Is THIS your best shot? A response to New Scientist's recent hit piece on non-materialist neuroscientists

A few days ago, a friend alerted me to an interesting development: In its Perspectives section, New Scientist - the National Enquirer of popular science magazines - had published a hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, my lead author on The Spiritual Brain. ("Creationists declare war over the brain" Amanda Gefter, 22 October 2008)

Non-materialists, essentially, think that your mind really exists; it is not simply an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in your brain. In fact, your mind is one of the key factors that shape your brain. On the medical side, non-materialist neuroscientists use this fact to alleviate illnesses such as obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias. They have good evidence for their case, and that is addressed here in an introduction to a recent symposium at the UN in New York. This post, however, will focus on the hit piece.

For me, the New Scientist piece was a gift. I sometimes teach non-fiction news writing. And it struck me as an excellent teaching opportunity ("the structure and function of the irresponsible hit piece, unpacked"). Of course, I mean to discourage my students from investing time or energy in such enterprises.

This piece is especially useful for two reasons: As Beauregard's co-author, I happen to know about non-materialist neuroscience already. So I need no research project to uncover the misrepresentations. Second, this piece is a very conventional example of the "hit" genre. That means I don't need to keep stopping and saying, "But, students, please note that this particular feature is rare."

Best of all, if I unpack this story now for interested Mindful Hack readers, I can save time in June (my busiest month) by just dusting it off for Write! Canada. So, let's have a look.

Sections

1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

Next: 1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

1 Scare their pants off before they even start reading: The art of the panic headline

First, note the headline of Gefter's hit piece: Creationists declare war over the brain

The headline was chosen for its inflammatory value, not its information value. So far as I know, only one of the people mentioned in the piece (Angus Menuge) is a creationist, and the fact that he is one is irrelevant to the story.

[Update 2008 11 01: Angus Menuge has written to say that he is NOT a creationist*.]

Creationism attempts to square the accounts of the creation of the Earth and life found in scriptures and traditions with accounts based in current science. However, typical creationist concerns like the age of the Earth and the origin of life are not a focus of neuroscience. Nothing much would follow for neuroscience from the triumph of one hypothesis over another in these areas because neuroscience studies the human brain in real time in the present day. Nothing discovered about the past can override observations in the present.

The words "creationists" and "declare war" do serve a purpose, but the purpose is not to provide information. The purpose is to scare New Scientist readers and discourage careful thought among them.

The piece opens with a quotation by neuropsychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain at a recent panel discussion:

YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.

It's an effective opening because, to the New Scientist fan - usually a loyal foot soldier for materialism, Schwartz's words must sound like frightening heresy. Readers will be eager to read down to the part where someone reassures them that it's all lies and Schwartz is a suspicious or despicable figure.

Reality check: I can’t begin to keep up with all the news stories whose basic message is that the materialist paradigm is breaking down. Mario Beauregard and I devoted a good part of The Spiritual Brain to examining just a few of these areas (before moving on to a discussion of more viable approaches).

To cite two examples: It has become increasingly obvious that computers cannot think like people, and ramping up their computing speed is not really going to help. Second, chimpanzees do not think like people either, despite many efforts to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the puzzle of human consciousness is still called "the hard problem of consciousness."

Remarkably, the "hard" problem of human consciousness is not just another example of researchers angling for more grant money by inflating the importance of the question they are studying. In fact, in this case, the researchers are considerably underestimating the problem. If granting agencies knew how difficult the consciousness problem is, they might choose to allocate the money elsewhere.

Moving right along, we read,

Earlier Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

Oh yes? Well, he did use the chopped series of words quoted here, but the original statement sounds very different.

For now, the New Scientist piece itself handily demonstrates Beauregard's point. Not that typical readers would be likely to notice. They will be offended by the very suggestion of a cultural war. A "war" would imply that there are two sides to the question, an assumption they will not wish to grant.

