1. OPENING REMARKS

Brain Science as a Path to World Peace

Robert Livingston opened the morning session on the first day of the conference by voicing the general elation at the news, just announced, that the Dalai Lama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his role as the scientific coordinator, Dr. Livingston articulated his personal vision of the purpose of the dialogue: that a better understanding of the brain’s complexity and adaptability, and of the resulting diversity of human consciousness, is critical to global human survival In the light of the Nobel Prize announcement, his message carried a profound sense of the responsibility of each of the participants gathered in that room. This face-to-face engagement of Western science with the Buddhist tradition of enquiry into consciousness might well have deep ramifications for world peace.

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: This initiates the second dialogue between Western neurosciences and Buddhist traditions. These two radically different ways of looking at mind and life have existed, mostly apart, over a span of about 2,500 years. They have been following such separate paths that there has been almost no cross-communication. So for all of us this is a significant opportunity. We anticipate that the Mind and Life dialogues will improve and increase communications and strengthen ties in terms of mutual understanding of neurosciences, consciousness, brain, mind, and the like, and also add new insights into human nature which we believe can contribute to world peace.

There are indeed two great fundamentals underlying this dialogue. First, the issues up for discussion here are not only of great importance in each individual human life, but their comprehension by a wider public may indeed be pivotal for human survival on a global scale. Such issues relate to individual and collective differences in perception, judgment, behavior, and communication. And second, the human brain is the only resourceful instrument for survival. It has always been obliged to be—and continues to be—constructively adaptive. Yet its full potential will not be realized until the brain is better understood, particularly in terms of its individuality and the consequent diversity of worldviews.

The brain is constructively adaptive in the sense that it is continually self-actuating and self-organizing with respect to its own body, and its projection and testing of images and maps of the outside world. According to its own timetable, it changes its internal states and partitions its activities swiftly and in a comprehensively integrated way.

There is a prior, slower brain dynamic in evolution, shaped by selective forces acting over extremely long periods of time. In all history, the most abrupt response to selection forces affecting brain evolution was the approximately threefold volumetric expansion of the hominid brain, which began about three million years ago with a common ancestor from which we diverged from present-day chimpanzees. In periods of individual human lifetimes, the brain is dynamic, too, in its embryonic, fetal, and childhood development, including its remarkable adaptation to a given environment and culture, and its diminishing powers associated with disease and aging.

These evolutionary and life-span changes are structurally dynamic at gross, microscopic, and ultrastructural levels of neuroanatomy. Changes in ultrastructure—at the level of electron microscopy—are occurring dynamically even as we think, talk, behave, and remember events. Changes at microscopic levels of organization take place at a slower rate in accordance with our use or desuetude of particular aspects of our conscious and unconscious experiences. Brain states arise from neuronal activity that involves dynamic bioelectrical and biochemical events, and that can change the ultrastructural features of the fine membranous architectures of cellular neighborhoods.

Very importantly, the brain is dynamic in an integrative sense. Whenever we examine someone with a drugged, diseased, or damaged brain, we observe what that particular brain can do as a whole, despite whatever enduring damage may have occurred, and despite whatever transient interferences may be occurring. In other words, the brain as a whole tends to do the best it can by integrating all of its resources that are available.

The brain is likewise dynamic in a personal, subjective, interactive sense, which I should like to illustrate for you now. For this purpose, I invite your participation so that your Holiness can focus consciously on some subjective experiences as they take place within your own brain.

Tibetan people have undoubtedly gazed at waterfalls often and for prolonged periods. When someone looks at a waterfall, steadily at one point in the falls, for at least a few minutes, and then looks away at the wall of the mountain adjacent to the waterfall, something amazing happens perceptually. Specifically, the wall of rock, in a width corresponding to the waterfall, now appears to move upwards and does so for some minutes.

This tells us that something dynamic has happened within particular brain circuits that process visual perception. Some among them have become temporarily actively engaged in adapting their powers of discriminative analysis to the problems of better perceiving swiftly falling water. We infer that after one has gazed at the waterfall for a short while, the perceptual apparatus has adapted itself so as to slow down the motion of the falling water, perhaps to allow it to be more precisely observed. The evidence is that the slowing down process, which is confined to a well-defined patch of the visual field centered on the waterfall, persists in dynamic fashion after one looks away and operates to produce the reverse motion perception of objects perceived by that transiently adapted sector of the visual field.

