Meditate on It

Can adding contemplation to the classroom lead students to more eureka moments?

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live discussion with Arthur Zajonc, director of the academic program at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, about meditation in the college curriculum.

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By JOHN GRAVOIS

Northampton, Mass.

Arthur Zajonc is sitting on the edge of a chair with his back straight, his eyes closed, and his brow lightly furrowed in concentration. He is meditating, but he does not look especially beatific. He looks like someone dreaming of algebra.

He sits in a circle of about 40 other people, some perched on chairs, others sitting cross-legged on plump, round floor cushions called zafus, many of their faces likewise knit with mild concern.

After a time, Mr. Zajonc lifts his hands from his thighs and retrieves a bell from a table behind him. He strikes it, the air seems to wobble a little, and the meditators blink open their eyes. When the room has come back into focus — dark wood paneling, clothbound books, old portraits on the walls — Mr. Zajonc begins to speak, and the gears of a group discussion slowly start to turn.

He is speaking to professors who have traveled from all over the country to Smith College for a weeklong seminar. Here in a region dubbed the "the Buddha Belt" for its preponderance of meditation centers, they are talking about adding meditation and other contemplative practices to the college curriculum. Mr. Zajonc (pronounced like "science," but with a "z") is a physics professor at Amherst College and the director of the academic program at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a Northampton nonprofit group that seeks to promote better living and a better society through meditation and yoga.

This seminar is only the latest flowering of the center's efforts in higher education. Over the past seven years, it has paired up with the American Council of Learned Societies to give out a handful of fellowships annually to professors who want to build contemplative components into their curricula — in subjects as varied as physics, business, and art history. The idea is that meditation doesn't just help stressed-out students find their happy place; rather, it actually deepens their engagement with subject matter — and may even prompt moments of insight.

The Northampton center's efforts are already bearing fruit. At the University of Michigan School of Music, students can receive bachelor's degrees in a program called jazz and contemplative studies. An economist at Emory University has drawn up a syllabus that requires his students to meditate on pictures of poor people. And at Brown, a religious-studies professor includes meditation "labs" among his course requirements.

When the center advertised this curriculum-development seminar for paying customers, it received twice as many applications as it could accept.

"We're not alone anymore," Mr. Zajonc tells the group of session attendees. "Science is being done, conferences are happening, communities are getting together locally, regionally, nationally.

"It's a wave," he says. "It's a movement."

Buoyed by Research

There's no place for this in the academy. This is spirituality in the classroom. This is Buddhism Lite. Meditative silence is a home for the demonic. How can you grade inner experience? This is pseudoscience. You can do the same thing with Prozac. How do you justify having students pay all those tuition dollars to do ... nothing?

Professors who want to introduce contemplation into the classroom take heat from all sides. But now isn't a bad time for them to make their case.

Over the past decade, and particularly in the past year, neuroscientific research on the effects of meditation has flourished. In a much publicized study last November, Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, showed that Buddhist monks who have logged more than 10,000 hours in contemplation are able — far better than novice meditators — to activate "positive emotion" centers in their brains when concentrating on compassion.

In fact, Mr. Davidson found that some of the most experienced monks registered higher brain activity in those regions than had ever been recorded in a healthy person.

Another recent study, by Paul Ekman at the University of California at San Francisco, indicates that the monks' compassion is more than a mere head trip. When experienced monks were shown a rapid succession of video images of minutely different facial expressions, they were better at distinguishing among the emotional states registered than were all 5,000 of Mr. Ekman's other test subjects.

Next month, in what is perhaps the most vivid sign of neuroscience's contemporary romance with Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is scheduled to deliver the inaugural lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, fresh on the heels of the publication of his new book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.

In it, he writes: "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

It is as though Buddhism were saying to science: Let's play ball.

Mr. Zajonc, who has coordinated some of the Dalai Lama's meetings with scientists, has much the same attitude about contemplation in higher education.

"I think it's totally fair to be held to high standards in the academy," he says. "We just have to develop the responses."

In the classroom, Mr. Zajonc believes that contemplative practice should function on multiple levels. The most basic is what he calls "mental hygiene" — the therapeutic, relaxing, focusing effect that most people think of when they imagine someone tuned out in a half-lotus position.

But beyond that, he says, there are more-specific exercises — like free writing, for instance, in which a practitioner writes for a set interval of time without ever lifting her pen — that can help students observe their emotional, intuitive, or physical responses to course material.

At the highest level, Mr. Zajonc says, meditation can shade into something he calls "contemplative inquiry," where students try to create the mental circumstances for moments of insight — minor versions of the "eureka moments" in the history of science.

That's not to say that adducing evidence and crunching equations should ever go out the window. But truly original discoveries don't usually spring straight from logical proofs, he says: "The conditions required for intuitive insight are quite different from the subsequent dispassionate, logical testing of it."

In his mind, the mental state behind such epiphanies is more akin to seeing than to deductive reasoning. Meditation, which builds skills of self-observation and trains the mind to mull contradictions without jumping to resolve them, he says, may be the best way to cultivate that special kind of vision.

