Scanning the Monk

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Is the religion of tomorrow hidden in our brains?

LONDON'S BOXY black cabs, with their big interiors and fold-out jump seats, are marvels of comfort and convenience. The cabbies themselves are marvels of another sort. Unlike New York taxi drivers, who usually can learn enough about their city's simple grid to get a license in days, London cabbies can spend years acquiring what they reverently call "the Knowledge." A cabbie there once told me how he had bicycled through London's intricate, medieval byways month after month, memorizing every corner and cobblestone in order to pass his trade's stringent tests. "I've got this town's whole bloody street map, down to the last lamppost, etched right here on my brain," he said with a finger-tap to his forehead.

His claim may not be much exaggerated, according to a study by University College in London. Researchers there discovered that the longer the cabbies had their jobs, the larger was an area of the brain -- the right rear hippocampus -- known to be crucial to storing mental maps of the environment. They concluded that a "redistribution of gray matter" had occurred after prolonged mental habit. "If you do something, anything, even play Ping-Pong, for 20 years, eight hours a day, there's going to be something in your brain that's different from someone who didn't do that," notes Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn. "It's just got to be."

As evidence grows that what we habitually think and feel actually resculpts our neural tissue, scientists have begun to study others who seem able to literally change their minds -- Buddhist monks who chant mantras and do visualization practices to develop what appears to be an indelible sense of compassion. With the day nearly arrived that a handful of angry people could blow up not just a restaurant but a city, we could use effective ways to defuse intolerance. Religion does not have completely clean hands in the matter. As we slowly emerge from millennia of holy know-it-alls trying to enforce competing copyrights on Ultimate Truth, a melding of Eastern and Western mind science might point the way toward the original spiritual goal of learning to get along.

If so, the key will be compassion, the x-factor that every faith (or its founders, at least) exalts as a supreme virtue. When the Dalai Lama says "My only religion is kindness," when the Pope calls for a "civilization of love," that can't be just mealy-mouthed piety. Kindness and love are actual forces to be reckoned with, able to transform the most relentless enmity. South Africa's Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities." Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print