Buddha’s Brain - Book Review - Buddhism Books

With the experience of a neuropsychologist, a lot of scientific insight and the wisdom of a meditation teacher or spiritual mentor, author Rick Hanson shines a beautiful light at the border between science and meditation in his book Buddha’s Brain.

The Buddha's Brain

The need for such a publication is not to be underestimated in a secular world where no policy or financial aid for the greater good of humanity and its mental and emotional health can be generated on a 2500-year-old tradition of ‘hear-say’ without clinical evidence.

The book is divided into four parts: causes of suffering, happiness, love and wisdom.

At first glance this may appear to the popular science readers that both the title and publishers have attracted, to be a superficial text. However as the cliché says do not judge a book by its cover. This is a welcome addition to Buddhism books

Hanson’s work is based on over 13 pages of scientific references from both academic journals conjoined with books from medical, scientific and psychological fields of research.

With so many people now engaging with the practice of mindfulness meditation and downloading millions of dollars’ worth of Apps from either Headspace or Buddhify, one needs to see the empirical evidence that engaging in these activities works by physiological improvements in the brain as well as psychological benefits.

The first book of this genre was The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson.

This was the inaugural study on meditation in western science. Before that there was no studies to cite despite so many people engaging in the practice and espousing the benefits.

The nexus of the book is to enable the reader to understand their own brain and by doing so induce positive mind states.

What is the brain structure, different parts and how all that effects the mind. The book goes deeper in that it explains how people can use this information in conjunction with meditation to create ‘more happiness, love and wisdom’.

The book is also not a textbook and is written for the general reader. The book starts out with hope that we really can change our brains - this is called neuroplasticity. Without losing a general reader, Hanson takes you on a neurological expedition coherently through a brain and all its components.

He illustrates all of this into ‘the first and second darts’ in order to help people understand how people’s neuropsychology works.

When you bang your toe on a chair the pain of that is the first dart. The second is the anger you feel towards the person who left the chair in that place.

We create more and more of these secondary darts like the guilt you then feel for being angry and so on. This is good but interestingly even though endocrinology is not his forte he fails to connect emotional health to hormonal and immunological health.

Thanks to modern research we also now know that six months of regular daily meditative practice reduces the size of the brains alarm system - the amygdala (the size of an almond) by a staggering 50%!

Happiness is the part of the book The Buddha’s teachings start to come in. Hanson paraphrases The Nobel Eightfold Path, and in particular Right Effort which Hanson upgrades to ‘wise effort’?

Here is where mindfulness subtly begins to reveal itself from the question which wolf in the heart are you going to feed? Love or hate?

Either one creates neural networks for your emotion of choice and it creates a brain wired for hate, love or depression by engaging in those states.

The deeper you go the more neural networks you create for depression, hate or love.

In other words, neurons that fire together network together. 

But how does a woman with post-natal depression hear this? Or someone with manic depression? Neither of these sets of people could identify with this as the depression is intrinsic (biochemical imbalance) and not exogenic as it seems this book is mostly relevant to.

Exogenic depression is caused from outside influences like conditioning and environment.

Nonetheless it is good advice overall to focus on the positive over the negative for the brain.

What he should be advocating is mindfulness. As we now know in neuroscience that the moment we switch off the chatter brain, the compassionate centres of the brain immediately and spontaneously switch on. No effort required here apart from the effort of meditation and getting some calm.

He goes on to connect the practice of meditation with the effects on the nervous system. This is quite important as a motivator to both secular mindfulness practitioners and Buddhist meditators alike. These are the USP’s (unique selling points) that give a motivating purpose or meaning to why a person should meditate. Meditation according to Hansard increases activity of the left front part of the brain, decreases the stress hormones, strengthens the immune system and helps a whole host of medical conditions. 

He enrolls the neophyte to commence meditation with loving kindness meditation first.

This is a good move to start a daily practice habit for someone. Coming straight to mindfulness meditation can initially be difficult for people with depression, trauma and stress. He follows this with wisdom and meditation and one can see that his flavour of meditation is influenced by the Thervadin tradition.

Although it has been secularised by the book and its titles of; generosity, kindness and concentration.

Even though the book is a good introduction to meditation and the effects it will have on the brain there is still good reason to study from an experienced meditation teacher in person. A book can only take a person so far. Meditation is a study and a practice and when the study is done the kinaesthetic practice is essential.

The book certainly is fantastic to enrol the medical and healthcare professionals of this world.

In the end I was slightly disappointed, in that I found out about the human brain and not the Buddha’s Brain so much, moreover the brain of the meditator.

With the electromagnetic field of the brain being only 10 femtotesla’s (a measurement of electromagnetic field EMF) and the heart being 50,000 by comparison perhaps the key to understanding the Buddha’s Brain maybe in what I like to call ‘heart-mind-fulness’. 

This maybe the subject of a new book and understanding towards which part of the body both The Buddha and mystics all over the world use to meditate.

The Budda Meditating