New Beginnings: Evidence That the Meditational ...

LONGEVITY, REGENERATION, AND OPTIMAL HEALTH

New Beginnings: Evidence That the Meditational Regimen Can Lead to Optimization of Perception, Attention, Cognition, and Other Functions William C. Bushell Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA A “framework” is presented for understanding empirically confirmed and unconfirmed phenomena in the Indo-Tibetan meditation system, from an integrative perspective, and providing evidence that certain meditative practices enable meditators to realize the innate human potential to perceive light “at the limits imposed by quantum mechanics,” on the level of individual photons. This is part of a larger Buddhist agenda to meditatitively develop perceptual/attentional capacities to achieve penetrating insight into the nature of phenomena. Such capacities may also allow advanced meditators to perceive changes in natural scenes that are “hidden” from persons with “normal” attentional capacities, according to research on “change blindness,” and to enhance their visual system functioning akin to high-speed and time-lapse photography, in toto allowing for the perception, as well as sophisticated understanding, of the “moment to moment change or impermanence” universally characteristic of the phenomenal world but normally outside untrained attention and perception according to Buddhist doctrine. Key words: Indo-Tibetan meditation system; perception; cognition

In this concluding paper I intend to focus on some of the key issues in “higher” cognitive subjects in an integrative (multidisciplinary, intertraditional) framework, following a loose trajectory implicit in the structure of this volume, from the physiological to the psychological, by highlighting important and exciting work of a number of the contributors. This paper will be organized into sections on perception, attention, and cognition, for purposes of clarity. I am again employing the device of the “framework” (see Overview chapter) as described and utilized by Crick and Koch,1 with the one caveat that I do not assert that the speculations emerging from it will be “largely correct,” although that indeed is the hope.

Crick and Koch describe their use of the term in their overview article, “A framework for consciousness”:

Address for correspondence: William C. Bushell, Ph.D., Anthropology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 16-267, Cambridge, MA 02139. [email protected]

A framework is not a detailed hypothesis or set of hypotheses; rather it is a suggested point of view for an attack on a scientific problem, often suggesting testable hypotheses. . .. A good framework is one that sounds reasonably plausible relative to available scientific data and that turns out to be largely correct. It is unlikely to be correct in all the details. A framework often contains unstated (and often unrecognized) assumptions, but this is unavoidable.

Perception . . . the basic emphases on empiricism and reason are similar in Buddhism and science. . .[but] because of the development of Western technology in the last two hundred years, science has been able to extend the capacity of the senses to degrees unimaginable in earlier times.2

Longevity, Regeneration, and Optimal Health: Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1172: 348–361 (2009). c 2009 New York Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04960.x

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Bushell: New Beginnings

We begin a consideration of perception by adding a major revision to the above formulation by the Dalai Lama, one that has actually emerged out of the formulation, in conjunction with the work of several conference participants. This revision proposes that the very same development of Western technology, paradoxically, can be utilized to demonstrate that some centuries ago developments in meditation practice coinciding with the emergence of Buddhism already had lead to extraordinary, if not unimaginable, extensions of the capacity of the senses, actually constituting an earlier scientific and technological revolution. This claim is based on a recent research—the advanced high technology research mentioned above by the Dalai Lama—by physicists and biophysicists from Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, Columbia, the University of Washington, among others, research that has demonstrated that, under certain conditions, the human visual system is capable of detecting light at or near “the limit imposed by quantum mechanics,” and actually at the level of single photons.3 To summarize this extensive research conducted in numerous labs, Rieke and Baylor, writing recently in Reviews in Modern Physics, claim that the human visual system, beginning with the photoreceptor cells of the retina, are “nearly perfect photon counters. . .[which] equal or exceed the performance of man-made detectors” including “solid state silicon detectors (photomultiplier tubes and charge coupled devices).”4 Speaking further of these “nearly perfect biological photon counters, built of protein, lipid, carbohydrate, and water,” Princeton biophysicist William Bialek explains that under certain conditions human “visual sensitivity approaches the limits set by the division of light into discrete photons and the statistical fluctuation in photon absorption. [And these fluctuations] are unavoidable and impose a fundamental limit to visual fidelity that no imaging device can exceed.”5,6 The first step in this elegant and advanced system, operating at the limits imposed by physical reality, in which light—in its fundamen-

tal statistical, quantum mechanical nature— actually meets the human retina, can be expressed in the form of two simple and elegant (Poisson) equations:7 P see =

