Yale Studies

Doesn't make much sense that they won't pay for travel if they need a good sample of people. I would be very interested in this if I were you as well, but like you said, if they can't help out, you can't help out.

I always hear about advanced meditators being scanned, but it seems most of the studies don't get released in detail. I know several pragmatic dharma folks have been scanned. It would be interested to see the results of some of the people here who advanced very quickly.

I did it last year, and a friend of mine did it a few weeks ago, so we were just comparing notes. I'm not sure I learned anything particularly, so much as it was just rather entertaining. I had fun playing along with the games and exercises.

You don't know exactly what they are looking for necessarily, because sometimes tests are being done that are not about the overt activity you are doing (ie sometimes an experiment can be as much about "if we give these instructions does it yield the same data as if we give those instructions" or something like that). My friend who went last week said her tests were different than the ones I described, so they must be analyzing different stuff now than a year ago.

If I recall, one thing they were trying to determine last year was whether there was a reliable correlation between certain activity in certain areas of the brain and what the meditator described verbally. So it was about (in part at least) mapping which areas of the brain to pay attention to in future experiments. So after each six minute session in which I followed a guided meditation I was asked to describe my experience and they could then compare my description to the fmri data.

I suppose I learned a couple of simple things. One is that I am not very claustrophobic and I can meditate in a very noisy and confined space. Two is that if you are shown a rapid sequence of images and they throw in one of something horrible, like a dead body, then it distracts you ever so slightly from the next picture, causing you to miss a target image. Makes sense, but I'd never seen it in action before. (That was from a long series of psychological type written/visual tests I did before the scanning.)

I do hope they keep striving to include people from diverse traditions. When I was there Judson said they mostly were getting people via word of mouth, so it was largely pragmatic dharma folks. He initially found me a bit off the wall, I think, and said he wasn't sure where I'd slot into things. I don't know if my tests ended up being useful or not. I referred a half dozen people but some are left handed and some have metal in their bodies, which are two factors that disqualify you, so I think of all of them only one or two were able to do it. I'd happily do it again if it were convenient and helpful.

Thanks for sharing your experience, Ona.

Ona Kiser wrote: I do hope they keep striving to include people from diverse traditions. When I was there Judson said they mostly were getting people via word of mouth, so it was largely pragmatic dharma folks. He initially found me a bit off the wall, I think, and said he wasn't sure where I'd slot into things. I don't know if my tests ended up being useful or not.

I'm kind of skeptical of the quality of the sample, personally, particularly with the label of "advanced meditators/yogis." I wonder how the pragmatic folks (trained much like myself, so I'm included) would compare to the yogis of Tibet, who spend anywhere from 3 to 12 to 20+ years in a Himalayan cave, doing solitary practice. THAT'S what I call "advanced." Me, not so much.

Ona Kiser wrote: I referred a half dozen people but some are left handed and some have metal in their bodies, which are two factors that disqualify you, so I think of all of them only one or two were able to do it. I'd happily do it again if it were convenient and helpful.

Do "fillings" count as metal in the body? Also, I'm sort of both left and right handed, but not ambidextrous. For example, I eat with my left hand, but I write with my right hand. I'm all mixed up in that way. I wonder if that would discount me from the study as well.

No, fillings don't count. It's if you have medical things, like a hip replacement or heart valve or bone screws - the MRI is a big magnet, if I recall, so it messes with metal. Somehow it doesn't rip the fillings out of your teeth or anything. I asked. The left handed thing is because left handed people have a different default brain pattern, so it messes up the data. If I recall.

Good point about the "advanced" meditators. That said, then there might be challenges in communicating the exercises and questions across very traditional traditions but I suspect that could be worked out.

Why does being left handed disqualify you. That seems really weird.

Oh... never mind.. I see you answered that already. That's still damned interesting. I wonder what about being left handed is so different.

Chris Marti wrote: I do hope they break out into other traditions and even beyond Buddhist practices into areas like Lakota practices and whatnot.

This is a bit off topic but I'm really pleased that I keep seeing statements like this from Buddhists in the west and modern times. It seems there is a lot of respect for other traditions and practices which I think is something new in the world, at least at the scale that it seems to be now. Just a cool thing. This sort of relationship with other schools of thought is the kind of sentiment that could potentially begin a healing process on a world wide scale. Perhaps that's a bit lofty though;)

I've been surprised myself, Duane, to run into openness in unexpected places. I went to a meditation retreat run by Benedictine and Franciscan monks at a Jesuit cloister last month. To my utter surprise among the 200 people in attendance (including priests, nuns, etc., mostly Catholic, but not all) tons of people had experience with Buddhist meditation, various yogas (not the exercise kind), Taoism, and other religions, and were open and respectful about the practices or beliefs they found helpful in those systems. Many of the older monks had first encountered contemplative practice in the 60s and 70s via Transcendental Meditation, and then gotten interested in the contemplative practices of the Desert Fathers. They seemed quite comfortable about it; there was no condemnation of other approaches, more of a reaching out, acknowledging that many seekers wander through wide territory and that there are deep common threads among the contemplative traditions of the world. I had a long and interesting chat with a guy whose guru was a Tibetan Buddhist, and with an experienced Advaita teacher who also studied with a Christian mystic. For me that just points to how useless my preconceptions can be. News reports, surveys, studies and popular opinion don't seem to reflect the diversity, subtlety and flexibility of individual experience, besides which the loud, controversial and shocking often get the most public attention.

"acknowledging that many seekers wander through wide territory and that there are deep common threads among the contemplative traditions of the world."

Yes, exactly. There are very few (as in one or two) Buddhists that I am aware of in the area that I live so most of my conversations about spiritual seeking are with Christians (Lutherans and Evangelicals mostly) or with people who have no particular slant. I'm just as excited to talk with any of them provided they are wiling and open to an actual conversation.

I do get funny reactions sometimes when I start up a conversation with someone who is "Christian" because their family is or that's just how they were raised and aren't really doing it (or maybe more accurately, is just not their priority). But those who are really into it, regardless of tradition, are usually very happy to discuss their methods and swap notes so to speak.