2009年6月8日星期一

Meditation on Demand

From Scientific American:


In the fall of 2005, the Dalai Lama gave the inaugural Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC. There were over 30,000 neuroscientists registered for the meeting, and it seemed as if most of them attended the talk. The Dalai Lama’s address was designed to highlight the areas of convergence between neuroscience and Buddhist thought about the mind, and to many in the audience he clearly achieved his objective. There was some controversy over his being invited to deliver this lecture insofar as he is both a head of state and a religious leader, and for that reason he largely stuck to his prepared text. But he strayed from the text at least once, reminding the audience that not only was he a Buddhist monk but also an enthusiastic proponent of modern technology.

Elaborating, he shared a confidence with the audience, telling the audience of scientists that meditating was hard work for him (even though he meditates for 4 hours every morning), and that if neuroscientists were able to find a way to put electrodes in his brain and provide him with the same outcome as he gets from meditating, he would be an enthusiastic volunteer. It turns out that a recent set of experiments, from researchers at MIT and Stanford, moves us a step closer to making his wish a reality.

More here.

1 条评论:

吴大地 说...

这篇报告提到,静坐主要有两种功法:一是“专注”,第二种是“观”:对自己精神活动全方位的知觉。这种说法对吗?请高手指教。

原文如下:“The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention. A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. ”