Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 51-minute forum, His Holiness the Dalai Lama engages with Western neuroscientists and philosophers on the relationship between mind and brain. The discussion opens with neuroscientific findings on memory consolidation during REM sleep — how the brain encodes spatial and motor learning — before shifting to fundamental questions about consciousness itself. The Dalai Lama resists radical materialism, arguing that while gross-level mental processes depend on the brain, Buddhist philosophy recognizes subtler levels of mind that may not reduce to physical properties. Neuroscientist Jack Pettigrew presents visual illusions demonstrating hemispheric differences in perception, linking this to meditation practice and conditions like autism and bipolar disorder. The panel explores whether subtle mind can have causal efficacy on matter, the difference between Buddhist non-dualism and Cartesian dualism, and how to bridge first-person contemplative experience with third-person neuroscience. Intended for informed listeners interested in Buddhism-science dialogue.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2024-05-02 – 1B – ANU – HHDL.mp3
UUID: 2bd28795-e043-4f99-991c-0eba7494fdb7
Teacher: HH Dalai Lama
Collection: Mind Science Forum
Date: 2024-05-02
Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide
Words: ~5,609
Part of the brain concerned with long-term memory, part of the brain called the hippocampus and we as Allan touched on imprinting. If for example, just before you went to bed you went at one of these horrible pinball parlors and you played one of those games and you’re using your limbs backwards and forwards, knocking the ball backwards and watching the screen up there to see if you’re winning your points. Then during this dream stage of sleep, the parts of the motor cortex here which control your limbs just in front of those, the premotor cortex which actually determines what the motor cortex will do, that lights up during this particular phase. And also what lights up is a part just in front of the visual cortex, which you were using also when you’re playing this pinball game. The next morning when you go back to one of these horrible parlors, you can play the game much better Mhmm.
Than you did when you went to bed. So that’s a kind of imprinting if you like. When we came out from the airport to come to this wonderful occasion, I didn’t know where we were going, I didn’t know where the World Hall was, but as we turned left and right and left in the taxi I took note of what he was doing. Now we now know that in the memory parts of your brain, the hippocampus, specific neurons will be firing just when the taxi turned left and I took note of it. And then when it took turned right at the next corner and took note of that, a different set of neurons will become active.
Now during dream sleep that you referred to, those same neurons, none others out of the 100,000,000 or so in the hippocampus, no others will be active. Just the ones that I was using to memorize when I where I was going the taxi. Now when I go back on the taxi to the airport, I can tell the taxi driver where to go if I’ve had some dream sleep beforehand. Frank Jackson, you’ve been sitting there listening to the scientists and to the Dalai Lama. Sometimes a description of the brain or consciousness is a failure of language to be precise enough to describe actually what’s going on.
Do you find this happening at all, or do you find it a convincing case in this description of mind, Frank Jackson? Yes. It does seem to be true that there is an intimate connection between memory and dream, and and also that the dream experiences can have impact upon one’s waking period. But there are some mysterious occasions, and it does occur very rarely so, that there are individuals who, you know, have very vivid dreams about certain places, the places that they have never been to before. And then these dreams are sometimes very vivid.
However and then when they visit the place, which they have never been before, but because of the dream, they can recognize it. So here, it seems to be almost the opposite. You have a dream, which then indicates a place, and on the base of the dream, you recognize it. So how does it come? So usually But?
Oh, usually, you see the most dreams I think my own case, I never dreamed that kind of thing. Only you see the past experience. But that I mean, that’s what I more easier to do know. But then you see some as I mentioned earlier, is it how does that develop, how does it come? Well, I can’t stress too much to yourself, your holiness, and this audience, but neurobiology knows virtually nothing.
What about philosophy Frank? Well, I think there’s a there’s a sleeper in this discussion. We’ve been talking quite a bit about the relationship between the the mind and the brain, but of course the philosopher is rather wondering whether actually they’re exactly the same thing. The Dalai Lama mentioned at the very beginning that the thorny issue of relationship between the the mind and the brain and also the respect that Buddhism has for neurophysiological investigation. But he also indicated that he wasn’t going to go down the path of radical materialism.
