Mind Your Head!

EU Referendum: Are you IN or OUT?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 04:23:00 +0000

Ever since the referendum campaign began in earnest, the public have repeatedly called for clear facts about the pros and cons of leaving the EU. With just a few more days until the vote, isn’t it appalling that for many people the issue remains about as clear as mud?

Having already made my decision before the campaigning started, it’s been interesting to see the twists and turns of both the Leave and Remain camps and the ways in which they have dealt with criticism. I can’t promise any facts but I do have some observations to offer. If you still haven’t decided which way you will vote, perhaps this may be of some use to you.

First, the bad news. None of the prominent figures in either camp genuinely have the best interests of the country at heart, but are only interested in furthering their own political careers. This in itself won’t raise any eyebrows with a certain section of the population, but it deserves explanation.

In his youth as an advisor to the Treasury, David Cameron was a eurosceptic. Having fought so ardently for Britain to remain in the EU during his campaign, it’s difficult to imagine him as anything other than an avid europhile. Why the change? Perhaps being in the driving seat has allowed him to see exactly what being in the EU means for Britain. The same goes for Theresa May, another eurosceptic-turned-europhile, who publicly claimed that cooperation across the EU was essential in bringing various terrorist suspects to book.

Boris Johnson, however, was almost rabidly eurosceptic in his youth, while working as the EU correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. After his largely successful tenure as the Mayor of London and having been at the heart of many international and European public celebrations, including the 2012 Olympics, it was widely expected that his initial views may have changed and he would come out in favour of the Remain camp. Alas, that was not to be.

Michael Gove is probably the only politician who takes his campaigning very personally, claiming that the EU and its Common Fisheries Policy was directly responsible for the destruction of his father’s fishing business, as well as the personal hardship that his family experienced as a result. This is tragic, except that Gove’s father recently contradicted his claims to say he had sold the business voluntarily instead of blaming it on the EU.

Still, no big deal. People and their opinions change over time. But at least in Michael Gove’s case, if he cannot even tell the truth about his own family history, what to speak of how widely derided he was for his meddling with education during his tenure of Secretary of State for Education, then how can we trust what he has to say on the state of the post-Brexit economy?

Take one of the most prominent statements of the Leave camp; “We pay £350 million a week to the EU”. This claim has been roundly exposed as a falsehood many times on live TV debates and newspaper articles as not taking into account the rebates we receive back from the EU, etc. And yet Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith et al. have repeatedly insisted that this figure is true and continue to doggedly defend it. If they cannot even get this basic claim right, or have the guts to swallow their pride and admit when they’re wrong, how can we believe in anything they say?

Indeed, on both sides the campaigns have made various claims and counterclaims, each accusing the other of scaremongering, outright lying, etc., on various issues including the economy, immigration, trade deals, and so on. The Remain camp insistent that an ‘out’ vote will mean Britain willingly entering a self-inflicted recession while the Leave camp insists that nothing will change and everything will be fine. In fairness, I also think that some of the Remain camp’s economic predictions are somewhat exaggerated, but it stands to reason that a rough exit from a relatively cosy financial situation will cause an immediate impact on the national wallet.

It’s a bit like voluntarily giving up your prized pitch in the local market to sell your wares from a car boot outside.

Of course there will be a major financial disruption, it’s crazy to think that there won’t be. You have to wonder at the credulity of people who genuinely believe that post-Brexit Britain will be something of a paradise. At least some of the prominent Brexiters are intelligent enough to acknowledge that, if we leave the EU, we will enter a period of hardship of our own volition. They also opine that this will be “worth it” without exactly explaining why. And how long will this period of hardship last? According to them, anything from between 2-10 years.

It’s nice to see how they talk so casually about potentially an entire decade of recession. Almost as if everyone has suddenly developed short memories. Anyone remember the last recession? The credit crunch? The bedroom tax? Various public outcries over cuts to public services that are still ongoing and set to get worse? And the very recent exposé of extremely physically and mentally disabled people being found “fit for work” as a result of cruel revision of the rules? Food bank usage is still on the rise and runs the risk of being part of the new normal. And not to mention how this government introduced various crafty and strange measures like zero-hours contracts for jobs, just so they could find a reason to shove unemployed people onto them and massage the employment figures to dishonestly claim that unemployment is coming down.

They did all of this, and more, without a mandate. Remember, the 2010 General Election was inconclusive and could only be saved by a shaky Coalition Government of the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. The people didn’t approve it; it was cobbled together during a week of intensive back-room discussions. The 2015 election was won by the Conservatives, if you consider 36.8% of the vote a win, but only by a tiny sliver of a majority. How they have the cheek to claim their actions so far are carrying out the will of the people is beyond me, and yet here we see them repeatedly chanting their twin mantras of “It’s about democracy” and how we need to “Take back control” whenever they want to run away from tough questions about the EU. So ask yourselves, do you think it’s right for eurosceptic politicians to make an issue of democracy within the EU when there’s little evidence of how much they care for democracy at home?

Not that there isn’t an issue with democracy in the EU; of course there is. There are many such issues and also widespread agreement that reforms are necessary. But do you think reforms can be made while being part of the group, or shouting from outside?

So, that’s the bad news. In all honesty there is hardly any good news in this debate so what I’m about to say won’t make things much better, but I hope at least I’ve shown how some of the arguments claim to be a genuine concern yet are more likely to be driven political self-interest and mealy-mouthed hypocrisy rather than genuine concern and interest for this country’s future. So I’ve personally paid little attention to the arguments of both sides, ridiculous as they are, and have attended more to the likely after-effects of the referendum.

Win or Lose, things are likely to get worse. This isn’t a doom-laden prophecy, this is a realistic appraisal even as certain sections of the Conservative Party are already polishing their knives to show exactly why they are world-famous for managed regicide; David Cameron is sure to be toppled whatever the result. A leadership contest is almost certainly on the cards, and who do you think is likely to be the next PM? A clown called Boris who doesn’t even brush his hair in the morning? Surely not. He certainly can’t escape the constant questioning about his leadership ambitions.

That’s the real reason why things will get worse. Not because of any particular issue in spite of all the lip service things like immigration and the economy have received. And what a horrendous mess they’ve made of the so-called issues. From the plainly laughable £350million-a-week claim to serious-faced hypotheticals about the entire population of Turkey (about 75million people) landing on our doorstep, the Leave camp has had 41 years to get their arguments properly composed and well presented in order to offer their proposals to the British public. And after every claim of theirs is dismissed with loud laughter they stick their fingers in their ears and use the last resort: “We’ve got too many immigrants, we need to take back control.” Was there was a major immigration problem in 1975, when the last referendum took place, and which was decisively won by the ‘In’ camp?

Grumblers have always grumbled against the EU and everything it stands for since its beginning, and they will continue to grumble whatever the result.

This isn’t about immigration. Or about the economy, or trade deals, or democracy, or even sovereignty. It never has been. These last-resort arguments tend to appeal to the lowest common denominator because the truth of the whole matter was revealed by Jeremy Corbyn in a BBC News interview back in February: “[David Cameron] has brought an internal Conservative Party dispute to international proportions.”

I believe this observation is bang on the money and explains the very root of the whole issue. Whatever the result, after the referendum we will be watching one half of the Conservative Party cannibalising the other half because the issue has already opened the fault lines in the party.

And that’s sad. Why should the whole country have to gamble on the national future because a section of a political party doesn’t like the way things are run? Make no mistake, this referendum is not a decision. It is asking the people to gamble on an economic risk and walk into an unnecessary self-inflicted recession.

Ask yourselves, if Britain votes for a brexit and things go seriously wrong with the economy down the line, how many of our now prominent Leave campaigners will care? They will tell us we voted for it.

Will there be a conclusion (after years and decades of further discussions, debates, and possibly another referendum) that we were better off in the EU when we were in it, and make moves to re-enter, with or without extended reform negotiations? If so, then how long will this process take? It took roughly 20 years of negotiations before Britain finally entered the Common Market in 1975, how long will it take now?

Why gamble the position we already have, and enter uncertainty?

The reason why this all has to happen is because, generation after generation, politicians refuse to learn the lessons of history. After all, Niccolo Machiavelli said it better in the 16th-century:

“What happens is that men willingly change their ruler, expecting to fare better. This expectation induces them to take up arms against him; but they only deceive themselves, and they learn from experience that they have made matters worse.”

Raising An Issue in Indian Psychology

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:30:00 +0000

A recent literature search threw up an interesting-looking paper; a randomised controlled trial (RCT) on the effect of yoga on gunas (personality) in healthy volunteers (free to read). I was surprised as I rarely come across academic papers on yoga, that too with explicit reference to 'gunas' in the title. . I couldn’t help noticing at the outset that the study appeared to have been carried out at the Department of Yoga Research, Swami Vivekananda Anusandhana Samsthana, a deemed-to-be yoga university. The study was also published in the International Journal of Yoga, which appears to be the university’s own journal publication. So there is plenty of scope for bias to creep in.

Despite that RCTs are the 'gold standard' of psychological research when done properly, the stated aims of this paper didn't exactly fill me with confidence. The study itself wasn't what interested me, but rather one of the tools that the researchers used to assess the participants' personalities. In psychology, personality is assessed using specific scales or questionnaires that have been designed to measure a particular construct, say, anxiety or depression. The Beck Depression Inventory is probably the best known and widely used example of a scale to measure depression, and you can find information about other scales at Wikipedia.

An important concept in the construction of such scales is known as construct validity, the ability of the scale to measure what it is supposed to measure. Using the BDI as an example, can it be that a set of questions is capable of measuring the presence and intensity of depression in a person? All other things being equal, the answer is that it is probably the most reliable tool we have for measuring depression at the moment and that it has been consistently used in a number of different medical fields. Much research has been done in the field of personality psychology in an attempt to construct a real-term workable scale with which to assess personality. Many scales exist, but generally speaking researchers have come to agree that personality can be defined in terms of the "Big 5" factors: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Psychopathy, and that all of our personalities can be measured in different ratings of these. The Reliability of such scales is another important issue that also means something different to the popular sense of the word, and we'll get to that at some point.

For this study the research team wanted to analyse the effects of a yoga course on personality and self-esteem, and they measured these with Karunanidhi's Self-Esteem Inventory (1996) and, wait for it, the Gita Inventory of Personality (Das, 1991). According to this paper, the GIP (referred to as GIN within the paper) was to measure three dimensions of personality: Sattva, Rajas and Tamas.

There is reason to suspect that, at least in the case of the GIP, something mischievous is afoot in the name of psychology. The Gita referred to is of course the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu scripture (traditionally believed to be 5000 years old), and the three personality dimensions being assessed are described in the 14th chapter of the text. I'm aware of issues of sensitivity surrounding cross-cultural research in psychology, the importance of accepting cultural boundaries, and so on. If you were to rely on Wikipedia, cross-cultural psychiatry (or transcultural psychiatry) is that which is "concerned with the cultural and ethnic context of mental disorders and psychiatric services".

I have to wonder, though, are cases like this something that ought to be a concern or to be praised? On one hand we have here a different outlook on personality that is independent of Western-oriented psychology, but on the other we have to wonder about the appropriateness of assessing people's individual personality traits on the basis of definitions provided in an antiquated religious text. Psychological research is frequently slighted or condemned (depending on who you listen to) as being overly WEIRD - analysing and assessing people that are dominantly Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic, and that is a fair criticism in context. In general, the field is crying out for fresh perspectives.

However, it remains unclear if ethnically contextual research from the other end of the spectrum will be able to provide new insight into the field of personality psychology if little to no effort is made to work collegially, and using similar standards of measurement with which to assess people and carry out much needed research.

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Deshpande S., Nagendra H.R. & Nagarathna R. (2009). A randomized control trial of the effect of yoga on Gunas (personality) and Self esteem in normal healthy volunteers., International Journal of Yoga, 2 (1) 13-21. PMID: 21234210

Before We Hear Of 'Neuropuncture' In The Commons

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:15:00 +0000

Late last month, it was announced that David Tredinnick MP had been appointed to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. The Times rightly described the collective gasp of despair and arms exasperatedly thrown in the air by British scientists in response to this news.

For Tredinnick is known to believe in and advocate for a variety of peculiar beliefs relating to superstition and alternative medicine. Namely, that biological mechanisms behind blood clotting - as well as pregnancy and hangovers - were dependent on the phase of the moon. He is also an avid believer in homeopathy and acupuncture, suggesting that they should be provided by the NHS in spite of extremely little evidence of medical efficacy.

In a recent Q&A he was provided the opportunity to clarify his position on these and other issues, but instead used the occasion to confirm his views defiantly. This part caught my eye; in response to what Tredinnick thinks the STC should look at:

"Looking at healthcare, one of the mysteries of Western medicine is acupuncture. And there’s a lot of criticism of it saying it doesn’t work. But I’ve used Chinese medicine for years, and I cannot work out why this isn’t more widely used in the health service. The same for herbal medicine, we need to get back to some natural remedies that have stood the tests of time."

Although he didn't specificy what for, presumably Tredinnick suggests that acupuncture may have some application for psychotherapeutic strategies and neurological conditions too? In which case, I need only point to James Coyne's two-part sparkling rebuttal to claims that acupuncture may have any special efficacy for mental health conditions such as depression. And as for the neuroscience (the more research-minded can enjoy this 2007 review), I recently acquired an online copy of Val Hopwood & Clare Donnellan's Acupuncture in Neurological Conditions (2010), and it's a very interesting read. Especially this amazingly revealing little tidbit listed as a 'key point' of Chapter 1:

"The concept of ‘neurology’ is a relatively modern one, with no real place in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This is only partly because there is no historical concept of the ‘brain’ in TCM physiology. There have been many schools of Chinese medicine: some included ideas that we would recognize as ‘neurology’, whereas others did not."

Y'know, when something this damning is admitted in the first chapter, it may be time to give up and put the book down and realise that you're not going to get very far with this. And if the House of Commons actually plan to consider these things, it can only be a colossal waste of time, energy and resources. What to speak of the possibility of garnering dubious expenses.

Terminator Vision: I Can Haz It?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:38:00 +0000

You've all seen The Terminator film and it's sequels and, admit it, you loved them. Not just because of the creepy futurealistic storyline but because of the stunts, the camerawork, the casting, and the sheer action of it all. And, of course, the special effects. As an example of the best sci-fi films out there, the Terminator films franchise has grossed nearly $1.5 billion worldwide. Some of the iconic scenes in the movies related directly to the Terminator itself, that ice-cold stare as a mistaken victim was brutally gunned down in pursuit of the target. But what was it about that scary stare? Surely it was the gleaming infrared light in the robotic eyeball that was shielded most of the time by the humanlike exterior. That infrared light enabled the Terminator itself to view its own surroundings:

Composite image. Credits: odysseyart.net and Orion Pictures

In the emerging field of neuroprosthetics, the most well-known examples of the technology are cochlear implants for the deaf and retinal implants for the blind. Generally speaking, they work by receiving auditory and visual signals and then transmit them to the relevant brain areas after being transformed into electrical impulses. Obviously, these tools are extremely useful in restoring hearing/vision functions to those who weren't born with them or who have lost them due to injury. In some cases, depending on the nature and extent of the absence/injury, it may be necessary to augment rather than restore the functions fully.

Now a new study by researchers at Duke University suggests that 'Terminator Vision' could one day be a reality for some, after successful experiments on rats found increased learning and perception skills when prosthetics were fitted into their brains. Eric Thomsen, Rafael Carra and Miguel Nicolelis trained a cohort of six rats on a simple visual discrimination task: Rats were placed in a circular chamber that had three reward ports. On each trial, a visible LED was activated in a particular port and rats who poked their noses in the correct port were rewarded with a drink of water. After three weeks of training, the rats managed to be 70% correct on average. They were then fitted with an infrared detector as well as implants into the whisker region of the S1 cortex, a touch-sensitive area of the parietal lobe which is largely responsible for spatial navigation.

Bearing in mind that rats are normally blind to infrared light (as are we), it would be worth putting them back into the chamber to see if they could perform the task as well as before. As for how it works: The IR detector transmits electrical impulses directly into the rats' S1 cortex if the rat moved towards the infrared light, which were increased as the rats moved closer or oriented their heads in the light's direction. And here's where it gets interesting: Not only did the rats perform better on the task as before by finding the infrared lights with greater accuracy, but other interesting behaviour was noticed too. Namely, "they learned to actively forage through the behaviour chamber, sweeping the IR sensor on their heads back and forth to sample their IR world".

Read that again: They learned to incorporate their new IR vision relatively quickly into their normal sensory range as a type of "IR vision". And they did this by taking the time to re-orient themselves and make sense of their surroundings. They didn't immediately associate the new stimulation with the task but just assumed it was "something new" for them, scratching their faces in response to the electrical microstimulation. Isn't that awesome?!

It is possible that criticism of this study may cite 'training effects', that the rats had an idea of what to do in the experimental condition because of their previous training with the LED light. But this can be rebutted by how the rats learned to navigate their way with normally invisible infrared light purely by their movement and guidance, what to speak of more additional difficulty layers being added to the original task which were relatively aced by the rats (above 93%) in the IR condition.

In conclusion, the researchers felt that the rats learned to treat microstimulation as an external stimulus originating in the surrounding environment rather than within their body, which is an interesting finding that reflects the understanding of vision in humans too. Even though we have innate eyeballs that look 'out', vision occurs by light entering 'into' the eye. So even though the rats' brains were being stimulated in (correct) response to invisible infrared light, they appeared to act as if the light was shining at them in order to attract them. It was beyond the scope of this study, however, to determine if the rats thought of microstimulation as a separate sense, although the researchers suggest that a potential application of this technology could be in developing motor neuroprostheses - artificial(?) limbs that would be improved in terms of reaction times and accuracy because of the closed-loop bidirectional interaction that the technology can offer.

And of course, a plethora of possibilities that offer the curious possibility of sensory augmentation, the potential to expand sensory range to see forms of light that are normally invisible to human eyes. So it is entirely possible for Terminator Vision to emerge one day.

UPDATE Feb 13th: Coverage of this paper at Scientific American has fallen into the trap of describing the augmented vision as a "sixth sense", oddly proclaiming it as a seventh sense too. Minor but amusing errors.

UPDATE Feb 14th: Wow, now BBC coverage has also fallen into the "sixth sense" trap. Makes you wonder as to who has actually read the paper.

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Thomson E.E., Carra R. & Nicolelis M.A.L. (2013). Perceiving invisible light through a somatosensory cortical prosthesis, Nature Communications, 4 1482. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2497

Primitive Physick - John Wesley

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:21:00 +0000

Christian theologian and cleric, John Wesley (1703-1791), who is credited with founding the Methodist denomination of Christianity, and due to whose teachings the Methodists were leading activists in the social issues of their day such as prison reform and abolitionism, is not necessarily someone we would expect to write a book detailing treatments for all sorts of medical ailments. But this is what he did in a relatively little-known work of his entitled Primitive Physick; Or An Easy And Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases.

