Discuss what the various tools of contemporary neuroscience possess revealed about the brains of people who spent years cultivating well-being and qualities of brain that promote an optimistic outlook.

Make use of the tools of modern neuroscience combined with the wisdom of Buddhism to study kindness and compassion–how spirituality meets science through the brand new field of contemplative neuroscience.

In 1992, the neuroscientist Richard Davidson got difficult from the Dalai Lama. By that point, he’d spent his career about The Neuroscience of Compassion requesting why people respond to, in his phrases, “life’s slings and arrows” in different ways. Why are some people even more resilient than others in the face of tragedy? And it is resilience something you can gain through practice?

The Dalai Lama had a different question for Davidson when he visited the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader at his residence in Dharamsala, India. “He said: ‘You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to review depression, and panic, and dread. Why can’t you utilize those same equipment to study kindness and compassion?’ … I did so not have a good answer. I said it was hard.”

The Dalai Lama was thinking about what the tools of contemporary neuroscience could reveal about the brains of individuals who spent years, in Davidson’s words, “cultivating well-being … cultivating characteristics of your brain which promote a positive outlook.” The effect was that, not long afterward, Davidson brought some Buddhist monks into his laboratory and strapped electrodes with their mind or treated them to a few hours within an MRI machine.

“The ultimate way to activate positive-emotion circuits in the brain is through generosity,” Davidson, who founded the guts for Investigating Healthy Thoughts at University of Wisconsin, Madison, said inside a talk on the Aspen Ideas Festival. “This is really a sort of fascinating neuroscientific finding because there are pearls of intelligence in the contemplative tradition-the Dalai Lama frequently talks about this-that the best way for us to become happy is to be generous to others. And in fact the scientific proof is in many ways bearing this out, and showing that there are systematic adjustments in the mind that are associated with functions of generosity.”