Meditate

Looking for a new way to understand consciousness? Meditate on it.

Anonymous 5/2012

Scientist. Biologist. Buddhist. Philosopher. Neuroscientist. Francisco Varela embodied the seemingly opposing elements that he wove together for his final work. Even as he lay dying in a French Hospital, his groundbreaking work on consciousness was being presented in a meeting between some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama. His ideas of combining first person data with more empirical data from traditional Neurology, self-titled neurophenomenology, helped begin a revolution in the way consciousness was approached.  This fusion of traditional western and eastern ideas of investigation sparked a lasting relationship between religion and science.

Traditionally, researchers approach consciousness studies with advanced scientific techniques and instrumentation, but a central difficulty in understanding remains. Scientists cannot “get inside your head” either literally or physically to see how introspective consciousness occurs. Introspective consciousness is simply thinking without external stimuli, although it may be triggered by stimuli.

For example, if right now you’re thinking that this article is nonsense, you’re introspectively conscious because you aren’t hearing or seeing those words but producing them in your mind. But only you know what you’re thinking, and often communicating or even understanding our own thought processes leads to us becoming lost in our thoughts. This deficit in reliable data creates the need for a better tool to collect first person information, a tool that can be found through meditation. This ancient practice can be used to complement the techniques that have been used to study consciousness for years.

History of the Study of Consciousness

In the western world, the field of consciousness studies is very young. Even though psychologists have long tried to understand aspects of consciousness, the paradox of understanding our own understanding was dismissed as unknowable. This is due in part to the limitations in data. First person accounts, popular in the early days of psychology, were dismissed as inaccurate.  Scientists turned to behavior to explain how the mind worked but this provided a limited understanding.

By the 1970s, the cognitive revolution had supplanted behaviorism. New techniques and technologies grew as scientists began to use physical data from the brain to examine thought. Even then, understanding of consciousness stalled. The data collected could tell to some extent what was happening in the brain, but that didn’t answer the question of what was happening inside the mind. To help answer that question, some scientist have begun to turn to Buddhists, who have been studying the mind for thousands of years.

Buddhism is a non-theistic religion- meaning that there is no deity. Rather than the Western scientific perspective that knowledge should be observer independent, Buddhism seeks to understand the self. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Buddhism for consciousness studies is the metal discipline practiced through meditation. Meditation is not simply breathing and sitting cross-legged; it is a type of mental training that changes thinking. Dr. Alfred Kasniak, a psychologist at the University of Arizona and Zen master, says that meditation is about “day to day discipline”. It is this very discipline that makes it a viable tool for consciousness research.

Research into Meditation and Consciousness

Conscious processes are complex and variable when analyzed through the lenses of imaging and other scientific techniques. The idea behind neurophenomenology is that first person data can be used so that for different processes there will be both a physical signature and a description of the thought process that can be used to synthesize a more complete picture of how the brain works. It’s like a picture book, where the first person data is the words that tell the researcher what is going on in the mind. Scientific imaging technique provides the pictures to go along with the description. This allows the pictures to be interpreted through the words and together a story emerges.

In order to collect first-person data that is reliable and repeatable, subjects have to be used who are trained in examining and focusing their own thoughts. Buddhists who are experts in meditation have refined their awareness of their own attention and thought processes. The goal of many Buddhist techniques is to develop attentional and vividness. Think of a telescope. If the mind is the instrument that is being used to examine itself, the development of attention stability plants the telescope on a firm base while vividness polishes the lenses. This creates an image that is both clear and focused. 

Researchers studying consciousness use two main kinds of meditation. Focused attention meditation is where complete focus is given to an object, thought, or emotion. Eventually, a practitioner can both maintain focus for a much longer time than a non-practitioner and realize when and how distractions are affecting her focus. This can take many years to master. Try to focus on an object, let’s say a drinking glass or pencil, for as long as you can. Two or three seconds later, you’re probably thinking about something else no matter how hard you try to focus. This is because the typical person can only maintain complete focus for a few seconds.

In the second type of meditation — opening monitoring — you focus on nothing and just take in what is going on around you. Like focused-attention, this is considerably more difficult than it sounds. It is the difficulty of these tasks that separates them from normal everyday thought process. Buddhists have spent thousands of years seeking to understand the self, and their techniques can take years to master.

The idea of neurophenomenology and the use of Buddhism as a tool within this new methodology is not simply theory. Even though it is a recent idea, studies have already come out supporting different aspects of the idea. In a study by Heleen Slaughter and colleagues at the University of Washington, those who had been through the meditation training showed reduced variability and increased attention stability as indicated both through their performance of a task and through a measurement of their brain waves with EEGs. It can be inferred that Buddhists who have spent years meditating would have similar or better results. 

