Neuroscience and Physicalism ... a key letter

My lead author, Mario Beauregard has just informed me that Science has not agreed to publish his response to Nancey Murphy and Martha Farah's defense of materialism (physicalism).

I've no idea why.

I simply don't get why anyone believes in that stuff any more, but then I never got why people used to believe in banshees either.

Like, at a certain point, don't you say, "But this doesn't make any sense ... Can we talk about stuff that makes sense, for once?"

But here's what Mario would have said if they had published his letter:

A Response to the Letter titled "Neuroscience and the Soul"

In their letter (1), Farah and Murphy claim that as neuroscience progresses, it gradually appears that all aspects of a person (e.g., self-awareness, emotion, morality, spirituality) can be explained by material processes in the brain. This affirmation is based on the physicalist/materialist belief that mental functions and events can be reduced to their neural correlates. It is important to bear in mind, however, that neural correlates do not yield an explanation of mental functions and events, i.e., they cannot explain how neural processes become mental events. Indeed correlation does not entail causation. Therefore, the results of neuroscience studies performed using either imaging, lesion, stimulation, pharmacological or recording techniques should not be presented as leading to, or validating, physicalism/materialism.

The physicalist/materialist ontology is based mainly on principles of classical physics that have been known to be fundamentally false for over three quarters of a century. According to the classical physical conception of the world, all physical behavior is explainable in principle solely in terms of local mechanical interactions between material entities. This conception was rejected by the founders of quantum mechanics, who introduced into the basic equations choices that are not determined by local mechanical processes, but are attributed rather to human agents (2). Consequently, physicalism/materialism can no longer be taken as the basis for any ontological belief about the nature of reality and a scientific Weltanschauung based upon the physicalist/materialist ontology must also be false.

The physicalist/materialist doctrine, which is unable to solve the "hard problem" of subjective consciousness, is no more “scientific” than other views (e.g., mentalism, dualism) with respect to the mind/body problem. In my perspective, a non-physicalist/materialist science of mind and consciousness account for facts related to human mental experience better than a physicalist/materialist one. For instance, there is mounting evidence that the intentional content of mental events (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs, volition) significantly influence the functioning and plasticity of the brain (3). This implies that mentalistic variables have to be seriously taken into account to reach a correct understanding of human behavior (as in the case of the placebo effect).

Furthermore, a non-materialist view can also offer science-based explanations of puzzling phenomena that are currently shelved (and considered taboo) by physicalism/materialism. One of these phenomena is veridical perception and information gained by patients during cardiac arrest while their brains do not show any detectable activity (e.g., the case of Pam Reynolds) (4). Another phenomenon is psi, the apparent ability of some humans to perceive objects/events beyond the range of the ordinary senses or to mentally influence physical or biological systems. Psi phenomena, which have been shown to exist in thousands of experiments (5), also calls into question the physicalist/materialist position.

It is legitimate and necessary to continuously reflect on the metaphysical assumptions of the scientific enterprise. It is also very important to realize that science in general, and neuroscience in particular, are not synonymous with physicalism/materialism.


Mario Beauregard*
Departments of Psychology and Radiology
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology
Neuroscience Research Center
Université de Montréal
Montreal (Quebec) Canada

References
1. M.J. Farah, N. Murphy (2009). Neuroscience and the Soul. Science 323: 1168.
2. J.M. Schwartz, H. Stapp, M. Beauregard, M. (2005). Quantum theory in neuroscience and psychology: a neurophysical model of mind/brain interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 360: 1309-1327.
3. M. Beauregard (2007). Mind does really matter: Evidence from neuroimaging studies of emotional self-regulation, psychotherapy, and placebo effect. Progress in Neurobiology 81: 218-236.
4. M. Beauregard, D. O'Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul (HarperCollins, New York, 2007).
5. D. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (Harper SanFrancisco, San Francisco, 1997).

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

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."

