Project Compassion
On the evening of July 25, 2008, an unprecedented meeting of the minds in Aspen, Colorado, marked the introduction of the Stanford University-based non-profit, Project Compassion (otherwise known as The Stanford Center for the Study of Altruism and Compassion), to a group of founding supporters. Honored guests of this AIMF-sponsored event included Dr. James Doty; Geshe Thupten Jinpa, His Holiness The Dalai Lama's principal translator; Tenzin Tethong, President of the Dalai Lama Foundation; Pico Iyer, author of Dalai Lama biography, The Open Road; and Matthieu Ricard, Buddhist monk and author of the recent best-seller, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill.
In honor of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's visit to Aspen July 24-26, Project Compassion unveiled the organization's mission of creating a multi-disciplinary environment whereby compassion and altruism research is supported and legitimized within the broader scientific community.
Project Compassion, founded by Stanford Professor of Neurosurgery, Dr. James Doty, is one of the most important scientific centers taking shape today. The effort is a joint project of the Neuroscience Institute and a host of contemplative scholars (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to explore the neural underpinnings of compassion states and develop protocols for potentiating these states in a secular structure.
Project Compassion goals include:
Exploring the neural correlates of compassion and human connection and devise secular protocols by which they can be trained
Researching civil and social structures in order to determine how to best create incentive for cooperative and pro-social behaviors
Helping to forge an international consortium to explore these topics and bring urgently needed, academic legitimacy to the field of compassion research
For more information about Project Compassion, visit www.compassionstanford.org