The New York Times published a surprising article last week on the topic of meta-neurotheology: the context and evolution of the social discussion about neurotheology. Author David Brooks points out the huge impact that the neuroscience revolution is having and will have on our culture’s views of God, religion, and science. His main point: the direction we will take as the discussion unfolds is not towards atheism and pure materialism, but rather something he calls neural Buddhism: “new movements that emphasize self-transcendence”, based on beliefs in a dynamic self секс телки , shared morals, elevated experience, and a new concept of God

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“Life’s experiences add molecular switches to the genes that control our brain activity,” is the subhead on an article in a recent issue of SciAm Mind. The article presents the new field known as epigenetics

, which holds that experience can cause chemical changes that boost or depress the expression of certain genes.

This is a rich potential mechanism for describing interaction of nature and nurture in general, but in particular the progress of spiritual development

associated with ongoing practices such as Zen meditation. Simply put, meditation practice could have chemical effects such as attaching methyl groups to genes, which quiets the gene by interfering with the ability of the RNA-based transcription mechanism. Or it could attach acetyl groups with the opposite effect, letting the genes express themselves more easily.

This is an intriguing supplement or alternative to other explanations of the long-term effects of meditation, such as neuroplasticity, but what is the gene, or genes, in question? Such a hypothesis will be a prerequisite for experimental design in this field.

Image of chromatin created by Nicolas Bouvier; courtesy of Genevieve Almouzni, Curie Institute, Paris, France.

2006 postings to Numenware are now available in book form

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2006 was the year with the greatest density of neurotheological content on the blog, and these articles, taken as a whole, would I hope represent a meaningfully significant, if somewhat quirky, overview of the field.

Loyal readers of Numenware who read posts as they went up may have missed the discussion in the comments section, many of which are extremely informative. These comments have been included in the book, typos and all.

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. 140 pp., with an extensive (10 page) index. Digital version available for three bucks and change.

The word must be out about what Daddy’s interested in because under the tree for me at Christmas-time were two, count ‘em, two books by Andrew Newberg, MD

, namely “Why We Believe What We Believe” and “Why God Won’t Go Away”. Picked up the first one and started in on Chapter 1, “The Power of Belief”. The first story was about a guy for whom a cancer drug worked when he believed it would and didn’t when he didn’t. That seems a little off-topic–the book’s supposed to be about “Why We Believe”, not “What Belief Does”, but hey, let’s give Andy the benefit of the doubt. But then he undercuts his own case by quoting estimates that such spontaneous remissions occur only one in 3,000 or perhaps as few as 100,000 medical cases. And that’s even before

you’ve eliminated spontaneous remissions not associated with “belief”. Why exactly are we supposed to be so concerned with something that might, or might not, be responsible for healing some infinitesimally tiny fraction of sick people?

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The magazine Utne has a series of articles in its June 2006 issue relating to topics such as neuroethics and neural implants. The one of interest to us, Saffron Robes and Lab Coats, discusses a recent Stanford forum entitled Craving, Suffering and Choice: Spiritual and Scientific Explorations of Human Experience Caleb’s Door trailer , attended by the Dalai Lama, and presents some useful insights on the science and religion debate, specifically on the approach to craving and suffering. Quotes:

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“The scientists and the Buddhists agreed that the type of craving that leads to an unhealthy life is a misapprehension of reality—desire taken to a destructive level. Buddhist practice holds that the correct view of reality comes through contemplation, while neurosicence focuses on localizing the brain activity associated with craving…”

“While their approaches to suffering may sound different, Mobley [William Mobley, director of Stanford’s Neuroscience Institute] said, neuroscience and Buddhism both acknowledge the Four Noble Truths regarding suffering. There is the fact of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to end suffering.”

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There don’t seem to be many recordings of glossolalia on the net. After much searching, I’ve found this one

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Giuseppe Pagnoni of Emory University (pictured) is doing fMRI studies of zazen (newspaper article Donald Gets Drafted full movie ), comparing 15 experienced meditators and 15 controls, with a focus on attention and inhibition.

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Pagnoni has also done neuroimaging studies of social interaction.

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Toy Soldiers trailer According to the newspaper article, Pagnoni is taking a more experimental approach than usually seen. Instead of simply looking at meditators’ brains and seeing what parts “light up”, he actually plans to put neurologically damaged subjects through a meditation training program so he can compare them to people with normal brain functioning. This is the kind of experiment we need many more of.

