We complete our three-part examination of Landmark Forum from the religiobiological perspective (Part I, Part II), wherein we ponder the plausibility of Landmark’s efficaciousness based on the neurotheological or religiobiological assumption: that religious experience and development is correlated with biology and/or neurology.

Body-mind aspects. The religiobiological assumption would lead us to expect religions and personal development programs to be more effective to the extent they address the body side of the body-mind issue. This could range from rules or practices for eating, to various forms of physical practice. Zen, for instance, has its kinhin walking meditation, as well as its ōryōki eating system. A high level of religious or personal development would seem to be impossible without a smooth integration of body and mind, and thus we would expect the religion or program to talk about it or address it through its practices.

Landmark Forum completely ignores the body side of the equation. Of course, so do many other religions and systems, but the fact remains that here, at least, we find no particular support for Landmark’s promised effectiveness.

Philosophy. I’ll go out on a limb here and attempt to summarize the Landmark philosophy.

1. People form and then get stuck in suboptimal identities and worldviews.
2. The present contains the seeds of myriad possibilities.
3. Language creates reality.
4. Things are meaningless.

Philosophy—we could equally well call it ideology, or theology, or theory—forms an integral part of most religious frameworks, although in some, like Zen, it plays a lesser role. It can serve as a a guidepost and motivator and provide context to experiential development. From a religiobiological standpoint, philosophy per se is suspect in terms of its religious effect since its higher-level cortical impact is unlikely to (or we don’t know how it might) lead to any long-term changes in neurobiological structure. In order for it to be an effective part of the religion or system, at a minimum it needs to be sustained and highly coherent and targeted.

In Landmark’s case, the teaching of the philosophy is not sustained, by definition, since the program lasts only three days, although there are a number of follow-on programs. Nor, in spite of my basic sympathy for the four points above, is it coherent or targeted. It’s more like an appetizer platter.

Although it’s not my role here to critique the Landmark philosophy, I do have to object to or comment on some of these ponits.

Point 1—that people form and become prisoners of their identity and concepts—is hardly new, but certainly worthwhile to present, especially to a demographic that probably has spent little or no time pondering such things. But Landmark presents this in a vacuum, the entire discussion assuming a disembodied “I” outside the process that is apparently free of misshapen identities but explored no further.

Point 2—that language creates reality (this is not my interpretation—Landmark itself says “language may in fact be what brings that world into being”)—is actually wrong. Doubtless language is a powerful instrument for channeling and reinforcing ideas, and calling attention to that fact is useful. But as a Go player, for instance, I know the sequence of moves I plan in my mind is perfectly real, long before it takes any linguistic form, if indeed it ever does.

Point 4—that nothing means anything—is startling in the lack of connection to anything else coming before or after it on the platter. And given Landmark’s focus on terminology, or “distinctions”, it’s doubly odd that they would present this as the linchpin of their philosophy without bothering to talk about what “meaning” means.

Summary. From the religiobiological standpoint, we find nothing in particular about the Landmark program that would indicate it’s likely to be effective.

So why, to revisit the issue raised in our second post, do so many people feel they have benefited from programs such as Landmark Forum? One commentator sums it up well:

The programs have given people a positive direction and focus, and surrounded them with like-minded folks for reinforcement. They have helped them achieve peace of mind or to accomplish goals they had been unable to accomplish heretofore. They have helped with personal relationships with spouses and children or helped them justify getting out of relationships with their friends and family. The program has forced them to be more self-conscious, forced them to think and examine their lives, something most people don’t do on an ordinary Tuesday. Any time a rational person reflects on his or her life, or on some of the bigger issues in life, it feels good or it puts things in perspective. Either way, it is usually satisfying.

In other words, even if you interpret my three-part analysis as weakening Landmark’s claim to being effective (as opposed to the alternative, namely weakening the religiobiological assumption), Landmark seems to be a perfectly good program for a certain category of people and is almost certainly worth the time and money for them.

Recap. Below I bring together the six aspects that I identified in this series as being relevant in examining any framework from the religiobiological stance.

