Brain: Now a threat to democracy

Joe Keohane for the Boston Globe reveals “How facts backfire: Researchers discover a surprising threat to democracy: our brains” (July 11, 2010) Many politicians would agree with him, of course:

Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of > information. It's this: Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Then the dull thud of pop neuroscience factiods hits the In Tray: “Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired.”

Aw come on, Joe! If that were a significant problem,
Read more »

Big brains result from cooking food?

Look, I tried. I practically had a nervous breakdown trying to think up anything as ridiculous as this that was not obscene. I am not into that.

You need to pay or sign up for something (which probably means contuaally being pestered for some promotion) to see the rest of this story from the National Enquirer of science mags, New Scientist, on why the large human brain can be explained by cooking food.

Strikes me that useful information would work the other way around. You start with a large brain, and ... voila! Escoffier!! I doubt it works the other way round.

Brain as illusion?

I see where Discovery Institute has put up a podcast with me, on “Is the Brain Just an Illusion?

This must be one of the ones I did in Seattle in 2007, when they asked me to come and explain the book.

What I always ask is, “If the brain or the mind are an illusion, whose illusion are they?”

This question is modelled on the Jewish zen: “If the mind is an illusion, whose arthritis is this?”

On this episode of ID The Future, Anika Smith interviews science writer Denyse O'Leary about her book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul.

In the book O'Leary and her co-author Mario Beaurogard, neuroscientist and Associate Professor at Université de Montréal, explore the question of whether or not the mind is an illusion as materialists believe. The Spiritual Brain looks at whether religious experiences come from God or are merely the random firing of neurons in the brain. Drawing on his own research with Carmelite nuns, Beauregard shows that genuine, life-changing spiritual events can be documented. He and O'Leary offer compelling evidence that mind creates matter, rather than matter creating mind.

Listen here. By the way, I always call myself the co-author and recognize neuroscientist Mario as the lead author.

But you're not nearly smart enough to tell me how to run my life

From an apparently unsigned Health column in The Hindu, courtesy The Guardian news service, "Our ideas of brain and human nature are myth," we learn

Perhaps that sounds a little overblown, but it’s not. Who, dear reader, do you think you are? Do you think your mind is capable of independent judgment and largely directs the course of your life? Do you think that most of your decisions in life have been the product of your rational, conscious self? Do you believe you are in control of your life? Do you cherish ideas such as self-expression, a sense of autonomy and a distinct, self—authored identity? The chances are that, albeit with a few qualifications, most of your answers are yes. Indeed, given a pervasive culture which reinforces all these ideas, it would be a bit odd if you didn’t.

But the point about this new explosion of interest in research into our brains is that it exposes as illusions much of these guiding principles of what it is to be a mature adult. They are a profound misunderstanding of how we think, and how our brains work. They are fairytales, about as fanciful and as implausible as goblins.

Does it indeed? Further,

It’s not an accident that many of the biggest bestsellers in this territory are about decision-making -- Blink, Nudge and The Decisive Moment. The image which comes to mind is that they are all sticks of dynamite dug in to explode the great sacred mythology of our time: namely that individual freedom is about having choices, and that progress is about the constant expansion of those choices.

Read these books and you discover that people are useless at making choices. We are lazy, imitative, over-optimistic, myopic, and much of our decision-making is made by unconscious habits of the mind which are largely socially primed.

Ah, I see. Any guesses as to how this thesis will be used?

It’s intriguing how much attention the thesis has attracted from many parts of the political establishment, such as policymakers in pensions, health and the environment, because often the gains from nudging seem pretty small -- it is fanciful to think it can solve the environmental crisis.

Well, where's the feather I knock myself over with when I am totally astonished? This is a thesis perfectly attuned to authoritarian government. It's also nonsense.

Freedom is about having choices, whether to start a business, leave a religion, or vote the government out.

