Ilia Seminars

Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 136-minute seminar, Ilia Durovic presents Buddhist Meditation and Neurobiology as a comprehensive exploration of how the mind-brain relationship illuminates Buddhist claims about mental transformation. He begins by showing charts revealing a paradox: Western societies with high development indices report declining happiness over decades, while poorer nations with low life expectancy show paradoxically high happiness levels. This disconnect motivates the central question: if material prosperity does not guarantee wellbeing, what does? Durovic then contrasts Buddhist and Western understandings of mind, explaining mind as an immaterial, cognizing phenomenon that changes moment by moment yet maintains continuity across lifetimes—before turning to contemporary neurobiology. He surveys neuroimaging techniques (EEG, fMRI, microelectrode recording) and walks through detailed visual perception pathways to illustrate how heavily constructed our experience is. The seminar culminates in Richard Davidson’s landmark research showing that intensive meditation produces measurable changes in brain structure, reduced emotional reactivity, enhanced attention, and increased immune function. Durovic critically examines what this research does and does not prove, and raises profound questions about the relationship between memory, brain damage, and Stevenson’s cases of children remembering past lives—suggesting that subtle minds may carry memories the coarse brain cannot retrieve.

File metadata (for organising)

File: Ilia Seminar 01 – IS.mp3

UUID: 26d7100f-eb3a-46c3-bebe-2b3cb4f39e7d

Teacher: Ilia S. Durovic

Collection: Ilia Seminars

Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide

Words: ~16,419

Just while the last couple of people are coming into to the Ilya’s presentation this afternoon, there is a bibliography out by the office desk, if you haven’t already picked it up. And, gratefully made your donation. Thank you. So given that the big hand has reached two, and congratulations for juggling daylight saving everybody, welcome to another of Ilya’s very stimulating and challenging seminars. Today’s talk, Buddhist Meditation and Neurobiology, a Facet of the Mind Brain Problem.

As usual, we’ll have a short tea break halfway through, and I think you all know where the the loos are, etcetera. So without any further ado, I would like to hand over to Ilya. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I’m afraid I have to immediately hand out, an updated bibliography with some extra material.

So first and foremost it’s an absolute delight to see so many known faces, and as my mother always said, Quality not quantity. So the topic is difficult and the topic is difficult. So I am not a specialist in the field and it is an extremely ambitious project to try to talk about something as difficult as this when one is not a specialist, although more so because we have at least one professional neurologist in the audience. So I present all my apologies for any misrepresentations or simplifications of the data and will try to address this to the best of my capacities. I think the first question which has to be asked is why precisely one should talk about neurobiology and Buddhist meditation in a Buddhist temple?

Is it a legitimate topic of conference and why is it relevant? I think the degree of interest which Western audiences show in the topic, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, is sufficient justification to address it. It is a topic which leaves most of the Asian Buddhist world profoundly indifferent. Profoundly indifferent because the results which we find so sensational and impressive are basically results which are taken for granted through experience. It is possible that precisely it is our lack of experience which has made the research in the last it’s been going on for more than forty years, but Varela’s and then Davidson’s research especially in the last decade have been very critical.

This research has become extremely important for Western Buddhists perhaps for this reason. Then I would like to start by addressing with you the situation which we are in and the reasons for which it is relevant to be interested in the mind. Our societies as a whole take for granted the hypothesis that as development increases, so does happiness. I think more or by definition if you are here, it means that you do not fully agree with this. But this is a viewpoint of society at large, and if we look at an interesting chart, which is based actually on the world value surveys, which covers some 115,000 persons worldwide, surveyed on their subjective experience of happiness, and this is per country, with countries like Tanzania or Nigeria here, and a cluster of developed countries here.

So we have inordinate happiness and on the abscissa we have the Human Development Index which as you know is a composite index which represents not only life expectancy but also income and the development of society at large. What we do find is that there is a pretty clear correlation between human development, in other words, prosperity in the broadest sense of the term, and happiness. With a cluster of Western societies up to the top here, which basically have high Human Development indices and high levels of happiness. What is however striking in this chart is that you can see that there are societies which diverge widely from the mean. We have a huge cluster of countries from the former Warsaw Pact, which have high human development indices and extremely low levels of happiness.

Astonishingly low. I traveled throughout Russia and The Ukraine some eight, nine years ago and was surprised at how mentally unhappy the people were considering the situations. Then on the other hand, we have countries with catastrophically low human development indices, which live in rank poverty with very low life expectancy, with the highest happiness index of all countries considered Nigeria and Tanzania. Nigeria? Nigeria and Tanzania.

But you note Uganda doesn’t do too bad either considering. So, this raises a very basic question. Clearly material prosperity in human development helps for happiness. Just as clearly from this chart, it is not everything. And if we take the case of the country we live in Australia, it’s very striking.

I have put on a graph two different plots. One, the mean happiness in Australia over the last sixty years, based on questionnaires, plotted against GDP per capita. In other words, the income produced in the country per inhabitant. This is mean happiness in Australia. Look, it’s very striking.

Australians describe themselves as very happy in 1945, and there is a steady, unambiguous trend downwards to 2010, which has absolutely no relationship with the changes in GDP per capita. It’s very striking. In both cases the data is recent. It becomes even more striking when focusing on particular age groups in this country, we look at the measure of what I think can be seen as the ultimate form of misery, which is suicide. By definition, someone who suicides is someone who sees no hope left in this life.

And if we look at male suicide changes in Australia over one century, divided by age groups, you have age 85 in red, 65 to 84 in blue, and the two age groups which concern us ages 25 to 44, sorry ages 15 to 24 in dark black, and 25 to 44 in light black. The suicide rate in the young ages 15 to 24 passes from six deaths per 100,000 in 1907 to twenty deaths per 100 thousand in 2,000. In other words, it is multiplied by five in one century. You will note that after a dip during the World War period, the suicide rate in the following age group, ages 45 to 64, seems to follow closely that of the young. So, this is a particularly troubling chart.

It’s troubling because if we look at it historically, we can well understand that in the nineteen twenties, people in the upper eighties, or for that matter in their sixties should have a higher suicide rate than the young. It’s normal. Conditions were difficult. There is sickness, old age, loneliness. This is to be expected as part and parcel of life and indeed at that period the young have a very low suicide rate.

We now have a situation where the suicide rate of the young is the same, a little bit before two thousand, as that of those in the 65 84 age group. The young who have every reason to be happy, they are generally speaking in good health, they’re looking forward to a good life. There is no particular reason for such levels of despair. And I think you will agree with me, suicide is the ultimate illustration of despair. Now if we look at the chart what we can see is that the rate of suicide among the young starts climbing in the sixties, which is a period of general social collapse, collapse certainly of the structures which existed until then, and it peaks a little bit before 2010.

It may be connected to many factors: drug usage, the collapse of the family, but more fundamentally a collapse of all the values which give meaning to life. And an outlook on life which is totally unwarranted in the light of the level of material development of the society. And this leads us to today’s topic: The reason to study the mind. What these charts, I hope, have demonstrated is that there is an abyss between exterior conditions and mental perception of these conditions. And the Buddhist contention is that happiness is first and foremost contingent on how we perceive phenomena, and that in addition, our mode of perception of phenomena can be changed through certain practices, which we call meditation, which are none other but the repetition of thought patterns which we wish to foster.

So we will first address the Buddhist understanding of the mind and then we will cover a brief presentation of brain function as understood by contemporary neurobiology leading us to some of the research done by the likes of Davidson, of Kabat Zinn, of Lutz and so forth on what we can call the neurological correlates of meditation. In other words, the impact meditation has on the nervous system. At the end we will address the issue of how beneficial these studies are for practicing Buddhists and what the road forwards is. So the Buddhist component of this conference, this is one of the pictures I took in Ajanta, We’ll start with a presentation of the Buddhist understanding of mind, which is fundamentally different from what mind means to a Western audience, and therefore it is important to clarify the issue. From a Buddhist standpoint, mind is defined as a clear and cognitive phenomenon.

This is a standard definition in Tibetan Buddhism. This definition has three features: Mind is clear. In other words, it is non material. It is immaterial. Mind has a function.

Its function is to cognize, and it has no other function than this. And mind is a phenomenon, in other words mind actually exists. It is not an artificial imputation on the basis of the brain. It is a non material phenomenon which only knows, only cognizes. In addition, mind has one fundamental feature it shares with all of the so called impermanent phenomena: mind changes instant by instant.

It is ever changing. This is the Buddhist understanding of mind. And therefore, as we saw over the weekend, on this basis, Dharmakīrti concludes to the existence of past lives, since mind can only give rise to a phenomenon which is of the same type as mind, therefore mind can only give rise to mind. We said, this line of reasoning is very powerful in ancient India and Tibet. Unfortunately it cuts very little ice nowadays.

Mind has additional features. The mental continuum, in other words mind as a flowing subsequent series of subsequent instances of mind, is eternal. Mind is therefore both eternal and impermanent. By eternal we mean that it has no beginning and no end. At the same time, it changes continually during this eternal existence.