It is notable, however, that during his lifetime Wesley was considered a quack, both spiritually and medically (Madden, 2007). He led an itinerant lifestyle in order to preach as he never had his own church, and it is thought that the prevalence of disease as well as the prevalence and tendency of quacks who combined their treatments with theology were among the reasons behind writing this book.

According to Wesley, the word 'primitive' was akin to 'original' or 'early', and 'physic' was a general term for health care, especially “how to live in accordance with nature by proper diet and exercise, both to restore health and to retain it,” (Maddox, 2007). Taken together, Primitive Physick was a book that would be classed as holistic or alternative medicine today.

In Ingram's Patterns Of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader, it is noted that Wesley saw disease as a consequence of the Fall and thus regarded mankind as primarily responsible for its own sufferings. Wesley says as much in his preface:

"When man came first out of the hands of the Great Creator, clothed in body, as well as in soul, with immortality and incorruption, there was no place for physic, or the art of healing. As he knew no sin, he knew no pain, no sickness, weakness, or bodily disorder ... But since man rebelled against the Sovereign of heaven and earth, how entirely is the scene changed! ... The seeds of wickedness and pain, of sickness and death, are now lodged in our inmost substance; whence a thousand disorders continually spring, even without the aid of external violence."

Wesley covered the common illnesses of his day in alphabetical order; mental illnesses, curiously, are not distinguished from physical ailments, as in Wesley's view both are derived from man's first disobedience. They are thus stigmatised no more than other illnesses.

What follows are Wesley's interesting and amusing remedies for various types of psychological conditions, especially the mania associated with rabies:

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44. An Hysteric Cholic.

164. Mrs. Watts, by using the cold bath two and twenty times in a month, was entirely cured of an hysteric cholic, fits, and convulsive motions, continual sweatings and vomiting, wandering pains in her limbs and head, with total loss of appetite.

165. In the fit, half a pint of water with a little wheat-flour in it, and a spoonful of vinegar.

166. Or of warm lemonade: tried.

167. Or, take 20, 30, or 40 drops of balsam of peru on fine sugar: if need be, take this twice or thrice a day:

168. Or, in extremity, boil three ounces of Burdock-seed in water, which give as a clyster:
169. Or, twenty drops of laudanum, in any proper clyster, which gives instant ease.

45. A Nervous Cholic.

170. Use the cold-bath daily for three or four weeks.

171. Or, take quicksilver and acqua sulphurata daily for a month.

136. Hypochondriac and Hysteric Disorders.

426. Use cold bathing:

427. Or, take an ounce of quicksilver every morning, and ten drops of Elixir of Vitriol in the afternoon, in a glass of cold water.

151. Lunacy.

468. Give a decoction of agrimony four times a day:
469. Or, rub the head several times a day with vinegar, in which ground-ivy leaves have been infused:
470. Or, daily take an ounce of distilled vinegar:
471. Or, boil juice of ground-ivy with sweet oil and white wine into an ointment. Shave the head, anoint it therewith, and chafe it every other day for three weeks. Bruise also the leaves and bind them on the head, and give three spoonfuls of the juice warm every morning.
472. Or, be elecrified: tried.

152. Raging Madness.

473. Apply to the head, cloths dipt in cold water:
474. Or, set the patient with his head under a great water-fall, as long as his strength will bear: or, pour water on his head out of a tea-kettle:
475. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month:
476. Or, nothing but bread and milk: tried.

153. Bite of a Mad Dog.

477. Plunge into cold water daily for twenty days, and keep as long under as possible. This has cured, even after the hydrophobia was begun.
478. Or, mix ashes of trefoil with hog's-lard, and anoint the part as soon as possible. Repeat it twice or thrice at six hours distance. This has cured many: and particularly a dog bit on the nose by a mad dog.
479. Or, mix a pound of salt, with a quart of water. Squeeze, bathe, and wash the wound with this for an hour. Then bind some salt upon it for twelve hours.
N.B. The Author of this receipt was bit six times by mad dogs, and always cured himself by this means.
480. Or, mix powdered liver-wort, four drachms: black pepper, two drachms. Divide this into four parts, and take one in warm milk for four mornings, fasting. Dr. Mead affirms he never knew this to fail: but it has sometimes failed.
481. Or, take two or three spoonfuls of ribwort, morning and evening, as soon as possible after the bite. Repeat this for two or three changes of the moon. It has not been known to fail.
482. Immediately consult an honest physician.

References:

Ingram, Allan. Patterns of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.

Madden, Deborah. 'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine': Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley's Primitive Physic (Amsterdam/New York: Rodolpi, 2007).

Maddox, Randy. “John Wesley on Holistic Health and Healing” in Methodist History, 46:1 (October 2007), 4-33.

Lead Astray

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 18:15:00 +0000

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A recent and interesting article at the investigative MotherJones magazine discusses links between crime rates and the prevalence of lead emissions, touting the latter as America's Real Criminal Element. A follow-up also noted interesting connections involving lead paint.

Kevin Drum does a good job of convincing readers that, rather than political measures being responsible for falling crime rates, the gradual decline of crack use or increased incarcerations, the rather counterintuitive proposal that said rates have dropped due to the gradual withdrawal of leaded petrol. According to Drum, there is a

"growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities."

And among the more important neurologically relevant observations, Drum made special note of a PLOS study; Cecil et. al (2008) found that lead exposure had in fact contributed to reduced/decreased myelination. Myelination refers to the process by which neurons are surrounded by a layer or sheath of myelin, a type of fat that both insulates the neuron and allows for faster transmission and complex communications, and accounts for the composition of the brain's "white matter". Lead exposure was to be a factor in causing a degrading alteration in myelin organisation. In other words, less myelination leads to less co-ordination and slower connections as the neurons will not be communicating effectively.

The same study used MRI-scanning to determine the effect of lead poisoning on the whole brain. Neuronal loss was found in various areas such as the cognitive and emotional areas of the anterior cingulate cortex, regions associated with "general intellectual and executive functioning, antisocial behaviors, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)". Poor scores were found in physical movement tests too, but by far the largest and most serious finding related to a permanent reduction in grey matter, specifically in the medial part of the pre-frontal cortex. According to one of the researchers, Kim Cecil, lead poisoning affected precisely the brain areas "that make us most human", as the pre-frontal cortex is associated with the brain's executive functions; emotion regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning and mental flexibility.

These findings certainly deserve attention although, as Deborah Blum (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and science writer) noted in her response, the research has been covered before, both by Drum (Jan 2012) and other authors/publications, including the Washington Post back in 2007. What makes this article different is Drum's seeming enthusiasm to attribute up to 90% of crime to lead exposure and poisoning. As Blum notes,

"does it trump drugs, poverty, urban gang warfare, education, and other such issues to the point that they account for a bare ten percent of the crime statistics? That's a harder case to make, partly because as Drum himself notes correlation is not causation: the fact, for instance, that falling crime follows a pattern of falling lead exposure doesn't rule out many other influences."

Blum also brings a calming elucidation to the worrying neuroscientific findings as well, stating that, while it is true that lead exposure may lead to significant neurological deficits, it is much more complicated than as simply thought. For instance, reduced myelination can also be down to malnutrition and other environmental factors, and also that research into the situation hasn't yet produced any indication of a clear biological pathway through which exposure to lead can influence individuals to become antisocial and criminal.

As well as indicating other sources of lead that could cause concern, there is agreement that increasing evidence does point to lead as being a significant threat to health and that further research could increase the knowledge and evidence base through which solutions can be found.

If you have time, go take a look at Drum's article. Aside from the '90%' issue (that has since been corrected) it is littered with links to research, making it an edifying and extremely interesting read.

Seeing God In The Third Millenium

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 04:08:00 +0000

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

Various responses to Eben Alexander's NDE account were published, but I have here collected those responses by esteemed neuroscientists and neurologists, who present an effective rebuttal of the account as well as question the validity of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a genuine medical and neurological phenomenon. We have seen Alexander's own account as well as two responses from Dr. Sam Harris, and now we will hear from Professor Oliver Sacks.
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by Oliver Sacks, Dec. 12, 2012.

How the brain creates out-of-body experiences and religious epiphanies.

There are many carefully documented accounts in the medical literature of intense, life-altering religious experience in epileptic seizures. Hallucinations of overwhelming intensity, sometimes accompanied by a sense of bliss and a strong feeling of the numinous, can occur especially with the so-called "ecstatic" seizures that may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. Though such seizures may be brief, they can lead to a fundamental reorientation, a metanoia, in one's life. Fyodor Dostoevsky was prone to such seizures and described many of them, including this:

"The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don't remember anything else. You all, healthy people ... can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second before our fit. ... I don't know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one."

A century later, Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard published a detailed report in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry of a bus conductor who had a sudden feeling of elation while collecting fares. They wrote:

"He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt he was literally in Heaven. He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven. ... He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days. Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences and he continued to believe in their validity. [Three years later] following three seizures on three successive days, he became elated again. He stated that his mind had "cleared." ... During this episode he lost his faith."

He now no longer believed in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, or in the divinity of Christ. This second conversion -- to atheism -- carried the same excitement and revelatory quality as the original religious conversion.

More recently, Orrin Devinsky and his colleagues have been able to make video EEG recordings in patients who are having such seizures, and have observed an exact synchronization of the epiphany with a spike in epileptic activity in the temporal lobes (more commonly the right temporal lobe).

"I was flying forwards, bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.'"

Ecstatic seizures are rare -- they only occur in something like 1 or 2 percent of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. But the last half century has seen an enormous increase in the prevalence of other states sometimes permeated by religious joy and awe, "heavenly" visions and voices, and, not infrequently, religious conversion or metanoia. Among these are out-of-body experiences (OBEs), which are more common now that more patients can be brought back to life from serious cardiac arrests and the like -- and much more elaborate and numinous experiences called near-death experiences (NDEs).

Both OBEs and NDEs, which occur in waking but often profoundly altered states of consciousness, cause hallucinations so vivid and compelling that those who experience them may deny the term hallucination, and insist on their reality. And the fact that there are marked similarities in individual descriptions is taken by some to indicate their objective "reality."

But the fundamental reason that hallucinations -- whatever their cause or modality -- seem so real is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.

In OBEs, subjects feel that they have left their bodies -- they seem to be floating in midair, or in a corner of the room, looking down on their vacated bodies from a distance. The experience may be felt as blissful, terrifying, or neutral. But its extraordinary nature -- the apparent separation of "spirit" from body, imprints it indelibly on the mind and may be taken by some people as evidence of an immaterial soul -- proof that consciousness, personality, and identity can exist independently of the body and even survive bodily death.

Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations -- normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one's body, from the perspective of one's own eyes, one's head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment -- video goggles, mannequins, rubber arms, etc. -- to confuse one's visual input and one's proprioceptive input and create an uncanny sense of disembodiedness.

"Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience."

A number of medical conditions can lead to OBEs -- cardiac arrest or arrhythmias, or a sudden lowering of blood pressure or blood sugar, often combined with anxiety or illness. I know of some patients who have experienced OBEs during difficult childbirths, and others who have had them in association with narcolepsy or sleep paralysis. Fighter pilots subjected to high G-forces in flight (or sometimes in training centrifuges) have reported OBEs as well as much more elaborate states of consciousness that resemble the near-death experience.

The near-death experience usually goes through a sequence of characteristic stages. One seems to be moving effortlessly and blissfully along a dark corridor or tunnel towards a wonderful "living" light -- often interpreted as Heaven or the boundary between life and death. There may be a vision of friends and relatives welcoming one to the other side, and there may be a a rapid yet extremely detailed series of memories of one's life -- a lightning autobiography. The return to one's body may be abrupt, as when, for example, the beat is restored to an arrested heart. Or it may be more gradual, as when one emerges from a coma.

Not infrequently, an OBE turns into an NDE -- as happened with Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who told me how he had been struck by lightning. He gave me a vivid account of what then followed, as I wrote in Musicophilia:

"I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, 'Oh shit, I'm dead.' I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman -- she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me -- position herself over my body, give it CPR. . . . I floated up the stairs -- my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me . . . pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up . . . there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, 'This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had' -- SLAM! I was back."

Dr. Cicoria had some memory problems for a month or so after this, but he was able to resume his practice as an orthopedic surgeon. Yet he was, as he put it, "a changed man." Previously he had no particular interest in music, but now he was seized by an overwhelming desire to listen to classical music, especially Chopin. He bought a piano and started to play obsessively and to compose. He was convinced that the entire episode -- being struck by lightning, having a transcendent vision, then being resuscitated and gifted so that he could bring music to the world, was part of a divine plan.

Cicoria has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and he also felt that his sudden accession of spirituality and musicality must have gone with changes in his brain -- changes which we might be able to clarify, perhaps, with neuroimaging. He saw no contradiction between religion and neurology -- if God works on a man, or in a man, Cicoria felt, He would do so via the nervous system, via parts of the brain specialized, or potentially specializable, for spiritual feeling and belief.

Cicoria's reasonable and (one might say) scientific attitude to his own spiritual conversion is in marked contrast to that of another surgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, who describes, in his recent book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, a detailed and complex NDE which occurred while he spent seven days in a coma caused by meningitis. During his NDE, he writes, he passed through the bright light -- the boundary between life and death -- to find himself in an idyllic and beautiful meadow (which he realized was Heaven) where he met a beautiful but unknown woman who conveyed various messages to him telepathically. Advancing farther into the afterlife, he felt the ever-more-embracing presence of God. Following this experience, Alexander became something of an evangelist, wanting to spread the good news, that heaven really exists.

Alexander makes much of his experience as a neurosurgeon and an expert on the workings of the brain. He provides an appendix to his book detailing "Neuroscientific Hypotheses I considered to explain my experience" -- but all of these he dismisses as inapplicable in his own case because, he insists, his cerebral cortex was completely shut down during the coma, precluding the possibility of any conscious experience.

"To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific -- it is antiscientific."

Yet his NDE was rich in visual and auditory detail, as many such hallucinations are. He is puzzled by this, since such sensory details are normally produced by the cortex. Nonetheless, his consciousness had journeyed into the blissful, ineffable realm of the afterlife--a journey which he felt lasted for most of the time he lay in coma. Thus, he proposes, his essential self, his "soul," did not need a cerebral cortex, or indeed any material basis whatever.

It is not so easy, however, to dismiss neurological processes. Dr. Alexander presents himself as emerging from his coma suddenly: "My eyes opened ... my brain ... had just kicked back to life." But one almost always emerges gradually from coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur.

Alexander insists that his journey, which subjectively lasted for days, could not have occurred except while he was deep in coma. But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others, that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in 20 or 30 seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander's case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.

To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific -- it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.

Kevin Nelson, a neurologist at the University of Kentucky, has studied the neural basis of NDEs and other forms of "deep" hallucinating for many decades. In 2011, he published a wise and careful book about his research, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience.

Nelson feels that the "dark tunnel" described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the "bright light" represents a flow of visual excitation from the brainstem, through visual relay stations, to the visual cortex (the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital or PGO pathway).

Simpler perceptual hallucinations -- of patterns, animals, people, landscapes, music, etc. -- as one may get in a variety of conditions (blindness, deafness, epilepsy, migraine, sensory deprivation, etc.) do not usually involve profound changes in consciousness, and while very startling, are nearly always recognized as hallucinations. It is different with the very complex hallucinations of ecstatic seizures or NDEs -- which are often taken to be veridical, truth-telling and often life-transforming revelations of a spiritual universe, and perhaps of a spiritual destiny or mission.

"Even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith."

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. For those who are religiously inclined, an NDE may seem to offer "proof of heaven," as Eben Alexander puts it.

Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route -- the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When God Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith. She joined an evangelical community as a participant-observer, immersing herself in particular in their disciplines of prayer and visualization -- imagining in ever-richer, more concrete detail the figures and events depicted in the Bible. Congregants, she writes:

"Practice seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching in the mind's eye. They give these imagined experiences the sensory vividness associated with the memories of real events. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them."

Sooner or later, with this intensive practice, for some of the congregants, the mind may leap from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant hears God, sees God, feels God walking beside them. These yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception, and this is because they activate the perceptual systems of the brain, as all hallucinations do. These visions, voices, and feelings of "presence" are accompanied by intense emotion -- emotions of joy, peace, awe, revelation. Some evangelicals may have many such experiences; others only a single one -- but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith. (For those who are not religiously inclined, such experiences may occur with meditation or intense concentration on an artistic or intellectual or emotional plane, whether this is falling in love or listening to Bach, observing the intricacies of a fern, or cracking a scientific problem.)

In the last decade or two, there has been increasingly active research in the field of "spiritual neurosciences." There are special difficulties in this research, for religious experiences cannot be summoned at will; they come, if at all, in their own time and way -- the religious would say in God's time and way. Nonetheless, researchers have been able to demonstrate physiological changes not only in pathological states like seizures, OBEs, and NDEs, but also in positive states like prayer and meditation. Typically these changes are quite widespread, involving not only primary sensory areas in the brain, but limbic (emotional) systems, hippocampal (memory) systems, and the prefrontal cortex, where intentionality and judgement reside.

Hallucinations, whether revelatory or banal, are not of supernatural origin; they are part of the normal range of human consciousness and experience. This is not to say that they cannot play a part in the spiritual life, or have great meaning for an individual. Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, hallucinations cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain's power to create them.

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

Science on the Brink of Death

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:37:00 +0000

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

Various responses to Eben Alexander's NDE account were published, but I have here collected those responses by esteemed neuroscientists and neurologists, who present an effective rebuttal of the account as well as question the validity of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a genuine medical and neurological phenomenon. We have seen Alexander's own account, now we will read the second of two responses from Dr. Sam Harris and one from Professor Oliver Sacks.
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by Sam Harris.

One cannot travel far in spiritual circles without meeting people who are fascinated by the “near-death experience” (NDE). The phenomenon has been described as follows:

"Frequently recurring features include feelings of peace and joy; a sense of being out of one’s body and watching events going on around one’s body and, occasionally, at some distant physical location; a cessation of pain; seeing a dark tunnel or void; seeing an unusually bright light, sometimes experienced as a “Being of Light” that radiates love and may speak or otherwise communicate with the person; encountering other beings, often deceased persons whom the experiencer recognizes; experiencing a revival of memories or even a full life review, sometimes accompanied by feelings of judgment; seeing some “other realm,” often of great beauty; sensing a barrier or border beyond which the person cannot go; and returning to the body, often reluctantly."

- E.F. Kelly et al., Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, p. 372.

Such accounts have led many people to believe that consciousness must be independent of the brain. Unfortunately, these experiences vary across cultures, and no single feature is common to them all. One would think that if a nonphysical domain were truly being explored, some universal characteristics would stand out. Hindus and Christians would not substantially disagree—and one certainly wouldn’t expect the after-death state of South Indians to diverge from that of North Indians, as has been reported.⁠ It should also trouble NDE enthusiasts that only 10−20 percent of people who approach clinical death recall having any experience at all.⁠

However, the deepest problem with drawing sweeping conclusions from the NDE is that those who have had one and subsequently talked about it did not actually die. In fact, many appear to have been in no real danger of dying. And those who have reported leaving their bodies during a true medical emergency—after cardiac arrest, for instance—did not suffer the complete loss of brain activity. Even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience. In such cases, there is generally no way to establish that the NDE occurred while the brain was offline.

