Mindful Hack

Brain: How much does brainpower matter to success? Some surprising answers, only one of which matters much

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:32:00 +0000

In "High-Aptitude Minds: The Neurological Roots of Genius" (Scientific American Mind - September 3, 2008) Christian Hoppe and Jelena Stojanovic tell us that "Researchers are finding clues to the basis of brilliance in the brain."

The clues are pretty murky, and the whole area sounds confusing and contradictory in the article (which is not the writers' or the researchers' fault - it is more likely due to the plasticity of the brain). For example,

No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.

The most useful take-home information is this:

University of Pennsylvania psychologists Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman examined final grades of 164 eighth-grade students, along with their admission to (or rejection from) a prestigious high school. By such measures, the researchers determined that scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ. What is more, they reported in 2005, students with more self-discipline—a willingness to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain—were more likely than those lacking this skill to improve their grades during the school year. A high IQ, on the other hand, did not predict a climb in grades.

In other words, one reason that a difference between highly intelligent people and the rest of us may be difficult to identify is that the difference is not necessarily reflected in real life performance.

Neuroscience: Yes, we do think while we are asleep

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:42:00 +0000

In "Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter" Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen reveal, "During slumber, our brain engages in data analysis, from strengthening memories to solving problems" (Scientific American Mind - August 7, 2008):

The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day's information. It combs through recently formed memories, stabilizing, copying and filing them, so that they will be more useful the next day. A night of sleep can make memories resistant to interference from other information and allow us to recall them for use more effectively the next morning. And sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of a memory. When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade-perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.

Their research is a far cry from earlier theories that the brain shuts down when we are asleep. Apparently, sleep plays an active, not merely a passive role in learning, as a number of fascinating experiments show.

The fact that sleep plays at least a passive role in learning won't be news to anyone who has had to teach students who were up half the night partying and can't now remember their classroom number, let alone the topic we discussed in the last class. But consider this:

In a 2004 study Ullrich Wagner and others in Jan Born's laboratory at the University of Lübeck in Germany elegantly demonstrated just how powerful sleep's processing of memories can be. They taught subjects how to solve a particular type of mathematical problem by using a long and tedious procedure and had them practice it about 100 times. The subjects were then sent away and told to come back 12 hours later, when they were instructed to try it another 200 times.

What the researchers had not told their subjects was that there is a much simpler way to solve these problems. The researchers could tell if and when subjects gained insight into this shortcut, because their speed would suddenly increase. Many of the subjects did, in fact, discover the trick during the second session. But when they got a night's worth of sleep between the two sessions, they were more than two and a half times more likely to figure it out-59 percent of the subjects who slept found the trick, compared with only 23 percent of those who stayed awake between the sessions. Somehow the sleeping brain was solving this problem, without even knowing that there was a problem to solve.

I'm not so sure the sleeping brain did not know there was a problem to solve - the prospect of waking up to another two hundred iterations of a tedious procedure must have set the little grey cells churning, so to speak.

"Neurotheology": Bad neurology and bad theology?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:07:00 +0000

In "God, theologian and humble neurologist", Alasdair Coles of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge reviews recent books, Did my neurons make me do it? and The Soul in the Brain for Brain (June 23, 2008). He and I share a dislike of "neurotheology," which he describes as "bad neurology and bad theology" (and which I have described less elegantly as "neurobullshipping"):

In the 1980s, a small group of neuroscientists arrogated for itself a new field of ‘neurotheology’ which has become—not to put too fine a point on it—an embarrassment. In privatized discussions, over-interpreted accounts of poor experiments are recycled to construct grand schemes to explain religious experience.

Yuh. Mario and I discussed a number of these schemes in The Spiritual Brain, and they all have one thing in common: They aim to explain religious experiences away rather than explain them.

It is as if someone were to explain Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in terms of infighting at the Vatican. If infighting at the Vatican in those days explained the Sistine, no one would bother with it now.

Coles also talks about another favourite subject - the apparently sudden emergence of human consciousness, especially as expressed in art, literature, music, and spirituality:

The Upper Paleolithic Revolution consisted of more than just cave paintings. Visual creativity emerged in many other ways. Burial rites become more complex. And, it is speculated, the first music was made and the first words spoken. van Huyssteen argues that the key distinction between Upper Paleolithic man and homo sapiens elsewhere and earlier hominids, was the power to construct and understand symbol, of which language of course is a part. This ability to ‘code the invisible’ allowed for storage of information outside of the gene and the start of the cultural
non-genetic inheritance. The ‘mental toolkit’ required to manage symbolic representation is the ‘ability to be conscious of being conscious’ and to search for meaning. The new humans wake up, discover they are naked and meet God.

[ ... ]

So it seems that, some 30–40 000 years ago in Europe, humans suddenly acquired the gifts of self-awareness, symbol, language and creativity. Which of these was the foundational event is hard to know, and perhaps need not be known. But, importantly, spirituality was part of the package.

Yes, and that spirituality seems so evident in the cave paintings! The pantings are not about animals literally, in the sense that an anatomical diagram or textbook description might be about animals. The cave paintings are about the artists' perceptions of animals, their relationship to animals, and their explorations of what it must feel like to be an animal.

Tour the caves, courtesy France's culture ministry. Also tour the Lascaux caves here (at Virtual visit) and view Altamira cave images here.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose.

Consciousness: So familiar and yet so puzzling ...

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:54:00 +0000

In The Return of Religion in Axess magazine, philosopher Roger Scruton observes,

Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects - a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the 'subject of consciousness', the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside.