Mind also passes from bodily envelope to bodily envelope under the force of two main factors: its predispositions, which is what we call technically karmic imprints, and karma itself or deeds. Because mind is impermanent, mind has features which work to our advantage or to our disadvantage. Mind, because it’s an impermanent and a cognizing phenomenon, can be developed infinitely in one of two directions. It can be allowed to develop infinitely until it fulfills the ultimate function of mind, which is to cognize everything, to become omniscient. This is what we know as a state of Buddhahood, full enlightenment.

It can be allowed to decay infinitely. As we said, it is both impermanent and eternal. In other words, it changes and it never disappears. The continuum never disappears. It can decay eternally until it sinks to the lowest level of sentience.

Buddhist traditions call these lowest levels of sentience the hell realms. These are realms where there is no difference between mind and pain. Now we see even in daily life huge gradients in the level of mental pain people experience in a human existence. Some human beings are very happy in difficult circumstances. Many Tibetans are very happy in very difficult circumstances.

Some westerners are miserable in incredibly privileged circumstances. One of the most unhappy persons I knew was the sign of a very wealthy Swiss banking family, who was born to wealth and never had to do a stroke of work in his entire life. Mentally, was a profoundly unhappy person. Unhappy. And then moving on to the Buddhist presentation of the forms of mind.

Mind can be subdivided, broadly speaking, into conceptual and non conceptual minds, or if you prefer, direct perception and thought. Direct perception perceives things without a mental image, what we know as a meaning generality. So, for instance, sense perception is direct perception. But there are many other types of direct perception. We also have at least three types of direct perception which are not acknowledged by Western neurology.

Mental direct perception, which is considered by Buddhist scholars to be one instant of mental perception between sense input and the dawn of consciousness, and cannot be noticed by an ordinary being, can only be noticed by an an advanced meditator on the path of seeing. We have Yogic direct perception, which occurs as a result of meditation and which is basically what the likes of Richard Davidson try to investigate using the tools of modern neurology. We have a form of direct perception which is acknowledged by only half of the Buddhist schools, which is the mind’s knowing itself in every instant. Is called reflexive direct perception. It is necessary for the existence of memory according to these schools.

The highest school according to the Geluk tradition of Tibetan Buddhism Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka does not consider that reflexive consciousnesses exist. And then, on the other side, apart from direct perception, we have thought. Thought refers to all mental activity in which the mind perceives or understands phenomena, should I say, through a mental image. So, refers to all memory, It refers also to all logical operations, to inference, to deduction. Modernity, as we know it, is a creation of thought.

Mathematics is pure thought. Mathematical theorems cannot be directly perceived. When a physicist endeavors to understand the behavior of a subatomic particle, he is obliged to use conceptual thought. There is no other means to do this. Likewise, biology is built on thought.

Empirical data is collected and then synthesis are created by thought. So, plays a fundamental issue in the development of modernity as we know it. Now, from the Buddhist standpoint it is considered that, and this is something we as Buddhists take for granted, but which until 2000, basically Davidson started his research, nobody else accepted. The mind can be changed and there are modes of voluntary transformation of the mind. I remember reading Davidson’s astonishment in a report here, an article he published for the Mind and Life Journal about this.

So, what we know as the voluntary transformation of mind, which occurs just through habituation, is meditation. Meditation in Tibetan means to become accustomed. Nothing else. There are two broad categories of meditation which very closely overlap what Davidson’s calls FA and OM meditations. One is analytical meditation and the other is fixative meditation.

Analytical meditation entails analysis, in other words it entails thought. Fixative meditation may entail thought, but does not necessarily do so, and aims to attain to non conceptual states. Meditation is simply through conceptual habituation with an object of meditation to lead to the disappearance of that mental image and the direct non conceptual experience of whatever we are meditating upon. This is the crux of the Buddhist understanding of meditation. So we can see in this presentation that conceptuality is central in most forms of meditation.

Meditation requires an object. Meditate meditating on no object is meditating still on an object. It is the object of no objectness. And the goal of meditation is eventually, in most forms of meditation, to gain a direct, naked, non conceptual, non mediated experience of what is meditated upon. From the Buddhist standpoint, if this is the meaning of meditation, and if the goal of meditation is to transform the mind in function of reality, we need reliable means to ascertain reality.

These are threefold from a Buddhist standpoint. They are: first, direct perception for phenomena which can be perceived directly, such as visual objects, the color of a tree, the shape of a flower and so forth. They are logic or inference for objects which cannot be perceived directly, such as for instance emptiness. We have to understand emptiness through logic, through inference and we try to understand emptiness or impermanence through logic and inference to eventually gain a direct experience of it. And then there’s a third category of phenomena which are the least important of all.

They are phenomena which cannot be understood through experience or through independent inference and can only be understood through what we call scriptural logic, an inference based on scripture. These are phenomena such as the very subtle workings of karma. They can only be understood on the basis of the Buddha’s teachings because they are beyond the purview of what an ordinary being can understand. There’s a marvelous quote by perhaps one of the leading American writers of the nineteenth century, who to the best of my knowledge never was a Buddhist, never encountered Indian religious traditions, and yet gives a presentation of mental training which is the very essence of how Buddhist meditation should be practiced. Henry David Thoreau says, As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.

To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. There is nothing to meditation apart from this. And this was an American author who lived in the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, I ask Khensur Rinpoche’s permission to talk briefly here about the presentation of mind from the standpoint of tantra.

And Rinpoche gave some very clear boundaries which I’m held to, but we can cover this nonetheless briefly. The highest school of Buddhist psychophysical practices according to the Tibetan tradition is Anuttara Yoga tantra, highest Yoga tantra. In Anuttara Yoga tantra mind is seen as inseparable from its energy. Literally, mind is seen as inseparable from the wind it rides. One understands mental phenomena in the light of a threefold structure.

Mind, its energy, and the channels in which the energy moves. Now, these might correspond quite closely to, certainly in the case of winds or energy, the nervous influx, in the broadest sense of the term, as an electrical influx inside the neuron and as biochemical transmission at the synaptic level. The channels themselves seem to correspond to the nervous system. Moreover, from the standpoint of tantra, there are three subdivisions of mind which correspond to the three subdivisions of energies. You will see that these two represent, if you want, the two sides of one coin.

Mind is non material and cognitive. The energy with which it is intimately connected is material, non cognitive and active. So the Tibetan lamas always said that mind was like a crippled beggar with sight on the shoulders of a blind man with strong legs. The crippled beggar with sight can see, but he can’t move. The blind beggar with strong legs can move, but he can’t see where.

Mind and energy functioning together, and I think if we look at the technical terms used, which are that they are of one nature but of separate isolates, we can get a very clear sense of what is being referred to, which is actually a unitary phenomenon, which can manifest as mind or as energy. So we are not far at all, in my personal opinion, from Schrödinger’s presentation of particles in quantum physics, as phenomena which can, depending on the observer, be understood as particles or as waves, manifesting or not manifesting diffraction. Now, if we look here at this presentation, the coarse minds and the coarse energies are intimately connected with the coarse brain structure. And as we will see today, any damage to the coarse brain structure affects very powerfully the coarse minds. Subtle minds with ever decreasing levels of conceptuality are more removed from the brain structure.

And it is taught in tantra that it is actually the extremely subtle mind, what is known as the fundamental mind, which transmigrates. This extremely subtle mind transmigrates in conjunction with the energy it is connected to, which is of one nature with it. So it is this mind energy complex which passes from life to life. And this mind energy complex, the fundamental mind, is the mind of the final stage of the death state, long after physical death. So this is a brief presentation of the Buddhist understanding of mind and we shall try to keep it present to our awareness as we move on to the understanding of mind in the light of neurobiology.

It is difficult for us to understand how recent the sense that there was a strong connection between the mind and the brain is. This is not something which was the dominant viewpoint in Western physiology for a long time. And one of the turning events which had very wide coverage in the popular press was an accident which happened to a US railway foreman in the nineteenth century, Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a US railway foreman who, in the process of tamping down explosives to prepare rails, set off accidentally the discharge of one of the explosives and his tamping iron actually penetrated his lower jaw and exited to the top of the skull. And Phineas Gage survived the experience.

I have actually seen reconstructions of the damage inflicted to Phineas Gage’s skull. It is astonishing that a human being could have lived through this. But what is striking in the case of, or what struck the nineteenth century in the case of Phineas Gage, were the changes in the personality of Mr. Gage. Phineas Gage was considered an extremely reliable, honest, churchgoing man, and to the surprise of his employers, his entire personality changed after the accident.

He became fitful, where he had been pious, he became irreverent, where he had been restrained, he became profane, Where he had been submissive, he became obstinate. Where he had been willful, he became capricious. Surprisingly, especially in a very Victorian age, he seems to have lost all inhibition in his behavior. So Phineas Gage made a living through, after the accident, through exhibiting himself. He was seen in the nineteenth century as living proof that the mind is not just intimately connected with the brain, but perhaps a byproduct of the brain’s activity.

Present reappraisals of the accounts of what happened to Phineas Gage show a much more mitigated picture. There were undeniable transformations in Phineas Gage, however, it seems they were not as long lasting as was claimed. It seems that the case was forced somewhat to make a point and the point was very much made. This point which was made is a turning point in Western thought. It is the idea that the mind probably is just a name we attribute to the activity of the brain.

