Mental Imagery - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 11|Session 2

Overview

When we are conscious of our thoughts, we are aware of images—visual, verbal, tactile, and all the rest. Objects populate the world without; images populate the world within. Until very recently, imagery seemed like and utterly private event, something we could access only through introspection. Growing suspicion of introspection in the middle decades of the 20^th century lead behaviorist, psychologist and philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein to thus claim that imagery could not be studied scientifically.

Today, we believe that the behaviorist and these philosophers were wrong. Not only have we developed behavioral techniques that allow us publicly to validate introspect ions by tracking the observable footprints of imagery, but also we now can use brain scanning to observe the neural levers and pistons that power imagery.

There is still, however, a great deal more to do. In particular, our understanding of the phenomenology of mental imagery – the scope of cognitive and emotional experiences that people can have of imagery – remains woefully underdeveloped. In contrast, over the centuries, Tibetan Buddhism has developed a system of disciplined introspective techniques for generating, controlling, and observing mental images that is probably unparalleled in the world. What can modern science learn from this rich and virtually untapped database of phenomenological observation? What can traditional Buddhism learn from us?

Dialogue 11
4 sessions
September 13, 2003
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

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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Daniel Reisberg is Professor of Psychology at Reed College. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, taught initially at the New School for Social Research, and moved to Reed in 1986. His research grows out of the claim that we will understand mental imagery only if we examine both the important commonalities between images and actual stimuli, and also the contrasts between them. This has led him to an examination of some of the apparent boundary conditions on what people can learn from or discover in their images, boundaries not shared by the corresponding stimuli. This work has included studies of both visual and auditory imagery, and his edited volume, Auditory Imagery, remains the only book on imagery in that modality. He has also explored, in a number of studies, the conscious experience of imagery, and how this experience influences remembering and problem-solving. His research also spans another area: how people remember the emotional events of their lives, and he is currently co-editing a new book on t his topic. He is also strongly committed to issues of undergraduate education, and this is reflected both in his current post at a liberal arts college, and in his publication of three textbooks, including one in Cognitive Psychology. He is also the author of over fifty chapters and journal articles. He is on the editorial boards of many journals, and has just ended his term as Associate Editor at Psychological Bulletin.

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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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Marlene Behrmann is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, and has appointments in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh) and in the departments of Neuroscience and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. and M.A. at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, in Speech and Language Pathology, and a Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto. Her research is on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie the ability to recognize visual scenes and objects ( common objects, faces and words), represent them internally in visual imagery, and interact with them through eye movements, reaching and grasping, and navigation. The major research approach is the study of individuals who have sustained brain damage, which selectively affects their ability to carry out these visual processes. This approach is combined with several other methodologies, including measuring accuracy and response time in normal subjects, simulating these visual processes and their breakdown following brain-damage using artificial neural networks; and examining the biological substrate using functional neuroimaging to evaluate patterns of cortical activity. She has published her research in many journals and books and has written extensively about her research findings and their theoretical implications. She has received the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, and the American Psychological Early Career Award in Neuropsychology.

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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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Nancy Kanwisher is Professor in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She r ceived a B.S. in Biology from MIT in 1980, and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from MIT in 1986. After postdoctoral work at Columbia, Harvard and, UC Berkeley, she taught in the UCLA Psychology Department and then the Harvard Psychology Department, returning to MIT in 1997. Kanwisher's research concerns the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying visual experience, using behavioral methods, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Much of her work concerns visual object recognition, a task the human brain accomplishes apparently effortlessly in a fraction of a second but that poses as substantial challenge to current computer vision systems. Using fMRI, Kanwisher's lab has contributed to the identification and characterization of four new regions in the human brain involved in visual perceiving faces, places, bodies, and objects. Her work currently focuses on understanding what processes go on in each of these brain regions, show their activity can be controlled by attention and imagery, and how their activity relates to behavior and awareness. Other work in her lab explores brain regions engaged in reasoning about number, and other regions involved in understanding other minds. Kanwisher received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Peace and International Security in 1986, an NIMH FIRST Award in 1988, a Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow Award from MIT in 2002.

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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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