Archive for the ‘religion’ Category

Numenware

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

I’ve renamed this blog Numenware to highlight its evolving focus on neurotheology issues.

The name “Numenware” is meant to evoke the “ware”—in our case, the hardware and software of the brain—associated with “numen”, defined as a presiding divinity ; spirit of a place; supernatural entity; creative energy; genius.

I hope to make this blog a useful resource for everyone interested in the field. I will continue posting, however, on language, Japan, Dogen/Zen, and even the occasional miscellaneous topic.

Painting by Yari Ostavny .

Neurotheology market in 2005: $2,150,030

Friday, January 21st, 2005

I am pleased to announce the first annual neurotheology market size survey.

There are many resources for understanding the neuroscience business as a whole, such as the Corante Brainwave blog, where you can find entries such as:

Cogniceuticals improve and treat disorders of attention, learning, memory, or cognition. Cogniceuticals are the fastest growing neuropharmaceutical market for two primary reasons: (1) demographic shifts towards aging population (2) scientific progress on memory related disorders, especially animal models.

However, no one has to my knowledge focused on the size of the neurotheology market, so I hereby present my first annual analysis.

Research: Five government and foundation-funded projects, averaging $250K each. Total: $1.25M.

Books: Ten books, averaging sales of 2,000 each, at $20. Total: $400K.

Materials: Transcranial stimulation helmets, herbs, sales of 5K at $100 each. Total: $500K.

Blogs: This blog makes about $30/year, from Google AdSense ads.

The total neurotheology market for 2005 is thus $2,150,030.

Our forecast is that the market should balloon to double the size in 2006, with more activity in each of its segments. If current trends continue, my blog revenue is expected to more than double, reaching $75.

Freedom of neuroreligion

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

“Let us pray,” the pastor exhorts the congregation attending the Sunday service in his suburban church. A suburban housewife lowers her head and ponders her blessings. She intones her silent prayer: “Thank you, God, for helping me find Zoloft.”

Although people do not think of taking their Prozac as a religious act, in a way it is; and as such, their freedom to take such drugs could easily be viewed in the context of the freedom of religion enshrined in the US Constitution.

The profits to be made from Prozac will keep it legal no matter what connection one draws between access to it and freedom of religion, but the US puts its foot down on psychotropic drugs that “alter reality”, notably LSD, in the name of protecting society’s members from themselves. A lesser known drug banned under Schedule I is DMT.

Dr. Rick Strassman is a controversial DMT researcher, author of DMT , the Spirit Molecule, which claims, among other things, that the emergence of the pineal gland in the brain 49 days after conception marks the entry of the spirit into the body (shades of the ancient Greeks who located the “mind” in that very same gland); that chanting stimulates the pineal gland to produce more DMT; and, farther afield, that DMT is connected to alien visitations. Strassman is also a Buddhist who proposed to Zen students they try some drugs as a way to extend their practice.

DMT, it turns out, is also found in the hallucinogenic tea (see picture) from the Amazon rain forest which adherents of the Brazilian group O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal (UDV) drink as part of their religion. The DEA confiscated the illegal substances, marked “herb tea”. Lower courts then upheld the group’s right to imbibe their sacraments, and ordered the tea the feds had seized returned, but the Bush administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Monday agreed to hear the case.

I won’t go into the details of the case here; more information is on the SCOTUSblog and in this Christian Science Monitor article.

The tea is called “ayahuasca” or “hoasca” (site) in Quechua, the language of the Incas. Based on my limited knowledge of Quechua, I believe the pronunciation is something like “wasca”. The meaning is “vine of the soul,” “vine of the dead,” or “vision vine”. The potion is said to

enable access to the visionary or mythological world that provides revelation, healing, and ontological security

I don’t know what ontological security means but it sounds good. Anyway, for purposes of this legal case in the US, the group’s lawyers suddenly sound extremely monotheistic, positioning the tea as letting believers “connect with God”, while denying that it causes any nasty hallucinations.

Ayahuasca is a combination of the vine called Yage, which has sedative, hypnotic, and anti-depressant effects. It becomes a visionary catalyst when mixed with chacruna (Psychotria viridis), which is where the DMT the feds are worried about comes from.