1. Talking (vs. doing). What is the balance between talking/preaching and doing?
2. Language (terminology). Does the system define and use a coherent terminology mapping to its worldview and practices?
3. Practice. Is there a structured, regular practice which would correlate to long-term neurobiological development?
4. Therapy. Does the system deal, directly or indirectly, with traumatic or damaging life experiences which can hinder early stages of development?
5. Body-mind aspects. Does the system address the body side of the body-mind equation?
6. Philosophy. Is the philosophy coherent, targeted, and sustained?

Clearly, there is ample room to improve on this list.

The Academy for Neuroscience and Architecture has as its mission to “build intellectual bridges between research on the brain and those who design places for human use”. That sounds promising.

In addition to the architecture of K-12 learning spaces (less-cluttered, better-lit classrooms promote learning) and hospitals (green walls help healing), the group is focusing on a topic of interest to Numenware readers: religious spaces. If this research succeeds, then as their web page says:

future generations of school children, hospital patients, office workers, and worshippers in sacred places will have their environments more carefully tuned to their needs and desires.

One wishes this group all the best. As Alison Whitelaw, one of its founders, wrote: “The prospect of designing rooms, buildings and public spaces that are in tune with human biology could have far-reaching social, personal and economic benefits.”

Current priorities for the group apparently include doing research (neuro-imaging of people looking at buildings) and doing databases. What seems to be missing is any hypotheses about the potential relationship between neuroscience and architecture, whether sacred or profane. One section of the group’s website does include some “hypotheses” but they are limited to the circular, such as “the sequence of brain activations as one processes a place of worship may bring about a spiritual feeling”, or “a [religious] space may evoke a spiritual feeling, resulting from the mystery or surprise of the arrival, that becomes a meaningful religious experience.”

I must admit to some doubts about this enterprise. I have visited the new Cathedral here in Los Angeles and it is a competent, pleasant building. But I can’t imagine the building itself stimulating some kind of spiritual experience. A spire points to the sky—reminding us of God. But this begs the question of what we think God is or why he is in an “upward” direction. The experiences of people attending masses in that building, I would think, are dominated by the music, the words, the rituals, the symbols, and the religious authority figures, not the shape of the building.

Remember that church buildings as we think of them are specific to the types of large-scale organized religions that evolved in the political and economic environment in the West. Wide swaths of world-wide religious behavior do not involve buildings at all, other than perhap the shaman’s hut. So any neurotheological theory of architecture would first have to explain what’s different about the brains of billions of people who do just fine without any architects around to design big buildings for them to worship in.

Timur’s astonishingly beautiful Registan buildings in Samarkand include mosques, but were mainly about him strutting his wealth and power (as is the case, indeed, with many other “religious” buildings). Pachacuti, the legendary Incan ruler, built the fabulous gold-encrusted Coricancha temple in his capital Cuzco, but it was not a place of worship per se; instead, the mummies of the dead rulers were kept there. Thailand’s Emerald Buddha is housed in a temple of moderate architectural interest, but the main focus, it goes without saying, is the statue itself.

Neuroreport reports research showing that meditation thickens your cortex.

We know that meditation changes brain wave patterns. But could that be due to changes in the brain’s physical structure? That’s the question the researchers asked. They stuck the meditators in an MRI machine, measured their cortical thickness (how?), and found it had increased.

From the abstract:

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical thickness in 20 participants with extensive Insight meditation experience, which involves focused attention to internal experiences. Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent cortical plasticity associated with meditation practice.

That’s great, because I’ve been really worried about that age-related cortical thinning thing.

The article itself is available only by subscription, but according to a news report on the findings:

Most of the brain regions identified to be changed through meditation were found in the right hemisphere, which is essential for sustaining attention. And attention is the focus of the meditation.

Dogen, in his later years, emphasized that to find the truth you would have to leave your family and join a monastery, but this study was of regular people with jobs and families who meditated just 40 minutes per day on average.

It seems obvious that a thicker cortex is a “good” thing, but why? Is it that new brain cells have grown, or simply that the intra-neuronal geometry and distance changes? Which layer of the cortex grew thicker, and how does that tie into theories of cortical functioning? Finally, if the cortex grows thicker presumably some other parts of the brain are getting compressed—which ones, and with what effect?