The Spiritual Brain gets Award of Merit at Write! Canada, plus Mario gets tenure

At Write! Canada's 2008 Gala, June 11, The Spiritual Brain received an Award of Merit in the Leadership/Theoretical category of the Canadian Christian Writing Awards.

It had been shortlisted in three categories, a fact that offended some persons. I said at the time that it was a darn tough field and the offendees should be just as steamed about the other entries.

I also received an Award of Merit for “Anti-God books: The God they don’t believe in is certainly not great”, which appeared in the St. Michael's (University of Toronto) Alumni Magazine, and is posted here. The whole awards list is here.

The big news: Lead author Mario Beauregard got tenure! For any young academic, that is a worry, but he says "The tenure battle is behind me now: I will be able to finish my neuroscience career at the University of Montreal (I am very glad)." And so should they be, in my view.

Also, while Bradford McCall's review of The Spiritual Brain in the American Scientific Affiliation's journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, won't be out for a while, here's an excerpt that especially pleases me,

Beauregard concludes with the contention that though studying what occurs within people’s brains cannot directly prove or disprove spiritual experiences (or, for that matter, the realities that said experiences point to), they nonetheless can give credence to such extrapolations. I heartily advocate the purchase of this book.

Yes, of course the review pleases me because, in it, he is encouraging people to buy our book. For one thing, I want to write another book, and selling this one is a key step. But also, McColl grasps our key point: We are not saying that we can prove that people who have spiritual experiences contact a reality outside their physical selves. We say that there is good evidence for that, so it is reasonable to believe it.

As for proof, well, it is actually very difficult to prove anything at all outside of mathematics. Someone will always raise an objection, perhaps one that sounds reasonable from his point of view but unreasonable from yours. (For example, "Maybe the whole universe is just a dream I am having.")

So the only available approach to most questions of fact is to assemble the evidence on both sides and see which model fits best.

(Note: Dr. McCall is with the Divinity Department of Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA.)

Spiritual Brain authors in the media: Mario Beauregard at New Dimensions Café

The podcast is here (scroll down). Mario writes,

"The Neuroscience of Consciousness". Go to www.newdimensions.org and click on New Dimensions Café Listen Now! You'll find a 24-1/2 minute dialogue that I recently had with Michael Toms. If you would like to subscribe to the New Dimensions Café podcast which features many of the guests that appear on New Dimensions it is available for a free subscription on the home page as well.

Spiritual Brain authors in the media: Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary

Here is the interview with Mario Beauregard at New Dimensions Cafe. Search on his name.

In a much more humble venue, last Friday (March 7, 2008) I addressed a "brain and behaviour" class at Tyndale University in Toronto, on non-materialist neuroscience. I talked about some of the primary topics of The Spiritual Brain: How you can know that your mind really exists and really controls your brain.

Students were very interested in the placebo effect
- the effect by which the influence of drugs or treatments depend to some extent on what you believe will happen. Yes, it is true. And it is very important.

Especially today, because an aging population must take - perhaps - several drugs that may not agree well together. The best solution is obviously not to need so many drugs or not so high a dose. That is where the placebo effect becomes important.

Spiritual Brain authors in the news

Mario Beauregard, lead author of The Spiritual Brain was a guest on the G. Gordon Liddy show, yesterday. (March 7, 2008) This link will get you the podcast.

He was also on Oprah radio, with Dr. Mehmet Oz and you can listen to a part of it here, (February 21, 2008).

Also, Mario tells me that the French edition of The Spiritual Brain is coming along nicely, and is due out in September. (They send him the chapters to approve, of which I am very glad.) The soft cover English language edition is due out in the fall too.

Also, I have just received a kind note from someone who is reading the book via a Kindle. I have been meaning to get one of those things myself, but have been waiting till they are no longer cutting edge. At my age, my children think I am showing off if I have cutting edge equipment.