And this underlies much of the research which is undertaken to this day on Buddhist meditation by neurologists. For this reason, this research must be handled with a very large grain of salt, because there are implicit and unstated assumptions we have to be aware of as practicing Buddhists, should we choose to consider ourselves so. So we’re now going to address the tools of the trade, the techniques which are used in neurophysiology and my presentation is not completely up to date, but it will do the job I think for what we have to address here. There are three broad sets of techniques starting with the most ancient electroencephalograms and the derived ERPs. This technique has been in use for much of the twentieth century and led to the famous research some of you probably read in the nineteen seventies by Charles Tart and his colleagues regarding the manifestation of electric waves of various frequency during states of meditation, specifically alpha, theta and even delta waves.

It’s a technique which has a big advantage. It enables one to follow the activity of the brain with a very, very high level of temporal resolution. One can follow what’s happening to the millisecond. Unfortunately, one has a very, very loose sense of where activity is occurring in the brain, even with the nets of electrodes which Davidson uses, which have some two hundred and fifty-six different electrodes. A new technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging has basically revolutionized the field.

Its first advantage is that unlike much of the other techniques which had to be used in the nineteenth century, it’s non invasive. Much of what we know about brain function we know because of operations undertaken on epileptics to try to cure them of epilepsy. These operations were mutilating operations which involved sections of the corpus callosum or the temporal lobes and could never be undertaken except in life threatening circumstances. FMRI has very high spatial resolution of the order of two-three millimeters, but presents some important disadvantages which are seldom mentioned. FMRI does not measure mental activity.

FMRI measures the blood flow to the concerned area. And there is an implicit assumption which is consistently made that increased blood flow indicates increased activity. This is basically a very naive assumption in the present state of our knowledge in neurology. It is taken for granted, it is perhaps true, it is certainly not something which we can just take on board without further qualification. The other problem with fMRI is very poor temporal resolution of the order of two to three seconds and even with bold techniques which is a variant of fMRI it’s down to one or two seconds.

For studying mental phenomena which change with extraordinary fleetness We are talking of for instance in the case of recognition of durations of two to three hundred milliseconds. This is far too coarse. So much of the research which has been undertaken by Davidson, by Kabat Zinn and so forth on meditators like Matthieu Ricard relies on a combination of EEG and fMRI to try to get a sense of the activation of certain brain areas. This is basically akin to chiseling a jewel with a sledgehammer. You can get somewhere, but the technique is extremely coarse and one must be very wary about rapid generalizations based on these results.

Then, the best technique, which is unfortunately by far the most difficult to use, is micro electrode single unit recording, where the activity of one individual neuron is examined. The best work in neurobiology, work specifically on the visual cortex of monkeys, has been made in this way. This is invasive work, electrode actually must be implanted, and it is work which unfortunately requires gigantic amounts of data processing. So the moment one starts studying even small parts of the brain like the insula, one is dealing with areas with perhaps millions of neurons, certainly hundreds of thousands. It’s very difficult in the present state of knowledge to see how one could insert one hundred thousand electrodes in a subject’s brain to monitor the activity of every single neuron Then one would have to use algorithms to try to interpret the data.

This is however probably going to be the way forwards. So, as you remember, we said that from a Buddhist standpoint, there are two broad categories of mental activities: perception and thought, direct perception and thought. And we are going to see what neurophysiology and neurobiology can tell us about perception and about thought, before we address the issue of Richard Davidson’s research. So I will address with Hume, in the context of the neurophysiology of perception, the case of vision. It’s a very intentional choice because vision is by far the best studied of all forms of perception and man is a visual animal.

Unlike many other species, a very important proportion of our cortex is dedicated to the processing of visual information. So this will be a little bit tedious and I apologize for it. I also apologize for mistakes I will make, but I think you will find at the end of the day it will give us new insight in how the brain operates and by extension how unreliable perception is, let alone thought. So if we start with the main organ of vision which is the eye, as you all know from high school the eye functions as a black chamber. Light penetrates and actually the visual image which is projected on the retina is an inverted image, exactly in the same way as in a photographic black chamber.

The retina itself comprises at its surface two broad groups of cells. One group of cells called cones whose main function is to detect color and another group of cells called rods whose only function is to detect light of any color. The data then perceived exits the retina after being processed in a bevy of specialized cells in the back of the retina which are called ganglia, neural ganglia. We will not talk of them today, it’s a very complicated topic. But the data exits the retina through the optical nerve and then enters after passing to the back of the brain the processing areas of the cortex, the so called visual cortex.

Now if we analyze the process of perception by the retina, it is eye opening. I’m sorry, the pun was unintended. It was unintended. The retina and the processing of visual qualia, in other words visual data. As we said, the retina contains two categories of photoreceptors, some six to 7,000,000 cones which are color sensitive and a gigantic number of rods in comparison, 120,000,000 rods which are non color sensitive.

Now, the cones actually are sensitive to wavelengths within a certain bracket. They are not sensitive to color per se. So the three categories of cones we have are sensitive broadly speaking to what is described as red, green and blue colors. Actually they tend to fuse with each other and we will see the frequency distribution table in just a minute or so. What is quite striking is that these cones in and of themselves do not perceive color.

They are merely photon counters. They count photons within a certain frequency range. Color therefore is constructed later on in the visual process. Colors as we know them, whether it is red, green or blue, we would say in Buddhist terms, are mental constructs. In addition to the photons we have the rods which in ordinary life are in a state of permanent saturation.

A physicist just in a paper a couple of weeks ago said that from the standpoint of quantum physics, rods were perhaps the most sophisticated photon counter in existence, since rods count individual photons, individual light particles. This is a frequency response for the three types of cones. So you can see that the blue cones respond at a peak to light in the four forty five nanometer frequency and their response decreases when the frequency changes. Green cones respond mainly to five thirty five nanometer frequency and red cones to five seventy five nanometer frequencies. We will see in a couple minutes that actually of these three cones, one actually is an evolutionary addition which is characteristic of primates.

Most mammals have only two cones and therefore apart from primates, the totality of color constructs made by the visual cortex of mammals is made on the basis of two and true sources of information only. Distribution of these photosensitive cells in the retina is highly erratic. So what we see is that in one specific area of the retina known as a fovea, the distribution of cones, in other words color sensitive cells, peaks. It is orders of magnitude greater than in the rest of the retina and in this area there are almost no rods. This is the one part of the retina which specializes in color detection.

In the rest of the retina, we have a very large distribution of rods, except for one point, which is the exit point of the optical nerve, where there are neither cones nor rods. In other words, this is a point of the retina where should light impact it, there will be no perception. If we now look at the modalities of perception by the retina, we can see as we mentioned the cones do not know what wavelengths of light they absorb. Distribution is not uniform. Therefore the perception of color is a construct of the primary visual cortex V1 and V2.

Through the comparison of the number of photons received by the three categories of objects. Color is therefore a synthetic creation. As mentioned, mammals have two categories of cones, primates have three, largely because it’s an evolutionary adaptation which enables primates to detect fruit on a background which is green. It enhances the differentiation between yellow and green in primates. And some shrimp have 11 different types of cones.

Therefore, just in terms of the organ of visual perception, there are gigantic differences in perception of exterior reality between living beings. If we now look at a summary of the visual pathway to the primary visual cortex, The data, which actually is much more complex than what I explained, since in addition to the identification of colors by the three codes and identification of the presence of light by the rods, there are processing cells within the neuron, the neural ganglia, and this has been discovered in the last fifteen years, which are specialized in identifying features of phenomena observed, such as length or movement. All of these cells transmit their data to two preliminary processing areas in the thalamus which are known as the LGN areas, which seem to have a map, a template, which reconstructs in a multiplicity of layers the data which has been transmitted. It is then passed onwards to the visual cortex and processed at the level of the visual cortex. So I have included a very brief schema of LNG area just to show you how this construction of an image based on data might operate.

This is poorly understood. It is quite clear however that these areas in the thalamus are central for the creation of visual reality. As is often the case within the brain, have powerful feedback loops which operate from, in this specific case, the LGN to the cortex and from the cortex back to the LGN. These feedback loops are very puzzling, because when we have a stream of data from the retina to the LGN, this area in the thalamus which we talked about, Some 90% of the fibers in the optical nerve project to these two areas. We have a very small transmission of data from these thalamic areas to the two visual cortexes.

There’s several more, these are the main ones we will consider here. And in the case of the cat, this was only the case which could be studied carefully, 10 times more fibers project back from V one to the LGN, than fibers projecting forwards. So this is a very puzzling feedback loop. It is a loop which I suspect clearly demonstrates the level of construction of the data at the level of V one. And illustrates probably quite clearly the extent to which visual reality as we perceive it is a construct of V one.

And then before we take a well earned tea break, and I’m sorry for the density of the material, but I’ve tried to make it as accessible as possible. It’s dense for me so I’m sure it’s dense for you too. I would like to address with you some tentative questions. The first of which is where precisely does visualization occur? In other words, what are the neurological correlates of visualization?

We in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition use visualization in meditation systematically. Then there is a very big question at what level of the path of processing of optical data does visualization occur? If we visualize for instance Je Tsongkhapa in the context of Ganden Lha Gyama, does this occur at the level of the LGN, the thalamic nuclei? Does it occur at the level of V one, The visual cortex, the first component of the visual cortex, does it occur at the level of V2 or further up in the chain? And in this context what was pointed out by Bartolomeo is that brain damaged patients demonstrate, can demonstrate either impaired imagery and preserved perception, or the opposite pattern.

