Some researchers in Texas observed Buddhist meditation practitioners using their brains differently from those in a "control" group to solve a problem. From this, the researchers drew the conclusion that Buddhist meditation promotes rational thinking. I'm not sure that's exactly what it promotes, but let's take a look.
The Buddhists -- recruited from the Houston Zen Center and other local Buddhist meditation groups -- and the control group were put through what is called the "ultimatum game." In this game, a person is given a sum of money to split with another person. If the other person accepts the offer, they both can keep the money. If the other person rejects the offer, neither keeps the money. The amount used in this experiment was $20.
The researchers found that when the offer was wildly uneven� --� $19 for me, $1 for you -- 72 percent of the control group refused the offer. But among the Buddhists, only 46 percent refused the offer. This was lauded as the "rational" choice.
The test subjects somehow played the game while lying inside an MRI scanner, so that the researchers could watch brain functions. What did the brain scan results show?
In the control subjects who received "unfair" offers,� the researchers saw increased activity in a part of the brain called the anterior insula. This part of the brain is linked to the emotion of disgust. But the meditators' brains reacted differently. In them, the part of the brain that "lit up" is associated with interoception, which is defined as awareness of or sensitivity to what's going on inside one's body, especially the viscera.
The article I'm going by isn't clear whether all the Buddhists skipped the disgust phase, or just the ones who chose to accept the uneven offer. In any event, the researchers concluded that mindfulness of the body canceled out emotion in the decision-making process, leading to the "rational" decision of accepting some money rather than none.
A researcher also noted that the "accepting" group was not tapping into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain thought to produce calculated reasoning. Further, in post-game interviews the Buddhists said they didn't feel the asymmetrical offers were unfair.
That last part is far more interesting to me than whether the decisions were rational. Of course, accepting some money rather than none is a rational decision in most contexts. But what's more important is that it appears the reaction of the "accepting" group was not being dictated from a perception of a separate self. Thus, "fairness" was not an issue, and the distribution of money was not perceived as a zero-sum game.
In other words, it seems to me that the critical difference is a shift in perception, not an enhancement of rational thinking skills. I could be reading too much into this, of course. What do you think?
Here is the article about the experiment, btw.
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