Brad Warner recently wrote about participating in this study (blog entry). Apparently Pagnoni is doing EEGs on meditators after having them do some cognitive exercises, followed by fMRI scans the following day involving the subject entering a meditative states and “doing some weird computer tasks”. The combination of EEG and fMRI sounds potentially fruitful. But how can you do mental exercises while “in a meditative state”?

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Ned Kelly release Rogue dvdrip Richard Davidson, the Dalai Lama collaborator who scanned Tibetan monks’ brains, was named to the Time 100 The Godfather: Part III divx , the newsmagazine’s list of 100 people shaping our world.

Time noted that “his research legitimizes, for scientists as well as monks, the study of internal states of consciousness by linking them to the objective reality of electrical activity in the central nervous system. It also gives us a handle for understanding spiritual experiences that have heretofore seemed purely subjective and beyond the reach of scientific investigation.”

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One can hardly imagine a better demonstration of the how the importance of the study of the biology of religion is increasingly being recognized in today’s world, but hopes that research on important neurotheology topics other than just the biology of meditation, which is Davidson’s focus, will also be given priority in the future—the biology of belief, to name just one.

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Amazon) is a snappy, readable book about, basically, how God doesn’t exist (or exists only with vanishingly low probability). Greater minds than my own have already reviewed the book (NYT The Tripper release ) and pronounced it brilliant or stupid or flawed or whatever. Here I’ll confine myself to neurotheological and Buddhist aspects.

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The most basic problem with this book is that it completely fails to take into account the connection between religion and any process of personal development and/or the biological “correlates” of that process. To the extent religion is to some extent a highly corrupted version of meaningful, biologically-based insights about how to be happier, many of Dawkins’ points would need to be modified or recast.

On p. 37 Dawkins claims he will not be “concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as ethical systems of philosophies of life.” That’s a great distinction to be made, but at the same time Buddhism and Western monotheism are similar in that they are both socially dominant systems of belief and thought, and rather than arbitrarily excluding one, why doesn’t Dawkins incorporate Buddhism into his thinking as a way to better define the topological contours of religion and religious behavior The Dead One move

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Surprisingly for a biologist, Dawkins mentions “neurotheology” only once, in a dismissive tone. On pp. 168-169, he says:

The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain. I shall not pursue the neurological idea os a ‘god centre’ int he brain because I am not concerned here with proximate questions…If neuroscientists find a ‘god centre’ in the brain, Darwinian scientists like me will still want to understand the natural selection pressure that favoured it.

This seems like a particular devious way to dodge neurotheological questions. Perhaps the existence of a ‘god centre’ (more accurately, religiously-connected neural circuitry or structures) can be considered a “proximate” issue, but attempting to understanding it, rather than simply ignoring it, could help in grasping the “ultimate” cause, which for Dawkins is the Darwinian one. Would Dawkins focus on the evolutionary reason for the existence of the visual faculty without bothering to learn about the structure of the eye?

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The cutest idea in this book, new at least to me, is that religion survives due an evolutionary tendency for children to believe what their parents say. This provides a scenario for a gradual decline over decades and centuries of Bible-thumping religions, as in each generation some percentage of believers, however, small, discard the religion of their parents and produce non-religious kids, as I did—to the extent that one day my oldest son came home from elementary school and asked me, “Daddy, who is this guy they were talking about in class today called ‘Cheeses’?”. Compare this to Dennett in Breaking the Spell, who provides no roadmap other than that people will or should stop believing just because he thinks religion is so stupid.

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Mario Beauregard has fMRI’d nuns having semi-mystical states and found that a whole range of brain regions (including the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, left brainstem, and extra-striate visual cortex), demonstrating that mystical experience (or at least the memories of mystical experience these Christian nuns called forth) were involved, thus supposedly disprovnig the “God spot” theory.

Beauregard’s article in Science Direct uses the term “spiritual neuroscience,” which I had never heard before. We’re all eager for good new terms to replace “neurotheology,” but I don’t think this suggestion will fly. It evokes images of scientists in white coats having spiritual experiences as they do their neuroscience research.

I guess political correctness is catching on in the neurotheology biz. Here’s Beauregard’s disclaimer from the article:

With respect to this issue, it is of paramount importance to fully appreciate that elucidating the neural substrates of these experiences does not diminish or depreciate their meaning and value, and that the external reality of “God” can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed by delineating the neural correlates of RSMEs.

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Everyone's Hero download Beauregard also uses the term RSME, for “religious/spiritual/mystical experience”. Is this well-known terminology, or something he invented? It seems useful.

The research was supported by Metanexus

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