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.

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, an organization which “advances research, education and outreach on the constructive engagement of science and religion.”

WebMD provides a brief overview of the research.

Neuroplasticity is a plausible—some might say obvious—hypothesis for the mechanism by which humans develop spiritually. For instance, the relatively slow speed of neurogenesis would account for the time required under development protocols such as meditation.

Now, Harvard scientists have identified a brain protein that may be responsible for the lack of plasticity in the adult brain—at least in rodents. Mutant mice lacking the protein, even after reaching adulthood, migrated eye function in the brain when the poor animals had one of their eyes sewn shut and light shined into the other, something heretofore seen only in young mice.

As reported in Science Express, the researchers found that mutant mice lacking a protein called PirB have more robust “cortical ocular dominance (OD) plasticity” at all ages. They note that “PirB is also expressed in many other regions of the CNS, suggesting that it may function broadly to stabilize neural circuits.”

Perhaps promotion of neuroplasticity will be one focus of future development of neurotheopharmaceuticals.

See also the press release, and Techorati links.

Image: neurons grown in culture and labeled to measure plasticity in a living system (courtesy of Liu Laboratory, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences)

How does the drug ketamine bring on visions of God?

Ketamine (Wikipedia) is a veterinary anesthetic. It is also a well-known party drug, known as “Special-K”, related to angel dust. But the drug, developed in the ‘60s, can also send users into other worlds or gave them visions of God, as soldiers in Vietnam discovered when administered the drug as a battlefield anesthetic. Austin quotes one researcher who describes ketamine as yielding a model near-death experience. Some patients report hearing voices, having out-of-body experiences, or losing their sense of self and connection to reality. Large doses can send the users into a so-called K-hole where they perceive, deep inside the mind, ineffable other worlds and dimensions.

An article in the NYT caught my eye when I saw it talked about a study showing that ketamine was a quick-acting antidepressant as well. Scientists had known that it had antidepressant effects in animals (how do you tell a cat is depressed or not?), but had not tried it on humans until now. The study showed immediate (as little as two hours) antidepressive effects, which lasted a week, when the drug was given at sub-anesthetic doses. Apparently the subjects first went off on a little mini-trip, then found themselves undepressed when they got back. This research was done under the auspices of the NIMH; here is the press release

The neurological mechanisms underlying the effect of ketamine are relatively well-known. It is an NMDA receptor antagonist, meaning it blocks the NMDA receptors, found mainly in the hippocampus (which is why it affects memory; many ketamine users cannot remember their trips), and the prefrontal cortex (hence its profound impact on thought). Normally NMDA receptors receive signals of glutamate, the most common neurotransmitter. Irregularities in glutamate function are associated with epilepsy, among other disorders, and may also be responsible in part for depression.

What is missing is any overarching theory of how ketamine could simuiltaneously cause God-like hallucinations and assuage depression, or what the relationship, if any, between the two effects might be. Such a theory would be a key contribution to the biology of religion.

I’d like to thank the readers of Numenware for their insightful comments and the value they add to the blog.

Actually, the greatest number of comments came on an obscure post about a trivial English grammar issue. For some reason, huge numbers of readers from India believed I was offering some kind of English lessons. I wish I could figure out how to monetize these guys!

Next most popular was 34 readers commenting on my post about Charles Shaw’s $2 wine. Must have gotten picked up somewhere. As long as they click on my Google ads, I’m fine.

My post on sushi restaurants near my house generated 24 comments. My favorite was

My two interests are Neurotheology and Sushi and those two roads have guided me to this informative website….

Thought-provoking comments included those on the article Science and Buddhism on craving and suffering and The End of Faith. On my post on Bill O’Reilly: unlikely neurotheology advocate, the actual interviewee who appeared on Bill’s program made a comment. Some of the comments were very personal: on Religious music in your brain, one reader commented:

I am constantly hearing Christmas and religious hymns whenever I am not concentrating on a task. I also hear some old popular songs ‘Tammy’ & “The Bells of St. Mary’s”, “Star Spangled Banner” Every tune is in the same beat of 3/4 time. How do I stop this, it is driving me mad.

No one bothered to comment on one of my favorite posts, God and the brain in your gut, although it got some trackbacks. Nor on Peak experiences on mountain peaks, although it got picked up by Mind Hacks, nor on the article about dried squid entrails. My post about Sanyo: washing machines and global symbiosis yielded a request for a user’s manual for one of their washing machines.

The longest comment, by far, was on my post Book review: Living with the Devil, where Nordron, a Buddhist monk from Dharmasala, gave a thoughtful, detailed Buddhist perspective. Rhawn Joseph himself commented on my post about him and warned me that the picture I was using was wrong (since fixed).