Many students of the NDE claim that certain people have left their bodies and perceived the commotion surrounding their near death—the efforts of hospital staff to resuscitate them, details of surgery, the behavior of family members, etc. Certain subjects even say that they have learned facts while traveling beyond their bodies that would otherwise have been impossible to know—for instance, a secret told by a dead relative, the truth of which was later confirmed. Of course, reports of this kind seem especially vulnerable to self-deception, if not conscious fraud. There is another problem, however: Even if true, such phenomena might suggest only that the human mind possesses powers of extrasensory perception (e.g. clairvoyance or telepathy). This would be a very important discovery, but it wouldn’t demonstrate the survival of death. Why? Because unless we could know that a subject’s brain was not functioning when these impressions were formed, the involvement of the brain must be presumed.⁠

What is needed to establish the mind’s independence from the brain is a case in which a person has an experience —of anything— without associated brain activity. From time to time, someone will claim that a specific NDE meets this criterion. One of the most celebrated cases in the literature involves a woman, Pam Reynolds, who underwent a procedure known as “hypothermic cardiac arrest,” in which her core body temperature was brought down to 60 degrees, her heart was stopped, and blood flow to her brain was suspended so that a large aneurysm in her basilar artery could be surgically repaired. Reynolds reports having had a classic NDE, complete with an awareness of the details of her surgery. Her story has several problems, however. The events in the world that Reynolds reports having perceived during her NDE occurred either before she was “clinically dead” or after blood circulation had been restored to her brain. In other words, despite the extraordinary details of the procedure, we have every reason to believe that Reynolds’s brain was functioning when she had her experiences. The case also wasn’t published until several years after it occurred, and its author, Dr. Michael Sabom, is a born-again Christian who had been working for decades to substantiate the otherworldly significance of the NDE. The possibility that experimenter bias, witness tampering, and false memories intruded into this best-of-all-recorded cases is excruciatingly obvious.

The latest NDE to receive wide acclaim was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine. The great novelty of this case is that its subject, Dr. Eben Alexander, is a neurosurgeon who we might presume is competent to judge the scientific significance of his experience. His book on the subject, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, has landed atop the New York Times paperback best-seller list. As it happens, it displaced one of the best-selling books of the past decade, Heaven Is for Real—which is yet another account of the afterlife, based on the near-death adventures of a 4-year-old boy. Unsurprisingly, the two books offer incompatible views of what life is like beyond the prison of the brain. (As colorful as his account is, Alexander neglects to tell us that Jesus rides a rainbow-colored horse or that the souls of dead children must still do homework in heaven.)

Having now read Alexander’s book, I can say that it is every bit as remarkable as his Newsweek cover article suggested it would be. Unfortunately, it is not remarkable in the way that its author believes. I find that my original criticism of Alexander’s thinking can stand without revision.¹ However, as he provides further “proof” of heaven in his book, there is more to say about the man’s mischief here on earth. There is also a rumor circulating online that, after attacking Alexander from the safety of my blog, I have refused to debate him in public. This is untrue. I merely declined the privilege of appearing with him on a parapsychology podcast, in the company of an irritating and unscrupulous host. I would be happy to have a public discussion with Alexander, should it ever seem worth doing.

As I wrote in my original article, the enthusiastic reception that Alexander is now enjoying suggests a general confusion about the nature of scientific authority. And much of the criticism I’ve received for dismissing his account has predictably focused on what appear to be the man’s impeccable scientific credentials. Certain readers feel that I have moved the goalposts: You see, even the testimony of a Harvard neurosurgeon isn’t good enough for a dogmatic, materialistic, fundamentalist atheist like Harris! And many people found the invidious distinction between a “neurosurgeon” and a “neuroscientist” (drawn in a comment by Mark Cohen in my last article) to be somewhat flabbergasting.

When debating the validity of evidence and arguments, the point is never that one person’s credentials trump another’s. Credentials just offer a rough indication of what a person is likely to know—or should know. If Alexander were drawing reasonable scientific conclusions from his experience, he wouldn’t need to be a neuroscientist to be taken seriously; he could be a philosopher—or a coal miner. But he simply isn’t thinking like a scientist—and so not even a string of Nobel prizes would shield him from criticism.

However, there are general differences between neurosurgeons and neuroscientists that might explain some of Alexander’s errors. The distinction in expertise is very easy to see when viewed from the other side: If the average neuroscientist were handed a drill and a scalpel and told to operate on a living person’s brain, the result would be horrific. From a scientific point of view, Alexander’s performance has been no prettier. He has surely killed the patient (in fact, he may have helped kill Newsweek, which announced that it would no longer publish a print edition immediately after his article ran), but the man won’t stop drilling. Many of his errors are glaring but immaterial: In his book, for instance, he understates the number of neurons in the human brain by a factor of 10. But others are absolutely damning to his case. Whatever his qualifications on paper, Alexander’s evangelizing about his experience in coma is so devoid of intellectual sobriety, not to mention rigor, that I would see no reason to engage with it—apart from the fact that his book seems destined to be read and believed by millions of people.

There are two paths toward establishing the scientific significance of the NDE: The first would be to show that a person’s brain was dead or otherwise inactive during the time he had an experience (whether veridical or not). The second would be to demonstrate that the subject had acquired knowledge about the world that could be explained only by the mind’s being independent of the brain (but again, it is hard to see how this can be convincingly done in the presence of brain activity).

In his Newsweek article, Alexander sought to travel the first path. Hence, his entire account hinged on the assertion that his cortex was “completely shut down” while he was seeing angels in heaven. Unfortunately, the evidence he has offered in support of this claim—in the article, in a subsequent response to my criticism of it, in his book, and in multiple interviews—suggests that he doesn’t understand what would constitute compelling evidence of cortical inactivity. The proof he offers is either fallacious (CT scans do not detect brain activity) or irrelevant (it does not matter, even slightly, that his form of meningitis was “astronomically rare”)—and no combination of fallacy and irrelevancy adds up to sound science. The impediment to taking Alexander’s claims seriously can be simply stated: There is absolutely no reason to believe that his cerebral cortex was inactive at the time he had his experience of the afterlife. The fact that Alexander thinks he has demonstrated otherwise—by continually emphasizing how sick he was, the infrequency of E. coli meningitis, and the ugliness of his initial CT scan—suggests a deliberate disregard of the most plausible interpretation of his experience. It is far more likely that some of his cortex was functioning, despite the profundity of his illness, than that he is justified in making the following claim:

"My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us, about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going."

The very fact that Alexander remembers his NDE suggests that the cortical and subcortical structures necessary for memory formation were active at the time. How else could he recall the experience?

It would not surprise me, in fact, if Alexander were to claim that his memories are stored outside his brain—presumably somewhere between Lynchburg, Virginia, and heaven. Given that he is committed to proving the mind’s nonphysical basis, he holds a peculiar view of the brain’s operation:

"[The brain] is a reducing valve or filter, shifting the larger, nonphysical consciousness that we possess in the nonphysical worlds down into a more limited capacity for the duration of our mortal lives."

There are some obvious problems with this—which anyone disposed to think like a neuroscientist would see. If the brain merely serves to limit human experience and understanding, one would expect most forms of brain damage to unmask extraordinary scientific, artistic, and spiritual insights—and, provided that a person’s language centers could be spared, the graver the injury the better. A few hammer blows or a well-placed bullet should render a person of even the shallowest intellect a spiritual genius. Is this the world we are living in?²

In his book, Alexander also attempts to take the second path of proof—alleging that his NDE disclosed facts that could be explained only by the reality of life beyond the body. Most of these truths must be left to scientists of some future century to explore—for although his collision with the Mind of God seems to have fully slaked Alexander’s scientific curiosity, it apparently produced few insights that can be rendered in human speech. This puts the man in a difficult position as an educator:

"I saw the abundance of life throughout countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond that of humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly. They cannot be known, or understood, from lower dimensional space. Cause and effect exist in these higher realms, but outside our earthly conception of them. The world of time and space in which we move in this terrestrial realm is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds…. The knowledge given to me was not “taught” in the way that a history lesson or math theorem would be. Insights happened directly, rather than needing to be coaxed and absorbed. Knowledge was stored without memorization, instantly and for good. It didn’t fade, like ordinary information does, and to this day I still possess all of it, much more clearly than I possess the information that I gained over all my years in school."

Alexander claims undiminished knowledge of all this, and yet the only specifics he can produce on the page are as vapid as any ever published. And I suspect it is no accident that they have a distinctly Christian flavor. Here, according to Alexander, are the deepest truths he brought back to our world:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong."

Not only will scientists be underwhelmed by these revelations, but Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta will find them astonishingly puerile. And the fact that Alexander returned from “the Core” of a loving cosmos only to piously assert the Christian line on evil and free will (“Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible…”) renders the overall picture of his religious provincialism fairly indelible.

Happily, you do not need to read Alexander’s book to see him present what he considers the most compelling part of his case. You need only spend six minutes of your life in this world watching the following video:

Watch the video to the end. True, it will bring you six minutes closer to meeting your maker, but it will also teach you something about the limits of intellectual honesty. The footage shows Alexander responding to a question from Raymond Moody (the man who coined the term “near-death experience”). I am quite sure that I’ve never seen a scientist speak in a manner more suggestive of wishful thinking. If self-deception were an Olympic sport, this is how our most gifted athletes would appear when they were in peak condition.

It should also be clear that the knowledge of the afterlife that Alexander claims to possess depends upon some extraordinarily dubious methods of verification. While in his coma, he saw a beautiful girl riding beside him on the wing of a butterfly. We learn in his book that he developed his recollection of this experience over a period of months — writing, thinking about it, and mining it for new details. It would be hard to think of a better way to engineer a distortion of memory.

As you will know from watching the video, Alexander had a biological sister he never met, who died some years before his coma. Seeing her picture for the first time after his recovery, he judged this woman to be the girl who had joined him for the butterfly ride. He sought further confirmation of this by speaking with his biological family, from whom he learned that his dead sister had, indeed, always been “very loving.” QED.

As I said in my original response to his Newsweek article, I have spent much of my life studying and even seeking experiences of the kind Alexander describes. I haven’t contracted meningitis, thankfully, nor have I had an NDE, but I have experienced many phenomena that traditionally lead people to believe in the supernatural.

For instance, I once had an opportunity to study with the great Tibetan lama Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche in Nepal. Before making the trip, I had a dream in which he seemed to give me teachings about the nature of the mind. This dream struck me as interesting for two reasons: (1) The teachings I received were novel, useful, and convergent with what I later understood to be true; and (2) I had never met Khyentse Rinpoche, nor was I aware of having seen a photograph of him. This preceded my access to the Internet by at least five years, so the belief that I had never seen his picture was more plausible than it would be now. I also recall that I had no easy way of finding a picture of him for the sake of comparison. But because I was about to meet the man himself, it seemed that I would be able to confirm whether it had really been him in my dream.

First, the teachings: The lama in my dream began by asking who I was. I responded by telling him my name. Apparently, this wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

“Who are you?” he said again. He was now staring fixedly into my eyes and pointing at my face with an outstretched finger. I did not know what to say.

“Who are you?” he said again, continuing to point.

“Who are you?” he said a final time, but here he suddenly shifted his gaze and pointing finger, as though he were now addressing someone just to my left. The effect was quite startling, because I knew (insofar as one can be said to know anything in a dream) that we were alone. The lama was obviously pointing to someone who wasn’t there, and I suddenly noticed what I would later come to consider an important truth about the nature of the mind: Subjectively speaking, there is only consciousness and its contents; there is no inner self who is conscious. The feeling of being the experiencer of your experience, rather than identical to the totality of experience, is an illusion. The lama in my dream seemed to dissect this very feeling of being a self and, for a brief moment, removed it from my mind. I awoke convinced that I had glimpsed something quite profound.

After traveling to Nepal and encountering the arresting figure of Khyentse Rinpoche instructing hundreds of monks from atop a brocade throne, I was struck by the sense that he really did resemble the man in my dream. Even more apparent, however, was the fact that I couldn’t know whether this impression was accurate. Clearly, it would have been more fun to believe that something magical had occurred and that I had been singled out for some sort of transpersonal initiation—but the allure of this belief suggested only that the bar for proof should be raised rather than lowered. And even though I had no formal scientific training at that point, I knew that human memory is unreliable under conditions of this kind. How much stock could I put in the feeling of familiarity? Was I accurately recalling the face of a man I had met in a dream, or was I engaged in a creative reconstruction of it? If nothing else, the experience of déjà vu proves that one’s sense of having experienced something previously can jump the tracks of genuine recollection. My travels in spiritual circles had also brought me into contact with many people who seemed all too eager to deceive themselves about experiences of this kind, and I did not wish to emulate them. Given these considerations, I did not believe that Khyentse Rinpoche had really appeared in my dream. And I certainly would never have been tempted to use this experience as conclusive proof of the supernatural.⁠

I invite the reader to compare this attitude to the one that Dr. Eben Alexander will likely exhibit before crowds of credulous people for the rest of his life. The structure of our experiences was similar—we were each given an opportunity to compare a face remembered from a dream/vision with a person (or photo) in the physical world. I realized that the task was hopeless. Alexander believes that he has made the greatest discovery in the history of science.

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1. Everything of substance in Alexander’s account hinges on his assertion that his cortex was shut down while he enjoyed a “hyper-real” experience of the afterlife. It seems, however, that it is easy for many readers to miss this. For instance, I’ve heard from several people who think that Alexander successfully ruled out the hypothesis that a spike in the neurotransmitter DMT could explain his NDE. But he did so only by observing that DMT would require a functioning cortex upon which to act, whereas his cortex “wasn’t available to be affected.” But no neurophysiological account of his experience could survive this treatment—because Alexander is asking us to stipulate that his cortex was functionally dead. As I have said, this is an incredible claim, rendered even less plausible by the fact that he does not appear to understand what sort of evidence would make it plausible.

2. The phrase “reducing valve” appears to come from Aldous Huxley in his Doors of Perception, but the idea that the brain is a filter (rather than the origin) of mind goes back at least as far as Henri Bergson and William James. Both Bergson and James suggested that the purpose of the brain might be to limit conscious experience to a range of perceptions and mental states compatible with survival in this world. When the barrier of the brain is breached—whether partially, through mystical experience, or fully, upon the death of the body—a wider range of conscious states and cosmic understandings become available.

However, as I said above, if the brain were merely a filter, damaging it should reliably increase cognition. Some readers objected to this, suggesting that the brain could be a filter that functions like a radio—a receiver of conscious states, rather than a mere barrier to them. At first glance, this would appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease: If one smashes a radio with a hammer, it no longer functions properly.

There is problem with this metaphor, however: Those who employ it forget that we are the music, not the radio. If the brain is truly a receiver of conscious states, it should be impossible to diminish a person’s experience of the cosmos by damaging his brain. He may seem unconscious from the outside—like a broken radio—but, subjectively speaking, the music plays on.

This is not how the mind works. Specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways, but there is no reason to think that the pervasive destruction of the cortex can leave the mind unaffected (much less improved). For instance, medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma. Similarly, the psychedelic drug psilocybin seems to reduce activity in brain areas responsible self-representation. It would be unsurprising if this accounted for the experience of self-transcendence that is often associated with this drug. But this does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the brain entirely would yield increased awareness of spiritual realities.

If Alexander’s account is correct, strategically damaging the brain should be the most reliable method of personal empowerment and spiritual practice available to us. In almost every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. Surely there must be a way of enjoying the benefits of this brain-reduction therapy while maintaining an ability to function in the physical world. He’s the neurosurgeon: I wonder which regions of his brain Alexander would remove first.

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

This Must Be Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:29:00 +0000

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

Various responses to Eben Alexander's NDE account were published, but I have here collected those responses by esteemed neuroscientists and neurologists, who present an effective rebuttal of the account as well as question the validity of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a genuine medical and neurological phenomenon. We have seen Alexander's own account, now we will read the first of two responses from Dr. Sam Harris and one from Professor Oliver Sacks.
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by Sam Harris

Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet”—for, as the doctor writes, “What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.”

Well, I intend to spend the rest of the morning sparing him the effort. Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover alone reveals the abasement and desperation of our journalism, the intellectual bankruptcy and resultant tenacity of faith-based religion, and our ubiquitous confusion about the nature of scientific authority. The article is the modern equivalent of a 14th-century woodcut depicting the work of alchemists, inquisitors, Crusaders, and fortune-tellers. I hope our descendants understand that at least some of us were blushing.

As many of you know, I am interested in “spiritual” experiences of the sort Alexander reports. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. Indeed, I have had similar experiences myself in meditation, in lucid dreams (even while meditating in a lucid dream), and through the use of various psychedelics (in times gone by). I know that astonishing changes in the contents of consciousness are possible and can be psychologically transformative.

And, unlike many neuroscientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are, of course, very good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind obviously is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were, in fact, irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos, or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs, requires that I deny this. So, although I am an atheist who can be expected to be unforgiving of religious dogma, I am not reflexively hostile to claims of the sort Alexander has made. In principle, my mind is open. (It really is.)

But Alexander’s account is so bad—his reasoning so lazy and tendentious—that it would be beneath notice if not for the fact that it currently disgraces the cover of a major newsmagazine. Alexander is also releasing a book at the end of the month, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which seems destined to become an instant bestseller. As much as I would like to simply ignore the unfolding travesty, it would be derelict of me to do so.

But first things first: You really must read Alexander’s article.

I trust that doing so has given you cause to worry that the good doctor is just another casualty of American-style Christianity—for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his adventures in coma, he presents the following self-portrait:

"Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself."

What it means to be a “faithful Christian” without “actual belief” is not spelled out, but few nonbelievers will be surprised when our hero’s scientific skepticism proves no match for his religious conditioning. Most of us have been around this block often enough to know that many “former atheists”—like Francis Collins—spent so long on the brink of faith, and yearned for its emotional consolations with such vampiric intensity, that the slightest breeze would send them spinning into the abyss. For Collins, you may recall, all it took to establish the divinity of Jesus and the coming resurrection of the dead was the sight of a frozen waterfall. Alexander seems to have required a ride on a psychedelic butterfly. In either case, it’s not the perception of beauty we should begrudge but the utter absence of intellectual seriousness with which the author interprets it.

Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.

The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly. Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?