Spiritual Brain authors in the media: Mario Beauregard on Maureen Caudill's show

Here's Mario's interview with Maureen Caudill at Music of Your Mind, January 10, 2008,

Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain? Drawing on his research with Carmelite nuns, neuroscientist Mario Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He offers compelling evidence that religious experiences have a nonmaterial origin, making a convincing case that it is God who creates our spiritual experiences, not the brain. In his book The Spiritual Brain, Beauregard and co-author Denyse O'Leary explore recent attempts to locate a "God gene" or explain away mystic experiences as due to epilepsy or other pathologies. Beauregard claims such efforts are misguided and narrow-minded, resulting from a refusal to consider anything except a monistic materialist world-view rather than deriving from valid scientific thought. Beauregard explores the latest neurological research on mystic experiences and gets to their real source. You won’t want to miss this fascinating discussion!

Mario Beauregard on CBC Radio

Anna Maria Tremonti of Canadian Broadcastng Corporation's The Current interviewed Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard (27 12 2007), author (together with myself) of The Spiritual Brain.

To listen, go here, select The Current, then scroll down to

27/12/2007: The Spiritual Brain
Mario Beauregard is a neuroscientist who has been studying the brain for years. His findings are surprising: he believes he has found a neurological reason to believe in the existence of the soul.

Right click to Download 27/12/2007: The Spiritual Brain
[mp3 file: runs 19:37]

Sorry that's so complex, but I cannot find a direct link to single podcast's own page.

Update: A kind commenter named Israel has left a note to say that you can go here, but note that the podcast will begin immediately.

I had mentioned this earlier and will put the link there too.

Beauregard and O'Leary on the Dennis Prager show - partial transcript

Bill Dembski asked me to post some excerpts from this interview that Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I did with American radio host Dennis Prager, on the difference between the mind and the brain (as set out in our book The Spiritual Brain, Harper One, 2007) at Uncommon Descent. I finally got a chance to transcribe a bit of it, so here is that bit:

DENNIS PRAGER: We always or nearly always associate scientists with skepticism if not downright hostility to the notion that there is something in us that is not physically or materially explicable. The notion that we have a soul, well, but you can't measure a soul, you can't see it, and it is not available through an x-ray and yet there are some scientists who say that science itself may argue for the existence of a soul and even for a higher intelligence.

And there is a book that has received remarkable reviews, just published it's called that argues and the neuroscientist in this case is a professor at the University of Montreal, an assistant professor in the departments of radiology and psychology and he is Mario Beauregard and in Toronto is Denyse O'Leary who is an award-winning Canadian science writer and journalist. They have co-authored this book.

So, tell our many listeners in North America, what is the basic theory of your book?Read more »

Spiritual Brain authors in the media

Christine Williamson, hostess of On the Line, will feature "The God Debate", an interview with Denyse O'Leary and Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Michael Pare, Friday, December 7, 2:00 pm EST. Christine is a most engageda nd engagin hostess and I believe that she really brought out the best in us. (Note: Re the link, you need to click Ontario, the Originals, then Programs.)

Anna Maria Tremonti of The Current, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program, interviewed Mario Beauregard for a special on spirituality that will be aired on December 27 (presumably 8:30 a.m.).

To listen, go here, select The Current, then scroll down to

27/12/2007: The Spiritual Brain
Mario Beauregard is a neuroscientist who has been studying the brain for years. His findings are surprising: he believes he has found a neurological reason to believe in the existence of the soul.

Right click to Download 27/12/2007: The Spiritual Brain
[mp3 file: runs 19:37]

Sorry that's so complex, but I cannot find a direct link to single podcast's own page.

Update: A kind commenter named Israel has left a note to say that if you go here the podcast will begin immediately.

Spiritual brain authors: Mario on Sheridan Voysey’s Open House Australia

Mario was on Sheridan Voysey’s great radio program, Open House Australia November 18, 2007, and you can listen here if you look for November 18, 2007. For more Sheridan, go to Sheridan Voysey. He takes on a variety of current events.

Do recent studies of out of body experiences show that there is no soul?

Several people have written to me asking whether recent reports of out of body experiences stimulated by electrodes show that there is no soul. The short answer is no, they don't. But first let's look at what they do show.