In any event, readers will assume - because they are not told otherwise - that Beauregard is himself an eager combatant. A modest amount of research would turn up a very different story. Non-materialist neuroscientists prefer to work in peace but are sometimes harassed by senior colleagues who view them and their findings as a threat. For example, regarding Beauregard's own work, as we relate in The Spiritual Brain,

... , with the grant received from the Metanexus Institute and John Templeton Foundation, we were expected to conduct a third study, a PET (positron emission tomography) study, on the nuns, in this case at the Brain Imaging Center of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI, the famous institute created by Wilder Penfi eld in the 1920s). The goal of the study was to measure serotonin (5-HT) synthesis capacity during the same conditions (baseline, control condition, mystical condition). The project was blocked by the PET Working Committee. We were given to understand that some committee members reacted violently to our submission. They thought that mystical states could not be studied scientifically (and they probably did not want the MNI to be associated with what they consider pseudoscience). We ended up using the money for another project in which we examine brain activity (with fMRI and QEEG) in NDErs who have been spiritually transformed by their NDEs. (p. 339, n. 32)

But that's nothing compared to the uproar that broke out when the Dalai Lama was scheduled to give the opening lecture at a 2005 neuroscience convention. Comments like this,

Neuroscience more than other disciplines is the science at the interface between modern philosophy and science. No opportunity should be given to anybody to use neuroscience for supporting transcendent views of the world. — Neuroscientist Zvani Rossetti, opposing the Dalai Lama’s lecture (p. 255)

were often heard. So yes, that was a cultural war, and no, the Dalai Lama did not start it. He remained gracious throughout.

So our writer has now convinced our New Scientist readers that "creationists" have started a "war" over the brain. At this point, she needs to convince them that the evil plot is headed up by intelligent design think tank [cue evil music] the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

*[Re Angus Menuge and creationism: I had been relying on a generally reliable source for the information about his view, a source I will not use again. Here is Menuge's own comment: "Angus Menuge is a Christian apologist and a defender of Intelligent Design, and is a creationist in the sense that he believes God created the universe, but he has not sought to defend a specific reading of Genesis." So, to the best of my knowledge, no one whom hit piece author Amanda Gefter identifies as a creationist is in fact one.) ]

Next: 2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

2 Reveal that a popular villain is behind it all (cue "evil" music)

At this point, Gefter, Philadelphia-based opinion editor at New Scientist, devotes a fair amount of space to the Seattle-based intelligent design think tank, Discovery Institute - an ever popular villain among her readers. They would believe anything of Discovery Institute (DI). So Gefter implies that DI is a key force behind non-materialist neuroscience:

In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design*, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?

Conspiracy thinking is a weak substitute for information. Discovery Institute is sympathetic to non-materialist neuroscience** (no surprise there), but it is not in any sense a key player. Non-materialist neuroscience probably owes much more to the Templeton Foundation, about whose science efforts Gefter is quite ambivalent, to say nothing of the Nour Foundation, which co-sponsored the recent symposium. But that would not fit the picture she is trying to paint.

Incidentally, will Templeton sour on non-materialist neuroscience, if Discovery gets more involved? Templeton and Discovery are not on friendly terms. Maybe, but Templeton may refuse to cede a fruitful area to a hated upstart. You don't get to be big that way, and Templeton is big.

*Note 1: A blind link was removed from the original at this point.

**Note 2: For the record, I spoke at Discovery's 2007 "Insider's Briefing," introducing The Spiritual Brain, which was released in hard cover that month by Harper One. That was where I first learned about Ben Stein's Expelled movie, and pelted back to my hotel room to blog about it - which is why that post originated in Seattle, not Toronto. Does Expelled - in which Jeffrey Schwartz makes a cameo appearance - mean that Stein and the Discovery Institute also intend to declare war on Hollywood? Hey, connect the dots, and ... celebs, shed those three-inch heels and run for the exits!!

Next: 3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

3 Haul out the goblins that scared them before

One thing to know about the New Scientist's readership, or The National Enquirer's, for that matter: On some topics they actually do not particularly want correct information.

Just as National Enquirer readers do not gladly hear that a movie star is not getting a rumoured divorce, New Scientist readers do not want to know why many doctors and psychologists find non-materialist neuroscience promising rather than threatening. So they probably won't seek corrrect information or thank anyone for providing them with it.

So the Gefter piece obligingly illustrates another key strategy in the "hit piece" technique - misleading definitions.

1. We are told that Schwartz and Beauregard are "attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism."

There are a number of models of dualism, and Beauregard and Schwartz think that interactive dualism is the best model, not Cartesian dualism. But knowing that might leave readers with questions or possible subjects to follow up on privately, in which case they might discover a whole new world out there that they don't want to know about and New Scientist never intended them to know about.

Anyway, while we are here, "dualism" is typically used by materialists as a term of abuse. That helps prevent people from seeing what should be obvious: The only alternative to dualism is monism - in other words, everything is material. That means that your consciousness - and any ideas you have as a result - are merely an illusion created by random firings of neurons.