And, while people have a variety of reasons for making choices, good or bad, if these theories are really as represented here, they would be far too simplistic to even approach the reality of how people make choices.* Our brains are more like an ocean than a machine, and schools of fish move about. As intellectual projects, they probably won't last nearly as long as behaviorism and maybe not even as long as evolutionary psychology. But while they're hot, the bat fairy must have delivered them to intrusive government. I can't think who else would.

*Maybe they're not; I haven't had time to read the books. What's significant to me is that that's the conclusion so swiftly drawn. By the way, the title phrase is from Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury.

Woman turns brain tumour into art

Well, that's the story at "Tumor Turns Everyday Painter into an Artist," (Perry Chiaramonte and Leonard Greene, New York Post, June 2, 2009).

Doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital say Alison Silva is a medical marvel whose tumor left her with blinding visions -- and breathtaking ability.

Faced with a choice between her artistic passion and surgery that could help her live a normal life, Silva, of North Bergen, opted against the operation because it might compromise her work.

I honestly find these stories hard to interpret, for a specific reason: Most people today grow up with a vision of art as somehow irrational. We no longer hear of the golden mean or any similar rational measure - and anything we do learn, we are supposed to learn by instinct or in a fit of rage, not by rational explanation.

Why does this matter? Because we become used to the belief that if we fall and get hit on the head or develop a brain tumour, or experience some other information scrambling event, we suddenly access a great deal of inspiration that we would not otherwise have.

Don't believe it? Neither do I.

I assume that Alison Silva is justly praised for her excellent work, but her tumour likely only got her attention to the need to actually do something while she still had the opportunity. That is not guaranteed to anyone ever.

Some stories and examples of Silva's work:

- Fox News

- Gothamist

- ITV

- Brain Damage A Path To More Creativity?

Like/don't like Silva's art? Fine, either way. Disease is no cocktail party joke. In my view, she should be commended for trying to deal with it the best way she can think of. Sometimes, that is all a person can do.

Meditation: More on how meditation changes the brain

In "Meditation on Demand: New research reveals how meditation changes the brain," Peter B. Reiner discusses recent efforts to understand meditation via experiments with mice.

It is hard to ignore the fact that the sustained gamma activity evoked in these mice was highly reminiscent of the type of electrical activity recorded from the long-time meditators practicing the elusive phenomenon known as open monitoring meditation. That being said, despite the elegant experimental design utilized by the investigators, sustained gamma-activity is not identical to meditation. For these reasons and more, it is doubtful that anyone would accept this experiment as satisfying the Dalai Lama’s call to the neuroscience community to develop a technological replacement for the many hours spent immersed in contemplative thought. But given the growing body of evidence which suggests that even short-term meditation improves measures of attention, these new experiments provide an interesting twist to the growing field of cognitive enhancement.

Sustained gamma-activity in mice is not identical to meditation?

Obviously, these critics have never heard of mice-stical contemplation!

Reiner wonders whether transhumanists will be tempted to automate mysticism via enhancements.

I doubt that will work because the whole point of effort of any kind is that it is really our effort, our experience, and our achievement. If we can buy an experience off the shelf, we can be pretty sure it isn't really part of our life.

See also:

Spirituality: Michael Gerson on Andrew Newberg's new "How God Changes Your Brain" book

New book watch: Newberg and Waldman's How God Changes Your Brain

Andrew Newberg: Meditation helps, but (how many times do we have to say this?), you must work work at it

Real Buddhism scholar to "neural Buddhists": The Buddha does not infinitely morph and would never drop two grand for "meditation gear"

Neuroscience: When reduction fails

In "Chimaeras of Experience", science writer Jonah Lehrer writes,

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

Oh? Could materialist philosopher Dennett really "dismantle this argument very, very quickly"?

Alva Noe would say no, in his recent Out of Our Heads, of which my review is here.

Reduction can be elegant. On the other hand, it can be lazy and greedy.

To say that the brain is "three pounds of meat" is like saying that the world's oceans are billions of tonnes of salt water.

