Book review and online vids: The Mind and the Brain

Here's a review of The Mind and the Brain by Jeff Schwartz and Sharon Begley,

Schwartz explains, in detail, how "mental force" enable to change the neural connections and structure of the brain; in other words, showing that mental force has a causal power. And this knowledge enabled Schwartz to develop a therapeutical strategy to help his patients to overcome Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

The steps of this therapeutical approach are explained in this website; and discussed in these videos too:

The review is a good resource for online vids on the use of non-materialist neuroscience in treating addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Podcasts with non-materialist neuroscientists

Materialism and human dignity

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at SUNY, Stony Brook, on the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Listen in as Dr. Egnor explains how a materialist understanding of the mind undermines human dignity, affecting bioethics, criminal law, and ultimately how we treat one another as human beings.

Listen here.

I personally think this is a serious problem. A materialist understanding of life justifies manipulating people because neither they nor we are ultimately responsible for what we do.

Now here's the fun one!:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz on the interaction between the mind and the brain in science fiction. Could the mind really be an illusion from a computer program, like in The Matrix? Listen in as Drs. Egnor and Schwartz explain how materialist fictions ultimately beg the question.

Hey, if life is all just this big fiction:

Step this way, please ma'am ...

Oops, where'd she go? Down there?

Oh, that's right. Too bad nobody remembered to replace that staircase.

Oh, well, life is all just this big fiction anyway .... uh, not!

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."

Psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz speaks on what drugs can do for you - and what you and your mind must do for yourself

Stephanie West Allen from Brains on Purpose relays an interview with Mario's non-materialist neuroscience colleague Jeffrey Schwartz on Irish radio here.

Psychiatrist Schwartz addresses key topics like self-directed neuroplasticity, role of drugs and therapists, narcissism, empowering clients, self-help, OCD, and more.

Well, good for him! The reality is that non-materialist neuroscience should be the way of the future for mental health.

We cannot fix ourselves by taking drugs. Drugs might help us calm down or cheer up, but they don't create mental health. They're not miracles, they're just chemicals. They're stupid, basically.
They do not have ideas. WE have ideas. Any idea we ever got, good or bad, we did not get from a drug. And for better mental health, we need to replace bad ideas with good ideas.

Like any real world program for improvement, it's not easy - but it is possible.

Jeff Schwartz lectures in Ireland on changing the troubled brain by changing the mind

Neuropsychiatrist Jeff Schwartz, Mario's colleague and lead author of The Mind and the Brain, has been lecturing in Ireland. According to Dick Ahlstrom, science editor for the Irish Times (July 11, 2008),

THE FANCIFUL notion of "mind over matter", where the mind can exert influence over the body, is not so fanciful after all. It is possible for the mind to impose lasting physiological changes on the brain to overcome psychiatric problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder.

So argues Prof Jeffrey M Schwartz, one of the world's leading proponents of mind over matter in a psychiatric sense, who was in Dublin yesterday to deliver a lecture at St Patrick's Hospital.

Ahlstrom talks about Schwartz's work treating obsessive-compulsive disorder - which highlights something I always stress when discussing non-materialist neuroscience: It is, first and foremost, a practical discipline.

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Schwartz and Beauregard are not trying to have a faculty common-room fight with materialist neuroscientists over abstract issues that begin and end in "ism." How would that help anyone?

Rather, they are concerned that many mental problems are not effectively treated when the brain is viewed materialistically as a pre-programmed machine - whose addled programming can somehow be knocked back into kilter by powerful drugs.

Non-materialists see the brain as the organ that connects our minds to life. Like any organ, it can have problems. Our minds can have problems too - we can have attitudes that are wrong and destructive.

That is not a brain problem, it is a mind problem. A mass murderer might have a perfectly healthy brain.

The non-materialist works with the patient whose behaviour is creating a problem, such as obsessive compulsions, to help change their mind. Then the mind changes the brain in the process, and thus the person's life changes slowly over time. Neuroscientists like Mario and Jeff have imaged this very process.

As Mario and I show in Chapter Six of The Spiritual Brain, non-materialist treatments work - and that is what keeps the non-materialist neuroscientist at work, despite much misunderstanding and occasional misrepresentation.

Spotted: Mario's colleague Jeff Schwartz in Expelled film supertrailer

The Expelled film is set to open on 1000 screens across the United States April 18, and non-materialist neuroscientist Jeff Schwartz, one of Mario Beauregard's colleagues and friends, makes a brief appearance in the supertrailer, commenting on the National Academy of Sciences (he's the guy in a taxi in a blue shirt, near the end). Jeff is best known as the lead author of The Mind and the Brain, a predecessor book to our The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen of Brains on Purpose.

Change your mind, change your brain: Smithsonian conference

Mediator Stephanie West Allen and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz are offering a program in the use of neuroplasticity (the way our brains change in response to the focus of our thoughts) at the Smithsonian on Saturday, March 1, 2008

The science of neuroplasticity demonstrates that our brains are always changing, meaning that we can resculpt our brains in productive ways. This seminar teaches you how to achieve control of your brain so you can meet goals, create life-changing habits, and realize your full potential.

The morning session focuses on the brain and its role in how we think, decide, and act; how the amygdala (reflexive brain) and the frontal cortex (reflective brain) work in decision making; how people affect each other’s mirror neurons; and the difference between the mind and the brain, a distinction critical for self-mastery.

Now, if only my mind could convince my brain that I really DO want the stuff that is good for me instead of the stuff that makes me feel good. But then who's the I and who's the me? The trouble is, I'm really both. And I'm the one that wants both - I just don't want to choose, but I must.

Psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz on the importance of The Spiritual Brain

The Spiritual Brain is a very important book. It clearly explains non-materialist neuroscience in simple terms appropriate for the lay reader, while building on and extending work that Sharon Begley and I began in The Mind and The Brain, and work that Mario and I collaborated on in academic publications.

Of utmost importance is the fact that The Spiritual Brain clearly shows that non-materialist neuroscience is not simply a controversial view held by some neuroscientists. It is a coherent and theoretically very well-grounded perspective that can play a critical role in developing more effective treatments for many medical and psychological disorders. Further, it creates natural links between physical and spiritual health by stressing the need for the active participation of people in their own treatment planning and implementation.

The Spiritual Brain greatly contributes to the on-going paradigm shift that is revolutionizing our understanding of the relationship of the spirit, the mind, and the brain in the 21st Century.

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD
Research Psychiatrist, UCLA
Author of Brain Lock and The Mind and The Brain

I love the way Dr. Schwartz focuses on the positive developments that Mario and I discuss. Many fine books trash materialism. But so what? Where do you go if you are not a materialist? We provide examples of non-materialist neuroscience in action, as he notes, and those examples may have key implications for treatment of currently intractable or difficult disorders.

Here are some articles and interviews with him:

Articles co-authored by Stephanie and Jeff:
"Brain Management . . . Law Firm Leadership on the Neuro Frontier" (article excerpt is found here)
"Lead Your Brain Instead of It Leading You" (article excerpt is found here)
"Law Students: Create A Well-rounded Life"

Interview of Jeff Schwartz about his work with Leonardo DiCaprio on the movie The Aviator
Interview of Jeff Schwartz about his book The Mind and the Brain
Jeffrey M. Schwartz — Wikipedia
NPR interview of Jeff Schwartz about The Mind and the Brain