I have been blessed with thoughtful, informative comments which add, I think, to the overall value of the blog, and not too many of them to be overwhelming. Thank you again.

It’s time to play another game of “what would Dogen have really been saying”! Here are your choices:

1. Time is like a mountain range you can look out across; it does not simply recede into the past.

2. Time is not like a mountain range you can look across, fading into the distance.

This, of course, is from Uji, where Dogen writes ã??ã?®æ˜¨ä»Šã?®é?“ç?†ã€?ã?Ÿã? ã?“れ山ã?®ã?ªã?‹ã?«ç›´å…¥ã?—ã?¦ã€?å?ƒå³°ä¸‡å³°ã‚’ã?¿ã‚?ã?¤æ™‚節ã?ªã‚Šã€?ã?™ã?Žã?¬ã‚‹ã?«ã?‚らã?šã€‚

Nearly all translations take the interpretation that time is like a postcard of a mountain range. Nishijima/Cross:

Even so, this Buddhist principle of yesterday and today is just about moments in which we go directly into the mountains and look out across thousand or ten thousands peaks; it is not about what has passed.

This is a serviceable translation, with the minor exception of being wrong. The principle is not about moments where we saw the mountains; it is that past and present are (or are not) the mountain view. More importantly, they reverse (in my opinion) what Dogen is saying about mountains and time.

Tanahashi/Welch somehow manage to mangle this sentence even more badly:

Yet yesterday and today are both in the moment when you directly enter the mountains and see thousands and myriads of peaks. Yesterday’s time and today’s time do not go away.

They completely leave out the word “concept” from the original; transform past and present needlessly into yesterday and today; mistranslate jisetsu as “moments”; have time being “in the moment” rather than “the case of”; and introduce a gratuitous sentence break—a sure sign that their parsing is off. The awkward “thousands and myriad” just adds insult to injury. Someone should take away these guys’ translating license.

But the real question is whether time is, or is not, like the series of mountain peaks. The syntactic problem here is that the Japanese has the structure “doing A, doing B not,” where A is the mountains and B is passing away. This gives rise to an intrinsic ambguity: it could be “(doing A, doing B) NOT” or “doing A, (doing B NOT).”

Beyond the syntax, however, there are a number of clues for us here. First and foremost, Dogen has spent the entire preceding part of the essay telling us precisely that time is not a linear sequence—which is exactly what the range of peaks is! The sentence starts off with a “but” which makes sense only if the sense of the entire sentence is negative. And the word “simply” (J. tada) right at the beginning—which Tanahashi/Welch toss away—pairs naturally with the “not” at the end.

Therefore, I believe that the “not” in the original extends to both time passing away and the view of time as a linear series of mountain peaks. Sorry if you were liking the analogy of past and present as a mountain range.

My translation would be:

But do not conceive of past and present simply as a vista of a innumerable peaks that you look out over from within the mountains, receding off into the distance.

This is somewhat disconcerting. Typically different interpretations might yield a shift in nuance or emphasis. But here they are diametrically opposed. And impeccably credentialed Zen masters and eminent scholars all assure us that Dogen is in fact exhorting us to rush out into the wilderness and gaze on mountain ranges as an excellent analogy for how time works.

What is a student to do? Simply understand the potential issue and make up your own min—assuming the translator deigns to point out the problem to you as I am doing here.

Clearly drugs cannot contribute to enlightenment. Right? According to James Austin’s new book, “Zen-Brain Reflections,” which I posted on here, zig-zag Zen is a “cultural aberration”, the term “entheogen” “camouflages” “ungodly hallucinations”, LSD causes bad trips, which studies such as Pahnke’s ignored, drugs amplify delusion, LSD is dangerous because it promotes the idea that reality is something to be maninpulated rather than accepted…and may leave you nuts, and on and on. He quotes Blake negatively, saying that his statement that “if the doors of perception were cleaned” involves a “very big if”.

The biology of religion, however, provides a different perspective. It says that meditation or other spiritual practices cause plasticity-based changes in the brain which promote well-being and/or happiness. There should be no difference if those same changes are occasioned by drugs. There are no a priori grounds for asserting that drugs could not produce equivalent changes in the brain, behavior, and state of life.

Leaving aside arguments along the lines of “I meditated for 20 years to get where I am and I’ll be damned if someone can get there overnight by ingesting psilocybin,” we must examine carefully the arguments for or against drugs being a positive element in spiritual development.

One counterargument is that drugs produce a one-time effect which quickly wears off. But kensho is also a one-time effect, which must be built upon, and there is no obvious reason why drug-induced experiences could not be similarly built upon. Indeed, all of our experiences are “one-time.”