I confess that I found Alexander’s account so alarmingly unscientific that I began to worry that something had gone wrong with my own brain. So I sought the opinion of Mark Cohen, a pioneer in the field of neuroimaging who holds appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Science, Neurology, Psychology, Radiological Science, and Bioengineering at UCLA. (He was also my thesis advisor.) Here is part of what he had to say:

"This poetic interpretation of his experience is not supported by evidence of any kind. As you correctly point out, coma does not equate to “inactivation of the cerebral cortex” or “higher-order brain functions totally offline” or “neurons of [my] cortex stunned into complete inactivity”. These describe brain death, a one hundred percent lethal condition. There are many excellent scholarly articles that discuss the definitions of coma. (For example: 1 & 2)

"We are not privy to his EEG records, but high alpha activity is common in coma. Also common is “flat” EEG. The EEG can appear flat even in the presence of high activity, when that activity is not synchronous. For example, the EEG flattens in regions involved in direct task processing. This phenomenon is known as event-related desynchronization (hundreds of references).

"As is obvious to you, this is truth by authority. Neurosurgeons, however, are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them. “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness ...” True, science cannot explain brain-free consciousness. Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.

"There are many reports of people remembering dream-like states while in medical coma. They lack consistency, of course, but there is nothing particularly unique in Dr. Alexander’s unfortunate episode."

Okay, so it appears that my own cortex hasn’t completely shut down. In fact, there are further problems with Alexander’s account. Not only does he appear ignorant of the relevant science, but he doesn’t realize how many people have experienced visions similar to his while their brains were operational. In his online interview we learn about the kinds of conversations he’s now having with skeptics:

"I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience,” or “That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

"Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings."

“Not even in the right ballpark”? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. Here is Alexander’s description of the afterlife:

"I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them… [there were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate….

"Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light….

"They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.

"But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work."

Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny. Here is how the late Terence McKenna described the prototypical DMT trance:

"Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

"The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

"This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find. (Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, pp. 258-259.)"

Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. Nor does he know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for merely a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether his cortex was rebooting or not).

Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension. As one of his correspondents has already informed him, similar experiences can be had with ketamine, which is a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that psychedelics like DMT and ketamine “do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.

Again, there is nothing to be said against Alexander’s experience. It sounds perfectly sublime. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. The problem is that the conclusions Alexander has drawn from his experience—he continually reminds us, as a scientist—are based on some very obvious errors in reasoning and gaps in his understanding.

Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:27:00 +0000

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

In October 2012, Newsweek magazine published the following article by Dr. Eben Alexander, an account of his near-death experience. It provoked an enormous reaction, partly because Dr. Alexander is a practising neurosurgeon and was advocating the survival of consciousness after death on the basis of his experience, a position that isn't held in medical and scientific consensus.

Various responses to Alexander's account were published, but I have here collected those responses by esteemed neuroscientists and neurologists, who present an effective rebuttal of the account as well as question the validity of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a genuine medical and neurological phenomenon. Starting with Alexander's own account (below), we will see two responses from Dr. Sam Harris and one from Professor Oliver Sacks.

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by Dr. Eben Alexander
Oct. 7, 2012

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death. I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am. Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.

When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline. Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey. I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a.) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b.) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent. It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.

Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms. A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get you wet.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial. The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question. A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration. Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

Later, when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.

“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons. What happened to me demands explanation.

Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation. Before my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their (very) different ways.

I’ve spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large. I don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place.

I learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was down. One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school. Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

This new picture of reality will take a long time to put together. It won’t be finished in my time, or even, I suspect, my sons’ either. In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child. I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right.

(1) Eben Alexander | (2) Sam Harris | (3) Sam Harris | (4) Oliver Sacks

LSD Visit To "Inner Space"

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 14 May 2011 09:46:00 +0000

LSD - The Consciousness-Expanding Drug is the title of a classic anthology compiled by David Solomon in the mid-Sixties, that contained informative articles on the subject of LSD use by a cross-section of intellectuals and pop-culture figures of the day, including Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and William S. Burroughs. It became a best-seller; partly because it was itself a reactionary text written at a time when mainstream LSD use was coming under fire from the police, government, and the media, and partly because of the number of articles written by doctors and other experts that reported the amazing therapeutic effects of LSD use in psychotherapy as well as the treatment and care of alcoholism and other mental disorders. The Hippie revolution was in full swing, and people looked to comprehensive and authoritative-sounding work in order to justify their use of the drug as well as engage with others in debate and discussion.

Solomon, in his preface, speak of his own LSD usage as well as experiments with mescaline and psylocybin:

"My first psychedelic experience was triggered by 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. It did indeed induce a flight, but instead of fleeing from reality, I flew more deeply into it. I had never before seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal unity and involvement with the concrete material world. My psychedelically accelerated mind did not merely grasp the symbolic poetic import, the utter simplicity and truth of William Blake's ecstatic vision: for the first time in my life I literally saw "the world in a grain of sand." My exponentially heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional, ego-constricted, false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday world. This was no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality."

One article by Houston Smith in the book discusses the religious import of LSD usage, and asks whether Prof. R. C. Zaehner's criticism of LSD-induced religious hallucinations as being of an inferior quality to the apparently genuine nature of 'authentic' religious visionary experience, is justified. I like the way he rebuts the question by, after briefly describing mystical drug usage in other religions, suggesting that to consider the phenomenology of the experience was more important than the ontology, fully aware of the limits of scientific research at the time and leaving it as an open question to be answered by future research.

The text also contains a rather long and experiential account of LSD intoxication by Alan Harrington, entitled 'A Visit to the Inner Space', after he embarked on a marathon trip with two friends:

"A twelve-hour session under the influence of the mind-dilating compound LSD-25 dispatched me on a trip through the cosmos inside my head. LSD enables everyone to become an astronaut of himself. During this flight beyond time into the depths of consciousness, to what must be the memory source of humanity, each of us can explore an inward universe filled with both violent and peaceful revelations ... Seventy-two hours after the night voyage, the emotional effect begins to fade. But details of the experience remain clear. Things seen by one's dilated eyes and the mind's eye will not be forgotten. Some of the more intellectual insights remain, too. I am speaking here of only one session—the initial, shocking one. You may be able to take off on other, much more easy, inward journeys. Unlike the first trip, these can be "programmed" to orbit you around a given life problem.

"A single LSD session will not be likely to produce a great and lasting change in one's life. But it shows the way to change. My first experience opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed. I know that the vision revealed by psycho-chemicals can help overcome feelings of alienation and loneliness; it can make death appear somewhat less fearful. The common vision of immortality, revealed in one way or another to most people under LSD, indicates the possibility of my survival in some form, my ever-returning to life ... It began with a salty taste in my mouth, and my vision started to become prismatic. (One's pupils actually dilate and appear to be the size of quarters.) There was a pressure in my head. The curtains seemed to billow. There might be somebody behind them. The air crackled silently. I had a feeling of colored musical notes floating about, and the scene, I can remark now, was quite like a Klee drawing. I felt a bit queasy, but it passed. The music was louder and the guitar strings beautifully separated. Ralph was looking at me, and I began to laugh. I was going to flip on my tape recorder! What a ridiculous, hilarious thing to do! Why not, though? "Why not?" Frank said, and we both laughed. I couldn't stop. Everything that I could think about was insanely and pitifully funny. The world. The universe. All the poor sweet pitiful people I knew. Myself. What a scene! Filled with noble, ridiculous people! The world, the world!

"This reaction which is Cosmic Laughter was different from any way of laughing I had known. It came out of me as though propelled by a force much larger than the person laughing. It came right up from the center of my being. The force continued throughout the major part of the experience, no matter what I was feeling. It resembled both a mild and sustained electric shock passing through the body and spirit, and a mild and incomplete and continuing orgasm. A throbbing and rhythmic current which for want of a fresh image—and one is no longer afraid of being banal—could be described as the life force shakes you, as if you might be aboard or bestride, or being carried along with, the force that penetrates and then fills all being."

A lot of interesting things in this classic book, which may result in further articles here.

See Reality Studio for more information on David Solomon.

Michael J. Fox on Parkinson's Disease

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:55:00 +0000

Michael J. Fox is a much-loved actor most famous for his endearing roles in the Back To The Future trilogy, Teen Wolf, and the Vietnam-inspired Casualties of War. In 2005, he appeared on James Lipton's Inside The Actor's Studio to talk about his life and career. The last twenty minutes or so of the interview dealt with Fox talking about his diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease as well as his charity work and coping strategies.

I transcribed the relevant parts when it was broadcast on Sky Atlantic recently.

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(The discussion develops from Michael's reminisces of his portrayal of hapless Deputy Mayor Mike Flaherty in the acclaimed sitcom Spin City)

James Lipton: Your final one-hour episode received the highest ratings in the show's history. What did you want to achieve in that final episode?

Michael J. Fox: There was a lot of personal stuff going on because I was leaving for health reasons and everybody knew that. And we were kind of dealing with this thing where people know your situation and you want to preserve the purity of the character, and the integrity of what we were trying to do in terms of presenting a fiction. You have to, on some level, find something very similar to it, and we did that in that [the character's] departure was not necessarily voluntary. And in playing that, it was the closest as I've ever been to line between my life and my work. That was the challenge that week and we were all really feeling the pressure. It was one of those things where we were rewriting it every day, trying not to make it too maudlin or over-emotional, but it was so affecting to all of us that it was a tough week.

JL: When did you discover that you had an illness?

MJF: I first felt the symptoms in 1990, but in 1991 I was diagnosed.

JL: As?

MJF: Parkinson's.

JL: And how did you deal with it during the show?

MJF: Well, the first couple of years was just trying not to let anyone know.

JL: How did you tell them?

MJF: It just got to a point where I couldn't hide it any more. I was afraid of the people I was working with, so I decided the time had come.

JL: Told the cast?

MJF: Yeah. (hand trembles as he sips water) As a matter of fact, can I take two minutes?

JL: Do.

MJF: (turns to audience) Because I couldn't do this, what I'm doing now. I need to take two minutes to wait for a pill to kick in.

(MJF walks offstage to take medication, returns few minutes later to applause)

MJF: (to JL and audience) That was basically what was happening during the show. When I was waiting for a pill to kick in, I was waiting to feel better and I knew there was a [full] house out there and I couldn't go out. And I couldn't say 'this is why I can't come out'. I thought, can I be funny if people know I'm sick? Is it OK to laugh at a sick person? So now, just to be able to say 'just give me five minutes' and then come back here and say 'I love it when the drugs kick in'. (audience laughter) So, you know? That's what I needed to do.

(The interview progresses to discussion about Fox's autobiography, Lucky Man)

JL: Where did the book's profits go?

MJF: Any profits I made went to the [Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research].

JL: And what does the Foundation do?

MJF: We're an aggressively entrepreneurial group that are trying to find a cure for Parkinson's.

JL: And how are they doing?

MJF: We're doing pretty good. We clearly haven't finished yet (audience laughter) but it's going really well. There's an amazing group of people that are working on it and amazing support from the public. We've been able to, in the last four years, put $50million towards research. (Audience applaud) Thank you.

JL: (to audience) Michael has said that the biggest thing is that I can be in this situation and love life as much as I do.

MJF: Well, it's funny, it's really not that bad. It's kind of like, as I was saying to my son the other day, it's a disease that makes you uncomfortable. So, all things considered, that's not too bad. I've described it as a gift, and people say to me 'how can you say it's a gift?' I say out loud it's a gift that keeps on taking. (Audience laughter) But it's still a gift that makes one alive. Again, to see what I've lost makes me look at what I've gained and what I have. So it's a tremendous opportunity and for that, I'm really lucky that I'm in this situation where I can help, because people have a relationship with me and feel they know me because of my work. But that goes to the fact that I've been able to do the work and have those relationships in the first place. And if that doesn't make me lucky, I don't know what does.

(Later in the interview, Fox fields questions from the audience members. One question asked further about his Parkinson's Disease.)

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Megan. I'm a first-year actor, and I just ..(cries).. I just wanted to say you're a great inspiration to me. About the same time when you came out and told everyone, I was diagnosed with dystonia which is neurological, covers like half your body. And it was wonderful to see that there could be people out there in the industry who were doing what they loved to do, even if they might be affected by it. So I just wanted to say thank you so much because, having the opportunity to meet you, it means a lot.

Michael J. Fox: Thank you.

Audience Member: (continues) And I also wanted to ask how ... (giggles)... because you're Michael J. Fox and I'm just Megan from Arizona who doesn't know anything or know anyone, how realistic is it for you to come out and tell everybody about what you have and about your disability, and be so open about it?

Michael J. Fox: Well, in a lot of ways my disease made me, once again, Mike Fox from Burnaby. It's a great leveller in a way. One of the things I had difficulty with was when I tried to put people at ease about how I felt and how I was OK with it, and that it was my reality and I accepted it, is that I didn't want to say it's a piece of cake or water off a duck's back. In a way that's a slight to people who really struggle with it and don't have the advantages I have, and have to worry about losing their insurance and their jobs, and have to worry about other people's perceptions. Shortly after I made my situation public, someone said "Oh yeah, that's what Michael J. Fox has", and they felt it made them easier to carry on in this world. That's a tremendous privilege and gift to me to be in that situation. It's purely not my design, it's the way it's worked out.

I think in anything, we're talking about acting, but in life too it really is ... just be honest and do the next right thing, and you'll know what the next right thing is for you. Dystonia is really a challenge. I sometimes get facial dystonia which is awful. It's like, imagine eating a lemon and the face you make, it's stuck like that for half and hour, 45 minutes, and it's quite painful. You just have to go to another place in your head and wait it out until it's done. And it's all about accepting and surrender and saying this is something - not to get too 12-Step - but it's what's in my power, what's in my control. Do I have to throw in the towel and have a tantrum about it? Or kill myself? Or what? None of these are acceptable to me. The only one that's acceptable is to go on and see what happens. And what I find cool is that there is great stuff out there, when you walk through this stuff, when you walk through this fear, when you walk through what people are gonna think about it, or what's gonna happen. Well, something's going to happen and we don't know what is, but chances are at least 50/50 that it'll be pretty good. So I'm willing to take that risk.

Future of Clinical Psychology in the NHS

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 03 May 2011 13:39:00 +0000

Nature (21 April 2011 edition) recently ran a series of special articles on the future of the PhD., all of which asked serious questions about the value of the doctorate in a job market that no longer appears to properly compensate the hard work of students with rewarding careers of their choice. Mark Taylor's editorial was quite frank: "Reform the PhD. system or close it down", suggesting updated and relevant curricula as well as cross-disciplinary communications as ways to move forward, and to discontinue 'redundant' programmes and use their resources for more productive lines.

Noah Gray, a senior editor at Nature, elaborated:

"..At some point we have to expand our view beyond academia and ask which jobs really need a PhD. and which don't. Academia asks a lot from its graduate students and isn't prepared or capable of providing a return on the investment of blood, sweat and tears made by the students. It only seems logical to contract somewhat, for the good of the students who are not aware of this difficult reality, rather than continue to exploit masses of under-compensated labor who may ultimately invest far more energy and time into a endeavor that will not place them in an adequate career."

In general it sounds a lot worse than it is; assuming that the ideas discussed in this series come to fruition, it becomes mainly an attempt at streamlining rather than wholesale cutting down.

It got me pondering the situation in the UK. Two years ago, the Feb 2009 issue of Clinical Psychology Forum (forum magazine of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the British Psychological Society) published an interesting article/study regarding the future of clinical psychology placements within the NHS. While it is well known that clinical psychology is a highly competitive area and that more applications are turned down than accepted, there seems to be newer causes for worry other than excellence in academia or training. Harriet Francis-Ehnholm and Tanya Petersen (hereafter "the authors") introduce the topic by describing their attempt to undertake a survey of ClinPsy. trainees and their opinions about clinical psychology during a conference held at the University of Hertfordshire. In the 1990s a shortfall in NHS clinical psychologists was remedied by increasing the number of training places, 583 places were available in 2007 which was a huge improvement from 321 places in 1997. (The situation has improved since; Leeds Clearing House report 617 places were available in 2010, although it is humbling to note that 11,319 applications were made.) However in the face of funding cuts the reduction in the number of clinical psychology posts results in fewer clinical placements for those already in training, leading trainees to wonder about the availability of jobs after completing the course.

To get an idea of the trainees' views, the authors carried out a survey questionnaire that covered three main topics:

What were trainees' thoughts about the future of the profession?
Had working in an 'uncertain' climate affected trainees' views of clinical psychology?
How does the next generation of psychologists intend to make the future more certain?

The surveys were distributed to the sample of 40 trainees, though only 24 returned a response! The results were more or less what one would expect: before the commencement of training job and security expectations were varied, which significantly narrowed after embarking on training and which resulted in envisaging a more constrained career path along with less security and choice. The interesting thing is that despite experiencing negative effects of funding cuts such as low morale and the threat of job cuts/service closures, all of them indicated that they still wanted to continue training to be clinical psychologists. Although it came to light that trainees felt they might benefit from advice on alternatives to working in the NHS and also on how to market the profession effectively to the public, they remained generally optimistic about the future of clinical psychology.

The authors concluded that while University of Hertfordshire trainees were fortunate not to experience the effects of any cuts in training places, they nevertheless experienced the effects of NHS funding crises on their clinical placements and of working in a climate of uncertainty. Now that things have moved on from 2009, that climate is sure to have worsened with service cuts, poor results and the resultant low morale that has emerged in clinical services across the board. A recent blog at The Psychologist by Christian Jarrett reports a disconcerting outlook for psychology as a whole in the UK as a result of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's spending review; a 50% slashing of PGCE Psychology places, research councils announcing a redirection of neuroscience-allocated funds in line with their research priorities, and a possible restructure of client services.

It all begs the question as to what clinical psychology trainees might think now in this bleaker situation. If the authors' snapshot article is anything to go by, the anxiety and stress felt by current trainees is likely to be amplified even more in this uncertain situation of global economic worries. However, a surprising suggestion of the authors is for the NHS to modify their programmes and training accordingly, even to the extent of suggestion that trainees be provided with teaching in private practice and how to set about this type of work, in spite of the fact that this may cause a conflict of interest (you know, getting trained by the NHS to work in the NHS and then uh,... not doing that).

Considering all of this, what can prospective clinical psychologists look forward to? More uncertainty? Faint light on the horizon? Is it time to call for an open discussion?

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 02:10:00 +0000

This excellent article by Raymond Tallis appeared in the Fall 2010 edition of the New Atlantic, pp. 3-25.
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There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order. This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities, and the present epidemic of such neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on.

The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activity corrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If we are just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organs designed to optimize our odds of survival — or, more precisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the genetic material for which we are the vehicle — then we are merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just our brains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, and our lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net that is the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

Most of those who subscribe to such “neuroevolutionary” accounts of humanity don’t recognize these consequences. Or, if they do recognize them, then they don’t subscribe to these accounts sincerely. When John Gray appeals, in his 2002 book Straw Dogs, to a belief that human beings are merely animals and so “human life has no more meaning than the life of slime mold,” he doesn’t really believe that the life of John Gray, erstwhile School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, has no more meaning than that of a slime mold — else why would he have aspired to the life of a distinguished professor rather than something closer to that of a slime mold?

