Monks in the lab
Last week, I watched a documentary titled ‘Monks in the lab’. It is made by the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation, in cooperation with the publisher Akosa. It is about scientific research on the neurological effects of different meditation states. I have attended a seminar last year, lead by Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. I found it is a very interesting field of study.
I absolutely recommend watching this broadcast (it is entirely in English, with some parts in French). I also have Alan’s book about Shamatha and I am looking forward to reading it soon.
Ton from Utrecht said,
April 10, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Thank you. I watched it on the internet tonight. It’s a nice documentary, that leaves important scientific questions unexplained, however and doesn’t satisfy me. The central thesis of the docu is: doing meditation enhances control of the mind, compassion, etcetera. Although - being a meditator in the vipasana tradition myself - I do believe (…) this is true, the film suggests, but never explains how this is scientifically proven.
We see monks with a certain amount of training who have this mind control, compassion, etc. Now imagine they have become monks because they were very good in mind control and compassion, etc. - I mean: even before they started meditating. Or after much training… Even then we don’t know now if everybody who would meditate enough, would “gain” in this respect. These are not proper experiments, these are correlations that can prove almost anything.
ton said,
April 10, 2007 at 10:03 pm
The documentary gives a good impression, and scientifcally, the experimenters have to take into account that the ’samples’ of test subjects are not neutral. How they try to do this, is not explained in the film, you are right about that. With the MRI’s they were looking at the brains of monks in different states of consiousness. They were not studying compassion per se.
What I liked to watch on Dutch public television, was the story about the work of Paul Ekman with his Facial Action Coding System (see http://www.paulekman.com/) and also the footage about the functional MRI’s of the monks, about which I heard during the seminar, and in reading the syllabus of Alan Wallace.
TonsofTime - Enjoy the now » New on TED: Mattieu Ricard on Training the Mind said,
November 5, 2007 at 10:39 pm
[…] Here is a related post. […]