When he was a graduate neuroscience student, Jay Sanguinetti attended a two-day retreat in 2014 with Shinzen Young, a prominent meditation teacher who describes his unique blend of Theravada and Mahayana techniques as “algorithmic”—meaning he offers students a very precise set of “if, then” instructions for navigating their inner experience.

“Shinzen’s retreat was the first retreat I had been to in five or six years,” Sanguinetti recalls. “It was so radically different than anything I had experienced up until that point.” Afterward, he approached Young and told him that he was researching the effects of ultrasound stimulation of the brain.

“I pitched it to Shinzen: ‘What about ultrasounding the brain and trying to teach people meditation?’” Sanguinetti recalls. “Shinzen had the responsible answer, which is, ‘It’s not ready, we need to learn more about it.’”

But in 2017 the pair reconnected—and now Young was onboard. Since then, he and Sanguinetti, associate director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson, have been running studies to determine whether exposing meditators’ brains to targeted ultrasound energy can help them quiet their inner chatter and enhance feelings of equanimity, or an internal steadiness.

The pair, who have raised $480,000 in funding, mostly from grants or private foundations like the Evolve Foundation, have an audacious plan. They hope to translate their research into an app-based artificial intelligence-driven technology that they believe holds the potential to transform society.

“If we can enhance baseline levels of equanimity, that might serve as the basis for accelerating the learning of mindfulness skills,” Sanguinetti says. “Can we measure that elevation? Is it safe to move people in that direction? And if that’s true, does that help people learn mindfulness skills quicker? And the last question is, ‘Is that good for behavior in the world’?”

Young puts it more succinctly. They are in the business of “democratizing enlightenment.”

The project follows standard neuroscience research protocols. In the lab, study subjects (novices as well as experienced meditators), don something that looks like a hairnet studded with ultrasonic transducers. Over a period of five or 10 minutes, they receive intermittent pulses of ultrasound energy. Ultrasound frequencies are far above the threshold of human hearing, so the test subjects feel no sensations, and because this is a placebo-controlled study, some people receive no stimulation at all.

Participants may also undergo ultrasound stimulation while lying in an MRI scanner that enables the researchers to gauge how different brain regions respond to the intervention. “The biggest brain and subjective reports are at about 20 minutes post-ultrasound,” Sanguinetti says. “So there’s some change in the way the brain regions are talking to each other.”

Ultrasound is a relative latecomer to the field of noninvasive brain stimulation, Sanguinetti says. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation—which sends a small amount of electric current through the skull—have been extensively studied as treatments for depression and other psychiatric illnesses. But in the past few years Sanguinetti and others have established that ultrasound is safe.

“You can think about it as an acoustic field that’s focused into something like a pencil shape—it’s really long and thin,” he says. A technical challenge is that the skull tends to distort the field, so researchers have to adjust the beam to ensure it’s aimed at the right brain structure. “Once you do, you get millimeter resolution,” Sanguinetti says. “You can pretty much target any depth in the brain, which is a huge advantage over any other noninvasive brain stimulation.”

The primary target is the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a region deep in the brain that is massively connected with other structures and is associated with the default mode network—active during daydreaming and mind-wandering. Young and Sanguinetti theorize that the ultrasound energy mutes activity in the PCC in much the same way meditation tames the “monkey mind.”

For Young, this maps perfectly onto the Buddhist paradigm.

“The basic model that we’re using is that the ‘okayness’ is already there,” he says. “There’s a primordial face that everyone has before anything is born. It’s always there. The basic Buddhist model could be interpreted as, ‘All you have to do is stop doing something to be OK.’ So as you’re going into equanimity, you’re letting go of grasping. You actually stop holding on and interfering with the natural flow of the senses.”

Young, who in 1970 ordained as a monk in a Shingon Buddhist monastery while a graduate student in Japan, emphasizes that the technology he and Sanguinetti are developing is intended to help people overcome obstacles to meditation and move more quickly along the path to awakening. 

“We’re not replacing enlightenment,” he says. “We’re not replacing getting over the self and we’re not replacing refining the self. And we’re not negating the need for bodhisattva-type service. We’re not asking anybody to believe that: we’re only asking them to believe that concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity are trainable and relevant to human happiness at all levels.”

While the technology could make meditation more accessible for novices, “we’re not saying we’re going to make it easy and quick,” he says. “What we mean by that is no watering down of the really good stuff in terms of the dimensions that we might call liberation on the one hand and character development on the other.”

Ultrasound’s apparent effect on consciousness sits squarely within a Buddhist framework, Young contends. “We’re thinking that equanimity is the centerpiece, rather than concentration or even clarity. Because it’s core Buddhism, it’s the Four Noble Truths, it’s the letting go of the push and pull on the flow of the senses. We call it equanimity: the Buddha called it ‘letting go of craving and aversion.’ That’s the kleshas.”

Experienced meditators report significant effects after undergoing the ultrasound sessions, Sanguinetti says. 

“Some people said, ‘This is like a week of retreat, and my baseline equanimity and baseline concentration is enhanced to what it would be like after five days on retreat.’ We got really excited, but with the understanding that these long-term meditators had a lot of prior experience, and this all could have been interacting with the placebo effect in some ways that’s hard to disentangle.”

The study was paused due to the pandemic, but it has since resumed, this time including less-experienced meditators—and those with zero experience. “We’re targeting those brain networks, first asking the basic question: Can we modulate the network we’re interested in?” Sanguinetti says. “It seems like we can. We’ve got these beautiful network changes in the default mode network.”

Adds Young, “We get these equanimity-related reports from the participants without prompting. They don’t know that we’re looking into anything related to meditation—we’re just some mad scientists that want to put energy into their brain. They on their own report some very meditation-like things.”

The pair started out by experimenting on themselves. “I have a principle in the lab that I won’t do anything on anybody else in terms of brain stimulation, unless I do it on myself,” Sanguinetti says.

He later put the procedure to the test during a 15-week online meditation retreat. “Four weeks in, I started four weeks of ultrasound,” he says. “The general effect was, within the first week, an extreme quieting of both inner and external space. The inner space became much stiller than I was able to accomplish just by sitting for 45 minutes every day. With the PCC ultrasound, it was within the first five minutes.”

Young helped Sanguinetti contextualize some of what unfolded as his conscious mind became very still. “My attention could sort of hone in very quickly on things that were occurring and I could see the way emotion was connected to visual thought,” Sanguinetti says. “But I’d never seen the unconscious mind get still.”

Equanimity was significantly elevated, he says. “I felt like I had this superpower where, if I stabilized my attention and focused—if I just increased my concentration a little bit—that I could blast into equanimity. That started occurring when I was off the pillow, when I was walking in the world, when I was giving talks. Those levels of equanimity were just present.”

Young, whose lifelong love of mathematics and science informs his style of Buddhist teaching, has an expansive vision for the future of app-driven meditation instruction, which he expects will help students realize his “Periodic Table of Happiness Elements,” a grid of twenty factors leading to greater fulfillment and less suffering.

“We want to marry [the ultrasound stimulation] to interactive apps that incorporate really effective AI, then use humans as the safety net underneath the apps,” he says. “We want to bring that on and couple it in one device, where the interactive training with the app and the neuromodulation come together. You might be able to buy it from Amazon, but that would be a good thing, if it delivers the goods and does relatively little harm.”

For some, the prospect of a powerful new brain stimulation technology might conjure up nightmarish scenarios. What if someone amped up the dose and caused brain injury? What if an employer (or the government) forced people to undergo ultrasound treatments?

The risks are real, Young acknowledges. 

“This is scary shit—really serious,” he says. “But if people like us aren’t the first to market with this, it’s going to be someone’s skunk lab with some very limited agenda for someone who cares about power. We’ve thought it through. That’s why people like me and Jay have a moral responsibility to do this research, because we do it in the open and we have a happiness grid that says these are the better angels, and this is what we’re working toward with this technology.”

However scary the project may be, it’s clear that for Young, it is a dream come true.

“It’s like I’m eight years old, and I get every day to speed dial a senior, cutting-edge research scientist doing something important in the world that few people can even understand,” he says. “Why are they even letting me in the room here? This is so much fun for a little kid.”

The post Equanimity On Demand: Can Brain Stimulation Technology Mimic the Effects of Meditation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Since the time of Galileo, science and religion have increasingly appeared to be at odds, with religion slowly but surely losing the battle, B. Alan Wallace observes. His series presents a paradigm in which science and religion join together in a spirit of radical empiricism and open-minded, experiential inquiry.

B. Alan Wallace is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He is the author of multiple books, including The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind from Wisdom Publications.

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When Emery first encounters the Sanskrit saying that serves as the title for this chapter, he may feel confused. It translates as “You are that,” and it’s certainly not something he will hear every day.

In fact, he might feel such a saying is counterintuitive, given all the divisions and tribalism that he sees today in our society. Almost everyone he encounters, and certainly what he is exposed to in media, will encourage him to see himself as different. However, I want my grandson to one day realize that Whatever it is, it’s you. That whatever he is experiencing, whether it be a person, place, or thing, he is in one way or another meaningfully connected to it. He can start probing this connection between himself and others with science. Specifically, he should begin with a revelation concerning how all of us can never be more distantly related than fiftieth cousins in Guy Murchie’s The Seven Mysteries of Life, a work one of my students once described as feeling like an entire college education between the covers of a single book.