And I think it would be interesting to find out why he he stands back from radical materialism. I guess it’s true to say most Western philosophers and I suspect the neuroscientists on this panel are probably kinds of materialists. Perhaps Perhaps they’re not radical materialists that is They’re they’re not the kind of materialists who want to downgrade the mind. They think of the mind as a real active causal force in the world. So they’re very much realist about mind, but at the same time they actually think the mind is when all said and done essentially the brain.
And the reason they do that is because the causal capacities that the mind enables seem to match up at least partly with the causal capacities that the brain gives us. So memory enables us do something, but the neurophysiologist hopes one day to explain that neurophysiological term. So it looks at what memory does and what the neurophysiology does are gonna come to to much the same. So I guess that’s an invitation for Your Holiness to tell us why you hold back from going down the materialist path. I feel now I think the with sort of a sort of cable scientist.
I’m a sort of a I dare not say I’m a Buddhist monk. I think I believe still the if we accept the phenomena called mind, it’s entirely depend on production of neuron. Reduce. Oh.
Entirely reducible to physical properties. Mhmm. I think still there are a lot of, I think, the unanswered problems. I can still remain. So not only our sort of day to day life, they it also related with the whole the crisis.
Why it happened? How it happened? Everything is just come suddenly without any cause. That also not satisfactory sort of answer. And with things come without a cause, that also illogical.
Then, of course, I think a thousand years, the another sort of concept, that is the creator. That also is for the Buddhist, and also many scientists, it also not very satisfactory sort of answer. Creator, concept of creator. Of course, we are not using now. We see discussion about religion.
The concept of creator, also a little difficult. With the hard cause, also difficult. So all these, you see the Alternatives. Or dated words. I feel that this whole issue of materialism versus alternative is is part of a much wider question of our understanding of the cosmos as a whole.
I believe that the the nature of what we call and what we experience as mind is something that has to be understood in terms of something that has direct and intimate connection to our understanding of the wider world, the cosmos, the evolution, and the origin of the universe, and so on. If we just like plant, you see, it happened, then finished. There’s no continuation on mystery level to us, mystery level, but the reality, something there, then is it difficult to why did this big bang happen. So so so in your view this this dream of Western philosophy that one day neuroscience will explain it all is is just a dream. There’s always going to be parts that we can’t really handle Oh.
Which what marks us off from plants. Presumably, in the case of plants, you can’t explain the behavior of plants more or less completely in biological terms. But in your view, that’s not gonna be true for human beings. So you see the beside physical, I believe there are some, you see, different mysterious sort of phenomena. So that’s why I become difficult to radical materialist.
So I believe there are some mysterious things. This is my belief. Facts. In in any case, I think still, really, I think, worthwhile carry thorough investigation. Yes.
Max, and then I’ll ask Jack Pettigrew to talk to us about an illusion. Professor Jackson’s hopes that neuroscience would explain it all. Mean the the underpinnings of my subject are that the psychological attributes of humans falling in love, thinking, remembering, all those those aspects which make us human that we will find in the brain certain neurons and certain activities which are associated or go on when we express or participate in one of these kinds of attributes. But as I said earlier, there are 20 times more neurons in the brain, the human brain, than there are human beings on the face of the earth and most human beings know about a few 100 people. Each neuron, which is an individual neuron, is not just a bit of a silicon chip, it knows about 10,000 other neurons.
We’re up against a deep problem trying to come to grips with this and I think the best illustration of that is that we’ve had fifty intensive years in the Western world of neuroscience and yet the greatest contributions that were made to the alleviation of mental suffering were made before neuroscience really kicked off. They were made between 1950 and 1952 with the discovery here in Australia of lithium for bipolar disorder, the discovery in Paris of chlorpromazine for schizophrenia and the discovery in America of the tricyclic antidepressants and there’s been nothing to touch that revolution and those discoveries were made virtually by clinicians serendipitously. So there’s an indication I think of the complexity of what we’re up against. So I do hesitate before entering into major components of hyperbole about neuroscience and how far we’ve come and just how we’re gonna crack the whole thing open in the next ten years. This is a formidable problem.
