Neuroscience Curriculum

Year 1 – Introduction to Neuroscience: Neurons, sensory organs, and the brain

Motivation: Our curriculum this year relies heavily on inputs from monastics involved in the ETSI, to build basic understandings of neuroscience and conceptual bridges to monastics’ Buddhist studies and practices. A driving motivation for the year’s curriculum draws from the mutual scientific and Buddhist concern with this question: What is sentience? Individual pedagogical sessions each are guided by their own related questions.

Curriculum

Year 2 – The science of knowing, understanding, and behaving

Motivation:  This year’s curriculum is motivated by the question of “How do we know?” How do we as living beings perceive and experience our worlds? But also, how do neuroscientists gain knowledge and understanding?
We use the visual system as an exemplar for how information is captured and processed.

Curriculum

Year 3 – Getting down to basics: transmission, integration, and response

Motivation: The fundamental driver for this year’s curriculum is the question: How does the nervous system work? Biochemical, molecular, and computational levels of explanation are unfamiliar to most monastics, but are intimately tied in to modern neuroscience. We build toward next year’s question of how brain and body work together in experience and behavior.

Curriculum

Year 4 – Emotions and memory

Motivation: This year we address subjective experience, asking “Where do our feelings and thoughts come from?” and “How do we learn and remember?” We build a neuroscientific view of emotions and their actions that speak directly to monastics’ understanding of them as inherently afflictive, and discuss the neuroscience of addiction to engage Buddhist emphasis on craving as the root of affliction. Neuroscience identifies the grounds for empathy. How does this fit in to the picture?  

Curriculum

Year 5 – Mind/Body and internal regulation

Motivation:  This year we take up neuroscientific insights on issues of self regulation, relationships with the world, and the grounds of suffering and resilience, and self transformation. We further explore questions about relationships of mind/brain and body, and how they work together in relating to and managing our internal and external circumstances. These big questions are explored through examination of biorhythms, resting states, attention regulation, and stress response systems. The discovery of neuroplasticity is probed. And monastics explore how brain plasticity sets the foundation for self transformation through practices such as meditation. Students engage in activities and experiments with heart rate monitors to explore these issues.

Curriculum

Year 6 – The mind at work / Doing science

Motivation: The final year brings it all together in understanding cognition and subjective experience. Students also participate in a thorough analytic review of the scientific process, as they design, implement and present a capstone project. The motivating questions for them are intellectual (What does neuroscience tell us about how we think and understand? How do these parallel or diverge in neuroscience or Buddhism?) and practical (What can I know through neuroscience?) Instructors work intensively with project groups at each step of the research process. Importantly, students learn the pursuit of meaningful scientific inquiry with limited resources. Lecture/discussions and projects are interwoven in successive sessions. We see all these as final steps to independent inquiry on students’ own terms.

Curriculum