There is an enzyme in our bodies called MOA (Monoamine Oxidase), which serves to deactivate neurotransmitters. The vine contains chemicals which inhibit the functioning of this enzyme (MOAIs). That reduces the metabolization of serotonin, and lets the DMT reach receptors in the brain, with an entheogenic (religious inebriation) effect. Warning to suburban housewife above: do not mix SSRIs with wasca!

As we progress in our understanding of neuroscience, neurochemistry, and neurotheology, our society and legal system will be confronted with increasingly subtle decisions that probe the boundaries of what we consider religion and religious practice. The DMT that naturally occurs in the brain, as the lower court judge in the ayahuasca case pointed out, cannot, of course, be made illegal. But then, what about meditation techniques that stimulate production of DMT in the brain? If DMT is dangerous to humans and should be banned because of its effects on them, then certainly practices causing the internal production of DMT are also dangerous and should be banned, right? If those practices are dangerous, then publishing information about them is equally dangerous, so let’s censor such publications. Or, imagine a device, such as a transcranial stimulation helmet, that activates a naturally-occurring hallucinogenic chemical in the brain—we must ban that as well. Thus begins our descent down the slippery slope.

The Supreme Court rarely gives us broad, overreaching decisions, often limiting their opinions to narrow, legalistic issues, but in this case, we certainly hope that they come down firmly on the side of the wide-ranging religiious freedom that our founders built into the fabric of our government 200 years ago.

Deepak Chopra hits a quantum discontinuity

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

In my relentless quest to bring the very latest and most objective reporting to Numenware readers, I jumped at the chance to go hear Dr. Deepak Chopra talk in person last night. Sometimes people can get their ideas across much better in person than on the written page (see earlier review of Chopra book). The occasion was his receipt of the Navind Doshi Bridgebuilder Award in an event held at Loyola Marymount University.

My conclusion: Deepak is trapped in one of his own quantum discontinuities—between irrelevance and confusion.

I already know that atoms are mostly made up of space. So what? I’ve already heard the analogy about how reality is like a movie being projected on a screen. Who cares?

I don’t understand why Chopra says that, before you “have a thought”, that thought was not in your brain, but lurking somewhere else, in some sea of consciousness. I can’t agree that the “discontinuity” between pieces of physical matter has anything to do with the temporal discontinuities in human processes of perception, and even if I did, what next? I’m at a loss as to what the audience, listening raptly, planned to do with the assertion that photons are the carriers of all information in the universe.

I’m astonished that Chopra doesn’t understand the Heisenberg principle, claiming it states that uncertainty is proliferating. I’m stunned that he mangles Godel’s incompleteness theorem into a proof of the existence of “creative jumps”, which he believes that “gaps in the fossil record” establish the existence of.

I’m amazed that in the cosmology or theology or philosophy or whatever it is that Chopra is trying to construct he fails to answer the most basic question: what is at the root of man’s fall, or, in his terms, the “fragmentation of consciousness”. I find unconvincing his argument that this fragmentation, whatever caused it, is responsible for Hurricane Katrina. I think it highly tautological, and therefore meaningless that the meaning of human existence is to ask “Why?”. I find it very odd that he apparently does not know the meaning of the word “phenomenon”, claiming that “consciousness underlies all manifestations” and then in the same breath calling it a “phenomenon”.

What I’m not surprised about is that people lap up this confused, pseudo-scientific mishmash. It’s merely the much hipper, New Age equivalent of good old religious myth.

Mapping the Mind

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

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.

Meditation as weight lifting

Sunday, January 16th, 2005

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.

Meditation as Flossing

Friday, January 14th, 2005

Think of meditation in the same way you think of flossing.

Clearly flossing is good for your long-term dental health, although any particular day’s worth of flossing doesn’t make hardly any difference in and of itself. You may enjoy flossing (you need to not not enjoy it), but it would be an odd bird that really got off on the daily flossing, and no-one would expect to have a moment of transcendant dental health while flossing. Try paraphrasing Dogen: “Flossing and dental health are one.” Roll this around in your mouth like a koan.

Buddhists and Christians agree: Katrina was karma

Wednesday, January 12th, 2005

Larry King, our favorite geriatric talk show host, revisited the old why-God-lets-horrible-things-happen problem on a recent show, trotting out the Dalai Lama and baby-faced Christian tele-evangelist Joel Osteen to “explain” Katrina. The interesting thing was that both seemed to agree: stuff just happens.