Wrong ideas about what human beings are and how we work, especially if they are endlessly repeated, keep us from thinking about ourselves in ways that may genuinely advance our self-understanding. Indeed, proponents of the neuroscientific account of human behavior hope that it will someday supplant our traditional understandings of mind, behavior, and consciousness, which they dismiss as mere “folk psychology.” According to a 2007 New Yorker profile of professors Paul and Patricia Churchland, two leading “neurophilosophers,” they like “to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor.” The article recounts the occasion Patricia Churchland came home from a vexing day at work and told her husband, “Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.” Such awkward chemical conversation is unlikely to replace “folk psychology” anytime soon, despite the Churchlands’ fervent wishes, if only because it misses the actual human reasons for the reported neurochemical impairments — such as, for example, failing to get one’s favored candidate appointed to a post.

Moreover, there is strong reason to believe that the failure to provide a neuroscientific account of the sufficient conditions of consciousness and conscious behavior is not a temporary state of affairs. It is unlikely that the gap between neuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed, even as neuroscience advances and as our tools for observing neural activity grow more sophisticated.

In outlining the case that neuroscience will always have little to say about most aspects of human consciousness, we must not rely on weak mysterian arguments, such as Colin McGinn’s claim, in his famous 1989 Mind paper “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?,” that there may be a neuroscientific answer but we are biologically incapable of figuring it out. Nor is there much use in appealing to arguments about category errors, such as considering thoughts to be “kinds of things,” which were mobilized against mind-body identity theories when philosophy was most linguistically turned, in the middle of the last century. No, the aim of this essay is to give principled reasons, based on examining the nature of human consciousness, for asserting that we are not now and never will be able to account for the mind in terms of neural activity. It will focus on human consciousness — so as to avoid the futility of arguments about where we draw the line between sentient and insentient creatures, because there are more negative consequences to misrepresenting human consciousness than animal, and because it is human consciousness that underlines the difficulty of fitting consciousness into the natural world as understood through strictly materialist science.

This critique of the neural theory of consciousness will begin by taking seriously its own declared account of what actually exists in the world. On this, I appeal to no less an authority than the philosophy professor Daniel Dennett, one of the most prominent spokesmen for the neuroevolutionary reduction of human beings and their minds. In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, Dennett affirms the “prevailing wisdom” that

there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain.... We can (in principle!) account for every mental phenomenon using the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition, and growth.

So when we are talking about the brain, we are talking about nothing more than a piece of matter. If we keep this in mind, we will have enough ammunition to demonstrate the necessary failure of neuroscientific accounts of consciousness and conscious behavior.

It is a pure dedication to materialism that lies behind another common neuroscientistic claim, one that arises in response to the criticism that there are characteristics of consciousness that neuroscience cannot explain. The response is a strangely triumphant declaration that that which neuroscience cannot grasp does not exist. This declaration is particularly liable to be directed at the self and at free will, those two most persistent “illusions.” But even neuroscientists themselves don’t apply this argument consistently: they don’t doubt that they think they are selves, or that they have the illusion that they act freely — and yet, as we will see, there is no conceivable neural explanation of these phenomena. We are therefore justified in rejecting the presumption that if neuroscience cannot see it, then it does not exist.

The Outward Gaze
A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in Dennett’s words, “the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice” to explain everything else in the material universe.

Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.

This claim refers to fully developed intentionality and not the kind of putative proto-intentionality that may be ascribed to non-human sentient creatures. Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint. This is apparent first because intentionality points in the direction opposite to that of causality: the causal chain has a directionality in space-time pointing from the light wave bouncing off the object to the light wave hitting your visual cortex, whereas your perception of the object refers or points from you back to the object. The referential “pointing back” or “bounce back” is not “feedback” or reverse causation, since the causal arrow is located in physical space and time, whereas the intentional arrow is located in a field of concepts and awareness, a field which is not independent of but stands aside from physical space and time.

Ironically, by locating consciousness in particular parts of the material of the brain, neuroscientism actually underlines this mystery of intentionality, opening up a literal, physical space between conscious experiences and that which they are about. This physical space is, paradoxically, both underlined and annulled: The gap between the glass of which you are aware and the neural impulses that are supposed to be your awareness of it is both a spatial gap and a non-spatial gap. The nerve impulses inside your cranium are six feet away from the glass, and yet, if the nerve impulses reach out or refer to the glass, as it were, they do so by having the glass “inside” them. The task of attempting to express the conceptual space of intentionality in purely physical terms is a dizzying one. The perception of the glass inherently is of the glass, whereas the associated neural activity exists apart from the cause of the light bouncing off the glass. This also means, incidentally, that the neural activity could exist due to a different cause. For example, you could have the same experience of the glass, even if the glass were not present, by tickling the relevant neurons. The resulting perception will be mistaken, because it is of an object that is not in fact physically present before you. But it would be ludicrous to talk of the associated neural activity as itself mistaken; neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken.

Let us tease out the mystery of intentionality a bit more, if only to anticipate the usual materialist trick of burying intentionality in causation by brushing past perception to its behavioral consequences. If perceptions really are material effects (in one place — the brain) of material causes (in another place — the object), then intentionality seems to run in the contrary direction to and hence to lie outside causation. That your perception of the glass requires the neural activity in your visual cortex to reach causally upstream to the events that caused it is, again, utterly mysterious. Moreover, it immediately raises two questions. First, why does the backward glance of a set of effects to some of their causes stop at a particular point in the causal chain — in this case, at the glass? And, second, how does this reaching backward create a solid, stable object out of something as unstable as an interference with the light? The ordinary inference implicit in everyday perception is that the events which cause nerve impulses are manifestations of something that transcends those events — namely, an “object” that is the relatively permanent locus of possibility for many future events — making intentionality even more mysterious.

The bounce back is necessary to mark the point at which sense experiences are, as it were, “received”; the same point where, via a variety of intermediate steps, they can trigger behavioral outputs. This is a crucial point of demarcation within the causal nexus between perceptual input and behavioral output. And yet there is nothing within the nervous system that marks this point of arrival, or the point at which arrival passes over into departure (perceptual input into behavioral output). Nor is there anything to distinguish, on the one hand, those parts of the nervous system that are supposed to be the point of arrival of neural activity as a component of conscious experience from, on the other, those parts that are mere unconscious way stations en route to some other point of arrival.

In any event, identifying experiences with neural activity requires that intentionality, which has no place in the material world — since no material object is about any other material object — nevertheless fastens us into the material world. Examination of neural activity reveals only an unbroken causal chain passing from sensory inputs to motor outputs. Intentionality is significant because it is that which opens up the otherwise causally closed physical world. It lies at the root of our being a point of departure in the world, a site at which events originate — that is, of our being actors. And the weaving together of individual intentional spaces creates the human world — that shared, public, temporally deep sphere of possibilities, that outside-of-nature which makes our individual and collective human lives possible. It lies at the origin of everything that distances us from the material world. Without intentionality, there is no point of arrival of perceptions, no point of departure for actions, no input and output, no person located in a world. It is intentionality that opens up the present to the absent, the actual to the possible, and the now to the past and the future, so that we are able to live in a world that is an infinitely elaborated space of possibilities, rather than being simply “wired in” to what is. These are large claims, some of which I have already elaborated in these pages (see “How Can I Possibly Be Free?,” Summer 2010). But the aspects presented here will be enough to wrest ourselves back from being assimilated into our brains.

It should also be noted that looking at the difficulties intentionality poses to materialism relieves us too of the need for the problematic views of (intermittently quite sensible) philosophers such as John Searle, who argues in his famous 1980 paper “Minds, Brains, and Programs” that intentionality “is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena.” Searle says this to undermine computational and functional theories of mind; but he still remains inside the biological frame of reference. And this requires him to think of intentionality — that in virtue of which an effect reaches back to its cause — to be itself the effect of another cause or set of causes. (The functionalism that Searle was rebutting claims that, just as a computer program is defined by how it transforms input to output, a piece of consciousness is defined by the particular causal transformation it effects between an organism’s perceptual input and its behavioral output. But since functionalism tries to assimilate perception into causation by arguing that the contents of consciousness are identical with their causal relations, it is just as easily disposed of by looking carefully at the counter-causal nature of intentionality, and the need for a point of arrival and departure, for input and output, without resorting to Searle’s argument from biological causes.)

Focusing on intentionality and placing it in the context of a materialistic, neuroscientific theory underlines what an extraordinary phenomenon perception is. It is that in virtue of which an object is revealed to a subject; or, rather, that in virtue of which the experiences of a subject are the revelation of an object. And this brings us to the heart of the trouble that the neural theory of perception is in: its central claim is that the interaction between two material objects — either directly, such as by touch, or indirectly, such as by vision — will cause one to appear to the other. The counter-causal direction of intentionality not only shows that this cannot be accommodated in physical science (of which neuroscience is a part) but that appearance is not something that the material world, a nexus of causation, affords. Indeed, we could go further and argue that the progressive enclosure of the world within the framework of physical science, its being construed as a material world, tends towards the elimination of appearance.

Making Appearance Disappear
Physical science begins when we escape from our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and thereby start to aspire towards Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.” You think the table over there is large; I think it is small. We make a measurement and discover that it is two feet by two feet. We now characterize the table in a way that is less beholden to our own, or anyone else’s, personal experience. Or we terminate an argument about whether the table is light or dark brown by translating its color into a mixture of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The table has lost contact with its phenomenal appearance to me, to you, or to anyone, as being characteristic of what it is.

As science progresses, measurement takes us further from actual experience, and the phenomena of subjective consciousness, to a realm in which things are described in abstract, general quantitative terms. The most obvious symptom of this is the way physical science has to discard what it regards as “secondary qualities” — such as color experiences, feelings of warmth and cold, and tastes. They are regarded as somehow unreal, or at least as falling short of describing what the furniture of the world is “in itself.” For the physicist, light is not in itself bright or colorful; rather, it is a mixture of vibrations of different frequencies in an electromagnetic field. The material world, far from being the colorful, noisy, smelly place we experience, is purportedly instead composed only of colorless, silent, odorless atoms or quarks, or other basic particles and waves best described mathematically.

Physical science is thus about the marginalization, and ultimately the elimination, of phenomenal appearance. But consciousness is centrally about appearances. The basic contents of consciousness are these mere “secondary qualities.” They are what fill our every conscious moment. As science advances, it retreats from appearances towards quantifying items that do not in themselves have the kinds of manifestation that constitute our experiences. A biophysical account of consciousness, which sees consciousness in terms of nerve impulses that are the passage of ions through semi-permeable membranes, must be a contradiction in terms. For such an account must ultimately be a physical account, and physical science does not admit the existence of anything that would show why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, create, produce, result in, or cause the emergence of appearances and, in particular, secondary qualities in the world. Galileo’s famous assertions that the book of nature “is written in the language of mathematics” and that “tastes, odors, colors ... reside only in consciousness,” and would be “wiped out and annihilated” in a world devoid of conscious creatures, underline the connection, going back to the very earliest days of modern physical science, between quantification and the disappearance of appearance.

Any explanation of consciousness that admits the existence of appearances but is rooted in materialist science will fail because, on its own account, matter and energy do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities. We could, of course, by all means change our notion of matter; but if we do not, and the brain is a piece of matter, then it cannot explain the experience of things. Those who imagine that consciousness of material objects could arise from the effect of some material objects on another particular material object don’t seem to take the notion of matter seriously.

Some neurophilosophers might respond that science does not eliminate appearance; rather, it replaces one appearance with another — fickle immediate and conscious appearance with one that is more true to the reality of the objects it attends to. But this is not what science does — least of all physical science, which is supposed to give us the final report on what there is in the universe, for which matter (or mass-energy) is the ultimate reality, and equations linking quantities are the best way of revealing the inner essence of this reality. For, again, it is of the very nature of mass-energy, as it is envisaged in physics, not to have any kind of appearance in itself.

This lack of appearance to mass-energy may still seem counterintuitive, but it will become clearer when we examine a well-known defense, again made by John Searle, of the theory that mind and brain are identical — or specifically, that experiences can be found in neural impulses because they are the same thing. In his 1983 book Intentionality, Searle — who, as already noted, is committed to a neural account of consciousness — addresses the most obvious problem associated with the claim that experiences are identical with neural activity: experiences are nothing like neural activity, and the least one might expect of something is that it should be like itself.

Searle denies that this is a problem by arguing that neural activity and experiences are different aspects of the same stuff; more precisely, that they are the same stuff seen at “different levels.” The immediate problem with this claim is in knowing what it means. Clearly, neural activity and experiences are not two aspects of the same thing in the way that the front and back of a house are two aspects of the same house. Searle tries to clarify what he means using an analogy: experience is related to neural activity, he says, as “liquid properties of water” are related to “the behavior of the individual molecules” of H₂O. They are the same stuff even though molecules of H₂O are nothing like water. Water is wet, he argues, while individual molecules are not.

Wetness is the one specific “liquid” property of water he cites at the outset, and the only others he mentions are that “it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it, etc.” Because of this, it may seem at first that all Searle has accomplished is isolating the experiential qualities of water from the non-experiential. That is, one interpretation of Searle’s supposed explanation is that neural activity is related to experience in the same way water is related to experiences of water. This explanation, of course, is completely inadequate, because it simply sets us at a further regress from the answer.

But it turns out that this interpretation of Searle’s argument is the charitable one. We can see why in a section where Searle responds to this famous argument made by Leibniz in The Monadology (1714):

And supposing that there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push against another, but never anything by which to explain perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.

Searle’s response:

An exactly parallel argument to Leibniz’s would be that the behavior of H₂O molecules can never explain the liquidity of water, because if we entered into the system of molecules “as into a mill we should only find on visiting it pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain” liquidity. But in both cases we would be looking at the system at the wrong level. The liquidity of water is not to be found at the level of the individual molecule, nor [is] the visual perception ... to be found at the level of the individual neuron or synapse.

The key to understanding Searle’s argument and its fatal flaw is in the words, “But in both cases we would be looking at the system.” It turns out that in this water/H₂O analogy, it is not just the water but both levels that are already levels of experience or of observation. Searle in fact requires experience, observation, description — in short, consciousness — to generate the two levels of his water analogy, which are meant to sustain his argument that two stuffs can be the same stuff even if they do not look like one another. This supposed explanation evades the question of experience even more than does the first. For what Searle is in effect arguing, though he does not seem to notice it, is that the relationship between neural activity and experience is like the relationship between two kinds of experience of the same stuff. And this is unsatisfactory because the problem he is supposedly solving is that neural impulses are not like experiences at all. (This rebuttal also applies — even more obviously, in fact — to another, very popular analogy, between dots of newsprint and a picture in the newspaper as neural activity and experiences. The dots/picture analogy also has the benefit of making clear another vulnerability of such analogies: the suggestion that neural activity is “micro” while experiences are “macro,” when it is not at all evident why that should be the case.)

Some will object to this experiential characterization of the “levels” argument, and will formulate it instead in terms of levels of organization or complexity: for example, the Earth’s climate and weather system is organized into many different levels of complexity, each exhibiting distinct behavior and distinct sorts of phenomena, from the interplays causing cycles of temperature over the centuries, down to the behavior of storms, down to the interactions of molecules. The implicit idea is that each level of complexity is governed by its own distinct set of laws. But one cannot take the distinction between these sets of laws to be inherent in the climate/weather system without in effect saying that when enough matter gets together in the same vicinity, it becomes another kind of matter which falls under the scope of another kind of law (at the same time that it remains the more basic kind of matter under the scope of the more basic kind of law). That flies in the face of reductive materialism — not to mention raises some very difficult questions about the identicality of these different kinds of matter. What is more, the “getting together” that makes, say, a storm a whole made out of parts, is itself description-dependent and hence perception-dependent. The very term “complexity” refers to a description-dependent property. A pebble may be seen as something very simple — one pebble — or something infinitely complex — a system of a trillion trillion sub-atomic particles interacting in such a way as to sustain a static equilibrium.

The persistent materialist may launch a final defense of the argument, to the effect that the particular descriptions of water and H₂O molecules Searle mentions do not really depend on experience at all. He writes, “In its liquid state water is wet, it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it, etc.... When we describe the stuff as liquid we are just describing those very molecules at a higher level of description than that of the individual molecule.” One might argue that these enumerated qualities of water are all physical facts, that they are true even when there is no one present to observe them. But to the extent that this reinterpretation of Searle’s argument helps it to hold water (so to speak), it is only due to the original argument’s imprecision. For if we take it to be truly independent of experience that water “is wet, it pours, you can drink it, you can wash in it,” then these facts are equally true of a collection of molecules of H₂O, because of course the physical stuff known as water just is a collection of molecules of H₂O. Water and H₂O molecules, considered solely as physical things, are identical, and have all of the same properties. No appeal to “levels of description” should even be necessary. The reason it is necessary hinges on Searle’s description of one level as that of “the individual molecule.” But an individual molecule is not at all the same thing as water — which is a collection of many individual molecules — and so of course we should not expect the two to have the same properties. If we remove from the analogy the differing appearances to us of water and H₂O molecules as sources of their un-likeness, then all Searle has demonstrated is how a thing can be unlike a part of itself, rather than unlike itself. This is trivially true, and does not apply in any event to the question at hand if neural impulses are taken to be identical to experiences.

Searle makes his position even more vulnerable by arguing that not only are neural activity and the experience of perception the same but that the former causes the latter just as water is “caused” by H₂O. This is desperate stuff: one could hardly expect some thing A to cause some thing B with which it is identical, because nothing can cause itself. In any event, the bottom line is that the molecules of H₂O and the wet stuff that is water are two appearances of the same thing — two conscious takes on the same stuff. They cannot be analogous to, respectively, that which supposedly causes conscious experiences (neural impulses) and conscious experiences themselves.

What Physical Science is Blind To
To press this point a little harder: conscious experiences and observed nerve impulses are both appearances. But nerve impulses do not have any appearance in themselves; they require a conscious subject observing them to appear — and it is irrelevant that the observation is highly mediated through instrumentation. Like all material items, nerve impulses lack appearances absent an observer. And given that they are material events lacking appearances in themselves, there is no reason why they should bring about the appearances of things other than themselves. It is magical thinking to imagine that material events in a material object should be appearings of objects other than themselves. Material objects require consciousness in order to appear.

All Searle has explained, again, is how two different appearances of the same thing can be unlike each other; but the problem he means to solve in the first place — or should mean to solve — is how something that itself has no appearance can give rise to, in fact be identical to, appearances. That is, Searle’s task is to show how something that itself has no appearance can be an appearance — and without someone else observing the thing so as to give it the appearance. The question becomes pointed in Leibniz’s thought experiment: how, from looking at the raw material of neurons in someone’s brain, are we, as outside observers, supposed to get the appearances these neurons are meant to be causing, or generating, or identical to? Searle is forced into this conclusion: “If one knew the principles on which the system of H₂O molecules worked, one could infer that it was in a liquid state by observing the movement of the molecules, but similarly if one knew the principles on which the brain worked one could infer that it was in a state of thirst or having a visual experience.” In other words, just by looking at neural impulses and “translating” them into the other “level of description,” we can get at the corresponding experiences. This sounds fine until we consider just what “getting at” those experiences means. For what Searle does not account for is how knowing that a particular brain is having a particular experience is supposed to be enough to deliver actually having that experience yourself. To fully accept Searle’s conclusion, we would have to believe that having the experience is the same as knowing that it exists — that it arises for the one person experiencing it, perhaps, from some implicit act of translation or “inference” — and so, among other things, that just by looking at someone else’s brain in the proper way, we could have the same experiences they are having. These are absurd conclusions, as we will see.

