![[dr. bob]](/dr-bob-sm.gif)
Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 1 to 14 of 14. This is the beginning of the thread.
Posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:04:09
>We say ‘I hear a voice’, you’ll strain your voice’ and ‘I have lost my voice’. Now is a voice a thing? If so, just what sort of thing is a voice? The voice we strain may seem to be as unproblematic a physical part of the body as the back or the eyes we strain, perhaps the vocal cords; but surely one does not have tenor vocal cords or enjoy Sutherland’s vocal cords, or lose one’s vocal cords, and ones voice, unlike one’s vocal cords, can be sent by radio across the seas and survive one’s death on magnetic tape. Nor does one strain or recognize or lose any vibrations in the air or manifold of frequencies. It might be argued that ‘voice’ is ambiguous – perhaps with some neat and finite list of meanings, so that the voice that changes or is strained is a part of the body, and the voice one enjoys or recognizes or records is some complex of vibrations. Then what is the voice one loses? A disposition, perhaps.
>Dividing the word into these different senses, however, leads us into ludicrous positions: Sutherland’s voice on the record is not (numerically) the same voice as the one she strained last month, and the voice that is temporarily lost is not the voice we recognize. How many voices does Sutherland have? If we took this claim of ambiguity seriously, the sentence ‘Sutherland’s voice is so strong; listen to the purity of it in the recording of it that I made before she lost it’ would be a grammatical horror, with each ‘it’ in need of a different missing antecedent, but there is obviously nothing wrong with the sentence aside from a bit of repetitiveness. When the word is viewed (correctly) as unambiguous, attempts to delineate any portion or portions of the physical world which make up a voice will be fruitless – but also pointless.
>A voice is not an organ, disposition, process, event, capacity or – as one dictionary has it – a ‘sound uttered by the mouth’. The word ‘voice’ as it is discovered in its own peculiar environment of contexts, does not fit neatly the physical, non-physical dichotomy that so upsets the identity theorist [who says the mind is the brain], but it is not for that reason a vague or ambiguous or otherwise unsatisfactory word. This state of affairs should not lead anyone to become a Cartesian dualist with respect to voices; let us try not to invent a voice-throat problem to go along with the mind-body problem. Nor should anyone set himself the task of being an identity theorist with respect to voices. No plausible materialism or physicalism would demand it. It will be enough if all the things we say about voices can be paraphrased into, explained by, or otherwise related to statements about only physical things. So long as such an explanation leaves no distinction or phenomenon unaccounted for, physicalism with regard to voices can be preserved – without identification of voices with physical things...
>Consider voices again. We entertained the proposal to admit voices into our ontology [to say there are such physical things as voices] because under some circumstances ‘there is a voice…’ rings true in the ear, but there are better reasons for denying them. If the anatomist or physiologist or acoustician were to be concerned because among all the things encompassed by his theories there were still no *voices*; if he were to suppose this meant he had left something out, something perhaps even inaccessible to science, he would have been confused by our admitting voices in our ontology [saying they exist]. He assumed this meant he could safely reason: Is the voice identical with the larynx? No. Then is it the lungs? No. Is it a stream of air? No. Is it a sound? No. Then it must be some *other* thing I have not yet examined. We must rule out this series of questions… The point, then, in denying the existence of voices is to permit the claim that physicalists need not identify voices with any physical thing… That such a denial is to some extent counterintuitive is not contested...
>Certainly no one interested in voices ever fell into the misunderstanding just described, but it is tempting to suppose that not only philosophers but also psychologists, neurophysiologists and cyberneticians are bedeviled at times by a parallel confusion over the ontological status of the mental vocabulary [beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, pains]...
Dennett, Daniel C. (1969) Content and Consciousness p. 8-11
And that is why the mind is not the brain.
Beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, pains etc are not to be identified with brain states.
In a very real sense there are no such things as these.
They are not things.
We should rest content if everything we can say about these can be translated into the vocabulary of the sciences.I’d try to explain it myself, but I don’t think I could do better than Dennett.
I am not sure that I have seen anyone do it better than Dennett.Onward to functionalism, ho.
Posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:12:34
In reply to What is a voice?, posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:04:09
The best science uses philosophical theory that is long outdated. Their data is grand, but their theories of the data, the interpreted significance of the data is questionable in many respects.
And that the best philosophical theory uses scientific data that is long outdated. Which leads us to go 'oh, bah! thats an empirical matter!'.
Can't keep up with everything at once I suppose...
Of course, there is something to be said for attempting to keep up with both. But there is more than enough to keep you occupied several lifetimes over just with one...
Identity theory is the favoured theory of neuroscientists. But it is discredited in philosophical circles. It is becoming fashionable to the general population as well. About half of students enrolled in an introductory course to philosophy of mind at second year level are dualists and about half are identity theorists.
By the end of the course everyone is a functionalist...
But that is not the end of the mystery...
There are so very many different varieties of functionalism...
It is just that once one has accepted that framework, well, it is then that things start to get really interesting.
Posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 0:23:26
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that..., posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:12:34
would you mind giving a brief explanation of identity theory? if possible...
i was going to go into neuroscience but after spending a week in a lab i changed my mind. but i would be interested to hear what the theory is that the neuroscience students believe in (at the beginning of the course, anyway).
SM
Posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 0:34:55
In reply to What is a voice?, posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:04:09
Between the angel and the animal
Lies the despotic eye
Turned from all that it surveys
Towards the vanishing pointAnd there lies melancholy
Where chocolate roses melt
In the soul’s feverish heat
Into puddles of sweet bitternessBetween the heavens and the abyss
We wander through
A Technicolor virtual reality
So very far from homeThe cogito project
Descartes’ plump and spoiled brat
Has projected our minds farther
Than our bodies may followSo through dreams
And disjointed memories
The fat apple tricks our eye
Into partaking of its sweet skinWe forget the angel
And become orphans of the earth
We forget the animal
And become gods of its domainAs the exile mourns
The loss of the homeland
So the soul longs
For the mind to remember
Posted by alexandra_k on January 30, 2005, at 1:15:45
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that..., posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 0:23:26
The identity theory is the theory that the mind is the brain. Most neuroscientists maintain that they study the mind/brain. The implication being that they are the same thing.
Hope that was brief enough :-)
> i was going to go into neuroscience but after spending a week in a lab i changed my mind.Yes. I discovered fairly recently that 'neuroscience' can be boring (in the sense that it turned out to be a little different than I had supposed). It all comes of other things (such as frogs) having neurons as well :-)
I am interested in higher mental functions (beliefs desires hopes fears etc). You don't find much of that..
More of it in cognitive neuroscience. I would like to do more of that. If I get into the US that will be my minor. I do hope I don't have to do lab work or stats... Hmm. Still, can always change my mind and just worry about philosophy.
:-)
Posted by alexandra_k on January 30, 2005, at 1:23:44
In reply to Re: My response to Cartesian dualism, posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 0:34:55
Oh wow, that was great Smokey :-)
I especially liked these bits:
> The cogito project
> Descartes’ plump and spoiled brat
> Has projected our minds farther
> Than our bodies may followThat is good. He does indeed end up with a disembodied 'I' with no substance.
> We forget the angel
> And become orphans of the earth
> We forget the animal
> And become gods of its domain> As the exile mourns
> The loss of the homeland
> So the soul longs
> For the mind to rememberI liked those bits very much.
In philosophy of mind the soul just is the mind.
But maybe there are problems with identity there too... hmm... i never thought of that.
You know I have dumped the seminar I put up here earlier in response to some of the things you said. I have started again. I think it is much better for it. I explain exactly what is meant by 'anomalous experience' the first time I use the term. I have tried to make it more readable and story like.Thanks so much for all your feedback on that.
I am sorry I can't help you with HTML.
I am sort of thinking of trying to learn.
My office mate is giving me a hand.
I'd like to make a homepage.
Posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 17:59:55
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that..., posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 0:23:26
i definately used to believe in identity theory whole-heartedly. then i took too many religion classes. i also took this class on psychopathology where i read this book on how the soul has been forgotten in modern neuroscience. but there is this article from Newsweek that still gets me. i will post it in my next post. i still believ that the mind=brain, but then there is the soul, which does not equal brain. so if the soul exists beyond the brain, then the mind might too. what evidence do you have to support the notion that mind does not equal brain?
SM
Posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 18:04:46
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that..., posted by alexandra_k on January 29, 2005, at 21:12:34
IN THE NEW FIELD OF 'NEUROTHEOLOGY,' SCIENTISTS SEEK THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SPIRITUALITY. IS GOD ALL IN OUR HEADS?
One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist--who was spending a sabbatical year in England--saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are," he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things."
Call it a mystical experience, a spiritual moment, even a religious epiphany, if you like--but Austin will not. Rather than interpret his instant of grace as proof of a reality beyond the comprehension of our senses, much less as proof of a deity, Austin took it as "proof of the existence of the brain." He isn't being smart-alecky. As a neurologist, he accepts that all we see, hear, feel and think is mediated or created by the brain. Austin's moment in the Underground therefore inspired him to explore the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experience. In order to feel that time, fear and self-consciousness have dissolved, he reasoned, certain brain circuits must be interrupted. Which ones? Activity in the amygdala, which monitors the environment for threats and registers fear, must be damped. Parietal-lobe circuits, which orient you in space and mark the sharp distinction between self and world, must go quiet. Frontal- and temporal-lobe circuits, which mark time and generate self-awareness, must disengage. When that happens, Austin concludes in a recent paper, "what we think of as our 'higher' functions of selfhood appear briefly to 'drop out,' 'dissolve,' or be 'deleted from consciousness'." When he spun out his theories in 1998, in the 844-page "Zen and the Brain," it was published not by some flaky New Age outfit but by MIT Press.
