CULTURA/HUGH WHITAKER/GETTY IMAGES
Exit
early stages, is showing that in
Tibetan Buddhist monks, this area
of the brain may be able to light
up for altruistic reasons.
“There are many neuroscientists out there looking at mindfulness, but not a lot who are
studying compassion,” Knutson
told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The Buddhist view of the world
can provide some potentially interesting information about the
subcortical reward circuits involved in motivation.”
Davidson’s research on Ricard
and other monks also found that
meditation on compassion can
produce powerful changes in the
brain. When the monks were asked
to meditate on “unconditional
loving-kindness and compassion,”
their brains generated powerful
gamma waves that may have indicated a compassionate state of
mind, Wired reported in 2006.
This suggests, then, that empathy may be able to be cultivated
by “exercising” the brain through
loving-kindness meditation.
YOU CAN ACHIEVE A STATE OF
ONENESS — LITERALLY.
Buddhist monks can achieve a
harmony between themselves and
the world around them by break-
THE THIRD
METRIC
ing the psychological wall of self/
other, expressed as by particular
changes in the neural networks of
experienced meditation practitioners, the BBC reported.
While a normal brain switches
between the extrinsic network
(which is used when people are
focused on tasks outside themselves) and the intrinsic network,
which involves self-reflection and
emotion — the networks rarely
act together. But Josipovic found
something startling in the brains
of some monks and experienced
meditators: They’re able to keep
both networks active at the same
time during meditation, allowing them to feel a sense of
“nonduality,” or oneness.
HUFFINGTON
10.06.13