H. Austin. James is America's professor of neurology in the University of Colorado Health

Sciences Center. He is one of the oldest and most respected experts on the links between

the neurological workings of the human brain and meditation. He is the author of the book

"Zen and the Brain" which is, as far as I know, one of the earliest and most influential

books on the topic. He is also the only real neuroscientist I know who is also a profoundly

deep meditator. And he's going to be very shy as in now, but he's--but he's quite enlightened,

and so making him a very rare master both in neuroscience and meditation. James' other

books include "Selfless Insight" and "Zen Brain Reflections". He is the only friend

I have who doesn't use email. Or he and the Dalai Lama. So, the two of them. And he's

the--and he's the only friend who writes me letters by hand, because the Dalai Lama doesn't

do that. So before we come here, he asked whether he should be doing the advance or

the--or the geneta--the version of his talk. So I asked for the advanced technical version.

So if it's too older, blame me. But if it's good, it's his credit. And with that, please

welcome our friend, Professor James Austin. Thank you.

>> Austin: Thank you, Meng, for your generous, hospitality and generous welcome to this group.

I have a very easy or very difficult job talking to this group at Google. The difficult part

of my job relates to your high level of intellect, which paradoxically makes it more difficult

for you to understand unless you remember how important it is to have moments of insight.

If you can remember the moments when you've had insight, when all you intellectual knowledge

has failed you but your intuition has given you a burst of understanding, then I have

an easy job. So try to keep in mind those moments of insight at your desk or any out

of doors when a moment of insight has clarified a problem that remained impenetrable to your

high level of intellect. Meng tells me that many of you in this group have taken the course

on meditation and consciousness, and so I think it's appropriate that we all start with

a moment of meditation. You've already worked hard all this morning. You've gotten here.

You've come here on time to this lecture. So let's start with a brief moment of meditation.

The first slide is the old Taoist yin yang symbol, and the purpose is to point out that

their two aspects, the black and the white, the male and the female, this into that are

complementary, not antagonistic. They're both necessary to be part of the cosmic whole.

You might wonder how a seemingly orthodox neurologist and academician would ever--would

ever be involved in anything as esoteric as Zen Buddhism. It stared when I was on sabbatical

in Kyoto, Japan. I was introduced, fortunately, to an English-speaking Zen master. And this

is the gate through which I entered this Rinzai Zen temple, Daitokuji, in 1974. It's an ordinary

gate of the kind that we use in the west and elsewhere in the world. It operates as a unit

so that the top and the bottom open simultaneously. What I'm about to describe to you as a theme

throughout this talk is something that may seem unfamiliar, but here's the theme. The

theme is that when we turn on our self-centered attention, we exert in a reciprocal opposite

fashion our external kind of attentiveness. And contrary-wise, when we turn on our attentiveness

into the external world, we dampen our resources that go into our self-centeredness. And with

this introduction, let's turn to the two different kinds of meditation, the attentive art of

meditation. For those of you who have handouts, this will be on the handout so you need not

try to memorize it. But basically we start as we did a few moments ago by looking down

and usually at a spot in front of us in a form of what's been called concentrative meditation.

It's a more effortful kind of attentiveness. It's focused and it's exclusive. If we're

pointing down like this, were excluding the world all around us and focusing on one point

in a deliberate one-pointed manner. Now, this requires our voluntary top-down processing,

and so it is more self-referential; we're in there doing it. It's the kind of attention

that can evolve later on into the absorptions, and it does involve our paying attention.

This kind of attention, this kind of awareness is personalized. We're in there doing it ourself.

Now, later on, after we've trained attention in a top-down manner, we move into a more

receptive kind of meditation. By definition, this is more effortless. It's attentiveness

that is unfocussed and it is inclusive. It will take in everything around us; front,

back, top and bottom. It's a more open, universal, bare awareness and it expresses our involuntary--our

involuntary attentiveness to the world around us. So it, by definition, is more other referential.

If self is everything inside our skin, other is everything outside of our skin. And this

is the kind receptivity that can later shift into more insightful, intuitive modes of processing.

It's called a choiceless awareness because we are not choosing to do it; it happens.

So this is a more anonymous kind of awareness; anonymous awareness. Now, we have two ways--two

ways of processing reality. The one we're most familiar with and the one's that's easiest

to understand is this form, the egocentric, self-centered kind of processing. If this

is the person doing it and looking at an apple, these lines of sight from the apple are all

coming back into the general access of this person's attentiveness. And this person--this

person has a frame of reference looking at the outside world. This person is holding

on with both hands to this frame of reference and he's seeing only what he chooses to. There's

another kind of reality which is revealed to us without our being aware of it. And just

as the word "ego" stands for self, the Greek word "allo" stands for other. So allocentric

reality is that world that the brain perceives without our knowing that it's doing so. And

when it looks out out there and automatically identifies these apples and positions them

in three dimensional space in relation to each other, no lines of sight come back here

to the person who is doing this kind of attentive processing. This is allocentric processing.

Now, the two kinds of processing, egocentric and allocentric are on your handout. But the

important thing to realize is that they pursue different pathways in the brain. The egocentric

pathway is, in a sense, the northern pathway which proceeds in the upper part of the brain.

The allocentric pathway is pathway that proceeds from back to front through the southern part,

the lower part of the brain. Next topic on your handout, and your handout has these topics

arranged in a serial manner, so if you proceed from the top, you'll be getting the whole

outline of this presentation. The next topic we're talking about is attention itself. William

James, the American psychologist and philosopher, outlined the importance of attention, and

he called it "The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again,

over and over again, is the very root of all of our judgment, character and will." I'm

going to make a little different tack and also emphasize that not only is this a voluntary

process, but that attention operates involuntarily. So let's look at the attentive brain here.