In other words preserved imagery and damaged perception. This provides a strong challenge to models postulating a function and anatomical equivalence of perception and imagery. In other words, if this is the case, and this is a recent study from 2008, then probably visualization would occur very high up in the neurological pathways processing data and would not occur low down at the level of the LGN or even at the level of V1. This is precisely the sort of work which should be undertaken to try to verify for instance and you will see it’s perhaps my main critique of Davidson’s research to try to verify in very very targeted and precise meditations what parts of the brain are activated. And this leads us obviously to another important question from a Buddhist standpoint.

A question which we can only evoke, which is what the neurological correlates of śamatha might be. Now if we look at the traditional Buddhist presentation of śamatha, śamatha is single pointed concentration with the features of mental and physical pliancy on the basis of a recollected object initially perceived by any of the five senses or ascertained conceptually. So normally we practice śamatha on the basis of a visual image, an image of the Buddha which is examined very carefully, the same way as we examine this cup. But then it is unanimous in certainly the Tibetan, Thai and Burmese traditions, Shamatha is not practiced on the basis of the visual consciousness from that point onwards. This object, was initially perceived visually, is visualized mentally.

There’s no particular reason śamatha could not be practiced on the basis of a sound, which is recollectant, and theoretically on the basis of a smell, a taste, a sensation. It is widely practiced in the Tibetan tradition and this was a case by my teacher, the late Geshe Rabten, on the basis of a thought. In other words, the analysis of the conventional nature of mind and then focusing on this awareness. So we can see within the tradition that śamatha can occur on the basis either of a sense object, a recollected sense object, or on the basis of a thought. It would be interesting to see if using fMRI one could establish, if one was using a visual object such as an image of the Buddha, whether there was increased activity of V1 or V2 during the meditators concentration on the visualized object.

This research has not been done, but it will be extremely interesting to see whether this was the case or not. And then I think we are all entitled to a tea break and I’ll reassure you the material gets easier from now on. So we will move onwards with this summarized presentation of the functions of the human brain as a prelude to understanding Davidson’s research, and I’d like at present to cover with you the work of a revolutionary neurologist, little known I think in the West, Jerzy Konorski, who was a Polish neurologist, whose work in the late 1960s and 1970s basically anticipates pretty much all of the main research fields in neurology nowadays. Specifically, Konorski introduced two concepts which are still being investigated. The first is neuroplasticity, which has become the received wisdom in the same way as when I was a child and my father had visiting professors come over, neuro rigidity was the received principle, so in thirty or forty years the paradigm has dramatically shifted.

In the same way Konorski introduced a concept which at the period was greeted with near ridicule. It’s a concept of gnostic cells or grandmother neurons. These are neurons which are so specific in their function that they’re called grandmother neurons because they would only identify your grandmother and nothing else. Or gnostic neurons because their function is cognitive. But they were considered creatures of the imagination until really the beginning of this century, when an American neurologist, Kreiman, who as a result of his PhD under Koch at Caltech, demonstrated the existence of these gnostic neurons in at least one case, As a result of this was basically of a tenure at Harvard and his own lab, which is about as high as you get.

So you can also call them the Bill Clinton cells, because what is striking with these cells is that in Kreiman’s research, Kreiman demonstrates that individual cells, individual neurons in the amygdala of a volunteer, an epileptic volunteer, would fire only when shown photographs of Bill Clinton. Irrespective of the angle the photograph was taken, and actually they would fire with pencil drawings of Bill Clinton, but would not fire, would not manifest in other words electrical activity, with drawings or photographs of any other American president. So this is strong evidence for the existence, at least in the amygdala, of grandmother cells. This has been the main focus of Kreiman’s research ever since as recently as last year. He was able to demonstrate that there are what seem to be grandmother cells, mnemonic neurons, in the medial temporal lobe.

This raises very fundamental questions. It raises fundamental questions about the dominant understanding of neural networks, and it also raises fundamental questions about what was taken for granted in much of neurology, which is a distributed nature of memory. One has the impression working through the research that there are two poles at present. There remains a more perhaps old fashioned view which sees memories as distributed either through all the brain as was initially supposed by Lashley in his ghastly experiments which entailed basically teaching mazes to mice and then progressively destroying their brain to see how much destruction was necessary before they forgot the maze. And in more recent research which demonstrates that memory is localized in broad areas, but Kreiman’s research on the other hand seems to indicate that there are individual neurons which have mnemonic or agnostic functions.

If this is confirmed, and it’s not just in the amygdala, then perhaps the very foundation of our understanding of neural networks has to be put into question, and I think certainly from a Buddhist standpoint this would open the way to a very large number of extremely interesting questions. There are certain Tibetan schools which teach that experience is actually encrypted in engrams at the level of individual channels. This seems to be very close to the understanding of grandmother neurons. Then we have tried to address as best as possible the issue of perception according to contemporary neurology. I would like to address at present briefly the neurophysiology of memory with you, using memory as an instance of conceptuality.

So the contemporary understanding of memory is that there are multiplicity of memories. We have, on the one hand, activity dependent memory, which is an extremely short term memory, which manifests neurologically by a continuous level of electrical activity in the concerned neurons. This is a memory we have of an object while looking at it, let’s say looking at this green folder, and looking away while keeping it in mind. It is not even a short term memory. We have structural memory, non associative and associative.

Non associative memory is simply adaptation, which has been demonstrated in some of the most primitive of organisms such as the marine snail, and associative memory which includes the various forms of conditioning, which you all know, classical Pavlovian conditioning, fear induced conditioning, fear context induced conditioning and so forth. Associative memory includes two broad categories of memory which are fundamentally differentiated in present day neurology: procedural and declarative memory. Procedural memory is the memory of how we do things. If we learn to ride a bicycle, this and we remember how to ride a bicycle, this is procedural memory. You cannot learn to ride a bicycle through having someone explain to you how to do it, however long he does so.

So procedural memory can only be learned through a process. Declarative memory on the other hand is a memory of facts and figures. If someone tells you that the bicycle weighs four and a half kilos and is made of aluminum and you remember that, that is declarative memory. The acquisition processes are different. In addition, we have several categories of short term or what is preferred as a term nowadays working memory.

We have the famous visual buffer, which is simply that part of the visual cortex which retains information after we have ceased to look at an object. It functions exactly as the buffer of a computer. It retains information until it is full, at which point that information is replaced by subsequent information. We have the phonological loop which we use when remembering what someone says. This, I suspect, is MRI was undertaken massively developed in translators such as My Humble Self, you’d probably find a phonological loop area which would be huge.

And we finally have fleeting memory, which is ultra short term memory, which gives rise for instance to images such as the famous circle of fire described in the sutras when one twirls a burning brand around. So we can see with this very brief presentation of memory that memory as it is understood nowadays in neurology is multiple. There are a series of memories: memories of processes and memories of facts, memories which are ultra short term, short term and long-term memories. I will address a bit later on in the talk the relevance of this to some of the work which Professor Sir Stevenson did, which we covered this weekend. So I’d like to cover with you briefly two cases, which show the impact of cerebral lesion on memory.

One is perhaps one of the most famous cases in neurology, the case of HM, he was anonymized until a couple of years ago. A young American epileptic who had to be operated in 1953 by Scoville who published the results, and Scoville basically proceeded to an ablation of both the hippocampus, which is involved in the assimilation of memory, and the amygdala, as well as large chunks of the medial temporal lobe. Now the results of this operation is that Moleson, Henry Gustave Moleson, the subject, was severely amnesic, but what was very striking is that he retained all his intellectual capacities, these were not affected, he remained conscious and he had procedural memory. In other words, the memory of the facts which had occurred before the operation, declarative memory, was destroyed, largely speaking. The memory of all the skills he learned, such as walking, which is a skill we learn, speaking for that matter, bicycling, if he knew to bicycle, this was preserved.

Now this case is very interesting because it demonstrates quite clearly that procedural memory and declarative memory are stored in different parts of the brain and are very different definitely different phenomena. So the case is credited with demonstrating the function of the hippocampus in the construction of categories of memory. You have all heard of the London cab drivers who have to memorize huge swathes of London streets for a test which is called the knowledge. It’s not like Adelaide cab drivers, go in a cab in London, they drive you to where you want to go and they know how to get there. But what’s striking is that their hippocampus is sharply enlarged as a result of this.

It’s a very clear case of neuroplasticity. In other words, a change of brain structure in function of learning, of acquisition. And the second case I will cover briefly with you is one some of you may know about Clive Wearing who was one of Britain’s most famous musicologists, a scholar, a conductor, a pianist, who fell ill with a form of encephalitis in 1985 which destroyed his hippocampus. He not only suffers from severe retrograde amnesia covering all the events before this date, but is unable to form new memories. However, procedural memory is clear, he can play the piano, he can direct the choir, he does not remember learning to do so or how he learned to do so.

And his diary entries show exactly the mental state he was dwelling in. On 08:31 he writes, Now I am really completely awake. At 09:06 he writes, Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake. At 09:34 he writes, Now I am superlatively, actually awake. In other words, he lives within a very, very small bracket of time with no memory of events more than a couple minutes before the present moment.

You see this in some cases of Alzheimer’s. Now this case is very interesting. It is very interesting because Koch, whose book the Neurobiological Quest for Consciousness, I relied upon for this conference, points out something very interesting in the case of Clive Wearing. The case of Clive Wearing demonstrates that consciousness and memory are two separate phenomena. Clive Wearing has no declarative memories more than a couple minutes before the present moment, yet he’s fully conscious.

And this raises many questions, because what it seems to imply neurologically is that consciousness is a more fundamental phenomenon than memory. Now if consciousness is a more fundamental phenomenon than memory, which is not affected in the case of Clive Wearing or in the case, the case, where in addition to the hippocampus large swathes of the brain had to be destroyed as well, then this raises the question what precisely consciousness is? Why is consciousness if we adopt the contemporary sociobiological viewpoint? Why is consciousness so important from an evolutionary standpoint? There’s no obvious reason.

Consciousness is a very expensive phenomenon urologically. It’s a question which has to be asked and I think if one considers the mind non material the response is fairly evident. If one doesn’t, one has to account for the fact that consciousness is preserved in situations where much of mental operation is destroyed. In other words, that from the neurological standpoint consciousness seems much more fundamental than declarative memory, the construction of short term memory and so forth, which are indispensable for survival. What I would like to address with you at present before passing on to Davidson’s research and the research in general on the effect of meditation on the brain is a question of how the research on memory, the possibility of for instance destroying declarative memory and not destroying procedural memory, connects with Stevenson’s research on cases of the reincarnation type.

Now, Stevenson, as you know, studied some 2,500 cases of children of which he has eight ninety five verified cases, in which the memories were found to correspond to events, and thirty five rich cases, these are strong cases, where the families in question had not met before Stevenson arrived. Now these cases include all three types of conditioning. We have Pavlovian fear and fear context conditioning, mainly in connection with the death experience. The charge of children manifest clear phobias related to the mode of death. A phobia is an instance of fear induced conditioning.

There are clear cases of procedural transmission of skills. If a child was good at the piano in a past life, he is good at the piano in this life. This is procedural. There are as well declarative memories. It is on this that the cases are generally built.

The child remembers his name as Ishra, for instance, the case we cover as the Katchapat twins, or as Gillian and Jennifer Pollock. The child also remembers semantic facts about his life where he lived, street names, addresses, the names of family members. How is this compatible with the research on the cases of and more recently Clive Wearing, where the destruction of areas of the brain leads to the apparent destruction of declarative memory. Here we have a case where in putative cases of reincarnation, the actual brain is destroyed. The previous remembered personality dies, the brain is destroyed, the mind purportedly passes on with the memories, With procedural memories, declarative memories, phobias, conditionings.

If memories are actually stored in the brain, how is this possible? If memories are not stored in the brain, then what is going on in cases such as the case of or Clive Wearing, where areas of the brain are destroyed and it is not possible anymore for the subject to retrieve declarative memories? There’s a very big question mark here. My personal suspicion is that this probably can best be understood in the light of the three categories of mind which we covered in the context of tantric psychophysiology. In other words, that coarse minds require a very strong neurological support, which subtle minds require less and less, and that there is a diffusion of memories from the coarse minds into the subtle minds, and it is this which would be carried over into the next life.

And this would explain why the memories of these children are partial, they are not complete, they are fragmentary. But it’s an open question. It’s a question which has to be addressed because unless one can find a middle ground, one has to put in question either the research on memory and engram storage or Stevenson’s research. So my personal suspicion is that it is this process of filtration, downward movement of memories from the coarser levels of mind and from the subtle mind, the subtlest mind, which enables them to be carried from life to life. So I would like to address with you at present, before starting Davidson’s research, the evidence we have for the possibility to transform perception through conceptuality.

So as we said, transforming perception through conceptuality is the goal of meditation. Analytical meditation is nothing else but familiarizing the mind with certain thoughts until one breaks through the thought barrier. Or as is said in Dharmakīrti’s works and in the debates of Dharmakīrti, the mental image becomes weaker and weaker until the phenomenon is perceived nakedly. This is central to Je Tsongkhapa’s tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and it’s a statue of Je Tsongkhapa which I have had all my life, so I feel very close to it. And there is evidence that conceptual habituation can modify perception permanently, but what is striking is that this evidence was never connected to meditation.

There is actually one type of conceptual meditation we all engage in pretty much all day, unaware of the fact that we are doing so without even thinking of it as conceptual meditation. And this is speaking our language, speaking our mother tongue. Whether our mother tongue is English, French, Vietnamese, German, Tibetan, each language has its own semantic and grammatical structures, which must be interiorized to speak the language. The question is, since basically we speak our mother tongue, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of hours in a lifetime, is there any evidence that speaking our mother tongue and the features of our mother tongue durably affect our perception of the outer world. If there is, there is evidence that conceptuality can durably modify perception, therefore there is evidence that analytical meditation works.

And this evidence is available, it is available basically in the work of Lera Boroditsky, which started some fifteen years ago studying the impact of grammatical categories on thought patterns. As you know, some languages, not English, but some languages, have very strong gender structures. The pronoun, the adjective, the noun vary in function of grammatical gender. In French, a tree is masculine and, for instance, a flower is feminine. You say un arbre and une fleur.

If you speak of a beautiful tree, the adjective is put in the masculine as well. You have un bel arbre, on the other hand une belle fleur. Pronoun, adjective and noun in the feminine. So Boroditsky tried to see whether when speakers of two languages, in this case Spanish and German, in which the gender of nouns was different were interrogated in English, the associations they made with objects whose gender were different were different or not, and they were strikingly different. In German, for instance, a bridge is feminine, it’s Diebrik, and in Spanish bridges are in the masculine gender, El Puente.

Now when Spanish speakers and German speakers were interrogated in English without knowing what the topic of investigation was, in English, Spanish speakers when asked to describe bridges saw bridges as dark looming and threatening structures. And German speakers, in whose mother tongue, but not in English bridges were feminine, saw bridges as fragile, gracile and even sensitive structures. Now this is clear unambiguous evidence of a durable impact of what I will call conceptual meditation on language, on perception. Bridges, when perceived, are perceived differently by speakers of languages in which a bridge is masculine or feminine. There are reams of research on this focusing not just on gender, but for instance on another key feature in the grammar of many languages: subject verb object order.

As you know, all Western languages generally speaking are SVO, subject verb object languages. Tibetan is not, and there are clear impacts on the way we think and view the world, and the way Tibetans think and view the world. So what this clearly demonstrates, this research on language clearly demonstrates, is the impact of conceptual habituation on perception. Therefore, it demonstrates the feasibility of analytical meditation. As I remember when I started, my father wrote me a very long elaborate letter demonstrating that through practicing concentration meditation I would go insane, because it would cause lasting damage to the nervous system, and that analytical meditation was of any way meaningless, because it was impossible through habituation to durably change the mind.

And he was broadly speaking reflecting the vision he was not a neurologist, was a biochemist of cancer but the vision of neurology which was prevalent in the nineteen seventies. This is no longer the case. And this is no longer the case thanks largely to the research of an American researcher, Richard Davidson, in cooperation with the French translator of the Dalai Lama, Matthieu Ricard. Davidson’s case is a very interesting case because it shows just how loaded the field is. Davidson actually was a medical student at Harvard in the 1970s when he did a retreat, it was nineteen seventy two-seventy three, and he was pretty much written off by his professors at that point as someone who was unreliable and wouldn’t amount to a lot in science and basically went undercover.

He became a professor, I believe, of neurology at the University of Wisconsin in medicine and maintained a lifelong interest in meditation, which was however hidden from his peers. He met with His Holiness in 1992, and as some of you may remember, it is in 1989 when His Holiness received the Nobel Peace Prize that suddenly Tibetan Buddhism became respectable. Until then, we were on the outer fringes. And in 1992, His Holiness personally asked him to, as he says himself, come out of the closet and start talking at least about his interest in meditation, which he did, and eventually he started researching the topic. So Davidson’s research at the Waisman Lab and now at the Center for Healthy Minds for brain imaging demonstrates that over the course of tens of thousands of hours of meditation, Lojong meditation practitioners have actually modified the physical structure of their brain.

These alterations are assessed by fMRI, of which we talked in the first part of the talk, with all the limitations of the technique, it is coarse. In addition, there are clear changes in cortical evoked response to visual and actually to auditory stimuli, and we will see there are important alterations in the amplitude and synchrony of high frequency oscillations, mainly gamma waves. Now the reaction is strongly dependent on the degree of habituation. Ten thousand hours seems to be a turning point in learning pretty much every skill. What Davidson found was that after ten thousand hours the effect was manifest, after nineteen thousand hours it was even stronger, and around forty five thousand hours there was a typical inverted bell curve significant of habituation and lack of necessity to put effort in the practice anymore.

So for those of us who meditate, if we think about what ten thousand hours of meditation mean, if you do an hour of meditation a day, that’s thirty years of meditation, a bit less, twenty five. If you meditate twenty five years you will get this effect. But what is quite surprising is that if you calculate the average amount of hours someone does in a three year retreat, you will find that it’s approximately ten thousand hours. So that the three year retreat seems to be the minimal duration calibrated to elicit not just mental change, but what is unsurprising, change in the physical substratum of the mind, which is the brain. Now, Davidson distinguishes between two types of meditation and this is I’m afraid where I am in, not in disagreement, but I feel that the distinctions are far too coarse.