KING: Your Holiness, how do you explain someone who believes in a higher being allowing this to happen to good people?

DALAI LAMA: Of course, from the Buddhist viewpoint, every event, every experience (UNINTELLIGIBLE) such a disaster, which is very, very painful, unspeakable sort of experiences. Are these things also, is it due to our own past karma or actions? And that is, I think, main causes, and the conditions the world climate conditions is changing, that also one factor.

Fine, but this is subject to misinterpretation. He does mean, doesn’t he, that the causal actions in question are generic, not some recent acts of evil on the part of the residents of the Gulf Coast that they are getting punished for, as some commentators, amazingly, have contended?

King continues: “But it doesn’t cause you, your Holiness, to question faith?”

DALAI LAMA: No. Of course, there—I think, for me, as a Buddhist, the real belief of all causality causes conditions, causes an effect, go like that [moving hands in a large circle]. Of course, the—even Buddhist own time, in the very eyes of—in front of Buddha’s own eye, is some people to suffer. That means things happen due to their own previous action of karma…

For the Christian answer, King moved to Osteen, asking “How do you respond to that same question? The Buddha said it’s the natural evolvement of things. What does the pastor say?” (Was Larry calling the Dalai Lama “the Buddha”? And is there really a word “evolvement”?) Osteen’s answer was almost indistinguishable from the Dalai Lama’s, although he omitted the causality twist and focused on God helping you make it through just after He destroyed your entire city:

OSTEEN: Well, Larry, what I believe from the Christian faith is that, you know, God is control. We don’t understand why all these thing happen. I think some of them are just natural disasters and you know, I think that when we come out of this we know that God is right there with us, the he’s the God to comfort us and, I don’t think we can explain this. So, we don’t try to get bogged down in that, we just try to—try to remind ourselves that God is a good God and, he’s on our side and he’s going to bring this through—bring us through these times of difficulty.

KING : Why not question it? If he’s a good God and he’s on your side, why did he flood New Orleans, something he could have prevented?

OSTEEN: You know Larry, I don’t think there’s an answer to all that. I mean you could go and figure out—and try to figure out why are babies born abnormal and why did this happen, that happen? I don’t think you can figure that out, Larry. I mean that’s, the Bible says, “God’s ways are not our ways, he works in mysterious ways,” and so, I don’t—I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up. But you know, part of trusting God is having faith in the tough times. And I think that’s what we—that’s what we do as Christians right now.

The sound of one hemisphere clapping

Monday, January 10th, 2005

What are the neurological correlates of “one hand clapping”, the most famous Zen koan in the world?

First, the koan challenges the processing patterns occurring in the association areas of the brain, where input from various sensory subsystems is integrated. In this case, we are asked to dissolve the normal association made in this area between the aural clapping input and the visual input involving two hands.

Second, the koan seeks to perturb the normal mapping between the motor commands to move the arm and the visual and proprioceptive inputs that the arm is actually moving. Put simply: can we will one of our arms to move, and believe it did, without it actually moving?

V. S. Ramachandran discusses a related situation in his brilliant book, Phantoms in the Brain. He describes the phenomenon where stroke patients believe they can move, or have moved, limbs which are in fact paralyzed.

Meditation’s Long-term Effect on the Brain

Monday, January 10th, 2005

A new study supports the idea that meditation causes long-term physiological changes in brain structure. A summary is here. The full article from PNAS is here. Specifically, the researchers found that experienced meditators had extremely strong gamma wave patterns before meditating (baseline), and those patterns strengthened further during meditation (see brain on right in figure). They note that “these data suggest that massive distributed neural assemblies are synchronized with a high temporal precision”. A correlation also was found between length of meditation history and gamma pattern strength.

Many people have heard about how meditation supposedly promotes alpha waves. The authors of this study hypothesize that that may be an effect of mantra-based meditation, whereas their study focused on Tibetan-style compassion-oriented meditation.

This type of research, incredibly important and interesting, is still in its infancy. It’s encouraging that the government is supporting such research (through the National Institute of Mental Health, Mind-Body Center). There is so much yet to study and learn about the neurophysiological effects of meditation.