And to get oriented, this is the back of the brain and you're looking down at the top of

the brain with the right hemisphere being on your right and the left hemisphere being

on your left. The nose is here. And let's look at the left hemisphere first and you'll

notice it has a lot of fine dots in it. This is to emphasize that the left hemisphere operates

in a discriminatory, fine-grain kind of processing. And when it looks out at the outside world,

and this outside world is on the opposite side of the environment because things are

crossed in the brain, it looks out and sees with discrimination, fine-grain discrimination.

It sees and hears with fine-grain discrimination. Now, you know that most--for most of us, almost

all of us, our language ability is centered over in the left hemisphere. Whereas, when

we're talking about attentiveness, the corresponding regions, very exactly in this right hemisphere,

are specialized for attention. Most of the training in Zen meditation involves the training

of attention; the training of attention, both top-down and bottom-up training of attention.

And here we see the reason why. Because this right hemisphere, you'll notice, has a lot

of spaces in between the lines. It's not a fine grain, it's more of a course grain kind

of processing. And when it looks out into the opposite visual field, there is plenty

of room between these lines for it to insert values, atmospheres of aesthetic appreciation,

and judgment. Then because it sends a message over to the left hemisphere through the corpus

callosum, it enters into a bargain with the left hemisphere. It's an age old bargain.

It's been going on for millenia. And it says, in effect, "Left hemisphere, you can take

over the responsibility of words, and language and speaking and understanding language. But

I'm going to co-opt everything that you see over in the right side of the world and claim

it as mine." And so the right hemisphere pays attention to both sides of the outside environment.

And this becomes very important because it means that the right hemisphere is poised

to be receptive to the whole outside world. Many years ago, it was theorized, with good

evidence, that these two pathways were organized into a where pathway and then to a what pathway.

It's now, I think, more reasonable to say that this northern root is a "where is it

in relation to me?" back in the center, and to say that the southern root is a "what is

it?" pathway that arrives at identification of the object that is seen out there. Those

of you who know some anatomy will notice an interesting point about this northern root,

because it goes through the angular gyrus here on it's way north into the parietal lobe,

and it misses the supramarginal gyrus which is more involved in the ventral kind of attentiveness.

This slide is a composite slide that shows the brain and what it perceives out there

as a--in a theoretical way. We'll start with two of these spots up in the top part of the

brain because one of them is intraparietal sulcus or the IPS. And the IPS is linked with

the frontal eye field which is in the frontal part of the brain, and the two together are

our two modes of top-down attentiveness. We spoke of top-down attentiveness earlier, and

it's on one of your handout tables. You'll notice that these two modes of attention are

in a position to be overlapped by the egocentric pathway of processing, so that the two together,

egocentricity and top-down attentiveness, are very easy to link together into one giant

function. On the other hand, lower down, is the temporoparietal junction which includes

the superior temporal gyrus here and the supramarginal gyrus. And it links up in the same network

and circuitry with the inferior frontal cortex which is farther forward in the brain. You're

looking here, by the way, at the brain where the occipital lobe is back here, the seeing

part of the cortex, whereas the frontal lobe and nose is way up here in front. Further

more, this lower ventral pathway for attention is closer to the allocentric or the other

centered mode of processing reality, and tucked into the undersurface of the temporal lobe

is a module called the FG or the fusiform gyrus. This is a gyrus that specialize both

for color perception and for the processing or facial features. Thank you. All right.

So here's this brain and it's looking up into the outside world, and what is it seeing?

Well, it's seeing four quadrants of vision, and let's look at them separately. Why, you

might ask, is there a red rim around the lower visual field? Well, that's because the egocentric

pathway, starting as it does in the upper part of the occipital lobe, is much more efficient

at processing things that are below the horizon. So, upper part of the occipital lobe, more

efficient at processing lower down. And ladies, there are several of you in the audience,

if you are balancing a baby on your lap, it's very important for you to be using the functions

that are up here, your functions of touch and proprioception, because they will help

you hold that baby accurately on your lap so the baby doesn't fall. And gentlemen, if

you are hammering a nail with your hammer and you'll hold the nail in your left hand,

it's very important for you have proprioception and touch so that you can come down with your

hammer accurately on the head of the nail because if you don't, your fingers are history.

So this pathway, the egocentric pathway, is highly specialized for action. And it depends

on the parietal lobe for its proprioceptive and touch skills. And notice that these objects

that it handles are down close to it in its very personal space in the envelope of space

right around it within reach; within reach. On the other hand, consider the allocentric

pathway starting in the lower part of the occipital lobe. Remember things are crossed

in the brain. So this part of the brain is most efficient at processing items that are

up here in the upper visual fields above the visual horizon. What is up here? Well, in

ages past, it would be very handy to detect the saber-toothed tiger by your sense of hearing,

audition, or your sense of color vision so that you could detect the difference between

the stripes on the tiger and the leaf patterns that are in the underbrush. And it's important

that the tiger be detected at a distance away from you so it doesn't wind up in your lap.

And having escaped the tiger, if you wanted to be in a contemplative mode and thank your

lucky stars, you could look out in the distance at the blue sky and the clouds and the mountains

and be in a more relaxed frame of mind. These are the differences between vision and audition

which are in the temporal lobe, and touch and proprioception, the circuitry of which

is in your parietal lobe. Now looking here at a functional MRI scan of the left--we're

looking at the right hemisphere from the outside, the nose is here by the inferior frontal gyrus

and the occipital lobe is back here in the back. And you see these same structures that

we've spoken about before, but the interesting point here is that the intraparietal sulcus

is right next to this blue spot which is the superior parietal lobule. What is the superior