∞ exp (−Q E N¯ )(Q E N¯ )n n! n ≥

(1)

where Psee is the number of photons required for seeing, is the behavioral threshold, N¯ is the number of photons arriving at the cornea, and QE N¯ is an unknown quantum efficiency. And ∞ exp [−Q E (N¯ + D )][Q E (N¯ + D )] P see = n! n ≥ (2) in which D is the “dark noise”—which can be expressed as an additive “dark light”—or, in other words, simply factors in the “false positives” created by thermal/metabolic events biophysically resembling photon absorptions that derive from the basic metabolic processes required for keeping the system active or living (also known as “quantum bumps”8 ; see below). Before proceeding to describe the critical factors that make it possible for humans to actually take advantage of this “soft tissue/high technology” system, we will sketch out, in the briefest schematic form, the remaining steps which can potentially lead to the conscious awareness of the contact with single photons at their quantum mechanical limit, steps which further strikingly illustrate this “soft tissue/high technology” nature of the visual system. When an individual photon makes contact with a rhodopsin molecule of the retinal photoreceptor cell, it produces a photocurrent of from 1–3 trillionths of an amp (1–3 picoamps).9 Before this contact can lead to either fluorescence or the loss of quantum mechanical coherence—both of which would prevent photon detection—an ultrafast chemical reaction (isomerization) occurs, actually within approximately 200 quadrillionths of a second (200 femtoseconds), which then allows the signal to avoid loss of so-called quantum coherence and be further transmitted from the retina through

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to an amplifying pathway of neuronal circuitry leading to the brain and the potential for conscious awareness.5,10 It should be noted that this latter process is similar to and provided the basis for the development of pulsed lasers, although, here again, high technology humanmade devices have not exceeded the performance of the “psychobiological technology” of the retina, as this isomerization reaction remains “one of the fastest molecular events ever observed.”5 So what, then, are the crucial conditions alluded to above, which allow conscious awareness to access the workings of this “soft tissue/ high technology” system? Their significance is great and must be considered only briefly here, under ideological, motivational, and what might be termed practical or logistical categories of factors. It will be seen that, although there have been no experimental studies of light detection at visual threshold in meditators, the following considerations indicate that Buddhist meditators meet and probably surpass the conditions under which Western subjects in the experimental psychophysics setting have provided the data which has been briefly reviewed above. To begin with, in ideological terms, these latter subjects were participating in experimental psychophysics studies explicitly designed to test the limits of human light detection, and the subjects were aware of this goal and were compliant with it. Presumably, some of the subjects were curious or enthusiastic, and others were less so. However, some form of motivation was required, because the conditions were demanding, usually taking several hours of preparation and moderate to intense attention and concentration. Resistance to distraction, fatigue, and restlessness were required to meet these demanding conditions, along with immobility of body, head (partially achieved through the use of harnesses and braces), and to some extent of the eyes. Finally, the subjects were required to be in near complete darkness, as it is only darkadapted, or “scotopic” vision, which is capable of light detection at absolute threshold.5,6,11,12

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

In reverse order, then, Buddhist meditators—particularly those of the Indo-Tibetan tradition—practice several forms of meditation under various dark-adapted conditions ranging from night meditation to a spectrum of “dark retreat” practices, including in meditation chambers which have multiple rooms with graded lighting conditions up to absolute darkness.13 Over time, yogic meditators achieve prolonged periods of more or less absolute bodily stillness, a number of cases being confirmed by electromyographic (EMG) recordings with zero readings for extensive periods, indicating a complete absence of muscoskeletal movement.14 In addition these meditators appear to experience periods with reduced or absent eye movements (blinks, saccades),15 which may also offer a crucial advantage in such contexts, as eye movements have been found to limit single photon detection,16 and may even lead to spatiotemporal distortions of photon emission events.17 Also over time Buddhist meditators seek to become able to significantly control their levels of wakefulness, arousal, attentiveness, and concentration for hours at a time. The control of attention is a major primary goal of the mediation tradition. In the textual and oral traditions, as described by the Dalai Lama, Robert Thurman, and others,18 this emphasis on attentional training is paramount, and according to recent experimental studies of advanced Indo-Tibetan meditators by Davidson19 and by Pettigrew,20 the training in fact appears to result in extraordinary levels of enhanced attentional control (see below). And for reasons related to enhanced relaxation, not only cognitive distractions are minimized, but on a basic physiological level, meditators are likely to experience fewer metabolic (thermal) events in the visual system, events which may otherwise add to the “dark noise” of the system, a form of noise which can lower detection accuracy, as indicated by D in Equation (2) above.21 And finally, to consider the ideological and motivational factors together: one of the