So if you think that your consciousness and your ideas are in some sense real, that they do bring you into contact with reality, you are a dualist already! You think that non-material entities such as your ideas can actually exist. We can sort out what kind of dualist you are later. If, by contrast, you think that everything you have ever thought or ever will think is an illusion, arguing the case with you would be a waste of time.

Making "dualism"into a term of abuse is one way that hard core materialists keep a hold on their loyal and/or frightened followers. So, if the term scares you, think.

2. "ID [intelligent design] argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution."

Here, Gefter repeats a legacy media fidget - a false definition of intelligent design theory. For the record, intelligent design theorists like Michael Behe and William Dembski argue that the intricate machinery we find in cells requires design as well as chance and the repetitive laws of nature. That has nothing to do with whether evolution occurs, though it strongly implies that evolution is not random and purposeless.

However, I will not belabor that point here because - strictly speaking - it is not relevant to non-materialist neuroscience. If evolution had been random and meaningless, but had nonetheless produced minds that can act on brains, non-materialist neuroscience would be just the same today. As with her use of the term "creationists", Gefter is using the term "ID" to frighten her readers into refusing to consider non-materialist neuroscience in a reasonable way.

3. Henry Stapp's interpretation of quantum physics is "non-standard."

Stapp uses the von Neumann interpretation, which is a standard one:

In the interpretation of quantum physics created by physicist John Von Neumann (1903–1957), a particle only probably exists in one position or another; these probable positions are said to be "superposed" on each other. Measurement causes a "quantum collapse," meaning that the experimenter has chosen a position for the particle, thus ruling out the other positions. The Stapp and Schwartz model posits that this is analogous to the way in which attending to (measuring) a thought holds it in place, collapsing the probabilities on one position. This targeted attention strategy, which is used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, provides a model for how free will might work in a quantum system. The model assumes the existence of a mind that chooses the subject of attention, just as the quantum collapse assumes the existence of an experimenter who chooses the point of measurement. - The Spiritual Brain, p. 34.

Misleading statements and definitions can do a great deal to reassure readers that they need do no thinking outside the box. But these techniques cannot do everything. There is also the art of stripping context from people's words and then adding another, irrelevant context.

Next: 4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

4 Context reduces fear. So get rid of context

Usually, when you hear a person's words in context, you understand the person's concerns.

So the hit piece author, seeking to demonize her subject, may strip words from their context and assign a different context, creating a misleading picture.

Amanda Gefter's New Scientist hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists provides a number of good examples. Here's one - she quotes Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard as follows:

Earlier Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".

So Québecois Beauregard - of all people - is a U.S.-style right-wing culture warrior?

Now, reading that and knowing how wrong it is, I did something that few New Scientist faithful will likely do: I got and read the actual transcript of Beauregard's remarks. And here are his words in context, with the quoted words highlighted:

But in reality, many more colleagues have sent me e-mails or have had secret discussions with me saying that it's time for a major paradigm shift in neuroscience, but since we're only a minority of maverick scientists at this point, it's not possible yet to reverse the old paradigm, even though a lot of young neuroscientists are very encouraged to look in this direction. But they're still afraid of having trouble securing research funding and encountering opposition from universities. The field is still controlled by the old guard, and the old guard still believes in the old doctrine that the mind is what the brain does and that you can reduce all spiritual and mystical experiences to simply electrical or chemical processes in the brain. So there's a battle. It's like a cultural war, if you will. But we are making progress slowly.

So, it turns out that Beauregard is - as noted earlier - talking about the problems non-materialist neuroscientists have confided in him about and is not himself seeking a battle with anyone. Gefter needed to take his remarks out of context in order to portray him as a threat to her readers.

Here's another example:

Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.

If you go to the page at The Mindful Hack where I wrote that consciousness might be Darwinism's "grave", you will find that I was responding to hard core materialist Nicholas Humphrey, who himself uses the term the "Achilles Heel." Now, an Achilles' heel is a spot where a fatal wound may be inflicted in an otherwise invulnerable person, and he asks whether consciousness is the Achilles Heel of Darwinism.

Do you see how this works? I did not originate the idea that consciousness might be a problem for Darwinism. Humphrey titled his own essay that way (though he believes the problem surmountable). I responded, suggesting that "grave" might be a better term, given the evidence. But Gefter's piece cleverly creates the impression the Discovery Institute or the "wedge document" had something to do with it - and that it is all part of a plot to "replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

And if you got all your science news from New Scientist, you would never even wonder ...

Next: 5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

5 Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea! But wait ...

Right in the middle of "Creationists declare war over the brain," New Scientist's gift to writing teachers (= "the structure and function of the irresponsible hit piece, unpacked") we suddenly segue away from the National Enquirer style. We encounter an actual argument against the non-materialist interpretation of neuroscience.

