998), and Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Forms. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award given by the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Scientist Award given by the Society for Research in Child Development.

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Jonathan Cohen is Professor of Psychology, Director of the Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior and Director of the Program in Neuroscience at Princeton University. He is also Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He has received the NIMH Training Award in Psychiatry; the Annual Resident Research Award, Northern California Psychiatric Society; the Miller Foundation Prize for Research in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; the NIMH Physician Scientist Award; the NIMH First Award; the Joseph Zubin Memorial Fund Award for Research in Psychopathology; and the Kempf Fund Award.

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Matthieu Ricard, PhD, is a Buddhist monk at Schechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a PhD in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate FrancoisJacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (1969).He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has served as the French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel); The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan); Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Import-ant Skill; and Why Meditate?. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, Matthieu has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan. He devotes all of the proceeds from his books and much of his time to 120 humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, and India—and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage—through his charitable association, Karuna-Shechen. Ricard has been deeply involved in the work of the Mind & Life Institute for many years.

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Richard J. Davidson, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s of arts and PhD degrees, respectively, in psychology. Over the course of his research career, he has focused on the relationship between brain and emotion. He is currently the William James professor and Vilas research professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author or editor of 13 books, including Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, The Handbook of Affective Science, and The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Davidson has published more than 300 chapters and journal articles, and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the board of directors for the Mind & Life Institute since 1992. In 2006, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he received the first Mani Bhaumik Award from UCLA for advances in the understanding of the role of the brain and the conscious mind in healing.

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Stephen M. Kosslyn is John Lindsley Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and Associate Psychologist in the Department of Neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a B.A. from UCLA and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in psychology. His research has focused primarily on the nature of visual mental imagery, visual perception, and visual communication; he has published 7 books and over 225 papers on these topics. Many of these papers focus on testing a neurologically plausible theory of mental imagery he and his group have developed over the past 30 years. He has conducted empirical research using a variety of techniques, including measuring response-times, collecting judgments to perform multidimensional scaling, characterizing deficits following brain damage, measuring regional cerebral blood flow (via positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging), and implementing computational models. He has received the APA's Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award, the National Academy of Sciences Initiatives in Research Award, the Cattell Award, the J-L. Signoret Prize (France), and election to Academia Rodinensis pro Remediatione (Switzerland), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

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Thupten Jinpa, PhD, was trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. In addition, Jinpa holds a bachelor’s honors degree in philosophy and a PhD in religious studies, both from Cambridge University. He taught at Ganden monastery and worked as a research fellow in Eastern religions at Girton College, Cambridge University. Jinpa has been the principal English translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama since 1985 and has translated and edited numerous books by the Dalai Lama, including the New York Times best-sellers Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness, as well as Beyond Religion, Universe in a Single Atom, and Transforming the Mind. His own publications include, in addition to numerous Tibetan works, Essential Mind Training; Wisdom of the Kadam Masters; Self, Reality, and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy: Tsongkhapa’s Quest for the Middle View; as well as translations of major Tibetan works featured in The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He is the main author of Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), an eight-week formal program developed at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Jinpa is an adjunct professor on the faculty of religious studies at McGill University, Montreal; the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, Montreal; and the general series editor of The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He has been a core member of the Mind & Life Institute from its inception. Jinpa lives in Montreal and is married with two daughters.

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