What I learnt about research on human trust

Last week I went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, United States to learn about research that is being done on trust. Mostly for the benefit of my future self, I will make an attempt at summarizing what I learnt about this somewhat foreign (to me) area of research. Trust is actually measured in lots of different ways, ranging from tightly controlled lab conditions to the messiness of the real world and foreign cultures. Trust models come larger from Roger Mayer. Fundamental components of trust appear to be ability, benevolence and integrity. In other words, you trust someone when you believe they can do things (ability), when you think they are meaing well (benevolence) and when you believe they act with integrity. Trust is most crucial in situations of risk, and when you are together with someone you trust, you are more willing to take risks in this relationship. Mei-Hua Lin discussed that trust depends on the amount of interaction you have had with a person, the similarity, affect, status, as well as situational factors. Mayer mentioned an interesting experiment to measure trust in a person, is to ask people how likely they would give ths person a project that is important to them when you cannot monitor them. Across the world, the integrity dimension appears to be the most important predictor of trust. Although mostly trust is considered to be positive, Alan Wagner is studying situations in which people overtrust. Most frequently people use Mayer's questionnaire for measuring trust, but another possibility is Rotter's Interpersonal Trust Questionnaire.

Trust in the laboratory can be related to confidence. It has been known for some time that confident testimony has greater influence, especially when it comes from people that also calibrate their confidence to their probability of being correct (Tenney et al., 2007). As such, you can examine trust in the laboratory by looking at how people take the advice of advisor that vary in how confident their advice is (see some cool new work by Yeung and Shea). It is apparently even possible to create computer models of trust, which update trust in an opponent on the basis of previous experiences (Juvinaet al., 2015). One interesting context in which these models were used were in peer-assisted learning of paired associates, in which your partner can inform your answers to the paired associates. In a slightly less cognitive lab setting, trust can be assessed by looking at people's facial expressions as they perform a task collaboratively (Social BART task). Even more, humans can extract trust from body odors, although this effect is modulated by gender. Extraction of social information from smell is also disrupted in people suffering from autism spectrum disorder.

Another dimension of trust occurs in teams of humans and robots collaborating. Antonio Chella thinks about whether recovery of trust can occur when we let a robot say "sorry". You can also look at how humans trust automation (e.g., in a factory) and look how often they notice failures of this automation, such as in the AF-MATB task. Apparently errors by the automated system can even elicit an error-related negativity ("oERN"). As the machine/factory makes more errors, people evidently trust it less. So in fact the reliability of one artificial agent affects how reliable we think another agent is: trust calibration.

On the other hand, do humans consider machines in the same ways as other humans? Jonathan Gratch looks at what aspects of robot behavior make us treat the robots like humans vs machines. Appararently the relevant dimensions are a sense of agency and displays of emotion--together he calls that mind perception. Humans treat robots unfairly and exhibit different emotions when they feel they are just machines. When you add emotions to the robot, people start to treat it more human-like. Apparently you can even decode from human brain activity whether people think they are dealing with humans versus machines. Also gaze is an important cue that humans use to decide whether to trust a robot. Angelo Cangelosi uses investment games to study how much people trust robots, and observed that people invest more in nice than in nasty naos. Amazingly enough, even rats prefer helpful robots over non-helpful robots! Also team interactions can be modelled with ACT-R, as Chris Myers' work on synthetic team mates shows.

Slightly less related to trust, but more to influence was work from Matt Lieberman, who showed that activity in the mPFC could predict behavior change in many contexts such as smoking cessation, wearing suncreen and more. Now what happens between two people are they are succesfully influenced? In experiments at Mount Jordan, Matt Lieberman showed that people's brains are more synchronized when they are watching a video together and are engaged and share a common reality. Also synchrony in speech (speech entrainment) can create social connectedness, because it is associated with increased positive feelings. However, this is not a simple phenomenon, because apparently it's not just more entrainment is better; rather, more variation in entrainment is better. The amount of speech entrainment seems to even affect whether people take advice from an avatar, although that is again a messy process. Less biological ways to measure connectedness include a questionnaire of social presence, which Kerstin Daubenhahn found to be sensitive to whether robots synchronized to the interaction with humans or not.

Other very interesting work by Clara Pretus looked at what is different in the brains of people who are wlling to fight and die for sacred values compared to people who don't. The main difference seemed to be less reliance on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for making these kinds of decisions. On a more positive note, very interesting work by Daniel Fessler showed how watching brief videos of prosocial behavior promotes real-world prosocial behavior (donations). The emotion of elevation appeared to be driving this real-world behavior. An important determinant in video content appeared to be reciprocation between the actors. Other happy news is a study by Adam Cohen who showed that when you ask people what kind of fictitious characters they would friend on Facebook, they trust Muslims and Christians equally, and the people they find most trustworthy are those who engage in costly religious practices (such as adhering to a kosher diet).

On a larger scale influence can be measured on twitter. People such as Vlad Barash have been developing network methods to study social contagion on this social media platform. Tim Weninger showed that social rating systems have a huge influence on how much other people like images/posts: to the extent that people are very poor at predicting what image will be more popular on social media, and popularity ratings are driven primarily by other users' ratings. In short, trust and influence are highly complex topics, on which very multidisciplinary research is done from many angles and perspectives.

Some useful tools I learnt about:

• facial analysis in OpenFace
• voice analysis with PRAAT
• Leanne Hirshfield has code for classifying brain data
• Online Experiment multitasking between N-back task and monnitoring an autonomic system

advice from successful scientists

I recently attended an evening with Spinoza laureates organised by the Young Academy of the University of Groningen, who shared their career advice.
Here you can find pictures and a collection of tweets about it: https://storify.com/mvugt/evening-with-spinoza-laureates-organized-by-young-

Running around a retreat with cell phone in hand--an opportunity to find spaciousness in busyness

I attended a retreat with my teacher Sogyal Rinpoche over Ascension day weekend. As I am writing this, after four intense days, I cannot help but feel tremendously spacious and relaxed. That is actually pretty odd given that I went there with a healthy dose of aversion, feeling tired and somewhat sick, and then spending the full four days of the retreat running around with phone in hand from 7:15 am to 9:00 pm. How could this be?

Sogyal Rinpoche teaching in Amsterdam (picture from Facebook Rigpa Nederland)

People attending the teaching; the dots dress on the far left is me (picture from Facebook Rigpa Nederland)

Going on retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche you know one thing, and that is that everything is going to change all the time. The only thing that is certain is the time at which the first session starts, and from that moment, everything is in a constant flow. The reason I was running around with the phone in my hand this time around was that I was the so-called "teaching services coordinator", who has to make sure that changes in the program are communicated to all the relevant teams, that every team is doing its work properly and that everyone has the materials they need and know what to do. In other words, this roles requires you to constantly be in touch with everything that is happening in all the different places, and to constantly be "in the change." It felt a bit like the retreat was an organism, and I as a teaching services coordinator had to feel what it was doing.