major goals of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism is to come to know, to understand, on a deep level— actually to directly perceive—“the nature and limits of phenomena,” to use the term of the leading scholar-practitioner of the central school (Gelugpa) of Tibetan Buddhism, Geshe Gedun Lodro.22 The nature and limits of phenomena are understood to include, among other epistemological concerns, the irreducible constituents, the “minute particles” or “partless particles of matter, energy, space, and time,” of which the macroscopic “objects” and processes of the phenomenal world are “composed,” aggregated.22,23 This understanding, this direct perception, is actually one of the ultimate goals of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and practitioners are, therefore, highly motivated to be able to detect light and other phenomena at the most irreducible limits of their existence. In fact these goals are explicitly sought by practitioners of mindfulness meditation, a form of perception-based meditation similar to that found in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, in pioneering studies by Dan Brown conducted in the 1980s (reviewed in Brown, this volume).24 Although these studies did not investigate performance at absolute visual threshold (i.e., scotopic visual detection of individual photons), they did look at the ability of meditators to detect extremely brief light flashes and to discriminate between pairs of extremely brief light flashes. The studies utilized the tachistoscope, a precision technical device that produces precisely calibrated and timed light flashes, and they provide the first precise quantitative evidence of “the long-standing descriptions of the enhancement of the perceptual field resulting from meditation.”25 These studies combined the tachistiscopic study design with in-depth interviews of the meditators based on Brown’s own extensive knowledge of meditation, and demonstrated that the practice of meditation was associated with significant increases in both detection and discrimination speed and accuracy, allowing experienced meditators to enhance their detection of light flashes as brief as three

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thousandths of a second (3.01 milliseconds). Moreover, advanced meditators reported observing three parts to the flashes—i.e., a beginning, middle, and end to each flash—and also provided phenomenological accounts suggestive of the possibility that at times they may have perceived the light flashes as “decomposed” or “broken down” into punctate light points (clusters of photons?). At other times advanced meditators’ phenomenological accounts of movements in and of the visual field suggest the possibility that the increased rate of perception may have ushered them to the beginnings of awareness of the “stroboscopic”26 or “frameby-frame”1 nature of consciousness that has recently been uncovered by new research in contemporary neuroscience (see below). These studies in turn stimulated further research by Telles and colleagues on yoga meditators’ perception of flickering light in a somewhat different protocol, utilizing the “critical flicker fusion threshold” (CFFT) paradigm, in which subjects are tested to investigate how rapid a rate of flickering light they are capable of perceiving before the light appears “fused” into one continuous stream. Several studies in Telles’ lab demonstrated that yoga meditators’ training significantly increased this rate of perception (and see below).27 The same period in Western science and technology that uncovered the extraordinary photon detection capacity of the human sensory perceptual system also uncovered another “remarkable” (in Bialek’s words6 ) capacity for perceiving phenomena in miniscule or even possibly microscopic realms, the capacity for hyperacuity.28,29 Hyperacuity refers to the capacity to detect features in the visual field which are smaller than the diameter of a retinal photoreceptor cell, as fine as 2 seconds of arc of the visual field, or in the range of millionths of a meter. Many features of the visual field including line segments, spots, properties of contour, depth, alignment, certain motion-related features, and others, have been found in the experimental psychophysics laboratory to be detectable in the hyperacuity range.28,29 Several

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key properties of hyperacuity perception are particularly relevant for the present context: •

•

•

Hyperacuity is subject to a phenomenon known as perceptual learning; perceptual learning may occur in response to exposure alone to a given stimulus; is generally enhanced when attention is directed to the stimulus; and is generally further enhanced through repeated attention to the stimulus, i.e., “practice” or “training.” Feedback is often not even necessary for perceptual learning to occur.28,29 Attending to such features in the visual field repeatedly often leads to both rapid (initial) enhancement of perceptual performance as well as long-term, continuous enhancement for over “thousands of trials” (i.e., of practice), and no performance asymptote has been reached in a number of experiments.30,31 Perceptual learning, including in the hyperacuity range, has recently been found to be associated with neuroplasticity, i.e., actual physiological changes in the neural circuitry underlying perception, in both early and higher levels of the visual system, changes that are relatively long-lasting and stable (i.e., resistant to decay). These neuroplastic changes can occur, moreover, throughout the entire neural substrate of the visual field (as represented retinotopically).28–33