“Your own ancestors,” Murchie tells us, “whoever you are, include not only some blacks, some Chinese and some Arabs, but all the blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Malays, Latins, Eskimos, and every other possible ancestor who lived on Earth around AD 700.”

I’ve pondered for a long time now Murchie’s fascinating claim that we need only go back to the year AD 700 to discover that no one in the human species can be less closely related than fiftieth cousins. Our genes, he points out, circulate throughout the human species in such a manner that we are joined to everyone once in every fifty generations. And Murchie cautions us: “If therefore your appetite disdains any kind of man, shake not your family tree. For its fruits appear in every color, in every stage of ripeness or rot, and its branches encompass the earth.”

If Emery needs a more immediate demonstration of his connectedness to others, and if he reads this book by his grandfather, Murchie would hip him to how the book he is holding in his hands was made possible by paper invented in China, by ink created long ago in India, by the invention of type by Germans who used Roman symbols they took from the Greeks who borrowed their letter concepts from Phoenicians who adapted them from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Science will also introduce Emery to mirror neurons, discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese. While research into this area is still very new, and often controversial, I think a thesis worth exploring is advanced by one of its champions, V. S. Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, who posits that mirror neurons are “the starting point for empathy.”

In the prefrontal lobes of monkey brains, and presumably in our own brains, the same cells that are activated when we perform an action are also activated when we watch someone else perform the same action. If Emery sees someone in pain, the anterior cingulate neurons in his brain will cause him to recognize such pain in others and understand it to be like his own experiences of pain. Although not yet empirically proven, I suspect that mirror neurons, which are a subset of motor neurons, not only help us “feel” the pain of others in a kind of virtual reality simulation in ourselves but also their happiness, love, joy, and other emotions. How many times have you listened to someone, a friend or even a stranger, describe in detail their experience of suffering and found tears welling in your own eyes? Or been moved, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, by “pity and fear” in a drama onstage? Or felt such fear when watching a horror movie that you had to avert your eyes? Or felt a powerful emotion sweep over you when listening to the lyrics of a love song? (My own recent favorite is Miten and Premal’s “Till I Was Loved by You.”)

We all know this experience, because it is what draws us so powerfully to art. “We have never lived enough,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes in Love’s Knowledge. “Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial.” All Emery will need to do to understand the truth in this is consider what takes place when he reads.

That experience will be similar to what author Zadie Smith describes in her recent essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” Of books, she writes, “I lived in them and felt them living in me. I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield . . . I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do.”

Open any novel (or this book in your hands). What is there? Black marks—signs—on white paper. First, they are silent. They are lifeless marks, lacking signification until the consciousness of the reader imbues them with meaning, allowing a fictitious character like Huckleberry Finn, for example, to emerge from the monotonous rows of ebony type. Once this magical act takes place in the mind of the reader, an entire world appears in consciousness: “a vivid and continuous dream,” as novelist John Gardner once called this experience, one that so ensorcells us that we forget the room we’re sitting in or fail to hear the telephone ringing. In other words, the world experienced within any book is transcendent. It exists for consciousness alone. Jean-Paul Sartre says in his book What is Literature? that the rare experience found in books is the “conjoint effort of author and reader.” While the writer creates their “world” in words, their work requires an attentive reader who will “put himself from the very beginning and almost without a guide at the height of this silence” of signs. Reading, Sartre tells us, is directed creation. For each book—each novel or story— requires that a reader exercise their freedom for the “world” and theater of meaning embodied on its pages to be. As readers, we invest the cold signs on the pages of Richard Wright’s Native Son with our own emotions, our understanding of poverty, oppression, and fear. Then, in what is almost an act of thaumaturgy, the powerful figures and tropes Wright has created reward us richly by returning our subjective feelings to us transformed, refined, and alchemized by language into a new vision with the capacity to change our lives forever.

I’m painting, I suppose, a portrait of our interwoven lives that some cynics might feel is too idealistic. Very well, then. I confess to being an idealist. All my life I’ve wondered what it would be like to live in a culture where, instead of men and women insulting and tearing down one another, people in their social relations, and even in the smallest ways, held the highest intellectual, moral, creative, and spiritual expectations for one another.

Since our social world is not that way, an idealist must get used to disappointment, especially at this hour in America’s culture history when we appear to be obsessed with “otherness.” By otherness Emery will come to understand the term is frequently used to refer to him, to LGBT people, to women, Jewish people and people of color and virtually everyone who is not a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, cisgender heterosexual male.

Straight WASP males, it is often argued, are the recipient of white male privilege, and in this country are the universal human standard against which all others are consciously or unconsciously measured. The glaring absurdity of this notion is evident when we consider that people of color make up between 70 and 83 percent of the world’s population while whites account for between 17 and 30 percent. I cannot deny, and have no interest in denying, that until quite recently this very racist propaganda, which was subtly and sometimes blatantly promoted in American and European societies from at least the 18th century, was a lie that could be found everywhere. It is behind the spurious justifications for slavery, racial segregation, colonialism, and the terrible treatment of everyone who in any way differed from cisgender white men.

He will recognize, even with limitations, his connectedness to everything supposedly “other,” and that nothing can be a stranger or alien to him.

At this writing, the agonies associated with otherness have polarized Americans in a way perhaps impossible to repair. The phrase E pluribus unum, or “Out of many, one,” can today seem like a cruel joke. The pain caused by our obsession with racial, gender, and sexual other-ness, in the past and present, has fueled various forms of tribalism, ideologies based on difference, and led to the sickening mass killings of black Americans in churches and Jews in synagogues.

My hope is that Emery will remember a story I read in my teens, which I will share with him, about D. T. Suzuki, the major interpreter of Zen Buddhism in the middle of the 20th century.

As the story goes, Dr. Suzuki was giving a lecture, and during the Q&A, a member of the audience asked him, “Dr. Suzuki, what about the Other?” Suzuki became quiet. He thought long and hard about the question, there at the podium. After a time, he put his head down on his folded arms, and only after a few minutes did he lift it. He looked at the person who’d asked him the question and replied, “What Other?”

In Buddhism, there is no dualism between self and Other. Indeed, there is no self—that is an illusion, a social construct—and there is no “Other” either. Science also denies the existence of such an entity as a substance—rather, we are simply consciousness, thoughts without a “thinker.” Suzuki paused and thought for so long because in Buddha Dharma the question simply made no sense.

As he grows in maturity, I think my grandson in his inevitable acceptance of the reality that nothing is personal, permanent, or perfect, will also ideally grow in humility and compassion. He will understand our limitations as C. S. Lewis described them: “Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?”

But he will recognize, even with these limitations, his connectedness to everything supposedly “other,” and that nothing can be a stranger or alien to him.

“A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space,” Albert Einstein once wrote. “He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

May our grandchildren break free of the “prison” Einstein spoke of and rise to the occasion of the task he placed before us.

♦

From GRAND: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life by Charles Johnson © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Hanover Square Press.

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Cheering crowds, flashing lights, high-tech scoring, and a carnival barker directing the action against the backdrop of a bustling festival—and at the center of it all, two competitors face off for the top score. The name of the game? “Relax harder.”

Welcome to Meditation Deathmatch, a pop-up exhibition that is equal parts art installation, sporting event, and science experiment. Participants are placed under visualizers—crescent-shaped panels that create brilliant light displays according to an algorithm that tracks brainwaves—and instructed to meditate for four minutes while the emcee dishes out distractions and encourages the crowd to do the same. Meanwhile, electroencephalogram (EEG) headbands record the participants’ brainwaves to determine who can attain the calmest state.

Related: This Is Your Brain On Zen

The idea for the project came from a group of neuroscience researchers and artists in Austin, Texas, who started building the system for a meditation competition in early 2014. That summer, they brought the finished product to Burning Man, the annual pop-up arts festival in the Nevada desert. Setting up their EEG readers next to the popular Thunderdome installation—where festivalgoers fight in a remake of the steel-cage arena from the Mad Max film—they challenged people to enter the Thunder OM and take part in a Meditation Deathmatch.

“It’s tongue in cheek,” said Brey Tucker, who joined up with the group at Burning Man before he and two others created their own iteration of Meditation Deathmatch, which debuted at the Bass Coast electronic music and arts festival outside of Vancouver, Canada, in 2018. “But at the end of the experience, someone’s been very subtly shown the power of meditation. A lot of meditation is very dull, and you really have to be patient to see the benefits from it. So when I first saw this, I thought it was an absolutely hilarious way to get people into something that’s otherwise not very exciting.”

Tucker, the technology director at a Vancouver construction firm, was joined by Alyssa Haas, whose background is in industrial design and architecture, and Greg Borreson, a programmer who helps develop educational games at an independent studio in Vancouver. Together they built a new system and introduced the visualizer pods, which react to participants’ brainwave readings. If a meditator is calmer than their opponent, the pods produce a bigger, brighter, more distracting lightshow to make meditating more challenging, leveling the playing field. The winner is the contestant who has the highest level of alpha and theta waves, which are associated with being calm and having a clear mind, and the lowest level of beta and gamma waves, associated with actively trying to concentrate and sensory distractions. (Delta waves, which can be associated with sleep, were ignored for the sake of the competition, and theta and gamma waves count for double.)

Borreson, who designed the visualizer and the scoring program, said that the system is not perfect but offers the best metrics presently available. “Measuring meditation is something where there’s always going to be just straight off physiological differences between people,” he said. Still, some interesting trends emerged.

