Last night I attended a talk given by Clifford Saron, Ph.D., an Associate Research Scientist at UC-Davis’s Center for Mind and Brain. The title of the talk was “Training the mind: A longitudinal investigation of intensive meditation, attention, emotion, and physiology.” Saron and his team of researchers have been studying the effects of deep contemplative practice on well-being and compassion. Here is how Saron describes the project:
Together with three-dozen collaborating researchers and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace, we are investigating how attentional, emotional and physiological processes are modified over the course of three months of intensive full-time training in meditative quiescence (Shamatha) and emotional balance (loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity), in a longitudinal randomized wait-list controlled study known as “The Shamatha Project.”
The early results from Clifford’s longitudinal study sound encouraging. Intensive meditative practice seems to have a positive impact on the practitioner’s overall well-being and on the level of compassion the practitioner shows toward others.
I noted a few limitations to the study, however. One was that practitioners were spending time at retreats, meditating for 8-10 hours a day. They also continued deep meditation afterward. Whence the question: how much daily meditation is necessary for the rest of us in order to achieve reasonable results? Another was the “ethical upshot”: feeling more at peace with myself and feeling more for the suffering of others may or may not lead to better conduct. (It’s a Humean rather than a Kantian approach to ethics.) Even if I feel, say, loving kindness for another, does my feeling for her fundamentally reorient me to the world, making me more likely to undertake action to alleviate her suffering (and the suffering of those like her)? Perhaps, but I’m not sure. These limitations aside, I was encouraged to see the rapprochement of science and meditative practice. We need much more of this.
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 