Viewing monastic debate through the lens of Western psychology and neuroscience: what can we learn?

I recently submitted a paper co-authored with probably more Tibetan monks than any paper in history (you can read a preprint here). The main point of the paper is to explain that while meditation research in the West has mostly focused on a narrow range of meditation practices such as mindfulness, there are many more practices out there, one of which is analytical meditation and debate. Why are analytical meditation and debate so interesting? As the Dalai Lama pointed out a few weeks ago in his talk in the Netherlands, reasoning and study, of which analytical meditation is the method, may be the best way for Westerners to engage with the Buddhist teachings. Even for a secular ethics that would be available for people from all religions, such analytical meditation could be useful.

So what is analytical meditation and what is debate? Analytical meditation is a practice of studying a text and contemplating it, asking questions such as "do I really understand what it means? How does that relate to other things I know? What follows from this statement? What is it consistent with? What is it inconsistent with?". In debate, you ask these questions to another person. In the tradition, such debates have a very distinct physical manifestation. You can find some videos and pictures from monastic debates a the website of the project.

In our paper, we describe what cognitive mechanisms we think are involved in the practice of debating. First you need to keep track of all the things that have been discussed so far, and this requires working memory. As the debate goes on, cognitive load increases. This may reflect in increasing engagement of a neural network called the fronto-parietal attention network, and this may also be associated with increasing inwardly-turned attention. In EEG measurements, such inwardly-turned attention is likely to be reflected in increasing brain waves in mid-frontal areas. Debating may also increase your speed of processing information, because if debaters do not respond quickly enough, then they are made fun of by their opponents. Furthermore, debate may promote mental flexibility, since winning a debate requires you to look at things from many different angles, and try to find an angle that your opponent has not yet found. Experienced debaters also say this is the most satisfying aspect of debating: it is a kind of research that may give you more insight into the topic when you consider the implications of looking at it in a particular way. This suggests to me as a neuroscientist that debate may require strong engagement of areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex. Debating also is a strong motivator for memory training, since you can not go back to your textbook in the debate courtyard. Indeed we found that during a type of debate called "counting debate", in which the debaters review the texts and definitions, it happened more often that one of the debaters had "difficulty remembering" than during the logic debates, but even there difficulty-remembering could occur. Since debate uses logical reasoning as a foundation, it may also train this cognitive skill. We are now measuring that with reasoning tasks (stay tuned for results!). But debating is not just a cognitive practice: it also requires resilience to strong emotions such as anger, anxiety and more. Once you lose your cool, you are likely to lose the debate. Especially during logic debates, the debaters face many self-reported difficulties. Nevertheless, in some preliminary data from a questionnaire, we found that more experienced monks reported fewer difficulties in regulating their emotions (also stay tuned for this). Finally, debate is a highly social form of meditation, and in another paper we report how inter-brain synchrony, thought to reflect mentally tuning into each other, changes over the different phases of the debate.

So why is all of this interesting? Maybe some of the techniques that the debaters use can also be helpful in our education system. For example, the movement aspect could be used to make the students more physically active. The technique of continually questioning everything that is being put forward and carefully examining its logical consequences could help to cultivate critical thinking. However, a significant challenge in this is that our education system in the West relies on covering a large amount of material cursorily and learning skills for managing information rather than really knowing a detailed area by heart. This makes it much more difficult to apply the techniques learnt in debate. But I continue to think about this idea. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Facing the ever-growing todo list with compassion

The next slogan in the #lojongchallenge is "turn all suffering into the path of awakening." While usually we want suffering to go away, and feel like it distracts us from the spiritual path, or whatever other goals we seek to accomplish, this slogan encourages us to instead use the suffering as fuel to progress on the spiritual path. How would that be possible? In contemplating this slogan, I realized that my particular and most pervasive suffering is the todo-list that keeps on growing, and makes me feel really stressed (you can tell I am pretty spoilt). I suspect I am not alone in this, since stress and feeling overworked are rampant in our modern society. But how can we work with the ever-growing todo list?

