Mindfulness and Beliefs: Irrationally Yours
I can't help it--I am a confirmed neuroscience geek.
So I was very excited to attend the fifth brain lecture in a
series (yes, I bought season tickets!) sponsored by Oregon
Health Sciences University. You see, the guest speaker was Dr.
Michael Gazzaniga, the father of cognitive neuroscience, and his
topic was The Ethical Brain--which happens to be the title of a
book he will publish this June.
He has written over 20 books, and in his work as the director of
the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College, he
continues to conduct research on how the brain enables the mind.
Dr. Gazzaniga believes there is nothing more fascinating than
the mind, and he is exploring how we develop, hang on to, and
change our beliefs. (Do you see why I love him?) Mindfulness
allows us to step back and watch our thoughts. By doing so, we
can develop a clearer perspective regarding our beliefs and our
attachment to them.
In his lecture, Dr. Gazzaniga discussed the power of the left
brain. Remember, that is the side that handles logic and
language, but the interesting part is how those two functions
work together, continually creating words to justify our
behavior.
Left => logic + language => lists
My favorite research illustrating this concept is the "scar
face" experiment, in which a participant is fitted with a fake
facial scar. The participant is told that they will be
interviewed in order to see how the visible facial deformity
might influence the way they are treated.
Then something sneaky happens: the scar is surreptitiously
removed, and the participant enters the interview thinking the
scar is still visible.
Right after the interview, in virtually every case, the
participant is full of all kinds of examples of how the
interviewer behaved negatively due to the scar. When viewing a
video showing the interviewer only, the participant can point to
several incidents which seemed to him to indicate distaste or
prejudice-- "See? He's staring at the scar!