how to: Academy welcomes Buddhist monk and molecular biologist Matthieu Ricard to the stage for a night of conversation with his close friend, the esteemed neuroscientist Wolf Singer.
Ricard is a global inspiration and the French interpreter for the Dalai Lama – his TED talk on ‘The Habits of Happiness’ has been viewed 7.5 million times. Singer is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Founding Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. These callings may seem worlds apart yet Buddhism and neuroscience have shared goals: what is this thing we call the mind, and how can we use it to fulfil our destinies?
Buddhism for two millennia has pursued its investigations through knowledge of the self. Neuroscience relies on third-person observation. So where do they meet? Can science ever access consciousness as a primary experience? Can Buddhist awareness ever aspire to neuroscience’s precise criteria for conscious and unconscious processes? In this unique conversation, Ricard and Singer will offer their converging but distinct perspectives on the self, consciousness, meditation and free will. Join us for an enlightening and passionate dialogue between Buddhism’s wealth of experiential findings and neuroscience’s abundance of experimental results.
More information on the “how to: Academy” website