Since then, more and more scientists have flocked to "neurotheology," the study of the neurobiology of religion and spirituality. Last year the American Psychological Association published "Varieties of Anomalous Experience," covering enigmas from near-death experiences to mystical ones. At Columbia University's new Center for the Study of Science and Religion, one program investigates how spiritual experiences reflect "peculiarly recurrent events in human brains." In December, the scholarly Journal of Consciousness Studies devoted its issue to religious moments ranging from "Christic visions" to "shamanic states of consciousness." In May the book "Religion in Mind," tackling subjects such as how religious practices act back on the brain's frontal lobes to inspire optimism and even creativity, reaches stores. And in "Why God Won't Go Away," published in April, Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania and his late collaborator, Eugene d'Aquili, use brain-imaging data they collected from Tibetan Buddhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nuns deep in prayer to... well, what they do involves a lot of neuro-jargon about lobes and fissures. In a nutshell, though, they use the data to identify what seems to be the brain's spirituality circuit, and to explain how it is that religious rituals have the power to move believers and nonbelievers alike.
What all the new research shares is a passion for uncovering the neurological underpinnings of spiritual and mystical experiences--for discovering, in short, what happens in our brains when we sense that we "have encountered a reality different from--and, in some crucial sense, higher than--the reality of every-day experience," as psychologist David Wulff of Wheaton College in Massachusetts puts it. In neurotheology, psychologists and neurologists try to pinpoint which regions turn on, and which turn off, during experiences that seem to exist outside time and space. In this way it differs from the rudimentary research of the 1950s and 1960s that found, yeah, brain waves change when you meditate. But that research was silent on why brain waves change, or which specific regions in the brain lie behind the change. Neuro-imaging of a living, working brain simply didn't exist back then. In contrast, today's studies try to identify the brain circuits that surge with activity when we think we have encountered the divine, and when we feel transported by intense prayer, an uplifting ritual or sacred music. Although the field is brand new and the answers only tentative, one thing is clear. Spiritual experiences are so consistent across cultures, across time and across faiths, says Wulff, that it "suggest[s] a common core that is likely a reflection of structures and processes in the human brain."
There was a feeling of energy centered within me... going out to infinite space and returning... There was a relaxing of the dualistic mind, and an intense feeling of love. I felt a profound letting go of the boundaries around me, and a connection with some kind of energy and state of being that had a quality of clarity, transparency and joy. I felt a deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.
That is how Dr. Michael J. Baime, a colleague of Andrew Newberg's at Penn, describes what he feels at the moment of peak transcendence when he practices Tibetan Buddhist meditation, as he has since he was 14 in 1969. Baime offered his brain to Newberg, who, since childhood, had wondered about the mystery of God's existence. At Penn, Newberg's specialty is radiology, so he teamed with Eugene d'Aquili to use imaging techniques to detect which regions of the brain are active during spiritual experiences. The scientists recruited Baime and seven other Tibetan Buddhists, all skilled meditators.
In a typical run, Baime settled onto the floor of a small darkened room, lit only by a few candles and filled with jasmine incense. A string of twine lay beside him. Concentrating on a mental image, he focused and focused, quieting his conscious mind (he told the scientists afterward) until something he identifies as his true inner self emerged. It felt "timeless and infinite," Baime said afterward, "a part of everyone and everything in existence." When he reached the "peak" of spiritual intensity, he tugged on the twine. Newberg, huddled outside the room and holding the other end, felt the pull and quickly injected a radioactive tracer into an IV line that ran into Baime's left arm. After a few moments, he whisked Baime off to a SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) machine. By detecting the tracer, it tracks blood flow in the brain. Blood flow correlates with neuronal activity.
The SPECT images are as close as scientists have come to snapping a photo of a transcendent experience. As expected, the prefrontal cortex, seat of attention, lit up: Baime, after all, was focusing deeply. But it was a quieting of activity that stood out. A bundle of neurons in the superior parietal lobe, toward the top and back of the brain, had gone dark. This region, nicknamed the "orientation association area," processes information about space and time, and the orientation of the body in space. It determines where the body ends and the rest of the world begins. Specifically, the left orientation area creates the sensation of a physically delimited body; the right orientation area creates the sense of the physical space in which the body exists. (An injury to this area can so cripple your ability to maneuver in physical space that you cannot figure the distance and angles needed to navigate the route to a chair across the room.)
The orientation area requires sensory input to do its calculus. "If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything," Newberg and d'Aquili write in "Why God Won't Go Away." The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity.
I felt communion, peace, openness to experience... [There was] an awareness and responsiveness to God's presence around me, and a feeling of centering, quieting, nothingness, [as well as] moments of fullness of the presence of God. [God was] permeating my being.
This is how her 45-minute prayer made Sister Celeste, a Franciscan nun, feel, just before Newberg SPECT-scanned her. During her most intensely religious moments, when she felt a palpable sense of God's presence and an absorption of her self into his being, her brain displayed changes like those in the Tibetan Buddhist meditators: her orientation area went dark. What Sister Celeste and the other nuns in the study felt, and what the meditators experienced, Newberg emphasizes, "were neither mistakes nor wishful thinking. They reflect real, biologically based events in the brain." The fact that spiritual contemplation affects brain activity gives the experience a reality that psychologists and neuroscientists had long denied it, and explains why people experience ineffable, transcendent events as equally real as seeing a wondrous sunset or stubbing their toes.
