They wrote a book together and they’re friends. But when it comes
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to the workings of the unconscious mind, neuroscientist Wolf Singer and molecular biology-trained Buddhist Matthieu Ricard don’t see eye to eye.
In an excerpt from their book in the MIT Press Reader, Singer sees meditation as an attempt to escape problems. Ricard takes Singer’s view of the unconscious as giving solidity to a mirage. At times they seem to be talking past each other. Here are a few of my takeaways from their exchange of scientific and contemplative worldviews.
What is the Unconscious?
For Singer, the unconscious is the many bodily, sensory, psychological, conceptual and learned routines that operate without us controlling them or even being aware of them. He even says we can’t be aware of some of these signals. For example, we respond to pheromones, yet we can’t smell them. Others may be accessible, but our conscious processing capacity is limited. It can deal with no more than four to seven items at a time.
Ricard thinks believing that this messy inner world is our bedrock is a mistake. Instead, he calls it “the outer layers of clouds formed by mental confusion that temporarily prevent one from experiencing the most fundamental nature of mind.” That nature is pure awareness. It’s a center of calm clarity.
Attention and Awareness
Meditation, Ricard says, brings us to that clear place where we can watch, detached, when habitual emotions and thoughts arise. We don’t need to be driven by them. Instead, we can observe them—pay attention to them–then let them dissipate.
Attention is important in Singer’s view too. He says where we place our attention is the key to becoming aware of any of the unconscious stimuli and processes that we can access. For example, our heart is always beating, but we only notice it when we pay attention to it. It’s an active, intentional directing.
However, he also says our attention “is often directed by processes we’re not aware of.” That view seems to align with meditation. After all, we’re not intentionally calling up those thoughts and feelings that arise when we’re meditating. Yet there they are.
Suffering and Problem-Solving
Buddhists have been observing the mind for thousands of years in order to understand it as a way to alleviate suffering. Meditation is their primary method. In Ricard and Singer’s conversation, Singer challenges meditation’s effectiveness. What good does it do to feel better for the duration of the meditation yet resume conflict with others, he asks.
Ricard counters, saying essentially if you’re only getting temporary emotional relief from meditation, and not carrying an inner calm into the world and relationships, then you’ve not been meditating long enough or deeply enough. When people meditate, over time, habitual, conflicting thoughts are less likely to arise. Experienced meditators cultivate an inner freedom that changes the way they experience and act with others.
Singer talks about the unconscious as a highly effective problem-solver—under certain conditions. He says, for complex problems where many variables aren’t well-defined and there’s time pressure for a solution, the unconscious produces better results than the slow, deliberate approach to problem-solving. That’s because the unconscious has a vast store of implicit knowledge, heuristics, motives and drives and operates using parallel processing. It can quickly make multiple comparisons and discard the least appropriate possibilities. A linear, logical rules-based method takes more time with less information.
In Singer’s explanation of the unconscious, Ricard sees author Daniel Kahneman’s thinking (Thinking, Fast and Slow). My first thought was, Singer and Kahneman may describe the mind’s mechanics similarly, but Singer comes to a different conclusion about the value of the unconscious than Kahneman (who thinks this fast mode of thinking is error-prone). I’ve talked about Kahneman’s view in a previous post on intuition.
Read More
If you’re interested in more of what Singer and Ricard have to say, read their full exchange or their book Beyond the Self: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience.