Cognitive Science

The Neuroscience of Meditation

The Neuroscience of Meditation Excellent article that attempts to unite theories of how Meditation may work in the brain.

I think Buddhism does a really good job at telling a coherent and useful story about how the mind works — and the difficulty of telling stories about the mind that are both coherent and useful is, I think, drastically under-appreciated. Major credit to Buddha here. But Buddhism is also incomplete: it talks about what the big-picture dynamics of subjective experience are, but is silent about how these dynamics are implemented. Put simply, Buddhism says a lot about the mind, but nothing about the brain, and this is ultimately limiting. We need ways to connect what’s going on in the mind during meditation to neuroscience and information theory … In other words, we can attempt to describe what’s going on during suffering & during meditation at multiple levels of abstraction, and the more stories we can identify and weave together and cross-validate, the better our understanding will get.