The Neuroscience of Compassion Audiobook (Free)

Discuss what the various tools of contemporary neuroscience have revealed about the brains of individuals who spent years cultivating well-being and qualities of mind that promote an optimistic outlook.

Make use of the tools of modern neuroscience combined with the wisdom of Buddhism to study kindness and compassion–how spirituality fulfills science through the brand new field of contemplative neuroscience.

In 1992, the neuroscientist Richard Davidson got difficult from the Dalai Lama. By that point, he’d spent his profession about The Neuroscience of Compassion requesting why people respond to, in his words, “life’s slings and arrows” in various ways. What makes some people even more resilient than others in the face of tragedy? And it is resilience something you can gain through practice?

The Dalai Lama had a different question for Davidson when he visited the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader at his residence in Dharamsala, India. “He stated: ‘You’ve been using the various tools of contemporary neuroscience to review depression, and anxiousness, and dread. Why can’t you utilize those same equipment to study kindness and compassion?’ … I did so not have a very good response. I said it had been hard.”

The Dalai Lama was interested in what the various tools of modern neuroscience could reveal about the brains of individuals who spent years, in Davidson’s words, “cultivating well-being … cultivating characteristics of your brain which promote a positive outlook.” The result was that, shortly afterward, Davidson brought a series of Buddhist monks into his lab and strapped electrodes to their heads or treated them to some hours in an MRI machine.

“The best way to activate positive-emotion circuits in the brain is through generosity,” Davidson, who founded the guts for Looking into Healthy Minds at University of Wisconsin, Madison, said in a talk in the Aspen Tips Festival. “This is really a sort of fascinating neuroscientific locating because there are pearls of intelligence in the contemplative tradition-the Dalai Lama regularly talks about this-that the best way for us to become happy is usually to be ample to others. And actually the scientific proof is in many ways bearing this out, and showing that there are systematic changes in the mind that are associated with functions of generosity.”