Transcript

According to Wikipedia, after leaving Stanford, you traveled to Asia and studied meditation with Hindu and Buddhist teachers. Could you give some insight into this, how significant was the time for you? Do you still practice meditation?

Yeah, I do practice meditation still. And this period of my life was absolutely formative of my view of the nature of human consciousness, what the possibilities are for changing our experience of the world. Why it’s interesting to study consciousness and subjectivity at the level of the brain, and all this preceded my interest in neuroscience. So, what I did in my twenties, really, I still practiced meditation, and I’ve done some subsequent periods of intensive practice on retreat, but in my twenties, I spent about two years of that decade on silent meditation retreats, ranging from as short as a weekend to three months. And most of this was done in a Buddhist context, to study in a practice called the Vipassana, which I blogged about on my blog recently.