Some reductions reformulate information in a simpler and more elegant way. One thinks of Newton's laws of planetary gravity, for example.

Other reductions just hide problems that more correct and inclusive statements do not hide. Reductions of the mind to the brain belong to the latter group.

Cognitive science: The glad, sad, mad computer - or anyway, merry chrysanthemum!

As Joseph Dumit (STS, University of California Davis) will tell it tomorrow at York University tomorrow (Tuesday, 24 March 2009, 12h30 - 14h0), Paul A. Delaney Gallery (320 Bethune College):

True Demons of Cognition: When Computers were Glad, Sad, and Mad yet Logical; or, a Brief History of Experimental Epistemology at the End of Cognitive Science

This talk proposes that we are approaching the limits of a cognitive neuroscience approach that adopts a too-simple model of circuits to account for emotions, pathology, meditation, and subjectivity. During the 1950s and ‘60s, experimentation with circuits co-produced computers, cognitive psychology, cybernetics, psychiatry, anthropology and psychoanalysis, with sometimes disturbing results. This work valued circuits for their innate, pathological irrationality, and for the way in which they portrayed time (subjective, logical, existential and even psychoanalytic) as something that fed back into a better understanding of the wiliness of machines. Such conceptions of time, however, proved short-lived. They were erased, curiously, by the advent of a cognitive psychology that took computers as models of (human) rationality, and which subsequently generated an image of computers as taken-for-granted objects, completely understood.

I am not sure what any of this means. The human brain is nothing like a computer, and efforts to make it appear so are efforts at creating illusions. I have long thought that the brain is more like an ocean, in the sense that you can drop down a probe, and turn up something you never expected. And every brain is different, so there are billions of oceans out there. A research heaven, if only the researcher were immortal.

Merry Chysanthemum? Oh, that's the computer's first Christmas card. Gives you some idea what to expect.

See also:

Mind: Yet another effort to explain to materialists why minds are not like computers; Getting computers to pretend to converse is an extremely hard computational problem; Artificial intelligence: Conversing with computers or with their programmers?; Computers: Most engineers must have that they themselves are not robots; Artificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor our computers can discover; Can a conscious mind be built out of software?; Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences; Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!); Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this?; Artificial intelligence: Making the whole universe intelligent?; Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

(Note: Thanks much to kind PayPal donors. As media move online, it is best to support the news you want to see. - Denyse)

Hat tip: The Sheepcat

Brain: Brain case volume may not relate to size

A friend draws my attention to this item in Nature News:

Basically, there is apparently no necessary relationship between the size of brains and of brain casings:

You may be struck by how small the brain (yellow) is compared to the braincase (red). If the scientists are right, it’s a cautionary tale for those who would estimate the size and shape of ancient fish brains from their braincases. But perhaps, in the future, researchers will find more actual brains, and will be able to chart the evolution of these delicate organs in greater detail.

Interesting. If we assume that the universe shows evidence of design, this would be easy to explain .A fish may need a bigger brain later than it does now. So what do we do? Build a case that can house only a very small brain or one that can house a bigger brain if needed?

Oh wait. Nature is blind and mindless, right? So ...

Mind: Yet another effort to explain to materialists why minds are not like computers

In "Why minds are not like computers," in The New Atlantis (Winter 2009) Ari N. Schulman explains:

Hmmm. What can go wrong with that reminds me of "The Computer's First Christmas Card," "Merry Chrysanthemum". And as a result,

Thus it is only partially correct to say that a computer performs arithmetic calculations. As a physical object, the computer does no such thing—no more than a ball performs physics calculations when you drop it. It is only when we consider the computer through the symbolic system of arithmetic, and the way we have encoded it in the computer, that we can say it performs arithmetic.

Okay, but what about the famed "Turing test" that would show that computers can think?