It was unclear to me at first why anyone would bury an actual argument in all this scare-the-pants-ology. But then, when I had a closer look at the argument, I sort of understood. Here it is:

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s* on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use "mindful attention" to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology - the material brain is changing the material brain.

The problem is that Gefter's explanation does not explain anything. The brain is a semi-liquid organ, always in motion, so live brains do indeed change themselves all the time. However, when the mind changes the brain, it is a result of information received by the immaterial consciousness itself. Here is an example, from The Spiritual Brain, that dramatically illustrates the difference information received into one's consciousness can make:

University of Michigan researchers recently demonstrated the placebo effect in young, healthy men. They injected saltwater into their volunteers’ jaws and measured the impact of the resulting painful pressure via PET scans. Volunteers were told that they were receiving pain relief. They reported feeling better. The placebo treatment reduced the brain responses in a number of brain regions known to be implicated in the subjective experience of pain. No pain-relief drug was used in the study.

The researchers commented (2004): "These findings provide strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias."47

47 Tor D. Wager, James K. Rilling, Edward E. Smith, Alex Sokolik, Kenneth L. Casey, Richard J. Davidson, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Robert M. Rose, Jonathan D. Cohen, “Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain,” Science 303, no. 5661 (February 20, 2004): 1162–67. They write: "In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, we found that placebo analgesia was related to decreased brain activity in pain-sensitive brain regions, including the thalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, and was associated with increased activity during anticipation of pain in the prefrontal cortex, providing evidence that placebos alter the experience of pain."

- The Spiritual Brain, p. 142

As the study authors observe, these findings certainly provide "strong refutation of the conjecture that placebo responses reflect nothing more than report bias." But they also demonstrate something else: the critical importance of what the mind believes is happening.

Essentially, volunteers did not feel pain when they were told they should not expect to, despite the fact that they were receiving no pain relief. Their brains apparently did not know that because their minds were not informing their brains correctly.

That cannot be accounted for by claiming that "the material brain is changing the material brain," in Gefter's phrase. The material brain isn't doing anything in this case except receiving input from the immaterial mind and acting on it - in this case receiving incorrect information and failing to produce sensations of pain that might otherwise be expected. And, as anyone who has suffered severe jaw pain will acknowledge, it's hardly something one can just fail to notice or choose to ignore.

I can now see why Gefter needs to offer her argument to her readers in a hit piece. Presented all by itself as an account of the interactions of the mind and the brain, it would not fare well.

Before we move on, let me offer a brief word about explanations in science in general. Any grand theory can "explain" a broad variety of phenomena. Some theories are presented as "theories of everything." For example, Freud, Marx, and Darwin (a familiar triad of theorists of everything) could each offer an "explanation" for the life and works of Mother Teresa or Gandhi. For example, Freud might say that Mother Teresa was sexually repressed, Marx might say that she was a useful idiot for capitalism, and Darwin might say that she was spreading her ideas instead of her genes by raising thousands of abandoned children as traditional Catholics.

In each case, the explanation supports the theory, but beyond that it doesn't lead anywhere. That is, if I wanted to know why Gordon "greed is good" Gecko is the way he is, one of these contradictory "theories of everything" might be useful at some point. But if my goal is to understand people who have transcended materialism and accomplished remarkable things as a result, materialist explanations are useless.

To sum up, a useful explanation in science must shed light, not merely come up with a story that supports the theory. Gefter's explanation of mind brain relations as mere brain-brain relations supports a materialist theory, but does not shed any light on the way the mind and the brain actually interact.

(*Note: When I tried this link, it did not lead to the article, only to The New York Times 's site.)

Next: 6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

6 Scare their pants back on again and send them out to raise hell about stuff they know nothing about

Once readers have settled into a "conspiracy" mode, as per Amanda Gefter's hit piece in New Scientist, they can swallow the most extraordinary displays of foolishness without curiosity.

Have a look at this comment from Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK on the non-materialist approach to neuroscience:

"This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries. Proponents make such potentially reasonable points as 'Oh look, we can change our brains just by changing our minds,' but then leap to the claim that mind must be distinct and not materially based. That doesn't follow at all. There's nothing odd about minds changing brains if mental states are brain states: that's just brains changing brains."

Amanda Gefter advises us that Prof Clark's view is "the voice of mainstream academia." Is it indeed? Wittering about a "mind-virus"? No wonder materialist theory is in trouble.