Others argue that drug-based enlightenment experiences simply cannot, by definition, measure up to the “real thing.” But why not, if they are functionally or descriptively identical?

Let’s approach this scientifically. Assume that there is an inherent temporal limitation in the ability of the brain to adapt. In other words, certain types of brain changes require a specific, finite amount of time to take effect. This would seem to support a model of only meditation one, two, four, eight, or sixteen hours a day over years or decades being capable of causing those changes. That may well be the case. But people making this argument provide no neuroscientific evidence whatsoever concerning such required durations for neural modifications. It could just as easily be the case that drugs could in fact accelerate such structural changes in the brain. Or, perhaps extended, incremental drug use could yield equivalent neural restructuring: four pills a day instead of four meditation periods.

An argument with which I can agree is that some people may view drugs as a shortcut, and imagine that they can achieve happiness and understanding through their weekly trip, without bothering to take responsibility to work through issues and manage their own spiritual development. But that is certainly not an indictment of a drug-based approach per se, only of how a certain subset of people try to take advantage of it.

At the end of the day, it seems counterintuitive that selective, disciplined use of psychopharmaceuticals could not play a role in a program of spiritual evolution. Dogen’s zazen has been passed on nearly unchanged for close to a millenium; certainly there is room for the blessings of modern science now to make their contribution.

Image of James Fadiman.

Translating Dogen demands a philosophy of translation. Many of those translating Dogen are not professional translators, which perhaps is why we so often fail to see coherent philosophies being applied.

The simplistic choice is between “literal” and “paraphrased” translations. These styles have names: formal and dynamic equivalence, or “form equivalence” and “functional equivalence”. Sometimes the terms “word for word” and “thought for thought” are seen as well.

The debate between the two schools is heated and often uninformed. The literalists accuse the paraphrasers of inserting their own opinions into the translation. The paraphrasers respond that the literalists create wooden translations that no one wants to or can read.

There are problems with both sides of course. No translation can be completely literal, since it must use the vocabulary and syntax of the target language. And if the objective of the paraphrasers is to “create the same effect in the mind of the reader of the translation as the original did in the mind of its,” clearly this is impossible given that the readers exist in different cultural and historical contexts.

Of course, which style to use depends on the goals of the translation and the target audience. A wider, more general audience would call for a more dynamic style, a narrower, more expert audience a more formal one. When the source and target languages are distant linguistically, a more dynamic style may be the only choice.

Dynamic equivalence was developed by the linguist Eugene Nida for Bible translation. He insisted that only this approach could create an approachable, meaningful Bible for the masses. Bible translations are clearly a useful analogy for translating Dogen. An interesting approach developed for the God’s Word translation is called closest natural equivalence translation.

Closest natural equivalence claims to achieve the following:

• provide readers with a meaning equivalent to the source language in the target language
• express that meaning naturally in a way that a native English speaker would have spoken or written
• express the meaning in a way that is as close as possible to the way the source language expressed the meaning

CNE asserts that an awkward translation by definition is not faithful to the original, while at the same time natural-sounding language in and of itself never suffices to make a translation good.

The obvious objection is that it may not be possible to convey meaning accurately in natural sounding language. I would assert, however, that it is simply a matter of time and effort on the part of the translator. It should not be out of the question to spend an hour, or even a day, on a single sentence. Naturally, this reduces translator throughput dramatically. It is striking, however, how in many cases, once the effort is made, the resulting natural English undeniably conveys the meaning of the original in a way much more compact and compelling that a mechanical translation might.

The web page quoted above ends with a caveat:

Translation can never be completely objective. Even when operating under the assumptions of closest natural equivalence, translators cannot produce a perfect translation. Translators use cautious judgment and maintain a keen awareness of all the factors needed for a full understanding of the source text. Among other things, translators need to understand the original language’s grammar and syntax, appreciate and understand literary devices used by the original authors, understand what kind of audience the original author had in mind when writing, and understand the modern target audience and its language. Because these factors call for balance and judgment, every translation (even those produced using closest natural equivalence) can be improved.

The journal Psychopharmacology reports on a fascinating study claiming that psilocybin-induced trips are indistinguishable from “true” mystical experiences and have long-lasting, positive effects. Leading the study was Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Roland Griffiths.

60% of the 36 educated, adult participants in the study had so-called complete mystical experience, based on tests such as the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which measures feelings of internal and external unity, transcendance, ineffability, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, and mood of joy/peace/love.

One third of the participants reported the experience was the most meaningful of their life, with an additional 50% placing it among the top five such experiences.

An intriguing aspect of the study was that friends and family of the subject were also interviewed, several months after the experiment, reporting sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior.

