In Mapping The Mind, the book I reviewed here earlier, the author gives Sir Roger Penrose a page to describe his theory of quantum consciousness, based on “tubules” within brain cells:

The human body contains structures called microtubules—tiny tubes that are especially prevalent in nerve cells. Those in brain cells could, I propose, give rise to a stable quantum state that would bind the activity of brain cells throughout the cerebrum and in doing so give rise to consciousness. Such a state could not be replicated in a computer…I have a strong feeling that it is obvious that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer.

Penrose’s thesis is set out most clearly in his book Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Conscousness Miracle psp . Perusing the reader reviews on Amazon, the one that stuck in my mind accused Penrose of an elementary syllogistic error: “the mind is strange, quantum things are strange, therefore the mind is quantum.” Another asks why tubules in cells in the foot do not generate consciousness.

I would add that the brain not being computer-like, an assertion with which I agree, does not imply that the brain uses some particular mechanism just because it is also not computer-like. Overall, though, I am not qualified to pass judgment on Penfield’s theories, even if I had read his books, which I haven’t. But given our lack of progress in understanding consciousness it certainly seems worthwhile to keep an open mind. And quantum consciousness certainly, in theory, could explain phenomena that more physicalist approaches could not.

Penrose’s collaborator in this consciousness research is Stuart Hameroff. By coincidence I just happened to run across an interview with him on the The Holy Grail, an offbeat blog worth reading if you’re interested in pyramids, life after death, and that sort of thing. Excerpt:

The Penrose-Hameroff quantum consciousness hypothesis proposes that quantum computations in microtubules inside the brain’s neurons convert pre/subconscious possibilities (manifest as dream-like quantum information) to particular information (choices, perceptions) by a type of quantum state reduction, or collapse of the wave function. The reduction itself – an instantaneous event connected to the funda-mental level of reality, as suggested by Penrose – is a conscious moment. A sequence of such moments gives our stream of consciousness.

Donald Herbert, a fireman, suffered brain damage during a fire, was in a coma for 2½ months, then emerged into a period of “faint” or “minimal” consciousness, where he stayed for more than nine years until “waking up” and reconnecting to his family and friends on May 2, 2005.

“Minimal consciousness” is defined as being aware, but unable to communicate.

See MSNBC report.

Damaged brains like Herbert’s have provided us with many clues about neural functioning (perhaps to the extent that we are overly dependent on that type of analysis). Neurologists will be certainly studying him in an attempt to understand what mechanism could account for his recovery. (Three months earlier, he had been started on a cocktail of three medicines usually used to treat Parkinson’s, ADHD The Shawshank Redemption ipod

and depression, intended to stimulate neurotransmitters.)

Our interest, though, is neurotheological. How did Herbert’s brain damage, his period of minimal consciousness, and his recovery affect his religiosity, if at all?

We know that loss of consciousness occurs in epileptic seizures, which in turn have been tied to religious or pseudo-religious experience.

In Herbert’s case, as the neurons in the higher levels of his brain were regenerating and weaving themselves together for nearly a decade, while he lay in bed mutely watching TV, finally reaching the critical mass necessary for the restoration of consciousness, did they also recreate the cortical pathways necessary for religious belief and experience? Is Herbert more or less religious now than he was before his accident?

Mapping the Mind, by Rita Carter, is a great overview of our current scientific understanding of the brain, targeting the amateur. It’s filled with attractive, easy-to-understand graphics.

However, although I obviously share the perspective that neuroscience is going to be a major element in the new understanding about reality that the human race is slowly arriving at, I don’t really think the field needs to be oversold the way she does in her cover copy:

The latest brain scans reveal our thoughts, moods and memories as clearly as an X-ray reveals our bones.

Then in the introduction (p. 6), she continues breathlessly:

The knowledge that brain mapping is delivering…is of immense…importance because it paves the way for us to recreate oursevles mentally in a way that has previously been described only in science fiction…brain mapping is providing the navigational tool required to control brain activity in a precise and radical way…all it will take is a little refinement of existing methods and techniques like drugs, surgery, electrical and magnetic manipulation and psychological intervention.

Oh, is that all.

Carter’s coveage of neurotheology is skimpy, limited (p. 13) to a mention of Persinger’s work, and concluding:

The fact that we seem to have a religious hot-spot wired into our brains does not necessarily prove that the spiritual dimension is merely the product of a particular flurry of electrical activity…Nevertheless, it is easy to see that being able to get your God Experience from a well-placed electrode could—at the very least—undermine the precious status such states are accorded by many religions. How believers will cope with what many might see as a threat to their faith is one of many interesting challenges that brain science will throw up in the coming millennium.