From a more practical standpoint, we can see why it will never be enough to dismiss the problem of appearances out of hand by appealing either to the idea that perceptions are just brain activity like any other brain activity, or the idea that consciousness (and so all appearance) is an illusion. For in either case, while appearances are “nothing but” neural activity, we still must be able to explain why some neural activity leads to the sensation (or illusion) of appearance while other neural activity does not; and we must be able to distinguish between the two by looking only at the material neurons. Neurophilosophers should be able to recognize this problem, since they acknowledge that the vast majority of neural impulses are not associated with appearances or consciousness of any sort. The search for neural correlates of consciousness has in fact turned up clusters, patterns, and locations of activity that are not in any significant respect different from neural activity that is not so correlated. What is more, “clusters,” “patterns,” and so forth also require an observer, to bring them together into a unity and to see that unity as a unity. That which requires an observer cannot be the basis of an observation.

The fact that intentionality does not fit into the materialist world picture has often been noted, but it is important to emphasize its anomalous nature because it lies at the root of pretty well everything that distances us from the material world, including other animals. The nature of intentionality becomes most clear when we see that the perceiver is an embodied subject — when the object is related to an “I” who perceives it, and who experiences himself as being located in the same experiential field as the object. The requirement of admitting the existence of a perceiving self is, of course, enough to make neurophilosophers hostile to the notion of the subject. But if they deny the existence of a self, they still have to account for how it is that matter can be arranged around a viewpoint as “near,” “far,” and so forth — for the construction of what Bertrand Russell called “egocentric space,” in which indexical words like “this,” “that,” and “here” find their meanings.

There are no appearances without viewpoints: for example, there are no appearances of a rock that are neither from the front of it nor from the back of it nor from any other angle. But there is nothing in the material brain, as we have seen, that could make it anyone’s own brain, or that could locate it at the center of anyone’s sensory field as the foundation of a viewpoint. We cannot appeal to the objective fact that the brain is located in a particular body to install it as someone’s brain, because ownership does not reside in bodies absent consciousness, or indeed self-consciousness — but consciousness is just what we are unable to find by looking at the material of the brain. Nor is the fact that the brain is located at a particular point in space sufficient for making it the center of a particular someone’s personal space any more than that fact is sufficient for a rock to have its own personal space.

The “view from nowhere” of physical science does not accommodate viewpoints. And since the material world has of itself no viewpoints, it does not, of itself, have centers — or, for that matter, peripheries. The equation E=mc², like all laws of physics, captures an ultimate, all-encompassing scientific truth about the world, a viewless view of material reality, and has nothing to say about the experience of the world. Absent from it is that which forms the basic contents of consciousness: the phenomenal appearances of the world.

Mysteries of the Subjective Self

The loss of appearances is not an accidental mislaying. It is an inevitable consequence of the materialist conception of matter as we have it today. The brain, being a piece of matter, must be person-free. This is true not only by definition but also in other, specific senses. Persons — or selves — have two additional features which cannot be captured in neural terms.

The first is unity in multiplicity. At any given moment, I am aware of a multitude of experiences: sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, emotions. I am co-conscious of them — that is, I am aware of each of them at once, so that they are integrated into a unity of sorts. Moreover, co-consciousness includes consciousness of things I cannot currently see or touch: it includes consciousness of the absent past, of the absent elsewhere of the present, and of the possible future.

It is difficult to see how this integration is possible in neural terms, since neurophysiology assigns these experiences to spatially different parts of the brain. Aspects of consciousness are supposedly kept very tidily apart: the pathways for perception are separate from those for emotion, which are separate from those for memory, which are separate from those for motivation, which are separate from those for judgment, and so on. Within perception, each of the senses of vision, hearing, smell, and so forth has different pathways and destinations. And within, say, visual perception, different parts of the brain are supposed to be responsible for receiving the color, shape, distance, classification, purpose, and emotional significance of seen objects. When, however, I see my red hat on the table, over there, and see that it is squashed, and feel cross about it, while I hear you laughing, and I recognize the laughter as yours, and I am upset, and I note that the taxi I have ordered has arrived so that I can catch the train that I am aware I must not miss — when all of these things occur in my consciousness at once, many things that are kept apart must somehow be brought together. There is no model of such synthesis in the brain. This is the so-called “binding” problem.

Converging neural pathways might seem to offer a means by which things are all brought together — this is the standard neurophysiological account of “integration.” However, it solves nothing. If all those components of the moment of consciousness came together in the same spot, if their activity converged, they would lose their separate identity and the distinct elements would be lost in a meaningless mush. When I look at my hat, I see that it is red, and squashed, and over there, and a hat, and all of the rest. Here is the challenge presented to neuroscience by the experienced unity and multiplicity of the conscious moment: that which is brought together has also to be kept apart. Consciousness is a unification that retains multiplicity.

Neurophilosophers have tried to deal with this problem by arguing that, while the components of experience retain their individual locations in the brain, the activity that occurs in those different locations is bound together. The mechanism for this binding is supposed to be either rhythmic mass neural activity or emergent physical forces which transcend the boundaries of individual neurons, such as electromagnetic fields or quantum coherence arising out of the properties of nerve membranes. This way of imagining the unity of consciousness assumes, without any reason, that linked activity across large sections of the brain — say, a coherent pattern of rhythmic activity, made visible as such to an observer by instrumentation — will be translated, or more precisely will translate itself, from an objective fact to a subjective unity. We are required to accept that something that is observed as an internal whole — via instrumentation — will be experienced as a whole, or itself be the experience of a whole, such that it will deliver the wholeness of a subset of items in the world while at the very same time retaining the separateness of those items.

The other distinctive feature of subjectivity is temporal depth. The human subject is aware of a past (his own and the shared past of communities and cultures) and reaches into a future (his own and the shared future). For simplicity’s sake, let us just focus on the past. There are many neurophilosophical accounts of memory, but they have one thing in common: they see memory as, in the slightly scornful phrase of the philosopher Henri Bergson, “a cerebral deposit.” Memory is, to use the slippery term, “stored” as an effect on the brain, expressed in its altered reactivity. This theory has been demonstrated, to the satisfaction of many neurophysiologists and cognitive neuroscientists, in creatures as disparate as apes and fruit flies. Some of the most lauded studies on “memory,” such as those that won Columbia University neuroscientist Eric Kandel his 2000 Nobel Prize, have been on the sea slug.

In reality, Kandel did not examine anything that should really be called memory — it was actually altered behavior in response to training by means of an electric shock — essentially a conditioned reflex. A sea slug does not, so far as anybody knows, have semantic memory of facts — that is, memory of facts as facts, laden with concepts. It does not have explicit episodic memories of events — that is, events remembered as located in the past. Nor does it have autobiographical memories — that is, events remembered as located in its own past. It does not even have an explicit sense of the past or of time in general, and even less of a collective past where shared history is located. Nor can one seriously imagine an elderly sea slug actively trying to remember earlier events, racking its meager allocation of twenty thousand neurons to recall something, any more than one can think of it feeling nostalgic for its youth when it believed that it still had a marvelous life ahead of it.

Of course, neurophilosophers are not impressed by the objection that the sea slug or any other animal model does not possess anything like the kind of memory that we possess. It is, they say, simply a matter of different degrees of complexity of the nervous system in question: explicit memories involve more elaborate circuitry, with more intermediate connections, than the kinds of conditioned reflexes observed in sea slugs. To dissect this response, we have to examine critically the very idea that memories are identical with altered states of a nervous system. Let us look first of all at how the fallacy commanded acceptance. Kandel, like many other researchers, seems to assimilate all memory into habit memory, and habit memory in turn into altered behavior, or altered reactivity of the organism. And altered reactivity can be correlated with the altered properties of the excitable tissue in the organism, which may be understood in biophysical, biochemical, or neurochemical terms — the kinds of chemical changes one can see in the contents of a Petri dish. But these changes have nothing to do with memory as we experience and value it, though they have everything to do with overlooking the true nature of memory.

This is because habit memory is merely implicit, while human memory is also explicit: the former sort of “memory” is merely altered behavior, while the latter is something one is aware of as a memory. Those who think this a false elevation of the human must address not only the fact that there are two broad categories of memory to be found among animal species, but that both of these types of memory coexist in human beings. We not only have uniquely explicit memory, but also have the same sort of implicit memory as Kandel’s sea slugs. Moreover, we can have both of these types of memory about the same event: After a spark from a doorknob shocks my hand as I close the door during the winter, I will instinctively flinch from touching it again, and will then stop and explicitly remember that I had previously received an electrostatic shock. This time, I will explicitly plan to shut the door with my foot, an act that will itself after a few repetitions become instinctive or implicit, until I again stop to recall the explicit memory of the event that led to the habit. The neurophysiological account fails to address these distinctions.

To get to the bottom of the fallacies that underlie the very idea of a “neurophysiology of memory,” we need to remind ourselves that the nervous system is a material object and that material objects are identical with their present states. A broken cup is a broken cup. It is not in itself a record of its previous states — of a cup that was once whole — except to an outside observer who previously saw the cup in its unbroken state and now remembers it, so that he or she can compare the past and present states of the cup. The broken cup has an altered reactivity — it moves differently in response to stimuli — but this altered reactivity is not a memory of its previous state or of the event that caused its altered reactivity, namely its having been dropped. Likewise, although the altered state of the sea slug is, as it were, a “record” of what has happened to it, it is a record only to an external consciousness that has observed it in both its past and present states and is aware of both. And this is equally true of the altered reactivity of neurons exposed to previous stimuli in higher organisms.

Indeed, just as a conscious observer is required for the present state of the broken cup to be regarded as a “record” or “memory” of its having been dropped, so it must be a consciousness that identifies the particular piece of matter of the cup as a single object distinct from its surroundings, having its own distinct causal history, of which there is one special event among all others of which the cup is a “record”: its being dropped. From a consciousness-free material standpoint, the cup is but an arbitrary subset of all matter, and its present state owes equally to every prior state of the matter that composes it. The cup would have to be at once a “memory” of the moment it was dropped and of the innumerable moments when it sat motionless in the cupboard — with the former in no way privileged. In fact, if you believe that the present state of an object is a record or memory of all the events that brought it to its present state, you are committed to believing that, at any given moment, the universe is a memory of all its previous states. This need not be so, of course, if an object is encountered by a conscious individual who can see its present state as a sign of its past state, and so can focus on salient causes of salient aspects — for example, the event that led to the cup being broken. The conscious individual alone can see the present state as a sign of a past state and pick out one present state as a sign of one of the events that brought it from its past state to its present state.

This final point illustrates how the effect of an experienced event is a record of this event only to an observer. But the brain, being a material object, cannot be its own observer, comparing its past and present states. More precisely, the present state of a portion of the brain cannot reach out or refer, by the temporal equivalent of intentionality, to those salient events that changed it from an earlier state. And yet this is what memory does. Memories, that is to say, have an even more mysterious and counter-causal about-ness than perceptions of present events: they reach back to previous experiences, which themselves, through perception, reached out to that which, according to orthodox neuroscience, caused the experience. Memories supposedly therefore reach back to the mental causes of their physical causes. What is more, just as in vision I see the object as separate from myself, in memory I see the remembered object as different from the present, from the totality of what is here — I see it as absent. The memory explicitly locates its intentional object in the past. To borrow a phrase that Roger Scruton used in relation to music, memories have a double intentionality.

The failure of neuroscientism to deal with this last twist of the knife is illustrated by a recent paper in Science which some regarded triumphantly as having nailed memory. The authors found that the same neurons were active when an individual watched a TV scene (from, of all things, The Simpsons) as when they were asked to remember it. Memory, they concluded, is simply the replication of the neural activity that was provoked by the event that is remembered. This fails to distinguish, and so leaves unexplained, how it is that an individual experiences a memory as a memory rather than as something present — or, actually, a hallucination of something present.

A putative neural account of memory cannot deal with the difference between perceptions and memories because there is no past tense — or indeed future tense — in the material world. Consciousness, with its implicit sense of “now,” is required to locate events in one panel or other of the triptych past, present, and future; it is the conscious subject that provides the reference point. This is why Einstein said that physicists “know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” A consistent materialism should not allow for the possibility of memory, of the sense of the past. It only manages to seem to do so because observers, viewpoint, and consciousness are smuggled into the descriptions of the successive states of the brain, making it seem that later states can be about earlier states.

As if the unity of the self or subject or “I” at a particular time were not sufficiently resistant to neurological explanation, the unity of the self over time is even further beyond its reach. The objective endurance of the brain does not generate the sensed co-presence of successive states of the self, even less the sense that one has temporal depth. Even if the self were reduced to a series of experiences, as in the accounts of David Hume or Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, it would not be possible to see how the series was explicit as a series, with different moments explicitly related to each other, where one part accessed another and saw that it belonged to the same self. Indeed, starving the self down into a mere implicit thread linking successive experiences renders it less, not more, amenable to neural reduction, since the question of why some particular set of successive experiences rather than another should be linked together as a single series becomes even more glaring when the experiences are seen as but some arbitrary physical events among other physical events occurring in many different locations in physical space.

And the problem is by no means absolved if the sense of self is — as claimed by some neuroscientists, like so many other things they are unable to explain — an illusion. My feeling that I am the same person as the person who married my wife in 1970 is just as impossible to explain neurologically if it is an illusion as if it is true. Neural activity does not have the wherewithal to create the sense that we have of feeling that we are the same individual at different times — just as little if the sense is illusory as if it is true. The notion that the material brain can produce the illusion of the self but not be the basis of the real thing seems, to put it mildly, rather odd. And what is it to which the illusion is presented? Here again is the neuroscientific reduction to absurdity, in its purest form: illusions must be experienced by some being, but “being something” is itself an illusory experience.

An Insincere Materialism

The belief among neurophilosophers that the brain, a material object, can generate tensed time is one among many manifestations of the insincerity of their materialism. As we have seen, under cover of hard-line materialism, they borrow consciousness from elsewhere, smuggling it into, or presupposing it in, their descriptions of brain activity. This ploy is facilitated by a mode of speaking which I call “thinking by transferred epithet,” in which mental properties are ascribed to the brain or to parts of the brain (frequently very tiny parts, even individual neurons), which are credited with “signaling,” and often very complex acts such as “rewarding,” “informing,” and so forth. The use of transferred epithets is the linguistic symptom of what Oxford philosopher P.M.S. Hacker and University of Sydney neuroscientist M.R. Bennett described, in their 2003 book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, as the “mereological fallacy”: ascribing to parts properties which truly belong to wholes. This fallacy bids fair to be described as the Original Sin of much neurotalk, and it certainly allows the mind-brain barrier to be trespassed with ease.

This ease is in turn concealed by the ubiquity of transferred epithets outside brain science in everyday life. We are so used to talking about machines (particularly computers) “detecting,” “signaling,” “recording,” “remembering,” “warning,” and so forth, that we hardly notice, even less object, when this talk is applied to brains. Indeed, given that the brain is often billed as the most sophisticated of all machines, the computer to end all computers, it hardly needs to demonstrate its entitlement to being credited with such activities. While the homunculus is out of fashion, and ghosts have been exorcised from the machine, there are apparently billions of micro-homunculi haunting the cerebral cortex. The exiled homunculus has crept back in the form of a million billion angels bearing messages from one part of the brain to another, chattering endlessly across synapses.

This absurdity is concealed yet more deeply by a mode of speech that populates even the material environment that surrounds the brain with “signals” and “messages” and “information.” All the nervous system has to do is to extract and transmit those signals and messages and information. The Princeton psychologist Philip Johnson-Laird, a leading figure of the school of thought that held that the brain-mind is a computer, stated in his 1988 book The Computer and the Mind that “light reflected from surfaces and focused on the retinae contains a large amount of information.” (Gossipy stuff, light.) He admitted, however, that there were no entirely free gifts:

No matter how much information is in the light falling on the retinae, there must be a mental mechanism for recovering the identities of the things in a scene and those of their properties that vision makes explicit to consciousness.

Nevertheless, stipulating that there is information in the energy tickling up the brain is a flying start, and gets you across the brain-consciousness barrier without any scientific or indeed conceptual work being done. The otherwise inexplicable miracle by which the brain is supposed to support intelligent consciousness is made rather easier to understand when the energy that impinges on it is billed as information — information “about” the brain’s surroundings.

This trend, incidentally, is the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which much lunacy lies. Information, once freed from the confinement of conscious human beings offering information to other human beings requiring to be informed, is everywhere. It is in the light; it is in DNA and other structures of the body. It is even in the material transactions of the non-living universe, as has been suggested by the advocates of “digital physics” — the idea that the universe is computation. By such misuse of language, matter becomes consciousness, or the energy in the material world comes to know itself, as has been suggested by the advocates of “panpsychism” — the idea that all matter is at least partially conscious.

The promotion of energy to information is the inverse of the demotion of consciousness to material transactions. In one direction, consciousness is in nothing; in the other, it is in everything. It gets right to the heart of how inherently absurd and paradoxical is neuroscientism to recognize that it naturally splits into these two wholly and fundamentally opposed modes of thinking, yet relies simultaneously on them both.

Finding Ourselves

We can see more clearly now the wide gap between brain function and consciousness — really, between people and their brains. This gap is seemingly crossed by linguistic legerdemain: people can be “brainified” if the brain is personified. But we have seen reasons why this gap should be unbridgeable. This, however, only throws into greater relief the magnitude of what remains to be answered, and so we must ask where we go from here. The failure to explain consciousness in terms of the brain — which follows from the failure of matter as understood in the most rigorous scientific manner to be able to house consciousness — raises two immediate questions.

The first and most obvious question is: Why, if the brain is not the basis of consciousness, is it so intimately bound up with it? Even those of us who object to the reduction of persons to brains have to explain why, of all the objects in the world, the brain is so relevant to our lives as persons. Nor can we overlook the extraordinary advances that have come from neuroscience in our ability to understand and treat diseases that damage voluntary action, consciousness, and mood — something that has been central to my entire professional career as a clinical neuroscientist. If consciousness, mind, volition, and so forth are not deeply connected with brain activity, then what are we to make of the genuine advances that neuroscience has contributed to our management of conditions that affect these central underpinnings of ordinary life?

The second question is whether, having shown the difficulty — no, the impossibility — of trying to get from brains alone to persons, we should abandon the very notion of the brain as a starting point for our thoughts about human consciousness. This question, however, brings us back to the first. If we say “I wouldn’t start from here,” then what do we do with the facts of neuroscience? Where does the brain fit into a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ontology of mind that deny the brain a place at their center? If we are thinking of a new ontology, an account of the kinds of things there are in the universe that goes beyond the traditional division into mental and physical things; or if we are to go beyond an interactive epistemology that begins with sensations arising out of the impingement of energy on our brains and ascends to our knowledge of the laws of nature; then how shall we make sense of the things neuroscience tells us? How shall we deal with the fact that we are evolved organisms as well as persons?