The highest scorer among the hundreds who participated at the Bass Coast Festival was a Kundalini yoga teacher. In general, people with a meditation practice fared better, as did those who were “commonly described by their friends as being really chill individuals,” Borreson said.

“At the end of the experience, someone’s been very subtly shown the power of meditation.”

Haas said that confidence was a predictor as well. “Often people who were like, ‘Oh, I’m horrible at meditating,’ didn’t do very well,” she noted. Borreson added, “My hypothesis is that they may have been on edge about the particular experience, and it was showing in their gamma dominance. They had a harder time getting comfortable, were more distracted, and were more worried about how well they were doing.”

Haas was also surprised to learn that some children were naturally inclined toward meditation, while others were not.

In addition to the Thunder OM team, the Deathmatch crew, and a third offshoot based in San Francisco called the Meditation Battle League (MBL), other independent meditation competitions have sprouted up. Greater access to neurofeedback technology has been one of the drivers of this trend. Products like the Muse Brain Sensing headband costs about $200, and various meditation apps let people track their own performance.

Earlier this year, Chris Taylor, a writer for the media and entertainment website Mashable, ran March Mindfulness (a take on March Madness) and found that a “calmness” competition could spur people who were typically stressed out about the prospect of meditating to take part. After the final round on March 31 at the San Francisco headquarters of the meditation app Calm, Taylor wrote that competitive meditation could be “a genuine sport in the making.” It’s unclear, however, how widespread the trend has become.

Yet Deathmatch seems to be unique in using spectacle to deliberately distract its participants. Borreson said he was not familiar with the other competitions but said that watching those would probably be like following “tennis or golf ”—whereas their own game, Haas chimed in, was “like WWE” wrestling.

The team said that the next step would be to create a more mobile version of the currently bulky Meditation Deathmatch setup in order to be able to tour with it more regularly. Deathmatch, MBL, and Thunder OM are also in talks to collaborate.

“Going forward, we’re hoping to connect the various groups and try to make sure that whenever the name Meditation Deathmatch is used, it is backed by a certain amount of shared vision and a standard of performance,” said Joshua Jackson, a member of the original Thunder OM team. Jackson said he has begun to collaborate with Meditation Battle League and was impressed by their enthusiasm.

“It’s just the first chapter,” said Tucker. “So I think you can definitely expect more from us.”

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The following article is excerpted from one of the final talks in our online course, Buddhism for Beginners. John Dunne, a Buddhist scholar and practitioner, introduces the origins, teachings, and historical development of Buddhism in this course for beginners and beyond. Here, he takes a closer look at the ongoing debate about whether Buddhism should be primarily thought of as scientific or religious.

♦

Starting as far back as the mid-19th century, various people have tried to promote Buddhism as scientific. The idea started among various Asian intellectuals, some of whom were pushing back against colonialism by demonstrating the strength of their culture. Later, Western Buddhists also promoted this claim. So is there any truth to it?

Lamas and the lab

One way to approach that question is to look at how the claim has informed some useful dialogues between scientists and Buddhists, perhaps most prominently His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. There are good reasons those conversations work well.

First of all, Buddhism endorses the notion that if we want to prove something, we need to use empirical evidence. If there is a contradiction between what we can observe—either directly or through inferences based on perception—and what Buddhist scriptures say, then we are expected to reject the scriptures and go with what we have established empirically. In other words, the evidence of our own experience and reasoning has to be the touchstone.

There’s a quote often cited in the Tibetan tradition (it was originally in Sanskrit) in which the Buddha says, “Just as a goldsmith tests to see whether something is gold by touching it to a touchstone, by rubbing it, by heating it, so too, oh monks, you should accept my words only after examining them and not out of respect for me.”

Scripture is useful, but it is not what we need in the end. In the context of Buddhism, what we actually need is experience—the kinds of experiences that transform our habits. Mere intellectual understanding isn’t sufficient. No matter how many of the Buddha’s discourses we read, it will never amount to experience. So from its earliest days, the tradition had a built-in sense that while the Buddha’s discourses are necessary for teaching the path, at a certain point, we need to leave that behind in favor of our own direct experience.

This is one way in which you could say Buddhism is scientific. In our cultural history, to be scientific, in part, means to turn away from the kinds of knowledge claims we find supported by our scriptural traditions in the Abrahamic religions. For a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim scientist, the appeal to scripture has to be set aside, but Buddhism set it aside at the very beginning.

Another way in which Buddhism can be said to be scientific is how it engages in a very detailed examination of the mind. Within the Abhidharma, one of the three forms of canonical Buddhist literature, there’s a great deal of discussion about the mind itself and various ways of analyzing how it works. It asks: How do attention and perception work? If I am attached, how is attachment operating? How does it make me behave? How do I counteract attachment? How do I learn to recognize attachment? These various ways of analyzing the mind that we find in the Abhidharma literature are quite detailed and profound and have already proven to be of great interest to scientists who are seeking some alternative perspectives on the workings of the mind.

One of the key aspects of these Buddhist accounts of the mind is that they do not assume that there is a single controller or ego that is running all of these processes. That belief has turned out to be a commonly accepted position among neuroscientists, who have not identified a part of the brain that controls everything else. There’s no evidence of any single controller within the various brain processes that constitute consciousness. So, Buddhism’s robust account of the workings of the mind along with the position that rejects the idea of a single controller is another way in which Buddhism aligns fairly well with our contemporary mind sciences.

When you look at all this then, it makes good sense to say that there is a possibility for a good dialogue with science and also that in a certain way Buddhism is scientific. But let’s not be too confused about this, because to say that there really is a Buddhist science requires some qualifications.

The scientific method

Although there are amazing and detailed theories within Buddhism about the workings of the mind and so on, many of those theories have not gone under any revision for centuries. But that type of revision is central to the scientific method, in which a theory leads to hypotheses that are then tested, and if they don’t work out, in principle, we revise our theories. From there, we continue onward, all the while making some advancement. We don’t quite see that in Buddhism, where many of the fundamental theories have not been revised for centuries.

Does this mean that there is something wrong with Buddhism? If those theories are good enough for the training of people and if we’re not interested in what is objectively true, which itself is a very problematic idea within Buddhism, then perhaps we don’t need to have so much theory revision. But whether or not theory revision is necessary or desirable, it’s certainly not present in Buddhism in the same way that it is in the scientific traditions in the West. So we need to be cautious when talking about Buddhist science or the ways in which Buddhism is scientific.

At the same time, we do see contemporary figures, most importantly His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who are interested in some theory revision. The Dalai Lama wants to engage in dialogue with scientists so both sides might learn and revise their theories. We see this slowly happening in the Tibetan monastic institutions in exile and to some extent within Tibet, too, where there’s an entire program of scientific education that is ongoing. In any case, the idea of Buddhism as science has often been a way for Buddhism to negotiate its identity within modernity.

A matter of faith

There’s one last issue that we should consider. From our cultural perspective in the United States, if Buddhism is science, then it would seem that it can’t be religion. We very often think of religion as standing in opposition to science or that faith stands in opposition to rationality. But from a Buddhist standpoint, that’s already extremely problematic.

Within Buddhism there are classical accounts of what we might translate as faith. The first, which is called clear faith, only involves a feeling of being inspired. It’s not about believing anything in particular. The second aspect is motivational faith, which is a feeling of admiration toward someone that motivates you to become like that person. The third feature of faith is a trusting confidence that is based upon reasoning. You could say that that third kind of faith is involved when you see a chair and you sit in it—just a quick glance suggests that the chair is probably not going to collapse when you sit down. It’s an act of faith to just sit in the chair, but it’s not completely irrational.

We often think about religion as involving a set of beliefs that can’t be substantiated through rationality because they are somehow beyond rationality. Rationality is the domain of science and this kind of faith is the domain of religion. If we adopt that kind of a split, then Buddhism is not a religion, because it doesn’t even endorse this type of division.

However, for academic scholars of religion, Buddhism is certainly a religion. But we have to ask the question: what does religion mean here?

What is a religion?

It’s a difficult question to answer exactly. But let me introduce you to one idea that I find particularly useful, which comes from Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), known as the father of sociology. In his famous work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim claimed that religions give us the tools to construct our reality together. It gives us the categories—space and time, gender and so on—that enable us to experience the world in a similar way. Of course, different cultures and religions have different ways of doing that. Sometimes that means they come into conflict because they can’t understand each other to the point where their worlds appear incompatible. They can’t even understand their different notions, for example of what constitutes the good or what constitutes beauty or what constitutes happiness.

For Durkheim, religion is that which gives us those tools for constructing reality, and we acquire those tools by participating in what he calls the sacred. The sacred is not about some kind of mystical underlying special world that is behind things. The sacred is simply that which we mark out as special in our lives, something that brings us all together and that we honor at once. When we come together and honor what we consider special, we are participating in mutually constructing a reality.

This vision means that religion could certainly apply to any system that brings people together under certain occasions to focus on what is special and in that sense participate in worship. This idea could apply very clearly to Buddhism, but it can apply to lots of other things as well.

I teach at the University of Wisconsin, and on several weekends in the fall, we see about 50–60,000 people dressed in the same color, all parading down the streets heading to the great hall, where they gather together, sing songs, and share a special moment. I’m talking, of course, about a college football game. Go Badgers! Well, is that religion? In some ways, from the Durkheimian standpoint, sports fandom functions very much like religion.

So, what is religion? It’s hard to say.

