This book examines how Western behavioral science--which has generally focused on negative aspects of human nature--holds up to cross-cultural scrutiny, in particular the Tibetan Buddhist celebration of the human potential for altruism, empathy, and compassion. Resulting from a meeting between the Dalai Lama, leading Western scholars, and a group of Tibetan monks, this volume includes excerpts from these extraordinary dialogues as well as engaging essays exploring points of difference and overlap between the two perspectives.

This book addresses important issues of ageing and spirituality and reflects on the impact of culture on both constructs. The papers are contemporary in that they include excerpts of cultural impact on spirituality from New Zealand, Singapore, India, United Kingdom, Australia and the United States. This book marks almost 20 years of international conferences on ageing and spirituality that commenced in January 2000. It opens the conversation to all who were part of this journey of ageing, including older people, practitioners in ageing and aged care, researchers, and those who reflect on the process of growing older. Chapters feature diverse perspectives, highlighting the need for inclusivity in conversations that surround ageing and recognize how development of cultures is influenced by the society where they emerge, and by minority groups within larger society. Chapters also note the occurrence of subcultures of ageing and aged care. The conference was held shortly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the chapters being written often during times of lockdown. Their content reflects the importance of spirituality in times of isolation and can show ways of reaching out to vulnerable older people, of various faiths and cultures, whatever their situations. Changing Cultures of Ageing and Spirituality will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Theology, Divinity and Religious Studies, Gerontology, Sociology, Psychology, Mental Health, and Nursing. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging.

In this "masterpiece... the preeminent historian of neuroscience" (Science) explores psychiatry's frustrated efforts to understand mental disorders as medical disorders. Anne Harrington reveals how psychiatry's waxing and waning theories have been shaped, not just by developments in the clinic and laboratory, but also by a surprising range of social factors. The "enthralling Mind Fixers" (Nature) recounts the past and present undertaking to understand the biological basis of mental illness-its potential and its limitations-in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and those whose job it is to care for them.

Presents experimental methodology, neuropsychological interpretations, and clinical applications of cognitive microgenesis theory along with research findings on visual information processing, anxiety, defense, attention, and personality assessment.

"Anyone interested in the differences in function between the left and right brain hemispheres will find Anne Harrington's ?binturicul? Account a freshening and sobering revelation. Far from being a new field of neuroscience, cerebral laterality was the center of significant and impassioned controversy in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with ramifications into . . . Accurate, fascinating, and important."--Julian Jaynes, author of "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

By the 1920s in Central Europe, it had become a truism among intellectuals that natural science had "disenchanted" the world, and in particular had reduced humans to mere mechanisms, devoid of higher purpose. But could a new science of "wholeness" heal what the old science of the "machine" had wrought? Some contemporary scientists thought it could. These years saw the spread of a new, "holistic" science designed to nourish the heart as well as the head, to "reenchant" even as it explained. Critics since have linked this holism to a German irrationalism that is supposed to have paved the way to Nazism. In a penetrating analysis of this science, Anne Harrington shows that in fact the story of holism in Germany is a politically heterogeneous story with multiple endings. Its alliances with Nazism were not inevitable, but resulted from reorganizational processes that ultimately brought commitments to wholeness and race, healing and death into a common framework.

Before 1933, holistic science was a uniquely authoritative voice in cultural debates on the costs of modernization. It attracted not only scientists with Nazi sympathies but also moderates and leftists, some of whom left enduring humanistic legacies. Neither a "reduction" of science to its politics, nor a vision in which the sociocultural environment is a backdrop to the "internal" work of science, this story instead emphasizes how metaphor and imagery allow science to engage "real" phenomena of the laboratory in ways that are richly generative of human meanings and porous to the social and political imperatives of the hour.

Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Can mind-body practices from the East help us become well? When it comes to healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter.

But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant cultural history describes mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories, allowing us to make new sense of our suffering and to rationalize new treatments and lifestyles.

Roxanne was only seventeen when she was raped and beaten into unconsciousness not remembering who or why anyone would do this to her. Roxanne having to live with the guilt of not remembering if she had contributed to the death of her seven year old sister Tonja, or what happened to her that same night; left Roxanne more confused and guilt ridden. Soliciting the help of her best friend Gloria, Roxanne asked her to revisit the night when it all went wrong. Roxanne's mother Mabel tells Gloria that she doesn't think that bringing up such a horrible tragedy would help Roxanne at all, and tells Gloria not to pursue it any further, . Being a virgin at the time of the rape left Roxanne empty and confused. Andrew, Roxanne's boyfriend does not understanding why Roxanne has all but pushed him out of her life, But things go from bad lo worse when Roxanne leaves a letter for her father saying that she would be leaving town. But what her father didn't know was that his daughter was pregnant and things were about to get a lot worse where she was headed.

Their meeting captured headlines; the waiting list for tickets was nearly 2000 names long. If you were unable to attend, this book will take you there. Including both the papers given at the conference, and the animated discussion and debate that followed, "The Dalai Lama at MIT" reveals scientists and monks reaching across a cultural divide, to share insights, studies, and enduring questions.

Is there any substance to monks' claims that meditation can provide astonishing memories for words and images? Is there any neuroscientific evidence that meditation will help you pay attention, think better, control and even eliminate negative emotions? Are Buddhists right to make compassion a fundamental human emotion, and Western scientists wrong to have neglected it?

"The Dalai Lama at MIT" shows scientists finding startling support for some Buddhist claims, Buddhists eager to participate in neuroscientific experiments, as well as misunderstandings and laughter. Those in white coats and those in orange robes agree that joining forces could bring new light to the study of human minds.

A mere "symbol" of medicine--the sugar pill, saline injection, doctor in a white lab coat--the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely managed its discomfort with this phenomenon by discounting the placebo effect, subtracting it as an impurity in its data through double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book is committed to a different perspective--namely, that the placebo effect is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our skin.

Anne Harrington's introduction and a historical overview by Elaine Shapiro and the late Arthur Shapiro, which open the book, review the place of placebos in the history of medicine, investigate the current surge in interest in them, and probe the methodological difficulties of saying scientifically just what placebos can and cannot do. Combining individual essays with a dialogue among writers from fields as far-flung as cultural anthropology and religion, pharmacology and molecular biology, the book aims to expand our ideas about what the placebo effect is and how it should be seen and studied. At the same time, the book uses the challenges and questions raised by placebo phenomena to initiate a broader interdisciplinary discussion about our nature as cultural animals: animals with minds, brains, and bodies that somehow manage to integrate "biology" and "culture," "mechanism" and "meaning," into a seamless whole.