Note also that this book is very focused on imaging and macro brain structure. You’ll find very little here about synaptic behaviors or neurotransmitters.

Overall, though, this book is one of the best introductions to popular neuroscience I have seen. Recommended.

My flossing analogy may have been a bit off. Lifting weights might be a bit closer. The difference is that you don’t really feel like you get better at flossing over time, or have different experiences of the flossing process. With lifting, one of the things that you metalearn is how to feel your body working and how to do to the exercise in a way that makes it work better. You learn to find and trace an “edge” of performance (and enjoy it). That’s an interesting process in itself, and it also is an important element in you making progress in your lifting and strength/fitness development.

I enter the church and take my seat among the faithful. The priest flips a switch, and the chapel is bathed in a sea of multicolored lasers, sending the worshippers into a deep, healing, unified, spiritual state.

That is the science fiction future a neurotheologist would invent based on the intriguing research reported in the latest issue of Cell Magazine, in a paper entitled Remote Control of Fruit Fly Behavior.

Dumping the awkward electrodes and transcranial magnetic stimulation devices of the past, the researchers implanted a rat gene into a fly, programmed to function only in the neuron of the fly, and to turn itself on only in the presence of a chemical called ATP. They then engineered a “caged” version of ATP which would not affect the neuron unless released by a flash of ultraviolet light.

Zapped with a laser, the re-engineered flies, even after being cruelly decapitated, jumped up and started flapping their wings (the neuron in question was not in the brain, but a “fiber neuron” extending the length of the fly’s body).

In the church of the future, then, baptism will be your injection with the bioengineered God-genes. Sacrament will be the priest placing on your tongue the drug that activates them. Prayer will be soaking yourself in the ultraviolet light that brings them to life.

See also An Off-and-On Switch for Controlling Animals? in the NYT.

“From Joseph’s descriptions of his experiences, he does not fit the pattern neurotheologians believe they have found for ‘religious experiences.’”

That is the conclusion of Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin, two Mormon scholars from BYU, looking at Joseph Smith Jr.’s 1820 vision of God and Jesus, in an article entitled Is Spirituality all in your Head? The article also provides a very simplified but serviceable overview of neurotheology. Continuing:

Joseph did not claim to have had a sense of transcending time and space, but claimed to have seen two real beings. Would Joseph’s brain have demonstrated the same patterns scientists found with meditating Buddhists or praying nuns, or would his brain functions have been substantially different? And what, we wonder, would they discover about the brain functions of some of us during our weekly Sunday meetings?

In Phantoms in the Brain, V S Ramachandran (left) devotes one chapter to the God question. His treatment is notable for its crisp articulation of the problem:

Do our brains contain some sort of circuitry that is actually specialized for religious experinece? Is there a “God module” in our heads? And if such a circuit exists, could it be a product of natural selection? What sorts of Darwinian selection pressures could lead to such a mechanism? Many traits make us uniquely human, but none is more enigmatic than religion—our propensity to believe in God or in some higher power.

Ramachandran focuses on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy who have “religious” experiences and fixations, not of the “Jesus bleeding on the cross” nature, but rather ones of religious ecstasy, divine light, and ultimate truth.

The author muses on the fact that the limbic system, where this type of epilepsy is focused, is responsible for emotional response. He proposes and rejects a couple of hypotheses (well, OK, he does not reject the hypothesis that God is actually visiting these people). Unfortunately, he seems to have largely run out of the clever, simple experiments we have come to rely on him for. Eventually he is reduced to proposing that we do the undoable: a “Godectomy”, where the patient’s temporal lobe is removed to see if that shuts down the mystical experiences.

In fact, Bear and Fedio (1977) conducted a study in which they used self report measures given to temporal lobe patients to categorize the characteristics of what is called temporal lobe personality. They came up with religiosity and sense of personal destiny among other traits. They also found that once these patients had temporal lobectemies all of these symptoms decreased (reference).

The rest of the chapter is an interesting, but not entirely relevant meditation on the theory of evolution, including the contributions of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, unlike Darwin, thought evolution could not explain the advent of advanced human capabilities like being able to do math, which developed far in advance of there being any selectional advantage associated with them, and invoked Providence as the explanation for such capabilities.

Our author’s admirably restrained conclusion is:

There are circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics…we are still a long way from showing that there is a “God module” in the brain that might be genetically specified.

Indeed.

Our condolences to our Catholic brothers and sisters on the death of their leader John Paul II, and congratulations on his being posthumously annointed the foremost human being of the 20th century.

The late Pope had a reputation as an intellectual, and a bridge builder. So is it safe to assume he had a learned, mature appreciation of Buddhism? Hardly. His thoughts on Buddhism are at the level of a gross caricature, belying his reputation as a thoughtful scholar.