Davidson distinguishes between focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation. I think down the line it will be necessary for Davidson’s team to focus on much sharper distinctions in meditative techniques, because if you just take the case of focused attention meditation, focused attention meditation can be visualization, it can also be focusing on a concept, but for that matter, even though Davidson qualifies or categorizes vipassana as open monitoring meditation, in actuality vipassana is focused attention meditation on the breathing with open monitoring of exterior phenomena which are adventitious. So I think down the line it would be very interesting for Davidson’s team to adopt, for instance, one of the many classifications of the types of meditation we find in Tibetan Buddhism, but in Indian Buddhism, Theravāda Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, whatever, and use that as a framework for investigation, to see for instance what difference there is, let’s say, in the context of deity meditation, between focusing on one’s body as a deity and scanning the body as the deity’s body. What difference there is between analytical meditation on Lamrim and fixative meditation on Lamrim? Analytical meditation on Lamrim does not seem to fall in either category.

It’s not focused attention meditation, it’s certainly not open monitoring meditation either. So I think this is one of the initial weaknesses of the program, perhaps its growing pains. The specific findings, and I apologize I was not able to reproduce the charts, they don’t come through very well, are as follows: first and foremost the finding which caused such a furor among Western Buddhists when it came out at the beginning of the century, a reduction in emotionally reactive behavior as a result of focused attention meditation. Now this is quite striking because this was considered physiologically impossible. The amygdala, which controls among other things, many other things, fear response, it also controls for instance social behavior, showed a very clear negative correlation.

In other words, amygdala reaction was reduced to extremely powerful and loud emotional sounds, such as screams and moans. I was told by an acquaintance they were of the sound of a gunshot, which were put to meditators with important numbers of what I would call concentration meditation during life. So this was one of the early seminal studies. It clearly seems to show that focused attention meditation leads to a reduction of reactive behavior. So, in as much as reactive behavior, emotionally reactive behavior, even in a mundane setting is problematical, there would be worldly benefits, immediate benefits for society in fostering focused meditation in children even on non-Buddhist themes.

Any reduction in this level of reactivity is quite beneficial. The second category of specific findings, it’s a bit technical but it is quite easy to understand once it’s explained, Reduced attentional blink as a result of OM meditation. Now, attentional blink is considered a basic phenomenon connected with the limitations of our visual and in this case or in some cases phonological buffers. When subjected to a stream of stimuli, such as for instance in the case I chose here a stream of letters which are shown to the subject, If numbers are inserted at random in the stream of letters and the letters are shown to the subject every tenth of a second, the subject is actually incapable to notice the second number which is shown, if the gap between the first and the second number is less than, depending on the subjects, three to four hundred milliseconds. This is taken for granted in much of experimental psychology and Davidson’s team was floored to find that after three months of vipassana training, there was a sharp reduction in the attentional blink.

In other words, subjects could notice numbers which were set much closer together in time. Now this was considered impossible. So this is very clear evidence that vipassana meditation, what Davidson calls monitoring meditation, has clear physiological correlates in a mere three months. The third category of finding Davidson made, which actually made Matthieu Ricard and then verified on a series of other subjects, is a dramatic shift in the brain’s electrical activity during what Davidson calls non referential compassion meditation, he considers to be an OM meditation and I personally think is a very clear case of FA meditation. So what Davidson calls non referential compassion is focusing on the feeling of compassion for all sentient beings.

It’s very striking that in these cases Ricard manifested very high amplitude gamma waves, the 30 to 40 Hertz range, which are associated with cognitive operations and according to some theories of consciousness are actually probably what allows consciousness. This is certainly Coarse vision of the function of gamma waves. So far so good, but what is quite surprising is a physiological impact of compassion meditation. Davidson recounts an anecdote which is quite amusing. It gives a sense of how little we know in the field.

He was with Francisco Varela in Dharmasala and he had just met His Holiness and His Holiness asked them to give a presentation to IBD, the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, on neurobiology and meditation. I gave them a presentation many years ago, were very sort of subdued group, very well educated. 200 monks gathered and they set up their equipment, Varela sat down and Davidson basically started setting up the electrodes and put the helmet on top of Varela’s head. 200 monks burst into hysterics. Quite naively Davidson thought it was because they thought Varela looked ridiculous with his helmet and electrodes protruding from everywhere.

He was told later by a translator that that was not the case at all. What the monk thought was absolutely hilarious was that he was hoping to detect the manifestation of consciousness at the level of the head, whereas it was obvious that it happened at the level of the heart. And then I think Davidson must have chuckled and, you know, thought that well, you know, these Tibetan monks are a lovely set of characters and we just have to work on their understanding of human anatomy. But to his great surprise some of his colleagues found to use fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, to see the heart inactivity at the same time as they were monitoring the brain function of a meditator meditating on compassion. And what they found is that experienced meditators elicit a dramatic increase, it’s multiples of the pulse rate of a normal non meditator when meditating on compassion.

And that there is a very clear activation during this meditation, and only during meditation on compassion, of the insula, the insular cortex, which is a region inside the folds of the cortex, which is one of the few regions of the cortex which has a direct template, if you want, a model of the viscera, of the organs of the body. It’s basically if we know how, you know, our stomach or our heart or our lungs feel, it is at this level of the cortex that it happens. Now, when Ricard was meditating on compassion, not only did they find these high gamma waves we talked about, but the insula was activated. You can clearly see it on the fMRI scans of the insula and pulse was multiplied by a factor of two to two and a half. So I saw the charts, I was not able to reproduce them.

It really it’s flooring, there was no other word for it. Now, Davidson does not address the issue of why this is the case. I personally suspect, and there’s evidence for this, that the insular is strongly connected with empathy. Empathy literally the Greek term empathein is to suffer with. Empathy actually entails physiologizing the experience of others.

If we see someone whose arm has just been cut, we ourselves shudder at the thought of our arm being cut. And it is very possible that this is precisely why the insula is activated during meditation on compassion, since when one meditates on compassion, one visualizes others suffering physically, it’s a very easy way of doing it, and one responds to this emotionally and then focuses single pointedly on this. So this is some of Davidson’s research and some of the more tantalizing work Davidson has done, which is less of interest in a Buddhist context and more of interest in a medical context, is the impact of FA and OM meditation on the immune system. And the impact is very striking. Subjects who went through eight weeks to two months of meditation showed a sharply increased antibody count when they got an influenza vaccine shot at the end of the period.

Again, I saw the graph, it’s almost a double, just by sight. So these neurological correlates of meditation, in other words, the neurological states which correspond to modifications of the mind, and these physiological correlates of meditation, these bodily changes which correspond to changes of the mind, we do not understand. I think Davidson’s research is extraordinary, it’s absolutely fascinating, but all we have with Davidson’s research is a mechanism. Then, I think it will be very interesting if Davidson can move beyond this towards perhaps the beginning of an understanding of the mind body relationship. And I would like to conclude with a brief presentation of the neurological effects of vipassana meditation based on Kabat Zinn’s research.

To do this I would first like to suggest, and this is my private theory, a possible neurological correlate of vipassana meditation. To do this we have to enter somewhat into the difference between reflexes, reflex action and other types of automatic or automated procedures. Specifically what is called what are called zombie agents. Reflexes are well known to all of us, they’re generally controlled by the spinal cord. They include coughing, sneezing, withdrawing one’s hand from the fire, and they do not involve any cortical activity.

What is striking however is a huge range of activities which are totally automated by the higher centers, mainly the cortex, and these have been nicknamed, and it’s a term which is actually taken from philosophy by Koch, but by Kahneman as well, zombie agents. They are agents, they are actors, but they are zombies, they’re dead. They just function without consciousness. Much of our daily activity is controlled by zombie agents. The classic case is saccadic suppression, and this connects with our explanation of percept visual perception earlier on.

When we visualize visually perceive things, when I look at you, for instance, Actually, to start with, I have a completely irregular cone distribution in the background of the retina, and therefore my brain compensates automatically for this. In addition, there’s a huge black spot in the middle of the retina where the optical nerve exits, which none of us ever sees, which is systematically covered over and reconstructed. The eye, in addition, automatically adjusts. This is so called saccades, which means sudden bursts of activity, so that the fovea, the part of the retina which is most sensitive to color, is always focused on the object. We do not see this.

I look at you and as far as I can see, my plane of vision is totally stable. A zombie agent is involved in the stabilization of this process and the elimination of saccadic movement, as well as the elimination of blinking. When we blink, we actually shut our eyes, yet none of us actually notices blinking. We blink and we we go through life assuming that the field of vision, the flow of visual data is uninterrupted, whereas it is interrupted every two to three seconds and is constantly shaking with at least one huge hole in the background. All of this is corrected by zombie agents.

Balancing the body is the other case. None of us ever thinks about balance, we just walk in a constant process of falling. My personal contention is that vipassana is nothing else but the deconstruction of these zombie agents. The deconstruction of these zombie agents to enable us from a Buddhist standpoint to deconstruct negative behavior and construct ethical behavior. Now the therapeutic benefits of mindfulness were established by Kabat-Zinn and others.