Yes. One person who doesn’t hesitate as much is Jack Pettigrew, who’s been doing some experiments which have shown fascinatingly how the brain may work and also how that understanding may help pathology. Now if you can describe for the panel who might not be able to see and a radio audience who certainly won’t see what your illusion is serving to illustrate Jack. Okay. Well, we we had trouble getting this on the audio visual, but but maybe maybe we’ll just maybe we’ll see the dog Jamie.
Can you show show us the dog? This is this is to follow on from what Alan so now there’s a look at this figure. There’s a there’s a dog up there. Can you see it? Now people who’ve seen it before, it’s actually a Dalmatian dog there.
If you ask a Westerner, can can you see it? There’s a I can see a Dalmatian. There’s a Dalmatian. Okay. Next next next one Jamie.
Just I can see the Dalmatian. There’s a Dalmatian like that. Now Alan Snyder showed this to an African and he said, oh yes, I can I can see the dog? It’s a it’s a hyena. Next one.
So you can see. Next one. See there’s a there’s a head facing this way. You didn’t see this head at all. You see the so the so the African Jack, could you talk into the mic?
Into the mic. What’s that? Talking to the mic. Sorry. So so the the point is here that there’s a lot of top down stuff.
You see you see what you want to see. You pull extract out what you what you want to see. And the illusion that I wanted to show but it didn’t work on the audio video was a similar one where despite the fact that there are things that are very bright and yellow they disappear because there’s a background swirl of blue dots which we can show in the lab as your left hemisphere preferring a viewpoint. It sees a certain thing and it ignores the other things which are very bright yellow. You can make them as bright as you like and they still disappear in an oscillatory fashion.
So by this magnet stimulation that we’ve been talking about you can show that the left hemisphere has kind of got a goal, it sees the nice blue ball of dots ignores the yellow, the bright yellow discs as bright as they may be. The right hemisphere flicks in and sees the whole world as it kind of is. So you’ve got this dialectic if you like between the two hemispheres and you can sort of make yourself aware of that in the clinical situation and what I drew attention to on that first question was the fact that the Buddhist tradition is somehow rather through meditation become aware of this come aware of this dialectic and so I’m very impressed by the fact that introspection what we what we might call the first person world does have its own power and so in response to the questions about you know radical materialism. I’m certainly not a radical materialist. I agree with David Chalmers that the world of neuroscience and this first person world study of the mind they overlap and there is some interaction between the two, but there are aspects and rules that govern the operation of the mind which are completely undetermined from the basic neurons in the same way that I think atmospheric physics might have trouble coming up with a tornado that can drive a straw through a hardwood plank that emergent property, the top down property of the mind.
If you think of the mind as kind of the weather, the weather of the brain. I agree with Chalmers it has to be studied in its own right and perhaps one of the most exciting things that’s happening now is a set of experiments that try to bring together these modern techniques of neuroscience with the first person world. So you have a experienced meditator who puts their head into a scanner while they meditate so you can actually try and understand what these states may mean. Do you mean you can successfully meditate in a scanner? As I said as I said earlier there it is now well established a certain types types of meditation turn off the executive functions of the brain the frontal lobes, parietal cortex and cingulate cortex.
Extraordinary. Jack, could you mention briefly the the ball that comes towards you and then sort of recedes. If you imagine on the screen something that is made up of dots and it’s great sphere and people who watch that sphere have a different perception perception of when it’s coming and going, which according to you, Jack, is some sort of representation of the switching between one part of the brain and the other, which is also linked to the pathologies that Max talked about. Is it on on my website you can try this for yourself. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it working that these bright lights bounce off the screen and they make it impossible to see the blue dots, but if I show a class of 200 these the blue dots which are just moving ambiguously, but you interpret them usually as a ball that’s rotating, but but you can see it rotating one way or the other and in a big group like this everybody in the room will be seeing something different and there’ll be a kind of a split roughly fifty fifty split between people who see them all rolling together and switching together and others who see them independently.
