Dr. Anthony Zanesco is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Psychology at the University of Miami. He completed his PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. His work investigates attention and mind wandering using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. One primary aspect of his research is focused on how attentional processes might be trained through meditation and mindfulness practices.
Brandon King, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Saron Lab at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain studying the effects of meditation training on empathy and emotional engagement with suffering. He is interested in how meditation training might shift motivational engagement with others’ suffering, as a possible antecedent for compassionate responding. In his dissertation research (also completed in the Saron Lab), Brandon employed measures of peripheral physiology and memory to examine the effects of a 3-month intensive meditation retreat on practitioners’ emotional responses to suffering in others. Brandon currently co-leads the Pathways Project—a study of how different contemplative training styles influence engagement with emotional stimuli depicting threats or harm to self and others. For this, he led the development of a novel stimulus set, informed by his work on his dissertation, that allows researchers to disambiguate responses to different classes of emotionally challenging stimuli. More broadly, he is interested in different approaches to meditation training and the role of intensive meditation retreats in contemplative practice. He hopes to understand and characterize what motivates people to meditate, how practitioners balance daily practice with more intensive forms of practice, and how the benefits of intensive practice are consolidated or integrated into everyday life.
David Sloan Wilson (SUNY Distinguished Professor, Binghamton University, USA) has made foundational contributions to Darwin’s theory of evolution. His work expands the horizon of evolutionary thinking beyond genetic evolution to include all of the fast-paced changes taking place around us (cultural evolution) and within us (each individual as an evolving entity). This expansion allows evolutionary theory to be related to religious and spiritual traditions more than ever before, including the necessity of an ethics for the whole world. Wilson’s most recent book, and the one most relevant to his conversation with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution.
