dharmadoctors.org

Thursday, April 1st, 2010; Munzer Auditorium, Stanford University

Together with Alan Wallace and three-dozen collaborating researchers, we are investigating how attentional, emotional and physiological processes change over the course of three months of intensive training in meditative quiescence and emotional balance, in a study known as “The Shamatha Project.” Scientific measures include established paradigms in cognitive and affective neuroscience, stress and affiliation-related biomarkers, EEG, autonomic physiology, facial expressions of emotion, self report, daily journaling, and structured interviews. Our initial findings demonstrate improvements in adaptive psychological attributes, perceptual and attention-related skills, improvements in inhibiting habitual responses, decreased mind-wandering, changes in the emotional response to the perception of human suffering, and changes in biomarkers associated with cellular repair. Together, these findings demonstrate wide-ranging benefits of the retreat experience. These findings will be discussed in the context of theoretical and methodological issues involved in conducting research in contemplative practice.

Clifford Saron, Ph.D., is currently an Associate Research Scientist and core faculty member at the Center for Mind and Brain of the University of California at Davis (http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu), and faculty member of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999 studying interhemispheric visuomotor integration under the direction of Herbert Vaughan, Jr. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in brain and behavioral effects of meditation practice, was on the faculty at the Mind and Life Summer Institute for the three years and currently serves on the Program and Research Council of Mind and Life. In the early 1990’s he was centrally involved in a field research project investigating Tibetan Buddhist mind training in collaboration with Jose Cabezón, Richard Davidson, Francisco Varela, Alan Wallace and others under the auspices of the Private Office of H.H. the Dalai Lama and Mind and Life. Currently, in collaboration with Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace and a consortium of nearly 30 scientists at UC Davis and elsewhere, he is Principal Investigator of The Shamatha Project, a unique longitudinal study of the effects of intensive meditation training based on the practice of meditative quiescence (shamatha) and cultivation of the four immeasurables (loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) on attention-related skills and emotion regulation. The Shamatha Project is the most comprehensive and multimethod study to date regarding the potential effects of long-term intensive meditation practice on basic mental and physical processes related to cognition, emotion, and motivation. His other primary research interest focuses on investigating brain and behavioral correlates of sensory processing and multisensory integration in children on the autistic spectrum.