Gefter ends by rallying her readers for a "big pre-emptive push" to educate the public about the brain. Does that mean more hit pieces?

In a letter to various notables, accompanying a copy of the hard cover edition of The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I said

Today, non-materialist neuroscience is thriving, despite the limitations imposed by widespread misunderstanding and, in a few cases, hostility. Readers are urged to approach all the questions and evidence presented in this book with an open mind. This is a time for exploration, not dogma.

At the time, it hadn't occurred to either of us that dogma would be supplemented by dark tales of conspiracy. But maybe that is a typical end state for a failing dogma.

Anyway, it's Hallowe'en, right?

Return to: Is THIS your best shot? A response to New Scientist's recent hit piece on non-materialist neuroscientists

Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - morning

"Mind-Body Connections: How Does Consciousness Shape the Brain?", the morning panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal, featured some interesting exchanges featuring a number of non-materialist neuroscientists. Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is not a mere illusion created by the workings of the brain.

(Both panels were televised and can be viewed here.)

Non-materialist neuroscience is practical!

French philosopher Elie During led off the first panel (Mario Beauregard, Esther Sternberg, Henry Stapp, and Jeffrey Schwartz, in order of speaking) by noting that the French mathematician Descartes - who believed that the mind was real - was, in a sense, the unlikely father of materialism because he tried to separate the mind entirely from the body:

Once the body and the brain were reduced to their sheer mechanical functioning and the mind was considered as substantially distinct from matter, the way was open for materialism: one only needed to drop the second part of the scheme—namely, the spiritual substance—and explain everything along mechanistic lines.

He also noted that quite a few of the panelists are medical doctors, and that doctors tend to be practical minded:

Here we have physicians who were led to psychoneurology by an intensive clinical or therapeutic practice. I believe this outlook makes a real difference. It means these people share a very concrete perspective. Their take on mind-body connections cannot be separated from the way they interact with patients who generally have their own views on the issue.

The focus of most non-materialist research is not armchair theorizing but treatments that work.

The question they are asking is not so much: “What is the nature of consciousness?” but rather, “What does consciousness do?” And such a query implies more than how consciousness operates. It echoes a deeper concern: “What can consciousness do for us?” In other words, can it improve our lives? Our selves? This pragmatic bent, I believe, is also palpable in Ostad Elahi’s description of the ethical underpinnings of spiritual life, so the pragmatic stance may well be one of the major threads of today’s event.

Of course non-materialist neuroscience needs theoretical underpinnings. But as pragmatists, the non-materialists tend to think that the theory emerges from the evidence. So the place to begin is gathering evidence.

The panel and audience then watched a clip from a documentary in which Leonard diCaprio shares with panelist Jefffrey Schwartz how he interacted with OCD patients to develop a proper acting method for his film The Aviator, on the life of Howard Hughes.

Here's a clip from The Aviator :




And here's DiCaprio talking about his portrayal of Hughes, who had the disorder (which Schwartz treats successfully with mindfulness techniques).




The panelists:

Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mind-body panel 1: Esther Sternberg - "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

Mind-body panel 1: Henry Stapp - Quantum theory makes us agents

Mind-body panel 1: Jeffrey Schwartz on how Leo DiCaprio gave himself obsessive-compulsive disorder and then cured it

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mind-body panel 1: Mario Beauregard - A Tale of Two Cultures ...

Mario Beauregard, an Associate Researcher at the University of Montreal in the Departments of Psychology and Radiology, as well as the Neuroscience Research Center, spoke on both the morning and afternoon panels of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium. In this morning session, he talked about how non-materialist neuroscientists (= the mind is real) interact with materialist ones (= the mind is an illusion).

Elie During [moderator]: He is of course an expert in the field of neuroscience and especially in issues regarding the spiritual side of the brain, if one may say so. I am referring to the book he co-authored, The Spiritual Brain, which is really a wonderful synthesis of almost all the questions that arise today in the field of the neuroscience of consciousness, and beyond. So my first question for you is the following: I’d like you to tell us a little bit more about the way your research, and more generally the kind of research you document in your book, is perceived by your colleagues. Is it easy to raise the kind of questions you’re concerned with? Do you perceive a form of embarrassment in the scientific community? And if so, how would you explain it?

Mario Beauregard: Thank you. Well, I would say that it depends where you are presenting your research, and also on the specific cultures associated with the various academic institutions.

I'll give you an example. In Montreal, we have two different cultures, an Anglophone culture and a Francophone culture. I am a French-Canadian and I’m at the University of Montreal, which is the second largest French university in the world after Paris. We have a very famous institution in Montreal, McGill University. It's called the “Harvard of the North,” as you know.