A report from ivillage, "Scientists spot brain center for 'out-of-body' experience", features a recent experiment in which Belgian scientists were able identify out of body experiences (OBEs) with abnormal activity in a specific region of the brain in a 63-year old patient.

Originally, they had implanted electrodes in the right side of the man's brain (temporoparietal junction) in order to relieve a sense of ringing in the ears (tinnitus). The treatment didn't work, but he started to experience odd episodes, lasting 15 to 21 seconds each, in which he did not feel quite in his body.

According to the report,

While at no time causing any alteration in his sense of consciousness, during each episode, the patient consistently reported feeling disembodied to a specific location -- namely about 20 inches behind his body and to the left. The perception remained the same, regardless of whether the patient was standing or lying down during electrode stimulation.

He was not actually seeing his body from behind. Rather, he felt as if he were to the left and rear of his body's actual location, but he still saw in a normal way.

Would it feel as if one was operating one's body as a remote controlled toy race car?

Anyway, positron emission tomography (PET) scans showed a spike in brain activity around the electrode implant (where the angular and supramarginal gyrus meet, and rear superior temporal cortex)

Study leader and neurosurgeon Dirk De Ridder explained that our total perception of ourselves is built of various parts, one of which is that consciousness belongs in the body.

"But when something goes wrong in that brain area so that the integration of all the incoming information -- sight, sound, smell, the senses -- is not happening as it should, then you can feel that you're not in your body," De Ridder said. "You can get an out-of-body experience. You're perfectly conscious. But you just feel as if you're not actually sitting in your body."

The scientists believe that they have found a clear connection between out of body experience and abnormal brain activity, but they were careful to qualify their findings:

However, they cautioned that while epileptics, patients suffering from migraines and tinnitus, and those undergoing a near-death experience have all been known to spontaneously experience out-of-body episodes, it remains unclear whether pro-actively stimulating the two identified cranial areas -- which don't normally activate in unison -- would induce a similar experience in healthy individuals.

It's well to bear such qualifications in mind. In The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I discuss extensively the tendency of the popular science media to jump on anything that looks like a mechanistic or materialist explanation of a phenomenon that is usually considered non-material, spiritual, or religious. The fabled skepticism of the media evaporates, and journalists rush claims into print that even the proposed mechanism's strongest proponents don't advance.

Anyway, I asked Mario what he thought about the assumption that we now "know" how OBEs of the sort that transform lives occur. He replied that it is important to distinguish between the effects of electrical stimulation, as described, and spontaneous out of body experiences:

The sense of disembodiment induced by electrical stimulation is limited to a fixed location. Whereas spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs) often involve accurate perception of the environment (including the physical body) from an extracorporeal visual perspective.

With electrical stimulation, experiencers continue to perceive the environment from the visual perspective of the physical body; In spontaneous OBEs: the disembodied center of consciousness may move about independent of the physical body.

With electrical stimulation, experiencers perceive the event as a trivial illusion; Spontaneous OBEs: experiencers usually perceive the event as profoundly real.

Conclusion: Given the differences in phenomenology and in psychological aftereffects for the experiencer, it is premature to assume that the mechanism of induced sense of disembodiment also applies to spontaneous experiences.

To judge from his comments quoted at ivillage, Dr. De Ridder seems to think of consciousness as if it were a mechanism: "The 'total perception of self,' " he added, "is built out of different parts. And one of these parts is that your consciousness belongs within your body." Consciousness, in short, is like a toaster. It has distinct parts. Malfunctions can always be traced to specific things wrong with specific parts.

Well, that's possible, but it's also possible that consciousness is organic. That is, consciousness is more like a painting. A painting has parts in the sense that we can consider and describe its features separately. Indeed, a part of the painting could be damaged beyond repair. Then the artist's representation of the world to us is damaged. (In the same way, the ability of our consciousness to represent the world to us could be damaged, as the Belgian patient's was.)

