Gaëlle Desbordes, PhD, Instructor (research faculty) at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)-Harvard-MIT Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging.
I will begin by presenting the circumstances and choices that led me to become both a neuroscientist and a Buddhist practitioner. I will specifically share how my Buddhist practice has motivated and informed my neuroscientific research on meditation, compassion, and mind-body medicine. Then I will review what I have learned over the past 8 years from working with the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative, a program to teach science to Tibetan Buddhist monastics, as part of which I spent multiple months in India conducting surveys and interviews in Tibetan monasteries and chairing dozens of focused discussion groups between Western science/philosophy faculty and Tibetan Buddhist monastic scholars (Geshes) in those monasteries. This work gave me some insights into the issues we face in attempting to bring these two different worldviews (modern science and Buddhism) into dialogue and mutual understanding. I will finally discuss what I see are challenges and opportunities in a transdisciplinary approach that integrates ontologies and methods from both Buddhism and science.
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