That a religious experience is reflected in brain activity is not too surprising, actually. Everything we experience--from the sound of thunder to the sight of a poodle, the feeling of fear and the thought of a polka-dot castle--leaves a trace on the brain. Neurotheology is stalking bigger game than simply affirming that spiritual feelings leave neural footprints, too. By pinpointing the brain areas involved in spiritual experiences and tracing how such experiences arise, the scientists hope to learn whether anyone can have such experiences, and why spiritual experiences have the qualities they do.
I could hear the singing of the planets, and wave after wave of light washed over me. But... I was the light as well... I no longer existed as a separate 'I'... I saw into the structure of the universe. I had the impression of knowing beyond knowledge and being given glimpses into ALL.
That was how author Sophy Burnham described her experience at Machu Picchu, in her 1997 book "The Ecstatic Journey." Although there was no scientist around to whisk her into a SPECT machine and confirm that her orientation area was AWOL, it was almost certainly quiescent. That said, just because an experience has a neural correlate does not mean that the experience exists "only" in the brain, or that it is a figment of brain activity with no independent reality. Think of what happens when you dig into an apple pie. The brain's olfactory region registers the aroma of the cinnamon and fruit. The somatosensory cortex processes the feel of the flaky crust on the tongue and lips. The visual cortex registers the sight of the pie. Remembrances of pies past (Grandma's kitchen, the corner bake shop...) activate association cortices. A neuroscientist with too much time on his hands could undoubtedly produce a PET scan of "your brain on apple pie." But that does not negate the reality of the pie. "The fact that spiritual experiences can be associated with distinct neural activity does not necessarily mean that such experiences are mere neurological illusions," Newberg insists. "It's no safer to say that spiritual urges and sensations are caused by brain activity than it is to say that the neurological changes through which we experience the pleasure of eating an apple cause the apple to exist." The bottom line, he says, is that "there is no way to determine whether the neurological changes associated with spiritual experience mean that the brain is causing those experiences... or is instead perceiving a spiritual reality."
In fact, some of the same brain regions involved in the pie experience create religious experiences, too. When the image of a cross, or a Torah crowned in silver, triggers a sense of religious awe, it is because the brain's visual-association area, which interprets what the eyes see and connects images to emotions and memories, has learned to link those images to that feeling. Visions that arise during prayer or ritual are also generated in the association area: electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes (which nestle along the sides of the head and house the circuits responsible for language, conceptual thinking and associations) produces visions.
Temporal-lobe epilepsy--abnormal bursts of electrical activity in these regions--takes this to extremes. Although some studies have cast doubt on the connection between temporal-lobe epilepsy and religiosity, others find that the condition seems to trigger vivid, Joan of Arc-type religious visions and voices. In his recent book "Lying Awake," novelist Mark Salzman conjures up the story of a cloistered nun who, after years of being unable to truly feel the presence of God, begins having visions. The cause is temporal-lobe epilepsy. Sister John of the Cross must wrestle with whether to have surgery, which would probably cure her--but would also end her visions. Dostoevsky, Saint Paul, Saint Teresa of Avila, Proust and others are thought to have had temporal-lobe epilepsy, leaving them obsessed with matters of the spirit.
Although temporal-lobe epilepsy is rare, researchers suspect that focused bursts of electrical activity called "temporal-lobe transients" may yield mystical experiences. To test this idea, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Canada fits a helmet jury-rigged with electromagnets onto a volunteer's head. The helmet creates a weak magnetic field, no stronger than that produced by a computer monitor. The field triggers bursts of electrical activity in the temporal lobes, Persinger finds, producing sensations that volunteers describe as supernatural or spiritual: an out-of-body experience, a sense of the divine. He suspects that religious experiences are evoked by mini electrical storms in the temporal lobes, and that such storms can be triggered by anxiety, personal crisis, lack of oxygen, low blood sugar and simple fatigue--suggesting a reason that some people "find God" in such moments. Why the temporal lobes? Persinger speculates that our left temporal lobe maintains our sense of self. When that region is stimulated but the right stays quiescent, the left interprets this as a sensed presence, as the self departing the body, or of God.
I was alone upon the seashore... I felt that I... return[ed] from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is... Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world encircling harmony... I felt myself one with them.
Is an experience like this one, described by the German philosopher Malwida von Meysenburg in 1900, within the reach of anyone? "Not everyone who meditates encounters these sorts of unitive experiences," says Robert K.C. Forman, a scholar of comparative religion at Hunter College in New York City. "This suggests that some people may be genetically or temperamentally predisposed to mystical ability." Those most open to mystical experience tend also to be open to new experiences generally. They are usually creative and innovative, with a breadth of interests and a tolerance for ambiguity (as determined by questionnaire). They also tend toward fantasy, notes David Wulff, "suggesting a capacity to suspend the judging process that distinguishes imaginings and real events." Since "we all have the brain circuits that mediate spiritual experiences, probably most people have the capacity for having such experiences," says Wulff. "But it's possible to foreclose that possibility. If you are rational, controlled, not prone to fantasy, you will probably resist the experience."