But the idea that Buddhism is not a religion is very problematic because part of what Buddhism is all about, even in a very self-conscious way, is the creation or the recreation of our shared reality together.

♦

For more on this and other questions, check out Buddhism for Beginners, Tricycle’s new, free resource for addressing the Buddhist basics. Or to delve even deeper, sign up for John Dunne’s Buddhism for Beginners course.

The post Is Buddhism Scientific or Religious? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It seems as if every day a new article is published promoting the benefits of meditation. According to the litany of reports, meditation can help with stress, anxiety, depression, sleep, and can even make you a better, more compassionate person. But according to a 2018 meta-analysis of meditation studies, the science behind these claims is plagued by methodological flaws.

The analysis—“The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” written by Ute Kreplin, Miguel Farias, and Inti A. Brazil and presented in the open-access journal Scientific Reports—looked at studies of the supposed prosocial effects of meditation, such as increasing compassion, connectedness, and empathy, or decreasing aggression and prejudice. They found that “the methodological quality of the studies was generally weak (61%), while one third (33%) was graded as moderate, and none had a grading of strong.” Other investigations, including a 2015 analysis of lovingkindness meditation studies published in the journal Mindfulness and a 2014 lovingkindness study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found similar results. And a 2009 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that results from studies purporting to show the benefits of mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques also suffered from methodological flaws.

Tricycle spoke to Ute Kreplin, one of the authors of the meta-analysis. Kreplin received her PhD in Affective Neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, teaches psychology at Massey University in New Zealand, and has conducted research at Oxford and Coventry universities in the United Kingdom. Here she discusses why meditation studies tend to be flawed and what that means for meditators—if anything.

Do your findings mean that we have to throw out all these meditation studies? It doesn’t mean that we can’t learn anything from them. But we need to be really cautious about how we interpret the findings that come from them and to keep in mind that they do have limitations. We could use them as a jumping-off point to create good studies, and then we can get good scientific evidence rather than stuff that’s biased.

Why is there so much biased research on meditation? There are many parts to that. One of them is that we normally study what we feel passionate about—and that’s not a bad thing. We want to do something that interests us, and we want to go and find out about it. But then it’s easy to get carried away wanting to prove that something works, and we tend to ignore some of the things that don’t work.

Another factor is that for a very long time it was important that you publish positive results. So if you ran a study and you didn’t find anything, then you had wasted a year of your life [laughs] because no one wanted to read about it. That’s starting to change now. Studies that have negative results or don’t find anything but can show that they are methodologically sound get published anyway. But for a long time there was this pressure, because if you got published, you’d get the money.

You said that people tend to study what they’re passionate about. What brought you to do this study? Are you a meditation enthusiast or practitioner? Not really. I’ve dabbled in mindfulness from my time working as a clinician, but my main research area is actually in neuroscience. It was through coincidence that I got to work with Miguel Farias, who is my coauthor.

I didn’t realize that the findings would be what they were. I thought we’d have a look and see whether or not the evidence showed that meditation increases prosociality. I wasn’t expecting to find all these weaknesses in the methodology. It’s hard to have a perfect study—no study is really perfect—but the number of flaws was quite surprising.

Could you explain what a strong study would look like? A strong study would try to eliminate bias. In drug trials, for example, you would run a placebo condition. Neither the researcher nor the participants would know who gets the real drug. It’s harder to have a placebo in meditation studies or behavioral studies in general, but there are other things you can do.

For example, you can blind your data analysis, so the person looking at the results doesn’t know which group is the control, which in this case would be the group that does not receive the meditation instruction. That way you can prevent yourself from tweaking your numbers to get one group to look better.

Another thing that you can do is preregister the study. There are websites where, before you run the study, you can lay out your groups, the criteria by which you exclude certain participants, and how you’re going to analyze the data. That means that later you can’t change the way you do your analysis to get some extra results. In a preregistered study, additional tests aren’t totally forbidden, but you have to justify them, and “my first one didn’t give me the right results” isn’t a very good justification.

A third thing you should always do in a behavioral study is to have an active control group. Many studies compared mindfulness to doing nothing, which is a passive control. And obviously, if I sit around for eight weeks and think about how I can be more compassionate toward other people, then at least temporarily I will be a little bit more compassionate compared to just going about my daily life. An active control group does something similar to the intervention that you want to test against. The control group could be a discussion about compassion. Then you would have more clarity as to whether the mindfulness practice was more effective than just thinking about com-passion—which would indicate that the mindfulness practice itself led to those results.

Did any of the studies that you looked at use an active control? There were some that used an active control. And some used both active and passive, which is great. But quite a lot of studies just used the passive control group.

Your analysis found that many of the meditation techniques in these studies were taught by one of the authors, which led to bias. Normally in a double-blind study the tester doesn’t know what they are testing for. But in Buddhist traditions, there’s a long process of becoming empowered to teach meditation. So is it possible to have an unbiased person running the meditation study? In the ’70s someone designed a double-blind study of transcendental meditation in which he wrote a whole new script for the control group that did similar things to transcendental meditation but left out some of its components. That’s very time-consuming and very hard. And whoever would be teaching it would have to be naive enough not to realize that one of the meditation scripts is just a sham.

“It’s hard to have a perfect study—no study is really perfect—but the number of flaws was quite surprising.”

Perhaps for meditation studies it’s more important to blind the data analysis and to have an external teacher run the intervention. The teacher can be really experienced in meditation techniques, but he or she wouldn’t know anything about the rest of the study.

One of the findings that surprised me the most was how many researchers were meditation practitioners and also ran the whole study—and yet they still weren’t trying to minimize any of the experimental bias. Experimental bias is quite a longstanding concept in psychology—you learn about it as part of your undergraduate degree. It’s really easy to influence people inadvertently.

The main thing your study looked at was findings of prosociality. How exactly do you define prosociality? Most of the studies we analyzed looked at whether or not meditation or mindfulness increased compassion. Or if people felt more empathic afterward. Or if people were less aggressive or less prejudiced toward minority groups.

How do you measure compassion and empathy? There are two ways. You could do a survey, which is what most people do. But all surveys rely on people to self-report. There were also a few studies that tried to use behavioral tests. So for compassion, for example, there is a classic test. You stage a waiting room with three chairs. Two stooges are hired by the researchers to sit, and then a study participant sits in the third seat. Then a fourth person walks into the room, and then the question is: will the participant give up the seat for the fourth person? The more likely people are to give up the seat, the more compassionate they are.

That sounds like it’s also more costly and time-consuming. A little bit, yeah. Because you need people that help you with the research in order to do that.

Did your study support any claims about the benefits of meditation? I would be cautious about saying that we supported any benefits. The one that came out clearest was an increase in compassion. But most of the findings on compassion fell apart when we looked at these methodological flaws. Compassion was supported only when the people used the passive control group—when it was compared to doing nothing—but it wasn’t really supported when it was compared to active control groups. Also, compassion was supported only when the researcher was part of the intervention team; when we separated out the studies where the researcher didn’t participate, those results fell apart again. We just don’t know. We don’t have evidence against it, but we most certainly don’t have evidence for it, either. What we are trying to say is that we need more good research to get a clear picture of what’s actually going on.

So basically all the articles in all the health magazines touting the benefits of meditation are groundless? Basing their arguments on weak evidence, I would say.

Related: Don’t Believe the Hype

That’s a kinder way to put it. I’ve read other meta-analyses to see if this was only an issue in studies that looked at prosociality. And most meta-analyses or reviews found methodological flaws around the meditation studies. Some areas will really have better evidence than other areas. For example, in cognitive behavioral therapy, the mindfulness-based stress reduction programs are more researched, although I don’t think all the studies in that field are totally sound. We have to be careful when we generalize.

There are many who would argue that Buddhist practice has to be a holistic approach. It involves studying the dharma—the teachings—and a variety of rites and practices, of which meditation is just one. Maybe this question is outside the scope of what you’re doing, but is it possible for randomized scientific studies to explore a holistic method by breaking it down into its component parts? You can compare a long-term meditator with people who don’t meditate and then see how they differ in either their behavior or how their brain activation differs from other people. Then you can say that their lifestyle, not just meditation, brings about these changes. So that question can be investigated with the scientific method to a certain extent.

The problem with those studies is that you can’t determine what the effect might have been attributed to. If someone is a Buddhist for ten years, meditation isn’t the only change in their life. They also might follow a specific diet or they might follow a certain rhythm throughout their day, and all of these factors can have an impact on how you behave afterward.

We looked at studies called randomized control trials, which all had a measure before and a measure after the intervention. The participants were randomly selected to be in the control group or the intervention group. These types of studies are the best way to determine if there’s an effect caused by a particular practice.

In these studies, people made a very specific claim that meditation removed from everything else can have these great benefits—and these benefits can be seen in short-term interventions, not just long-term meditation. It’s a different question behind that: can meditation, when removed from its framework, have the same effects or not? That’s probably more a philosophical question than a scientific question.

Related: Living by Meditation Alone

Are you familiar with the monk Matthieu Ricard, who after being put in an MRI machine was given the moniker “happiest man in the world” (a title I don’t think he’s fond of)? Is that the purpose of Buddhism, though, to be happy?

