The Study of Tibetan Analytic Meditation Through the Lens of Neuroscience: A Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchange
Monastic Analytic Collaborative
Dr. David Fresco
David Fresco is Professor of Psychological Sciences at Kent State University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He directs the Psychopathology and Emotion Regulation Laboratory (PERL) and is a Co-Director of the Kent Electrophysiological Neuroscience Laboratory (KENL). David received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University. His program of research adopts an affective science perspective to the study of anxiety and mood disorders. Working at the interface of cognitive behavioral and emotion regulation approaches, he conducts survey, experimental, and treatment research to examine factors associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) including metacognitive factors (e.g., explanatory flexibility, decentering, rumination, worry), peripheral psychophysiology, and emerging work from affective neuroscience, utilizing neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques. Another focus of the PERL lab is the development of treatments informed by affective and contemplative neuroscience findings that incorporate mindfulness meditation and other practices derived from Buddhist mental training exercises. Much of his NIH-funded treatment research has focused on the infusion of mindfulness into Western psychosocial treatments. He is currently serving as PI on a recently funded NIH R01 (1R01HL119977-01) comparing the efficacy of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) versus Stress Management Enhancement (a non-mindfulness comparator) for unmedicated hypertension. He is also Co-Investigator of a recently funded NIH Center grant entitled, SMART Center II: Brain-Behavior Connections in Self-Management Science. He served as Co-PI of a recently concluded NIH proof in concept trial of MBSR for prehypertension (PI = Hughes). David is presently Associate Editor for two journals, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and Cognitive Therapy and Research, while also being a frequent reviewer for the Interventions Committee of Adult Disorders (ITVA) of the National Institute of Mental Health, the Mechanisms of Emotion, Stress, and Health (MESH) study section, and various study sections of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).
Dr. Marcel O. Bonn-Miller
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Dr. Joshua Pollock
Joshua Pollock is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Kent State University. He is the acting director of the Kent Electrophysiological Neuroscience Laboratory (KENL). Joshua received his PhD from the University of Akron. His program of research involves using a neuroscience approach to quantify sociological and psychological changes. To that end the KENL is currently investigating identity relevant feedback, neurophysiological responses to changes in the orientation of stimuli, and emotional responses to valenced stimuli. The research he conducts is on emotion regulation changes, cognitive regulation changes, and emotion arousal changes elicited by a variety of different stimuli. He has previously investigated emotion regulation differences in age. His current research involves neurophysiological differences in emotion regulation between practitioners of meditation and those who are not experienced in meditation. He is currently a Co-Investigator on a recently funded Army Research office grant investigating the neurodynamics of social status (PI= Kalkhoff). Joshua also consults on both electroencephalograph (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) designs for The Ohio State University.
Dr. Marieke van Vugt
Marieke van Vugt is an assistant professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence (ALICE) at the University of Groningen. She obtained her PhD in neuroscience focusing on the role of brain oscillations in recognition memory with Dr. Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. She then went on to do postdoctoral research on the neural correlates of decision making with Dr. Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University before starting her own group as a tenure track assistant professor in Groningen in 2010. Her research focuses on dissecting the fundamental cognitive operations and neural processes involved in making decisions, and on how our decisions are affected by meditation practice. She makes use of a combination of computational modeling, neuroscience, and experimental psychology tools. She has developed a unique approach to studying meditation by using computational models of cognition. Using these methods, she showed that meditation reduces mental noise. She has also developed a novel method to track perseverative cognition, with which she showed that after mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, people were less "stuck" in recalling negative memories. More recently she has started to build models of the meditation and distraction process itself.
Dr. Bryce Johnson
Bryce Johnson has been working continuously with the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives since 2000. He received a B.S. in 1997 and M.S. in 1999 from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Mechanical Engineering. During this time he developed a personal interest in science and philosophy. Bryce lived in Dharamshala for two years from 1999-2001 where he helped start the Library's science education project. During this time he began a deep appreciation for Buddhist philosophy and sharing western science with Tibetan monastic scholars. In 2007, he completed a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Johnson has worked as a scientist for the California Environmental Protection Agency on water quality issues related to mercury contamination in Northern California. In 2008 he worked as a IC Postdoctoral Fellow at Texas A&M University at the Laboratory for Oceanographic and Environmental Research in Galveston, Texas. Bryce's research focuses on issues related to water quality with an emphasis on the connections between humans and their impact on natural and engineered environments.