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The Neuroscience of Buddhism – Practical Tips via Insightful Framework
I don’t want my articles here to get repetitive, but my most recent read was “Buddha’s Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom” by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius. I really enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone who wants a neuroscientific breakdown of important concepts in spirituality, Buddhism, meditation. One of my favorite things was how it explained how dopamine is a gateway to the regulation of working memory. When dopamine levels are steady, the “doorway” of working memory is closed; when they are low, the “doorway” opens, when there is a spike, the “doorway” opens. Why is this?
When you are feeling bad, (low dopamine), your attention is scattered so you can find things in the environment that will spike your mood: you are going to be more likely to be able to find food, sight potential mates, etc. When there is a spike in dopamine, you need to open your attention to be alert to the new threat/opportunity. Otherwise you can let the contents of your working memory remain constant so you can work on whatever problems are currently on your mind.
Remember the concept of “flow” by Mihali Csikszentmihalyi? “Being in the zone?” This may operate through similar principles. When a task is too easy for you, there will be low stimulation, so you will be easily distracted. When a task is too hard for you, you will not be able to solve it. But when it is sufficiently hard and when your skills are sufficiently trained, there will be a steady flow of dopamine, leading you to be “in the zone”, happy and undistracted and fully engaged in the problem. (Your working memory won’t flow open and you won’t be prone to random distractions.) Many psychologists, including Martin Seligman, believe that regular experience of “flow” is an important component to long term happiness, and I’m inclined to agree.
How about meditation? Breathing is important to Buddhism. The reason for this is because exhaling invokes the parasympathetic nervous system – the branch of your autonomic nervous system that “slows you down”. By the way, I know that “parar” means “to stop” in Spanish, which is how I distinguish between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.
Another ideal of Buddhism is “no-mind”: to stop thinking. We know that thinking is often non-deliberate, and stresses us out, such as when we are trying to fall asleep. What the authors of Buddha’s Brain insightfully point out is that when one area of the brain is engaged, other components/processes will not be used. So if talking/thought loops operate through the left hemisphere, then we should engage the right hemisphere if we want to relax and stop thinking. An excellent way to engage the right hemisphere is by trying to feel and experience the body as a unified whole… this is called proprioception.
Many helpful concepts are detailed alongside their neuroscientific mechanisms. You’ll get a great explanation of how the Prefrontal Cortex, Basal Ganglia, Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis, and autonomic nervous system all operate in concert to create your experience of consciousness. If you enjoy the hand-wavey feel good books like Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” but get frustrated when grandiose claims of peacefulness are invoked without any material grounding, you’ll LOVE Buddha’s Brain. It explains the theory and then uses the theoretical framework to produce practical tips that anyone can use – even if you are a regular person living a hectic life and don’t have the luxury of a monastery. (For example, it tells you exercises that will invoke the parasympathetic nervous system, or that will release oxytocin, or dopamine… it even contains an appendix of vitamin supplements that affect the production of neurotransmitters! I’m going to try an experiment of taking Vitamin E (gamma-tocopherol), DHA/EPA, Vitamin B-6 (as P5P), and 5-Hydroxytryptophan in the morning. I’ll let you know how it goes ![](http://zacharyburt.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif&66586" alt=){kind=icon}
I also learned some two VERY helpful ideas that help me understand “living in the now” even better, from a practical perspective.
- The Two Dart System. When something bad happens, it as if we are hit by two darts. The bad thing, the pain, is often very real… we can call it the first dart. For example, if we stumble and hit our head, it probably hurts. This is the first dart. If we then think about how unlucky we are, and why couldn’t we have known better, and keep replaying the incident in our head, this is the second dart. The second dart is insidious because we don’t realize that we have control over it. We can structure our life in a way to minimize the chance of getting hit by First Darts, but we can deliberately practice not being affected by Second Darts. The best way to do this is probably to practice being conscious of when we are indulging in self-pity and replaying – and realize that this is a kind of pain that is within our locus of control. These are the second darts.
- Feeling Tones. Apparently there’s an idea in Buddhism called feeling tones: in our head, things can be subjectively experienced as positive, negative, or neutral. When things get really positive or negative, our ego (“self”) gets involved, attaching a story to the experience: this probably helps us strive towards more positive things and away from more negative things. However, equanimity (another important component), mind-balance in the face of nettlesome (or exceptionally positive) circumstances, encourages us to practice renouncing ownership over positive or neutral experiences. Equanimity leads to an enduring tranquility.
Anyway, “Buddha’s Brain” is available from Amazon for only $12.21. So far, it is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year.
Update 09/27/2010. A reader writes in with these thoughts:
I’ll probably eventually read Buddha’s Brain as that brings together my interests in neuroscience, evolutionary theory and zen (I use lower-case ‘zen’ to refer to, let’s say, the ultimate basis rather than the Zen sect, the boundaries between the two admittedly blurred for me). The writer, Zachary, seems thoughtful and intelligent, but also naive in his certain of his renditions of zen. I realize that my quibbles may be akin to, say, the nitpicking an architect may do in r/t a presentation about architecture, but first I’d want to say, zen is not really about stopping thinking. I think it would be better to say it’s about being more skillful with one’s thinking. Initially, zen practice is–inevitably?–about improving one’s ability to concentrate (lit. ‘coming to center’), which entails the ability to not get hooked by each thought that comes along (in an endless string of association). Thoughts at this juncture seem to be the Enemy, the less thinking the better! The capacity to concentrate, ’tis said, enables one to approach the source of thoughts (which is not a thought). As my old teacher used to say, “clear mind is like a mirror: red comes–red; white comes–white; if somebody hungry comes, give them food.” So, this mirror-like mind perfectly reflects* trees, persons, and, I dare say, thoughts. Here it might be said that thoughts are OK, if you don’t get hooked by ‘em. And yet again, another perspective in Buddhist teachings has it that each appearance, whether of sensory perception or thought, is an expression of the absolute, the relative and the absolute being essentially non-dual (a nice job if you can get it!).
2nd quibble: Zach dismisses Tolle’s ‘Power of Now’ as so much “handwaving” compared with the material grounding in ‘B’s Brain’. My bias–because, my experience–is that the most telling thing is to try whatever practice and see if it seems helpful. But different arguments will appeal to different persons. For me, it was the ‘philosophical’ (existential?–ideas tied to the experiential)) that got me interested. It’s been said before that we live in an extremely materialistic culture: it doesn’t ‘matter’, it’s not ‘solid’, unless it’s matter; reality is cold and hard.
3rd quibble: When things are really positive or negative, Z says, the ego gets involved and makes a story about the experience. But ‘ego’ has no fundamental existence and cannot ‘do’ anything. Rather, the term is shorthand or code for ‘making’ or grasping a separate self. The stories one makes–the ones that cause, or in a sense ARE, the most suffering–are those populated by an idea of ‘me’. Co-arising with ‘me’ is a separate ‘other’. My observation has it that the ‘me’, the ‘other’, the ‘stories’ may arise at any time, not just during extremes of pos. and neg. (My old teacher would say, “take bad–make correct; take good–make correct”). Note that as soon as we talk about ‘an experience’ it becomes a story. I liked Z’s “two darts”, wherein one might experiences pain–and then goes on to make something of it.
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