My presentation on The Spiritual Brain in Seattle

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Mario's and my new book, The Spiritual Brain (HarperOne, September 1)to a private conference in Seattle.

Looking out at the audience, I realized clearly that nonmaterialist neuroscience (neuroscience that assumes that the mind is real) is NOT just a way for fifty academic bores to contend at the taxpayers' expense about whether or not the mind is real.

Even if the mind were not real, the time and money they waste is real. And it is at the expense of learning how to help the mind heal the brain and body.

I stressed the practical value of treatments for disorders based on harnessing mental attention and the placebo (remembered wellness) effect. I also encouraged an evidence-based approach to the efect of spirituality on health, the effect of prayer on healing, and the effect of near death experiences on life change.

The materialist, by contrast, is stuck trying to develop a model that proves that nothing is really happening, everyone is deluded, it's all wrong, all bad, et cetera.

The presentation went pretty well, and many people bought copies of the book.

It was the first time I'd tried PowerPoint, so I just typed out the key points. Quite honestly - an experienced presenter told me later that I shouldn't do that. I am (he said) a natural speaker and very entertaining, and knew the material well enough that the printed key points (which always seemed to me to appear in the "wrong" order) were sometimes a distraction. Well, the certainly distracted me. He recommends using pictures, charts, and graphs instead. That sounds like fun, and I am going to put together something like that.

Meanwhile, the audio book (from Tantor), in several formats, will be available in December.

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.

Thinkquote of the day: Cardinal Schoenborn on faith and science

It sounds to me like Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn gets some neuroscience implciations of the conflict between materialism and nonmaterialism, in his recent First Things essay, “Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith”:

Neurobiological research ... can uncover withexquisite detail the physical substrate of mental processes. But neuroscience cannot prove that the mind is reducible to the brain, because its methods are unable directly to grapple with immaterial realities. (In fact, good neuroscience is highly suggestive of the irreducibility of mind to brain.)

The workings of the mind, as distinct from the brain, can of course be indirectly observed, as mario Beauregard shows. We talk quite a bit about that in The Spiritual Brain in Chapter 6, “Toward a Nonmaterialist Neuroscience.”
(Note: You have to buy a subscription to view Schoenborn’s First Things article just now (a good value, I may say); it doesn’t go into free archives for a couple of weeks.)

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).