I felt that just realizing that the ever-growing todo-list was making me feel stressed was already quite an accomplishment. Such a realization is the moment of awareness. Suddenly the stress is not the thing that defines me, but instead is linked to something outside me--I am not the stress. In fact, I can kindly look at the stress and become friends with it. Instead of hating my endless todo list, I can also ask what it can teach me. What does an endless todo-list say about your priorities? Maybe my ego thinks I am so important that I need to do all those things? Do I really need to do them? And even if there is such a long todo list, I can also just get started, dedicate all my efforts to the benefit of beings, and not worry so much about all the other stuff that still needs to be done. In some of his teachings, Tsoknyi Rinpoche explains very well how sometimes we let ourselves become really stressed because when we are doing one thing, our mind is already onto the next thing and starts worrying about that. in fact, the moment we do nothing, our mind is so restless that it wants to do something--anything. This is one moment when we may create more stuff to do.

Random picture taken by my brother Floris van Vugt

What I found very helpful is just to sit for a moment with my todo list. Not to let myself get distracted by it, but just simply to feel my feelings. Suddenly the todo list was not so daunting--really my stories and catastrophizing were what made it so bad. So whenever I feel this stress about the growing todo list creep in, I try to kindly observe it, and let it dissolve on its own accord. It definitely has helped me be a little bit more calm and happy.

Another important observation is that sometimes I use my todo-list as an excuse for not being able to do my meditation practice. But in fact, the todo list (or any other problem or stress) is exactly when you should practise says Khandro Rinpoche. Practice is not about feeling good; it is about confronting the neurotic aspects of ourselves that make us aggrandize things, go after the things we want and run away from the things we don't want, and ignoring everyone else. So when we feel like a martyr who has to work so hard when looking at our todo list, when we want to run away from it and be in some different place, this is our chance to work with that. Of course that doesn't mean we have to always accept such a todo list and not change the outer circumstances as well. But given that we are now in this situation, why not relate to it in a more sane way?

"Don't run too fast"--self-compassion in the rat race that can be work

Another Lojong slogan is "Begin the sequence of sending and taking with yourself." This slogan reminds me of what we often tend to overlook: caring for ourselves. While caring for others can create a "broad mind" as I suggested in my previous blog, this does not mean you should completely neglect yourself. I think that many of us in the West do not have a sense that we are basically good, and as a result, we are continually trying to prove ourselves and try to get "better." Tsoknyi Rinpoche is one of the Tibetan lamas who has very good teachings on this topic. interestingly, when we try to benefit others and only focus on others to be a "good human" but we don't feel fundamentally good ourselves, then the whole thing becomes quite neurotic.

So what should we do? We can apply all the compassion practices to ourselves! And we should. If you find yourself thinking "I don't need this", "I don't want to waste time on this", this probably means that you really need it! So, instead of taking others suffering and giving away your happiness, as is suggested in the practice of tonglen, you can take away the suffering of your future self, and give happiness to your future self. Or, as is suggested in the Tibetan book of living and dying Chapter 12, you can take on the suffering of the part of you that was hurt, and give it your happiness. In this way you can heal yourself, so that you are in fact ready to give. These ideas are backed up by a lot of research suggesting that self-compassion is crucial for human well-being and can help people deal much better with a lot of stress and emotional turmoil.

Picture by Floris van Vugt

This week, I tried to practise self-compassion when I went back into the thick of work: the academic year is starting. One mantra that I learnt during the retreat is "you don't have to run so fast." My main habit is that I tend to want to do too many things and go too fast when I am insecure. During my runs during the retreat, I would time and time again repeat to myself "you don't have to run so fast." During running, this is important to ensure that you reach the end of the run. But during work, it is important to ensure that you don't overlook things or make (too many) errors. So for me, self-compassion involves mostly giving myself space and permission to not run too fast (both literally and metaphorically).