One of the big themes of the retreat was the "twit-twit mode"--a mode of being very busy and not being aware of what is actually happening. This mode of being sounded very familiar to me, and therefore the retreat was a fantastic way to work with it. The idea is that if you are connected to the awareness that is always present in your mind, then you will be able to hold your ground, instead of being swept away by busyness. I noticed that I was able to get a flavour of this at the retreat, because I was able to listen to the teachings on meditation in the nature of mind, and then immediately go back to working to hold the retreat. In that way it was quite easy to experiment with that awareness. Another beautiful idea that Sogyal Rinpoche used to describe this state of mind was that our ordinary mind would be consumed by the awareness of our nature of mind, instead of our ordinary being consumed by confusion. And when we are confused, we are easily burnt out because we cannot prioritize.

An important part of being aware is also being able to listen. Sometimes working together is benefits from less focus on results, and more focus on just getting together and listening. In fact, when you are with people, it's not what you say, but how you are. What is incredibly helpful is just to be open, loving, and compassionate, and then things may resolve themselves. This is both the case for situations between people and for our own mind: when we leave our mind in its pure awareness, then we can also find our true home. This is a true friend that is always there, whereas all other friends will some day disappear.

A further theme was the "throwaway culture" in which we live nowadays, in which we always want quick fixes yesterday, instead of going for more durable solutions. In particular, we are not willing to spend time and effort on a spiritual path that does not give very quick improvements. Moreover, we always want new things, and quickly get bored. I found that this analysis of present-day society rang true to my own experience, especially our consumerist society.

In addition, we often look for happiness outside ourselves. But actually, the source of happiness is inside ourselves: in a sense of joy and appreciation for what is always there. This ability to transform everything that happens into something good is the essence of Vajrayana buddhism. It reminds me of a Dutch poem: "if you look carefully, then you see that everything is colorful." Everything is in fact a display of clarity, joy, and wisdom, but it's so easy to forget that in the nitty-gritty of our everyday experience. Similarly, we can find joy in our work--even when we are very busy--when we are inspired by bodhicitta and caring for others. But if we just do the work to get ahead and to gain recognition then we will quickly burn out.

In summary, I felt the retreat was very much about bringing together the absolute teachings about the nature of awareness with the nitty-gritty of everyday life. I was able to get a taste of what happens when you get let go of the "twit-twit mode" and instead expand your awareness to everything that happens in the retreat, being in touch and not so much worried about little things. An inspiring way to find space in my own mind!

What happens when you try to transplant cognitive science to a Tibetan monastery

After a short night on the plane from Frankfurt to Bangalore, and a long drive to the monastery, we arrived safe and sound from hustling and bustling in India to the quaintness of a Tibetan monastery. Our mission? Trying to learn about the effects of the debating that Tibetan monks engage in on their cognitive and emotional functioning. But (obviously) none of it was as easy as that may sound.

cow in front of Sera Jey's science centre, where we conducted our studies

a visit by NIMHANS scientists

Doing research in India reminds you of how we take so many things for granted: drinkable water flowing from the tap, warm water to take a shower, steady internet, and electricity. The first few days, internet was mostly absent and electricity was intermittent. This meant we were really coding like monkeys, because apart from talking to our monastic collaborators, there was no distraction! We had brought a few tasks that we routinely use in our laboratories to study logical reasoning, working memory, and decentering (this is the ability to realize that your thoughts are just thoughts, and then to step outside a train of thought). We thought that translating the tasks and their instructions would be quite trivial, since it mostly involved common words like 'shoebox' and 'baseball bat.' But of course, shoeboxes and baseball bats are actually not that common in a Tibetan monastery! So we had to had long conversations about what the best Tibetan equivalent for a particular word would be. This really makes you realize how western-centric the psychology tasks that we normally use are! Another example of that came up in a working memory task that we use, in which you have to intersperse memorizing a visual object and making decisions about words. As it turns out, monks are really not used to doing two things at the same time (or maybe we should say: Westerners are chronic multitaskers). So is this actually a good measurement of working memory?

a testing session in action (with a visiting dog)

But doing research in India is not only being a crazy coding monkey: relationships with people are also very important. We received a visit from Prof. Shantala Hegde and Shivarama Varambally from the prestigious National Institutes of Mental Health And Neuroscience in Bangalore. They gave talks to the monastic core team about their work on how music affects emotions, and what goes wrong in patients with schizophrenia. And imagine, the tasks had to be improvised without slides because we still had no power! Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time together and learned a lot. We also were invited by the abbott of the monastery. What was very exciting was that some of the monastic collaborators actually presented the data and graphs single-handedly to the abbott, who was very inspired, and gave his blessing to the project. Not unimportant for a project that takes place at a monastery...

After a few days, and lots of struggles with Tibetan fonts, we got the tasks to show up on the little tablets we brought and we were able to start testing (victory!). We started doing our usual thing: trying to rush through the tasks to get in as much data as possible. However, this just doesn't work for the monks. As we slowed down, we realized the process was much more pleasant for everyone (and much more informative!) if we took a break after every task and asked the monks about their experience in doing the tasks--what worked, what didn't, whether it was related to things do would do in their debating or analytical meditation practice, and so on. We also quickly discovered the meaning of "Indian time"--groups of monks could show up 15, 30, 45, or even 60 minutes late! On the other hand, it is also quite rewarding when your participants tell you that a boring task is "good mind training." Even more rewarding was the fact that our monastic collaborators really manifested and single-handedly took charge of the testing sessions.

Monks taking charge of the testing sessions!

Altogether, it was a wonderful gift to hang out with my monastic collaborators once again. They are some of the most kind, funny, and joyful people I know. Quite illustrative for this was Easter, which fell in the period that we were visiting to conduct some studies. My collaborator Amir and I hid some chocolate easter eggs, and the monks playfully went around searching for them, and even rehiding some of them after they had found them!

How to activate students? Ideas for juicing up your teaching

me teaching during the Artificial Intelligence teacher of the year award ceremony. Picture by Niels Taatgen.

I recently attended a workshop at my university about innovations in teaching. There were several ideas that I thought were useful, so I decided to blog about them. Firstly, I attended a workshop on MOOCs by Tom Spits. There are more and more MOOCs. You can actually use those MOOCs to complement your classroom teaching. For example, you can use them in the flipped classroom: students watch the MOOC at home and then you spend the time in the classroom doing assignments and discussing difficult points. I think this makes a lot of sense, because sometimes lectures on MOOCs are excellent, and why would you waste your own time and effort on that? For example, I found this MOOC on methods and statistics excellent. I may actually refer students to that for some components of my Research Methods class. This could be also helpful for students who need a bit more explanation or background information. The only thing you have to watch out for is MOOCs taking place asynchronously with your class, so that students are not able to sign up and watch the lectures.