In his 1995 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, His Holiness commented (emphasis in the original):

…it is not inappropriate to caution those Christians who enthusiastically welcome certain ideas originating in the religious traditions of the Far East—for example, techniques and methods of meditation…

Note how the pontiff limits his concern to Westerners adopting such “traditions”; he apparently does not feel all the Asians believing in them are worth worrying about.

The Pope goes on to reveal his ignorance by claiming fallaciously:

…the Buddhist tradition…[has] an almost exclusively negative soteriology…the “enlightenment” experienced by Buddha comes down to the convicition that the world is bad, that it is the source of evil and of suffering for man. To liberate oneself from this evil, one must free oneself from this world, necessitating a break with the ties that join us to external reality…

The dearly departed Holy Father then proceeds to debunk the theories of a relationship between Christian mysticism and eastern religions:

Saint John of the Cross does not merely propose detachment from the world. He proposes detachment from the world in order to unite onesefl to that which is outside of the world—by this I do not mean nirvana, but a personal God…Carmelite mysticism begins at the point where the reflections of Buddha end…

The Bishop of Rome continues in a highly chauvinistic and nearly racist vein. He credits Christianity with giving Western civilization its “positive approach to the world”, and, astonishingly, attributes the achievements of science and technology to “Judeo-Christian revelation”.

Luckily, we don’t have to worry too much about this. The Pope saves us the trouble of having to seriously consider his ideas on the topic by making his ignorance of the area so blatantly obvious.

Shinjin datsuraku (身心脱è?½) is Dogen’s trademark phrase. It’s said to be a phrase his teacher Nyojo was fond of; some say it’s the phrase which Dogen became enlightened upon hearing. It is found throughout both Shobogenzo and other writings by Dogen. English translations invariably render this as casting off body and mind. Reading these translations you can almost hear the translators saying to themselves, great, there’s something I don’t have to think about how to translate, and the readers saying to themselves, my, what a very Zen-like thing for Dogen to say. But this translation is not just wrong, it’s harmful. I’m just imagining all the poor Zen students sitting there on their cushions trying to figure out how to cast off their bodies and minds like the book says!

Chinese has thousands of two-character words, each of whose meanings is some composition of the meaning of the individual characters. Take seishi (生死), composed of the characters for “life” and “death”. Superficially, we have no clue what the compositional semantics are. It could be “and”, yielding the meaning life and death. But the meaning could just as easily be living death, life vs. death, the unity of life and death, life then death, or death via life. In other cases, the two characters mean approximately the same thing and the effect of combining them is emphasis.

In the compound shinjin, the first shin means physical body, the second kokoro (mind, heart, spirit). The “default” compositional semantics are “and”, giving us mind and body. But wait. Let’s apply the test of common-sense that so many translators fail to. Is it logical that Dogen would be telling us to let our “mind and body” fall away? How can we possibly let our body fall away? And Dogen teaches, in Bendowa among other writings, that the very concept of a body-mind distinction is a fallacy, so why would he be talking about something which he himself doesn’t think exists dropping away? Dogen, the down-to-earth teacher who instructs us to just sit, is now suddenly telling us to enter some kind of disembodied state?

It makes far more sense that Dogen would be using the term shinjin in the sense of the distinction between body and mind, whether or not that was a common sense in medieval Japan, or a sense he or his teacher pioneered. What needs to be cast off, or rather dropped off, then, is not a non-existent mind, or a body that is who we are, but rather the mistaken dichotomy between them. Or our fixation on that dichotomy.

As for datsuraku, or totsuraku as it’s sometimes spelled. I don’t think the meaning of this word has changed very much during the last 800 years. Its meaning in modern Japanese is drop out (of a race, or school).

That’s why my translation of shinjin datsuraku is drop out of the body/mind game.

It’s fine to say we’ll study the relationship between the brain and people’s belief in God, but what is the nature of this belief in God whose relationship with the brain we are trying to study? That is the topic of the intriguing field of religious cognition.

I ran across the work of Nicholas Gibson, a PhD student at Cambridge. He notes that traditional survey-type research into people’s beliefs in God suffer from the problem that people give the answers they think they are supposed to, so instead he’ll borrow methods from cognitive psychology. One of his research projects included an experiment where subjects were timed in identifying whether certain words were most characteristic of God, mother, or self. He found that “religious” people answered “God” more quickly than others. His conclusion was that

…Evangelical Christians have a greater efficiency of processing with regard to God….a large, well-organised store of readily accessible information about God.

From a psychological perspective that might be an adequate conclusion, but our question is what is the neurological basis of this efficiency in processing, the well organized nature of the knowledge, and its ready accessiblity?