Summer Research Institute

at the Garrison Institute

Upcoming SRIs

Past SRIs

Past SRI faculty

Purpose

The purpose of the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute is to advance collaborative research among behavioral scientists, neuroscientists, and biomedical researchers based on a process of inquiry, dialogue, and in some cases, collaboration, with Buddhist contemplative practitioners and scholars and those in other contemplative traditions. The long-term objective is to advance the training of a new generation of behavioral scientists, cognitive/affective neuroscientists, Buddhists and other contemplative scholar/practitioners interested in exploring the influence of contemplative practice on mind, behavior, brain function, and health, including the potential role of contemplative methods in characterizing human experience and consciousness.

The specific goals of this program are:

  1. to cultivate strategic dialogue between experimental psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists on the one hand, and contemplative scholar/practitioners and philosophers on the other, in order to develop research protocols to enhance investigation of human mental activity;
  2. to foster a cadre of nascent scientists (graduate students and post-docs) and contemplative scholars and philosophers to participate in the development of the next generation of scientists, clinicians, and scholars interested in innovation and collaboration at the mind-brain-behavior interface;
  3. to advance a collaborative research program to study the influence of contemplative practices on the mind, behavior and brain function, by informed use of highly trained subjects in human neuroscience protocols.
  4. to explore ways in which the first-person examination of mental phenomena, by means of refining attention and related skills, may be raised to a level of rigor comparable to the third-person methodologies of the cognitive sciences; and
  5. to catalyze the creation of three new scientific and academic disciplines: Contemplative Neuroscience; Contemplative Clinical Science and Contemplative Studies.