Dogen keeps talking about shinjin , inevitably translated as “body and mind”. The fascicle of Shōbō Genzō named Shinjin Gakudō (身心学é?“) is translated by Tanahashi as Body-and-Mind Study of the Way . The word also forms a part of Dogen’s trademark phrase shinjin datsuraku, of course, which in an earlier post I analyzed as Dogen telling us we should “drop out of the body/mind game”.

Today let’s delve more deeply into shinjin. The first character is 身, pronounced shin in Japanese; it’s also used to write the native Japanese word mi. Mi is a great example of how Japanese assigns single words to broad swaths of meaning. In English, we break things up right away into little pieces, assigning a separate word to each; in Japanese, they group things into big catch-all lexical categories, then let the context do the disambiguation. If necessary, they’ll narrow down the meaning by tacking on words (or, in some cases, by choosing one out of several alternative Chinese characters to write the word).

The broad category that mi covers is primary physical content. There is a nuance of substantiality, as well as of centrality. There is also a connotation of an underlying process, probably intentful, which has given rise to the content. Thus, mi is used for “fruit”. In other words, behind every mi is a kind of spirit or essence—in the case of the fruit, the tree that bore it. Of course, mi is also commonly used to refer to the human body.

We thus see how the dichotomy between form and essence is embodied in the Japanese language, with mi corresponding to form.

What then is essence? That’s kokoro , the native Japanese word written using the shin (心) character. To find out about kokoro , let’s ask 100 Japanese to point to their kokoro, and watch as every single one points to their chest. We hear couples pledging love from their kokoro, or politicians apologizing for scandals from their kokoro. A nationalist might refer to the kokoro of Japan. No question about it: this kokoro maps very closely to the English “heart” or “soul”.

So why do Dogen translators always render this as mind? Applying the “point to it” test, we find English-speakers point to their head when asked to indicate where their mind is. Whatever mind is, it’s connected to the brain somehow, and involves cognition, mentation, and intention—not the feeling we associate with the heart. Which leaves us with the very simple conclusion that translating shinjin as “body/mind” is wrong.

So Western students of Dogen, struggling fruitlessly to “cast off body and mind” as they believe the master instructed, have been betrayed not only by an incorrect syntactical analysis of the phrase, as I have pointed out earlier, but also by an egregious lexical mixup in translating the individual words and characters that form the most important half of the phrase shinjin datsuraku, the mere hearing of which is said to have nudged Dogen into enlightenment. Rather than “body and mind”, it must be “body and soul”.

Sitting on their cushions, Western practitioners can somehow imagine what it means to cast off body and mind, or even to cast off the body/mind dichotomy. But what on earth does it mean to cast off body and soul, or the body/soul dichotomy? The utter strangeness of this concept is what probably prevented translators from getting it right. They translated kokoro as mind because they themselves simply weren’t capable of imagining how you could cast off your soul.

The key is to remember that kokoro means essence. Mi means the physical expression of that essence. Thus, the two characters forming the compound shinjin refer to the essence and its expression. But in the context of shinjin datsuraku, it’s clear that shinjin cannot mean “essence and expression”—how could one possible cast that off?—but rather the dichotomy between the two. That is what Dogen is counseling us to cast off. He’s teaching us, in one memorable four-character phrase, not to segment the world into ideas vs. objects, concepts vs. physical reality, the ideal vs. the concrete.

Of course, the characters in shinjin, in addition to having the general meaning of essence and expression, do possess strong associations with the human body and spirit, yielding an additional layer of guidance: we should apply this insight to our own views of ourselves.

My new translation for shinjin datsuraku is thus: dropping out of the body/soul game.

Calligraphy by K. Kuwahara.

Are you studying to be a neurotheologian, but worried about your future career prospects? Now you may be able to find high-paid work as a commentator on sports figures’ religious experiences!

Baseball fans will not soon forget the miraculous come-from-behind victory by the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 World Series. It was the first world championship for the Sox in 86 years.

