Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [85]
Raised Jewish, Davidson had attended a yeshiva for seven years in Brooklyn before delving into Eastern philosophy as an undergraduate at New York University. In 1974, when he was a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard, Davidson ventured to India for his first meditative retreat. There he learned the mental rigors of Buddhist meditation and watched in awe as some contemplative monks sat hour after hour, sometimes fifteen hours a day, fully engaged in their internal mental world. As he did, a question arose that would chart the next thirty years of his life. Was there something about the monks’ brains that allowed them to respond to “life’s slings and arrows” more positively—and could anyone do the same?
“I became more and more interested in the possibility of transforming our brain by changing our mind, and in how meditation could play a very beneficial role in that process,” he explained to me as we sat in his office, which looked out on the snowy midwestern campus in mid-February.
Davidson believed—and later demonstrated—that mental exercise could sculpt a person’s mental circuitry, just as lifting weights could sculpt his biceps. Davidson had shown as much with the EEGs of Buddhist meditators, who could with a little focus shift their brain-wave activity to the left side of the brain. This intrigued Davidson, since earlier studies had shown that people with higher brain-wave activity in the left prefrontal cortex reported feeling more alert, energized, enthusiastic, and joyous. People with higher brain-wave activity in the right side reported feeling more worry, anxiety, and sadness; they rarely felt elation or joy. The fact that the brain-wave activity of the Buddhist monks swamped to the left persuaded Davidson that the brains of these meditators were different from yours and mine. The question thus became: Are these Buddhists born with different brains, which is why they gravitate toward meditation? Or could anyone achieve that state of joy, peace, and holiness with a little practice?
Enter the Dalai Lama. When the Dalai Lama heard of Davidson’s work, he invited the neurologist to Dharamsala for a chat. So it happened that in 1992, Davidson, two other neuroscientists, and a Buddhist scholar dragged hundreds of pounds of equipment—laptop computers, EEG machines, and untold numbers of batteries—to a remote mountain refuge. Their mission: to measure brain-wave activity of Buddhist “adepts.” These monks had between 10,000 and 50,000 hours of meditation under their belts. If mental Olympians did exist, they would be found there, under the wing of the Dalai Lama.
“From a scientific perspective, it was thoroughly unsuccessful,” Davidson recalled. “Most did not speak any language other than Tibetan. They have not lived anywhere other than in the Himalayas. They had never seen a computer before. To many of them, just the act of interacting with a keyboard was completely novel. And so it was a rude awakening for us regarding the problems of bridging this cultural chasm.”
The scientists left India with no data, but they did leave with a prize far more valuable in the long term: they piqued the interest of the Dalai Lama, who eventually sent eight of his monks to Davidson’s laboratory in Madison,Wisconsin.
They arrived one by one, dressed in their saffron robes and eyes wide as pies, to be slid into brain scanners, or affixed with 256 EEG electrodes on their shaved heads, hanging down like dreadlocks. Davidson would compare the brains of these monks with the brains of ten students who received one week of meditation