Many of the same conditions listed above as necessary for photon detection at visual threshold (i.e., appropriate motivation, disciplined attention, immobility, etc.) are likewise required for perceptual performance on a hyperacuity level, with certain exceptions: in many cases (but not all) hyperacuity requires photopic (daylight or well-lit), rather than scotopic (dark adapted) conditions; and eye movements, including saccades, microsaccades, and tremor, often appear to augment, facilitate rather detract from hyperacuity performance—in this case, such movements enhance perceptual performance according to the same set of principles which are employed in scanning electron

microscopy or other sophisticated visual scanning devices.26 Ericsson (see above, this volume) was an early contributor to the field of “hyperfunction” in perceptual learning, especially forcefully demonstrating the role of attention and deliberate practice in the achievement of the highest performance levels, in perceptual as well as other forms of learning; and he also contributed to recognition of the role of physiological plasticity in the nervous system and other tissues, including muscle.34 Ericsson and colleagues have contributed substantial evidence that disciplined, deliberately applied attentional states, on both a short-term and long-term basis, underlie the highest levels of achievement across the entire range of “expert and exceptional performance”—ranging from the performance of chess masters and grandmasters to world class mathematicians and scientists, and many others—including in the domain of perceptual learning, such as, for example, expert radiologists who are capable of detecting certain miniscule features in x-rays and other radiological scans which cannot be detected by untrained individuals (see below). Attention Taken together, this body of research reveals that the expert deployment of the attentional faculty can actually drive perceptual learning, including its underlying neuroplastic changes, to a “remarkable” hyperacuity level of perceptual performance in the experimental psychophysics setting28,32 and, according to the suggestive studies of Ericsson and colleagues (and see further, below),34 also in the context of expert and exceptional performance beyond the experimental psychophysics setting, in “the real world.” Moreover, when this evidence is considered in the context of the IndoTibetan meditational system, it appears that similar processes may be at work in enhancing the perceptual performance of meditators, especially in light of the fact that meditators


apparently fulfill or even surpass many of the same conditions that subjects in experimental psychophysics studies fulfill to achieve such levels of performance. Indeed, such notions of the potential effects of virtuoso mindfulness meditation training were what Thurman had in mind at the Harvard-MIT Mind Science Symposium several years ago, while in dialogue with leading neuroscientists and the Dalai Lama, he proposed the idea of a computer-based model in which “the Tibetan inner [meditative] technology creates software for the biocomputer’s [i.e., the brain’s] wetware that can lead to extraordinary results,” and proposed a bold, comprehensive program of research into “the cognitive, perceptual, and neurophysiological correlates of attentional training.”18 Where then does this attentional training lead the meditator? It can, as we have seen, lead the meditator’s attention or awareness into the “microscopic” realm of a fraction of the diameter of a retinal photoreceptor cell, within the millionths of a meter range. Moreover, repeatedly applied, disciplined attention (“practice” or “training”) can drive neuroplastic changes (Thurman’s “wetware”), potentially throughout the entire visual field,25,32,33 thereby transforming the neural circuitry (“soft tissue”) into a mechanism allowing precision detection of many physical features within this range of photoreceptor cell size, dimensions of several seconds of arc or millionths of a meter (“high technology”). This training can propel attention even further down into the microscopic level of light at “the limit imposed by quantum mechanics,”35 where the photocurrent produced by a single photon, several trillionths of an amp, is amplified by the laser-like operations of a sophisticated biochemical system—a “nearly perfect biological photon counter, built of protein, lipid, carbohydrate, and water” rather than silicon—into conscious awareness. The flashing or flickering of this light can, through the meditative training of attention—and possibly control of eye movements—be detected and discriminated in the millisecond range, possibly also even lead-