In survey after survey since the 1960s, between 30 and 40 percent or so of those asked say they have, at least once or twice, felt "very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself." Gallup polls in the 1990s found that 53 percent of American adults said they had had "a moment of sudden religious awakening or insight." Reports of mystical experience increase with education, income and age (people in their 40s and 50s are most likely to have them).
Yet many people seem no more able to have such an experience than to fly to Venus. One explanation came in 1999, when Australian researchers found that people who report mystical and spiritual experiences tend to have unusually easy access to subliminal consciousness. "In people whose unconscious thoughts tend to break through into consciousness more readily, we find some correlation with spiritual experiences," says psychologist Michael Thalbourne of the University of Adelaide. Unfortunately, scientists are pretty clueless about what allows subconscious thoughts to pop into the consciousness of some people and not others. The single strongest predictor of such experiences, however, is something called "dissociation." In this state, different regions of the brain disengage from others. "This theory, which explains hypnotizability so well, might explain mystical states, too," says Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, which debunks paranormal phenomena. "Something really seems to be going on in the brain, with some module dissociating from the rest of the cortex."
That dissociation may reflect unusual electrical crackling in one or more brain regions. In 1997, neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran told the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience that there is "a neural basis for religious experience." His preliminary results suggested that depth of religious feeling, or religiosity, might depend on natural--not helmet-induced--enhancements in the electrical activity of the temporal lobes. Interestingly, this region of the brain also seems important for speech perception. One experience common to many spiritual states is hearing the voice of God. It seems to arise when you misattribute inner speech (the "little voice" in your head that you know you generate yourself) to something outside yourself. During such experiences, the brain's Broca's area (responsible for speech production) switches on. Most of us can tell this is our inner voice speaking. But when sensory information is restricted, as happens during meditation or prayer, people are "more likely to misattribute internally generated thoughts to an external source," suggests psychologist Richard Bentall of the University of Manchester in England in the book "Varieties of Anomalous Experience."
Stress and emotional arousal can also interfere with the brain's ability to find the source of a voice, Bentall adds. In a 1998 study, researchers found that one particular brain region, called the right anterior cingulate, turned on when people heard something in the environment--a voice or a sound--and also when they hallucinated hearing something. But it stayed quiet when they imagined hearing something and thus were sure it came from their own brain. This region, says Bentall, "may contain the neural circuits responsible for tagging events as originating from the external world." When it is inappropriately switched on, we are fooled into thinking the voice we hear comes from outside us.
Even people who describe themselves as nonspiritual can be moved by religious ceremonies and liturgy. Hence the power of ritual. Drumming, dancing, incantations--all rivet attention on a single, intense source of sensory stimulation, including the body's own movements. They also evoke powerful emotional responses. That combination--focused attention that excludes other sensory stimuli, plus heightened emotion--is key. Together, they seem to send the brain's arousal system into hyperdrive, much as intense fear does. When this happens, explains Newberg, one of the brain structures responsible for maintaining equilibrium--the hippocampus--puts on the brakes. It inhibits the flow of signals between neurons, like a traffic cop preventing any more cars from entering the on-ramp to a tied-up highway.
The result is that certain regions of the brain are deprived of neuronal input. One such deprived region seems to be the orientation area, the same spot that goes quiet during meditation and prayer. As in those states, without sensory input the orientation area cannot do its job of maintaining a sense of where the self leaves off and the world begins. That's why ritual and liturgy can bring on what Newberg calls a "softening of the boundaries of the self"--and the sense of oneness and spiritual unity. Slow chanting, elegiac liturgical melodies and whispered ritualistic prayer all seem to work their magic in much the same way: they turn on the hippocampus directly and block neuronal traffic to some brain regions. The result again is "blurring the edges of the brain's sense of self, opening the door to the unitary states that are the primary goal of religious ritual," says Newberg.
Researchers' newfound interest in neurotheology reflects more than the availability of cool new toys to peer inside the working brain. Psychology and neuroscience have long neglected religion. Despite its centrality to the mental lives of so many people, religion has been met by what David Wulff calls "indifference or even apathy" on the part of science. When one psychologist, a practicing Christian, tried to discuss in his introductory psych book the role of faith in people's lives, his publisher edited out most of it--for fear of offending readers. The rise of neurotheology represents a radical shift in that attitude. And whatever light science is shedding on spirituality, spirituality is returning the favor: mystical experiences, says Forman, may tell us something about consciousness, arguably the greatest mystery in neuroscience. "In mystical experiences, the content of the mind fades, sensory awareness drops out, so you are left only with pure consciousness," says Forman. "This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and is not a mere byproduct of sensory action."
