First, on Thursday, the 14th spiritual leader of Tibet visited Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where he spent two days giving talks, including one before a conference of top-tier scientists hoping to determine the neurobiological roots of social compassion and empathy.
Then, on Sunday, he showed up for a three-day-long stay at Emory University in Atlanta, appearing under the title "Presidential Distinguished Professor" and lecturing on behalf of a transnational exchange program designed to bring "together the best of Western science and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual traditions to create new knowledge for the benefit of humanity."
But while researchers have yet to figure out how best to apply the rigors of scientific inquiry to the issue of compassion, the Dalai Lama offered listeners his own solution.
"There is one thing I can state definitely, with confidence: The mind can change through training, through awareness. That's for sure," he said at Stanford when describing a meditation practice.
It's a nice idea, and one that has scientific underpinnings of its own. Myriad studies have indicated that meditation might have powerful health benefits, from controlling the body's stress response to relieving chronic pain and hot flashes, according to the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine.
And meditation continues to grow in popularity. An estimated 9.4 percent of Americans reported meditating at least once in 2007, according to a federal survey.
Meanwhile, scientists are narrowing in on a definitive connection between the brain's complexities and the influence of meditation on everyday human emotions and social interactions.
"[Meditation] tries to train people to rethink and reimagine their relationships with other people," said Emory's Charles Raison, who also doubles as a CNNHealth mental health expert. "It's a series of visualizations and mental challenges where you use meditation to challenge why you feel the way you do about people."
"We're at the very beginning of this research, but there's good evidence that compassion can be elicited in the laboratory," said Brian Knutson, whose team at Stanford is using brain scans to identify brain regions associated with compassion. "We need to further investigate."
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Other researchers are evaluating neural responses to voluntary charitable donations and how the brain reacts to social connections. Understanding such factors will, scientists hope, lead to lab-born compassion that can literally be cultivated from the inside out, by targeting key brain regions.And whether compassion is one day triggered by a doctor's appointment or by decades of dedicated meditation, there's one point on which both scientists and the Tibetan leader agree:
"There is a misunderstanding that showing compassion and love for others means sacrificing yourself," the Dalai Lama said. "This is not the case. By helping others, you are helping yourself."
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