Although hospital chaplains play a vital role in delivering emotional and spiritual care to a broad range of both religious and non-religious patients, there is remarkably little research on the best practices of chaplaincy training or “active ingredients” of chaplain spiritual consults. The need for rigorous research in this area is highlighted by the demands …
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Developmental Contemplative Science: Framework for the Study of Prosocial Development
The aim of this talk is to provide a brief introduction to Developmental Contemplative Science (DCS), a theoretical framework that leverages insights from recent research on brain and behavioral development and examines how contemplative practices can facilitate the emergence of essential human functions such as reflection, agency, well being, and empathy. On this view, development …
2020 Mind & Life Conversation with the Dalai Lama: Resilience, Compassion, and Science for Healing Today
The Mind & Life Institute was honored to host this special livestream event with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The program explored insights for individual and collective healing, integrating contemplation, science, and action, helping us to consider how crisis can be an opportunity to shift human consciousness and embrace our shared humanity. For viewers in …
Addressing moral distress in clinical practice: A contemplative, neuroscience-based intervention
The experience of acute moral distress has become a pervasive and serious problem among health care clinicians. Clinical care, especially of patients with serious and life threatening illness, requires clinicians on the front lines to discern ethically justifiable courses of action in exceedingly complex circumstances, riddled with conflict and uncertainty. Although complex moral decision-making is …
Meditation, concepts and de-reification: Investigation of possible links between contemplative and neurocognitive perspectives
This project is a theoretical and experimental pilot investigation of the impact of contemplative practices on concepts — the fundamental building blocks of cognition. The exploration focuses on intentionality of concepts as their property of representing entities whilst being detached from them. Terms such as ‘metacognitive insight’ (Teasdale et al., 2002), ‘re-perceiving’ (Shapiro et al., …
Where’s the Breath? An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Breath Awareness Placement
This will be a Scientific Pilot Study of the significance of where practitioners place their attention when they are doing breath awareness meditation. We will concentrate on two distinctive forms of Buddhist meditation, mindfulness practice as drawn from normative Pali Canon texts that emphasize placing the attention on the nostrils and zazen texts from the …
Philosophical and historical accounts for the neuroscientific investigation of human spirituality
Although human spirituality has long been considered impenetrable to empirical investigation, recent cognitive and affective neuroscience studies have started the neuroscientific exploration of the mental processes and the neural underpinnings underlying spiritual and religious experiences. The scientific investigation of such complex phenomena, however, cannot proceed in the absence of a deep philosophical conceptualization of human …
The effect of mindfulness training on executive function and social cognition in the developing brain: An EEG study in preschoolers practicing mindfulness
Recent years have seen a proliferation of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in K-12 educational settings. Scientific inquiry of MBIs in adults suggests beneficial effects on a wide range of cognitive and socio-emotional processes. In line with these findings, MBIs studies in K-12 settings have reported a reduction in behavioral difficulties, psychopathological symptoms, executive function (EF) and …
The impact of mindfulness training on emotion regulation of primary school children in Vietnamese cultural context: Integrating electrophysiological and first-person assessments
Mindfulness is a form of mental training wherein metacognitive awareness, attention control and an attitude of non-reactivity are cultivated. Applied to managing of emotions, mindfulness can be considered an emotion regulation strategy. Only a few developmental studies explored the direct link between mindfulness and emotion regulation and they were limited to Western cultural context. Additionally, …
1987 Mind & Life Dialogue I
This groundbreaking meeting, which began the Dialogue series, was inspired by a shared interest in opening a conversation between Buddhist thought and cognitive science to mutually inform and enrich these two distinct modes of exploring existence. LOCATION: Dharamsala, India Participants