Alien visitations, odd as they are, have something in common with religion: people believe in them. Why do people have the belief they were abducted by aliens? How do those beliefs relate to beliefs they or other people have about anything, including God? If we understood the neurological mechanisms underlying why people believe they were abducted by aliens could we understand why they believe in other things, including God?

Today the New York Times published an article entitled Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers, talking about the forthcoming book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy. According to the cover blurb, “Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a mélange of nightmares, culturally available texts, and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.”

The Times comments: “Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine visitations.”

Unfortunately, Clancy failed to gather information about the “abductees” religious lives, but now realizes this was a mistake. As the Times notes: “The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious imagery.”

Scientists have identified a brain-related gene which emerged in a place and time consistent with the historical Buddha, giving rise to the intriguing possibility that his enlightenment was aided by genetic factors.

The research was done by scientists at the Howard Hughes Medican Institute and is reported here. Or, you may prefer the New York Times version.

The gene in question, known as ASPM, is associated with brain size (this gene was identified due to its role in causing microcephaly—shrunken brains). Such a gene is of obvious interest, since increase in brain size is a hallmark of human evolution. The researchers had already done phylogenetic studies showing that these genes were more evolved in humans than in apes.

In the latest research, in a sample of humans from around the world, the scientists found unusually common groups of “haplotypes” (genetic variants), but also slight variants from those common haplotypes, indicating that their evolution was ongoing. This gave rise to the headlines in your local newspaper screaming “Evolution of Brain Continues!” Well, why would anyone have thought it had ever stopped?

The most intriguing part of the research was how it walks back in time , using the statistical characteristics of the genetic variations, to estimate when—and where (based on the geographically diverse group of subjects)—the current dominant form of the gene evolved. For ASPM, the conclusion was that that a new allele emerged 5,800 years ago. and occurs more frequently in in a band running east-to-west from the Mediterranean to India.

The scientists muse that 5,800 years ago was when writing emerged in those regions, and agriculture , and settlements, and wonder if a connection could exist there. I’m more interested in the uncanny match with the time and place of the historical Buddha.

If we believe that genetic changes and resulting changes in brain size or structure could predispose people to reaching transcendant states or making progress on religious paths, some interesting neurotheological conclusions could follow. We could in theory develop genetic tests to identify good candidates for spiritual training. We would want to reverse the trend for advanced practitioners to remove themselves from the gene pool by becoming celibate—perhaps a monks’ sperm bank could be set up. Most interestingly, we may have grounds for optimism that as humans and their brains continue to evolve, as long as we don’t kill ourselves first, evolution will eventually bring the race to a perfected neural state where everyone can enjoy divine grace.

In The Meditative Mind, a worthwhile tour of major meditative traditions, Daniel Goleman (picture, Wikipedia entry) quotes Joseph Goldstein, a teacher of insight meditation:

It’s simple mathematics: all meditation systems either aim for One or Zero—union with God or emptiness. The path to the One is through concentration on Him, to the Zero is insight into the voidness of one’s mind.

I’d like to do some brain scans to illuminate this simple division of styles. One would expect that One-based meditation would involve parts of the brain associated with identity and boundaries, the Zero-based style pattern-matching and categorization.

If any readers know of similar kinds of research, I’d love to know about it.

Meditation can stabilize your perception. In a new study, Tibetan monks donned special helmets which fed conflicting images into the left and right eyes (“binocular rivalry”). Normally the brain fluctuates back and forth between the images. But during and after meditation, the monks were able to stabilize on one image or the other, or a combination.

This was the result reported by J. D. Pettigrew of the University of Queensland and other researchers in Meditation alters perceptual rivalry in Tibetan Buddhist monks, in correspondence recently published in Current Biology.

The light blue and dark blue bars in the graph above indicate the percentage of subjects where the “rivalry switch rate” either slowed down or stopped after (middle bar) and during (right bar) meditation.

