Tibet House US & Science of Yoga Project Blog present it's second installment.
| Continuing where we left off in the first blog entry, we are in the process of introducing into this “cyberframework” subjects that have been presented in our recently published volume, Longevity, Regeneration and Optimal Health; Integrating Eastern and Western Perspectives (Annals of the New York Academy of Sceinces, Volume 1172), based on a Conference of the same name held at Tibet House’s Menla Center in late 2006 with keynote speaker His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In the last blog, I very briefly described how meditation and yoga could potentially activate the body’s powerful innate defenses against the forces of aging and disease, and how our Conference and volume contributed to the process of integrating the exciting new discoveries in various branches of “Western” (actually more appropriately called “cosmopolitan”) science with the ancient and still-flourishing Asiatic sciences of meditation and yoga. Now I would like to also briefly introduce the idea that these practices not only possess potentially powerful “defensive” properties, but also properties that can lead to the optimization of functioning as well. Here in this blog, as well as in the last chapter of our volume and in the last of my three classes for the Spring 2010 semester at Tibet House, I am focusing on how these practices may lead to the optimization of fundamental functions such as perception and cognition. The fundamental idea – based in part on the writings of the Dalai Lama, Professor Robert Thurman, and other major figures in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, along with contemporary scholarship and science – is that these practices have the potential to actually transform the brain. In particular, working with these sources, I have developed an integrative “East-West” scientific model, based on critical analysis of direct and indirect evidence, that suggests that meditators may through prolonged intensive practice become capable of dramatically enhanced visual perception, including into much more refined and smaller scales of space and time. For example, the evidence critically reviewed and interpreted in this model suggests that advanced meditators may be able to achieve clear perceptual awareness at least within intervals of several miiliseconds of time and several millionths of a meter in space. Meditators may also be able to exploit the innate capacity of the human visual system to perceive light itself at the level of single photons, at its quantum mechanical limits. According to this new model, these capacities may be obtained through the development of profound stillness and corresponding subtle awareness in which the signal-to-noise ratio becomes increased; through the related capacity to control attention, which has recently been dramatically demonstrated by advanced meditators in the experimental setting; and through neuroplastic changes in the visual system itself, mediated by the process known as “perceptual learning.” These terms will be explored and defined more precisely and in depth in future blogs and publications, as will the model that suggests that these changes in capacity may be at least partly responsible for enabling advanced meditators to directly perceive aspects of the phenomenal world which are geometrically “right in front of our eyes” but nevertheless not detectable without these changes, such as, possibly, the “subtle moment-to-moment impermanence” and lack of solidity of the objects that make up the phenomenal world. We will return to these perhaps tantalizing suggestions, hoping to elicit further comments, questions, and criticisms from a range of readers, in future installments of Tibet House’s Science of Yoga Project. |     |