MOOCs can also be a helpful source of assignments. Of course you should check this with the MOOC teacher, but reusing some of these assignments can save you a lot of time (given that creating assignments takes *a lot* of time...). Moreover, many of these assignments even give automatic feedback, which can help students to practise the material well. Another potential use of MOOCs could be to remedy deficiencies. For example, in a multidisciplinary field like Artificial Intelligence, some students are weak on programming, others on psychology or machine learning. There are plenty of MOOCs in all these areas that students can do to remedy these deficiencies. Advantage of MOOCs over regular university courses is that they can be done at your own pace, and in your own time.

A significant challenge with MOOCs is finding the right one. One place to start is a MOOC search engine: moocse. There are also websites with reviews of MOOCs, e.g., class central. And of course you can follow your favorite academics on twitter and find out when they are teaching a MOOC.

Another teaching innovation are learning communities. mentimeter in the lecture to keep students engaged. And finally, a very simple thing you can do to have students take charge of their learning is to provide lecture slides before the lecture so that students can click links and explore during the lecture (of course this is also tricky, since it may be very distracting for the students...).

In summary, I got quite a few new ideas for enhancing active learning in my classroom. I am planning to check some of these ideas out in the next few weeks, when I am starting to teach again.

A new way of dieting or other habit changes: quantifying your wants

There is a cool new research project called qwantify.org in which some of my friends from the Mind and Life Institute participate. The project seeks to investigate what people think about and want and how those things influence each other. They do this study by means of a smartphone app, which everyone with a smartphone can download and try out. I downloaded it and have found it very insightful.

I often find myself wanting things, ranging from food to consuming media to--in fact--consuming anything. The app prompts you to investigate these wants. A few times a day, it buzzes you and asks you whether you want anything, a question that is immediately followed by questions like: how do you want to feel? (e.g., accomplished, comfortable, connected...).This is fascinating because it draws the connection between what you want immediately and why you might want that. For example, often I may want to check the twitter or consume other media. But why? Do I want to feel comfortable? Connected? Or actually, is feeling accomplished more important? If so, is social media the best thing to want right now? The app also asks you about your emotions and your social situation. For example, it asks you whether you feel content, angry, etc. It also asks you whether there are currently people around you, and whether you are interacting with them. Do you want more things when you are by yourself, or when with others?

After you have filled out a few prompts, the app starts to give you charts that index many different aspects of your behavior. For example, I found out that apparently, I am a pretty happy person, because my predominant emotions are content and happy. Also, want things more when I am alone than when I am with others. This makes sense to me, since when I am with others my mind is sufficiently occupied that I don't really need much more. Moreover, I want things more badly when I am in a bad mood compared to when I am in a good mood. Overall, I am pretty amazing that there are even such patterns in my own data. Quite interesting.

Most importantly, the app drew my attention to the kinds of choices I make in my life. Normally, when I want things, I unquestioningly follow those impulses (or resist them), but I don't investigate what is behind them, or whether they actually make me feel better. As a result of working with the app for a few days, I became more aware of what impulses make me really happy. For example, creating things and accomplishing things for others is what makes me happy, while my wants are usually quite the opposite: consuming things (mostly food and media). So, if I take a moment to reflect, I could actually become happier by following the longer-term goals of creating things for other people rather than simply following my mindless impulses... Do you want to try it out as well (and help science along the way)?

when you really need to dance... resources for doing ballet class/fitness at home

The holidays are coming up, which means that a lot of ballet classes are sadly not happening. Where can I still get my fix? For those occasions, I like to do ballet classes or workouts at home.

This is me doing a ballet class in the fitness centre of a hotel.

Since several people asked me about it, here is an overview of resources I really like for that:

• Lazy Dancer tips is a youtube channel with a lot of nice workouts, including this ballet barre for fitness and some 5-minute-beach-abs workouts. Good for dancers but also suitable for non-dancers
• For $15 you can buy a download of the barre and the centre this class by Kat Wildish, a ballet teacher from New York City specialising in adults. Her style is very easy to follow and focuses a lot on correct placement.
• Another youtube channel is Kathryn Morgan, who has some good workouts such as a pointe barre workout and a workout to strengthen your feet. She also holds online ballet classes, of which I really like the free stretch and strength class
• If you would like to improve your core and your form, floor barre is excellent. Yumiko sells a wonderful DVD
• On youtube, you can also easily dance along with Pacific northwest ballet school's Balanchine-style class
• Another DVD that I like a lot is one with Andrey Klemm, which is quite easy to follow, a good workout, and gorgeous dancers
• If you would like to improve your turns, then Finis Jhung has some good DVDs, although those are pretty pricy. I like the intermediate-advanced turning class, which unfortunately is no longer available

And of course, sometimes the most fun thing to do is just to put on some music that moves you and dance! 

does mindfulness mean we have no judgment whatsoever?

In a video on the bodhi Facebook page, Kimberly Poppe asks an important question here: can we suspend our judgment for a moment? What does this feel like? There has been a lot of controversy on mindfulness promoting non-judgmentalness and thereby condoning injustice, bigotry and violence in the world. I think what is shown here is that it is not about getting rid of judgments altogether, but rather taking a moment to first perceive what is, in a way that is as unbiased as possible, and then engaging in a way that is usually a lot more sane because you had a chance to think it over.

In this way, mindfulness can allow you to not become a zombie, but in fact allow you to see injustice more clearly and act in a more skilful way. By reducing the reliance on forming an opinion before you have had a chance to actually see, you can potentially go beyond your habits of thinking, especially those habits that are quite "sticky", i.e., those that involve your hopes and fears. Instead of running through patterns such as "I am a worthless..." or "s/he probably thinks I am a loser" or "these people are really stupid" again, and thereby making them stronger, we can also have a fresh look at what presents itself. Then we may be able to see different sides of a situation, and choose to do something different than the thing we usually do. So we can still have a strong opinion, and a strong commitment to act on an unjust situation, but now it is founded in a bit more of a grounded response.

