Harvard Medical School Distinguished Lecture in Mindy Body Research and Health: This presentation will be our next annual HMS Distinguished Lecture in Mind Body Research and Health, jointly hosted by the Osher Center for Integrative Health at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, The Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine and the Center for Mindfulness Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance

From a cognitive science perspective, many of the cognitive processes crucially involved in mindfulness meditation practices are internalized forms of social cognition and depend not just on the brain but also on the rest of the body interacting with the environment. Therefore, thinking of mindfulness meditation as a kind of internal individual introspection or private mental monitoring in the head is inaccurate. This lecture will explore these ideas drawing from Buddhist philosophy and the cognitive and brain sciences.