For all the tentative successes that scientists are scoring in their search for the biological bases of religious, spiritual and mystical experience, one mystery will surely lie forever beyond their grasp. They may trace a sense of transcendence to this bulge in our gray matter. And they may trace a feeling of the divine to that one. But it is likely that they will never resolve the greatest question of all--namely, whether our brain wiring creates God, or whether God created our brain wiring. Which you believe is, in the end, a matter of faith.
This Is Your Brain On God
Brain scans of people lost in prayer or deep in meditation have revealed the neurological underpinnings of religious states such as transcendence, visions, enlightment and feelings of awe.Cosmic unity: When the parietal lobes quiet down, a person can feel at one with the universe
Response to religious words: At the juncture of three lobes, this region governs reaction to language
Scared images: The lower temporal lobe is involved in the process by which images, such as candles or crosses, facilitate prayer and meditation
Religious emotions: The middle temporal lobe is linked to emotional aspects of religious experience, such as joy an awe
Attention: Linked to concentration, the frontal lobe lights up (red at top in scans) during medication
Posted by alexandra_k on January 30, 2005, at 21:45:20
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that..., posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 17:59:55
> i definately used to believe in identity theory whole-heartedly. then i took too many religion classes.
So you swing on the pendulum between dualism and the identity theory (which many believe is synomomous with materialism or a scientific world view)?
>i also took this class on psychopathology where i read this book on how the soul has been forgotten in modern neuroscience.
Hmm. Well first you need to say what you mean by the soul. Then we have to figure out whether it is any different from the mind... Then you have to figure out how much neuroscience forgets the both of these! In the worlds of John Searle 'the trouble with cognitive science is that it leaves out the mind' "The Rediscovery of the Mind".
>but there is this article from Newsweek that still gets me. i will post it in my next post.
Thanks, I will tell you what I think.
>I still believ that the mind=brain, but then there is the soul, which does not equal brain. so if the soul exists beyond the brain, then the mind might too.
ok.
what evidence do you have to support the notion that mind does not equal brain?
The same evidence that we have that a voice does not equal any portion of the physical world. That was what Dennett was showing in the bit from him I quoted. All the things he said about voices apply to beliefs and desires and hopes and fears and pains as well. There isn't any portion of the phycial world (including a portion of the brain) that just is those things. I can tell you a bit more about why. I like Dennett, but that section was probably a bit much 'philsophy for philsophers'. If you can't say it so that other people can understand it then what I am increasingly starting to worry about is whether it really does make sense.
Or whether it is just disguised nonsense...
Posted by alexandra_k on February 1, 2005, at 2:02:15
In reply to Re: It always amuses me that... » smokeymadison, posted by alexandra_k on January 30, 2005, at 21:45:20
Why the Identity Theory Isn't True.
The Identity Theory is a theory of the relation between the mind and the body / brain. According to the Identity Theory mental states are brain states.
The Identity Theorist maintains that science has discovered that the mind is the brain the way that scientists discovered that water is H2O and that heat is mean kinetic energy.
In order for it to be possible that mental states are brain states there must be a perfect correlation between mental states and brain states. If mental state x is brain state y then everytime x happens y must happen, and everytime y happens x must happen too.
It follows from this that only beings with brains like ours can have mental states like ours. Something without a brain could not have mental states.
Lots of people don't like this. It seems to be possible in principle that we could discover silicon based martians or that we could develop AI (artificial intelligence) and that these things could have mentality despite lacking a brain.
Leibniz law says that for x and y to be the same thing they must share all the same properties (at any fixed moment in time). That is because a thing is always identical to itself. If we can discover a genuine property that x has that y lacks then x and y cannot be the same thing.
(The following is derived from my interpretation of Kripke) .
Mental states are essentially subjective. (they can only be observed by one. There is something that it is like to have a mental life 'from the inside').
Brain states are essentially objective. (which is why many people can observe them. That is what makes them a fit object for scientific investigation).So mental states and brain states have different essential properties. They are essentially different. Brain states may well be correlated with mental states in beings with brains, but there is no reason why something else couldn't support mentality.
This is especially the case if we consider that what is so very important about brains - what it is about them that supports mentality - is to do with their complex structure and organisation.
If we could capture that complex structure and organisation with a computer program, then would we have AI with genuine mentality?
Posted by alexandra_k on February 1, 2005, at 2:10:46
In reply to Re: Newsweek article on religion and the brain, posted by smokeymadison on January 30, 2005, at 18:04:46
Yeah, that is a hot topic at the moment. I know someone who fairly recently finished her PhD on the neural basis of religious experience (she studied it within the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies).
So it seems to be the case that certain kinds of religious experience are correlated with certain kinds of brain states.
That is interesting.
What is interesting to me (and this is something that we argued about a bit) is whether religious experience is the result of MALFUNCTION of the brain. In the way that people want to consider hallucinations, dissociation, and related phenomena to be malfunctions (coping strategies to be sure, but still malfunctions). If it is the result of malfunction then rather than 'seeing things the way they really are' and such, people may be just under the illusion that this is the case.