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ing to the “decomposing” of light flashes into punctate light points or “clusters” of photons— one interpretation of some of the phenomenological descriptions in Brown’s studies, based on research conducted on image transformations of light.36 As mentioned briefly above, this accelerated perception, moreover, may actually usher meditators to the threshold of awareness of their own awareness—“awareness turned back on itself ” in Brown’s words—in which wave-like “movements” of the visual field itself may reveal the “stroboscopic” or “frame-by-frame” nature of consciousness that has recently been revealed by combined psychophysics, neuroimaging, and phenomenological research in contemporary neuroscience.1,26,37 This research demonstrates “the power of intense attention to reduce the duration of individual frames”37 of conscious awareness, potentially leading to awareness of the fundamental discontinuous nature of the stream of consciousness as described by Crick and Koch,1 and also of the discontinuous nature of the witnessing self as recently described by Farb and associates.38 Indeed, according to Solnit,39 speaking in the Western scientific-technological context, the “splitting of the second. . .is as dramatic and farreaching an action as the splitting of the atom,” a statement with important implications for the first precise, technologically-based electronic studies of meditatively trained perception by Brown24 and Telles27 (tachistoscopic and flicker fusion, respectively). The meditative program of attentional training leads present-centered conscious awareness both to millisecond durations of perception—in which the light flash is further perceptually subdivided into three parts—in the visual field, as well as of the visual field, as it moves discontinuously through the stream of consciousness. Indeed, this virtuoso training potentially leads attention not only to the splitting of the second and to the capture of the individual photon in the visual field; to the visual recognition of the space within the photoreceptor cell’s diameter, potentially throughout the visual field; but even also to

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awareness or “meta-awareness” of the visual field itself. And the training program leads to metaawareness not only of the stream of waking consciousness, but of other modalities of consciousness, including apparently both dreaming and dreamless sleep. As written about insightfully by both Thurman,40 and B. Alan Wallace, in his pioneering book The Attention Revolution,41 the training of attention can lead to conscious awareness during dreaming, or lucid dreaming, a phenomenon that has been empirically and experimentally confirmed in the Sleep Laboratory at Stanford by LaBerge.42 In the IndoTibetan tradition, lucid dreaming or dream yoga43 is a component or dimension of the overall program of developing attention to enable access awareness to all normal and exceptional states of consciousness, also including—as recently established in a study published in the leading journal Sleep—awareness during nondreaming (stages 3 and 4) sleep.44 Hence, we see the extraordinary multidimensional significance of the training of attention, and why it is accorded central importance for the whole Indo-Tibetan meditational and epistemological agenda, as emphasized by the Dalai Lama, Thurman, Wallace, and many others. We need to also bear in mind that in recent neuroscience investigations of attention-related performance by advanced Indo-Tibetan practitioners, the level of performance was found to substantially exceed normal levels. Davidson and colleagues found that advanced meditators’ attention-related brain wave activity (gamma EEG) was “the highest reported in the literature in a nonpathological context”19 while Pettigrew and coworkers found that the performance of practitioners on tests measuring, among other things, attention control, “contrasted sharply with the reported observations of over 1,000 meditation-na¨ıve individuals tested previously” on measures of both perceptual rivalry and motion induced blindness, and in both tests, Tibetan meditators demonstrated unprecedented control of attention (see below).20


This high level of “raw” attention power or control is particularly important to keep in mind along with the other data reviewed above as we now consider the higher level cognitive dimension of the Indo-Tibetan meditation system. And to continue with our heuristic model or framework of the “soft tissue/high technology” perceptual revolution associated with the development of Buddhism, we now consider how the advanced “data detection technology” is matched by a corresponding dimension of data processing and data analysis in the realm of cognitive functioning. Cognition (Data Processing/Analysis) The importance of attention to higher cognitive functioning is great, as will be now seen, particularly with regard to two major related subjects in cognitive psychology—the study of “intelligence” and the study of “expert and exceptional performance,” a field pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson34 and his mentor, Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel Prize winning cofounder of the fields of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. For this section it should be borne in mind that the Indo-Tibetan meditation system emphasizes the capacities of analysis, discursive reasoning, problem solving, insight, and other higher cognitive functions, which are included under the rubric of “analytic” meditation and what might be considered mnemonic meditation. The stereotypical notion that all forms of meditation are designed to empty the mind of discursive thoughts is quite inaccurate—though such a form of meditation is certainly one major form of meditation in the system, and is considered with respect to other forms of meditation in greater depth elsewhere. Briefly, Western (cosmopolitan) experimental psychology research on intelligence has recently come to focus on the central importance of attention as determining what is normally thought of as general or fluid intelligence (“g”).45,46 One representative example among