A study done by Francisco Varela and his colleagues at Institut Pasteur indicated that clustering subjects by first-person reports created clearer patterns of neural behavior and reduced the need to average results. Typically in studies with human subjects, there is a high level of variability in the data received through techniques such as MRIs and EEGs. This need for averaging reduces the precision of the data. Due to the reduced variability that comes with clustering by described experiences, using first-person data actually made the experiment more accurate. This experiment shows the promise of neurophenomenology as a practical way to study consciousness.

Buddhism and Emotion

            One of the more studied relationships between Buddhism and consciousness is that of emotions and qualia. Well beyond being a great word for Scrabble, qualia is used to describe the indescribable. It refers to the uniqueness of experience. Just look at something familiar; let’s say the back of your hand.  Without knowing it, you’ve already experienced qualia. The experience is unique, not because someone else can’t also see your hand but because you have unconsciously or consciously connected your hand with a quality or feeling. Maybe seeing your hand makes you feel good because it is strong or attractive. Maybe you feel ashamed because you still bite your nails. The quality doesn’t matter. It just matters that the quality is unique and thus is qualia.

Buddhists can better observe and record qualia because of their emphasis on being self-aware of all their emotions and their lack of “I” in understanding the world. Expert practitioners have been shown to respond to emotions differently than non-practitioners, with a greater degree of control and understanding. The research done has brought up more questions than answers, but the answers to these questions could change our understanding of how the mind works and what it is capable of.

For Francisco Varela, these ideas were primarily theoretical, based off a few small studies and an extensive personal knowledge of the connection between Eastern and Western philosophy. He was a pioneer, one of the first to see a potential for fusion, or as he described it “a gentle bridge”. When explaining his vision for neurophenomenology, he said, “Science and experience constrain and modify each other as in a dance. This is where the potential for transformation lies.”  This potential continues to be explored in the years after his death as others take up his vision.

Controversy and Limitations

The incorporation of Eastern techniques for understanding consciousness with Western scientific techniques has met with controversy.  For many scientists, first person data is still too subjective to qualify as science. Varela said, “It requires us to leave behind a certain image of how science is done, and to question a style of training in science which is part of the very fabric of our cultural identity.” In order to effectively study consciousness, scientist must open their own minds to ideas that they may not fully understand from their Western philosophical standpoint. When studying a phenomenon that does not give clear physical data, a strictly western standpoint has long since proven ineffective.

There are also questions raised about the religious beliefs associated with the practice of meditation and how they are affecting research. It seems to go against the orthodoxy of science. Any research that has a basis in religion immediately sparks questions of bias and scientific validity. In general, there’s a perceived schism between religion and science. One is based in facts, and one is based on faith. However, because Buddhism does not qualify in many ways as a religion, most of these objections are superfluous.

One solution would seem to be to separate the practice of mediation from the practice of Buddhism. However, the enormous dedication and possible trait changes that comes about as part of meditating seriously for a long period of time are difficult to replicate without the dedication that comes with religion. Even those who began mediation for reasons other than religious reasons often stay because of the religious aspect. To some extent, the philosophy of Buddhism may provide its own insights into consciousness. When questioned about the Buddhist idea that there is no self, Varela said, “…there is no gap at all between the insights reached through meditation and the research results of cognitive science. Both arrive at the identical conclusion that an independent self cannot be detected and that the search for it inevitably leads us astray.”

Eleven years have passed since Francisco Varela’s death. The bridge that he built between science and Buddhism is rapidly becoming a path, leading in new directions for consciousness studies and branching off to create new paths. By fusing seemingly disconnected elements, he revolutionized the study of consciousness. And from his beginning, other scientists influenced by his ideas are discovering new information about the brain that can potentially change the way we think about how we think.

Sources: Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Blackmore, S. J. (2006). Conversations on consciousness: What the best minds think about the brain, free will, and what it means to be human. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Slagter, H. A., Lutz, A., Greischar, L. L., Davidson, R. J., & Nieuwenhuis, S. (August 01, 2009). Theta phase synchrony and conscious target perception: Impact of intensive mental training. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21, 8, 1536-1549.

Lutz, A., Lachaux, J.-P., Martinerie, J., & Varela, F. J. (February 05, 2002). Guiding the Study of Brain Dynamics by Using First-Person Data: Synchrony Patterns Correlate with Ongoing Conscious States during a Simple Visual Task. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99, 3, 1586-1591.