... they indicate crucial errors in AI researchers’ understanding of both computers and minds. Suppose that the mind is in fact a computer program. Would it then be possible to conclude that what’s inside the mind is irrelevant, as is supposed by some interpretations of the Turing Test? If we have some computer program whose behavior can be completely described as if it were a black box, such a description does not mean that the box is empty, so to speak. The program must still contain some internal structures and properties. They may not be necessary for understanding the program’s external behavior, but they still exist. So even if we possessed a correct account of human mental processes in purely input-output terms (which we do not), such an external description by definition could not describe first-person experience. The Turing Test is not a definition of thinking, but an admission of ignorance—an admission that it is impossible to ever empirically verify the consciousness of any being but yourself. It is only ever possible to gain some level of confidence that another being is thinking or intelligent. So we are stuck measuring correlates of thinking and intelligence, and the Turing Test provides a standard for measuring one type of correlate. Similarly, although social interaction requires communication in the form of such “input-output” as speech and hearing, it also requires two or more agents who experience that interaction: A teddy bear may provide a child with the same comfort and companionship—and elicit from the child the same responses—that another human being would, but we cannot say that it loves.

Schulman, whose comments I commend to all, is assistant editor of The New Atlantis.


Personally, I think that the artificial intelligence project is dead, but no one has got round to raising the funds for a decent burial.

See also:

Getting computers to pretend to converse is an extremely hard computatinal problem

Artificial intelligence: Conversing with computers or with their programmers?

Computers: Most engineers must have that they are not robotsArtificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Can a conscious mind be built out of software?

Also: Mind vs. meat vs. computers - the differences

Let the machine read your mind (We offer an installment plan!)

Mind-computer blend: Who believes in this? Artificial intelligence:

Making the whole universe intelligent?

Brain cells release information more widely than previously thought.

(Note: Thanks much for all kind readers who are still here. I would have hoped to be here more often too. And thanks to kind PayPal donors. As media move online, it is best to support the news you want to see. - Denyse)

A Beautiful Mind: When the mind restores order to the brain?

A friend writes to ask,

I was wondering if you were aware of the movie A Beautiful Mind? It may make for a good brain/mind point.

John Nash's malfunctioning brain kept telling him that the people, which he was hallucinating, were real but his mind eventually figured out that they were not (even though he kept experiencing the hallucinations after figuring it out).

The film is based loosely* on the life of schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for economics. Here's a synopsis.

Essentially, my friend is right. In the film, Nash must decide whether to believe what he is experiencing or what he knows to be true. The more he believes what he knows to be true, the more distant the fantasy figures that formerly dominated his life become. In some ways, that is a useful analogy to the importance of the focus of attention in non-materialist treatments of brain disorders.

Perhaps my friend is also recalling this comment by neurosurgeon Mike Egnor regarding the great neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield:

Penfield was a neurosurgeon who pioneered the field of epilepsy surgery. He operated on thousands of patients who were awake (under local anesthesia), and were able to speak to him while he stimulated various regions of their brains.

Penfield found that he could invoke all sorts of things- movements, sensations, memories. But in every instance (hundreds of thousands of individual stimulations- in different locations in each patient- during his career), the patients were aware that the stimulation was being done to them, but not by them. There was a part of the mind that was independent of brain stimulation and that constituted a part of subjective experience that Penfield was not able to manipulate with his surgery.

I've performed some epilepsy surgery (although it's not my primary specialty), and my experience has been the same. Patients always know that the memory or sensation or movement is is imposed on them, not by them. Some colleagues who do specialize in epilepsy surgery have confirmed Penfield's observations as well.

Penfield called this "double consciousness", meaning that there was a part of subjective experience that he could invoke or modify materially, and a different part that was immune to such manipulation.

*Doctors tell me that, in reality, most schizophrenic delusions are not nearly as interesting as described in the film.

See also:

Just how much brain do you need? Could you use that space for something else?