several of recent papers critically reviewing this field is that of one of the leading intelligence researchers, Nelson Cowan and colleagues, entitled “Scope of attention, control of attention, and intelligence in children and adults.”45 This article describes research linking the ability to maintain an expanded window of attention amid distracting elements, as determined in numerous experimental and correlational studies, with standard measures of intelligence. And in fact the parallels to forms of meditation which emphasize control of attention are obvious if frequently overlooked—perhaps in large part due to the fact that many are still influenced by the stereotypical notion of meditation as a completely non-cognitive activity. In a closely related field within psychology, the study of “expert and exceptional performance,” a large body of research spanning more than four decades has also come to focus on the central role of attention. Pioneered by Simon, Ericsson, and colleagues, this body of research has been directed to investigating the key cognitive factors in enabling the attainment of world-leading performance in cognitive (as well as other) domains, ranging from chess masters and grandmasters, leading mathematicians and scientists, intellectual prodigies and “geniuses,” professional mnemonists, calculating prodigies, virtuoso musicians, autistic savants, and others. To summarize this extensive body of research with respect to the key central factor of attention, Ericsson and Faivre claim:47 Our reviews of empirical studies show that individuals who sustain a focus of attention and effort for extended periods can achieve a level of performance that is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from that of normal persons. . .In sum, the characteristics of exceptional ability are completely consistent with the characteristics of [attention-based] skills acquired through extensive practice. . . thus we can say that exceptional ability is the result of a focused attention during extensive practice of the skill.

One major thrust of Ericsson’s work has been to show that such levels of performance owe more

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to directed attention than to so-called “innate aptitude.”34 Here again, the parallel with the emphasis on attention in Buddhist meditation as described by the Dalai Lama, Thurman, Wallace, and others is obvious. Perhaps less well-known is an emphasis on enhanced memory common to the range of categories of expert and exceptional performance investigated by Ericsson and colleagues, as well as to the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition. For, as described in depth elsewhere, in both traditions there is an emphasis on the development of powerful mnemonic systems based on elaborate cognitive retrieval structures or templates. These retrieval structures or templates are akin to, and often explicitly based on, the so-called “memory palaces” developed in Western classical times, in which elaborate architectural structures served as mnemonic “repositories” for cognitive material to be mnemonically “stored” within the “rooms” or other locations (alcoves, closets, etc.) of the mental structure in the form of visual imagery and/or linguistic forms (letters, syllables, words, phrases, lists).48–50 This mnemontechnical system, more formally referred to as “the method of loci,” has been claimed for centuries to produce dramatic enhancements in memory— perhaps counter-intuitively to the skepticism of many—enhancements which have been born out by recent experimental memory research, including studies by Ericsson and colleagues. Although empirical studies of the use of such structures for mnemonic purposes has not been undertaken with meditators, several scholars have identified meditation mandalas as mnemonic structures which can assist meditators to achieve dramatically enhanced memory, according to textual and observational sources.51,52 Recent experimental psychology research in memory has determined that normal memory has a much greater capacity for both storage and fidelity than previously thought in mainstream Western psychology. The landmark 2008 MIT study (Brady et al., 2008),53 “Visual long-term memory has a massive

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storage capacity for object details,” found that normal individuals could hold thousands more details in long-term memory than previously thought, while recent landmark research at the University of Norway found that normal memory also possesses a higher level of fidelity than previously thought.54 Expert and exceptional memory are characterized by volume and fidelity, but also by availability or accessibility, while the latter typically is not characteristic of normal memory. The research of Ericsson, Simon, and colleagues found that experts such as chess masters and grandmasters, world class mathematicians and scientists, etc., possessed almost immediate recall—requiring less than 550 milliseconds—to over 50,000 units or “chunks” of high-fidelity domain-specific data in what Ericsson describes as “the long-term working memory” or “skilled memory” of expert and exceptional performers.50,55,56 When such units or chunks are further configured or hierarchicalized into specific modules or matrices for particular contexts, the number of chunks of such domain-specific information accessible for rapid recall may possibly become even greater than 50,000. And, because of the rapid retrieval of less than about half a second, this large body of domain-specific knowledge is potentially effectively available for presentcentered attention or awareness, and for use in the “online analysis” of incoming perceptual data. It is reasonable to assume that Tibetan meditators possess some similar or identical mnemonic capabilities, at least on a preliminary hypothetical level, owing to the fact that they utilize retrieval structures which are quite specifically architecturally-based like the “memory palaces” and similar mnemonic templates (“method of loci”) and which are understood as mnemonic devices in the tradition.51 Moreover, practitioners spend comparable, or even more time, utilizing and developing these mnemonic devices for remembering domainspecific knowledge, the “stuff” of the Tibetan Buddhist knowledge system (philosophy, logic, principles of meditation training, etc.). Else-