Georges Dreyfus has a much more scholarly discussion of this topic: http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Articles/Is%20mindfulness%20present-centred%20and%20non-judgmental%20A%20discussion%20of%20the%20cognitive%20dimensions%20of%20mindfulness_CB_Dreyfus_2011.pdf

review of the Society for Neuroscience conference

A few weeks ago I went to the big Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego. This yearly conference usually draws around 30,000 neuroscientists. I was quite actively live-tweeting the conference, so for an impression of the current research on brain oscillations, decision making and mind-wandering, check out my storify: https://storify.com/mvugt/society-for-neuroscience-2016-review

One trick for slowing down: study Tibetan monks in India

I previously blogged about my study of monastic debate in Tibetan monks in India. Last July I returned for another research visit. It was very exciting to get to go back to these wonderful, cheery individuals. While the purpose of our first visit was just to try things out and come up with a model of what the monastic debate that these monks do might be, this time it was a matter of getting down to business and actually collecting data.

I spent the first few days of this trip in Bangalore, networking with scientific colleagues. One of the places I visited was NIMHANS, a premier mental health institution and research facility. What was very notable was that unlike in institutions in the West, here the care was not just taking into account the patient, but also his/her family. This meant that the complex had big parks and gardens where whole families could just hang out with the patient. Moreover, conventional scientific approaches to mental health were sisterly placed next to ayurvedic approaches. Similar to in the West, there was substantial interest in meditation interventions, and scientists with labs studying the basic science of, for example, decision making, often also have a research program on meditation. It was really interesting to see how things that we in the West tend to think of as separate are here were much more integrated.

Once my American colleagues arrived, we drove to Bylakuppe, the Tibetan settlement where Sera Jey monastery is. We stayed in the very quiet guest house, which has a lovely garden with tea stall. Unlike our previous visit, nothing was going on at this time, and the place looked deserted. The only thing that was busy was...us! I had made an ambitious schedule for running behavioral studies, EEG studies, and discussions. Due to some poor preparation, I was still finishing programming tasks on a tablet (it's really cool that OpenSesame allows you to program tasks that just run on a tablet!). Consequently, I was totally absorbed in my laptop, instead of hanging out with the monks. And actually, for doing research in India... this is the most crucial thing! Research in India does not primarily proceed by making a tight schedule and squeezing in as much as possible, but rather by hanging out and being in touch with what happens. Only then can you see what is really happening, and can the monks feel comfortable to approach you and share their wisdom and ideas. So, once we realized this, we actually consciously slowed down.

In the West, we are used to just showing an undergrad into a cubicle with a testing computer, letting them do the task, pay them, and get them out again. With the monks, we actually first leisurely introduced ourselves, explained why we thought their method of debating was interesting, then started with an experiment, showing how the experiment worked slowly, and afterwards had a nice chat about science, monk life, consciousness, world peace, and more. We learnt a lot, and I think the monks did so too. One important lesson was that what we find simple in using a computer may not be as simple for a monk who rarely uses one. Tasks that we administered on a tablet seemed much easier than tasks administered on a laptop. And the younger monks seemed to find the computer tasks much easier than the older monks. Something to think about in our next studies...

On the last day we were once again reminded of slowing down. While we were walking to a place to have lunch, one of the dogs that was following us around got hit by a car, ran off howling to the side of the road and died. One of those moments that brings the reality of life and death quite up close. Somehow it really touched our hearts very deeply as we watched but could not do anything. A precious reminder that life is much too short to squander it being busy doing lots of things without being present to what is.
(also posted on http://radicallyhappy.org/blog/2016/11/28/one-trick-for-slowing-down-study-tibetan-monks-in-india)

Trying to make sense of Tibetan Buddhism: how devotion helped me gain self-confidence

I have been thinking about this blog for a while. As a modern-day Western practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, the role of devotion to a teacher is always a difficult thing to grapple wih. Very often there are stories of people uncritically submitting to a teacher, and the first association is that those people become nothing more than weak vegetables or uncritical robots. However, in my experience it works a little differently, and actually I found that in the practice of devotion I became more self-confident instead of a little vegetable. Why? As I explain below I think the crucial thing is that by focusing on the teacher (or the Buddha, for that matter), you let go of your worries about me (thinking too many self-related thoughts is associated with several forms of psychopathology), and connect to something that is much larger than you, and that is completely positive.

photo by Gerard Nikken

In Tibetan Buddhism, there are many meditative practices in which you invoke a teacher or a Buddha, you call out for help, and imagine that they grant their blessing and you become one with them (for a better explanation, see chapter 9 of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Over the years that I have been practicing this path, it has become a habit to call out to the Buddhas whenever I face difficulty, or whenever I for example have to teach, give a talk or have an important conversation. In those moments I imagine that I am empowered with the wisdom, and I try to let go of my own wants and concerns.

Interestingly, I feel this practice has really helped me acquire self-confidence. How would that work? I think that a lack of self-confidence arises when you feel you can never satisfy the expectations you have of yourself, and thereby you are continually sucked into cycles of thoughts centred around "what about me?". You have these expectations so you feel others can think you are amazing. But actually this need for recognition is very much the problem. If we think about it, we can actually never be happy if you continuously look for other's approval. Now in this act of letting go of all expectations and dedicating whatever you achieve to this other person of being, it is no longer about you. You don't have to worry you cannot do it, because you surrender it to this higher being that certainly will be able to accomplish. In focusing on this being instead of your hopes and fears, they can then dissolve by themselves.

refuge tree thangka, which is one of the objects of devotion of Buddhists

One recent event in my life showed me the power of this practice quite clearly. Just before I had a meeting with my dean in which he told me he was going to fire me (see this blog for the whole story), I did this practice in which I invoked the buddhas and imagined their wisdom and power was transferred into me. Then when this bad news came, the practice I had done, and the focus on "not-me" enabled me to stay very calm and friendly. A few weeks after this difficult conversation (and after he had receversed his decision), the dean told me he was impressed by how I was able to communicate kindly and yet full of confidence. I think this is what devotion is about: by letting go of the hopes and fears of your small self, you can find a confidence that is much bigger than you.

Minding and finding the gap

I recently went on a retreat in Lerab Ling, a Tibetan style Retreat Center with an authentic Buddhist temple in the south of France. A retreat is a period that you step away from your ordinary life and focus intensely on spiritual practice, instead of the mundane concerns of ordinary life. For me one of the most important themes of this particular retreat was "the gap." While the gap has a very specific connotation in the teachings, metaphorically it is a very important concept.

