Learning to rest and resting to learn

It took me a while to write this next blog in the #lojongchallenge because I have been running around at Drepung Loseling monastery in India to teach the monks there about neuroscience in the context of the Emory-Tibet Science initiative. It has been an amazing experience! About every other morning I go for a run, and during this morning's run and the subsequent resting meditation I finally had an idea for this blog. The next Lojong slogan is "rest in the nature of alaya."

Monks resting during a class experiment with heart rate monitors

In the classroom at Drepung Loseling

According to my limited understanding, the idea of this slogan is that after all of the investigation, you can rest in meditation and simply observe the thoughts and emotions. Actually, this led me to think a bit more about a very interesting meditation method common for analytical meditation: first you contemplate and reason about some concept (such as the emptiness of phenomena and self that we talked about before), and then when you get tired, you simply drop the meditation and rest. This method of resting is unique to the practice of analytical meditation, and is what makes it different from conventional study in school. The resting may help to consolidate the insights into your experience, and create a deeper and more embodied understanding.

How would resting enhance your understanding? One possible neural mechanism is that of replay. It has been found in animals that when they sit quietly, then their brain activity replays recent experiences. This replay is mostly visible in hippocampal cells that are sensitive to specific locations in space, which repeat the recent trajectory of the animal, and to some extent predict its upcoming choices. It is thought that such approximate repetition reflects the animal's simulation of recent experiences and allows it to generalize and produce adaptive choices on the basis of that (see this paper for an example of replay and its consequences for decision making in humans). In other words, we continually replay recent experiences when we have a moment of rest, and these allow us to recombine these experiences, encode them in our memory, and generalize them to new situations.

Despite this potential benefit of rest, it is sometimes hard to do. I have written before that I find it difficult to rest, but when I manage to do so, it creates a lot of spaciousness and satisfaction. One powerful moment to rest is when you--as I did this morning--have gone for a run and then afterwards you come home and feel completely exhausted. That is a moment it is very easy to simply drop your mind and rest in the essence of the mind, without any further desires (of course the endorphins created by the running help too!). So, note to self: remember to rest!

"I have no time." But how much should you believe your mind?

A bit delayed, but this blog is about the slogan "Examine the nature of unborn awareness". Where the previous slogan was about investigating the nature of reality, this slogan is about investigating the mind that perceives that reality. From my perspective as a neuroscientist I can of course say an infinity of things about this. Our mind feels so real when we think about it every moment. However, an interesting exercise is: how would you draw the mind? As a neuroscientist, I would draw the mind probably as a nice brain picture with colorful blobs. But also as a neuroscientist I know better than anyone that these blob-pictures are highly-processed statistical pictures, that actually say very little about the lived experience of our mind. They only say something about how large numbers of trials in one condition differ slightly from a large number of trials in another condition. So when you come to think of it, our mind does not really have a form.

busy in India (where I am now)

Even worse, we think we can control our minds, but actually, most of the time we are not even aware of what it is doing. In a very interesting article, Thomas Metzinger analyzes how little time we actually have agency over our minds. So much of our thinking is just driven by all kinds of habits, which we repeat over and over again without questioning. My personal favorite habit is "I don't have time", which I have been practising quite a few times in the past weeks (hence no blog). The more I practise it, the more my mind feels tight and my life feels like a heavy blanket. Sometimes, when I can see this is all just a construction of my mind, I can actually develop some agency. And even if not, at the very least, considering for a moment that my mind is a construction that seems much more real than it really is, creates a tremendous sense of space. At least for one moment I can take "I have no time" less seriously--because time too is a construction of my mind...