However, Scruton does not think that that works very well.

But these traditional 'solutions' merely duplicate the problem. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by re-describing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus - be it a soul, a mind or a self. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery.

Actually, consciousness is immaterial whether we like it or not. Your idea of red - or mine - are both immaterial. They have material correlates - that is, they relate to material things, including red objects, eyes and neurons in the brain. But the concepts are not material in themselves.

Scruton, usually a clear thinker, makes his effort to defend religion (the primary purpose of his piece) unnecessarily difficult, by agreeing in advance to two mistaken concepts - that the evangelical atheists are right in their general picture of the universe and that they are not religious.

Surprisingly, he even endorses Richard Dawkins’s "selfish gene" (you are merely a robot that your selfish genes use to replicate themselves) - a concept that is increasingly regarded as an embarrassment to evolution theory.

He then announces that this concept presents no problem for traditional religion. Huh?

Unfortunately, his idea of traditional religion turns out merely to be sentimental longing for the comforts of an exploded belief system - which is certainly not how we see it at my church, where traditional religion is a living presence and the selfish gene isn't.

Meanwhile, an American lawyer friend, John Calvert, writes me to point out the second serious flaw in Scruton's understanding of religion.

According to a popular dictionary religion is a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life.

Dawkins, et al are promoting a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life, predicated on a dogma - scientific materialism. Hence, they are also promoting a religion in the Constitutional sense and in its functional sense. Atheism and its sister religion of Secular Humanism function in the very same manner as traditional theistic religion.

The Supreme Court and most other courts have recognized that in a pluralistic society, religion must be defined functionally and inclusively. An exclusive definition of religion discriminates by limiting it to only theistic beliefs.

Atheism and Secular Humanism have both been held to be religions. They are in fact organized religions that meet in churches, have manifestos, ethical and moral tenets, priests and Sunday school teachers.

Yes, precisely. "Religion" includes materialist atheism and secular humanism because they act as a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life.

The fact that the zealots of these relatively new religions attack traditional religions is more or less what you might expect.

Podcasts: Mind vs brain, plus exclusive interview with parts of your brain

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:55:00 +0000

Dr. Jeff Schwartz, lead author of The Mind and the Brain explains the difference between the two here in less than one minute.

Whew! Thought I was trying to unload an 800-page book on you, eh? Nah. Also, in t his video of the neuroscience of conflict resolutin, he plays various parts of the brain (amygdala, Mr. Myg, and the frontal cortex), interviewed by "Radio NEURO."

As in

Radio NEURO: Mr. Myg, what do you do all day?

MYG: I watch for people who look threatening ...

Hilarious, have a listen!

Coffee break: Neurotoxins and sea lions

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:39:00 +0000

Here's one Northwest coast sea lion who, essentially, got drunk on domoic acid, and just look at the results.

Such unusual behavior is a red flag for domoic acid poisoning, said Amy Traxler, coordinator at the San Juan County Marine Mammal Stranding Network in Friday Harbor.

Domoic acid is a neurotoxin that occurs naturally in algae. Marine mammals affected by the toxin can display erratic, aggressive behavior and often become disoriented, said Mieke Eerkens, spokeswoman for Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.

Well, another use for a wildlife recovery program. Now back to work.

Evolutionary psychology: British physicist targets theory-of-the-month on "how religion got started"

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:41:00 +0000

British physicist David Tyler, in his mild-mannered but incisive way, comments on Fincher and Thornhill's theory-of-the-month that religion got started because it reduced the spread of epidemics and thus was "naturally selected." The basic idea is that religions form closed little groups that do not admit outsiders. He writes,

The first concern is about causation. What is the cause and what is the effect? How do we know? The authors do not appear to discuss these questions. The areas of high religious diversity are in the tropics, where diseases tend to be more virulent and more numerous. Life in the tropics introduces many challenges that are not faced by those of us living in temperate zones of the Earth. Some analysis of lifestyles in the tropics would appear to be warranted, but this is not supplied by the authors.

Citing other problems, Tyler concludes,

There is a strong presupposition in the minds of many scholars that religion must be an evolved behaviour and that it must be possible to identify the drivers for the rise of religion as a phenomenon. What few will even consider in their research is whether man is a spiritual, as well as a material, being and that the drivers for religious diversity come from mankind's spiritual nature. This position is, historically, part of the Christian worldview and, at very least, it deserves to be tested and scrutinised fairly by academics.

Of course, the position that Mario and I take in The Spiritual Brain is that the driver of religion is humankind's spiritual nature. How it came about is currently unknown, but there is some reason to believe, based on prehistoric cave paintings and other art works, that it happened rather suddenly.

On that view, diversity is the outcome of different personality types, mind sets, moral development, and such. Pioneer psychologist William James recognized this long ago, when he pointed out that cheerful people tend to adopt different spiritualities than depressive ones.

The silliness of the current theory-of-the-month lies principally in the fact a stroll down any street in downtown Toronto, where I live, will show that most major religions thrive on evangelization, - the very opposite of avoiding disease by forming a closed little group. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, evangelical Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hare Krishna, secular humanists - whoever they are, they want you to come in, germs and all, attend their services, read their literature, go through their initiation - and then go out and bring in more people.

Was religion ever any different? Ancestor worship and shamanism are different, because, by their very nature, they do not encourage evangelism. But, as we pointed out in The Spiritual Brain, religions of that type are bound up with magic - best understood as a primitive attempt at technology, an attempt to control the world without really understanding it. So we will not understand much about the evolution of religion if we focus on that kind of thing.

