How Thinking Can Change the Brain

January 29th 2007

20 Jan 2007 (Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal) Dalai Lama helps scientists show the power of the mind to sculpt our gray matter.

Although science and religion are often in conflict, the Dalai Lama takes a different approach. Every year or so the head of Tibetan Buddhism invites a group of scientists to his home in Dharamsala, in Northern India, to discuss their work and how Buddhism might contribute to it.

In 2004 the subject was neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change its structure and function in response to experience. The following are vignettes adapted from ‘Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,’ which describes this emerging area of science:

The Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a visit to an American medical school over a decade earlier, asked the surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?

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