Why should religious experiences be taken to be more in touch with the ultimate nature of reality than the rest of our experiences?
It doesn't follow that because there is a neural basis that there is a god.
But then it doesn't follow that becaue there is a neural basis that there isn't a god either.The finding of a correlation between certain kinds of religious experiences and certain kinds of brain states cannot hope to provide evidence of either of those: whether there isn't a god or whether there is a god has to be settled on conceptual grounds. Or it can be a matter of faith.
The person I know didn't like the 'malfunction' idea.
I don't hold on to that especially but I don't like her much and so it was fun to annoy her :-)
She is deeply religious, but a real sickler for the 'rules' (when it suits her).
Anyways, that is what I think...
Posted by smokeymadison on February 1, 2005, at 16:17:03
In reply to Re: Newsweek article on religion and the brain » smokeymadison, posted by alexandra_k on February 1, 2005, at 2:10:46
> What is interesting to me (and this is something that we argued about a bit) is whether religious experience is the result of MALFUNCTION of the brain. In the way that people want to consider hallucinations, dissociation, and related phenomena to be malfunctions (coping strategies to be sure, but still malfunctions). If it is the result of malfunction then rather than 'seeing things the way they really are' and such, people may be just under the illusion that this is the case.
>
> Why should religious experiences be taken to be more in touch with the ultimate nature of reality than the rest of our experiences?
>
I don't like the malfunction idea either, actually. but just because a certain part of the brain shuts down during these mystical experiences doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is malfunctioning. according to the article, the part that shuts down is the part that gives us the distinction between us and everything else. this distinction is necessary for everyday living; wihtout it we would not be able to carry out basic survival functions, but this distinction may not actually exist on a spiritual level. this part of the brain draws the line for the above mentioned reason, but perhaps the distinction is a distortion of reality, just like our eyes distort reality in a way so that we can function.in Buddhism there is a saying about how we are waves in the ocean. we are not separate from the ocean but from our view, as individual waves, it seems as if we are. According to a Transcendental Meditation teacher i talked to once, meditation takes us beneath the surface and reunites us with everything else. the findings from the Newsweek article seem to point in this direction, i think.
> It doesn't follow that because there is a neural basis that there is a god.
> But then it doesn't follow that because there is a neural basis that there isn't a god either.
>
Science will never be able to prove or disprove God. ok, i take that back. it might happen in physics/chemistry. if you can prove that atoms break down into infinitely smaller particles, then i think that you can prove there is such a thing as eternity since time and matter are related. that would be the first step, since God has always existed in some form in most religions.i don't believe that God created the world exactly. i think that God has always been a part of it. Is it. so when we loose touch with ourselves,lose the distinction betwen us and everything else, there we find God.
>
Thanks for my sidetrack into religion. it wasn't exactly what you posted, but i really enjoy discussing it.SM
Posted by alexandra_k on February 3, 2005, at 14:44:33
In reply to Re: Newsweek article on religion and the brain, posted by smokeymadison on February 1, 2005, at 16:17:03
> Thanks for my sidetrack into religion. it wasn't exactly what you posted, but i really enjoy discussing it.
Thats ok. I don't mind talking about what other people want to talk about too :-)
> just because a certain part of the brain shuts down during these mystical experiences doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is malfunctioning.
Thats right. It doesn't seem to follow quite yet, so I'd need to try to tell a bit of a story...
>According to the article, the part that shuts down is the part that gives us the distinction between us and everything else. this distinction is necessary for everyday living; wihtout it we would not be able to carry out basic survival functions...
That seems correct. Although if we are interested in 'the ultimate nature of reality' then it seems that what we are grasping is a self-other distinction that exists in reality. How do we know that it exists in reality? Well, if you cannot grasp that distinction then you would die out pretty quick. It's the mechanism that stops us (well, lobsters anyway) eating themselves and that helps us look out for our bodies realising that our limbs etc are 'ours'.
>but this distinction may not actually exist on a spiritual level.
Here it would depend on what you mean by the 'spiritual level'. If you mean that when people are meditating they lose the self-other distinction then that is true, I grant that. But if you are talking about reality then I think that what is happening is that we are failing to grasp a distinction that is there in fact.
I would say, however, that statements that are spiritual or religious are true or false not because they correspond to reality. Reality doesn't come into the picture with respect to statements of religion, spirituality, or faith. One way of saying it is that they are 'not truth apt'. They are neither true nor false they are not about the world they are expression of a certain kinds of 'seems'.
(A lot confusing - sorry)
>this part of the brain draws the line for the above mentioned reason, but perhaps the distinction is a distortion of reality, just like our eyes distort reality in a way so that we can function.
The eyes 'distort reality'? They represent reality (beliefs formed on the basis of accepting our visual experiences as veridical) turn out to be incredably useful to us with respect to helping us navigate our way around the world. I would say that the 'distortion' is more a matter of 'simplification'. I would say that closing our eyes to the world compared quite well with not utilising the parts of the brain that represent distinctions in the world (like the self other distinction). That is not to imply that it is pigheaded or willfill at all - just that sometimes it is not reality that interests us.
