Exploring together-apart mind and reality in times of COVID-19

Last week I attended the European Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. I have been lucky enough to attend many such events over the course of my career, and it is safe to say they have shaped my career as a contemplative scientist. During these Summer Research Institutes, scientists and contemplatives get together to discuss about issues in the field of contemplative science, but also do a lot of contemplation themselves. Unsurprisingly, this year's edition took place online.

I was not sure how an online version of this event would work out, but I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of connection that I felt with the other attendees. This was achieved by some quite inventive meeting formats. Before the meeting itself, the faculty had recorded brief (20-30 min) lectures that you could watch and ask questions about. These questions were collected on a board that allowed for upvoting of your favorite questions. Participants who presented posters had submitted PDFs and 2-minute video presentations of their posters and all gotten a Slack channel to discuss these posters during the meeting. Every day of the meeting started with contemplative practices: a choice of meditation, and a choice between chi gong, yoga and juggling. I ended up mostly not following those but taking a ballet class instead. After that, the first session was a plenary meeting with the faculty in which they briefly recapped the essence of their talks, followed by a panel discussion, partly driven by the submitted questions. There was also a brief period in which we were put in breakout rooms to discuss possible questions to ask. I must confess that during most of these sessions I ended up instead just talking to the others about their fascinating work! In the afternoons, we then had breakout groups with the day's speakers in which we discussed a bit more deeply. Before that, we would often have a fun activity, for example answering a question with one word on mentimeter that then transformed into a word cloud. The afternoon ended by bringing everyone back together with reports from the breakout groups and more general discussion. As the week progressed, there were also more and more self-organized zoom meetings for discussions and chats. As usual, there was a much-needed silent meditation day in the middle of the week which also featured a teaching by Mingyur Rinpoche, who talked about his wandering retreat and meditation in general.

Now the contents of the meeting. We started the first day by talking about perception: how do we derive knowledge from the world? This questions was approached from neuroscientific, philosophical and contemplative directions. Michel Bitbol for example argued that our experience of the world is just the part we need, which is an optimal way to perceive the world, but we should remember that that is not reality. There were many discussions about how we continuously make up stories about the world, and then confuse them for reality. Yet even if science is just another story, Michel Bitbol argued that it is a very efficient way towards knowledge, for example in the case of a search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

The second day was dedicated to interoception and emotions. Holger Yeshe talked about how the Buddhist teachings give us tools to investigate where our suffering, and our negative emotions (which are the source of this suffering) come from. Micah Allen talked about interoception--the feeling of our body from the inside, and argued that many psychiatric disorders are accompanied by problems in interoception. There have been claims that meditation improves interoception, but the evidence for this is not unequivocal. He also argued that we need more replication in the field of meditation reserarch and called for a Many Labs experiment in this field. I fully agree, and I am working on a project to work towards that! On a more poetic note, Giovanna Colombetti argued that emotions are not a feeling of the body but a feeling through the body. A lot to think about!

Thursday was dedicated to embodying knowledge. All too often, we think that knowledge is just in our heads, but dancers will know that you can also know and investigate through the body--a perspective that was also shown by Asaf Bachrach and Hsuan-Hsiu Hung. Asaf Bachrach showed an intriguing experiment in which people were moving in virtual reality, where he found that people felt very calm, and he noticed that when people moved slowly, they felt more together than when moving quickly. Despite the wisdom there is to be found in movement, Guiseppe Pagnoni argued that by keeping body and mind still during meditation practice, you can detect changes in the body-mind complex with much greater precision, which affords you to be less enslaved in your habits.

The last day was dedicated to artificial intelligence. Luisa Damiano argued that in addition to the empirical cycle of scientific research, we need the synthetic cycle in which we simulate the world and explore the world in-silico. Father Tiso discussed how artificial intelligence allows us to appreciate the sphere of interconnected minds through the internet (as was indeed happening there and then during the summer research institute!). Venerable Aileen Barry summed up the Ai day very beautifully by arguing that behind every AI there is a human, and a motivation, and we should watch this motivation.

Altogether, the ESRI was a very rich and beautiful exploration of what it means to know, and what it means to connect as humans--through technology. My head was spinning by the end, and there was as always too little time to explore this richness in ideas, but it was definitely a beautiful experience. And now it is time to take that wonder into my own retreat.

Trusting the power of our own wisdom and daring to question

A few weeks ago I attended a teaching by Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel. I think she is a wonderful Western Buddhist teacher in a Tibetan tradition. It was very refreshing to hear her perspective on the Dharma. While she teaches traditional teachings, she also gives it a distinct modern flavour. What I really liked was that she very much encouraged people to question everything. Because according to the Buddhist teachings, the main problem is that we think we know how things are, but we hold onto our image of things instead of seeing how they are changeable and interdependent. So it is important to never be completely convinced that you are accurate, because there is no solid thing out there to be accurate about. This is interesting because as scientists we know more than anyone that science is only true until proven wrong by the next study. And that is fine (in some way, that is part of the fun...). The challenge is the willingness to remain curious and to bear witness to the complexity of life.

