Mysticism at the SfN

In the New York Times today, I read a story about a controversy brewing among neuroscientists concerning someone who has been invited to speak at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) to be held next month in Washington, DC.

[The Dalai Lama] has been an enthusiastic collaborator in research on whether the intense meditation practiced by Buddhist monks can train the brain to generate compassion and positive thoughts. Next month in Washington, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to speak about the research at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

But 544 brain researchers have signed a petition urging the society to cancel the lecture, because, according to the petition, "it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity."

Defenders of the Dalai Lama's appearance say that the motivation of many protesters is political, because many are Chinese or of Chinese descent. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese crushed a Tibetan bid for independence.

But many scientists who signed the petition say they did so because they believe that the field of neuroscience risks losing credibility if it ventures too recklessly into spiritual matters.

On that last sentence: How 'bout this: Science will lose all credibility if it ventures into mysticism at all.

This is not to say that research into what is going on in the brain during meditation is totally unwarranted. At least from the news article, it appears that this is plausibly what the Dalai Lama has helped some scientists do.

In one widely reported 2003 study, Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison led a team of researchers that found that 25 employees of a biotechnology company showed increased levels of neural activity in the left anterior temporal region of their brains after taking a course in meditation. The region is active during sensations of happiness and positive emotion, the researchers reported.

This area of research is completely unfamiliar to me, so will leave aside the question of how well this study was conducted and how well its conclusions are supported by other work. However, I see no substantive difference in testing brain activity while someone is meditating as opposed to while they are performing other mental tasks. This sort of work is done all the time. (What would be wrong would be to use the fact that meditation was studied rigorously to imply that unrelated claims about what meditation can accomplish are somehow validated.) In this respect, I have no problem with researchers studying willing participants, including the Dalai Lama.

What I do wonder about is this: What makes the Dalai Lama a scientific collaborator? His cooperation might be crucial to the work in question, but suppose I wanted to study brain differences between, say, professional basketball players and the general population. I might enlist the aid of the NBA or a few team owners in the quest for study participants. The study wouldn't happen without their help, but that would not make the owners collaborators. They are not scientists. The players themselves provide data, but they are also not collaborators in the scientific sense. While the owners and players would be thanked in any resulting publication of the work, they would not be listed as authors and would not be qualified to speak about the science at all.

And you would not see someone like Mark Cuban or Shaquille O'Neal speaking at a scientific conference.

Granted, one might attribute to journalistic sloppiness the use of the term "collaborator" in this story to describe the Dalai Lama's role in ongoing research on meditation, but that still begs the question of why he was invited to speak at a scientific conference. Even if the research on meditation is rock solid (a contention that some scientists clearly do not agree with), this invitation can be easily manipulated to give his religion a veneer of credibility that only science can give it.

Indeed, from a description of the talk that appears at the conference web site (No permalink: Citation is "Dalai Lama. THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MEDITATION Program No. 8. 2005 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner. Washington, DC: Society for Neuroscience, 2005. Online."), that seems indeed to be what is going on. The talk is to be the first in a lecture series called "Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society", which will feature insights from leading figures in "fields at the boundaries of neuroscience". While this is certainly legitimate at the meeting of the SfN, and one could argue that the Dalai Lama, after 15 years of working with neuroscientists might have some interesting things to say, the last sentence in the description sounds like he will be using the lecture as an opportunity to promote his religious views at a scientific conference, something that is exactly what should not be going on. To paraphrase: The Dalai Lama will discuss the implications of this research in promoting "compassionate behavior in all human beings."

In fact, the scientist who invited the Dalai Lama to speak at the conference seems to share in this agenda.

"The practice of meditation is a human behavior, and the Dalai Lama is extraordinarily skilled at it and at promoting qualities of peace and compassion that I thought could bring us together," said Dr. Barnes, a professor of psychology and neurology at the University of Arizona who invited the Dalai Lama to speak last February.

The place to promote Buddhism as the path to peace is anywhere but at a scientific conference.

-- CAV