Religion, separated from magic (which is often forbidden in major religions), tends to be evangelistic by nature. People who have apprehended what they believe to be a spiritual truth usually want to communicate it, to help others. Religion has probably spread as many epidemics than it has stopped, for that very reason - not that anyone could do anything about that until the existence and role of viruses and bacteria were understood.)

One thing I find intriguing about materialist theories-of-the-month about religion or spirituality is the way they typically begin by ignoring the most obvious facts about the subject. Thus, the best theory of religion becomes a fact-free theory.

See also: Religion: It got started to avoid the spread of disease?

The neuroscientist and Shakespeare - no, actually, this is fun!

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:11:00 +0000

In "The Shakespeared Brain", Philip Davis offers some interesting, non-reductive neuroscience research on why we react to some of Shakespeare's more unusual phrases the way we do.

By "non-reductive", I mean that he is not trying to persuade us that "we" don't really react to the phrases or understand their significance ("it's just your neurons firing, you know"). Indeed, Davis starts with the assumption that we do react to them because we try to understand them.

He focuses on a peculiarity of Shakespeare's writing - "functional shift." Shakespeare turns nouns into verbs or pronouns into nouns in arresting ways - for example, in Coriolanus, a man writes of his benefactor: "This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, godded me indeed." and in Twelfth Night, Olivia is called "the cruellest she alive."

The literary device of functional shift turns on a feature of English as a language. Its grammatical structure depends heavily on simple conventions of word order. That in turn means that words can change their function abruptly simply by being put in a different position in a sentence.

For example, consider

"Jane knew the ins and outs of the grocery business."

"In" and "out" are prepositions. They do not normally appear as nouns.

I made "in" and "out" into nouns by the simple act of parking them in a noun's position in the sentence. I reinforced their new position by making them plural. (That way, you know for sure that they are not prepositions any more.) If the sentence makes sense, that's all a reader (or hearer) requires.

I am told that not every language is suited to this device of functional shift - possibly because factors other than word order are used in those languages to organize thoughts.

Anyway, Shakespeare was obviously well aware of how such a functional shift can attract a hearer's attention. Davis, who is editor of The Reader magazine, decided to have a look at the neuroscience underlying that.

Functional shift was small and tight enough for experimentation. Up until now the main cognitive research done on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged. But hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a 'positive error', such as functional shift in normal healthy people. We decided to try to see what happens when the brain comes upon these sudden new formulations in Shakespeare. We would use three pieces of kit. First, EEG (electroencephalogram) tests, with electrodes placed on different parts of the scalp to measure brain-events taking place in time; later, MEG (magnetoencephalography), an imaging technique using a helmet-like brain-scanner which measures effects in terms of location in the brain as well as their timing; and finally fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which uses those tunnel-like brain-scanners that focus even more specifically on brain-activation by location. Together with my English Language colleague, Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, I set up forty of the following four-sentence stimuli based upon Shakespeare, where 'A' is the control sentence or basic norm, making both grammatical and semantic sense; 'B' the Shakespearian functional shift (in this case adapted from Coriolanus 5.3); 'C' a functional shift in syntax but one that doesn't make sense in context; and 'D' a formulation that has no grammatical shift but still doesn't make sense semantically. People undergoing the experiment simply had to press a button if the sentence roughly made sense to them.

(A) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, deified me indeed.

(B) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, godded me indeed.

(C) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, charcoaled me indeed.

(D) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, poured me indeed.

What happened?

Davis distinguishes between two types of sentence violations whose effects, once perceived, are registered in the brain: semantic violation (= the sentence doesn't make sense, called N400) and syntactic violation (= the sentence makes sense but doesn't read right, called P600). You can read the details here, but you won't likely be surprised to learn that the EEG picked up

(A) no reaction to A (just a normal sentence)

(B) a high P600 reaction to B "(because it feels like a grammatical anomaly) but no N400 (the brain will tolerate it, almost straightaway, as making sense despite the grammatical difficulty)."

(C) Both N400 and P600 were high because the sentence is both ungrammatical and meaningless.

(D) No P600 reaction because the sentence is grammatical but high N400 because it makes no sense.

Davis concludes that

... functional shift is what the scientists call a robust phenomenon: that is to say, it has a distinct and unique effect on the brain. Instinctively Shakespeare was right to use it as one of his dramatic mental tools.

(Mind you, if Davis had concluded from his research that Shakespeare was wrong to use functional shift, I would conclude that Davis himself should stay in neuroscience and not try to make a living as a playwright.)

What's fascinating is that Shakespeare may have been tapping into a little known feature of brain organization to achieve his effect. Davis suggests:

... some neuroscientists believe that there is one area of the brain that processes nouns and a different area of the brain that processes verbs. Too often people suppose that brain experimentation is reductive, mechanically localising 'love', for example, to a specific part of the brain. But look at this case: supposing that nouns and verb are indeed separately localised, what happens when the brain is momentarily stunned by a functional shift that it cannot immediately identify as noun or verb? Then the brain is pressured into working at a higher adaptive level of conscious evolution, paradoxically undetermined by the localised laws and structures it nonetheless still works from.

Conscious evolution ... I like that. Alfred Russel Wallace would have liked it too.

Non-reductive research may shed light on how some stylistic devices draw a crowd - and others empty the theatre faster than a fire alarm, as people are suddenly seized with a conviction that watching shirts dry on the clothesline is way more interesting.