First of all, a retreat in itself is a gap--a gap between our ordinary ways of thinking, completely reactive and preoccupied with whatever is at hand. Because a retreat is a place where you are in a completely different context, it allows you to take a step away from your ordinary thinking patterns and take a more bird's eye perspective. Sometimes you need a full retreat to remind you that there is actually the possibility of a gap, but of course the gap is always there. There is always a space to take a step away from your ordinary thinking. Just take a breath, and drop all your concepts and preoccupations, and there is a gap. It is so easy to forget that! In fact, I think it takes a lot of courage to break through our ordinary thinking and take the space to just be for a moment. And even if you try, sometimes you may feel as if it just doesn't work to drop your preoccupation. That is fine too. You can even let go of the concept of letting go. This may seem paradoxical, but sometimes when trying it out, this can just work. Why is engaging with a gap so important? Very often we keep ourselves busy from early morning to late at night (at least I do!), and there is no space to think about why and what we are doing. We are just following our mental habits. Making a little gap allows you to step outside these habits for a moment, which may provide you with a new perspective. Moreover, I find that I feel less stressed when I make a moment to stop and observe the gap. Another thing a "gap" can do is to consolidate our knowledge and understanding. A traditional Buddhist method for contemplation is to alternate periods of analytical thinking about a philosophical issue with periods of just resting. The idea is that when you rest, the knowledge becomes more embodied. Wouldn't it be an interesting experiment to try that out with things that we are analyzing and thinking about in our work? It may lead to interesting new insights, or maybe to a stronger memory of the material you are thinking about. I am definitely going to try this. So: it may be worth it to not forget the gaps, but to try to cultivate them. This blog is also posted on http://radicallyhappy.org/blogpage

Finding the place that is all good

While my previous blog talked about mostly misery, this blog shows that there is always a way out. This past weekend I attended a retreat by my Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche in Amsterdam. The event was notable in that there were about 500 people--some his students, some completely new, all there to learn about the Buddhist teachings, or some ancient wisdom for the modern world. The weekend went from teachings about transforming the mind, to giving us a glimpse of what we find when we transform this mind, to showing us how to consolidate that glimpse by contemplating on emptiness and practicing noticing our moments of distraction. Evidently, all these topics passed by at break-neck speed, but I will try to gather a few tidbits that I found really helpful.

impression of the final teaching

joyful imitation of work frustration in the office, preparing the Notes Archive (picture by Jeroen Top)

The most important lesson I gathered was that actually I always take refuge in my work, which may not be very smart, because we never know how long we still have work. Actually real happiness can only be found by looking inward, and being content with what is. Obviously this does not mean that you should totally abandon all worldly activity, and all drive to be successful, but it's important to not put your whole being in those pursuits.

At the same time, it is really important to cultivate patience. This is an important lesson for me, because I always want to do things too fast, and too many things at the same time. Sogyal Rinpoche taught us that actually when you are patient, you are ready to receive the greatest gift when it comes. Patience in some sense also comes from a confidence that whatever needs to come, will come. When you don't waste all your energy trying to move faster than light you also have much more space to be aware of what is happening and therefore make fewer mistakes. This is a big habit I need to work on, so it was good to be reminded of that. I could already practise that a little bit in my retreat job, in which I took care of the archive with quotes and needed to both quickly and spaciously be able to find the right quotes when they came up in the teaching.

Another lesson was that when you take the time and space look inward, and look at where the thoughts come from, surprisingly there is a tremendous stillness and OK-ness in there. Then there is somehow nothing to worry about, all the hope and fear dissolve. This is such an important thing to keep in mind when going through the job-related anxiety I have been going through in the past months. Obviously the problem is that it is quite easy to forget this, so it is important to keep reminding yourself of this space inside you--as many times a day as possible. I think it is really worth trying to remind myself of that space when I have lots of meetings, lots of conversations, and a lot of thinking. I always feel I have no time to do that, but probably doing that can really help me to become more aware of what is going on (and potentially even where I am dropping the ball).

The final big idea that came up was seeing how a lot of our thinking and our habits are empty. A student of Sogyal Rinpoche said "having a (emotional) reaction (or judgment) is much more exhausting than letting go." We could practise with this extensively when Rinpoche provoked people in various ways. When you see that you reaction never really lasts, and actually completely dissolves if you don't feed it, that gives a glimpse of its emptiness. And when we practise seeing this more often, then things that originally look really intimidating (like someone else's judgment about you) lose a lot of their power. Many wise life lessons. Now on to trying to embody these!

What I learnt about samsara through getting tenure

The good news is: I got tenure at the University of Groningen (for those not in academia: this means I got a permanent job). The bad news is: I don't feel that happy about it. Why? I got a permanent job, but not the promotion to associate professor, and it feels like failure. Let me tell you what happened.

The tenure evaluation process took almost half a year and was a beautiful insight into what Buddhists call "samsara." Samsara is the cycle of existence, birth and death, characterized by suffering, continuing until one reaches nirvana. It is mostly driven by our habitual hopes and fears, which are the things that generate suffering. And surely that was what the process of tenure evaluation was like. I felt myself continuously oscillating between hoping I would "make the cut" and fearing I was not good enough. Hope to have job security, fearing for the loss of my job. Hope generated by a job offer from another university, but still... It made me aware how much I take a stable situation for granted, and how I become uncomfortable in the prospect of change. Only the thought of losing my job really filled me with fear. To console myself, I have often thought of a saying of my Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche: you have to give up your job when you die. So there is life after a job. Nevertheless, it's easier to logically recognize this truth than to live it.

After the meeting with the tenure committee that would make the decision about my fate cames months of waiting--not being sure what the future would bring, checking my mailbox every day for a letter. Then finally, about a month ago came the meeting with the dean, who told me that while the tenure committee had judged positively about my case, he could not give the tenure because basically I had not brought in enough grant money and not supervised enough PhD students. The PhD student supervision is also related to money, because every graduated PhD student gives the university a promotion bonus of tens of thousands of euros. I was devastated. It felt like all the hard work of the last 5 years had been sort of meaningless, and I was just ditched by the organization. And that too, is samsara: we work all we want, but things just don't work out. Very often when we work, we think that if we just work hard enough, then things will work out. But in fact, there are many things beyond our control. And of course grant money is a particularly strong case of being outside our control.

The next episode in this journey was that after this quite depressing meeting I received a message from the dean asking for more information about some things I said, and eventually (after also several of my supervisors sent letters to the dean and university board) I ended up sitting in front of him once again. This time I was told that I would receive tenure, but without promotion to associate professor (and the chance to try again after 5 years). And that was it: five years of blood, sweat, and tears, and I got a permanent position, but somehow I could not feel happy. That is yet another aspect of samsara: you can never really be happy, because it is never good enough, and things never work out the way you want it. Because seen from another perspective, I have been able to get a permanent position at a university where I have the freedom to do the research I want, get to meet wonderful people, and get to shape new generations of students. And I even have a choice, because I could also take up another position at a wonderful university where people really care about my research. And more importantly: I am more than my job. While it generates lots of hopes and fears, I can also choose to respond differently to the situation. I can choose to see the hopes and fears are just hopes and fears, and there are always lots of possibilities beyond that.

