By JUSTIN POPE
Associated Press Writer
Can concentration be controlled? Can attention be practiced and perfected?
These are questions that are of increasing interest today to scientists, but which Buddhist monks have been exploring for thousands of years.
With the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, sitting between them, the two sides gathered Saturday at the Massachusetts Institute Technology in a search for common ground in their pursuit of understanding of the mysteries of the human mind.
Scientists are trained to trust “third-person” verification and are sometimes wary of “first-person” spiritual explanations.
But psychologists and neuroscientists have become interested in meditation, a central component of Buddhist religious life, and in what it says about the limits of an individual’s control over the mind.
Panelists suggested that scientists are starting to see that expert meditators may be useful not only as guinea pigs, but in shaping understanding.
“Before I got into this, I thought we should be open-minded, but I didn’t think it was likely we would be able to have a useful exchange,” panelist Nancy Kanwisher, an MIT psychologist, said after the first morning session of the two-day conference.
Now, she said, “I feel like there is a common language, a common engagement of ideas. We’ve only scratched the surface.”
The Dalai Lama, who is half way through a 16-day tour of the United States timed to coincide with the Sept. 11 anniversary, said he hoped science could provide answers in areas where inward contemplation cannot.
“I myself am not clear,” he said at one point, drawing laughs from the overflow crowd that included actors Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn.
The scientists wanted to pick the minds of the Buddhist scholars about how best to use technology such as brain imaging to study consciousness.
“I can think of a million things to measure, but what I am interested in is, ‘What do you think are the right things to measure?'” asked Jonathan Cohen, a Princeton University brain expert.
Ajahn Amaro, co-abbot of a Buddhist monastery in California, had a ready answer: use technology to measure how the brain reacts to “the effects of one’s behavior, particularly one’s lifestyle.”
Amaro said he would like to know what the machines say about how “level of comfort is associated with how honestly you live.”