The difference is that the parts of the painting are not literally separable, in the way that the parts of the toaster are. The painting works as a whole.*

If consciousness is more like the painting than the toaster, a quest for one simple explanation that covers all out of body experiences is unlikely to succeed. Shades of the "God helmet" (see Chapter 4 of The Spiritual Brain).

*Indeed, if a part were literally separable, it probably shouldn't be there! At least, that is what we writers say about writing - if a chapter of a non-fiction book you are writing is literally detachable from the main argument of your book, save your editor some trouble by just detaching it yourself before you turn in the manuscript.

(While we're here: I've suffered all my life from debilitating migraines and never had anything exotic like an out of body experience, though reportedly ten percent of people have - and for all I know, the majority of those undeserving wretches are migraine-free. Luck of the Irish, I guess.)

Scientific American article features Spiritual Brain author's work

In a careful and well-researched article in Scientific American's Mind magazine online, SciAm associate online editor David Biello examines efforts to pinpoint locations in the brain for spiritual experiences. Of course, Mario’s recent work with Carmelite nuns, reported in The Spiritual Brain, demonstrates that looking for a “God spot” as such is based on a misunderstanding of how the brain works. As Biello notes,

The quantity and diversity of brain regions involved in the nuns’ religious experience point to the complexity of the phenomenon of spirituality. “There is no single God spot, localized uniquely in the temporal lobe of the human brain,” Beauregard concludes. “These states are mediated by a neural network that is well distributed throughout the brain.”

Biello also outlines the limitations of what neuroscience can tell us about spirituality, ending with

Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation f God’s interactions with them. After all, finding a cerebral source for spiritual experiences could serve equally well to identify the medium through which God reaches out to humanity. Thus, the nuns’ forays into the tubular brain scanner did not undermine their faith. On the contrary, the science gave them an even greater reason to believe.

He also tells me that he "enjoyed" The Spiritual Brain. Wonderful, David, and I enjoyed your article! It is a model of critical good sense that stands out all the more starkly amid so much neurobullshipping and naivete.

Note: I won't be blogging for a couple of days. While searching for a link, I stumbled onthis article on the emotional life of the alligator. Yes, you heard that right. Follow the link.

Milt Rosenberg interviews Mario Beauregard and Francis Collins

Thursday,, my lead author Mario Beauregard will be on

9:05pm Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg: Does science reveal the existence of God? Are science and God mutually exclusive? Tonight, we will attempt to answer these questions, as we welcome to the studio Mario Beauregard, author of the book The Spiritual Brain: How Neuroscience is Revealing the Existence of God, and Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Both guests are leading scientists and have written rivetting new books discussing how science may actually prove the existence of God.

A friend writes to say,

Milt Rosenberg is one of the best and most objective interviewers in the U.S., and his program is not only on a 50,000-watt clear channel AM station, but also regularly has listeners in Australia via the Internet.

Mario wrote me earlier today to say,

I am ready for this radio interview (it's a very good thing that Mr. Rosenberg is an objective interviewer).

Well, so we'll see. I will link to a podcast if available. Francis Collins is, of course, the famous genome mapper, and author of The Language of God.

Here's the link to the podcast.

P.S.: To the person who wrote to ask me if Mario is married. Yes, he IS married. And his wife Johanne is an enchanting person. I only had the happiness to meet her once, in Ottawa. Yes it was cold. Yes she was warm. Yes, she agrees with Mario on the thesis of The Spiritual Brain. Update: I should have mentioned, come to think of it, that Johanne isa neuroscientist in her own right, in clinical work rather than research.

Mario Beauregard: Speaking at mind-brain conference in Finland today

Mario, the lead author of The Spiritual Brain, was speaking at the international Developing Brain, Emerging Mind symposium at Finland's University of Helsinki, at 3:00 p.m. local time. His topic: Mind Does Really Matter: Evidence from Neuroimaging Studies of Emotional Self-Regulation, Psychotherapy, and Placebo Effect.