How can we get students actively engaged in learning? (report from a workshop I attended)

A few days ago I attended a symposium about promoting active learning organized by my university. Here are some of the things I learnt. There is a lot of interest currently in "flipping the classroom". We learnt that a new tool that is available to make flipping the classroom a little easier is Perusall. When you add your PDF to this system, students can annotate it collaboratively and ask questions. You will then be provided with a report, so you can adjust your teaching to the student's questions. With some magical algorithm, the system is also able to grade the quality of the students' comments, although I am a little suspicious of that, I must say.

Luckily there are also quite a few non-electronic ideas to "wake up" your students, which I picked up in a workshop by Jasmijn Bloemert. A good start of a lesson is to ask students what they hope to get out of it, and to write it down. Asking the student to think about their objective directs their attention away from the preceding events and towards the learning that will take place in the classroom. Moreover, it creates a sort of contract that they can go back to, to check whether they are getting out of the class what they want to. Writing things down is helpful because it makes the intentions more real than just holding them in your mind.

Lectures often consist of a lot of dense material. To help the student navigate that, it is often useful to give them a question that they need to find the answer to. In that way, they have a target to keep track of. You can alternatively ask them to come up with question about what they just heard, or simply to compare notes with a fellow classmate.

here I am attending a different workshop on teaching, a few years ago, at the UOGC (University of Groningen Teachers Education Centre)

Frequently students don't speak up for fear of making mistakes. To get them to speak up, you can ask them questions that do not have right or wrong answers, such as "how do you feel about this? Is it positive or negative for you? Another good trick to draw out people's interest is to show them a puzzling picture (or quote, or other type of material) and ask them to guess what it is or what it means. In a similar vein, you could show two "things" (e.g., pictures) on the screen and ask students to find the differences.I guess this will be hard for the course Research Methods that I will soon be teaching, but it may work well for courses that involve more concrete "things."

Teaching the reading of difficult material can also be made more social by asking students to underline the most important sentences of a passage, and then asking them to compare notes on what was underlined, and finally to come up with a summary of the text in one sentence. Doing this really helps you to find the essence of a text. I may try this out with research papers in one class where I read the primary literature with students. It is often difficult for them to draw out the essence of a paper, and this exercise may help them to develop this "helicopter view" of the material.

Finally, there was an interesting method used often in America called "teachers teach." At some random moment in the lecture, the lecturer claps their hands three times, and students have to immediately teach each other what they just heard. It is a very high energy method, but kind of fun, and encourages students to think on their feet (if they are willing to do it, of course). Altogether, I acquired some fun ideas in this workshop. I will definitely try out some of these in my upcoming classes.

A cross-cultural collaborative study of monastic debate (aka my India adventure)

Last December I got on the plane with an exciting destination: Bylakuppe, India. It was probably the most mind-blowing journey I have made for work thus far. The primary goal of this journey was to collect pilot data for a research project on debating practices engaged in by TIbetan Buddhist monks. For those who have ever watched debate, it is quite a spectacle (see for example here). When my collaborators (David Fresco, Marcel Bonn-Miller, and Josh Pollock) and I left, we knew very little about debate (except for having read parts of this phenomenal book by Georges Dreyfus), and our objective was to learn as much as we could and collect pilot data for future studies.

picture by David Fresco

What made our study so unique is that--inspired by our work with Science for Monks last year, we wanted to make the research really a two-way street. We went to learn about debate, but also to teach our monastic collaborators about how to conduct science. To accomplish this, we had a meeting every evening with the monastics, and chatted about what debate brought them, showed our EEG equipment, while they showed us their debating practice. The first evening after our arrival we were still fairly hung-over from our flights, but nevertheless learnt a tremendous amount about debate while having a nice dinner with the monastics. They told us for example that debating is not just a dyadic practice, but involves a continuously changing group of people. As the debate heats up and interesting arguments are being made, more people may join in. Informal meetings such as this dinner turned out to be a well-spring of information for us curious scientists.

our puppy team member (picture by Marcel Bonn-Miller)

In the following days we would meet our monastic friends in the evenings in the Sera Jay science centre, a place where the monks learn about science and where we had put up our camp (i.e., the EEG that we had brought along in a suitcase). The first night we just showed our EEG equipment (we were amazed it even worked in India!), but before we knew it the monks were already playing around with the equipment, fascinated by seeing their own brain waves. Because the monks did not seem to have too many problems with the EEG equipment, we could move onto the more exciting stage the next evening: wiring up two monks, and then having them debate while they wore the caps. We were particularly curious about what would happen to the synchronization between their brains over the course of their debate. Inter-brain synchronization is a very new field, but it is thought that it reflects some sense of social connectedness. For example, it has been shown that in a prisoner's dilemma, between brain synchronization is larger when players cooperate than when they defect. Nevertheless, given that this was a very new tool, we had no idea whether this was going to work. Another challenge was that we observed this practice, but since the monks debated in Tibetan, we had little idea of what was going on. For that reason, we developed a new technology. We asked one of the monks to set at one of our computers and press a button whenever he thought and event of interest (e.g., the debaters are now getting in synch, or the debate is heating up, or there is a large amount of disagreement). I sat next to that monk and wrote down his description. What I really liked about this method--as crude as it is--was that it really included the monk's judgments and perspectives into our data analyses. The next day we would spend analyzing the just-collected data, thinking about what we found, and coming up with a plan for that evening.

One of the interesting things we learned from the monks was that debate is not only a method to sharpen your intellect (they quoted a Tibetan saying that says "don't bang your head against the wall, and don't argue with a Geshe", which means that both are not a good idea, since a Geshe will always outwit you). Debate is also a way to train emotion regulation. When the monks start debating, they can be very angry with each other. In debate, they learn to quickly move into and out of the anger, and thereby the emotion loses its intensity. They also told us that debate can help create self-confidence, because they learn how to argue well (interestingly Daniel Perdue argued the same in a book he wrote on applying debate in the Western classroom).

attending the Mind & Life meeting. Picture by David Vago

the dangerous bee nests

debate with EEG hyperscanning in course - picture by David Fresco

While every day was an amazing adventure during this visit because we learnt so many new things (and we also got to attend the Mind & Life meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, doing research in India was not without challenges. Several times we wondered whether we were going to survive the auto-rickshaw ride. As a reminder of impermanence, we saw a little puppy being hit by one such autorickshaw on one of our first days in India. He was adopted by Marcel Bonn-Miller and slowly became a new member of the research team as he was nursed back to health. On one of the last days of our trip, one of the killer bee colonies that was hanging alongside the monastery broke out and preyed on several monks, as well as my colleague Marcel, who suffered 30 bee stings and had to be brought to the clinic. Thankfully he was able to get the appropriate treatment and survived, but it surely brought back the precariousness of life in India. Despite these less-pleasant adventures, I think this visit to India taught us a phenomenal amount, and I am already looking forward to the next trip!