That’s a good question. Probably not. It’s probably beyond that. Meditation or mindfulness by itself is often sold as the happy pill. The purpose becomes completely different from what it would be in a spiritual context, and you are meditating just to be happy. But is meditation really the right path to happiness? According to research from Dr. Willoughby Britton of Brown University about meditation’s occasional negative effects, as well as earlier accounts of meditation not leading to desired results (such as a 1976 study by Arnold Lazarus of Rutgers University), the answer is: not always.

The post Bad Science? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2016, viewers of HBO’s Westworld were treated to a sci-fi thriller in which participants in a Wild West–themed immersion experience—an amusement park of sorts—robbed, killed, fell in love, and lived out a host of other adventures with artificially intelligent robots who were almost indistinguishable from human beings. The blockbuster show was fodder for TV-loving Buddhists, some of whom opined that the endless loop of the robots’ lives and their attempts to break free by “waking up” made a good metaphor for samsara, the cycle of worldly existence. Although the show was certainly not the first pop culture creation to explore the ascension of AI beings and the question of those beings’ sentience, its “futuristic” setting seems to be on its way to becoming reality—making the relationship between this technology and humanity’s highest values and biggest mysteries ever more urgent.

Investors have tripled AI investments over the past three years, and AI technologies are currently being researched and introduced into fields as wide-ranging as health care and construction. There are AI airport guides, AI baby and child tutors, AI pesticide sprayers, AI stock traders, AI paralegals, and AI gamers (who are often better than human ones). AI systems can perform tasks as mundane as providing on-demand cat facts (as any Alexa user will tell you) or as serious as analyzing tissue slides for cancerous cells. It’s clear that AI’s vast potential, as well as its current stage of progression, demands attention. As Steve Omohundro, a scientist and writer who is internationally recognized for his work on artificial intelligence and strategies for its beneficial development, puts it, “We’re at a critical moment in human history, where this technology is in the process of transforming everything. We don’t want the decisions about where it goes to be made purely by technologists or capitalists. It needs a broader perspective, particularly a spiritual and psychological one.”

The dialogue that follows was recorded on November 2, 2017, at the California Institute of Integral Studies as part of the institute’s Technology & Consciousness Series. In it, Omohundro speaks with Nikki Mirghafori, an artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, about the intersection of artificial intelligence and the Buddhist idea of karma: more specifically, the AI future we’re heading toward, and how our intentions might shape it. It may make the difference, they say, between a world in which a corporation serves up a venue for massively wealthy individuals to enact their most selfish fantasies—and one that leads to the flourishing of humanity’s best potential.

—Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Editor

Nikki Mirghafori (NM): Steve, what is artificial intelligence (AI)? Give us a historical perspective.

Steve Omohundro (SO): An AI system is a computer program that makes decisions to achieve a goal. When you look at what it does, it appears to be smart: it’s pretty good at achieving its goal. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the late 1950s, but the idea of having machines that might think was introduced in the 1940s, when two of the early inventors of computers, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, wrote books about how the brain works and discussed whether computers could mimic it.

AI as a field has had many ups and downs. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, they were ecstatic about the possibilities. They thought the machines were going to reach human-level performance in just a few years—we’d be able to get rid of human labor and make wonderful changes to the world. But the technology didn’t advance the way they hoped it would, and people became pessimistic. There was the first of several “AI winters,” when the funding for research dried up and scientists in other disciplines started to say, “This is a garbage field; there’s nothing real here.”

There has also been a pendulum swinging back and forth between two ways of thinking about how intelligence works. One is the symbolic approach, where thoughts are viewed as made from symbols and thinking is viewed as mathematical proof. The other is the neural network approach: Human brains consist of 86 billion neurons, these little cells that transmit signals among one another. They’re connected together in a complicated way, and they are able to learn from their experience. In that approach, you just throw a bunch of computational elements together and hope that the system is able to learn by itself.

The symbolic approach used to be viewed as more promising. Then, in the 1980s, the neural network advocates got a burst of energy when they figured out how to train networks with multiple layers of units—the most common were three-layer networks—that could solve harder problems than was previously possible. But those networks reached a plateau, causing another AI winter, until around 2012, when researchers started having great success with “deep neural networks,” which have many more layers, say 10 or 100. In the last five years these networks have started solving many problems we couldn’t solve back in the ’80s. For example, they have outperformed the older networks—and sometimes even humans—on tests of speech recognition and image recognition.

One of the great lessons from all of this is that to train large networks you need large training sets. The Internet has made the entire world’s transactions available for training: the 200 billion Tweets people send per year can be used to train algorithms that model human verbal responses; and YouTube has more than a billion videos that can be used to train visual models for everything from facial expressions to car crashes.

NM: But really what has made this an AI Spring, if we can call it that, is computational power. Now the same old algorithms can run a lot faster. And the price of data storage has reduced very significantly, so it’s also possible to store a lot of collected data. You can do all your computational modeling on a lot more data, and the models can become smarter as well because they have so much data available to them. In fact, we have a saying in my field: “There is no data like more data.”

SO: So that’s a quick summary of the current state of AI. Nikki, what is karma, and where does it fit into all of this?

“We’re facing what is probably the most powerful technology that humanity has ever created, so our intentions matter a lot.”

NM: In Buddhism it has to do with action; the word actually means “action.” And karma has to be understood in terms of intention: the same action done with different intention can have different karmic consequences. Imagine a scenario where one person slits open another person’s stomach. In one case the person is a thief; in another, a doctor. It’s the same action but a different karmic intentionality and result.

Karma is also a teaching about empowerment, because this moment’s actions condition the next moment. When we say “actions” in Buddhism, we include thinking and speech as well as physical action—thoughts are considered actions of the mind. For example, if I think thoughts of gratitude in this moment—I’m so glad to be here with my good old friend Steve—it brings a good, wholesome state of mind, but it also predisposes me to be kind and say kind words. My heart rate will go down, and I’ll become relaxed. But if instead I remember that one time you didn’t lend me the book I wanted—I’m making this up, by the way—I’ll get angry, into an unwholesome state of mind. My heart rate goes up, cortisol levels rise, and I’m all tight. I might say something vengeful that has negative repercussions.

SO: We’re facing what is probably the most powerful technology that humanity has ever created, so our intentions matter a lot. One of my big goals is to get us thinking clearly about that.

From its inception, AI has been funded primarily by the military. The defense department immediately saw the potential for robot soldiers. It may be that wars with our robots fighting their robots are far preferable to our people fighting their people. But what happens when you have robot soldiers everywhere? Where does that lead?

Once the technologies started working well—and this is happening right now—big business suddenly realized that it could dramatically improve productivity and make lots of money. The consulting firm McKinsey estimated that over the next ten years robotics and AI could potentially create $50 trillion of value. That’s a huge number. The entire United States gross domestic product is about $18 trillion a year. So we’re talking about a massive tsunami on the world economic stage caused by these technologies. There are now something like 1,500 AI startup companies funded at around $15 billion. The Japanese company SoftBank recently announced a $100 billion investment fund in these technologies, which was a previously unheard of amount. And then, in October 2017, they said, “No, that wasn’t big enough. We’re going to up it”—to about $880 billion of investment. Not to mention that China has committed to becoming the world leader in AI over the next five years. The race is on!

I would like to see us being very conscious about what it is we’re trying to create. The technologists are pretty much excited just about the technology. The businesses are excited about making money. But we need somebody holding up the highest values of humanity to say, “This is a vision for where we would like to end up.” For me that is the karmic aspect: what are our intentions as we move forward?

NM: Exactly. And whether we’re technologists or consumers, we do have a say as voters. By starting to think about what we want our society to look like—which is not so different from the thinking that we need to be doing anyway—what do we want to manifest in the world? AI makes things more intense by orders of magnitude, so the impact that people can have either as individuals or as societies in general is amplified. We could have a wealthy person controlling lots and lots of AI soldiers. Or we could have lots and lots of AI nurses.

SO: Our current political system has a pretty coarse feedback path from the population to our government. In the United States we vote once every two years, and our votes are for A or for B. You’re not really expressing the depth of your humanity in a way that our government can hear. But with AI systems it may be possible to create voting systems whereby citizens can communicate exactly what they care about and how much they care about it. Potentially, if you do it right, these systems could aggregate the intentions and goals of an entire population and help politicians make policies that really serve the entire population rather than a few special interest groups.

NM: We’ve mentioned a few different verticals where AI has been making advances and changes. It would be interesting to actually talk about some of those verticals.

SO: It’s fascinating to look at almost every business that’s driving the economy today. For instance, a bunch of companies are developing self-driving cars and trucks. A world with self-driving vehicles could be far more efficient and have way fewer auto accidents. So that’s amazing, wonderful, great—except that truck driving is the number-one employer in almost every state in the U.S. We’re going to have big socioeconomic shifts as a result of that kind of enormous increase in efficiency, and we need to make sure that those efficiency improvements are well distributed throughout society.

In another big economic area, health care, there are many ways AI can make a difference, such as robotic surgeons. About a year ago I saw a talk by a company that is building a robot to do hair transplants. Apparently hair transplant surgery is pretty straightforward: you take tufts of hair from one place on the head and you put it someplace else. But it takes hours, and human surgeons get bored and make mistakes, whereas for a robot, it’s no problem. Another example is brain surgery: robots can align the location of a scalpel with what shows up on an MRI with great precision.