They established very clear pain relief in patients trained in mindfulness meditation. Kabat-Zinn established in other works very clear stress relief as well, and has become one of the main proponents of a secular use of mindfulness to alleviate physical pain and mental stress. And as you remember, Davidson, and this is just some of his latest research, has clearly established an impact of mindfulness on the immune system. So I think, summa summarum, what we can see on the basis of this two hour presentation is that the research which is being done by Davidson but in other fields by Kreiman, which used to be done by Varela, on the effect of Buddhist meditation demonstrates clear physiological and neurological effects. It demonstrates, which perhaps is not surprising if neuroplasticity is a reality, that the brains of meditators change in reaction to meditation.

The insula, for instance, in meditators is more developed than in non meditators. It’s actually a thickening of the cortex. There is a very clear demonstration in Davidson’s research of the full range of the psychosomatic effect to a degree which is unsuspected. Davidson pulled short, and I don’t know his personal opinion on the topic, regarding viewing the mind as a non material phenomenon. So in this respect I think his research is extremely interesting as a gateway into an appreciation of Buddhism, but it is difficult as a Buddhist to limit oneself to this as a foundation for practice.

What I also hope that I was able to show today is the degree to which our perception of reality, both sensory and mental, is constructed. Now, I took the example of the visual field, it’s the best studied. I suspect the same is probably true or would be true if we examined auditory, olfactive, gustatory or tactile perception. We can say in a nutshell that 80, maybe 90% of what we perceive visually is a construct. The figures are evident when we look at the size of the neural loop between the LGN and V1, the visual cortex.

It implies degrees of construction of visual reality, which are totally at odds with our own experience. Our own experience is that of a world out there which is real, has the colors which we see and the shapes which we see. This in no way seems to correspond to the actual reality on the outside. Likewise, I hope to have shown that the understanding of memory which is presented in contemporary neurobiology raises many questions when it comes to the issue of the transmission of procedural and declarative memories to children who remember past lives and I have tried to propose an explanation of this phenomenon. And finally I thought it not inappropriate to end with a marvelous quote from the Majima Nikāya, which you all know.

Suppose Manonkyaputta, a man, were wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with poison and his friends and companions brought a surgeon to treat him. The man would say, I will not let the surgeon pull out the arrow until I know the name and clan of the man who wounded me, whether the bow that wounded me was long or short, whether the arrow that wounded me was hoof tipped, curved or bobbed. Or this would still not be known to that man and meanwhile he would die. So to Malunkyaputta, if anyone should say, I will not lead the noble life under the Buddha until the Buddha declares to me whether the world is eternal or not eternal, finite or infinite, whether the soul is the same as or different from the body, whether an awakened one ceases to exist after death or not, that would still remain undeclared by the Buddha and meanwhile that person would die. Jumping on: I have not explained these other things because they are not useful, they are not conducive to tranquility and nirvana.

What I have explained is suffering, the cause of suffering, the destruction of suffering and the path that leads to the destruction of suffering. This is useful leading to non attachment, the absence of passion and perfect knowledge. So, I would like to thank you all for the attention you paid to a very difficult and challenging presentation and we have some twenty minutes which are at your disposal to ask questions. I’ll do my best to answer them. Yes, Anne.

Well, he hasn’t done any on nuns simply because most nuns don’t meditate. The situation of the nuns in Tibetan tradition is not good and Tibetan nuns typically have a far lower level of education, so it’s much more difficult just in terms of odds to get Tibetan nuns who are good meditators. Now I don’t know whether he did research on Western nuns or not, that I don’t know. Funding of his research, he actually ran the Weisman Lab at the University of Wisconsin and then His Holiness the Dalai Lama started giving him some funding in 2003, I think, but I don’t know the source of his funding. Are there other questions?

I should point out his work is peer reviewed. I saw a very interesting chart a couple days ago. Some of you may know what Medline is, it’s database of all medical publications. Anything which is serious is basically catalogued on Medline. If you look at the amount of publications on the effect of meditation, it skyrockets in the 1990s and peaks just three four years ago and actually has dropped a little bit since then.

So there’s been a tremendous interest, perhaps because at last the techniques allow us to investigate this, in the physiological effects of meditation. Are there any other questions? Yes, Anne. It’s very good news, and please give me the names of the companies. They’re surprisingly difficult to interpret.

I mean, had a look at some of Davidson’s slides. I think only a neurologist would know what’s going on. And then I do think one of the things which is very striking with this research is, I’d say, the extreme humidity of Davidson in terms of the claims he makes, which is very, I think, characteristic of a good scientist. And at the same time, it seems like a very piecemeal approach to meditation. It’s like, we try this, oh, there’s an effect, nobody really understands what the effect means.

Then we try this, ah, yes, And that part of the brain is activated. So there is a lack of an overarching theory and that’s very striking. Very striking. I would suspect so, yes. I would suspect so.

Is that true? Would suspect so. Here we only have evidence. But we have I mean, the shift is dramatic. The only studies I knew in the 1970s and 80s which demonstrated clearly an impact of meditation with the studies of a French doctor, Marie Labrosse, on yogis who were able to interrupt the beat of the heart for up to four minutes.

And she had the EEGs to prove it, it was done in Pondicherry, she was a member of the CNRS. Apart from that there was almost no research. Then there was a TM research which was basically biased, everyone knows. So there was no real serious research and it’s Varela and Davidson who really have been the pioneers in the field and have demonstrated at least that part of the Buddhist claim is true. Part of the Buddhist claim is that these meditation techniques have demonstratable effects.

So what Davidson has demonstrated is that they have physiological effects. Physiological effects which are extremely important. In some cases, effects which are not suspected and perhaps are even unexplained. But what he has not demonstrated, perhaps it’s not possible, is that they have mental effects on an immaterial mind. And I myself find the juncture of this work and Stevenson’s work extremely interesting.

I think it is at that level that from a Buddhist standpoint we would like to see more research. It would be very interesting for instance to have fMRI scans of children who remember past lives while they recount their memories of their past lives, to see precisely what cortical areas are involved, if any. Are they the normal areas associated with recollection or not? None of this has been done. I wasn’t aware of it.

I remember. It’s the first You did it with Jeffrey. Right? Jeffrey was Yeah. Yeah.

As an author. He was co authoring the case because he was the translator. That I simply don’t know. I remember reading the article many years ago. It’s a very nice article.

Yes, yes. Very nice article. Benson struggles to explain the increase in temperature due to tummo. Then he says it’s brown fat, think, or something like that. It was very strange.

You see, what’s puzzling to me working with this material is how contemporary research has become mechanism obsessed. We have a constant search for mechanisms. Mechanisms are given as explanations. A mechanism explains nothing. You know?

If you ask me who made the car and I say to shift from first to second gear, you press on the clutch and you pull here, you I have asked you for a question for meaning and you have given me a mechanism. Now this is pretty much the sort of dialogue we are having now with much of contemporary science. There is, and perhaps I’m being a little unduly harsh, but there’s a refusal to address issues of meaning and a fascination with mechanism. So I think it’s delightful that people actually are slogging through this and doing the hard work on mechanism. But what is interesting to me is that when a scientist actually has the courage to ask questions of meaning, which is what Stevenson did, he is, if it is possible, destroyed, and if it is not possible, he simply shunted aside, which is exactly what happened to Stevenson.

And I suspect perhaps this is a situation Davidson would like to avoid for himself. I suspect. So do you have any other questions? Yes. There’s a marvelous article I was going to print it out but then I thought it’s unduly provocative.

In the Journal of Scientific Exploration by obviously a very frustrated researcher. How to make any hypothesis absolutely unprovable. And what he does is he shows the steps to be followed to make any hypothesis one doesn’t like unprovable by increasing the burden of proof so much that it is absolutely impossible to meet the conditions. And my feeling, and actually, you know, it’s pretty much what Robert Almeder, who I showed you the video of the weekend, says, is that this is what happened to Stevenson’s research. I mean, Stevenson famously said at the end of Reincarnation of Biology that he felt it was possible for a rational person to believe in reincarnation.

Almeder actually countered saying that he felt Stevenson’s claim was too weak and that actually on the basis of the data, Stevenson should have said that it is irrational to disbelieve in reincarnation. Now, it is precisely this sort of sharp analysis of the material which is lacking. If we take Stevenson’s case, we need we have 2,500 cases, 895 verified cases, 35 strong and rich cases. We need only one case actually to prove reincarnation is possible. One.

Logically we need one strong unassailable case. So what has happened is that it’s not from from the side of researchers like Stevenson that there’s been mission creep, there’s been goal creep from the side of the assessment. Each time the data comes in, the criteria are upped. So obviously at a certain point it does become impossible and I think it is one of the weaknesses which we’re just going to have to take on board. Perhaps I’m being unduly harsh in my assessment, but if you look at the reception of Stevenson’s work and now some of the problems Davidson has had to face, I mean partly political, but there was a joint declaration by four hundred and thirty-two American neurologists, it turns out mainly of Chinese origin, asking that the American Neurological Association not chair a meeting with the Dalai Lama and with Davidson, because Davidson’s research was unscientific and because the claims of the Dalai Lama were unverifiable, then this is the sort of situation we have to struggle with.

