Science and Spirit

Two interesting articles in Nature about the brain and spiritual experiences. The first debunks the recent study claiming that the brain was inventing ghosts during sudden electrical storms across the temporal lobes.

The second relates a recent conference on neuroplasticity between western brain researchers and the Dalai Lama. The Lama is keenly interested in neuroscience and how scientific insights can shed light on the mysteries of transcendence.

For many Buddhist monks, this interest in science is focused on an intense curiosity about the workings of the brain. Monks typically spend hours in meditation each day, a practice they say enhances their powers of concentration. Highly trained monks report being able to focus on a single object for hours without distraction and to recall complex scenes in exquisite detail. A question that deeply interests the Dalai Lama, and indeed some neuroscientists, is whether these phenomena have a biological basis.

... Before the late 1990s, it was thought that adult brains were more-or-less complete. Learning involved the development of new connections — but no new neurons were born, and when these cells died they were gone forever. Now it turns out that new neurons do grow and our brains are much more flexible than was once believed. As a key component of Buddhist belief is that meditation literally transforms the mind, Buddhists are keenly interested in scientific advances that could help explain this observation.

Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the coordinator of the Dharamsala conference, has learned from the monks through study. He found that certain neural processes in the brain are more coordinated in people with extensive training in meditation, an observation that may be linked to the heightened awareness reported by meditating monks (A. Lutz et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16369–16373; 2004).

[neuroscientist Fred] Gage says that what particularly impressed him was the Dalai Lama's empirical approach. "At one point I asked: 'What if neuroscience comes up with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?'," says Gage. "The answer was: 'Then we would have to change the philosophy to match the science'."

So far that hasn't been necessary.