where we describe how these mandala palaces also may serve as “virtual enriched environments,”57 in that they are highly complex, ornate, and extraordinarily detailed40 and the meditator spends hours in each session visualizing being inside of the three-dimensional structure, and the effects of such expressly environmental visualization meditation may in fact lead to neuroplastic changes, including neurogenesis—just as actual enriched environments lead to such changes, particularly in light of the work of Stephen Kosslyn and others demonstrating the neurobiological equivalence of mental imagery with like-modality perception.58 And elsewhere we describe how such high-fidelity memory also appears to lead to the development of eidetic imagery and memory, in which precise, fine-grained, veridically accurate mnemonic records can overcome the usual “failures” of memory that prevent accuracy in comparing the visual record from one moment to the next, thereby leading to the phenomenon of “change blindness,” which may in part underlie the persistent failure of normal perception to capture the moment to moment changes or “impermanence” that advanced meditators claim to be able to directly perceive.57

Change Blindness, the Power of Attention, “Moment to Moment Impermanence,” and “Yogic Direct Perception” Another set of recent findings in perceptual/cognitive neuroscience is relevant to the present framework, findings which demonstrate the existence of a surprisingly pervasive set of perceptual phenomena known collectively under the label “change blindness.” A leading researcher in this new field, Jeremy Wolfe, provides a general description of this set of phenomena, which also includes “inattentional blindness,” “repetition blindness,” the “attentional blink,” and several other related phenomena:59

Bushell: New Beginnings At any given moment, the visual world appears to be filled with a number of recognizable and actively recognized objects. You may look out the window and see a field, a tree, a cow, and a stream, all of which seem to be perceived and recognized. However, work from a number of laboratories suggests that it is not straightforward to describe the relationship between what we see and the stimulus that gives rise to that perception. The most dramatic demonstrations of this apparent poverty comes from ‘change blindness’ experiments in which observers fail to notice substantial and clearly visible changes in natural scenes [my italics].

Such changes which are not noticed may persist in occuring even after hundreds of viewings of target stimuli (Wolfe et al., 2002);59 “may even go unnoticed even if subjects are “visually tracking the object at the moment of change;”60 may even go “completely unnoticed” when “spatially or temporally nearby” to the target stimulus;61 and, moreover, such changes may go unnoticed if they are cognitively or semantically, i.e., categorically, “incongruent” to the context of the task (see below).62 Though there have been no specific studies of meditators’ performance on formal tests of change blindness, several studies have been conducted on meditators’ performances on closely related tests. A recent study by Davidson and colleagues found that meditators compared to controls evidenced a significantly enhanced window of attention in an “attentional blink” study, in which performance is based on detection of both the first and second of two target visual stimuli presented in close temporal proximity.63 Advanced Tibetan meditators were also recently tested in studies of performance on “binocular or perceptual rivalry” and “motion induced blindness” (MIB) tests, which measure, among other things, the capacity to deploy attention in order to control various forms of visual illusion, including detection of versus “blindness” to, various stimuli. Without going into all the complex details of these kinds of studies, it should be noted that the meditators significantly outperformed controls, and in the case of the most experienced Tibetan meditator, the latter was able to main-

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tain the motion induced blindness perceptual task for over 12 minutes, when the average control value was 2.6 seconds!20 Here again we can see, in the few studies already undertaken with these advanced yogic meditators, the extraordinary accomplishment in attentional control. The results of Brown’s and Telles’ studies on perception and attention performance briefly reviewed above are also relevant here.24,27 When considered together in the context of the implications of change blindness and related studies, it becomes conceivable that such meditators may in fact be able to perceive changes that most nonmeditating controls do not. And, if change blindness and related forms of perceptual and attentional “blindness” are as pervasive, frequent, and even as “surprisingly”59 commonplace as this new research has been recently determining, this fact may, in conjunction with the recognition of the unusually enhanced perceptual and attentional capacities of advanced meditators, provide an initial basis for understanding neuroscientific aspects and dimensions of the Buddhist assertion that all of phenomenality is characterized by the pervasive “shimmering moment to moment impermanence,” 23 among other characteristics of the ultimate Buddhist ontological and epistemological category known as “emptiness,” which cannot be directly perceived except by advanced meditators.23 Indeed, in a manner similar to the descriptions of change blindness, the Tibetan tradition also claims that such changes do in fact occur right before the eyes of everyone, but that they are missed by all those lacking in advanced meditational, i.e., attentional and perceptual, faculties.23,64 Although the subject of “emptiness” is obviously outside the scope of the present essay and volume, elsewhere we discuss the subject, including the potential for the yogic direct perception of same, including special techniques that we believe enable meditators to perceive phenomena more accurately than is possible in normal perception. This discussion includes the channeling and harnessing of emergencylike states brought on by death meditation and