> in Buddhism there is a saying about how we are waves in the ocean. we are not separate from the ocean but from our view, as individual waves, it seems as if we are. According to a Transcendental Meditation teacher i talked to once, meditation takes us beneath the surface and reunites us with everything else. the findings from the Newsweek article seem to point in this direction, i think.
Yeah. They seemed particularly keen on Buddist religious experiences. But what about people who say they have the experience of the holy spirit? Does that entail that the holy spirit exists? We cannot deny that they are having the experience they are having - but we can question whether it represents reality accurately or not. Even if it does not. Even if it is 'false' that may be the wrong way to look at or interpret religious discourse. We cannot deny the experience, but maybe the belief that 'it is the holy spirit' should be understood as an expression of faith rahter than as a claim about external reality.
I know another person who is working on a PhD in the same department and what she is looking at is showing how the best current physics is telling us that reality is fundamentally the way that the buddist principles always said it was. This is of course one interpretation of the best physics... And it is one interpretation of what religious discourse is trying to do (to make claims about the ultimate nature of reality). We can always choose to see things that way. But we have to see how far it gets us at the end of the day. You could always say that on the ultimate physical level there aren't any objects anyway, just degrees of charge in fields of force. If there aren't any objects then in a sense I suppose we could say that object distinctions (including the self other distinction) are false...
But then we have to worry what people are getting at and what people mean to say when they start to deny the existence of middle sized objects like tables and chairs and such...
> Science will never be able to prove or disprove God. ok, i take that back. it might happen in physics/chemistry. if you can prove that atoms break down into infinitely smaller particles, then i think that you can prove there is such a thing as eternity since time and matter are related. that would be the first step, since God has always existed in some form in most religions.
I am reminded of Wittgenstein, though I don't think I can get it word for word correct. Basically, this present moment is eternal Smokey. NOW. It is ALWAYS now. Forever and ever amen. (And according to Wittgenstein what came before and what comes after is of no interest to us).
I used to meditate on 'I am an active information processor', basically because I liked it... I have recently discovered 'I am here now'. See this statement is necesarily true no matter who utters it, where it is uttered, and when it is uttered. The people change, the places change, the times change but the statement remains necessarily true. It is a necessary truth that gives no information whatsoever as to WHO is uttering it WHERE they are uttering it or WHEN they are uttering it. But I like it as an example of a necessarily true (eternal) contentless statement. Some people like to think of numbers (which are supposed to be eternal and immutable too - you can never locate or destroy the number 7).
> i don't believe that God created the world exactly. i think that God has always been a part of it. Is it. so when we loose touch with ourselves,lose the distinction betwen us and everything else, there we find God.I think we can find peace and happiness. If that is what you mean by god then I could grant you that. But it depends on what you mean by god...
(I am not hostile to spiritual principles and if I had to pick I would go the buddist way.. I just enjoyed annoying a certain person in the department..)
But it all depends on what you mean by god..
Posted by alexandra_k on February 3, 2005, at 18:05:39
In reply to Re: Newsweek article on religion and the brain, posted by smokeymadison on February 1, 2005, at 16:17:03
Okay, a bit more...
When you are conscious you are always conscious of something.
Firstly I heard that you were supposed to 'empty your mind of everything - just think of nothing'. But you can't do that. That is impossible. As a matter of principle and so I struggled with something I couldn't understand. Then I was told that another way is to focus all of your attention on just one thing. The way your breathing feels or whatever. But just one thing. Other things will occur to you and I used to think that meant I wasn't doing it properly. But now I get that other things will occur to you but meditation is just about refocusing your attention back to that one thing over and over and over and not getting upset with yourself over it but just accepting it and letting the other stuff 'bubble up and pass' and continually refocus you attention back again. You can even observe yourself following that process. (Though that is focusing your attention in a different way). I guess that the better you get at it (in the sense of the more practiced you are and the more control you gain over your attentional processes) the more you are able to just focus on one thing.
If you manage to focus all of your attention completely on one thing then that one thing is one thing no longer - it is everything. And everything is now and now is eternal. There aren't any distinctions anymore.
But you are conscious of something. How breathing feels or whatever. I found meditation easiest with feeling to start with. How breathing feels. The sensation. The only way to 'stop' thinking is to focus all your attention on something else. In this case how my breathing feels. If I catch myself thinking I refocus on how my breathing feels.
It is awareness (consciousness) of one thing. Normally our mental states represent things in the world. We don't see our representational states as representational states. We don't see sense data we see objects in the world. But by ignoring the objects in the world, by focusing on our experience to the point where it becomes everything the self other distinction doesn't make sense.
Distinctions don't make sense because one thing is everything and that is all there is and all there is is now and now is eternal. And everything is eternal..
And call it what you will...
But it is something interesting that one can do with ones brain.
It is something one can do.
And people report feeling better for it, so that is good.
But IMO with respect to capturing 'the way things really are' all it is is one way to look at a tiny little aspect of reality.
I dunno :-)
This is the end of the thread.
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