And then there are more ambiguous areas, like marketing. Marketers love AI because it allows them to know exactly what buttons to push. You think things are addictive today? Imagine when you have an AI that knows exactly what you like, that can precisely generate new images that will be the most seductive thing for you at that moment. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s say some marketer is trying to convince you to buy their new car. They show you yourself driving the car, so you can see just how much better your life is with this car. Oh my God, you’re going to go buy the car. But then you could have your own private AI that will watch what’s going on and say, “Now Steve, you told me that should you ever get into this frenzy where you’re about to impulsively buy a car, you’d want me to come in and show you what is really going on here.” So possibly individuals will have AIs that serve as a defense against manipulation by corporate AIs.

There’s a company called Cambridge Analytica based in England that took credit for the Trump win, the Brexit win, and a number of other elections. They built personality models of every person in the United States based on their Facebook “likes” and targeted political messages based on those models. There’s controversy over whether they really had that much impact, but they were definitely there. The ability to manipulate the emotions and thinking of a population—that’s huge. How do we ensure it’s done with positive intentions?

NM: It would also be interesting to talk about some of the more positive effects of AI. Eco-policing, for example.

SO: Yes. We have a horrible pollution problem right now. There’s a floating bunch of garbage the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean, you know. You could stop it if you had enough people monitoring the ocean, but that’s impractical. On the other hand, AIs will be cheap and plentiful. In certain ocean ecosystems, massive numbers of jellyfish are coming in, crowding out other species, killing coral, and causing all kinds of problems. So someone developed a little jellyfish-eating robot. [Laughs.] It works like a vacuum cleaner.

In terms of global warming in particular, AI systems can go in and fix a lot of the problems that our earlier technologies created. Simple AI systems running on used cell phones are keeping rogue loggers from cutting down trees in the rain forest, for instance. AI is also learning how to more accurately predict weather patterns and optimize energy use, and it may help us create better solar cells and batteries.

NM: Wealth distribution becomes an urgent and important question as well: whether an AI-powered world would create a very small percentage of “haves” and a huge population of “have-nots.”

SO: There’s certainly a possible dystopian future: the robot owners are the ones who own everything. But there’s also a possible utopia. Today only about 2 percent of the population actually does what we need for sustenance. And so with the rise of robots, from one perspective we could ask, why should a human have to do any job that a robot can do? Potentially we could have a new flowering of human creativity, of connection, of love. But we have to structure things so that will be the outcome.

In Britain, for instance, they’ve started floating the idea that maybe there should be a robot tax. And there’s also the idea of a universal basic income, that every citizen should be paid a certain amount that covers necessary costs. Another view suggests that since this technology will create so much productivity, everyone should get shares in it; the economic power of all this new AI and robotics is part of the human endowment, and you should be paid dividends that may support you over your whole lifetime.

NM: Another place of intersection for us to consider is AI as human prosthetics. More and more companies are coming out with chip implants for various parts of our body—to increase your memory, perhaps, or the power of your thinking or communication. Although we already are kind of partly machine, right? We’re already carrying smartphones and wearing various kinds of technologies that empower us in different ways.

What are the karmic implications of being partly machine, partly human? There’s a lot of fear about completely intelligent robots that are just like human beings taking over. What are the karmic consequences of interacting with these robots? What if you kill a robot? And do robots have karma themselves? We can wax philosophical about this.

In terms of human prosthetics, I think as long as we’re still mostly human with our consciousness intact, intention is still determining the karmic results. In terms of interacting with machines, we can talk more about whether fully human machines are possible or not—there are different takes on that, depending on how you define consciousness—but assuming it might be possible at some point, I would say again that for a human being karma still rests in the intention. Are you killing or unplugging a machine because you want to rob a bank, or because you want to stop that machine from doing harm?

In terms of potentially intelligent beings having karma, I’d surmise that the karmic results rest with the creators, even if those results are being manifested in the world by AI programs. Because there isn’t a sense of intentionality in automatic systems, as defined for humans.

SO: I totally agree that a person with a cell phone is a very different creature than that person alone. Ride on any major transit line and you’ll see that we’ve got a lot of those creatures around, right? [Laughs.] So this technology, which is pretty low in intelligence, is already dramatically changing us. One of the effects that maybe wasn’t so obviously going to happen is that people offload tasks that they used to do themselves, like navigating. A lot of people don’t know directions anymore. It’s just, “Uh, my phone tells me that.” We’ve lost some of our capacity in that way.

I’m also thinking about Alexa, the Amazon speaking agent that sits in your house. I have one. I like it; it’s nice. Kids love it. Because you can talk to Alexa, you can ask Alexa to tell you jokes, and Alexa never gets mad. [Laughs.] But Alexa does not require you to say please or thank you. And some kids tend to slip into a commanding tone: “Alexa, tell me a joke now.”

Then they get used to doing that, and they do that with their friends too, and then they start doing it with their parents. And so parents are saying, “Oh my God, Alexa is turning my kid into a jerk.” [Laughs.] There are secondary consequences of interacting with these things as they begin to take on more roles.

NM: The Alexa example in particular brings up another thought for me as it relates to karma. An aspect of karma is habits of the mind; habits are really karmic tendencies. If you get angry once, for example, that will predispose you to becoming angry again. That ties in with neuroscience as well, actually—the neurons that fire together, wire together, and these grooves get set in your mind. Karmic patterns get set as well, leading you to behave in the same angry way over and over again. And then your state of mind, and all your actions and interactions, become anger-ridden. So if kids start to set this pattern of rudeness with Alexa, that will become their karmic tendency through life. That’s something to really consider about the way that we interact with computers and artificial intelligence systems.

SO: Of course, we can use that in a positive way too. I do something called nonviolent communication, which is a simple but beautiful way of being more empathetic. But it’s hard. If you’re not used to that way of speaking, it’s a challenge. I can imagine AI systems that would help you learn to do that—that would give you feedback in real time so you can develop those desired habits.

NM: Basically what our conversation is demonstrating is that the karma of the action really doesn’t depend on the technology. The technology itself is agnostic. It depends on how it is used, for good or for evil.

SO: Today systems like Alexa pretty much do what their programmers intend, though they may exhibit some unexpected behaviors. There’s a program called AlphaGo that beat the world champion in Go [a strategy board game traditionally associated with Buddhism]. In Asia, Go is viewed as a quintessential human game, where human creativity is absolutely essential. And when AlphaGo beat the world champion, friends from Korea told me that people were crying in the streets. It had an enormous impact. It readjusted people’s sense of what is quintessentially human. That program played moves that no human has ever played. Human experts in Go ended up studying the AlphaGo games to learn how to play Go better.

That’s an example where the general thrust of the program was determined by programmers, but not the individual moves. I think that’s going to happen more generally: we’re going to end up with such systems, where if the robot kills somebody, you can’t say it was the programmer who did it. You have to assign culpability to that robot. How is our legal system going to handle that? Already there are some funny examples. In Holland they set up a bot, gave it some bitcoin, and hooked it up to the dark web, where all sorts of nefarious things happen. They had it just randomly surf the dark web and order stuff. So it got ecstasy pills, guns—all kinds of stuff came flowing in. They had an art exhibit where they hung it all up on the wall. They wanted to see how the police were going to deal with it. And the police, I thought, were actually quite brilliant. They let the art exhibit go on, but when it closed, they came in and arrested the robot. [Laughs.]

But it’s possible we’re going to have to rethink what responsibility and culpability are. These systems are going to get more and more intelligent; they’re going to be able to solve harder and harder problems. When it gets to more human things, like consciousness or qualia, the sense of what an experience is, then it’s more iffy. I think we won’t know until these things are built. And then when you talk about past lives or multiple lives, all those things, I think we get even more speculative. But how are people going to respond when you have a system that says, “I’m conscious. I’m just as conscious as you. What makes you think I’m not conscious?” What is that going to do to our own sense of consciousness, and what is that going to do to our view of this entity?

NM: It definitely comes down to the question of qualia and what consciousness is. Some people are materialists and claim that consciousness gets created when this machine or this set of neurons work together. Some near-death studies were published about people on the operating table who became clinically dead, with no brain activity and no blood flowing to the brain, and their eyes and ears were blocked during the operation. After they came back to life, they reported what they had seen and heard during their surgery, which were corroborated by the staff. That really throws into question what consciousness is and whether it is dependent on this machinery. Because yes, we’ll have machinery with semi-intelligent beings. But consciousness? I don’t think so. I’m going to put a flag down in the sand.  This reflection is not so much from the perspective of a scientist but from the perspective of a practitioner who has practiced in silence in various states of consciousness, where the mind can open in ways I didn’t know could possibly exist. From that perspective, I don’t think a material thing can have access to states of consciousness in a way that we can as human beings.

SO: I’m very convinced that material objects can be intelligent in the sense of making choices that lead to desired outcomes. But whether at some point we will be able to ascribe consciousness to these AI programs, I don’t know. We’ll have to see what happens.

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The University of Massachusetts Medical School announced last week that the department is now home to “what is believed to be the first-of-its-kind academic division focused on the study of mindfulness.”

Dr. Judson Brewer, associate professor of medicine and psychiatry and director of research at U Mass’s Center of Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, has been named as chief of the Division of Mindfulness.

“The creation of a stand-alone Division of Mindfulness embedded within a Department of Medicine highlights how far the field has progressed and matured, and will create the infrastructure and support for researchers dedicated to furthering our neuroscientific knowledge of how the mind works, and for what medical conditions mindfulness is efficacious,” Brewer told Tricycle in an email.  
The move comes more than 30 years after the center’s Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) clinic was established at the university. Since then, more than 24,000 people have been trained in Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the clinic.

