The Dalai Lama at MIT

A cornucopia of riches for anyone interested in what is known and yet to know about the nature of the mind. The dialogues weave a compelling tapestry of perspectives, insights, good-natured banter, and ideas for new studies that will fascinate not only scientists, but anyone interested in meditation and mind-body interactions. -- Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of <i>Coming to Our Senses</i> and Vice Chair, Mind and Life Institute In the late 1980s, Colorado's Mind & Life Institute initiated a series of semiprivate conversations involving the Dalai Lama, leading figures from the contemplative traditions, and prominent Western scientists with the aim of enhancing our understanding of the mind. Accessible to nonspecialists, this work, extraordinarily well edited by Harrington and Zajonc, takes the reader to the two-day-long Mind & Life XI, a conference cosponsored by MIT's McGovern Institute in 2003. On each of three topics--attention and cognitive control, imagery and visualization, and emotion--two papers, one presented by a Buddhist practitioner and the other by Western researchers, combine with a panel's reactions and questions from the 1200 observers in pursuit of empirically testable hypotheses integrating Buddhist and scientific approaches to understanding the mind. The conference reported experimental results that challenge Western assumptions, while Zajonc's summarizing reflections note several exciting research collaborations spawned by the event. -- James R. Kuhlman * Library Journal * Can the sciences of the mind and brain learn anything from Buddhism? Plenty, say the neuroscientists and Buddhists--the Dalai Lama among them--who attended a conference at MIT in 2003 to explore how both disciplines investigate reality. This compelling book lays out the issues discussed there. Most illuminating is seeing how the different approaches (subjective in Buddhism, objective in science) can complement each other, and how open Buddhists are to accommodating scientific progress into their thinking. * New Scientist * The practical applications of this meeting are fascinating; something whole is created from these conversations that leaps off the pages and gives a reader new reason to remember that science has more to do with life than with destruction and death. -- Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times Book Review * The Dalai Lama at MIT is a "broadcast" of an historic 2003 meeting between the Dalai Lama and 22 world-renowned scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...The Dalai Lama at MIT does an excellent job of introducing readers to Buddhist and scientific approaches to understanding human consciousness. -- Mirka Knaster * Greater Good *

Anne Harrington is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Arthur Zajonc is Professor of Physics at Amherst College.

* Contents Part I: Orientations * Introduction *Anne Harrington * Neurophenomenology *Evan Thompson Part II: Attention and Cognitive * Understandings of Attention Cognitive Neuroscience *Jonathan Cohen * Buddhist Training in Advanced Attention Skills *B. Alan Wallace * Dialogue: Attention Part III: Imagery And Visualization * Buddhist Perspectives *Matthieu Ricard * Introspection and Mechanism in Mental Imagery *Stephen Kosslyn, Daniel Reisberg, and Marlene Behrmann * Dialogue: Imagery and Visualization Part IV: Emotion * An Adhidharmic View of Emotional Pathologies and Their Remedies *Georges Dreyfus * Emotions from the Perspective of Western Biobehavioral Science *Richard Davidson * Dialogue: Emotions Part V: Integration and Final Reflections * Dialogue: Integration and Implications * Reflections on "Investigating the Mind," One Year Later *Arthur Zajonc * About the Mind and Life Institute *R. Adam Engle * Contributors * Notes * Index