This book is no ordinary book. It bridges the traditional meditative practices of Buddhism for beginners with the newest findings of neuroscience, thereby justifying the beneficial effects of these practices as explained by brain research. Even though it is from 2009, we now have scientific evidence for why meditation worked for a man born 2587 years ago in India. A man that later became a Buddha based on the practice of contemplation and meditation.
One of the most important parts of the book describes how the brain creates the illusion of a self by doing a neurological process called self-ing. Our brain simply creates a continuous sense of self by piecing together bits of sensory information, primarily visual input. This is a key point in understanding awareness, because if we know how this process of self-ing takes places in the brain, we can develop a practice that counteracts it, thus arriving at an experience of the world with no self, which equals the end of all suffering. As the saying goes, "no self, no problem".
"As different parts of self come forward and then give way to other parts, so do the momentary neural assemblies that enable them. If the energy flows of these assemblies could be seen as a play of light, an extraordinary show would move endlessly about your head. In the brain, every manifestation of self is impermanent. The self is continually constructed, deconstructed, and constructed again.
The self seems coherent and continuous because of how the brain forms conscious experience: imagine a thousand photographs overlaying each other, each one taking a few seconds to develop into a clear picture and then fade out. This composite construction of experience creates the illusion of integration and continuity, much like twenty-two frames per second create the semblance of motion in a movie. Consequently, we experience "now" not as a thin sliver of time in which each snapshot of experience appears sharply and ends abruptly, but as a moving interval roughly 1-3 seconds long that blurs and fades at each end (Lutz et al. 2002; Thompson 2007)
It is not so much that we have a self, it's that we do self-ing. As Buckminster Fuller famously said, "I seem to be a verb."" (Buddha's Brain, p. 212)
So, what are the specific neural assemblies involved in self-ing? The reflective self (anterior cingulate cortex, upper prefrontal cortex and hippocampus), the emotional self (amygdala, hypothalamus, striatum, upper brain stem), autobiographical self, core self, self-as-object. Narrative self-referencing (midline cortical structures a.o.) and other assemblies are briefly described on pages 209-211, and the subject of subjectivity as quoted here:
"More fundamentally, the self-as-subject is the elemental sense of being an experiencer of experiences. Awareness has an inherent subjectivity, a localization to a particular perspective (e.g. to my body, not yours). That localization is grounded in the body's engagement with the world. For example, when you turn your head to scan a room, what you see is specifically related to your own movements. The brain indexes across innumerable experiences to find the common feature: the experiencing of them in one particular body. In effect, subjectivity arises from the inherent distinction between this body and that world; in the broadest sense, subjectivity is generated not only in the brain but in the ongoing interactions the body has with the world (Thompson 2007).
Then the brain indexes across moments of subjectivity to create an apparent subject who-over the course of development, from infancy to adulthood-is elaborated and layered through the maturation of the brain, notably regions of the prefrontal cortex (Zelazo, Gao, and Todd 2007). But there is no subject inherent in subjectivity; in advanced meditation practices, one finds a bare awareness without a subject (Amaro 2003). Awareness requires subjectivity, but it does not require a subject.
In sum, from a neurological standpoint, the everyday feeling of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid "I" is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the fundamental sense that there is a subject of experience is fabricated from myriad, disparate moments of subjectivity." (Buddha's Brain, p. 210)
This is a book to re-read many times filled with traditional meditations and practices. Rick Hanson has made traditional Buddhist meditations accessible and relevant in the light of neuroscience. He is co-founder of the Wellspring Institute:
and the author of many books, including Buddha's Brain:
Buddha's Brain is an easy way into meditating for beginners and seasoned meditaters alike.