A few years ago when I decided to do a project with the Carmelite nuns, funded by the Templeton Foundation, two of the studies were supposed to be conducted at the University of Montreal, and a third was supposed to be conducted at McGill University, at the famous Montreal Neurological Institute founded by Penfield in the late 20s. This project was supposed to involve PET scanning to examine what's going on with regard to a chemical messenger in the brain called serotonin that is related to all sorts of functions, including mood regulation as well as various spiritual and mystical states. We asked for permission to use their PET SCAN to conduct this project over there and we were flatly rejected, whereas at the University of Montreal the other two projects were welcomed because the researchers there thought the projects were pioneering, innovative, new, and exciting, and that such questions were considered to be worthy of scientific investigation.

I was told later that at McGill University, neuroscience and spirituality/religion should not have anything to do with each other. And one of the members of the committee was a famous neuroscientist over there—I’m not going to mention her name, but she is known all over the world and she's even studied with Penfield in the 60s; some of you may know her. She said that as long as I'm here, as long as I am on the PET-working committee, there is never going to be any study about neuroscience and religion/spirituality. So that illustrates the differences in views regarding this question. It depends on where you are, but in general it’s very polarized.

For a minority of my colleagues, they think that his new kind of research is important, which tackles the mind-body problem and at the same time reveals all the shortcomings and limitations of the materialist view. I would say this is true for the minority of my colleagues who dare to say this publicly.

But in reality, many more colleagues have sent me e-mails or have had secret discussions with me saying that it's time for a major paradigm shift in neuroscience, but since we're only a minority of maverick scientists at this point, it's not possible yet to reverse the old paradigm, even though a lot of young neuroscientists are very encouraged to look in this direction. But they're still afraid of having trouble securing research funding and encountering opposition from universities. The field is still controlled by the old guard, and the old guard still believes in the old doctrine that the mind is what the brain does and that you can reduce all spiritual and mystical experiences to simply electrical or chemical processes in the brain. So there's a battle. It's like a cultural war, if you will. But we are making progress slowly. I'm sure that in 10 or 20 years from now, things will change dramatically, especially if we can receive important funding to do these types of studies. Interestingly, more and more private foundations are open to these questions in Europe as well as in the United States.

Elie During: Well, I guess in 10 years, you can eventually publish these secret emails and make a book out of it!

Beauregard later said: To come back to the question of how consciousness can influence brain events, I would like simply to note that during the last decade, there’s been a series of brain imaging, functional neuroimaging studies that have been done by Jeffrey [Schwartz], in my own lab, and in many other labs as well showing clearly that intention can modulate brain activity in the brain regions and neural circuits involved in the processing of emotion; this has also been shown with respect to the placebo effect. In the placebo effect, neuroimaging studies have shown that beliefs and expectations about various types of treatments can significantly influence the way the brain is functioning. In other words, mental factors like beliefs, desires, emotions, and feelings can exert a very important influence on how the brain is functioning electrically and chemically. This is something that is very important to remember and that can be used in everyday life.

The line of inquiry to use is to demonstrate that perhaps mind and consciousness are non-local, to use terminology similar to that in quantum physics. In other words, it’s possible to demonstrate that mind and consciousness can exert non-local effects between humans at certain distances, or between humans and animals, or even electronic machines. That’s the goal of “psi” research, or so-called parapsychology. These types of studies have been done now for several decades, though they’re still taboo among mainstream science. Yet, if you consider all the data that has been accumulated in this field of research, it seems clear that mind and consciousness cannot be associated solely with the brain and the body, for they seem to be able to exert an action, a non-local action. So that’s one line of investigation that would be useful.

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Esther Sternberg - "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

Mind-body panel 1: Esther Sternberg - "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

National Institutes of Health physician Esther Sternberg, author of The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (W.H. Freeman & Co., 2000), reminded the panelists and audience at the recent Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium that people do change their opinions, though it often takes a long time. The closed-minded attitude she encountered when she first started studying the way the brain and the immune system talk to each other has dissipated over the years.

In the area of my study—which is the science of the mind-body connection, the connection between the brain and the immune system, the mind, our emotions, and our immune system and health—this field was disparaged when I first got into it more than 20, 30 years ago. The Chair of my department, when I was training in the United States, said, "Esther, you're going to ruin your career by doing this."