Non-materialist neurosurgeon's criticisms of current medicine called well-founded

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor to lecture on why we got eugenics

Here is a trailer for A Beautiful Mind:

Neuroscience: We know nothing of brain evolution

Well, that's according to Harvard's Richard Lewontin, in an article posted by James Randerson of the Guardian (February 19, 2008)

We know nothing about brain evolution

Scientists are still completely in the dark about why the human brain evolved to be so big, according to Richard Lewontin

[ ... ]


All in all, despite thousands of scientific papers and countless National Geographic front covers, we have not made much progress in understanding how our most complicated and mysterious organ came about.

"We are in very serious difficulties in trying to reconstruct the evolution of cognition," said Lewontin. "I'm not even sure what we mean by the problem."

The main thing to see - from a layperson's perspective, is that countless National Geographic front covers do not add up to an ounce more certainty.

My own view is that the subject is not very important anyway. The important question for today is how to make the best of what we have. We may discover how we have it - or maybe not. But if we don't make the best of it, we are just plain losers, and that's all.

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

In The Ottawa Citizen, Robert Sibley advises

From New Age cults to murderous fundamentalism, these are dark times for religion, and the 'new atheists' are in the ascendant. The problem with their movement is that they don't understand the source of their hostility ... (December 26, 2008)

Oh? In the ascendant? In the legacy mainstream media, maybe, but not in the world at large.

In fact, this year - for the first time in a long while - I noticed a decisive pushback against their efforts to stop people from saying "Merry Christmas!"

Be a Christian, don't be a Christian, ... it's your choice. But December 25 is Christmas Day. In Canada, both December 25 and December 26 are statutory holidays - and pretty popular ones, too, so you need to keep that fact in mind if you intend to try litigation. No one is going to thank you for forcing them to work on one of those days, if they are not in an essential service field.

Anyway, I don't think the new atheists' movement is really going anywhere because what they don't have is any important new ideas.

I mean, once you get past Richard Dawkins explaining to Ben Stein in Expelled that space aliens might have created life - but not God - or Lee Smolin's zillions of flopped universes, theirs are not new ideas that we can compare with, say, the discovery of neuroplasticity in the brain.

Now THAT was a discovery - oh my heavens, what a discovery! Just think of all the old people who realize that they are not consigned to involuntary senility after all! But that discovery did not help materialist atheism one bit. Neuroplasticity makes way more sense if your immaterial mind is real and directs your brain.

Which reminds me: What discoveries would have helped materialist atheism? Here are some:

1995: It is conclusively proven that there is a single gene switch that causes people to be gay or straight. Soon after, the single switches that cause people to be fat or thin, faithful or unfaithful to their partners, and liberal or conservative in their voting patterns are quickly found.

1996: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a chimpanzee.

1998: Major science geek gets Nobel Prize for discovering the God gene, which causes people to be religious.

1999: It becomes impossible to determine whether one is communicating by keyboard with a human or a computer.

2000: A rogue module is found in the brain that controls the sense that one is an "I" rather than an "it." Everyone is really an "it" after all, and the "I" factor is a delusion caused by a glitch.

2001: Evolutionary psychologists lead the way in developing effective treatments for mental disorders, using their theories, including the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, which wins a Nobel Prize for its sheer cogency.

2004: A computer program is developed that can predict within 99.99999% certainty who will commit a crime - or do a variety of other things - in the next twelve months, all based on hormones and similar factors.

2007: Most people worldwide agree that belief in God is harmful because it leads to bad ideas like right and wrong, and the harmful practice of accepting responsibility for one's own actions. Billions of people urge their governments to take over intimate details of their lives to prevent further harm.

Okay, obviously, none of this happened. And Bill Maher's Religulous came and went.

The real reason for the spate of New Atheist books, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is that they want you to become an atheist now - before you figure out that atheism is a crock. There is no way out of the desperations of human existence through atheism.

Look, I am NOT one of those feel-good Christians who try to tell you that God has a wonderful plan for your life. Maybe he does, and I am glad for you. But the figure at the front of my own church is of a crucified man (depicted above), and it is in that knowledge that I am instructed to live the rest of my life.