The center was previously housed in the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Massachusetts.

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Attention is not just another “function” alongside other cognitive functions. Its ontological status is of something prior to functions and even to things. The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to, the very nature of the world in which those “functions” would be carried out and in which those “things” would exist. Attention changes what kind of a thing comes into being for us: in that way it changes the world. If you are my friend, the way in which I attend to you will be different from the way in which I would attend to you if you were my employer, my patient, the suspect in a crime I am investigating, my lover, my aunt, a body waiting to be dissected. In all these circumstances, except the last, you will also have a quite different experience not just of me, but of yourself: you would feel changed if I changed the type of my attention. And yet nothing objectively has changed.

So it is, not just with the human world, but with everything with which we come into contact. A mountain that is a landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to a prospector, a many-textured form to a painter, or to another the dwelling place of the gods, is changed by the attention given to it. There is no “real” mountain that can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking that reveals the true mountain.

Science, however, purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value-free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted. Yet this highly objective stance, this “view from nowhere,” to use the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s phrase, is itself value-laden. It is just one particular way of looking at things, a way that privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer or more real, closer to the nature of things.

Attention also changes who we are, we who are doing the attending. Our knowledge of neurobiology and neuropsychology shows that by attending to someone else performing an action, and even by thinking about them doing so—even, in fact, by thinking about certain sorts of people at all—we become objectively, measurably, more like them, in how we behave, think, and feel. Through the direction and nature of our attention, we prove ourselves to be partners in creation, both of the world and of ourselves. In keeping with this, attention is inescapably bound up with value—unlike what we conceive of as “cognitive functions,” which are neutral in this respect. Values enter through the way in which those functions are exercised: they can be used in different ways for different purposes to different ends. Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a “howness,” a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a “whatness,” a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.

♦

From The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission of the author. 

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Last May, an article about mindfulness on a popular mainstream news website finally spurred neuroscientist and meditation researcher Catherine Kerr to act. The article cited 20 benefits of meditation, from “reducing loneliness” to “increasing grey matter” to “helping sleep,” and painted a picture of meditation as a kind of golden elixir for modern life. Kerr posted the article on her Facebook page. “It is not like any of this is grossly inaccurate,” she wrote in her post. “It is just that the studies are too cherry-picked and too positive.”

Assistant Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine at Brown University, Kerr directs translational neuroscience for Brown’s Contemplative Studies Initiative and leads a mindfulness research program at Providence’s Miriam Hospital. She takes no issue with the value of mindfulness practice; Kerr has personally reaped enormous benefit from Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in a two-decade-long battle with cancer, and as a researcher she has studied the beneficial effects MBSR has had on others.

But as a scientist committed to facts, she was worried. “I think we are all going to need to take responsibility and do something so that the coverage looks slightly more balanced,” she wrote to her Facebook friends who are scientists, clinicians, philosophers, and contemplatives in the meditation research community. “Otherwise, when the inevitable negative studies come, this whole wave will come crashing down on us.”

Within three days, Kerr’s Facebook thread grew to over 100 comments. Kerr founded a Facebook group and moved the discussion there. Today, “Mindfulness and Skillful Action: A Research Discussion Group” is an important rallying point for over 400 prominent academic, scientific, and clinical meditation researchers as well as leaders from the Buddhist community. (The group is now closed to new members.) This Facebook community has been tracking two rapidly diverging discourses: the evolving scientific, scholarly, and clinical consensus and the popular press coverage about that consensus.

As the gap between the two widens to what Kerr fears will soon reach a “crisis point,” group members are asking themselves and each other what ethical obligations they have to intervene in the popular discourse around meditation. Together they are strategizing about how to tone down the hype to accord with the facts while not, as Kerr commented in one post, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Tricycle spoke with Kerr in Providence, Rhode Island to understand the significance of this emerging meta-discourse—the conversation about the conversation about meditation.

—Linda Heuman, Contributing Editor

In a recent article in U.S. News, you were quoted as saying: “Mindfulness is a science that is just beginning. And there’s a lot of media hype around that.” What kind of hype?
The Huffington Post is the worst offender. The message they deliver becomes a ubiquitous, circulating meme that people put up on their Facebook pages and that becomes “true” through repetition alone. The Huffington Post features mindfulness a lot and tends to represent only the positive findings (and in the most positive light imaginable) rather than offering a balanced reading of the science.

They use that approach to justify the idea that every person who has any mental abilities should be doing mindfulness meditation. I don’t think the science supports that. The Huffington Post has really done mindfulness a disservice by framing it in that way.

Related: New Study Finds Benefits of Mindful Meditation Hard to Prove 

How does hyping mindfulness do it a disservice?
One of the negative consequences if this wave of hype continues could be that the backlash will be too strong. People will lose faith and revert to the other side: mindfulness has no value.

What are some of the popular myths or narratives about mindfulness that scientists would like to correct?
Scientists are, for the most part, circumspect about making claims for cures attributed to mindfulness. The science doesn’t support that. Scientists know from looking at meditation trials that not every person benefits from mindfulness therapies, but this is something non-scientists seem to have difficulty with. Individuals should not make clinically based decisions based only on neuroscientific studies because the sample sizes are too small; if you are making an evidence-based decision, it should be from a full picture of the evidence that includes clinical trial data.

The clinical trial data on mindfulness for depression relapse, for example, is not a slam-dunk. The results are really not better than those for antidepressants. In general, mindfulness is not orders of magnitude stronger than other things that people are doing right now to help manage stress and mood disorders. So you have to look at mindfulness in the context of a range of options. Unlike other therapies, mindfulness can be self-led at a certain point—it becomes a practice rather than a therapeutic modality in the same way that exercise is a training or practice. But mindfulness doesn’t work for everything and is not suitable for everyone.

Another popular narrative about MBSR is that it’s derived from a two-and-a-half-millennia-old practice. It is very hard to evaluate or falsify that statement or even to figure out what it means. I think it gets assigned way too much weight.

Could you give an example of a scientific result that was oversold by the media?
I was the second author in Sara Lazar’s 2005 paper “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness.” It is a lovely paper, but its findings were preliminary.

Was this the study that had everyone saying that meditation changes your brain?
Yes. It is cited over 800 times in scientific literature. Sara is still interviewed constantly about this study. And scientists know that it’s a nonrandomized cross-sectional study, which means that the measures are only taken at one time point. So if there is a difference in brain thickness, we don’t know if the cause is practice or lifestyle, or if people with thicker brains are simply attracted to mindfulness. To see that something is causing something else, we need to see change over time that’s controlled. And we don’t see that in the paper. But the typical headline in the popular press was “Mindfulness Makes Your Brain Grow.”

We also didn’t claim that there was a directly measured behavioral benefit in having a thicker brain. (There are actually some conditions where it’s not good to have a thicker brain!) We were really clear about the significance of our findings in our paper, but because the brain is such a fetish and because the idea of growing your brain was so attractive, many media portrayals missed the subtlety entirely.

Sara Lazar’s finding has since been replicated. I wasn’t totally sure about the results until they were replicated.

So even though the measures were only taken at one point, because it has been replicated the results are still significant?
Yes, it has been replicated many times in different ways. It’s very exciting for a scientist to have your findings replicated. There’s a really significant replication crisis right now in psychological science—especially in social psychology. Many findings that were thought to be canonical—which were in the psychology textbooks and which everyone just thought were true—are not replicable. We can’t generate those effects. It’s not necessarily the case that the first study was bad, but the gold standard of science is replication.

There’s a broader replication crisis in medicine. There is a very famous article about this by John P. A. Ionnidis called “Why Most Published Research Studies Findings are False.” In the same vein, a report published in Nature reviewed preclinical cancer studies and found that over 80 percent of the findings reported in top journals were nonreplicable. That means we can’t trust them. They’re likely not true!

Both scientists and scientific laypeople have a lot of trouble with these reports.

Why do you think that is so?
We want certainty; we do not like the indeterminacy of not really understanding what is going on. Yet somebody who has a clear scientific understanding knows that the evidence base is always mixed—it is not a 100-percent, only-positive thing. Mixed into the weave of the science are negative findings and poorly designed studies. The problem is not isolated to mindfulness.

So how should scientific laypeople interpret the research on meditation?
It’s fair to say that there are some clues from brain science that meditation might help enhance brain function. That is an evidence-based statement. The mistake is investing 100-percent certainty in a result and not holding a probabilistic view of scientific truth or risk and benefit. When people are making decisions for their own well-being, they need to be able to hold that uncertainty in mind. And they need to understand that the scientific context in which they are making their decisions could be different five years from now. Personally, I don’t really make decisions about what to practice based on these small-sample-size studies reported in the media. Many mindfulness scientists are very puzzled by people making decisions based on these small neuroscientific studies.

What kind of evidence would it be appropriate to consider in evaluating mindfulness as a therapeutic remedy?
Consideration of the concrete experience of doing these practices should be much more central in the discussion. “This is what it feels like to follow your breath for twenty minutes. How do you like it? What did it make you feel like later in the day?” Those seem like the real questions, not “What would happen if I threw you in a scanner?”

There are many claimants for attention and funding from the National Insitutes of Health (NIH) and insurance companies. I think it’s fair to ask for some objective evidence before you decide to reimburse on something, to have preliminary scientific data before the NIH bestows a million-dollar grant. That type of demand has its place. The problem is when the volume is turned up too high, when there is an overestimation of what the evidence might really mean. This problem of overestimation is ubiquitous. It is true in statin literature; it true in hormone replacement therapy literature. We thought there were really strong benefits, and they turned out to not be there—sometimes these therapies were even harmful.

