A group of Chinese researchers has studied go players using fMRIs. The experimental design had the subjects looking at an empty board, a board with randomly placed stones, and a real game position.

Two findings struck me. First, the researchers found players may be internally verbalizing their play.

Lateralized activity was also found in the left dorsal lateral prefrontal area (BA44/45): it was activated when the subjects carried out the GO playing task. Because left BA44/45 is usually involved in language functions, [2], this result suggests that the subjects may be verbalizing GO terms when they were playing GO.

Second, they found players may be imagining the actual physical motion of playing stones on the board.

The primary somatosensory and motor areas (BA3-1-2/4) were more active in the GO playing task. A possible explanation for this activiation may be that subjects were imagining that they were picking up stones and placing them on the game board int he process of finding out the next reasonable solution.

There are other interesting findings as well, such as a modest right lateralization in the parietal area as compared to chess, which they attribute to the heavily spatial nature of the game. They found activation in many other cortical areas, such as dorsal prefrontal, parietal, occipital, and posterior temporal areas.

Abstract of the paper, “A functional MRI study of high-level cognition. II. The game of GO”, is here . Full paper is here.

In The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religous Experience, Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg (picture) sketch out their framework for neurotheology. Famous for their neuroimaging studies of meditating monks and praying nuns, the pair’s work is considered ground-breaking. None other than Fraser Watts lauds their ideas as “the best available neuropsychological theory of religion,” and Publisher’s Weekly called the book “exhilarating” and “fascinating”. Not content to just illuminate the biological aspects of religion, the researchers conclude their book with a discussion of how neurotheology could serve as the basis for a “metatheology” or even a “megatheology”. At the same time, they assiduously maintain a facade of evenhandedness, claiming not to know or even care whether God really exists, and stridently denying anything reductionist about their approach. It’s like saying you’re going to study the Man in the Moon, then professing complete ignorance about whether he actually exists or not, claiming that you are just studying the lunar features that may or may not constitute his face.

If this book represents the state-of-the-art in neurotheology, we are in deep trouble. It’s intellectually sloppy, disorganized, selective, and unscientific.

The problems start with the book’s title, and the word “mind” used therein, which the authors admit they have no idea how to define. They say, “The mind is the name for the intangible realities that the brain produces.” They don’t do much better with the word “mystical” in the title, giving new meaning to the word circularity with their definition that “the idea that the brain and mind are mystical suggests that the function of the brain and mind can lead to mystical experiences.” They then bounce to the idea that the mind/brain is just, well, intrinsically mystical.

But perhaps those are just semantic quibbles. The problems deepen when they start actually laying out theories, starting with the so-called “cognitive operators.” These are

primary functional components of the mind, specific functions that specific [unspecified] parts of the brain perform as part of the mind..analogous to the operators used in mathematics. The functioning of the cognitive operators is what produces a sense of “mind.” The brain structures and neurons that work to generate the functions of the operators are part of the overall structure and function of the brain. Thus brain function results in the function of the cognitive operators and therefore results in the function of the mind.

I quote at length to demonstrate the utter incoherence of their writing.

The seven primary cognitive operators that “comprise the most basic functions of the mind” are:

1. holistic
2. reductionist
3. causal
4. abstractive
5. binary
6. quantitative
7. emotional

Newberg and d’Aquili present no justification for these operators—they are made up out of thin air. They provide no neural correlates of them. They present no evidence that any of these actually exist, or that their list is comprehensive. One can only conclude that they worked backward to come up with these particular operators. Let’s see, we have transcendant states, so there must a holistic operator; we have images of God as the ultimate mover, so that would need a causal operator; primitive myths involve good and evil so let’s put in a binary operator.

I think phrenology would probably do at least as good a job of helping us understand religion as these made-up operators.

In a future post, I will review Newberg and d’Aquili’s specific theories as to the neurophysiology of (one kind of) religious experience.

Children respond easily and naturally to the concept of God. They assume his omniscience, for instance, as a matter of course. In one study which asked children what kinds of beings could know everything, specifically what was in a closed box, 5 and 6-year-olds answered that only God and an orange kitty with special vision could. They had already figured out that their mothers did not know everything (which is what the 3 and 4-year-olds had believed). Other studies have shown that children associate God with the creation of natural objects, as opposed to the humans who create artificial objects. Yet additional studies in cultures with a hierarchy of supernatural beings showed the children could order the beings by their power, from God on down to the sun and rocks. Most studies contradict the notion that children build their notions of God as superpowerful versions of their parents.