Mario's other book: Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain

Mario Beauregard (the lead author of The Spiritual Brain) edited Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain, as part of a series called Advances in Consciousness Research (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003). It's Vol. 54 of Series B, Research in Progress.

If you are interested in psychology, cognitive science, or neuroscience, you will find it quite interesting. The contributors focus on the ways in which we regulate the emotions we experience.

As we know all too well, in the current climate of opinion many people do not even try to regulate their emotions.

We've all met people like that. A few summers ago, while I was stuck in traffic, waiting to pass slowly, single file through a construction zone, guided by a police officer, I heard a driver cursing and swearing loudly behind me, deploring the inconvenience of it all. Actually, it was no more of a problem for him than for the rest of us. We were all busy people; otherwise we would be at the beach on a hot summer day, not stalled in traffic. I wondered idly how he felt about the way he was behaving. Could he hear himself?

Some people believe they can't regulate their emotions. ("That's just the way I feel. Nothing can be done about it.")

Others believe they mustn't. ("If you bottle up anger, it's only explode one day, and that could be a lot worse.")

And then there are quite a few people who insist, "I have a RIGHT to my feelings!"

Of course, learning to regulate emotions is not only possible, it is an essential part of growing up into a mentally healthy human being. Contributors to the volume Mario edited look at the cognitive strategies by which we do so using neuroscience tools and concepts. In The Spiritual Brain, we look at some of these same studies as well, but we minimize the technical stuff there.

As for the guy I was telling you about, the one who was yelling about the traffic slowdown: While driving away, I saw in the corner of my rearview mirror that when his turn came to go through the defile, the cop tipped his hat and handed him a ticket. So I guess learning how to regulate emotions can save a person money as well as grief.

The Spiritual Brain: Here’s the cover!

This is what the cover for The Spiritual Brain looks like. Mario liked it and so did I. Here’s what I said when someone asked me recently what the book is about:

The Spiritual Brain examines the claim that the mind is simply the functions of the brain and rejects it, not because it is uncomfortable, but because it conflicts with key evidence. In fact, materialism is approaching a crisis. Unable to account for such fundamental features of the human being as consciousness and free will, it is reduced to asserting that they are illusions. As one small example, the 1990s generation of antidepressants that was famously hyped as proving that there is no such thing as the soul turned out to perform only somewhat better than the familiar placebo effect. Similarly, claims that spirituality can be reduced to a God gene or lobe in the brain are paltry, and sometimes ridiculous. Having demolished the nonsense, the book introduces the quietly growing discipline of non-materialist neuroscience, which treats the mind as real and demonstrates the ways in which it changes the brain. A non-materialist approach to neuroscience is not merely another new theory: It offers hope for treating difficult disorders such as phobias and obsessive compulsions. Treating the mind as real, we also examine claims for such puzzling and controversial experiences as the psi effect and near death experience. We also let the public in on a little secret you won’t hear from the current spate of anti-God books on the market: Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows that spirituality is good for you. More significantly, Beauregard and Paquette's Carmelite nun studies demonstrate that it is reasonable to believe that mystical contemplatives do indeed contact a power outside themselves.

Hey, there’s lots for some people to like and others to be mad about.

Non-materialist neuroscience book gets sympathetic review in Publishers' Weekly

I've just seen the Publisher's Weekly review of Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard's and my book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul:

Following C. S. Lewis’s dictum that “to ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see,” neuroscientist Beauregard and journalist O’Leary mount a sweeping critique of a trend in “the pop science media” to explain away religious experience as a brain artifact, pathology, or evolutionary quirk. While sympathizing with the attraction such “neurotheology” holds, the authors warn against the temptation to force the complex varieties of human spirituality into simplistic categories that they argue are conceptually crude, culturally biased, and often empirically untested. In recently published research using Carmelite nuns as subjects, Beauregard’s group at the University of Montreal found specific areas of brain activation associated with contemplative prayer. But these patterns are quite distinct from those associated with hallucinations, autosuggestion, or states of intense emotional arousal, resembling instead how the brain processes “real” experiences. Insisting that “we have never entertained the idea of proving the existence of God,” the authors concede that “the results of our work are assumed to be a strike either for or against God” and that “on the whole, we [don’t] mind.” Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled. (Sept.)