Another important topic that she discussed was the concept of agency: we are more powerful than we think we are. The problem is that we get stuck in relationships with others in which we act as if we aren't. For example, we often end up trying to do what we think makes other people like us--then we are not really free (I'm guilty as charged on this one!).

A particularly challenging relationship she taught about was the relationship with the teacher. Here we sometimes create a dynamic by acting like a child in relationship with a parent, instead of claiming our own agency. She said we should never just do what the teacher says but always question what works for us. The role of the teacher is to challenge us, and the role of the student is to seriously engage with these challenges (and actually not bypass them). Then we have the tendency to deify the teacher, which sets us up for disappointment, after which there is a tendency to demonize the teacher. These tendencies show up especially in situations where abuse occurs (which sadly is not that uncommon). When mistreated (or even just disappointed) it becomes very attractive to victimize ourselves. This is particularly attractive because it feels good to be right and point out that someone else is wrong.

While victimizing is attractive, it is also dangerous, because as a victim, you lose agency and you get stuck in the situation. If instead you can work to view the complexity of the situation, where you are almost always also somewhat involved, then you can learn from it and work with it. This of course is not a permission for anyone (and especially any teacher) to mistreat people, but things happen. And if we work together as a group of people to understand the situation, we can also work to create circumstances that make abuses less likely to happen in the future. And definitely asking questions, listening to each other and remaining curious are very important there. Because very often it is not that clear what is right and what is wrong in a situation when you are in the middle of it. Then the challenge to us is, as Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel phrased it, to try to make our mind big enough to be able to hold a horse race inside.

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!

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...

Where meditation meets reasoning: analytical meditation

Over the course of the last two years or so I have been studying, with several American colleagues, the practices of monastic debate and analytical meditation. As I am writing this I am once again in India for that study. It is a tremendous gift to be able to spend time in India working with a fantastic group of monks in the context of my work. During this visit, we had a short panel at the monastery on analytical meditation in which I shared some words about how we measure the brain with EEG, but most interestingly, two very bright monastic scholars shared textual and practical information about analytical meditation and debate. To ensure that I do not forget it, I decided to share it here on my blog (doing my best not to misrepresent what I have heard).

While analytical meditation (Tib. che gom) can be traced back to the historical Buddha (described for example in the King of Concentration sutra), and even Hindu saints before that time, it really became popular with the Buddhist saint Tsongkhapa. Tsongkhapa was the founder of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism which has a strong focus on study and reasoning. Apparently there is also the criticism from other schools in Tibetan Buddhism that say that analytical meditation is just fake meditation invented by Tsongkhapa. Analytical meditation is complemented by stabilizing meditation, in which the mind is placed on an object and tries to stay there without moving. This stabilizing meditation is more well-known in the West, where meditating on the breath is a quite popular component of many mindfulness courses and interventions. However, it is said that such calm abiding does not really help to transform suffering in the long term--it can only give calm in the short term. Analytical meditation seeks to investigate the true causes of phenomena and thereby can lead to wisdom and new insight into the nature of phenomena.

However, neither type of meditation can exist without the other ones. Without stabilizing meditation, the analytical meditation cannot really thoroughly accomplished, because the mind is just too wild. Without analytical meditation, stabilizing meditation is just a brief respite from our crazy monkey mind (if we manage to get it quiet). Also interesting: in this tradition, meditation is referred to as familiarization (see also Dreyfus (2015) for an excellent discussion)--meditation is becoming thoroughly familiar with its object (such as the breath) by bringing your attention to it again and again.

Analytical and stabilizing meditation differ on various dimensions. As I mentioned above, the results of analytical meditation are more stable than the results of stabilizing meditation. While stabilizing meditation is only practised individually, analytical meditation can also be practised in smaller or larger groups, such as in the debates that we have been recording in the lab. While in stabilizing meditation, the body should remain still, in analytical meditation, it can also move (as it does in monastic debate).

This movement dimension is also the feature of analytical meditation that is fascinating to me, given my experience in dance. It seems like a genius way to make meditation palatable to young men in a monastery that have lots of physical energy: meditation in action! Analytical meditation is characterized by a continuous questioning of the topic at hand, looking at it from all directions and asking "why" and "how"? These questions then allow the practitioner to become more familiar with the topic at hand (traditional topics include concepts such as impermanence and interdependence) by thoroughly investigating it. Debating in the physical way that is used in the monastery (see this clip for an example makes it more interesting than just sitting down. In addition, the monks say that standing makes your thinking quicker and more clear. It brings all the senses together. Through a repeated investigation of concepts like impermanence, but also negative emotions like anger, slowly your mental patterns start to change, such that eventually thoughts of impermanence or patience come up more automatically in daily life, and in situations where you are about to become angry.

It seems to me that analytical meditation is worthy of more attention by contemplative neuroscientists. We have begun to do the first EEG studies and behavioral experiments. This surely is a slow process, frought with dangers of misunderstanding, but I think it is well worth our while. It is important not only because of potential applications in education or in therapeutic interventions to manage maladaptive thought patterns, but surely also because there is so much interest in science in the monastic community as well. I hope to be able to share some preliminary results in this space in the near future.