At the same time, a prodigious amount of research in the field of developmental neuroscience is gradually illuminating the incredibly elaborate process by which our brains take shape in the womb and develop through puberty.

What’s remarkable is that no one has pulled together these two threads—children’s concepts of God, and the development of children’s brains—into a science I will call “developmental neurotheology”. A robust research program could track the parallel development of the child’s brain and his concept of God to find key linkages, expanding our knowledge of both fields. This, not transcranial stimulation or made-up theories of God modules in the brain, is what neurotheology should be about.

Walking on Water is a cute little refreshing book that “walks” you through the process of opening up and challenging yourself, based on the story of Simon/Paul, the disciple Jesus invited out for a stroll on the Sea of Galilee.

The book is not overly Christian in focus, notwithstanding the central metaphor. Claire Summerhill, the author, has a lucid, highly readable writing style, but more importantly has an important, if simple, message for us. Oh, she’s also my sister. Congratulations on your new book, Claire.

Researchers have built a computer model which replicates our human ability to learn rules and use them to control ourselves—which scientists call “cognitive control”. Cognitive control is how we mold and channel our thoughts and actions to reach some goal. The prefrontal cortext (PFC) is a key player in cognitive control.

The computer model, described here, accurately mimics the behavior of normal people on typical tasks such as card sorting. It reproduces the process by which we learn new cognitive control rules, down to the level of biological properties specific to PFC neurons. The model shows why learning self-control takes so long—often into the teens, or even longer in some cases.

But then the scientists gave their model the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy—and found that the model failed to learn and apply rules in exactly the same way similarly damaged humans did. This is a big improvement on lobotomy techology: just use your mouse to uncheck the “frontal lobe” checkbox, instead of going in with an ice pick!

The paper was published at at PNAS; here is the abstract, from which I excerpt:

We show how the development of task-specific PFC representations can occur when a set of PFC-specific neural mechanisms interact with breadth of experience to self organize abstract rule-like PFC representations that support flexible generalization in novel tasks.

Neurotheology desperately needs a similar computer model, one which replicates the religious pathways in the brain. This is the subject of the field called “computational neurotheology”, which I referred to in earlier posts. (Of course, a model cannot prove that a particular mechanism is the one actually at work, but it can establish plausibility, show that existing conceptual models are underspecified, and provide insights for further research.)

Running such a model, the computer will, for the first time, literally experience God.

Neuroscience is rapidly permeating popular culture. Proof in point: Jim Holt’s recent New York Times Magazine article, Of Two Minds. But Holt sadly fails to meet the special responsibility of writers targeting the mainstream, not to promote oversimplified neuromemes that threaten to invade popular consciousness. He starts off apparently worrying about privacy:

The human brain is mysterious—and, in a way, that is a good thing. The less that is known about how the brain works, the more secure the zone of privacy that surrounds the self. But that zone seems to be shrinking.

As proven by the neuropop “factoid” that scientists can now read your mind. Leapfrogging:

How will our image of ourselves change as the wrinkled lump of gray meat in our skull becomes increasingly transparent to such exploratory methods?

Second factoid: meditators can modify their brain structures . As if no-one had ever heard of neuroplasticity before. Wait, though:

…there could be revelations in store that will force us to revise our self-understanding in far more radical ways.

Sounds frightening. Third factoid: research showing that severing the corpus callosum (which is white, not gray) gives rise to weird stuff happening (he fails to tell us that this research was first done nearly a half-century ago). He goes on:

Pondering such split-brain cases, some scientists and philosophers have raised a disquieting possibility: perhaps each of us really consists of two minds running in harness.

Oh no! He proceeds to quote Thomas Nagel:

The ordinary, simple idea of a single person will come to seem quaint some day, when the complexities of the human control system become clearer and we become less certain that there is anything very important that we are one of.

Thomas Nagel (home page) is an eminent philosopher at NYU. But certainly Holt needed to put this quote in the context that Nagel is a leading anti-reductionist, famous for his insistence that consciousness cannot be reduced to brain activity. It seems unlikely that Nagel meant that scientific insights about the functioning of the hemispheres will give rise to a new understanding of what a “person” is.

Holt concludes:

The more that breakthroughs like the recent one in brain-scanning open up the mind to scientific scrutiny, the more we may be pressed to give up comforting metaphysical ideas like interiority, subjectivity and the soul. Let’s enjoy them while we can.