In Game 6, Curt Schilling took the mound for the Sox, defying predictions that the torn tendon sheath in his ankle would prevent him from pitching. Instead, the doctors basically stapled his tendon down so it wouldn’t flap around and Schilling went out to pitch, bleeding visibly around the ankle. His famous “bloody sock” was later donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Before the game, we are told, Schilling, devastated by his loss in Game 2, “surrendered to the Lord”, although he is not normally a very religious person. Then, in the fifth inning, a runner on second, Schilling had a major religious epiphany. “Something” (“somebody”?) “told” him not to make the pick-off throw he had been planning and instead pitch to the batter, who promptly lined into a double play, ending the Yankees’ threat.

“I just laughed,” Schilling says. “I couldn’t deny Him now.” After the game, he told the other players, “It wasn’t me. It was all God.”

To explain what was going here, the editors of Best Life, a men’s magazine, turned in their June, 2005 issue to Andrew Newberg . How did they find him? Well, successful neurotheologians all have agents these days.

Newberg started them off with a sort of Neurotheology for Dummies-level overview:

The images [of people meditating] revealed distinct changes in the temporal lobes, suggesting a neurological basis for these types of occurrences. But that doesn’t mean people’s interpretations are wrong. “We can see what the brain was doing.” Newbert says, “but we can’t see if God was there.”

I see. Newberg proceeds to explain his basic theory of religious experience:

When these spiritual events occur, the frontal lobes block incoming sensory information from reaching the parietal lobes, where the information would be processed. The results is a loss of the sense of self and a feeling of deep connectedness to nature or to God, explains Newberg.

Fine, but how is this related to Schilling?

This kind of episode can occur spontaneously in a stressful situation like Curt Schilling’s, when the autonomic nervous system is kicked into high gear. The heightened arousal (caused by stress), combined with a lack of sensory information to the parietal lobes, leads to a sense of peacefulness, of connectedness to something greater than the self—exactly what Schilling describes.

An often-overlooked benefit of being stressed out all the time: all those bonus spiritual experiences.

“Schilling’s not a Buddhist or Hindu, so he’s not going to have a Buddhist interpretation of that experience,” says Newberg. “He’s Christian, so his interpretation is that God was with him.”

But there was a key element missing from Newberg’s explanations. Seeing God out there on the ballfield is well and good, but how did those deprived parietal lobes contribute to Curt being able to make the right pitch to get the guy out? Come on, Andy, give us a little more body/mind here.

Another great career opportunity for neurotheologians, especially here in Hollywood, is as consultant to the entertainment industry. When neurotheology enters the mainstream in a big way, we’ll find neurotheological elements all over the movies and TV. Then there’s also this neurotheology Nintendo game I have designed, where you try to keep all your brain chemicals in balance for that really big religious explosion…gonna be a big hit.

I’d like to introduce Numenware readers to the Eide Neurolearning Blog, one of the best out there. It has everything a blog should: well-selected content, engaging writing, good links, frequent posts, and nice pictures. If you’re interested in the brain and learning, read this.

The brain is not a computer, of course. But wait. Computers are devices that process information…and that’s certainly what the brain does, right?

As an alert reader pointed out in my post on Roger Penrose, the English mathematician and philosopher, the problem here lies in the definition of “computer” or “computer-like”.

In one sense, saying that the brain is a computer is saying exactly nothing. That’s since the word “computer” refers to any device that “computes”—processes information. That includes everything from adding machines to quantum computers . Penrose may think the brain operates on quantum principles—so fine, it may be a quantum computer, but that’s still a computer. The only possibility for negating the assertion that the brain is a computer in this extremely general sense is to hold that the brain does not even “process information”. Perhaps it is doing something with information other than processing it, or perhaps it is processing something other than information as we know it. A more likely possibility is that it might be processing information but, at the same time, doing additional, important things that cannot be interpreted as processing information—such as being conscious. In that case, we would have to say the brain is only partially “like a computer.”

We also have to be aware of hidden agendas in defining these words. For some people, saying “the brain is not (like) a computer” is a kind of code for a belief in the human “spirit”, the absolute uniqueness of our “minds”, or the ineffability of existence. These people are simply making an exclamation of a particular variety of faith.

Personally, I believe that even consciousness is a form of information processing, and thus that the brain is a computer in the tautological sense. (Not that I think it’s a quantum computer.)

In that case, in what sense of the word “computer” does the brain fail to qualify? The narrowest sense is that of von Neumann, a stored program computer , one that computes a problem sequentially and deterministically from beginning to end. Even if we include parallel processing within the von Neumann paradigm, our “neural computer” does not fit within that framework. Most basically, it seems clear our brains involve no equivalent of a “program” or “stored data” in the von Neumann sense.

