Author: Rick Hanson

Hanson is a clinical psychologist who spent years in Buddhist practice and then went looking for what neuroscience could say about it. Buddha's Brain, with the neurologist Richard Mendius, works through attention, compassion and equanimity in terms of the systems involved. His central claim is a negativity bias: the brain is, in his phrase, like velcro for bad experiences and teflon for good ones, so a pleasant state has to be held deliberately for half a minute before it registers. In places the neuroscience is stated more confidently than the evidence carries.