And so I’m very interested in these individual differences We’re all very different in the way we perceive the world and that led me to a question for His Holiness. He comes from a come from a remarkable family because there was no less than three Tulkus in the one family. Now in the West, we would tend to think that was a genetic thing. And particularly when you consider that special mental attributes are often associated with mental disorder. Alan Snyder got me to go to conference once and I was supposed to be the madman since I suffer from manic depression and I have experienced psychosis, but I also work on the brain and I was supposed to be the genius I couldn’t do that, but I was supposed to be the genius in the audience and the madman to illustrate this nexus between mental illness and and possible, you know, great mental functioning.
So I I wanted to ask His Holiness, when you’re looking at people who might become great monks, do you consider individual differences in mental ability? Because it seems to me when I talk to my class and I for example introduce them to Tonglen, I mean I practice Tonglen and I like to introduce that to the class. Some of the class can do it. They can understand it and they can do it very readily, but many people in the class have have a problem with this. They they don’t want to know about this meditation.
So and and they seem to go with certain mental attributes. The the fast switches have problems with meditation and the slow switches seem to be very good at meditation. So I thought since The question about switching. So since your family is so distinguished, you’re distinguished and you’ve got three Tulkus in the same family and also you have a brother with with manic depression. I wondered whether you could touch on this issue of mental propensity, special mental propensity, which seems to be a feature of your of your family.
And do you do you when you’re choosing a monk try and sort of test them to see if they have the right mental abilities or is is it possible to identify someone with the right mental abilities to So in my family, the first reincarnated lama was my eldest brother, Taktser Rinpoche. But when he was recognized as a tulku, I’m sure it wasn’t done on the basis of his genius mental on the basis of his mental capabilities. Then suddenly, you see, my brother was in in Kumbum area, and the thirteenth Dalai Lama decided, you see, that young boy as a reincarnation of the previous, you see, So suddenly, the not based on geshela. Mental abilities of the child. So and and and then also, I think the some genuine reincarnation, they as far as their brain is concerned, not very smart.
Even even myself, you see the some sort of wandering now now in in India. There’s a few reincarnation whose previous life, so cuddled, so smart, all great scholar. Learned one. Very learned one. But seems to see the way to choose the reincarnation, or I think the normal way or the correct way, and we believe that’s the reincarnation of the real reincarnation of the person.
But this case, quite dull. Their mind quite dull. So I, myself, of course, is the from the strictly Buddhist speaking, then, of course, we have different reasons. But otherwise, you see, are little sort of strange. So genius No.
It’s difficult to to attribute genius to the family. But you can try. I I think it now here. For example, in the Tibetan understanding of intelligence, the sort of levels of intelligence among children, we make distinctions between kind of inborn as intelligence and acquired intelligence. So in some cases, it is the there is an inborn level of intelligence, which, of course, the Buddhist would attribute to some other factors such as past lives and so on.
Max, and then Yes, Paul. The different capacities of the two hemispheres to fire impulses under different conditions in different parts of those hemispheres comes up in a number of situations which Jack’s alluded to. For example in bipolar psychosis that he talked about in relationship to his own family and your family, we now know that in the depression phase of manic depression, during that depression phase the left frontal lobe here becomes inactive. It turns off during the normal working day and since that is a very important part of what I refer to as the executive function of the brain which has to be working for normal activity during a normal day, this is a very serious deficit in your capacity to do things. In the manic phase of manic depression, the bipolar disorder, the other side of the brain, part called the orbitofrontal cortex which is concerned with the appetites like thirst and hunger, that turns off during the manic phase and in a kind of metaphorical sense, of course, people who go into this manic phase or just manic, they don’t attend to their normal shall we say vegetative functions of eating and drinking.
They just go for days and days without sleep or anything else. So we know there’s this kind of imbalance if you like between the two in bipolar. In autistic children which was mentioned in the introduction here, we now know something very interesting I think about autism, both actually in children and in the adults, and that is that in this condition of autism the part of the brain which is concerned with your emotional life or part of your emotional life called the amygdala doesn’t function properly. So you’re emotionally incapable of participating in the world in that way in which we normally do. In the other side of the brain, part called the temporal lobe here, in the region that has to be functioning correctly for you to be able to identify faces, recognize people or even to actually distinguish one object from another, that won’t function correctly in autistic people.