A broader sense is that of the Turing machine. This is the model that Eric Baum believes the brain works under, although in his details he often seems to have a von Neumannian focus. A Turing machine executes algorithms, and serves as a model for all modern computer hardware and software architectures.

If we limit ourselves to considering the synaptic architecture of the brain, we can say that it has Turing-like aspects, and its processing can be described as being algorithmic in nature, but it’s very unlike any Turing machine you’ve ever seen, with tens of thousands of dendrites converging on individual neurons, and neuronal plasticity involved in a type of learning at the level of the architecture of the “machine” itself.

But in other important regards the brain is almost certainly not a Turing machine. First, neural functioning involves chemical and hormonal levels which are fundamentally analog in nature; such analog behavior could be simulated by a digital computer, but never reproduced exactly. Second, the brain appears to be strongly specialized to deal with intrinsic temporal flow and temporal patterns.

In summary, we can say that the brain is a semi-analog, parallel, self-modifying, temporally-specalized device for processing information. Whether or not that’s a “computer”, we’ll leave up to the reader.

A few years ago I attended a talk given by two Zen masters, one male, one female. The man, going first, retold and analyzed some ancient Chinese koan in very Zen master-like fashion. The woman, when her turn to talk came, just sat there silently for a while, then burst into tears. Regaining her composure a bit, she sobbed, “I’m just so happy that I can be here with you all. It brings my practice to life.” She went on to share with us her personal relationship with that zen community, and the frustration she felt at having only blunt, dualistic, verbal tools at her disposal to communicate her insights with us, then cried some more. Finally she flopped over and leaned into the male master sitting at her side, throwing her arms around him.

We all have similar experiences in our own religious traditions of the difference between what men and women take from the religion, what they emphasize.

We know almost as little about the neuroscience of gender as we do about the neuroscience of religion. But perhaps we can overlay our sparse knowledge of the two fields to generate some new insights.

For instance, what are the neurotheological implications of the well-known research concerning the relative size of the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH-3), showing that it’s more than twice as large in men as in women (and homosexual men)? Could this be related to the hypothalamus’ role in the fear response, and thus connected to the informal observation that men’s relation to religion is more often one of “fear and awe” than women’s “love and compassion”?

To build robust neurotheological models, we need every clue we can get. Hopefully our expanding understanding of the neurological differences between the sexes can be one fruitful source of such clues.

It’s just a matter of time before the brisk sales of Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory, my childhood memoir, force it into a second print run. So I’m collecting new bits of information for the second edition.

One factoid I definitely want to add is the name of the Richland High School sports teams. That’s right: they’re the Bombers, a name adopted just weeks after the proud little atomic city’s plutonium devastated Nagasaki. And the school logo (see above) is a cute mushroom cloud, imposed on the “R” for Richland. One thing is sure: this is a town confident in its identity. RHS alumni congregate at RichlandBombers.com (where you can get your memorabilia emblazoned with the “Proud of the Cloud” motto—mugs or mousepads anyone?), and then there’s BomberBoosters.com. The school mascot is a green and gold bomb, an airplane affixed to its top, carted onto the field by cheerleaders bearing the cloud image on their bosoms.

Various attempts have been made to change the name, but all were voted down. A Japanese delegation visited the school to request a change, but the principal dismissed them, saying “We didn’t start that war.” But in case Richland High ever gives in to the political correctness wave and needs a new name for its teams, could I suggest “Homeless Indians”? How about “Crispy Japs”? Or “Thyroid Cancers”?

Bread is central to our Western civilization, so much so that it’s a common metaphor for spiritual nutrition. The starving Israelites wandering in the desert survived on manna from heaven. Jesus multiplied the loaves to feed the multitudes.

So it’s rather surprising to learn that bread was not first baked in Japan until 1842. Egawa Tarozaemon, a 19th century Japanese Renaissance man, was the man responsible, and is thus known as “Panso”: the Father of Bread. He felt bread would be the ideal food for the “farmer militia” he came up with the idea of training in readiness for attacks from foreign ships, although the bakufu never adopted his plan.