Moving your meditation - exploring meditating while moving

During new year's eve, I attended a Moving Meditation retreat. As a dancer and meditator myself, it was quite interesting to bring those two together. So what is moving meditation? In many forms of meditation you focus on an object, frequently the breath. Moving meditation is similar, but now the object of your focus is the movement. We mostly danced with music, and the "game" was to be aware where in your body a movement arose, to just let it happen, and not lose focus. Whenever you lost focus, you could stand still, observe, and start to move again, with awareness. What I found interesting was that this movement led to a very fluid state. I had practised modern dance techniques before in which you are also taught to let the movement arise from the body, without commentary, everything is good (e.g., movement research by Edan Gorlicki). What was different in this case was the emphasis on awareness--using the movement as an anchor of your attention.

What was also different from previous classes I have done was the use of relational techniques. We spent a decent amount of time dancing together--feeling the movement not just of ourselves but also of the others. It may well be a very interesting way to cultivate empathy and awareness of how we relate to others. I found it also allowed me to develop a sense of non-judgmentalness towards people, because we practiced interacting with other people from within the space of meditation. In this meditation, I could see my reactions and judgments arise, but I was reminded that I could simply let them dissolve again as well.

Now what are the effects of these practices? I think movement meditation is a beautiful way to bring movement into meditation, and meditation into movement. Very useful for those like me, who cannot sit still. it also opened the door for me to bring meditation in other dance I do, like ballet. Such cases are substantially more difficult, because there is a lot more outward focus and direction by others, but it is a nice challenge. More generally, I feel that movement meditation can make it easier to bring the awareness of meditation into daily life because most of our daily life we're not sitting on a cushion, but moving about.

Challenges and opportunities in the meeting between buddhism and science

I recently attended a conference on the challenges and opportunities that arise in the meeting between Buddhism and Science (see link here). The first keynote was by Alan Wallace. Alan has been involved in this dialogue for a long time because he trained as a Buddhist monk, but also got a PhD in Western academia. His talk was mainly about how mindfulness is frequently misrepresented as some kind of non-critical happy state, without any ethical dimension. To make his point, he started by talking about distinguishing two types of happiness: in hedonic pleasure we want to get something from the world (such as food, money, power), while in eudaimonic well-being we instead want to give something to the world. Only this second type of happiness leads to mental balance and wisdom. One way to achieve such authentic well-being is to follow a Buddhist path and to practise right mindfulness. This right mindfulness incorporates an ethical dimension (on both social and environmental levels), a mental well-being dimension and a spiritual or wisdom dimension.



Yet, in the current discourse, mindfulness is mostly focused on mental well-being and reducing stress, even though in the Buddhist discourse, 'right mindfulness' is so much more. A particularly rampant misunderstanding is that mindfulness is simply non-elaborative, present-centred awareness, without judgment. However, in the traditional sense mindfulness in fact does involve a strong ethical component and a clear judgment about what actions are wholesome and what actions are unwholesome. While I agree with Alan that it is important to not reduce mindfulness to too simple-minded present-centred awareness, I think the talk sometimes oversimplified the scientific discourse on mindfulness. Most of the studies do not claim to study the whole "right mindfulness" path, but merely as aspect of the practice that people do when they sit down on their cushion. Nevertheless, I think a challenge for us scientists is to communicate clearly when our research is about the whole path, and when we're simply talking about a specific way of paying attention that some people on their cushion are doing. Eventually those are of course intertwined, but to get somewhere with science we have to simplify.

Another interesting keynote came from Edel Maex, addressing the criticisms about how compassion and enlightenment are missing from MBSR. However, he started with his own story, and his discovery that the only way to become truly happy is to find the courage to look suffering directly into the face. He found that compassion is in fact the only sensible response to suffering. Instead of looking at suffering people with an attitude of "something is wrong with you", you can then switch to asking them what their pain is. So in that sense, compassion is crucial for finding both your own and other's happiness.

He then talked about some criticisms on mindfulness, namely that it has removed the traditional practices from their main goal, namely enlightenment, and that it lacks an ethical context. He drew our attention to the traditional definition of nibbana, which is extinction, the extinction of grasping and being stuck. Now mindfulness is all about letting go of such grasping and giving people a choice between being stuck and distracted, or alternatively to bring their attention to an object like the breath. He said that in fact Jon Kabat-Zinn hoped that an 8-week MBSR course would give people a small taste of enlightenment. Edel also mentioned that without compassion, no mindfulness is possible, which he defines as a kind, open attention. Cultivating this type of attention makes compassionate behavior much more natural. He ended with a very inspiring note about how this compassionate attention helps us first and foremost develop self-compassion, such that our compassion from others can flow naturally and with abundance.

After the keynotes, the afternoon was filled with a wide variety of workshops, of which I gave one. In my workshop I tried to also address the tension between buddhism and science in my own research on the effects of meditation on cognition. While the research is very helpful in that it forces us to think more deeply about what the practices are about, the research also forces us to simplify and reduce the things we are studying. We need to do that to be able to connect to the rest of the scientific literature, which is based on well-controlled lab tasks. Yet reading the scientific literature, especially the literature on attention, even I sometimes become uneasy when people reduce the practice of meditation to a simple concentration practice. In my own experience it is so much more, but that often does not fit into our scientific boxes. The crucial point is therefore to see science as just one model of the world, while someone's first-person experience is another. We shouldn't start to believe too strongly in either reality. While Buddhism and science can really enhance each other when they cultivate a sense of curiosity and deep discovery, they can also challenge each other when either of them beliefs they have a patent on the ultimate reality.

The paradox of self-promotion for a Buddhist academic

As I am approaching the moment of my tenure decision, I find myself in the position of having to produce lots of materials that state how awesome I am. To stand a chance for grants and promotion, I have to constantly assert myself and claim that I am one of the best people in my field. Being a Buddhist practitioner as well, that is sometimes a bit strange, because my Buddhist practice teaches me to be humble, and to try to worry more about others than about myself. It can sometimes create a bit of cognitive dissonance.

On the other hand, I think that actually what my Buddhist practice teaches me about not taking myself too seriously is very beneficial. It is very easy to start feeling very low among so many amazing colleague scientists (see for example this blog). The problem really starts when I am comparing myself to all these others and worrying whether I am good enough. When, on the other hand, instead of focusing on this comparison, I simply focus on my motivation, then there is no problem. I have learned in my practice that the "I" that seems such a solid core, and that hurts so bad when someone criticizes my paper or my grant, does not even exist. We waste so much time and energy trying to prove to others that we are good enough, whereas in reality this self is quite elusive.