And I, perversely, didn't listen to him, because I was convinced ... by having seen a patient who had been perfectly well until he was treated with a drug that changes brain serotonin—this drug is not used anymore—and he developed an autoimmune scarring, a painful disease, and that was to me such powerful evidence that you can change the brain and have an immune response or immune disease as a result that I spent the rest of my career trying to understand the connection between the brain and the immune system.

The problem, she explained, was that she could not even discuss the question of whether stress can make us sick - even though that is a commonplace today.

Fifteen years ago, I was afraid to ask a scientific audience: “How many of you believe that stress can make you sick?” The scientists were stressed—although they denied that they were stressed—just to hear that question. And now, it's accepted, it is part of the dogma, and why is that? It’s because we’ve been able to prove, in the language of science, that these phenomena that we all knew for thousands of years are real. We can show the molecules that make you feel sick, we can see the different parts of the brain that are activated when you feel sick. We can see what happens when you inject an immune molecule into the belly and change how the brain functions and so on.

That's not to say that that's the only way we should think; I think it’s wonderful to think outside the box. But if you're going to convince a large community of scientists, you need to use the language of scientists, and I have seen it happen. I have seen in this aspect of the field that I study a sea change so that the vast majority of scientists and physicians now accept the notion that the brain and the immune system talk to each other, that stress can make you sick, that believing can make you well—that’s a little more on the cutting edge and not fully accepted yet, I won’t say fringe but some scientists think of it that way—but because of the wonderful researchers we have here today and who will be speaking this afternoon, research by Mario Beauregard and Andy Newberg, the evidence is there to help scientists and physicians believe.

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Henry Stapp - Quantum theory makes us agents

Mind-body panel 1: Henry Stapp - Quantum theory makes us agents

Non-materialist neuroscientists are intrigued by the fact that in quantum mechanics, the observer becomes a cause of events merely by observing. That provides a model for the way in which the choice of a focus of attention changes the brain. Theoretical physicist Henry Stapp, and author of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics and Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer, elaborated on this for the audience at the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium:

There is a famous quote by Richard Feynman: “I don't understand quantum mechanics and I don't think anyone understands quantum mechanics,” and in talking to his students at CalTech he said,“and if you can possibly help it, don't try, because if you do, you'll go down the drain just like everybody else who ever tried.” So that's kind of the attitude of most scientists toward this problem of consciousness.

The way that quantum mechanics was formulated at the beginning of the 20th century was in terms of a set of practical rules that worked, and those rules allowed you to explain how your experiences were organized and the way it was structured—it brought your human experience into the dynamics and that was the real change. Human experience was brought into the dynamics. You often hear that the observer was brought into physics by quantum mechanics, but it was not a passive observer. The observer in some sense was always there, we’re somehow aware of what’s happening. The whole dynamic, according to classical ideas, was a mechanical clockwork universe that somehow we were aware of, and quantum mechanics brought the human being into science not only as a passive observer of what was going on, but as an agent and that is the key point.

In order to make quantum mechanics work, you've got to bring the human agent into the equations of quantum mechanics, which are designed to explain human experience. You had to bring the human brain into the dynamics at the outset and the effect of this was to allow attention, what you are focusing your attention on, to affect what's going on in your brain, and the other aspect of that is whether the thing that determines the attention was not already determined by the brain beforehand. You could say there's kind of a loop here: the brain determines what you are going to think and it's just kind of a cyclical process.

But the crucial point is that there is nothing in quantum mechanics, as we currently understand it, that determines what the intention is going to be. So it's not just machinists doing it all. There’s something that's coming in, that according to current ideas is not caused by the machinery; rather, it causes the machinery to do something, but it is not itself caused by the machinery.

So that's a huge difference, and the effect of it is to explain the OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder] that Jeffrey Schwartz will tell you about, it allows you to understand, in terms of the equations of quantum mechanics, a quantum Zeno effect. We’re talking about real equations that you can apply and understand. You understand how your intent can cause your brain to behave in a certain way. And by making it behave in a certain way, as Jeffrey will emphasize, it actually changes the structure of your brain. So you're changing the way you think in the future.

You’ve probably all heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. What used to be a very mechanical picture of the universe in classical mechanics has since become smeared out because of this uncertainty principle, or the representation of the physical aspects of the system, by quantum mechanics. They have a wave function, for example, that represents the brain—it’s a smeared out thing. All these different classical probabilities or possibilities are all there on an equal footing. Now, we know that, for example, if I’m about to say something, there will be a lot of possibilities about what I might say and the way quantum mechanics works, there has to be the mysterious thing called “The Collapse of the Wave Function” or “The Reduction of the Wave Function.”What happens is that this big smear of possibilities or potentialities suddenly gets reduced to something understandable. And that's a critical point. This reduction is always to something that's associated with an increase in knowledge. So, before there can be an increase in knowledge, there has to be a process that occurs—and this is the process that’s not understood, but it is postulated in quantum mechanics—there has to be this decision as to what question is going to be asked, what new knowledge am I going to be able to gain.

