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Dalai Lama visits MIT

By JUSTIN POPE
Associated Press Writer
09.13.2003 2:22 P.M.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP)

Can concentration be controlled? Can attention be practiced and perfected?

These are questions that are of increasing interest to scientists, but which Buddhist monks have been exploring for thousands of years.

Both sides gathered at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute Technology on Saturday, with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, sitting between them on the stage, trying to find common ground in their pursuit of understanding the mysteries of the human mind.

The groups are not a natural fit; scientists are trained to trust "third-person" verification and are sometimes wary of "first-person" spiritual explanations.

But psychologists and neuroscientists have become more interested in meditation, a central component of Buddhist religious life, and in what it says about the limits of an individual's control over the mind.

Panelists suggested that scientists are only now starting to see that expert meditators may be useful not only as guinea pigs, but in shaping understanding.

"Before I got into this, I thought we should be open-minded, but I didn't think it was likely we would be able to have a useful exchange," Nancy Kanwisher, an MIT psychologist and panelist, said after the first morning session of the two-day conference.

But now, she said, "I feel like there is a common language, a common engagement of ideas. We've only scratched the surface."

The Dalai Lama jumped in periodically to the philosophical and scientific exchanges, saying he hoped science could provide answers in areas where inward contemplation cannot.

"I myself am not clear," he said at one point, drawing laughs from an overflow crowd of scientists, students, monks and even celebrities Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn.

The scientists, not surprisingly, wanted to pick the minds of the Buddhist scholars about how best to use new technology, such as brain imaging, to study consciousness.

"I can think of a million things to measure, but what I am interested in is, 'What do you think are the right things to measure?"' asked Jonathan Cohen, a Princeton University brain expert.

Ajahn Amaro, co-abbot of a Buddhist monastery in California, had a ready answer: use the new technology to measure how the brain reacts to "the effects of one's behavior, particularly one's lifestyle."

Amaro said he would be curious what the machines say about how "level of comfort is associated with how honestly you live."