Brain Control of Consciousness States with Dr. J. Allan Hobson - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 2|Session 4

Overview

The current knowledge of the control of the states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming by the brain stem is reviewed. The way the brain is activated and how the source of information processed is switched is detailed. The neurobiological data are related to details of the experience such as dream visions, dream thinking, and dream feeling. Techniques for dream collection incubation, lucidity, and control are reviewed along with some of the history of these techniques in western science and religion.

Dialogue 2
6 sessions
October 6, 1989
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

Bio dialogues

Dr. Allan Hobson is interested in the relationship of mind and brain with special reference to conscious states, including dreaming. He studies human sleep and dreaming and performs experiments on animals in the Laboratory of Neurophysiobiology at the Harvard Medical School where he is a Professor of Psychiatry. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain (1988) and Sleep (1989). Не recently won the prestigious von Humboldt award ofthe Max PlanckSociety. He is a lucid dreamer.

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Robert Livingston is Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus at UCSD. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. Prior to founding the world's first Department of Neurosciences, the first department in the new School of Medicine at UCSD in 1965; he taught Neuropathology at Stanford, Neurophysiology at Yale, Psychiatry at Harvard, and Physiology and Anatomy at the UCLA Medical School. He also served as Executive Assistant to the President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the National Research Council; and as Scientific Director for both the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Livingston has held research and teaching fellowships at the Université de Genève, Collège de France, Oxford University, Göteborg University, University of Hawaii, and University ofZürich. He is active in Physicians for Social Responsibility, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Beyond War. He participated in the founding of the Council for a Livable World, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Elmwood Institute.

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