It was great that the reviewer homed in on some of what Mario and I are trying to do - expose the sheer shoddiness of so much materialist thinking in neuroscience in the area of spirituality.

Naturally, I wish more had been said about the growing body of non-materialist neuroscience - and how and why it works - which we outline in the book in considerable detail. Mario, after all, is recognized as a pioneer in this area. But hey, this is a 200-word review, and we are off to a good start if a non-materialist perspective can get serious, non-hostile attention for a change.

A"lively" introduction, the reviewer says. Yes indeed. I swore I'd die laughing when I heard some of the materialist theories of spirituality that have actually been taken seriously in recent years. Shortly after I turned in the manuscript, I wrote, regarding the materialist sludge:

You think it's all nonsense, do you? Or do you worry in your heart of hearts that one or another of these concoctions might be true? Well, I spent a year examining all of them in detail (or anyway, as many as we could spot flying above the radar). It was the hardest year of my life, considering the piles of stuff I had to get through—dating from 1902 through 2006—and discovered that … it is indeed all nonsense.
I came away astonished by the gullibility of the popular science media in this area. There were times I howled with laughter. The only explanation for the tendency to offer credibility to any "we've found God in the genes/brain" announcement, however poorly supported, is reflexive materialism.

Materialists make for great comedy, actually, all the more so because they are deadly serious - and never more so than when they are fronting complete nonsense.

Non-materialist neuroscience watch: *New article* "Mind does really matter"

My lead author Mario Beauregard has an article coming out in Progress in Neurobiology which describes a number of studies in non-materialist neuroscience (Non-materialist neuroscience = the mind exists and uses the brain but is not the same thing as the brain).

It also sets out his hypothesis of the relationship between the mind and the brain, the psychoneural translation hypothesis. Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can now show the ways in which people reorganize their brains by changing their minds. However, their ability to do this is in direct conflict with materialist theories of mind, according to which the mind either is simply the brain at work or is a side-effect of brain processes - or perhaps does not even exist. As Beauregard writes,

The results of the neuroimaging studies reviewed here call in question the psychophysical identity theory and epiphenomenalism. For the psychophysical identity theory, mental processes (including intentional ones) are identical with neural processes (Feigl, 1958). For epiphenomenalism, mental processes are causally inert epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of neural processes. These findings also challenge eliminative materialism (or eliminativism). According to this view, mental processes and functions (e.g., consciousness, intentions, desires, beliefs, self) can be reduced entirely to brain processes. These mental processes and functions are pre-scientific concepts that belong to unsophisticated ideas of how the brain works (sometimes called ‘‘folk psychology’’). Eliminative materialism further proposes that all common language or ‘‘folk psychology’’ descriptions of mental experience should be eliminated and replaced by descriptions using neuroscientific language (Churchland, 1981). For these materialist views (psychophysical identity theory, epiphenomenalism, eliminative materialism), physically describable brain mechanisms represent the core and final explanatory vehicle for every kind of psychologically described data. These views are extremely counter-intuitive since our most basic experience teaches us that our choice of perspective about how we apprehend our mental states makes a huge difference in how we respond to them (Schwartz et al., 2005).With regard to this issue, we agree with Glannon (2002) that the tendency of modern neuroscience and biological psychiatry toward neurobiological reductionism, i.e., the reduction of persons to their brains (a form of "neural anthropomorphism"), is ill-advised and socially hazardous. We must keep in mind that the whole human person, not merely a part of a brain, thinks, feels, or believes. Indeed, the human person cannot be reduced to neural processes and it is difficult to understand a whole person without understanding the sociocultural context in which the person lives.

Okay, if you are not a neuroscientist, you are probably better off reading The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, which explains this and a whole lot more in really simple language - the kind of thing I understand better myself, no less.