(Note: The image is from The Dallas Public Library Fine Books Division.)

Philosopher: Why you can't be both an evolutionist and a materialist

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 10:56:00 +0000

In "Evolution vs. Naturalism: Why they are like oil and water", philosopher Alvin Plantinga comments (Books & Culture, July/August 2008),

As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic.

Plantinga cites with approval some more intellectually respectable atheist works.

But in general, many people have noticed the trend he points to. Hatred can drive good writing, but not usually good reasoning. Indeed, most of the recent "new atheist" books remind me of anti-immigration tracts . They attribute all the world's ills to religion in the same way that some attribute all the country's ills to new immigrants - and with about the same amount of justification too.

Plantinga goes on to say,

Nearly all of these books have been written by philosophical naturalists. I
believe it's extremely important to see that naturalism itself, despite the smug
and arrogant tone of the so-called New Atheists, is in very serious
philosophical hot water: one can't sensibly believe it.

Why?

Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism. In particular, they often appeal to the modern theory of evolution as a reason for embracing naturalism; indeed, the subtitle of Dawkins' Watchmaker is Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Many seem to think that evolution is one of the pillars in the temple of naturalism (and "temple" is the right word: contemporary naturalism has certainly taken on a religious cast, with a secular priesthood as zealous to stamp out opposing views as any mullah). I propose to argue that naturalism and evolution are in conflict with each other.

Because?

The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies, such as our nervous systems, or brains, or perhaps part of our brains (the right or left hemisphere, for example), or perhaps some still smaller part. So let's think of naturalism as including materialism. And now let's think about beliefs from a materialist perspective. According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system. Neurophysiology, furthermore, also causes behavior. According to the usual story, electrical signals proceed via afferent nerves from the sense organs to the brain; there some processing goes on; then electrical impulses go via efferent nerves from the brain to other organs including muscles; in response to these signals, certain muscles contract, thus causing movement and behavior. ...

Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce.

In short, if you are a materialist, you can never hope to know that materialism is true because there is no direct relationship between your beliefs and evidence; your beliefs are merely the output of irrational forces. Read the rest here.

One can have philosophy without God, but not without a mind that is real, rather than an illusion. No wonder the new atheists (who differ from the old atheists precisely in that they do not think that the mind is real) sound like a host of "anti-" zealots. It really is the best they can do.

Coffee break! Why two heads are NOT better than one ...

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:54:00 +0000

Not if you are a two-headed snake, that is. Here is a video explaining the difficulties when the unfortunate creature(s) try to eat:

Actually, a two-headed snake is really twin snakes joined, usually, at the neck or just below. They are not typically intelligent enough to realize their situation and co-ordinate their movements, as human siamese twins must learn to do.

Ideally, they would have a third head as a referee ...

Seriously, some believe that an increase in the number of two-headed snakes, due to the artificial environments of zoos. It's hard to say because such creatures almost never survive long in the wild, for obvious reasons, though some, like We, have survived in zoos for a number of years - and even helped out with the fundraising.

Now back to work.

The Spiritual Brain: Vindicating Alfred Russel Wallace, the "other" discoverer of natural selection?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:24:00 +0000

Mike Flannery, a Wallace fan and scholar, thinks that Mario Beauregard's and my The Spiritual Brain is a vindication of Alfred Russel Wallace, among other things. Wallace was Darwin’s co-author of the theory of natural selection (survival of the fittest).

But Wallace became estranged from Darwin’s circle, because he saw natural selection only as a mechanism by which one species might slowly transform into another. He did not see it as explaining life, the universe, and all that - and certainly not the origin of the human mind. Anyway, Flannery comments,

The human facility for mathematics, for music, for art, for reasoning, for metaphysics, even for humor, where do these qualities come from? Answer: “the facts, taken in their entirety, compel us to recognize some origin for them wholly distinct from that which has served to account for the animal characteristics – whether bodily or mental – of man.” That “origin” and all the evidence “point clearly to an unseen universe – to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate.” Such was the conclusion of the co-discoverer (some would say sole discoverer!) of modern evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel Wallace.

Now Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary in their carefully researched and tightly argued The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of Soul agree, lending a modern scientific perspective in their analysis of the religious, spiritual, and/or mystical experiences recorded by all cultures at all times and studied in detail among Carmelite nuns.

Few remember Wallace because his eminently reasonable conclusion was drowned out by the rank materialism of Charles Darwin. When Darwin insisted that human faculties were derived from the lower animals, Wallace protested that such a conclusion “appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence.”

Neither is it supported by modern neuroscience say Beauregard and O’Leary. Wallace vindicated! The Darwinists will cry “NO!!!” just as Darwin himself did when he first read Wallace’s 1869 paper objecting to the Down House patriarch’s materialistic absolutism, but nonsense then remains nonsense now. Darwin’s reductionist speculations now appear as old and threadbare as the Victorian scientism from it sprang. “If we are to make significant breakthroughs with regard to our understanding of human mind and consciousness as well as the development of the spiritual potential of humanity,” write Beauregard and O’Leary, “we need a new scientific frame of reference.”

A century and a half of neglect is too long. Has the near-forgotten Wallace finally been heard?

Well, we hope so. If I ever get a chance to visit Wallace's quiet grave, I will place on it a morning glory, like the one from my garden, pictured above.

By the way, Flannery's reference to "(some would say sole discoverer!)" refers to long-standing suspicions that Wallace should properly be credited with first outlining the theory of natural selection, but Darwin's aristocratic associations led to his getting the credit instead. Start here for more on that.