I have found that instead of worrying whether I'm good enough (and whether I'm going to get this grant, or going to get tenure, or any such thing), I can just put one foot in front of the other and dedicate my efforts to the well-being of all sentient beings. If I need to promote myself to be effective in that endeavour then I can do so too, but never forget that it's all just a big cosmic joke. And at the end of the day, I just dedicate my efforts, so that in some way (that I do not understand) whatever I have done may be of benefit. When I actually do this, and stop worrying about being good enough, I notice how much less stressed I feel. So the paradox seems to be that although I have to engage in self-promotion as an academic to be able to be of benefit, at the same time I have to not take it seriously in order to maintain my mental health. If I could only remember that a bit more often...

A meeting of Eastern and Western sciences of mind

Last fall I had the amazing opportunity to travel to India to participate in the Science for Monks programme. Science for monks is a project that has been established by the Library for Tibetan Works and Archives to teach monastic graduates (mostly geshes) about Western science. They have created this programme at the request of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Every year a group of monastic graduates from a wide range of monasteries all over India (this year even including some from Bhutan) travel to study together for a month and learn the basics of physics and neuroscience. The programme is mostly taught by faculty from the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. However, towards the end of the programme, some scientists currently doing research are invited to share some of their latest findings. This is how I came in. I was requested to come to India to teach about my work on computational models of the mind and meditation. You can imagine I was pretty excited!

One morning in October I left for India. I went a few days early so I could travel to Varanasi and enjoy my chance to go to the East a bit more. In some sense, that may not have been an amazing idea, since it was just the holiday of Diwali, meaning that the city was packed. It was a bit of a culture shock, but also quite beautiful to be surrounded by so many devout people making their rounds between the temples. Probably a highlight was an early morning boatride on the Ganges, seeing the sun arise between the burning ghats, the cremation places. It is almost surreal.

Now what a difference was the arrival in Dharamsala, where the course was held, with crammed Varanasi! When we flew into Dharamsala, we were welcomed by a team from the organisation and brought to the monastery. The teaching programme took place in Sarah, a monastic study college somewhere to the south of Dharamsala. Every day was divided into four sessions with lectures from each of the lecturers in turn. We had all sent our slides beforehand, so they could be translated into Tibetan. Now how often does it happen that you get to present from Tibetan slides, and have a translator by your side who turns every phrase into Tibetan? What made this interesting is that it forced me to be much more precise about what I am saying!

In my lectures I talked about creating computer models of the mind, with which we basically simulate what we think the humans are doing in particular cognitive tasks. We test these models by giving them the same tasks as humans and then seeing whether those produce the behavior we see in humans. The idea is that if you can build a system, then you understand it. We talked about computational models of decision making that assume that decisions are driven by a noisy process that meanders over time as information accumulations, and that turns into a response when it crossed a decision threshold. To better understand it we acted out this model: some monks being the decision threshold, some a meandering piece of information. It was great fun! One of the amazing things of teaching these monastics is that they are quick to laugh and extremely engaged. No bored looks here!

Things got a bit more intense when I presented my computational model of meditation (or at least the beginnings thereof). While they understood my interest in studying meditation, they were worried that this ignored many important aspects of the practice. I agree, and this led to good discussions about how science consists of making models of reality, that are clearly only approximations. The important thing is not to start believing in them too seriously! Another interesting question they asked me is why I needed all these participants in my experiments. Since I am a meditator myself, why could I not just study myself? This led to some good discussions about the science of measurement and needing larger groups to be able to generalize to the whole population.

The monastics had pretty intense days, because apart from our lectures during the day, they did some ritual practices ("puja") in the evenings, as well as debate. Debate is its own story, and quite fascinating to watch. In a very stylized physical game, monks debate important philosophical issues to increase their understanding. Even when you do not speak Tibetan and cannot understand what they are talking about, it is still a fascinating thing to watch!

Apart from this being an amazing experience, what did it teach me? First, it showed me that Tibetan monks do not spend most of their time meditating, but rather, study place a prime role. I think it would be really interesting to do scientific studies on how these study programs help to transform people's minds. Another lesson was that the monastic don't make such a difference between science and ethics as we do in the West. They kept asking me about compassion and about how my work was going to alleviate the suffering of beings. I think it is really good to be reminded of that time and again. Maybe we should do a little more of that. And wouldn't it be awesome if we could introduce some of the debating or analytical meditation methods in our Western university classrooms?

post on What meditation really is

I recently posted on the What Meditation Really Is blog

A big move

I just moved back from the US to the Netherlands after more than seven
years. It's been quite an experience. There are a lot of subtle
changes in culture. For example: being reawakened to the fact that
although many Dutch people are very nice, some of them are quite
rude. While biking through the city, some random girls were shouting
'bitch' at me. Bikes themselves are quite another thing. I am very
happy I can bike everywhere again. Even when you go to IKEA, there is
a bike path that leads you right to the entrance. Because people do go
to IKEA on bikes! It took some getting used to the sheer volume of
other bikes--navigating the group dynamics that arise from that (e.g,,
needing to pass the slow bikers, people biking all over each other at
an intersection...)

Other things that struck me were garbage disposal policies, rules in
general. You actually have to walk 100 m or so to get to an
underground container where you can deposit your trash bag if you use
an electronic card to open it. And then there is paper and glass
recycling in another place. Quite complicated compared to simply
putting it outside your house in the US! And then the amount of little
rules, e.g., you're not allowed to have a water boiler in your office
(but there is no central water boiler either!), not allowed to hang
things on the wall of your office except on the rails provided by the
university, etc etc. It also struck me there are quite a few smokers
in the Netherlands compared to the US (luckily they are not allowed in
buildings anymore, but that's actually quite recent). Speaking of the
office: to my astonishment my office at Zernike science park turns
pretty much into a ghost house at 5 pm. This is quite different from
my office at Princeton, which is buzzing with activity until about 7
pm.

And then the trains: what I love is that there are so many of them,
and some of them even have free wifi! What sucks though is that
because of the complexity of the railway system, things can go
dramatically wrong. Like this past weekend, after 25 cm of snow in
Amsterdam: almost no trains were running and I spent *a lot* of time
in a packed train, shuttling from Amersfoort to Amsterdam and back
(including an amazing experience of taking about one hour to get from
Amsterdam Muiderpoort to Amsterdam Centraal). Having said that, the
camaraderie between the travellers was wonderful.

I am sure I will discover many more funny little differences as I am
getting settled more in the Netherlands. It's quite an interesting experience!