These questions are posed because the case outlined here has been, necessarily, quite negative. It has merely been meant to clear the decks so we can set sail on the real work of finding a positive description of our nature, of the place of mind in nature, and, possibly, of the nature of nature itself. We need to start again thinking about our hybrid status: as pieces of matter subject to the laws of physics, as organisms subject to the laws of biology, and as people who have a complex sense of themselves, who narrate and lead their lives, and who are capable of thinking thoughts like these.

Raymond Tallis, emeritus professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, is the author, most recently, of Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence (Yale, 2010) and Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, forthcoming in 2011). This essay has been adapted from a lecture delivered in February 2010 at the American Enterprise Institute.

Raymond Tallis, "What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves," The New Atlantis, Number 29, Fall 2010, pp. 3-25.

Faster Than The Speed Of Light?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I'd like to put up this excellent short piece by W. Daniel Hillis, the renowned computer scientist and engineer. It was originally published in How Things Are: A Science Toolkit for the Mind by John & Katinka Brockman (1996), and it outlines the bare basics of why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light. This may bring disappointment to sci-fi movie fans with a liking for 'time travel' movies, which often propagate the idea that time travel is possible after travelling faster than light speed. Far from shattering illusions of the possibility of doing so at some point in the future, this article actually serves as a quick crash course into a basic issue of physics. Slightly technical in the beginning but gets easier and easier to understand, eventually resulting in a realisation of learning. Enjoy.

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Special Relativity: Why Can't You Go Faster Than Light?

You've probably heard that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, but have you ever wondered how this rule gets enforced? What happens when you're cruising along in your spaceship and you go faster and faster until you hit the light barrier? Do the dilithium crystals that power your engine suddenly melt down? Do you vanish from the known universe? Do you go backward in time? The correct answer is none of the above. Don't feel bad if you don't know it; no one in the world knew it until Albert Einstein worked it out.

Image courtesy: Fx-1988

The easiest way to understand Einstein's explanation is to understand the simple equation that you've probably seen before: e = mc². In order to understand this equation, let's consider a similar equation, one for converting between square inches and square feet. If i is the number of square inches and f is the number of square feet, then we can write the equation: i = 144f. The 144 comes from squaring the number of inches per foot (12² = 144). Another way of writing the same equation would be i = c²f, where c in this case is equal to 12 inches per foot. Depending on what units we use, this equation can be used to convert any measure of area to any other measure of area; just the constant c will be different. For example, the same equation can be used for converting square yards to square meters, where c² is 0.9144, the number of yards per meter. The c² is just the conversion constant.

The reason why these area equations work is that square feet and square inches are different ways of measuring the same thing, namely area. What Einstein realized, to everyone's surprise, was that energy and mass are also just two different ways of measuring the same thing. It turns out that just a little bit of mass is equal to a whole lot of energy, so in the equation, the conversion constant is very large. For example, if we measure mass in kilograms and energy in joules, the equation can be written like this: e = 90,000,000,000,000,000 m. This means, for example, that a charged-up battery (which contains about one million joules of energy) weighs about 0.0000000001 grams more than a battery that has been discharged.

If we work with different units, the conversion constant will be different. For instance, if we measure mass in tons and energy in BTUs, then c will be 93,856,000,000,000,000. (It happens to work out that the conversion constant in a particular set of units is always the speed of light in those units, but that is another story.) If we measure both energy and mass in what physicists call 'the natural units' (in which c = 1), we would write the equation: e = m, which makes it easier to understand; it just means that energy and mass are the same thing.

It doesn't matter whether the energy is electrical energy, chemical energy, or even atomic energy. It all weighs the same amount per unit of energy. In fact, the equation even works with something physicists call 'kinetic' energy, that is, the energy something has when it is moving. For example, when I throw a baseball, I put energy into the baseball by pushing it with my arm. According to Einstein's equation, the baseball actually gets heavier when I throw it. (A physicist might get picky here and distinguish between something getting heavier and something gaining mass, but I'm not going to try. The point is that the ball becomes harder to throw.) The faster I throw the baseball, the heavier it gets. Using Einstein's equation, e = mc², I calculate that if I could throw a baseball one hundred miles per hour (which I can't, but a good pitcher can), then the baseball actually gets heavier by 0.000000000002 grams - which is not much.

Now, let's go back to your starship. Let's assume that your engines are powered by tapping into some external source, so you don't have to worry about carrying fuel. As you get going faster and faster in your starship, you are putting more and more energy into the ship by speeding it up, so the ship keeps getting heavier. (Again, I should really be saying 'massier' not 'heavier' since there is no gravity in space.) By the time you reach 90 percent of the speed of light, the ship has so much energy in it that it actually has about twice the mass as the ship has at rest. It gets harder and harder to propel with the engines, because it's so heavy. As you get closer to the speed of light, you begin to get diminishing returns - the more energy the ship has, the heavier it gets, so the more energy must be put into it to speed it up just a little bit, the heavier it gets, and so on.

The effect is even worse than you might think because of what is going on inside the ship. After all, everything inside the ship, including you, is speeding up, getting more and more energy, and getting heavier and heavier. In fact, you and all the machines on the ship are getting pretty sluggish. Your watch, for instance, which used to weigh half an ounce, now weighs about forty tons. And the spring inside your watch really hasn't gotten any stronger, so the watch has slowed way down so that it only ticks once an hour. Not only has your watch slowed down, but the biological clock inside your head has also slowed down. You don't notice this because your neurons are getting heavier, and your thoughts are slowed down by exactly the same amount as the watch. As far as you are concerned, your watch is just ticking along at the same rate as before. (Physicists call this 'relativistic time contraction.')

The other thing that is slowed down is all of the machinery that is powering your engines (the dilithium crystals are getting heavier and slower, too). So your ship is getting heavier, your engines are getting sluggish, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the worse it gets. It just gets harder and harder and harder, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't quite get over the light barrier.

And that's why you can't go faster than the speed of light.

The Twins Who Share A Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:47:00 +0000

Channel 4 recently broadcast an interesting documentary as part of their 'Bodyshock' series, dealing with a set of twins who are joined at the head. I wrote some notes while watching the documentary:

Tatiana and Krista Hogan are regarded as a 'medical marvel'. While instances of twins being born joined at the heads are rare, ithis particular case is certainly a marvel in living memory. Their mother, Felicia Hogan, discovered this information at her 21-week scan. As she was 21 years of age at the time and already had two older children, the medical staff offered her the option to have a termination in view of the weight of responsibilities she would have if she went through with the birth. Felicia opted against the offer and, at the time of birth, doctors were surprised at the survival of both mother and babies. They also noticed something strange: when one twin was injected, the other spontaneously cried. Further observations from family as the twins were growing up, such as one twin 'zoning out' when looking at something while the other twin's eyes twitched, made them speculate as to whether the twins shared senses.

How could this be possible? Four months after the twins were born, they underwent a CT scan to check for any indications. It was found that they shared brain matter and arterial structures in an interconnected fashion, so there could be no possibility of surgical separation as sometimes occurs in other cases of conjoined twins. Furthermore, it was discovered that both twins shared the same thalamus, which is the brain structure responsible for processing sensory inputs and relaying them to other structures - a communications control room.

(Tatiana, bottom left, and Krista, bottom right, with their mother Felicia, top left.
Image courtesy: Macleans.ca)

The documentary followed the progress of the Hogan twins over the course of a year or so. At around age 2 years and 4 months, the twins weren't able to walk but could stand with support, and had begun to talk using simple expressions like "stop that!" in response to stimulation. Also, it was possible to see the birthing of two distinct personalities.

Tatiana's qualities include being the more "intellectual" of the two (whatever that means for a 2 year old child!), and is very loving, engages in frequent hugging and kissing behaviours, of a happy disposition. By contrast, Krista, who can also be loving and happy, tends to be more hot-tempered, exhibiting protest (crying) behaviours and is more aggressive, will scream to get what she wants and can even be a bit of a "bully" according to Felicia. However, separate personalities though they are, they are already beginning to learn the value of cooperation and they work together on simple tasks such as coordinating movement to stand up and attempt to walk. If you tickle Krista, Tatiana giggles.

Some of the usual medical problems affecting many pairs of conjoined twins also affect the Hogans. Despite being smaller and thinner, Tatiana's heart pumps for both of them and is thus at risk of enlargement and possible failure. Tatiana's heart also works twice as hard to supply the brain's arterial system with blood. Over time, her heart rate has thankfully dropped and is much closer to Krista's, but the possibility of further complications as the twins age always looms.

It was also discovered that when the twins slept, Tatiana would stop breathing for up to 20 seconds. A surgical operation was needed to remove the huge adenoids that were causing the problem, but when Tatiana was anaesthetised it was observed that she was borrowing a large amount of blood to keep her going. The trouble with this was that Krista didn't have enough blood to be anaesthetised herself, which meant she had to be awake (and suffer pain?) when Tatiana went under the knife.

The rest of the documentary focused largely on the Hogan family's meeting with another pair of craniopagus twins, Lori and George Schappell, who are also joined at the head but have separate brains. The Schappells have enjoyed fame to an extent by appearing on a variety of talk shows, television dramas and singing contests, and were able to discuss their situations and give advice for the Hogans in matters of parenting and how to engage the Hogan twins in relationship skills.

At a later date, further tests were carried out to investigate further the possibility of shared senses. They concluded that the "brain of one twin records signals from the other's visual field". The explanation proffered for this told about how images entering the eyes of a twin travel along a "neuron highway" to the other's visual cortex, meaning that one twin can see what the other witnesses. Fascinating.

Virginia Woolf's Last Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:09:00 +0000

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th Century, having produced several novels, short stories, and diaries. A number of traumatic events in her life, such as the death of her parents in her teens and sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers, may have contributed to the depression that plagued her throughout her life. Although her literary output remains largely unaffected, she was subject to periodic mood swings and associated illnesses until her suicide at age 59.

In a letter to her husband, regarded as her suicide note, she revealed a glimpse of life as a voice-hearer:

Transcript:

Tuesday.

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

When a Man becomes a Woman

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sun, 16 May 2010 22:17:00 +0000

Interesting article in The Guardian the other day, about how virtual reality (VR) can be used in certian circumstances to change a male's sense of self into that of a woman's, the perceived experience being so powerful that the men reacted quite sharply (i.e. like a woman) to a slap. Patronising as that sounds, the state of mind does remain an interesting feature and it reminded me of a particular religious tradition that urges it's male adherents to emulate a type of female consciousness. Perhaps I may write more on this later, here's the article for now:

Virtual reality used to transfer men's minds into a woman's body

Researchers projected men's sense of self into a virtual reality woman, changing the way they behaved and thought

* Ian Sample
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 May 2010 22.00 BST

Scientists have transferred men's minds into a virtual woman's body in an experiment that could enlighten the prejudiced and shed light on how humans distinguish themselves from others.

In a study at Barcelona University, men donned a virtual reality (VR) headset that allowed them to see and hear the world as a female character. When they looked down they could even see their new body and clothes.

The "body-swapping" effect was so convincing that the men's sense of self was transferred into the virtual woman, causing them to react reflexively to events in the virtual world in which they were immersed.

Men who took part in the experiment reported feeling as though they occupied the woman's body and even gasped and flinched when she was slapped by another character in the virtual world.

"This work opens up another avenue for virtual reality, which is not just to transform your sense of place, but also your sense of self," said Mel Slater, a virtual reality researcher at the Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies and University College London. "There isn't any other technology that allows you to look down and see another body that isn't yours and give you the illusion that it is," he said.

"If you can temporarily give people the illusion that their bodies are different, then the evidence suggests it also affects their behaviour and the way they think. They can have new experiences: a person who is thin can know what it's like to be fat. A man can have an experience of what it's like to be a woman."

In the study, 24 men took turns wearing a VR headset that immersed them in a virtual room. Some men saw the virtual environment through the eyes of a female character who was sitting down, while others had a viewpoint that was just to the side of her.

During the experiment, a second virtual female approached and appeared to rub the person's shoulder or arm. Researchers in the lab mimicked this sensation in the real world for some of the volunteers by rubbing their shoulder or arm, helping to reinforce their feeling of occupying the character's body.

Later in the study, the second character lashed out and slapped the face of the character the men were playing. "Their reaction was immediate," said Slater. "They would take in a quick breath and maybe move their head to one side. Some moved their whole bodies. The more people reported being in the girl's body, the stronger physical reaction they had."

Sensors on the men's bodies showed their heart rates fell sharply for a few seconds and then ramped up – a classic response to a perceived attack.

As expected, the body swapping effect was felt more keenly by men who saw their virtual world through the female character's eyes than those whose viewpoint was slightly to one side of her. In all cases, the feeling was temporary and lasted only as long as the study.

The study, which appears in the online science journal PLoS One, suggests that our minds have a very fluid picture of our bodies. The research is expected to shed light on the thorny neuroscientific puzzle of how our brain tells the difference between a part of our own body, and something else in the wider world.

The work might also improve rehabilitation for patients who have experienced strokes and other medical problems by immersing them in a world that helps them to use their bodies to the full again.

Introducing: Petri Dish Talk

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:39:00 +0000

I was delighted to stumble across a neuroscience blog that I hadn't seen before. Petri Dish Talk is run by Mohammed Rahman, a neurobiology researcher who now works in biotech, and who has also worked with drugs that affect the CNS such as Carbidopa and Divalproex, which are used to treat Parkinson's and Bi-polar disorder respectively.

Among the few posts currently published, Rahman discusses the tension between research and industrialisation in his first offering. He suggests that departmentalising projects will allow errors to slip through the net in spite of well-intentioned lab researchers, and that biotech industries should do more to ensure research and experimental integrity instead of following a business model that tends to be blinkered and short-sighted in regard to such concerns.

After a very brief and informative post on BOLD fMRI that excellently serves as an expanded definition of the term, he launches into a more detailed post about dendritic pruning within the wider issue of neuroplasticity. With decent illustrations, Rahman talks about how Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) is one of the many theories advanced to explain this adaptability of the brain and the mechanism by which the dendrites are pruned. He ends with looking forward to a future in which neuroplasticity will be vigorously studied and what it will have to say about our minds as a physical structure (and rightly so).

In the last two posts we are treated to a double-whammy that explains how meditation can bring about neurophysiological changes, by virtue of a 2007 PNAS paper on the neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-time meditation practitioners, that long-time (focused) experts tend to have specialised attentional networks with a simultaneous decrease in "chatter". In the second part, Rahman discusses a 2008 paper that discusses these changes: larger volumes of grey matter in the hippocampus and frontal cortex. On the face of it,this seems as natural as a professional athlete gaining muscle mass due to exercise, so in the same way an experienced meditator gains greater "strength" in certain neural circuits due to focus and concentration-oriented meditating.

Overall I think this is a good start for a blog and I was impressed with the quality of the information as well as the easily readable presentation. I'll definitely be looking forward to more contributions.

Foot Discovered In Baby Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:10:00 +0000

Ok guys, for the first time I have something that's

NSFW!

Pity that isn't my own work, I'm lazy right now and nicked this via Joanne Manaster and KevinMD.com. Still, you gotta admit this story treads the fine line between Whoa and Pass-Me-That-Buckettttt. The Denver Channel is running a story about a medical first - a foot found growing inside a newborn's brain. I have nothing to add so I'm just gonna post the entire article here. Graphic image ahead, you have been warned:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- A Colorado Springs family is part of one of the strangest cases in medical history.

Dr. Paul Grabb, a pediatric brain surgeon, said he was surprised when he discovered a small foot growing inside the brain of 3-day-old Sam Esquibel. "The foot literally popped out of the brain," Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.

The appendage threatened the newborn's life.

When Grabb performed the life-saving surgery at Memorial Hospital for Children in Colorado Springs, he was in for another surprise: he also found what appeared to be parts of an intestine in the folds of the infant's tiny brain, in addition to another developing foot, hand and thigh. "I've never seen anything like it before," Grabb told the Colorado Springs Gazette. "It looked like the breach delivery of a baby coming out of the brain."

Sam was delivered on Oct. 1, within hours of an ultrasound that showed what appeared to be a tumor developing in the brain of the fetus. Three days later, Grabb performed the surgery to remove it. The reason for the strange growth was not clear at first. It was thought to be a teratoma -- a congenital brain tumor composed of foreign tissue such as muscle, hair or teeth -- or a fetus in fetu, which is a developmental abnormality in which a fetal twin begins to form within the other.

Grabb, the only pediatric brain surgeon in southern Colorado, said that the formal pathology report identified the mass as a teratoma because of how perfectly formed the structure was but there is a fine line between that and the fetus in fetu. "So it's unclear if a fetal twin began to form within another," Grabb said.

Grabb said he sees a teratoma once every few years but it doesn't compare to Sam's. Teratoma tumors do not usually grow as complex as a foot. "You show those pictures to the most experienced pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, and they've never seen anything like it," Grabb told the Gazette. "This is completely abnormal."

Grabb said neurologically, Sam is expected to do well. Sam's brain tumor can come back so he will be monitoring that in the months and years to come.

Mom Says Baby A Miracle

Sam's mom, Tiffnie, told TheDenverChannel on Wednesday that her son is doing well but that she didn't want to appear on camera because she doesn't want to exploit her child and make him appear like a freak in the eyes of the world.

"This is our baby," Tiffnie explained, in tears.

She said when she first talked to the Gazette, she thought the story would only appear in the small-town paper. But it has circled the globe and she is getting calls from national and international media outlets. "I am so overwhelmed right now ... We've been bombarded with calls," Tiffnie said.

DenverChannel.com Reporter Jane Slater held the infant with the baby blue eyes and round face and said "he is the cutest baby I've ever seen." Sam's at a healthy weight -- as evidenced by his pudgy arms and legs -- which explains why family members call him the "Michelin Man," Slater said.

He was alert and happy, with a barely visible inch-long scar which stretched from his hairline to the top of his cheek. Sam is still recovering from the surgery and shows weakness on one side of his body and some trouble with higher-level eye functions. He is already undergoing rehabilitation.

Tiffnie had said that her pregnancy was easy and there were no signs of complications until the ultrasound on Oct. 1. She and her husband had given up on the idea of having any children after years of trying and then Sam was conceived. Tiffnie said she doesn't mind driving to the hospital every week or month for Sam's MRI and blood checks, considering that he is healthy and happy.

"It's a miracle," she said.

In the meantime, Grabb wonders about the possibilities for medical science. "How does the body form complete extremities? Who is to say we can't grow a heart, leg or foot?" Grabb asked the Denver Post earlier. "This could show a window of what's possible."

"It's always impressive to see these sorts of things but it's not as unsual as you would think," said Dr. Rich Gustafson, with Cherry Creek Pediatrics. "Teratomas can be found in abdomens or other parts of the body ... what made this case so unusual is how perfectly formed the foot was and being in the skull as well. Usually, it's a totally safe and benign tumor. Often, it gets picked up in adulthood but now with ultrasound, you're actually picking more up as they are getting fetal ultrasounds."