You have probably noticed also on a sea voyage, that after much rolling and pitching motion of the ship, a similar sense of motion can persist for many hours after you go ashore. Or following flight in an airplane, your hearing may be affected for some hours after landing. There are many other commonplace means of witnessing dynamic features of brain mechanisms. For example, when you have traveled across several time zones in an airplane, you have undoubtedly experienced jet lag. Your body, including your endocrine system, digestion, and sleep mechanisms, takes some days to recover normal rhythms while your brain is readjusting your daylight cycle entrainment in accordance with the new time zone.

At this point, Dr. Livingston asked His Holiness to participate in an exercise to become consciously aware of one’s own brain during voluntary performance. He demonstrated by spreading and closing his fingers in a fanlike motion, and asked the Dalai Lama to copy this action.

When you do this, you are first of all politely acceding to my request that you do so. Then you are engaging in voluntary, deliberately willed actions. This involves certain parts of your motor cortex in a discrete and complicated pattern of electrochemical activity. You can subjectively recognize the feelings generated by your intentions, your initiatives, and the corresponding perceptual experiences that return from your fingers, hands, and vision, to inform you that you have performed the actions more or less appropriately.

Dr. Livingston then took the Dalai Lama’s hand in his own, holding his fingers together.

If I restrain your fingers so that your voluntary actions are gently prevented, and ask you to nevertheless continue spreading your fingers in the same way, you can immediately appreciate the difference required by having to make extra brain efforts, or willpower, as well as extra muscular efforts.

DALAI LAMA: So what is the meaning of this?

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: Using Western neuroscientific techniques we could obtain simultaneous objective and subjective evidence that many specific parts of your brain were performing certain orderly, yet very complicated, operations: responding to my request, deciding whether to comply, executing particular finger performances, doing so against resistance, and so forth. Altogether a fantastically large number of distinctive parts of your brain were involved in these activities—auditory, visual, visceromotor, somatomotor, somesthetic, etc.—and individual body parts have been commanded discretely, differentially, and with exquisite sequential precision. In short, for this simple performance, there has been a spectacular orchestration of activities among many discrete parts of your brain. I venture to say that at least a few dozen billion nerve cells and numerous scores of trillions of electrochemical signals were activated in the course of this modest exercise. These brain events involved near and remote circuits and multiple sectors of cortical and subcortical cellular constellations, all of which were harmoniously integrated.

We take this entirely for granted, but it is nonetheless quite astonishing to consider. I suggest that we need to engage in this kind of thinking in order to gain an inkling of the complexities and finesse of human brain processes, and to hold the brain’s potentialities in sufficient awe. These are the kinds of considerations that bring Western neuroscientists to determine experimentally how detailed brain processes occur during perception, judgment, and behavior. How are such detailed brain events channeled to control our bodies, to produce sentences, to generate ideas, experience, and manifest emotions? What is the nature of central brain command, and, more broadly, how do dynamic changes of brain state take place between sleep and wakefulness, or between sleep, deep sleep, and dreaming sleep? How are these changes of brain state controlled? More broadly still, what is the role of consciousness in such activities?

These are the kinds of questions we would like to open for free discussion with you in this dialogue. We pay our respects to two cultural traditions which have been separated for so very long and now have a cordial opportunity for exchange by virtue of your curiosity, initiative, and generosity. This opens for neuroscientists an excellent opportunity for professional enrichment because Buddhists have been thinking about consciousness, mind, and body for a very long time along different conceptual paths. We must acknowledge our own humility and naiveté: there are many things that we don’t yet know about the brain and the mind, so many about which we are unsure, and others still about which we remain unknowingly in error.

We shall attempt to represent Western neurosciences in a fair way. We can then become your allies in helping insofar as possible to increase mutual understanding in both directions and to dissolve barriers that have too long separated these two insight-seeking cultures. In the process, it should be possible to devise innovative experimental strategies directed to objectifying phenomena studied according to both traditions.

Many fundamental concepts are swiftly changing in Western neurosciences’ views relating to brain mechanisms. So we must stay tuned in order to move together within this tumbling stream of scientific innovation.

One of the fundamentals underlying these dialogues is our mutual concern for world peace. We sincerely believe that several pertinent disciplines from both traditions are of great importance for humanity to help in the development of more rational human self-knowledge, cross-cultural mutual understanding, and compassion, all urgently needed to safeguard this planetary habitat and to ensure equitable sharing of its bounty.