This is intriguing research, but raises many additional questions which I hope the scientists will address in future research:

1. Only 50% of the monks reported this phenomenon. Why?
2. What governed which of the conflicting images the monks stabilized on? Some monks stablized on one, some on the other, and some on some combination.
3. Why did the effect occur only with “one-point” meditation, focusing on a single object, and not with so-called “compassionate” meditation?
4. What is the hypothesized mechanism? The authors merely note that focused styles of meditation have been associated with changes in neuroal activity in prefrontal regions of the cortex, which in turn have been implicated in sustained attentional rivalty.

The writers conclude:

This study offers an initial contribution towards increased understanding of the biological processes underlying meditation and rivalry, while additionally highlighting the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness.

Everyone’s talking about Science Magazine and its list of 125 big questions. Personally I like “Why is time different from other dimensions?”, but that’s down around #50. The interesting question, way up at #2, asks what is the biological basis of consciousness. That’s right up our alley, although it’s questionable if “scientists have a good shot at answering the question over the next 25 years”, which is supposed to be one of the criteria.

But the editors completely missed a key point: what is the value of solving these questions? In the absence of other metrics, let’s think in terms of economic value. If Science had adopted this perspective, they certainly would have included our question: what is the biological basis of religion/religious experience/religious behavior? Whether morality is hard-wired into the brain did make it onto the list, but that’s a little different.

The economic value of understanding this neurotheology question can be summed up in just one word: terrorism. Why do people fly airplanes into buildings or strap on explosives to blow up themselves and some people on a street in the name of religion? It must be more than just the 72 doe-eyed virgins whose ministrations await them in heaven. Just a wild guess, but given the money being spent on the “war on terror”, solving this problem should be worth at least a trillion dollars. The consciousness problem is intensely interesting, but what’s the payoff?

Stigmatics are people in whom the stigmata, the wounds inflicted on Jesus when he was crucified, are reproduced. Since the phenomenon first appeared in the Middle Ages, about 500 stigmatics have been reported.

What explains stigmatism? Is it Jesus reminding us through His messengers of the pain He suffered as He redeemed mankind? Is it a biological process tied to religious mentational activity—the biotheological phenomenon par excellence ? Or is it simply fraud?

We know that emotions can cause skin eruptions. The medical term for this is psychogenic purpuras, bruising and bleeding from the skin from emotional stress. However, these look like bruises, or spots—not wounds. And the bleeding is subdural—under the skin.

There are substantial grounds for doubting supernatural explanations, besides the fact that some stigmatics themselves admitted they were frauds (such as Magdalena de la Cruz, 1487-1560). There is no video or other objective, scientific account of a stigmatic episode. It seems unusual that stigmatism would have emerged in the 1200s, right when there was an emphasis on the crucifixion, and then largely died out over the last few hundred years. Furthermore, stigmata appear in people’s palms, whereas it now seems likely that the actual wound was in Jesus’ wrist. Virtually all stigmatics are Roman Catholic.

Of course, there are reported aspects to stigmata that do not and probably could not have a scientific explanation, including the fact that they heal instantly, have no odor (or sometimes smell like perfume), bleed only on holy days , and even have a blood type different from the sufferer. If we want to adopt a non-supernatural explanation, we simply have to reject these reports as being pious falsehoods, as we would also reject reports of crying statues of the Virgin Mary.

What we do know is that self-mutilation and flagellation are associated with a variety of psychological disorders which in turn may involve religious manifestations. Cutting has been reported to be the most popular type of self-mutilation. Such disorders have been associated with eating disorders—which also appear in religious contexts, where they are sometimes hailed as miracles allowing saints to survive with no food intake. Both psychopathologies are much more common in females than males, which foots with the fact that 90% of known stigmatics have been female.

There are also reports of unusual mental activity during stigmatic episodes. Some stigmatics reportedly speak to visions of Christ and angels during their trials, and smell strange scents. Many female stigmatics were reported to be “ecstatics”—which apparently means they were in dissociative or schizoid episodes some or all of the time. Today, most of these girls would be on high doses of antipsychotics drugs.

The work of Ross and McKay on adolescent female self-mutilators, who carved themselves with words, letters, and symbols, is reminiscent of variant stigmata involving the names of Jesus and Mary appearing on the body. (St. Francis, an early stigmatic, also had unusual wounds: the skin formation on his palms is said to have actually replicated the shape of the head of the nail on the palm side and, on the reverse side, that of the shaft.)

