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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is coming to Seattle on April 11 - 15 to participate in "Seeds of Compassion," a dialogue with leading educators, researchers, and policy makers highlighting the vision, science, and programs of early social, emotional, and cognitive learning. In preparing for this visit, I googled "Dalai Lama" to find out his views on "early social, emotional and cognitive learning." Up popped an intriguing Wall Street Journal article, "How Thinking Can Change the Brain: Dalai Lama Helps Scientists Show the Power of the Mind To Sculpt Our Gray Matter." In the article, author Sharon Begley shared this story...
"In 2004...the Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a visit to an American medical school over a decade earlier, asked the surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?.... One brain surgeon hardly paused. Physical states give rise to mental states, he asserted; 'downward' causation from the mental to the physical is not possible. The Dalai Lama let the matter drop. This wasn't the first time a man of science had dismissed the possibility that the mind can change the brain. 'But I thought then and still think that there is yet no scientific basis for such a categorical claim,' he later explained. 'I am interested in the extent to which the mind itself, and specific subtle thoughts, may have an influence upon the brain.'"
In the article, Begley goes on to describe at length how, since then scientists have indeed significantly revised their views on how the brain is shaped. She concludes with another story...
"Eight Buddhist 'adepts' [who had practiced meditation for at least 10,000 hours] and 10 volunteers who had had a crash course in meditation engaged in the form of meditation called nonreferential compassion. In this state, the meditator focuses on unlimited compassion and loving kindness toward all living beings. As the volunteers began meditating, one kind of brain wave grew exceptionally strong: gamma waves. These, scientists believe, are a signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung circuits — consciousness, in a sense. Gamma waves appear when the brain brings together different features of an object, such as look, feel, sound, and other attributes that lead the brain to its aha moment of, yup, that's an armadillo.
"Some of the novices 'showed a slight but significant increase in the gamma signal,' Prof. Davidson explained to the Dalai Lama. But at the moment the monks switched on compassion meditation, the gamma signal began rising and kept rising. On its own, that is hardly astounding: Everything the mind does has a physical correlate, so the gamma waves (much more intense than in the novice meditators) might just have been the mark of compassion meditation.
"Except for one thing. In between meditations, the gamma signal in the monks never died down. Even when they were not meditating, their brains were different from the novices' brains, marked by waves associated with perception, problem solving, and consciousness. Moreover, the more hours of meditation training a monk had had, the stronger and more enduring the gamma signal....
"It was something Prof. Davidson had been seeking since he trekked into the hills above Dharamsala to study lamas and monks: evidence that mental training can create an enduring brain trait."
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