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

The afternoon 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 between 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 the morning and afternoon panels were televised and can be viewed here. My excerpts from the morning panel are here.)

As before, French philosopher Elie During led off the panel, featuring (in order of first speaking), neuroscientist Andrew Newberg, M.D., near death researcher Bruce Greyson, M.D., spirituality and health researcher Christina Puchalski, M.D., and neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.

Philosopher During noted, referencing Andrew Newberg's work:

What you show, based on neurological evidence, is that there's some sort of consistency or robustness to these [spiritual] experiences: they are, I quote, “the result of coherent sensory perceptions shaped by the proper neurological functioning of sound, healthy minds.” In other words, they may be unusual experiences, but they are not at all outside the range of normal brain activity. This is a very important conclusion, but I cannot get rid of a feeling of discomfort, because it seems what you’re implying is that ultimately, it is the brain that is able to answer the question of the reality or unreality of our lived experience. It is the brain—or the neuroscientist—that is the ultimate criterion when it comes to assessing the reality of those experiences. When it's real for the brain, it’s real for us. Reality, at the end of the day, is “what happens in the brain”…. This I find quite hard to accept, since the brain, after all, is itself only a piece—albeit an important piece—of the reality we’re experiencing and reflecting about: it doesn’t stand outside the picture as a transcendent norm. Do you see my point?

Newberg replied,

We often don’t know whether someone who has a normal psychology can also have a normal religious or spiritual experience versus someone who has an abnormal psychology. In fact, one of the questions that I pose to all of my students is: “What is normal?” We really struggle with that. It becomes something that is very difficult to know how to define, especially in the context of religious or spiritual experiences.

A good example of this type of problem is Joan of Arc. Fifteenth-century France was descending into chaos after the Hundred Years War, and the king of England was planning to absorb the country. A peasant girl, Joan, informed local notables that she had received visions telling her to take the crown prince (the dauphin) to the traditional place where French kings were crowned (Reims) - thus establishing a counterclaim.

At that time, of course, women, especially peasant women, were expected to mind their own business at home and keep silent. Politics was a game for men of noble birth.

Was Joan delusional? Many thought so. But she raised an army, took the dauphin to Rheims, and got him crowned, thus putting a deep - and permanent - dent in the English king's plans.

The conventional view of delusions is that they disorient us and prevent us from seeing reality clearly. But Joan's spiritual experiences had the opposite effect - they enabled her to see reality quite clearly and to do what no one else in France had managed. And she did it from one of the lowest positions in her society.

So was Joan "normal"? To ask the question is to impose on spiritual reality a standard created for Dilbert's cube world. She wasn't normal at all, and if she had been, she could never have done what she did. So part of the challenge of studying spiritual experiences is to move beyond the standards generated for measuring other types of experience, standards that may be irrelevant for the purpose.

(Note: Newberg also offered some interesting observations on attempts to measure consciousness, as I have reported here.

Panelists watched a National Geographic Moment of Death, on the complexities of determining when and how death occurs. One problem is that death, like life, is a process. Freezing cells, Hayflick-style, results in a stasis that is neither death nor life.

The panelists:

Mind-body panel 2: Andrew Newberg - "A growing openness to these kinds of issues"

Mind-body panel 2: Bruce Greyson - Brain and mind don't seem to be the same thing.

Mind-body panel 2: Christina Puchalski - "We know maybe forty percent"

Mind-body panel 2: Mario Beauregard - "Brain imaging data alone doesn't tell us whether an experience is real or not"


Next: Mind-body panel 2: Andrew Newberg - "A growing openness to these kinds of issues"

Mind-body panel 2: Mario Beauregard - "Brain imaging data alone doesn't tell us whether an experience is real or not"

Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., is currently an Associate Researcher at the University of Montreal in the Departments of Psychology and Radiology, as well as the Neuroscience Research Center. Here's a snippet of dialogue he led off, from the second panel:

Mario Beauregard: Well, I have only one thing to add because a lot of things have been said already. It’s true that we have to take into account the meaning and content of the experience with respect to the experiencer, and we cannot rely solely on brain imaging data to determine whether an experience is real or not. If you take the case of hallucinations, for instance, you also have neuro-correlates for delusions, auditory hallucinations, etc., so it’s only one piece of data and we have to consider many other parameters.

Elie During: One thing I’ve learnt from your book The Spiritual Brain is that there are actually ways to detect the difference between someone who is faking it and someone who is hallucinating, based on brain imaging techniques.

Mario Beauregard: Sure, it can be useful, but that is not the only piece of evidence that we have at our disposal to consider.

Elie During: I believe there is a more general issue at stake in our discussion. I’ll put it this way, as a question addressed to all of you: what role does belief, and here I mean your own beliefs, play in the kind of research you’re involved in? When I say belief, I don’t necessarily mean religious belief, but more broadly, the systems of beliefs or values that shape your view of the world, especially those beliefs and values that relate to the way in which you draw the limits of reality.

My personal feeling is that no one can help having beliefs in that sense. Again, these beliefs can be based on philosophical, cultural, or religious grounds. How do these beliefs interfere with your activity as scientists or working professionals? Do they interfere at all? Because you are all well aware that one of the objections that is often raised against the kind of research programs you’re involved in is that it is quite biased.

The suspicion is that there is some hidden agenda— that you are either trying to provide evidence in support of specific personal beliefs, or you are trying to force facts into your own framework without even being conscious of it. Is it reasonable to expect people to sustain a purely neutral, objective stance on such issues? How does it work for you?

Andrew Newberg: All of us are human beings, and we all have beliefs and biases. That certainly holds true for science, for theology, and for philosophy. I suppose one of the things for us to always keep in mind is that as objective as somebody may think anything is, or however real or true or absolute anybody thinks anything is, we are very limited in our abilities to look at the world as human beings. As wonderful as our brain is, it only takes in a very small percentage of the information that’s out there. So whenever we apply ourselves to some part of the world, one of the problems that we have is that our brain tends to tell us that we’ve got the whole picture and doesn’t bother to tell us when it is filling in information, when it is lying to us, or when it is being inaccurate. Yet we often tend to think that we understand the world accurately, whether scientifically, politically, philosophically, spiritually, etc.

Newberg sure got that right. And, as Mario and I said in The Spiritual Brain, this is a time for exploration, not dogma.

See also:

Multidirectional skepticism: Skepticism finding its true voice?

Brain science supports traditional view of soul?

All the junk that's fit to debunk: Neuropolitics is up next

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

Back to top: Selected moments from the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium - afternoon panel

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 ...