Neuroscience: Why the carrot and the stick motivate donkeys but not people

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:52:00 +0000

Jeff Schwartz, lead author of The Mind and the Brain, a pioneer work in non-materialist neuroscience, is speaking on the neuroscience of leadership is doing a radio show here which you can download.

Neuroscience of leadership? Another useless fad? Not necessarily. Non-materialist neuroscience tends to be practical because so many of the scientists who think that the mind is real (not just an illusion) work in medicine. Their main job is to find treatments that work.

In the article, David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz ask, who do so many management techniques result in an environment parodied in the Dilbert cartoons? They offer interesting information from neuroscience about what is happening in people's brains when they encounter stupid, stunned management, like Dilbert's pointy-headed boss, for example:

Many existing models for changing people’s behavior are drawn from a field called behaviorism. The field emerged in the 1930s and was led by psychologist B.F. Skinner and advertising executive John B. Watson, building on Ivan Pavlov’s famous concept of the conditioned response: Associate the ringing of a bell with food, and a dog can be made to salivate at the sound. The behaviorists generalized this observation to people, and established an approach to change that has sometimes been caricatured as: “Lay out the M&Ms.” For each person, there is one set of incentives — one combination of candy colors — that makes the best motivator. Present the right incentives, and the desired change will naturally occur. If change doesn’t occur, then the mix of M&M colors must be adjusted.

Yet there is plenty of evidence from both clinical research and workplace observation that change efforts based on typical incentives and threats (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run. For example, when people routinely come late to meetings, a manager may reprimand them. This may chasten latecomers in the short run, but it also draws their attention away from work and back to the problems that led to lateness in the first place. Another manager might choose to reward people who show up on time with public recognition or better assignments; for those who are late, this too raises anxiety and reinforces the neural patterns associated with the habitual problem. Yet despite all the evidence that it doesn’t work, the behaviorist model is still the dominant paradigm in many organizations. The carrot and stick are alive and well.

Well, the carrot and the stick were designed for use on donkeys, and the assumption is that the donkey is not as smart as his driver. People who think that their employees are much stupider than themselves will usually find quite the opposite - that the employees are aware of the scheme and finding a way to work around it.

Religion: It got started to avoid spread of disease?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:15:00 +0000

Every years seems to bring a new study purporting to explain how "religion" got started. As Rachel Zelkowitz explains in Pathogens and Prayer, (ScienceNow Daily News, 30 July 2008),
reports,

The same diseases that plague humanity may also drive one of the fundamental elements of human culture, a new study suggests. A statistical analysis shows an association between higher rates of infectious disease and religious diversity around the world. The findings have already sparked debate within the academic community; critics are questioning the validity of the interpretation, and supporters say that the finding could offer a new perspective on why religions exist and what role they play in society.

The histories of individual religions are well-documented, but the evolution of religion itself is not well-understood.

No, and the new study won't make it any better understood.

Fincher and his colleagues looked for an association between a nation's religious diversity and rate of disease. They used Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia to tally the number of religions in 219 countries and checked that against pervasiveness of disease in those areas, as documented in a global epidemiology database. There was a statistically significant, positive relationship between prevalence of disease and religious diversity, or religion richness. This persisted even when the researchers controlled for other variables that could impact the number of religions in a country: land area, population, religious freedom, and economic inequality. To correct for different patterns of human settlement in different parts of the world, they also tested the association of disease and religious diversity within the world's six major regions; the correlation still held true.

but

Courtney Bender, a sociologist of religion at Columbia University, disagrees. Religions around the planet range from being very open to very closed to outsiders, she says: "You can't just say religions have strong boundaries."

Yes, exactly. Religious groups range from those that don't accept converts to those where believers are expected to bang on doors handing out tracts.

I wonder how many religions exist in Canada? Canada reports religion data every ten years, and here are the data for 2001. All the major religions and many minor ones are represented here, and non-Christian numbers are growing (principally due to immigration). We are pretty religiously diverse but I would be surprised if Canada was one of the high disease areas. (If it is, there is something wrong with the study; our longevity has risen dramatically.)

Origin of religion is like origin of life: The problem is not solvable but every new theory creates a little wave of interest.

Prayer: Asking for more than healing

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:34:00 +0000

Speaking of prayer (story below), in "Do we have a prayer?" in The American Spectator, editor Quin Hillyer reflects on politicial activists and prayer:

Most of us have known people, too, who swear, absolutely swear, that they are alive today after some dread illness only because the prayers of others got them through. But then we wonder about those like Snow who did not survive, and none of it makes sense. Do prayers work? How? Why? And when they don't seem to, at least not by our understanding, why not?

He notes,

... we know that prayer doesn't necessarily bring comfort, or at least not "comfort" in the way the world usually understands it. Prayer does not bring comfort in the sense of ease or luxury or softness.

Ah ... word study urgently needed here: "Comfort" originally meant "strengthen" (the "com" part = with, and the "fort" part = strength). Later, "comfort" came to mean "ease" or "soothe." That created much misunderstanding around the idea that prayer "comforts" people.

Here is my view as a Catholic Christian: I have myself benefited from several healings that could only be attributed to the power of prayer, however understood. I would encourage anyone to pray, even if they are not a religious believer. Just say, "I know I am not a good person, but this feels too hard for me to bear. If You are out there, help me, please, at least to understand what is happening to me."

The main role of prayer is to put us in touch with God's view of our situation. We benefit from prayer to the extent that it does that. We benefit little from prayer if we view it as a way to make God do what we want.