700-year-old Brain Found Preserved!

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:19:00 +0000

Evolutionary psychology tends to receive harsh criticism, and often rightly so. One of the main reasons for this is the severe lack of evidence for many of it's proposals given that the paucity of fossilised brains fails to bolster many a case. And it isn't even anyone's fault. That's just the way it goes sometimes, that the brain is a jelly-like substance that is subject to decay after death, and there's no way we can objectively analyse or verify any differences in brains of long ago with brains of today.

This isn't set to change anytime soon, but the remarkable discovery of a medieval child's brain was the subject of a Neuroimage paper published recently. This is extremely exciting on many counts: the brain has been so fantastically preserved that it is possible to identify the frontal, temporal and occipital lobes, and even the sulci and gyri, the grooves and furrows channeled into brains.

However it is only the left-hemisphere that survived and not the entire brain, which had also shrunk to about 80% of it's original weight due to the (natural) mummification process. Although it was first discovered in 1998 and preserved all this time in a formalin solution, it was found in the skull of a 13th Century infant that was exhumed at an archaeological dig in north-west France. The body of the 18-month-old child was wrapped in leather and kept in a wooden coffin with a pillow underneath the head.

The presence of acidic clay soil and fresh briny water around the burial site is believed to have contributed towards the excellent preservation of the brain. To a certain degree, even the innate cellular structure had been preserved, so much so that intact neurons and dendrites - branched fibres that extend from the cell body of a neuron - had survived for observation in the 21st Century. It was also possible to identify grey and white matter. Apart from the external burial conditions, the toughness of the neuronal myelin sheath and collagen fibres are said to be the reasons for why the brain tissue had been nicely preserved.

It cannot be said for sure how the infant died, but the presence of an unhealed circular head fracture may have been the likeliest cause. High levels of hemosiderin suggested that the infant had heavy bleeding for several days prior to death. Poor little mite.
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Papageorgopoulou, C., Rentsch, K., Raghavan, M., Hofmann, M., Colacicco, G., Gallien, V., Bianucci, R., & Rühli, F. (2010). Preservation of cell structures in a medieval infant brain: A paleohistological, paleogenetic, radiological and physico-chemical study NeuroImage, 50 (3), 893-901 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.01.029

What is "Self Transcendence"?

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:58:00 +0000

A recent study by Italian researchers uncovered the fact that neurosurgery involving certain brain structures can effect personality changes that make one feel more "spiritual". 88 patients underwent pre- and post-surgical personality assessments while treated for tumours, and the results were combined with lesion mapping procedures (to precisely locate lesions) after surgery to measure changes in a personality construct called Self-Transcendence (ST). It was found that patients with posterior lesions experienced a considerable increase in 'spirituality' after the surgical removal of their tumours than those with anterior lesions, and that those with more aggressive types of tumour were most likely to describe themselves as religious. For a fuller report and discussion of this fascinating study, please see Mo Costandi's Neurophilosophy.

As I read through various articles detailing this announcement, I became intrigued at the constant mention of ST as a measure of personality. In his paper, Cosimo Urgesi describes ST as reflecting "the enduring tendency to transcend contingent sensorimotor representations and to identify the self as an integral part of the universe as a whole." ST is among several other personality dimensions in the psychobiological Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) that was devised by C. R. Cloninger and colleagues in 1994. The TCI has been used in genetics to show ST as a heritable trait, and in molecular neurosciences to show ST related to the functioning of the serotoninergic system. According to Cloninger et al. (1993) their model followed on from previous research that confirmed four dimensions of temperament; novelty-seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence, and added three more dimensions that mature in adulthood; self-directedness, cooperativeness and self-transcendence.

In their discussion of ST, Cloninger et al. begin with the amusing sentence: "Most people meditate or pray daily, which is more frequent than sexual intercourse according to population surveys". They go on to note the lack of spirituality-related traits from personality inventories including the well-known Five Factor Model, which is odd considering that spirituality is an integral aspect of people's lives and mental activity. In describing their definition of spirituality, they say:

"Self-transcendence refers generally to identification with everything conceived as essential and consequential parts of a unified whole. This involves a state of 'unitive consciousness' in which everything is part of one totality. In unitive consciousness, there is no individual self because there is no meaningful distinction between self and other—the person is simply aware of being an integral part of the evolution of the cosmos. This unitive perspective may be described as acceptance, identification, or spiritual union with nature and its source ... The person may identify (or feel a sense of spiritual union) with anything or everything. They may experience the feeling that they are part of or being guided by a wonderful intelligence, which is possibly the divine source of all phenomena. Ultimately, there may be loss of all distinctions between self and other by identifying with the concept of an immanent God as one-in-all."

So it all sounds rather New-Agey (the paper mentions Buddhism and nirvana, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta), but I was still curious about the actual questions themselves. In formulating questions to measure personality dimensions, care is taken to ensure that they accurately represent the concepts they try to measure. Moreover, statistics such as Cronbach's Alpha are employed to ensure that the measure has a high level of internal consistency; the higher, the better it is at measuring a personality construct. In this context ST consisted of three sub-scales; Self-forgetfulness vs. self-consciousness, transpersonal identification, and spiritual acceptance vs. materialism, all three exhibiting a Cronbach Alpha of above 0.7. This indicates that each of the three sub-scales were reliable in excess of 70% in measuring what they claimed to measure.

PsychMaven kindly helped me aquire a copy of the TCI. Bearing in mind that the "questions" are actually statements that one ought to rate on a 5-point scale (1 = Definitely false, 5 = Definitely true), here is the complete list (in order of appearance) that purport to contribute to the ST dimension of personality:

12. I often feel a strong sense of unity with all the things around me.

25. Often I have unexpected flashes of insight or understanding while relaxing.

29. I sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one living process.

32. I think that most things that are called miracles are just chance.

42. Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time and space.

43. I sometimes feel a spiritual connection to other people that I cannot explain in words.

52. Sometimes I have felt my life was being directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being.

56. I have had moments of great joy in which I suddenly had a clear, deep feeling of oneness with all that exists.

68. I often become so fascinated with what I’m doing that I get lost in the moment – like I’m detached from time and place.

73. I often feel a strong spiritual or emotional connection with all the people around me.

91. I have made real personal sacrifices in order to make the world a better place – like trying to prevent war, poverty and injustice.

95. It often seems to other people like I am in another world because I am so completely unaware of things going on around me.

99.I often feel like I am a part of the spiritual force on which all life depends.

106. I have had personal experiences in which I felt in contact with a divine and wonderful spiritual power.

112. Often when I look at an ordinary thing, something wonderful happens – I get the feeling that I am seeing it fresh for the first time.

118. Religious experiences have helped me to understand the real purpose of my life.

143. I believe that all life depends on some spiritual order or power that cannot be completely explained.

148. I often feel so connected to the people around me that it is like there is no separation between us.

151. I am often called “absent-minded” because I get so wrapped up in what I am doing that I lose track of everything else.

157. I often do things to help protect animals and plants from extinction.

175. I have a vivid imagination.

190. I would gladly risk my own life to make the world a better place.

206. I think it is unwise to believe in things that cannot be explained scientifically.

212. Often I become so involved in what I am doing that I forget where I am for a while.

223. I have had experiences that made my role in life so clear to me that I felt very excited and happy.

232. Reports of mystical experiences are probably just wishful thinking.

It could be argued that statements such as these are anything but 'transcendent'. As Costandi eloquently put it in his report, Urgesi et al. fall short in their study of truly defining spirituality because it is likely that different patients will hold different ideas of spirituality and how it affects their lives. Furthermore, spirituality is an area that consists of many ideas apart from 'transcendence' which, by all accounts, is generally taken to refer to a state of being philosophically and affectively 'above and beyond' this world and all forms of mundane issues. Although many items deal with experiencing spiritual connections and having a sense of oneness with the universe, items that attempt to measure patients' attempts to save plants and animals from extinction hardly qualify as being transcendent and neither does gladly risking one's life for any purpose do the same. Having a "vivid imagination", however, is certainly a questionable inclusion which is bound to draw some sarcastic remarks.

We may quibble about the exactness of ST items and whether they accurately measure spirituality, the neurological findings nevertheless support the dependence of religious beliefs on brain function and even further increases evidence that religious beliefs can be experimentally studied. Urgesi et al. even go as far as to say that "dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviours".
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Urgesi, C., Aglioti, S., Skrap, M., & Fabbro, F. (2010). The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence Neuron, 65 (3), 309-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.026

Cloninger CR, Svrakic DM, & Przybeck TR (1993). A psychobiological model of temperament and character. Archives of General Psychiatry, 50 (12), 975-90 PMID: 8250684

We've Been Nominated!

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:13:00 +0000

The team at ResearchBlogging.Org and Seed Media Group are honouring the best bloggers who discuss peer-reviewed research in the first Research Blogging Awards. Over 400 nominations were made, and an expert panel of judges have whittled them down to 5-10 blogs per category which are deemed to be the "best of the best".

I feel very honoured to have my blog nominated under the category of Best Blog - Psychology, and would like to thank the judges for this. I would also like to give a very heartfelt thank you to all my readers.

To view a record of my peer-reviewed research posts, please see a list of all my research posts or my user page at ResearchBlogging. Voting is underway as registered bloggers have been sent invitation by ResearchBlogging.Org. If you're not registered (and blog about peer-reviewed research) but would like to vote, register here.

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UPDATE 23 March 2010: The award for Best Blog-Psychology went to Christian Jarrett of the BPS Research Digest. And I wish him a hearty congratulations on the achievement.

Mr. Crowley's Suicide Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:11:00 +0000

Wine is fine,
But whiskey's quicker.
Suicide is slow with liquor.
Take a bottle, drown your sorrows,
THEN IT FLOODS AWAY TOMMORROW!!

So goes the first verse of 'Suicide Solution', an infamous song of Ozzy Osbourne's that deals with the dangers of alcohol abuse, and which was the central feature in two legal cases against him where he was charged with inciting the suicides of heavy metal fans after they listened to the song. In fact, controversy has dogged Osbourne since the beginning of his career with the founding of the influential heavy metal group Black Sabbath, who are credited with having invented the genre. Although Osbourne was found not guilty in those cases, other related matters referred to the issues of including satanic imagery in song lyrics, stage performances and album covers, as well as allegations of surreptitious backmasking of satanic messages in said albums, all things that were said to be bad infuences on young adults. Osbourne has claimed he harbours no satanic beliefs and that the inclusion of such imagery in his musical corpus was purely for reasons of showmanship.

Similarly, the music of Marilyn Manson is said to have contributed to at least one fan's suicide. But more seriously the students who carried out the Columbine High School massacre and the SuccessTech Academy shootings were said to have been heavily influenced by Manson's music. Around 50 churches were also burned down between 1992 and 1996 in Norway, for which many fans of the developing black metal scene claimed responsibility.

It isn't just the fans who are supposedly influenced adversely. Mayhem vocalist Per Yngve Ohlin, better known by his stage name 'Dead', was notorious for mutilating himself on stage with hunting knives and broken glass. Finally in 1991, and almost as a fitting homage to his nom de plume, he sat down among his bandmates and calmly slashed his wrists and neck with small cuts before inserting a shotgun into his mouth and blowing his brains everywhere. Other bandmates were famous for regular conflicts, culminating in the brutal murder of guitarist Øystein Aarseth by bassist Varg Vikernes.

If one looks deeper in the issue, one is sure to find many more horror stories of murders and depressive suicides with the common denominator of metal music. Indeed, one wouldn't be blamed for automatically assuming that individuals attracted to such music may tend to be prone to depression and/or exhibit anti-social behaviour of other kinds. But is there any actual data to substantiate this?

Vaughan Bell of mindhacks.com was kind enough to alert and send me a paper published late last year that attempts to analyse if there is a link between mental health and the enjoyment of such music. The main research questions that the study sought to answer were:

Do metal music fans in France exhibit great levels of anxiety and depression?
What variables mediate the levels of anxiety and depression for metal music fans?

Recours et al. (2009) surveyed 333 French metal fans by administering the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS), a simple test that aims to detect, obviously, notable anxiety and depression. Among other things, they analysed differences in gender, age, status, education, motivation and level of participation in metal culture. This included intimate items such as the behaviour of participants at metal concerts and whether they had body modifications such as piercings and tattoos.

Summary of the very interesting results: Out of 333 participants, 282 were male (87.8%) and 39 were female (12.15%), the mean age of which was 22.6 years old. (age range: 13-44 years). Half of them were students, 41.7% of the rest being employed and the remainder being both students and employed. Average years immersed in metal music culture was 9.22 years with average concerts attended per year was 16. Slightly over one-third had a tattoo or piercing while just 5.3 had a combination of both. The most popular subgenres of metal music indulged in were death metal (37.7%), black metal (22.7%) and thrash metal (18%). Motivations for attending concerts included the expectedly high 95.9% to enjoy the music, followed by 84.6% attending for the "ambience". Only 33.9% cited drinking as a reason to attend, and very small percentages of people attended in order to sample drugs (4.98%), sell drugs (2.72%), and to fight (0.91%).

Factor analyses revealed a three-dimensional structure, and an orthagonal rotation was performed to analyse how pertinent the depression and anxiety factors were. These two factors ended up explaining 38.71% of the variance (27.55% = anxiety, 11.17% depression), with reliability factors using Cronbach's Alpha being 0.70 and 0.67 respectively. In plain language, this means that - based on the answers provided - the HADS test was 70% and 67% reliable in detecting anxiety and depression respectively.

All in all, the results showed that the respondents exhibited low levels of anxiety and depression. The HADS instrument can be used to determine an arbitrary cutoff point as there is no generally accepted cutoff. The creators of the instrument, Zigmond & Snaith (1994), recommended a cutoff of 7/8 for possible and 10/11 for probable anxiety or depression. Following previous research Recours et al. chose 11 as a cutoff score for each dimension of anxiety and depression, implying that respondents exhibiting a score greater than 11 would be considered to have a serious level of anxiety or depression. The results found the average scores to be 7.26 and 3.76 for anxiety and depression respectively, far below the chosen cutoff levels. However, as in all populations there were some individuals scoring above the cutoff (15.6% anxiety, 3.4% depression) but these cannot be said to be due to the influence of metal music.

Multiple regression analyses revealed that none of the other variables (age, gender, concert attendance, etc.) had a link to mental health in terms of either anxiety or depression, but surprisingly the same analyses revealed a relationship between mental health and writing song lyrics, drinking at concerts, and having scarifications. Also, links were revealed between mental health, education level and employment status. However, these relationships were still nowhere near the 'danger' cutoff point of 11.

In conclusion, the authors discuss the huge gender bias towards males among other things, and suggest it as being 'very' representative of the culture of metal music. Maybe so, but let's get to discussing the drawbacks of this study:

The study was carried out over the Internet. The HADS instrument is effectively a questionnaire that was administered over a non-personal medium, but even with personal contact there is no way to certify the replies as genuine. In this way Internet-administered tests contain an extra layer of uncertainty. The authors state that they considered 'personal' measures such as approaching "morbidly dressed" metal fans on the street, but this would isolate metal fans who do not attire themselves in such an "obvious" way. But at least they entered 10 different Internet forums dedicated to metal music in order to have a realistic possibility of contacting individuals with an almost certain interest in metal music and culture. However, another category of isolation occurs here as genuinely depressed people are least likely to complete a questionnaire.

Also, by the authors' admission, France happens to be a country where the growth of cults are strictly controlled, and where "French officials are particularly concerned about Satanic cults related to metal music". Apparently a Govt. ministry has warned parents to limit their children's exposure to metal music and also to monitor their access to metal-oriented websites. Could it be possible that the majority of the French metaller population aren't exposed to the most extreme of metal subgenres? After all, throughout the entire paper scant mention is made of any specific group and metal music is referred to in categorical format; black, death, and thrash. Passing mentions are made of Slayer, Black Sabbath, Megadeth and Metallica, bands that have a certain notoriety but are also decidedly mainstream. Aren't French teenagers aware of bands like Arch Enemy, Goatwhore, Amon Amarth, Dimmu Borgir, Extol, Kult ov Azazel, and others? These are things to consider.

It was also interesting to observe how the results pointed to an unnoted third factor before orthogonal rotation enabled relevance to the anxiety and depression factors. So I agree with the authors that further research needs to be undertaken in order to determine which factor(s) can aptly describe the 61.3% of the variance that wasn't accounted for by anxiety and depression.

In closing, the authors offer reasons for why the general conclusions point to lower levels of anxiety and depression among metal lovers. It is proposed that the predominant themes of satanism, gloom and death give airing to subjects infrequently discussed in society and which are treated in a somewhat taboo manner. Although metal music is classed as entertainment in contrast to real images of death, it presents such themes as "typical occurrences that are not outside the norm" and I interpret that as a desensitising factor of sorts. So metal music lovers who frequently indulge in this pastime are more often exposed to morbid themes that have the effect of eventually desensitising them and enabling them to treat it more of the entertainment that it is supposed to be.

But then, what of all the horror stories referred to earlier? What about Dead's suicide? What about the terrible Marilyn Manson-inspired school shootings? Ozzy Osbourne's "satanism"? A tentative proposal is that metal music has a malevolent effect on individuals with certain vulnerabilities, and this is precisely why further research is needed in order to uncover these details. It is for this reason that I do not heartily share the confident assertions of the authors that their "representative" sample (from one country!) indicates low levels of anxiety and depression among metal lovers. Typical quote:

"The results indicate that fans of metal music are in good health with respect to anxiety and depression ... [and] indicate that, contrary to critics who suggest that images of death and destruction in metal music have harmful consequences, the mental health of fans of this type of music is generally good."

Hmmm, when they put it that way it's hard not to agree, but only tentatively. A more accurate representation of this study is that it simply provides an indicative snapshot rather than a comprehensive description.

Speaking of which, it's been ages since I've been to a Motörhead concert...

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Recours, R., Aussaguel, F., & Trujillo, N. (2009). Metal Music and Mental Health in France Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 33 (3), 473-488 DOI: 10.1007/s11013-009-9138-2

Snaith, R. Philip, and Anthony S. Zigmond (1994). HADS: Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Windsor: NFER Nelson.

Junkie On The Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Neural Outlaw) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:42:00 +0000

Kirsten Emott is an MD from British Columbia who also writes poetry. The March 2010 issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry has published a poem of hers that was originally printed in The Naked Physician: Poems About the Lives of Patients and Doctors by R. Charach.

Junkie On The Phone

You don’t have a headache.

The GP you named doesn’t know you.

The pharmacist recognizes your name.

You even called me before.

I won’t prescribe the drugs.

Play the game elsewhere.

Call up some other doctor.

Set out your lies:

"Doctor, here is my lie.

I want you to join me in my lying.

Pretend I am sick.

Give me what will make me sicker.

Give me a stick

with which to beat myself.

Help me to die."