There is no escape from the glory and tragedy of being human, not an animal, and the "new atheist" movement is a paltry cheat and a waste of your time.

If you want to be an atheist, be an old atheist, not one of these new atheists, looking for the latest buzz from the popular science press to bolster lame ideas. Believe in God or don't believe - you are still accountable for what you do. You really are.

Fascinating facts you never knew about the brain

Here are ten facts offered, courtesy a nursing assistants' program:

1. Weight. The weight of the human brain is about 3 lbs.

2. Cerebrum. The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain and makes up 85% of the brain’s weight.

3. Skin. Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain. Gray matter. The brain’s gray matter is made up of neurons, which gather and transmit signals.

4. White matter. The white matter is made up of dendrites and axons, which create the network by which neurons send their signals.

5. Gray and white. Your brain is 60% white matter and 40% gray matter.

6. Water. The brain is made up of about 75% water.

7. Neurons. Your brain consists of about 100 billion neurons. Synapses. There are anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 synapses for each neuron.

8. No pain. There are no pain receptors in the brain, so the brain can feel no pain.

9. Largest brain. While an elephant’s brain is physically larger than a human brain, the human brain is 2% of total body weight (compared to 0.15% of an elephant’s brain), meaning humans have the largest brain to body size.

10. Blood vessels. There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain.

Hey, read the rest here. And remember, most of the time, doctors don't save your life. Nurses and nursing assistants do. That's just true. Get used to it.

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

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

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

Non-materialist neuroscience is practical!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's a clip from The Aviator :




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




The panelists:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MercatorNet: Political science: the messy room

Junk science about voting is floating around and you might bump into some this election.

by Denyse O'Leary

In "Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings" (Scientific American, October 13, 2008) Jordan Lite tackles the "hard science" question, "Do genes determine whether you'll be liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican?"

What if they did? Then we could dispense with elections in favour of DNA tests. Anyone who doubts that many academic would prefer such measures has not noted the drift to hard core materialism, or naturalism. In a recent study, for example, 78 per cent of evolutionary biologists were pure naturalists -- that is, they maintain that there is no God and no free will. Obviously, if there is no free will, democracy is not clearly a defensible system.

Finding what you are looking for

Of course, "Neat or Messy?" research is not motivated by anything so grubby as politics, right? ... Right?

Read the rest here:

Brain: The turtle really did beat the rabbit, you know ...

MercatorNet “Navigating Modern Complexities” has kindly published my recent article on getting good marks, “The payoff for straining the brain: Does self-discipline beat intelligence? What about a good night’s sleep?”(October 8, 2008):

When researchers examined the final grades of 164 Grade Eight students, together with their acceptance or rejection from a prestigious high school, they found that “scholarly success was more than twice as dependent on assessments of self-discipline as on IQ.” Students with more self-discipline—meaning that they would sacrifice short-term fun for long-term gain—were more likely to improve their marks during the school year than those who wouldn’t sacrifice fun. By contrast, a high IQ did not predict a rise in grades.

Obviously, this won’t surprise an experienced teacher or a mature parent. But it bears repeating all the same: Modern neuroscience is not overturning millennia of experience; it is filling out what the other disciplines already tell us. Our brains are very plastic organs, and paying attention determines the areas in which they develop. Like our bodies, brains must be exercised effectively to achieve our goals. That is why self-discipline is as important to brain exercise as to body exercise.

Go here for the rest.

The difference between the mind and the brain ... in under one minute

Explained by Dr. Jeff Schwartz, pictured here.

The easiest way to understand the difference between the mind and the brain is - the brain is a piece of biological matter ( protoplasm) in your skull. That's the brain. It's a thing; you can hold it in your hand. The mind is your experiences, and especially for scientific purposes your attention and attention focusing capacity so they aspect and the way in which you focus attention on your experiences.

and put to music by Marcia Bauman! Here’s the song, "Blowin' in the mind"

Hat tip Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg.

Photo © Laszlo Bencze