So they have this double burden of being unable to express emotions or engage in emotions or interpret emotions because that part here in the amygdala is not working properly and that great problem in just engaging with other people because of this problem in the temporal lobe. So we’ve got it down to that level of present. What has gone awry in these parts of the brain? One hemisphere on the other, we haven’t got a clue. We just know they’re not functioning.
One potential area of research that might be of interest is to see if we can find subjects, train subjects, who could consciously sort of engage in meditation while they are dreaming, and see if there we can detect any sort of chemical differences or whatever between a normal dreaming state, and then someone like a trained subject, you know, who can do some meditation in dream while dreaming. Wow. And then So, originally, I know these things are, I think, worthwhile. Could that be done? Big sort of investigation.
I I can’t conceive of how to do that. I guess Jack? What I I I No. We we can do. You can do.
No. No. No. No. No.
No. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Then I I invite you to my laboratory. Firstly, firstly, I have no capacity, you see, to meditate during dream. But but you see some people Some people. You see, have, you see, that capacity. Oh.
So you see, let them have the meditation during dream dream time, then we can, see, you we can carry experiment. I know what to expect. I have a hypothesis, but no experiments have been done. But of course, in in in in the past, as a result of some discussion with some some scientists, they actually brought some simple instrument to carry out some experiment. Those people who actually clinically die death, but still bodies remain fresh.
So some experiment on that dead body, but still, we believe, not death, but dying. So but somehow, when the mission available, they no one die. When you say death come or mission not available, so in the past so I think somehow, death also is a way I think it’s worthwhile to carry experiment. The person whose body, even after, is it, ten, twenty twenty days after death, clinically after death, bodies still remain very fresh. So we believe the innermost subtle consciousness is in the body.
So so the go ahead. Quick response. We we we I mean, we you we say not dead, dying. So the make differences. What is the normal dead body and dead body through some experiment?
Quick response from Max. Do you want to and then No. What was course going through my mind was I hope that his holiness was able to meditate during dream sleep. So I could get him into my laboratory because I’m certain I will get my research grants funded for the next Oh, as I mentioned earlier, oh, as I mentioned earlier, I have no such capacity. I just use the empty word here.
Oh. Oh. I’d like to just pick up on the theme of materialism that we were discussing earlier. Because when his holiness has been talking about the mind, about meditation, about consciousness, levels I I I of consciousness. Materialism, alright.
Radical materialism. Because Well, materialism. Oh. The point I wanted to make is that you’re you use the words as if the mind is a thing, a separate thing. And philosophers usually refer to this as dualism, the notion that we come with a brain and a mind and somehow the mind interacts with the brain.
It’s an idea that in Western thought goes back to Rene Descartes And almost all of the philosophers and scientists I know have no time at all for dualistic thought. They regard the mental processes as an aspect of the physical processes in the brain. Now the question I have is can you be a Buddhist and not be a form of dualist? Is it possible to be a Buddhist and not believe that the mind is in some sense a separate entity? I think from the Buddhist viewpoint, the as I mentioned earlier, it’s mind, not just one sort of What?
Or one no. And one more solid thing, but they are variety. So some gross level of mind, you see, almost like produced by brain. So something like, I think, energy of the brain. So these minds, so long brain function, these minds function.
As soon as the brain functions stop, these minds stop. So that is like because of the projection of mind, a projection of brain. What philosophers call an epiphenomenon. Now, another deeper level of mind, you see, we believe that our mind becoming more deeper, more independent. So even body function completely stop, but still function mind, some function in the body.
So that is the Buddhist explanation, particularly, including the tantric explanation. Then this did come come out, this explanation. And do you think of the mind So, therefore, mind The problem is the the usage of the term mind, which tends to give the impression there is one thing. Mhmm. However, from the Buddhist point of view, we understand the mental in terms of very complex levels of activity.
And at the gross level, one can say that it’s almost contingent upon the body and it’s a it’s almost a product of the body. But there are again different levels of mental activity. And can these higher levels exert physical effects? This is always the problem for the physicist. If we think that you have the brain here, it’s a physical thing made of atoms and the mind is some sort of nebulous entity that is associated associated with with it.