The study was random and double-blind, but of course any study like this will have built-in assumptions. In this case the subjects were regular participants in religious or spiritual activities, which might have made them more prone to ascribe religious significance of personal meaning to the experience. They were also first-time users of hallucinogens.

In an editorial accompanying the article, Harriet de Wit notes (my paraphrase):

It may be time now to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences. The Griffiths study is unique in applying rigorous, modern methods of psychopharmacological research and in studying the lasting, life-changing effects that have been attributed to such experiences. It will likely take an important place in the history of human psychopharmacology research. We would do well to be prepared to consider the entire scope of human experience and behavior as legitimate targets for systematic and ethical scientific
investigation.

So, is this “God in a pill”? In interviews, Griffiths said answering questions of religion or spirituality “far exceeds the scope of studies like these. We know that there were brain changes that corresponded to a primary mystical experience,” he said. “But that finding—as precise as it may get—will in no way inform us about the metaphysical question of the existence of a higher power.” He likened scientific attempts to seek God in the human brain to experiments where scientists watch the neurological activity of people eating ice cream. “You could define exactly what brain areas lit up and how they interplay, but that shouldn’t be used as an argument that chocolate ice cream does or doesn’t exist,” Griffiths said.

Anticipating a common objection, the researcher noted “My guess is that there will be people saying ‘You’re looking for a spiritual shortcut’”. He stressed that the drug is no replacement for the mental health benefits of continuous personal reflection: “There’s all the difference in the world between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life.”

See Google News for other reports.

In a future post I’ll ruminate on whether psychoactive drugs can be an element of spiritual development.

Zen-Brain Reflections is James Austin’s follow-up to “Zen and the Brain.”

Austin’s work and study has led him to a deep understanding of what it means to translate ancient philosophical texts. Below I quote at length from his discussion of translating the Sandokai by Sekito (Shih T’ou) (p. 330; my emphasis, slightly edited for clarity):

Can any translation today have the same meaning as did the original, a work composed of only 220 Chinese characters? Suppose you were to insist on having only a direct, literal translation of each original Sino-Japanese ideogram. It would be a crude version in broken pidgin English. Professional translators can only be humbled by all the major compromises they have had to make. Beyond the basic problem, the casual Western reader may not suspect how many other major semantic compromises can enter in.

Begin with the title itself. One soon discovers that this same Sino-Japanese title has been translated into English in diffferent ways. Some options from our own era are

• coincidence of difference and sameness
• merging of difference and unity [Loori]
• inquiry into matching halves
• realizing unity [Cleary]
• the coincidence of opposites
• the harmony of difference and equality [Shunryu Suzuki]
• the identity of relative and absolute [Glassman]

and so on.

The above examples suggest that different translators…might have chosen to insert aspects of either their own private experience, or earlier personal opinions, or even some doctrinal belief system into a given phrase. Moreover, each translator can have several other subjective needs…

Let us be more specific, citing only a few potential conflicts that a contemporary translator might need to resolve. Must I adhere rigidly to literal interpretations, to traditional doctrinal formulas (and often multiple footnotes) to remain within acceptable scholarly traditions? Or can I remain true to what experience tells me is the direct, immediate flash of Zen insight itself? Because surely this deepest experiential truth entails letting go of my own tendencies…to attach arcane, dated references that overburden a line and blur the central message.

Nor do the translator’s conflicts and compromises end there. Can I still be true to those few old original ideograms, yet express their flowing spirit and intent in a readable contemporary literary style? Furthermore, must I conspire with the original author in old mystifications, thereby perpetuating the notion that everything about Zen is forever mysterious, if not unknowable?

Austin then proceeds to give his own translation of the Sandokai, which, although I know little Chinese and have never studied this poem in detail, appears to be a major improvement over existing translations in terms of both fidelity and readability.

Here is an aspect of translation that often goes unnoticed, whether the document in question is a philosophical tract or a computer manual: the fluent translation is often actually more accurate. In other words, sloppiness on the part of the translator in understanding the original text tends to be correlated with sloppiness in rendering that understanding into the target language.

I’ll have more on Austin’s new book in the coming weeks.

This picture shows the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church, the site of a program featuring nine organists performing the complete organ works of Mendelssohn on Sunday, June 25, 2006.

Mendelssohn lived to only 39, dying in 1847 after a series of strokes. The world would be much poorer without the brilliant set of sonatas he had completed just two years earlier—arguably the most powerful, lush, compelling works in the entire organ oeuvre.

An interesting feature of the PPC organ is the so-called “Echo organ” of 14 ranks in the rear of the church. Such multiple-organ setups often work less than ideally, but is an absolutely perfect fit here, especially for Mendelssohn’s favored loud/soft counterpoints, in the first and other sonatas.