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related practices, which when properly cultivated may engender a controlled state of “intense awareness of impermanence;” 65 such emergency states have been found to increase and enhance the rate of perception according to the research of Noyes and Kletti,66 Oliver Sacks,37 and Christof Koch.67 Sacks reviews neurological and neuroscience data showing that the visual nervous system is capable of perceiving in a manner akin to both high-speed photography as well as, conversely, time-lapse photography. Furthermore, the Tibetan tradition places a great deal of emphasis on states of euphoria or “bliss,” and euphoric affect has also been found to potentially lead to increased rates of perception and cognition.68 In fact, research by Merzenich and colleagues69 has demonstrated that reward is in general critical for the neuroplasticity underlying perceptual learning; and, more specifically for the present context, Seitz et al. (see above) have shown that the increased rate of perception of light, which enables one to “decompose” a beam of light into the more accurate perception of it as in fact composed of discontinuous flickering, is tied to the “flooding” of the brain by neuromodulators like dopamine, which are associated with euphoric affect.31 The Dalai Lama has described how one means of attaining to the level of the yogic direct perception of “emptiness” is through the virtual conditioning of this perception together with the bliss experience.70 And finally, another form of special state which is discussed elsewhere is curiously and intriguingly similar in some ways to an autistic mode of perception, though with a number of other, significant qualifying features. I would like to conclude this paper with a brief consideration of the example of several participants in the conference, namely participants who have both well established Western (cosmopolitan) scientific/medical research practices and long-term contemplative practices, mostly, but not limited to the Buddhist traditions. Dan Brown, Joseph Loizzo, and Neil Theise openly represented themselves as hav-


ing such experience (though others may as well, but were less declarative on the matter) and, in a manner, brought the various streams of thought and practice present in the conference as a whole into mutually reinforcing, creative juxtaposition in their work and perspectives. For the sake of brevity, Neil Theise’s experience will be highlighted here. His discoveries of new lineages of adult human stem cells (some in collaboration with colleague Diane Krause71 )—which the history of science will likely show to be revolutionary—in fact reflects a number of the key phenomena discussed in this paper. In the first place, Theise’s perception of cellular and tissue dynamics reflects his training and eventual achievement of expertise as a liver pathologist and stem cell researcher, and thereby is characterized by the same perceptual learning and hyperacuity which has been documented for radiologists and other classes of medical diagnostic experts by Ericsson, Sowden, and other investigators.72 However, this ability to discriminate different categories of cellular types in Theise’s case has been augmented by his long-term training in Buddhist meditation, and familiarity with the pervasive conceptual experience of emptiness.73–75 This latter familiarity and training allowed Theise to “de-reify” and see beyond established cellular categorizations—i.e., to escape from a form of categorical change blindness63 — enough to be able to discriminate, perhaps for the first time in history, that the microanatomical structure of the human liver was different than had been assumed, thereby elucidating that it was the long speculated liver stem cell niche, and, moreover, that bone marrow stem cells could also participate in regenerating the liver, indeed all other organs of the body, “despite the fact that most, if not all of the phenotypic and molecular aspects of the cell had changed in the process of engraftment.”73 Moreover, not only was there this “masking” of the phenotypic traits, but there were the rigidly ensconced “scientific” canons which legislated against such stem cell structural and functional plasticity. Nevertheless Theise’s


perceptual expertise coupled with the instinct toward the “de-reification” of arbitrary categorical assumptions in terms of the de-reifying training in the nuances of emptiness74 —which is ultimately both a perceptual and conceptual mode of realization76,77 —enabled him to correctly identify these processes and to open the door to a new way of understanding cellular and organismal plasticity and regeneration potential,78,79 a potential which has been claimed for centuries by Indo-Tibetan Buddhism in its own terms, and which now appears to possibly possess a mechanistic basis, when viewed in an integrative framework, a possibility that is presently in the initial stages of further investigation. It appears likely that an integration of the two hypothesized scientific revolutions described above—in the kind of nonsectarian framework advocated in general by the Dalai Lama and others—may provide a dramatically productive way for continuing the “pursuit of truth” which has ultimately been crucial to both. Conflicts of Interest

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