It, We would like some people would like to think that the mind can affect the brain and move the atoms around in some way. It will have actual physical effects. To a physicist and I think to many philosophers, this seems deeply mysterious and in fact most of the people I know who work in this area would think this is just a confused way of talking about the mind body problem or the relation between the mind and the body. Now, does a Buddhist believe that the higher levels, not maybe not the low levels, the high levels actually have what is would technically be called causal efficacy. Can they actually move matter around?
Can I just come to this very quickly because it’s actually the sleep issue? I made a hash of my philosophy. You can correct No. Me. No.
Just wanted to say how nice it is to have such good support from a physicist when in fact I’d suspect suspected the neuroscientists to be the ones arguing in my corner. The business of the world behind the clock on the Friday is the trouble. The I think I’m just this is just an interjection. I think here, there’s quite a lot of confusion caused by the language. I think the Descartes the Cartesian dualism model, I don’t think cannot can be really grafted onto the Buddhist conception of mind.
That’s that’s good. But that point is clarified. But what his holiness has just said is that this issue of whether the subtle mind, as Buddhist understands it, can really have an effect, causal effect on the bodily level, at the level of matter, at the level of body. Because so long, those grosser level of mind, which based on which cause the No. Produced by body, lung.
Body function. That subtle mind, these grosser levels, no longer active. So this grosser level of mind becomes inactive. So it is it is difficult to envision a possibility where this subtle level of mind can actually have a causal effect on the body.
Because so long as the grosser levels of consciousness, grosser levels of mind are functioning, the subtle levels are not active. This Inactive. No. They remain inactive. And the grosser levels of mind are products of the body, contingent upon the body.
So it is difficult to envision a stage where the subtle level can have a causal efficacy on the body. So these higher mental levels are in a realm of their own, so to speak, decoupled from the physical world. The understanding is that the the grosser levels of mind that we experience at the sensory and the thought processes level, these are seen as, in some sense, manifestations of the subtle level. So the subtle level serves as a basis. And, yes, you you mentioned something.
Yes. You. And you didn’t finish what you were saying. I was just expressing my pleasure. I’m Paul.
Paul. I’ll come to you, Frank. I I’m I’m a physicist, so it always bothers me when we’re dealing with this whole problem of the the mind and the body to worry about the forces that are acting. And so for example, I would like to know, it’s an old problem, I would like to know if I want to raise my arm, goodness me, it moved. How did my thoughts, my intentions make my arm move?
Now we can trace the causal chain all the way back from the arm through the neurons to the brain and we can imagine some very delicate process in the brain that is triggered by this intention, this thought that I want to move my arm. We can imagine all that. But as a physicist, it would seem deeply mysterious to me if we have to, in addition to the forces which I know act in the brain, the electrical forces and so on, we have to then have something else called the mind which is going to move matter, is going to make the atoms move to a different position from what they would have had if there was no mental activity going on. So that is the problem with the the dualistic view of the mind. Now, I have never seen a resolution of this difficulty that I’m happy with.
It works the other way too. Why is it that some swirling electrical patterns, those that go on in my head have thoughts and sensation attached? Whereas others like the swirling electrical patterns in the electricity grid in in New South Wales for example, presumably don’t have thoughts attached. Physicists would like to know what sort of processes give rise to thoughts, to consciousness and what don’t give rise to consciousness and why? What is the mechanism?
I think it’s still deeply mysterious and I don’t have the answers but I’m always troubled by language in which it makes it look like the mind is a physical thing that can exert physical effects. Because as a physicist, I would like to know how does it do the pushing and the pulling. How does the mind move atoms? That’s the central problem for me. In subtle energies.
No. According to this Buddhist view of understanding of mind that was described earlier, we see mental activity as actually a composite of two aspects two dimensions. One dimension is the the subjective experience of knowing. So there is this quality of knowing. And then there is also an a dimension which the Buddhists refer to as the with the term lung, which is roughly translated translatable as a wind or energy of some kind.
Anyway, it’s associated with the activity of mobility, moving on to something. So a mental activity is seen as a composite of these two two activities. So from the Buddhist point of view, this causal movement, this efficacy would be understood more in terms of this energy or this this wind dimension rather than the actual subjective dimension.