Zen and the Brain: Mutually Illuminating Topics

Zen Buddhist meditation trains attention and awareness during daily life, reduces egocentric behaviors, and applies compassionate insight-wisdom. This review examines how such training relates to Zen's emphasis on direct experience, particularly acute states of awakening called kensho and satori. It distinguishes concentrative and receptive forms of meditation, which train top-down and bottom-up attentional processing. Two processing pathways are contrasted: an egocentric frame of reference tied to body and mind, and an other-centered (allocentric) frame. A model proposes that a triggering stimulus causes the reticular nucleus to release GABA, inhibiting the dorsal thalamus and blocking somatic and psychic cortical functions, thereby deleting maladaptive aspects of selfhood while releasing a unified experience of other.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Zen Buddhist meditative practices emphasize the long-term, mindful training of attention and awareness during one’s ordinary daily-life activities, the shedding of egocentric behaviors, and the skillful application of one’s innate compassionate resources of insight-wisdom toward others and oneself.This review focuses on how such a comprehensive approach to training the brain could relate to a distinctive flavor of Zen: its emphasis on direct experience, with special reference to those major acute states of awakening that create deep transformations of consciousness and behavior. In Japanese, these advanced states are called kensho and satori.Ten key concepts are reviewed. They begin by distinguishing between the concentrative and receptive forms of meditation, noticing the complementary ways that they each train our normal ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ modes of attentive processing. Additional concepts distinguish between our two major processing pathways. The self-centered, egocentric frame of reference processes information in relation to our body (our soma) or to our mental functions (our psyche). The other-centered frame of reference processes information anonymously. Its prefix, allo- simply means ‘other’ in Greek. Subsequent concepts consider how these useful Greek words --- ego/allo, soma/psyche --- correlate with the normal functional anatomy of important thalamo↔cortical connections. A plausible model then envisions how a triggering stimulus that captures attention could prompt the reticular nucleus to release GABA; how its selective inhibition of the dorsal thalamus could then block both our higher somatic and psychic cortical functions; so as to: a) delete the maladaptive aspects of selfhood, while also b) releasing the direct, all-inclusive, globally-unified experience of other.Two final concepts consider how the long-term meditative training of intuitive functions relates to certain kinds of word-free spatial tasks that involve insightf