This master lecture roundtable panel brings together eminent scholars in the field to explore the very idea of Contemplative Studies and its future. Panelists will explore critical questions and probe the importance of collaborative research processes that involve first, second and third-person perspectives and span the disciplines. They will explore questions such as: What is …
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Master Lectures: Social Justice Panel: “From Awareness to Embodied Change: A Conversation Toward Contemplative Justice”
In her Keynote at ISCS 2016, Rhonda Magee posed the idea of “creating science that resonates with the suffering of the world” by considering how colorblindness and implicit bias impact contemplative research and practice communities. We are called to consider the ways in which it is necessary to move beyond identifying these individual factors toward …
2018 International Symposium for Contemplative Research
The Mind & Life International Symposium for Contemplative Research (ISCR) is the flagship conference for interdisciplinary investigations of the mind, meditation, and other contemplative practices. We are teachers, researchers, scientists and scholars. We are activists, politicians and business leaders. We are parents, students, social workers and first responders. We are instructors, writers, filmmakers and philosophers. We are all change-makers.
Ecologies of Mind in Health and Illness: A Perspective from Cultural Psychiatry
Mental afflictions challenge people everywhere in the world and every tradition has methods for alleviating mental suffering. Cultural psychiatry explores the impact of diverse social histories, cultures, and contexts on mental health and illness. A growing literature demonstrates the role of culture in shaping illness onset, experience, coping, healing, and recovery. Recent work in cognitive …
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You Are Always on My Mind
During the last decade, much of social neuroscience has gone anti-solipsistic. That is, research is discovering how we, with our minds and bodies, are deeply connected to others, and that this may be seen in patterns of brain activity and other physiological signals. Be that in terms of action representations, markers of empathy, signs of …
Interdisciplinary Panel & Small Groups
This panel aims to foster greater interdisciplinary dialogue by highlighting the subtleties, challenges, and opportunities involved in working across disciplines. Faculty representing diverse academic perspectives will give a brief overview of their discipline, including discussion of the central questions and approaches used in each, and how these come into play in contemplative studies. There will …
2017 Summer Research Institute
The 2017 Mind & Life Summer Research Institute gives attention to scientific, humanistic and first-person contemplative perspectives on intersubjectivity and social connectivity. Plenary presentations, workshops and small group discussions explore interrelational human dynamics, including how we relate to ourselves and others, and to community and strangers. Faculty from across a multitude of disciplines present research findings on the meditative cultivation of pro-social emotions, intergroup dynamics, social and embodied cognition, cognitive ecology, implicit bias and social justice.
Love and Enaction: Towards an Engaged Epistemology
How do we understand life and mind? For Kym Maclaren, understanding something means “letting it be.” We understand something only to the extent that we do not fully determine it. Understanding something wrongly can do an injustice to it. Imagine a horse trainer only interested in the moneymaking his animal can do; it will collapse …
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STEMing the Tide: How Female Experts and Peers Foster Social Connections and Serve as “Social Vaccines” to Protect Young Women’s Self-Concept in STEM
Individuals’ choice to pursue one academic or professional path over another may feel like a free choice but it is often constrained by subtle cues in achievement environments that signal who naturally belong there and who don’t. What factors release these constraints and enhance individuals’ real freedom to pursue academic and professional paths despite stereotypes …
Plasticity of the Social Brain: Effects of a One-year Mental Training Study on Social Connectedness, Compassion, Theory of Mind, Social Stress, and the Body
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to positive changes in socio-affective and cognitive functions. Tania Singer will show first results of the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program in which participants were trained in …
