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 Dean Philip Pizzo, MD, and William Mobley, MD, PhD (left), offered some concluding remarks after the Dalai Lama presented conference participants with white scarves. Offering a white scarf, or a kata, is a traditional Tibetan greeting that symbolizes purity of intention. Photo: Linda Cicero |
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View Video Morning Session : Craving and Choice[1:55, StreamingVideo] Afternoon Session : Suffering and Choice[2:31, StreamingVideo] |
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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, has demonstrated his many gifts as the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, but how often does he get asked to become a reviewer for a neuroscience journal?
That proposal came at a medical school panel on Nov. 5 at Memorial Auditorium from a neuroscientist who had just heard the Dalai Lama’s critique of her imaging study. While her suggestion was somewhat tongue in cheek, she was dead serious in her admission that she might have conducted her research differently if she had spoken with him first.
The study showed that empathy for others causes activity in the same areas of the brain as does pain itself. The researchers used loved ones to elicit empathy from the test subjects. In Buddhism, the belief is that empathy and compassion for loved ones is an extension of the self. But real compassion comes from feelings for those unrelated—or even enemies. So a more telling experiment, the Dalai Lama remarked, would be to examine such feelings toward these less-related people to see if activation arises in the same areas of the brain. More
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