Stepping back, the relationship between the corporeal and the divine is one of the most complex and profound in our psychosocial spaces. The physical body is our vehicle for experiencing the ultimate, and its gift to us. It is not surprising, that we would find intriguing phenomena at this boundary, or that world religions mark and celebrate it with ceremonies and rituals involving the body, including flagellation—not to mention circumcision.

Fakir Musafar is an artist who is exploring this realm in a non-religious context, the founder of the so-called Modern Primitive Movement, attempting to show that “deviant” self-mutilation is actually on the same spectrum as something as mundane as, say, nose-piercing. According to Musafar, “body play [as he calls it] offers a method for achieving spiritual grace, an enhanced state of awareness, and a communion with some form of higher power,” and “rituals involving self-mutilation practiced by other societies have many beneficial effects to offer those who approach the practice of body play with awareness and respect.”

Musafar says:

…we are doing more than just pushing steel needles through flesh. Something is happening in the emotional and psychic world of both the piercer and the piercee. It’s more than hanging rings there just for looks. In many cases, some of the people we pierce actually experience some kind of transformation. A self initiation. And these changes mean magic…as the people who have done this for thousands of years have discovered, it can be transmuted into ecstasy, bliss and other states of grace.

But most people would still distinguish esthetic body modifications from pathological self-mutilation, especially the type where significant damage is done to the body. The majority of such patients suffer from a psychotic disorder, and have their own “reasons” for engaging in the behavior, according to A. R. Favazza, who also notes that “the most common reasons provided by patients have historically been associated with religion, demonic influences, guilt over sexual thoughts and activities, or heavenly commands.”

Ian Wilson is the author of The bleeding mind: An investigation into the mysterious phenomenon of stigmata. He believes that stigmata are a manifestation of undiscovered abilities of the mind to influence the very shape and functioning of the human body, related to the ability to heal warts with your mind (or increase your breast size). According to a review on amazon.com, Wilson thinks the “phenomenon is a psychological one, with a pathology related closely to multiple personality disorder. Stress and poverty in early life are a common thread running through the lives of many stigmatists. Nearly all suffered some sort of personal catastrophe before the onset of the stigmata, and nearly all had a predisposition to trance states and other altered modes of consciousness. Aparently stigmatists identify so closely with the life of Christ and visualize Him so clearly that some undiscovered physiological mechanism imposes Christ’s marks of suffering on the body of the stigmatist.”

But undiscovered physiological mechanisms don’t have much explanatory power, do they. Although Numenware tries to maintain a studiously objective stance on such issues, my hypothesis is that stigmata are cases of self-multilation as part of psychotic states with religious fixations, and that the reports of unique bleeding or healing patterns are simply pious falsehoods. Unfortunately, with the last known stigmatic, Padre Pio (the newly sainted Italian priest) having died in 1968, any experimental design to validate this hypothesis will be limited to studying historical accounts.

Links:

Skeptic’s Dictionary

Catholic Encyclopedia

Wikipedia

Investigating the Mind 2005 is an exciting conference scheduled for November in DC, the theme being “The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation.” It is sponsored by the Mind & Life Institute, founded by the Dalai Lama and a neuroscientist to “create a rigorous dialogue and research collaboration between modern science, and Buddhism,” and co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Georgetown University Medical Center.

This is the 13th conference. The 12th was held last year in Dharamsala, India, under the theme “Neuroplasticity: the Neural Substrates of Learning and Transformation.” The 11th conference , which was the first open to the public, was held in conjunction with the MIT McGovern Institute of Brain Research.

From the announcement:

Recent studies are showing that meditation can result in stable brain patterns and changes over both short and long-term intervals that have not been seen before in human beings and that suggest the potential for the systematic driving of positive neuroplastic changes via such intentional practices cultivated over time. These investigations may offer opportunities for understanding the basic unifying mechanisms of the brain, mind and body that underlie awareness and our capacity for effective adaptation to stressful and uncertain conditions.