Do you think that the researchers themselves are in part responsible for the media hype?
The approach in mindfulness science is pretty much aligned with how scientists generally communicate, where, especially in early-stage work, one of your responsibilities is to generate enthusiasm. To get things going, get collaborators, and garner NIH interest, you need to be a little entrepreneurial. There is a real art to expressing something as a theory you want to test and getting people excited about it while making sure that they understand this theory hasn’t been proven yet. Researchers have to strike a tricky balance between expressing genuine enthusiasm and cautioning about limitations.

But a lot of times I will clearly say, “I am stating a very exciting hypothesis.” When I lay out how the hypothesis might work, listeners grab onto that hypothesis story as though it is true—even though I’ve said, “It hasn’t been proven yet.” People don’t really know how to hear a story that a scientist is telling as a hypothesis. They don’t know how to gauge that. The hypothesis somehow registers as “already proven.”

Do researchers benefit from the hype? Do they leverage it—intentionally or unintentionally?
You can read media coverage of scientists’ encounters at public forums and probably find examples where they are making a story a little stronger than the evidence suggests. Mindfulness didn’t invent the problem. It is a big problem in science communication across the board. That is how things work in these TED-style forum talks—it is not about skepticism or careful thinking; it is about who can tell the most dramatic story.

It is very hard for the public to remember a complex story. Part of our job as communicators is to strip the story down. The tricky thing is to determine when we cross a line to become manipulative and not true to the underlying science.

The NIH takes an interest in therapies that are popular and available, so publicity can translate into more NIH funding. Other scientists start to get interested, and that recruits more scientists into the field. It makes our studies seem more interesting and significant because they relate to a phenomenon that people are interested in. So we do benefit. But I don’t think that is the main thing that has been driving the hype.

You have called on scholars of contemplative studies to take the lead in starting a critical dialogue about mindfulness. What would that look like?
Some important questions to ask are why people want to believe that mindfulness is good in every circumstance, that there are no negative side effects, and that it’s derived in a pure way from a 2500-year-old practice. Why do contemplative practices, especially Asian contemplative practices, seem to elicit this type of positive response? Those are the really interesting cultural questions about the present moment.

What would be your contribution be?
I’m very interested in patient narratives—clinical narratives. When I read critiques of mindfulness closely, I see they often don’t address the experiences of people who do the practice. Left out of consideration in current critiques of mindfulness is people’s sincere desire to be happy and to suffer less.

In my brain science course, I bring in examples of what a scientific abstract says and also a news article that reports on it. They are very disconnected from one another. People want ways to reduce suffering and stress and they have grabbed onto mindfulness like a life jacket. I find that very moving, and I want to take it seriously.

There is a flavor of desperation around some of this hope. I’m sensitized to this from over ten years of research I did on the placebo effect at Harvard Medical School with Ted Kaptchuk, a leader in the field. When people seek help in a medical-therapeutic context, they are often quite desperate for relief.

What is the placebo effect, and does it relate to the healing power of mindfulness?
The placebo effect is usually defined, somewhat tortuously, as the sum of the nonspecific effects that are not hypothesized to be the direct mechanism of treatment. For example, having a face-to-face conversation is not hypothesized as what makes psychotherapy work—you could have a face-to-face conversation with anybody. But for some reason, if you go every week to therapy, you are going to get better. But you could talk about the weather! When we perform these rituals with a desire to get better, we often do.

We now know that a lot of the positive therapeutic benefit from psychotherapy and from various pain drugs may come from that initial context; it often has nothing to do with the specific treatment that is being offered. It is really just about the person approaching a situation with a sense of hope and being met by something that seems to hold out that hope.

MBSR has tapped into that in a really deep way. What happens to an individual in the course of the eight-week MBSR course is based on this initial motivation to get better. Much of the benefit he or she receives from MBSR likely comes from that. Participants have complex relationships around their hopes of getting better. There is something very profound about that—something very human.

My sense of this isn’t only grounded in my knowledge of mindfulness science and my earlier work on the science of the placebo; I live this. I have had an underlying cancer for 18 years. Qigong and mindfulness have been very helpful to me in managing the side effects of my illness and psychological fluctuations. They may have even helped me manage my immune system. But what is in the foreground for me is that every morning I get up and have a sincere desire to be better.

If someone is aware that the placebo effect may be an important part of why a particular treatment works, will the treatment still work for that person?
As someone who is an expert on the placebo effect, can it still affect you? Why wouldn’t it? You can’t imagine you are healing. If you are healing, you are healing!

Ted Kaptchuk did a great study on “placebos without deception.” He recruited people with irritable bowel syndrome and told them: “We have a treatment here that we’ve already studied. It appears to really help people. It is called ‘the placebo.’ So I’m going to hand you some pills that have no physiological benefit. But based on our data, we think this will help you.” And there was a pretty robust response. 

Even though people knew it was a placebo?
So you don’t need to be under the illusion that you are taking an actual drug? You need something that you are actively doing for yourself. You need to take a pill; you need to get touched—something needs to happen. There needs to be a ritual where there is a transaction of some sort.

The placebo effect is a kind of category mistake. It is what gets left over when you throw out the effects of the specific treatment. But the minute that you make the placebo a veritable mechanism, it stops being “the placebo effect.” It is paradoxical in that way. It has been studied, and it is tractable. It seems like the dynamics of ritual are very important.

Are you saying that if there are two people who are both ill and really want to get better, the one who takes any kind of action has a better chance of recovery?
Yes. What is interesting about mindfulness is the way it works with that desire and the simple fact of taking action by doing your homework every day. It enrolls you in a process of which you are very self-aware.

Do you think there is a risk that mindfulness hype preys on that hope people have by giving them a false promise of cure?
I’ve heard reports of people who have abandoned chemotherapy to do mindfulness. I don’t know if that has really happened. Certainly there are people who go off their antidepressants or lithium and think that mindfulness is going to manage their serious depression or bipolar disorder. That’s a concern we have with the current hype around mindfulness. People might see it as being more active than it really is. It doesn’t resolve those situations.

If mindfulness doesn’t actually resolve conditions like depression, how does it help?
I did a qualitative study of participants in an MBSR course and I found that they appear follow a trajectory. People show up and they really want relief. They have a lot of different conditions. They are seeking help. They think that maybe this course is going to take away their problems. And the teacher on the first day says that’s not what this class is about. This class is about learning how to be present to your own inner life, including distress and suffering that you may have been avoiding. By weeks four and five, people really get it.

They’ve been sitting and their suffering has not gone away, and there’s this profound experience people have in which they realize that maybe just wiping away the suffering is not what this is about. Then people have a lot of generalized distress, and they go through it and end up on the other side. They realize, “I can face that!”

When promoters of mindfulness only focus on its effects on brain mechanisms—and I say this as a brain scientist—they are missing a big part of the story. Similarly, when Buddhist critics of mindfulness attack secularized mindfulness because they are worried it is corrupting the dharma, they too are missing something important. Both are blind to this experiential dimension of what it is like for people in pain to take an MBSR course: you have this very complex process of wanting relief, discovering that this isn’t going to take your problems away, and then facing into your problems in a new way.

That process is about learning how to tolerate the uncertainty that is our existential problem. We’re not sure if we are right; we don’t know how things are going to turn out. Living with that uncertainty is really deep! And MBSR and its variants help people with that. I worry that our tendency to parse the world into competing abstractions—scientific reductionism on the one hand or dharma purism on the other—may cause us to miss this hard-to-see qualitative shift that may be the true source of the power of mindfulness.

Do you consider yourself part of the “mindfulness backlash?”
I am a cautious member of the backlash, but I am also aware that the backlash can crystalize into ideological rhetoric. People who think of mindfulness as “training their brains” are taking refuge in an idea that has not been proven; they are either unaware of or unable to process the problem of scientific uncertainty. Similarly, people who are concerned that “McMindfulness” could be watering down the dharma could also be viewed as ideological and intolerant of the uncertainty that comes with something new. Insistence on surefire answers, whether in science or about a received notion of the dharma, can be an avoidance of the existential problem of uncertainty.

Do you think that there is no place for critics who are saying we should exercise caution about whether we consider this a new form of Buddhism?
These are important questions for dharma teachers, but I’m not sure of their social significance beyond committed dharma teachers and students. Viewed in terms of the amount of suffering that is being met by MBSR, the question of whether or not MBSR is Buddhism doesn’t really matter.

There are, however, significant questions about how the increasing popularity of secular meditation programs might affect Western Buddhism. How would you recommend Buddhists meaningfully discuss these issues?
It is important for mindfulness critics to be curious about the experiences of people who take these secular mindfulness programs. The questions people need to be asking are not these abstract ones: “Is it scientific?” “Is it true dharma?” The question to ask is: “What does it feel like?” If you go straight to brain circuits or straight to ideology, you are missing that fundamental question—and that curiosity. 

With support from the John Templeton Foundation, Tricycle’s Buddhism and Modernity project is initiating a conversation between Buddhists and leading thinkers across the humanities and social sciences. Tricycle is exploring how perspectives drawn from research on the nature of religion, culture, science, and secularism can shed light on unexamined assumptions shaping the transmission of Buddhism to modernity.

[This story was first published in 2014]

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