Brain scanners will eliminate the concept of subjectivity? (Hint: who is looking at the brain scans?) Interiority is a “metaphysical idea”? Neuroscience will eliminate the idea of the “soul”, which is “comforting”?

We can only hope that those responsible for interpreting and presenting the insights of neuropsychology to our culture at large will do much better than this in the future.

Look up the word “think” in an English-Japanese dictionary and you’ll find two main alternatives: “kangaeru” and “omou”.

Often when Japanese splits a concept more narrowly than English, native English speakers have a horrible time learning to make the distinction. I’ve never known of anyone who had trouble with “kangaeru” vs. “omou”, though.

That’s because the difference is clear. “Kangaeru” refers to a higher-brain process, “omou” to a lower-brain one. “Kangaeru” is linear and deductive and rational, it figures and reckons, it is based on assumptions, reaches conclusions. “Omou”, on the other hand, is an attitude, a stance, a belief, almost a feeling.

Descartes famously asserted, “I think, therefore I am” (or, “Je pense, donc je suis”). Inexplicably, this has been translated into Japanese as ‘’ware omou, yue ni ware ari”. That’s right—”think” (or “cogito” in “cogito ergo sum”) has been rendered as “omou”, instead of the obviously correct “kangaeru”. I would like to track down the Japanese scholar responsible for this original mistranslation, which has certainly confused countless Japanese students of philosophy over the centuries.

Talking about my cat’s behavior in Japanese, I never use “kangaeru”—that’s simply not something cats do. But I use “omou” all the time: “gG [cat’s name] thinks he’s going to get fed.” So this mistake in translating Descartes’ phrase is by no means benign. The mistranslation has the effect of making Descartes’ proof of existence apply to my cat!

Students of neurotheology study near-death experiences because NDE’s (a word coined by Raymond Moody) are a kind of religious experience—not in the sense that they constitute any kind of “proof” of an “afterlife”, but in the way that they may share neurophysiological and neuropsychological aspects with religious experience. Notably, they also give rise to similar effects in the experiencer: becoming less materialistic, more compassionate, and less fearful of death.

In addition to saying that NDE’s are a type of religious experience, we could also say that religious experiences are a type of NDE.

Why do humans have NDE’s? Newberg & d’Aquili put forward the surprising hypothesis that NDEs are evolutionarily adaptive, increasing survivability through such mechanisms as letting the dying organism think more lucidly and flexibly in order to save itself from death, or to pass away more calmly in the interests of avoiding societal stress. They also make the intriguing assertion that animals may have low-level NDEs. This is something that should be possible to verify experimentally, at the cost of a few dead rats. Experimental designs, anyone?

NDE’s represent a potentially fruitful source of neurotheological insights, because we can study and measure them in ways not possible for other types of religious experience. For instance, children do not have NDE’s until around the age of ten—what aspect of neurodevelopment could account for that?

Many thoughtful people may have placed NDE’s in the same category as alien abductions or crop circles. That would be a mistake. NDE’s are neurotheological events eminently worthy of our attention.

Full moon overhead
In the waning days of March.
Yes, dying in spring
Beneath a blossoming tree
That would be the choice I’d make.

This is my translation of a famed waka by Saigyo (see picture), the 12th-century Japanese poet/monk:

ねがわくば
花の下にて
春死なん
そのきさらぎの
もち月のころ

The knowledgeable reader will notice that I’ve completely reversed the order of the lines, although I’ve maintained the 5-7-5-7-7 meter. It turns out when translating from Japanese into English, reversing the order is often the key to a more compelling, readable, or understandable rendition—not only for poems, but computer manuals as well.

This technique applies to everything from two-word pairs, to clauses in a parallel construction, to phrases in sentences, to sentences within paragraphs. Even entire sections can often be usefully reconstructed by moving the last paragraph in the Japanese to the top, and vice versa. I haven’t yet experimented with reorganizing the chapters of a book along these lines, but it seems worth a try.

Perhaps we should try this with Dogen’s Shobo Genzo as well—moving Genjo Koan from the very front to the very back, where it would serve as a thundering conclusion to the masterpiece, rather than a mere introduction.

For extra credit, I’ll accept reader hypotheses, involving your favorite theories of evolutionary linguistics or neuropsychology, as to why Japanese should exhibit such a radically reversed order from English at all levels.

Saigyo’s wish was granted: he died on the 16th day of Kisaragi (translated as “March” above).

Myra Burg makes these fabulous objects, tubes layered in incredible, rich varieties of colors and textures. She calls them “Quiet Oboes”.