|
|
Buddhist brain studies Manipulating one's brain in order to highten oceanic feelings of oneness with the world or with God shows only that brain manipulation can make you think something that isn't necessarily true. Whether you experience tranquility or ecstacy doesn't have a thing to do with the nature of reality or the reality of God. You might as well pop a Prozac or drink a shot of whiskey because they too will alter your brain perceptions and make reality a little more pleasant to deal with. I am bringing this information to Buddhists because Buddhists will not bring that information to you. If they did I wouldn't need to do so but like anyone else defending their territory, Buddhists will negate these brain studies as they do not want Buddhism exposed as simple brain manipulation that has produced a whole philosophy based on creating a void in a major part of the brain and projecting that void out as if reality itself were nothing more than a huge Void and ourselves merely temporary shadows in it. If Buddhists want to know the spiritual truth, they first must seek God and not seek personal personal escape from psychic pain. Life is meant to be faced full on, a wonderous journey that come from being a fully functioning human being not afraid to experience life as it is, wonderful, painful, even deadly but worth the risk because this life is the environment given to us where we experience the miracle of love. From a report on the Newberg and Aquili brain studies Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, US, told BBC World Service's Discovery programme: "I think we are poised at a wonderful time in our history to be able to explore religion and spirituality in a way which was never thought possible." Using a brain imaging technique, Newberg and his team studied a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks as they meditated for approximately one hour. When they reached a transcendental high, they were asked to pull a kite string to their right, releasing an injection of a radioactive tracer. By injecting a tiny amount of radioactive marker into the bloodstream of a deep meditator, the scientists soon saw how the dye moved to active parts of the brain. Sense of space Later, once the subjects had finished meditating, the regions were imaged and the meditation state compared with the normal waking state. The scans provided remarkable clues about what goes on in the brain during meditation. "There was an increase in activity in the front part of the brain, the area that is activated when anyone focuses attention on a particular task," Dr Newberg explained. In addition, a notable decrease in activity in the back part of the brain, or parietal lobe, recognised as the area responsible for orientation, reinforced the general suggestion that meditation leads to a lack of spatial awareness. Dr Newberg explained: "During meditation, people have a loss of the sense of self and frequently experience a sense of no space and time and that was exactly what we saw. The former area is responsible for attention, and shows the focusing of the mind, a common part of meditation and prayer. The later area is involved in helping you orient yourself in space, telling you which is up and which is down, forward, or behind, and also where you end and "not you" begins -- the mind's way of telling you the difference between you and everything else. "What if the area [the area responsible for telling you you were separate from "not you"] was working as hard as ever," said scientist Newberg, but somehow the act of meditating had blocked its flow of sensory input? We were fascinated by this possibility." Newberg and Aquili asked: "Would the orientation area interpret its failure to find the borderline between the self and the outside world to mean such a distinction doesn't exist? In that case the brain would have no choice but to perceive that the self is endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything the mind senses. And this perception would feel utterly and unquestionably real."This is exactly how their subjects, and people involved in prayer and meditation over the centuries, have described their experiences." More indication of Buddhist brain manipulation February 4, 2003 Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left By DANIEL GOLEMAN "Too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive. But today I feel vindicated. To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to soothe. The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss how people might better control their destructive emotions. One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain's set point for moods. The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress. By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex. Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic. By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid. This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically determined set point for our emotional range. One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a year or so after the events their daily moods are about the same as before the momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes little, if at all. By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point. Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the meeting between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding, while intriguing, raised more questions than it answered. Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become monks? Or was there something about the training of lamas — the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher — that might nudge a set point into the range for perpetual happiness? And if so, the Dalai Lama wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to be shared for the benefit of all? A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester."
|