Curriculum Fight

In 2000, three years after getting a contemplative-practice fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, Ed Sarath submitted a proposal for an entire degree program in jazz and contemplative studies to the curriculum committee at the University of Michigan School of Music. In addition to typical courses in music theory, performance, and improvisation, the major would require four semesters of a "contemplative-practice seminar" and a course called "Creativity and Consciousness," plus work in meditation-related fields like psychology and religion.

To his surprise, the idea sailed through the committee with a unanimous vote. Then it went before the entire faculty of the school for consideration. Ten days went by before anyone weighed in.

Then the exchange of a few e-mail messages started what is still known at the school as "the great debate."

"Things got testy," says Mr. Sarath, a jazz professor. "I was getting tendonitis every night responding to challenges to it."

Logan Skelton, an associate professor of piano at the school, was one of the curriculum's most vocal opponents — though he took pains not to attack contemplative practice in its own right.

"Not everything that's worth doing belongs in a classroom," he says, still maintaining the position he held five years ago. "How do you grade contemplative achievement? How do you assess anything to do with it? It seems to me that it is in a domain that is deeply personal."

Mr. Skelton also took issue with the amount of class time the curriculum required students to spend in meditation.

"If you were to add it up," he says, "you'd probably have something like an entire semester's class where they do nothing but sit in silence. That seems out of balance to me."

What seems to divide Mr. Sarath and Mr. Skelton most is a disagreement over whether something akin to inquiry — something substantive — is happening when students meditate.

"It's not just that the students are sitting in silence, it's that they're reflecting on related models, theoretical models of consciousness," says Mr. Sarath. Moreover, he says, "the quality of interaction that happens after that silent time can be very powerful."

After weeks of debate, Mr. Sarath's curriculum passed by roughly a two-thirds majority.

According to Stephen Shipps, an associate dean of the music school who supported the program from the beginning, it has thrived. "It's probably one of the three or four most difficult curricula in the school academically," he says. "And it has attracted some of the most intelligent and interesting students we have."

'Out of the Closet'

Frank L. Maddox, an associate professor of economics at Oxford College of Emory University, is a big guy with a Southern drawl and a short goatee. An avid country two-stepper, he might not seem out of place at a monster-truck rally — except that he is wearing a sea-green T-shirt emblazoned with a big Sanskrit "Om."

Mr. Maddox is sitting with a handful of other professors in a bright and airy classroom at Smith. They've just come in from a "walking meditation," where they clocked a tortoiselike average of 20 steps per minute around the campus quad. Now they are sharing their plans to incorporate contemplation into their students' college experience.

"I might have them look at an image of something to do with poverty or globalization," Mr. Maddox says, "then free write, then meditate, then look at the image again, then free write." He pauses. "And then watch all hell break loose with my course evaluations."

(In fact, most professors at the seminar who have tried out contemplative exercises in the classroom report overwhelmingly positive reviews from students.)

Like many of the professors attending the seminar here, Mr. Maddox has incorporated vaguely contemplative elements into his classes for years, without flagging them as such — and he certainly didn't trumpet his meditative intentions when he was still an assistant professor. "I did not come out of the closet that much until I was tenured," he says, "and it was a good call."

At times, the trepidation that the professors here feel about bringing contemplative practice into their classrooms shades all the way into skepticism and self-doubt. A constant anxiety in group discussions is "the flake factor," as in "we must minimize the flake factor."

Aron Shlonsky, an associate professor of social work who recently left Columbia University to teach at the University of Toronto and is a dedicated meditator, makes repeated calls for measurable results. "If we're going to be doing this in the academy," he asks the group, "does this result in better knowing? Does this result in a student doing better on a physics test?"

"Remember," he says, "people used to think phrenology was a real thing."

Future Plans

On the last day of the session, the group of 40 professors gathers in a circle one last time to discuss the future. One of the attendees, David Kahane, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta, in Canada, who only found his way to the session because he spent years doing Google searches for "Zen" and "pedagogy," volunteers to start a Web log so the group can keep trading ideas online.

Another attendee proposes a "road show" that would take the session leaders to various campuses across the country. Others hatch plans for meetings on the West Coast. Still others make ardent last-minute suggestions for rhetorical strategies to convince administrators of the worth of contemplation in the classroom.

(And sure enough, in the weeks after the August session, the blog will take off, new gatherings will land on the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society's calendar, attendees will set up their own workshops on contemplative pedagogy at their home universities, and one professor — Fred Curtis, an economist at Drew University — will deliver his institution's convocation address with a surprise emphasis on mindfulness.)

If nothing else, the session confirms that contemplative practice in higher education is an idea on the march — or at least an idea on a very slow walk.

After about an hour of increasingly breathless brainstorming, Mr. Zajonc brings the discussion to a close, ushering everyone back into a final period of silence with the sound of a bell. The air wobbles. The room disappears.