Buddhism and Brain Science

Side saggital view of human cranium MRI scan

Human brain (LiveScience.com)

What Buddhism Offers Science (Dalai Lama)
Mixing Buddhism and Neuroscience to Understand Human Consciousness
OCT/NOV 2005 issue of Seed magazine

The experience of consciousness is entirely subjective. The joy of meeting someone you love, the sadness of losing a close friend, the richness of a vivid dream, the serenity of a walk through a garden on a spring day, the total absorption of a deep meditative state—these things and others like them constitute the reality of human experience. And all of these experiences—from the most mundane to the most elevated—have a certain coherence and, at the same time, a high degree of privacy, which means that they always exist from a particular point of view. More>>

(Matthieu Ricard)

Buddhist Meditation and the Brain (Derek Ellerman)
A Neural Basis for Mystical Insight

Ellerman presents a theoretical model for understanding Buddhist meditation and experience based on neurobiology. Elaborating on the biological basis of the brain-mind, he provides a theory for consciousness and higher-order processing based on neurological function. From this foundation he examines the hypotheses of neurological correlates to Buddhist meditation to arrive at a clearer understanding of the nature and origin of Buddhist insight. Click here for a PDF version of the paper. More >>

Buddha bust, Gandharva period, India (Norton Simon Museum of Art)

This is Your Brain on Buddha Erik Davis

Celebrated neuro-thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland are reluctant to give the "inside" of awareness or experience much explanatory weight, insisting that objective accounts of consciousness are far superior if you want to understand how the mind actually works. Such thinkers argue that subjectivity may have an undeniable intuitive appeal, but our own experience is an unreliable source of information, a morass of illusions and myths that cloud the quest to describe reality. Yet in his 1991 book The Embodied Mind, co-written with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, the celebrated neuroscientist... More >>

• Buddhism and Neuroscience