So if there are yes, Chris. So to start with, the contemplative intellectual dichotomy is one which runs throughout all the Tibetan and non Tibetan traditions. Basically, the Thai tradition, as a Theravāda tradition, is overwhelmingly intellectual and non contemplative. Thai monks study, they don’t meditate. With the exception of the fourth tradition, which is ultra minoritarian.

There was a resurgence in meditation in the Theravāda tradition thanks to the Burmese. Is the Burmese tradition which has maintained this. The Sri Lankan tradition was almost exclusively academic. It is from the Burmese, from the likes of Mahasi Sayadaw and U Pandita, that eventually a revival of vipassana spread to Thailand and to Sri Lanka. In Tibet likewise, there are both contemplative and, let’s say, more scholastic traditions.

The kaigyu tradition is almost exclusively contemplative. Scholastic level is unfortunately not very good. The Geluk tradition, and formerly the Sakya tradition, have strong scholastic backgrounds and normally add on top of this strong contemplative training. Now, it is possible to proceed in many ways to progress on the path, but the Indian tradition, the Nālānda tradition is very much one which emphasizes a sequence. It is a sequence of attending teachings, studying and thinking about these teachings and meditating about what or on what one has studied.

This is specifically depicted by Kamalaśīla in the Bhāvanākrama. This famous metaphor, you race the horse on the track, you have walked it upon. First you walk the horse around the track, then you race it. The reason for this is because if we take the case of śamatha, Rinpoche will explain this, there are very important risks in the practice of śamatha. It is extremely easy in the practice of śamatha to get sidelined and to actually meditate on subtle sinking.

The result of these meditations is an animal rebirth. It leads and we see this, I’ve seen Westerners in this case, you know immediately the person becomes dull under your eyes. So if as a result of Shamatha meditation the person’s memory declines and their intellectual acumen declines, you can be sure that what they think is good concentration is actually subtle sinking. The more they meditate, the more their mental acumen will drop. So as a result of meditation there are difficulties down the line.

For that reason it is important to study carefully a good account of Shamatha. Shamatha alone leads nowhere. Shamatha is a shared practice with the Hindu and the Jain traditions. Jhana actually for that matter, is probably one of the main practices the ancient Indian sorcerers engaged in. It’s a means of operating witchcraft.

Shamatha is the gateway or the tool used to meditate on selflessness. Without Shamatha there is no effective meditation on selflessness. However, it is not possible to meditate on what one does not understand. You cannot meditate on emptiness if one doesn’t understand the object of refutation. Emptiness is a refutation of something, it’s the absence of something.

If we don’t understand what is absent, we can’t meditate on its absence. That can only be acquired to study. Then, obviously, the Gelug tradition sets the standard very high. It’s a solid twenty year study for monks who want to become Geshes. This is not the case for lay people who can get by with a couple years of attending teachings, studying, trying to understand.

However, the great attainments are not possible without tremendous effort and without also considerable study. And I think we have to be very realistic about who we are and where we stand in terms of our lifestyle. None of us in this room, I imagine, I’m pretty sure, has she. If any one of us did, you would see it in the behavior and they could manifest it, they could demonstrate it. None of us has renunciation, we would not live the way we do, none of us has bodhicitta, and none of us has ever experienced emptiness.

So these are beyond us. It’s very difficult. We talk about it, we hear the teachings to familiarize the mind, but we have Geshe’s who don’t have renunciation after three years retreat. We have Geshe’s who work hard at developing renunciation. Renunciation is not something which comes like that.

Then the view is very difficult. We have meditators with ten-twenty years meditation who never gain a conceptual understanding of the view. Does not come like that. I mean, it’s quite interesting how many Westerners gain śamatha easily when the Tibetan struggle so hard. I remember I had lunch with His Holiness Sakya Trizin, and he is very, very subtle in a fairly sharp way, he said to me, Yes, yes.

He said, It’s quite extraordinary, you know. He said, one of my students here, Western Australia, this was in Sydney, she sees Vajrayoginī. It’s amazing, he said. Vajrayoginī actually gives her her laundry lists when she forgets them. He looked at me, he said, you know in Tibet, we had to work so hard and we still did not get those visions.

Why do you think that’s the case? And I looked at him and I said, bad dope perhaps? So you see, these things are very, very difficult to get. What we do when we study here, when we attend teachings, we are being the map is being shown to us. We have purpose at present.

We can’t afford to travel to Paris to the Ritz, but we can try to get familiar with what it would take for us: the planes we would take, the hotels we would go to, the sites we would see. Then we have to get the money, and the money is a merit. We have to get the merit. Then we have to get the wisdom, and the wisdom comes through study. That it’s not impossible to do this as a lay person, but it is incredibly difficult.

It’s much more difficult as a lay person than as a monk. It’s this is why people become ordained. People become ordained because it’s an easy road for a practitioner. It’s not a difficult road. People who think that as lay people they can practice at the level of monks or nuns are living in fantasy land.

I’ll never forget, I was translating for a very great Drigung master, Garchen Rinpoche, in Estonia, the National Library. And he was an extraordinary practitioner, spent twenty years in a Chinese jail, he was said to be the reincarnation of Padampa Sangye, a great tummo practitioner. Very humble, you know. And one of the long-term Estonian students asks a question you always get at a certain point, especially with these great Drigung practitioners who are very aesthetic. He said, Rinpoche, is it possible for a lay person with a family, children and a job to attain the same types of realization as someone in a hermitage?

Rinpoche looked at me and he said, What am I supposed to answer to him in Tibet? I said, Rinpoche, tazab, zab, nahonas. I us be careful. Then just said something very unclear which did not offend the person. The reality is obviously no.

If you meditate the figures are here. If you meditate fifteen minutes a day, on off days, and there’s no ethics, and there’s no real understanding of what one’s meditating about, there’s no attainments. It’s not possible. This is why when Rinpoche teaches, Rinpoche teaches at a level which us, normal lay people, can practice at. And what Rinpoche has emphasized is basically the motivation.

Motivation at the beginning of the day, which transforms what we do during the day into Dharma practice. And then for the students who have the energy, a bit of meditation in the morning and studying as much as possible. But it’s not possible it’s not possible to drive a Ferrari without the money for a Ferrari. Does that make sense? Then sitting, you speak of vipassana.

vipassana is tremendously popular in the West, that’s why I brought it up last weekend. I think it’s very beneficial for Westerners. It’s beneficial because through observing the mind in vipassana, one can get, as a beginner, direct experience of two facets of the mind, the suffering nature of the mind and the impermanent nature of the mind, one sees. Not fully, yes, but one sees nonetheless that actually there is a tremendous amount of suffering and one sees impermanence. Now impermanence is not a problem for Westerners, suffering is.

So that is very beneficial when connected to Lamrim. But the vipassana tradition, if practiced seriously, is incredibly demanding. If you were to go to study with U Pandita in Yangon, in Burma, I was going to do the retreat, the first thing he says is you have not the right to do any other practice, you give up your commitments. Then you practice a minimum of twelve hours a day sitting and you are allowed a cushion or not depending on your level of practice. So as a clear result of this, people tend to bandage their legs very quickly.

You work through the pain. Most of us are not able to do that. And then somebody who does that gets a very clear understanding of the Noble Truth of suffering, gets a very clear understanding of impermanence. But ultimately, you know, without the sacrifices there’s no result. So that’s why we study here the totality of the path, but we have to be very honest about who we are.

I mean, in this room I think all of us can work hard at being beings of the small scope. That’s what Rinpoche has offered to us. Rinpoche teaches a great vehicle. We study, we listen, we think about it. We’re not beings of the great vehicle.

We’re not even close. We’re not beings of the meek vehicle because who has renunciation? People with renunciation do not behave the way we do. Then, most of us in this room are worldly beings, we’re not even beings of the small scope, but if we work hard, we can become a being of the small scope who thinks, okay, next life is the most important. That’s a big thing.

Christian monks are beings of the small scope. A Christian or Trappist monk is at that level. We don’t we are not at the level of a Trappist monk, any one of us, I think, you know. So we move up to that. Does that I’m sorry, it’s a long winded answer, but does that answer your question?

Good. Thank you very much. We have reached time, and then, you know, I hope this has been not too difficult and that there’s been some benefit. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ilya.

And I think we have We’re very privileged to have another presentation on Saturday, May 21, Empathy and Kindness versus Survival of the Fittest: Buddhism and Sociobiology Contradictory. That’s Saturday, May 21. So once again, Ilya, thank you so much for your generosity, your productivity in giving presentations like this is only outmatched by your devotion to Rinpoche. So we are very honored to have you here as the loudspeaker for Rinpoche and to help us to enrich our lives and our understanding so that we can be successful on the path. Thank you very much.

One small piece of private opinion I would like to just float your way is I think this work is very interesting. Those of you who are interested in this, try to look at the original research. Don’t go to the New Scientist or Discover magazine. At least if you’re interested in science and want to connect it to what’s happening in Buddhist studies, at least you have to work at the level of Scientific American. At least, preferably science or nature.

And then there’s an extensive bibliography because otherwise you will find, it’s even a new scientist, some very, very sloppy work, real caricatures of the research. And this leads to a lot of wrong views. Thank you very much. Would anybody be going down towards Port Adelaide? If so, somebody needs a ride.