So this is the “Collapse of the Wave Function” that you're talking about. This point is something very new and different about quantum mechanics, and it opens the door because of the fact that there is the possibility of this. I say each collapse is preceded by a human action that is supposed to define a possible increment of knowledge, a new increase in knowledge; these collapses are associated with human knowledge, and before you know what the collapse can be, before there can be a collapse, there has to be an action on the part of the person who's going to have the experience that defines what the new increment of knowledge is going to be. The wave function is a mechanical, mathematical thing that does not have meaning or knowledge in itself. And the act of the human being is, in effect, to say, “I want to know something,” and he or she wants to know something meaningful. To constitute knowledge, it somehow has to be meaningful to the person.

So you're getting this injection somehow—we don't know from where exactly—but in quantum mechanics it has got to be there, this question has got to be posed. And once you say that the question is posed, and once you just follow the rules of quantum mechanics, then you can understand how this thing from the outside is able to actually control your behavior, and your behavior then is going to control how your brain evolves and develops, and then you're going to change your brain wiring, which is what Jeff is talking about repeatedly.

(Note: See also the paper Stapp wrote with Schwartz and Beauregard (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2004))

Next: Mind-body panel 1: Jeffrey Schwartz on how Leo DiCaprio gave himself obsessive-compulsive disorder and then cured it

Mind-body panel 1: Jeffrey Schwartz on how Leo DiCaprio gave himself obsessive-compulsive disorder and then cured it

As Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain, told the audience at the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium,

Maybe I’ll tell one brief anecdote about Leo DiCaprio that will kind of lead into where I'm going here, which really does make the point. Leo DiCaprio so immersed himself into this role—and there's another 15-minute video after the one that you saw where I talk about Mario Beauregard's work in the lab showing how the mind can change serotonin and how actors in portraying a role actually change how their neurochemistry works—that for three months after the filming was stopped he could not stop having obsessive-compulsive disorder. So he actually induced in his own brain a transient case of obsessive-compulsive disorder that took several months for him to recover from.

That should tell you how powerfully the mind can affect the brain, and how much an actor can immerse himself in a role to the point that it takes him three months after the shooting is done to get out of the role and to stop having obsessive-compulsive thoughts, feelings, and symptoms. I think that is a very powerful way of understanding the extent to which focused attention can change the brain.

In a lighter vein, Schwartz - who famously says what he thinks - struck at least one other panelist (Sternberg) as "confrontational." For one thing, he was quite frank in his assessment of the pharmaceutical industry:

I am not anti-pharmaceutical industry or anti-drug, although my opponents try to describe me as such. But the fact that I want to use pharmaceutical agents, psychiatric medicines as a way to enable people's capacity to focus their attention more effectively so that they are enabled to change their brain, that view of using pharmaceutical agents, which I think most people would say is common sense, is considered radical and anti-establishment. They are now putting electrodes in people’s brains even though the neuroanatomy is not understood at any level that would justify doing so to treat psychiatric disorders, and yet it's been done and it’s being aggressively pushed by the industry, by a collaboration of industry and elite science who want on the one hand to push the materialist paradigm, and on the other hand to make significant profits from the sale of these medical devices.

And the following comment certainly yanked the chain of a New Scientist writer:

The last thing I want to say is that you cannot overestimate how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You’re going to hear a lot in the next calendar year about Darwin and how Darwin's explanation of the manner in which human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it. If you take what Henry said as a physical mechanism, you can understand evolution, and even Darwinian evolution. There's a big difference between Darwin's view, and the neo-Darwinian view, and you can understand that difference in non-materialist ways. If the scientific culture is going to become “pro-human life”—I don’t want to say “pro-life” because I don’t want to throw around politically charged terms, but a “pro-humanity culture,” it is going to have to deal with the fact that the materialist paradigm has broken down. There are huge social resistances against recognizing this fact and I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment,“Enough is enough!” Materialism needs to start fading away, and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.

Schwartz insisted, in response to Sternberg's discomfort, "I don’t think I was confrontational; I was assertive, but I was not confrontational."

Moderator During responded, with impeccable smoothness, "Yes, I think that was pretty clear."