In that case, even if we seem to get what we want for now, we will not grow into the people we should be. And there will come a time when we don't get what we want, and we also did not learn anything that would help us see the bigger picture. So we stop praying, and stop growing spiritually. Which is very sad because healing is only one of the benefits of prayer.

We are all going to die someday, which means that all healings are temporary. So I would say, by all means ask for healing, but don't stop there. Ask for insight too, for the day when healings come to an end.

Prayer: Are studies of intercessory prayer an insult to God?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:45:00 +0000

In Chapter 8 of The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I talked about an experiment in praying for the sick that didn't work out too well (the Benson study), and the reasons why. In Answering the New Atheism, philosophers Scott Hahn and Ben Wiker also comment, from a philosophical perspective.

First, they note, there is a big difference between studying a cause that is thought to be a natural cause and studying a cause that is thought to be a person. A natural cause must act under the right conditions, but a person (or Person!) hears you and can choose whether to act or not. It is the difference, for example, between using the laws of gravity to pilot an airplane and persuading the boss to let you buy an airplane for the business. Now, the philosophers say,

The error of the double-blind prayer experiment is that it treats God like some kind of natural cause rather than as a personal, rational Being. In doing so, God is being unjustly subjected to a humiliating attempt to manipulate Him by an experiment. In short, the experiment is an insult, and any rational being, superhuman or not, would treat it as such. That does not, of course, mean that praying for healing itself is an insult; we are speaking only of framing such prayer in the context of a manipulative experiment. (p. 57)

That, of course, has always been the difficulty with studying the effects of intercessory prayer as if they were like the effects of Pill A vs. Pill B.

See also:

Are prayer studies a waste of government money? No way!

Prayer studies: From one-way skepticism deliver us!

Prayer: Intercessory prayer works, according to study

Psychology: What we see is as much reality as we can deal with

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:58:00 +0000

We think we see reality, but reality is overwhelming. So of course we do not really see reality.

One of the functions of our brains is to edit out unnecessary items and present a picture our minds can use. And to fill in things we expect to see.

Of course, that is precisely how our minds can be tricked!

Here are a number of visual illusions courtesy Michael Bach and of Lowell Psychology.

(Note: Many illusions did not work for me but it is an individual matter. Try them and see.)

Just up at Colliding Universes (one of my other blogs)

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:05:00 +0000

How important did people think Earth was before Copernicus and Carl Sagan came along and set us straight? (Not important at all, actually!)

Chance - you mean, it isn't really a "thing"?

Life does not defeat chaos, but outwits it by wisdom (or information)

Economic decisions - complex but not irrational?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:38:00 +0000

In The New Republic (July 9, 2008), Alan Wolfe assesses recent books that claim that economic decision-making is irrational:

Economists used to believe that it was unnecessary to measure utility except in this way: the price that a person was willing to pay for something established its utility, and so there was no need to dig any deeper, to examine what was driving the psyche of the economic actor. But the behavioral revolution in economics challenges this assumption. It is based on the idea that we must look into that black box called the human mind to find out whether the things that we say we want really do give us pleasure. Utility, after the revolution, is no longer abstract. It is lived, experienced; it is existential. And fortunately, or so these books argue, the field of psychology has uncovered timely and fascinating truths about the ways our minds work, and these insights may breathe new life into the old idea of utility. Hedonic psychology, happiness research, behavioral economics, economic psychology, the study of well-being, judgment and decision-making--call it what you want. Suddenly everything we thought we knew about economics begins to look different.

In other words, if you think something makes you happy, it probably does. It may not be wise or good or right, but a decision to pay for it is based on many complex factors. Wolfe also offers a helpful caution:

... , I conclude that we should once and for all stop calling for revolutions in our understanding of ourselves, and end this remarkable presumption. In the long history of humankind, the social sciences were developed only recently, but we have been trying to figure ourselves out since we first began to think. It defies the imagination that one new methodology or theoretical assumption is going to topple all previous efforts to understand the human condition. Sometimes revolutions in our understanding of the world do happen--they tell me that Albert Einstein led one (and that, having done so, he spent the rest of his life running down the wrong paths)--but they are rare in the physical sciences, and they are next to nonexistent in the social sciences. Human beings are indeed charming and perverse and altogether fascinating creatures, and the study of ourselves is among the richest of intellectual endeavors. We ought to give ourselves a bit more credit than the revolutionists of the social sciences extend to us: we pursue many goals at the same time, and we do so in all kinds of predictable and unpredictable ways.

It pays to listen to what people actually say instead of trying to find out how a monkey would think about it.

Animal minds: Monkeys understand money?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:04:00 +0000

Well, no, they don't. And then again, who does?

Why is so much of our communal life governed by an entirely abstract concept? And if that does not help us see that the human mind is immaterial, what does?

Well, some do try to find other explanations.

In a "Cultural Animal "post coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs, "The Evolution of Economic Rationality: Do Monkeys Understand Money?" Roy F. Baumeister reports at Psychology Today (July 15, 2008) that

Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows. (This already is a difference of gigantic proportions in that monkeys must learn about resource-exchange using something that is already a primary reinforcer - food - whereas humans can extend the range of their motivations to secondary reinforcers.)

That should have ended the experiment, if the object was to understand an abstraction as pervasive as the power of money, but ...

A resource (marshmallows) exchange task was introduced whereby pressing a lever would give another monkey a marshmallow; hence this was a task that involved a bit of altruism. Not only were monkeys taught about the game. Two specific monkeys were conditioned (entrained), such that one always pulled the lever for his monkey partner (thus being a very generous partner) and the other never pulled the lever for his partner (stingy). Then they let these conditioned monkeys play the game with other monkeys. Monkeys that played with the highly generous monkey figured it out and quickly took advantage of him. Monkeys that played with the stingy monkey also figured it out quickly and subsequently shunned or were aggressive toward him.

Thus, monkeys can at least understand and respond effectively to the difference between a generous provider and a tightwad. Still, the fact that these differences had to be done with marshmallows instead of a more abstract representation of value (which is what money is) suggests a limited capacity to use or understand money.

Apparently yrying to promote monkey intelligence over human intelligence, Baumeister proclaims,

If you and someone else worked equally to earn $100, and that person has the power to divide it and chooses to offer you only one dollar while keeping $99 for himself, well, you are still better off with one dollar than with nothing. Hence economic rationalists find it slightly scandalous that people ever refuse any offer. Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys.

Well, only if they had nothing better to do, right? The rest of it gets slightly more interesting:

But a fully developed sense of fairness means that you are uncomfortable with being overbenefited as well. That is, it bothers you to get more than your fair share. Here is where humans seem to part company with other creatures.

Now herre Baumeister seems to connect with reality. Surely we have all suffered through overly lavish compliments, overly generous rewards? ... what's going on? (I did my job. Can't I just please go home now?) However,

What happens when monkeys overbenefit from an exchange - do they experience guilt, embarrassment, shame, or try to rectify the situation? Apparently not.

Well, monkeys wouldn't see the problem, would they?

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I spent some time on the problem of people tryingto understand human psychology from ape or monkey psychology. Basically, it doesn't work. Having a human mind, however you want to interpret it, really does make all the difference.

A number of interesting issues are raised in the Comments.

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:37:00 +0000

Here's an interesting site: How the brain works sponsored by Eugene B. Shea.

Neuroscientists around the world are working day and night with their brain scans to analyze the activities of individual neurons and segments of the brain in hopes of learning how the brain works, and eventually, arriving at an understanding of human behavior.

[ ... ]

But since this article will take strong exception to the direction of their research, I must devote the following portion to explaining why I believe the great majority of cognitive neuroscientists and neuropsychologists are on the wrong track.

First however, I want to clearly and largely exempt Bernard J. Baars, Ph.D., and Nicole M. Gage, Ph.D. from my criticism, based on their marvelously lucid and carefully researched new textbook, Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience - Academic Press, 2007. Indeed, I am deeply indebted to them for much of the factual neuroscience cited in this article. I think every serious student of cognitive neuroscience should have a copy of this excellent book.

Shea is, I gather, just as impatient as Mario and I are of schlocky pop science theories of how the mind works.

Remember, your brain is like an ocean.

The problem is not that some theorist is wrong about what is in your brain. Rather, so much is in your brain that you should avoid giving his theories an unrealistic amount of attention.

Look at it this way: Suppose an oceanographer told us that his specialty is sea horses. In his view, we cannot understand the history of life - or even our own lives - without an intimate knowledge of sea horses.

Well, maybe - or maybe not.

Similarly, all theories of how the mind works may be true for at least some people some of the time, but probably none is true for everyone everywhere. And if the theorist thinks the mind an illusion or believes that it is some sort of material thing, well ... Anyway, I expect Shea has some good ideas.

He notes, while dismissing shallow theories,

Nor is there any validity to the “triune” nature of the brain, as composed of evolutionary development from reptilian to mammalian to primate brains. The so-called “reptilian brain” is not a brain at all, since it only represents a portion of the reptile brain, which is comprised, like ours, of brainstem, midbrain, and cortex. Nor, for the same reason, is the mammalian brain a brain. And as we shall see, our derogation of these so-called lizard and mammalian brains in favor of the cortex has led researchers to only a perfunctory analysis of their marvelous functions, without which we would be vegetables shortly before our demise.

Ah yes. I am glad he raised that topic.

I have not found any good evidence that reptiles are in principle incapable of emotion, as is often claimed. If you think that, please do not get in the way of a she-alligator nursing her eggs. She will behave exactly the same way as a she-bear nursing her cubs. It seems that, in these situations, the alligator uses the reptile brain the same way the bear uses the mammal brain: To drive off or kill the threat to her offspring. And if you think that that is not emotion, then you must commit yourself to the view that no animal ever shows emotion.

I wrote about the alligator's behaviour here, relying on the expertise of a man who knows a great deal about alligators.

See also: The unfeeling reptilian brain: Don't mess with its babies.

Are religious ideas innate?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:43:00 +0000

Recently, a reader wrote to ask why I was not enthusiastic about Logan Gage's recent claim that there may be an innate human tendency toward religion, and that such a tendency should be evidence for rather than against God.

I replied more or less as follows:

I think that a human level of mental capacity means that people will naturally have certain questions.

But asking the questions is a function of having the capacity. I doubt that an innate mental program prompts us to ask specific questions.

Here is an example of what I mean:

I know that there is a future.

I observe that all humans grow old and die.

I am a human.

My grandparents have all grown old and died.

So, I naturally wonder, what happens to those people's minds, their personalities?

I also wonder why the universe is the way it is. Did someone make it this way? Who? If there is a mind behind the universe, is it one we can contact?

I don't need a special mental program to ask questions like that. Normal conscious awareness of the past, present, and future, the near and the far, will prompt such questions.

Now, crickets are different. Crickets would need some sort of special program to think such things. They do not have the minds or life experiences that observe their grandparents, their grandparents' deaths, or anything of the kind. They do not have enough of a sense of the totality of things to ask "How did the universe come to exist?"

When humans ask these questions, they answer them in very different ways: Some worship the spirits of powerful animals, some become monotheists, some become Buddhists, some atheistic materialists.

My reason for disagreeing with Gage is that I think that the idea of an innate "religiosity" program is an unnecessary complication. Some questions naturally occur to the aware conscious mind.

And the fact that so many humans have answered them in so many different ways tells - to me at least - against the existence of an innate program. Attempts to show that a program exists have not been successful, as mario and I show in The Spiritual Brain.

Note: Innate program: You may observe a pair of birds building a basket nest. So far as we know, the birds have some sort of innate program for that. The individual bird would not design the nest as an act of personal intellectual creation. Two birds together would not likely fare any better. The nest gets built because both birds know certain moves that feel right to them. But they always build the same kind of nest. Human religious ideas are not similar in that way. The question and answers originate with individuals.

See also: Does religion really poison everything?

Today at Colliding Universes ...

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 02:39:00 +0000

Increase in UFO sitings in Canada - what's behind that?

All existence is the expression of wisdom

So what if fossil bacteria are found on Mars? Polls show many Americans expect Star Trek!

Agnostic mathematician: God is in the discoveries, not in the gaps (assuming he exists)

(Colliding Universes is my blog on theories about the universe. It is actually a lot of fun.)

Creating belief systems more essential to our humanity than making tools?

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:23:00 +0000

A fascinating article by Judith Thurman, "First Impressions: What does the world’s oldest art say about us?" (June 23, 2008) in The New Yorker explores the attempts we make to understand the artworks left by humans drawing on the walls of caves thousands of years ago. She reflects on the Chauvet paintings found in south central France. These oldest known paintings predate the Lascaux and Altamira friezes by fifteen to eighteen thousand years.

The history of interpretation of older artworks has suffered from too-ready assumptions about "primitive" people, in particular that, as mud slowly morphed into mind, art would gradually become more sophisticated. For example,

He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and [i]n that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Also, curiously in the light of the notion of the "violent brute" cave man,

No human conflict is recorded in cave art, although at three separate sites there are four ambiguous drawings of a creature with a man’s limbs and torso, pierced with spearlike lines. More pertinent, perhaps, is a famous vignette in the shaft at Lascaux. It depicts a rather comical stick figure with an avian beak or mask, a puny physique, and a long skinny penis. He and his erect member seem to have rigor mortis. He is flat on his back at the feet of an exquisitely realistic wounded bison, whose intestines are spilling out. The bison’s glance is turned away, but it might have an ironic smile. Could the subject be hubris? Whatever it represents, some mythic contest—and the struggle of prehistorians to interpret their subject is such a contest—has ended in a draw.

Her descriptions are beautiful,

A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.

and I will spoil no more of them for you. A fierce controversy rages over how exactly to interpret the art and its purpose - or whether one should attempt to interpret it at all. One archaeologist defended his interpretation as follows:

Clottes was hurt and outraged by the rancor of the attacks that greeted “The Shamans of Prehistory” (“psychedelic ravings,” one critic wrote), and the authors defended themselves in a subsequent edition. “You can advance a scientific hypothesis without claiming certainty,” Clottes told me one evening. “Everyone agrees that the paintings are, in some way, religious. I’m not a believer myself, and I’m certainly not a mystic. But Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis. The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems that influence nature. And shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunter-gatherers.”

Influence nature, yes, but we also need to understand and interpret nature. Probably the most important thing that the cave paintings tell us about ourselves is that the mind seems to have emerged rather suddenly, not by a long series of increments, a point that Mario and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain.

Tour the caves, courtesy France's culture ministry. The image above is from www.archaeology.org. Also tour Lascaux here (at Virtual visit) and view Altamira images here.

A journalist tries to understand a jealous god - materialist science

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:40:00 +0000

After reading American journalist Pam Winnick's A Jealous God (Nelson, 2005), I informed her that I wish I had written it.

The rest of my review is here.

Neuroscience: How complex is your brain? More than you can easily imagine!

noreply@blogger.com (Denyse) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:11:00 +0000

A friend writes to quote me a passage from Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music, noting, "Levitin does a great job of presenting the complexity of the human mind, as relates to thought and music processing, in a way that even the non-specialist can understand":

It is difficult to appreciate the complexity of the brain because the numbers are so huge they go well beyond our everyday experience (unless you are a cosmologist). The average brain consists of one hundred billion (100,000,000,000) neurons. Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out- let's say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money. Even if you gave away hundred-dollar bills once a second, it would take you thirty-two years to pass them all out. This is a lot of neurons, but the real power and complexity of the brain (and of thought) comes through their connections.

Each neuron is connected to other neurons- usually one thousand to ten thousand others. Just four neurons can be connected in sixty-three ways, or not at all, for a total of sixty-four possibilities. As the number of neurons increases, the number of possible connections grows exponentially...The number of combinations becomes so large that it is unlikely we will ever understand all the possible connections in the brain, or what they mean. The number of combinations possible- and hence the number of possible different thoughts or brain states each of us can have- exceeds the number of known particles in the entire known universe." (Levitin, pp.85-86)

Yes, we take good note of that in The Spiritual Brain. Most of us, far from overestimating our brains, probably underestimate them. It's not magic, but it is reality. It will not do everything we want, but it will do far more than we sometimes expect.