Egawa not only introduced bread into Japan, but was also responsible for bringing in landfill technology for creating harbor islands. He did the initial work that led to the development of Odaiba , a huge man-made island in the middle of Tokyo Bay, now packed with leisure and business facilities. He also built some of the earliest cannons in Japan, which required construction of a pig-iron furnace, still a landmark in the area. He dabbled in painting too: the drawing to the left is his self-portrait.

Egawa was a hereditary local governor in Nirayama (map), a part of modern-day Shizuoka Prefecture. His ancestral house, which still stands, is well worth a visit. Nearby, you can purchase modern-day versions of the bread he made 150 years ago; it’s dry, almost cracker-like.

Additional information in Japanese (Wikipedia ) and English.

What is the relationship between music and the brain? A leading theoretician on that topic was Dr. Gordon Shaw (left), who died last month, and was most famous for discovering the so-called Mozart effect (addtional link), which evolved into the folk “meme” which claimed that listening to classical music makes your smarter. Before long, people were playing Mozart to their babies in their cribs. In fact, what Shaw had shown was simply that listening to Mozart improved performance on spatio-temporal tasks for ten minutes.

But the Mozart business overshadowed the immense body of ground-breaking research that Shaw carried out. Working at the University of California at Irvine, Shaw focused on cortical organization, developing his unique, columnarly-based trion model. A list of his papers is on the web site of the MIND Institute, the group Shaw founded to continue his brain research and explore applications to elementary education, in the form of the Math+Music program which combines non-language based computer math games with specialized piano training.

Shaw’s model for the architecture of the cortex was set forth in his paper entitled “Model of cortical organization embodying a basis for a theory of information processing and memory recall.” The abstract states:

Motivated by V. B. Mountcastle’s organizational principle for neocortical function, and by M. E. Fisher’s model of physical spin systems, we introduce a cooperative model of th cortical column incorporating an idealized substructure, the trion, which represents a localized group of neurons. Computer studies reveal that typical networks composed of a small number of trions (with symmetric interactions) exhibit striking behavior—e.g., hundreds to thousands of quasi-stable, periodic firing patterns, any of which can be selected out and enhanced with ony small changes in interaction strengths by using a Hebb-type algorithm.

I’m wondering how Jeff Hawkins managed to write an entire book about cortical architecture without mentioning Shaw’s work.

A particular intriguing aspect of Shaw’s theory is that humans love music because it resonates with the innate columnar cortical structure. Xiaodan Leng then derived music directly from these theories, yielding eerily human-sounding, classical-like pieces; get your MP3s here!

Neurotheologically, what conclusions can we draw from Shaw’s insights? In the West, we think of religion as having a heavy musical component; after all, every cathedral has its organs, and Bach’s “religious” compositions tickle those trions of yours every bit as well as Mozart does, but this focus on music, at least of the cerebral kind, may be peculiar to Christianity. You don’t hear people talking too much about “Buddhist music”. Perhaps in a neurotaxonomy of established religions, Christianity occupies a position closer to the cortex.

One high-level hypothesis that should be part of a neurotheology research plan is this: religious practices such as meditation give rise to persistent neurological changes. Although most studies to date have focused on neurological changes during meditation, research such as Lutz et al supports the existence of long-term changes.

One way to verify such persistent changes is to examine the motor behavior of adherents. For instance, Zen masters demonstrate an intriguing economy of physical movement. In his voluminous treatment of neurological aspects of Zen, Austin spends a mere half-dozen pages discussing this topic, noting that there are three different occasions when forms of what he calls “behavioral enhancement” occur: two after peak and absorption experiences, the other more gradually as training progresses. He infers that the use of the subjects’ frontoparietal, basal ganglia, and cerebellar systems are “integrated, graceful, and efficient.” He goes on to outline a research plan:

The objective studies necessary will have begun long before by careful recordings of the subject’s baseline performance skills. Later, these will be compared with the same person’s skills immediately after major absorptions and kensho, respectively, and then repeated during subsequence years of follow-up studies as the subject moves further along the path.

Such ambitious longitudinal studies would, of course, be a major undertaking.

In my research, I would attempt to define and measure efficiency of motor functioning. I would propose neurological mechanisms (additive or subtractive) through which mental training might affect biokinesiology. I would design imaging experiments to build on these hypotheses. It would be important to understand taxonomies of religion-based meditative practices and map out differences in their neurology. And I would build computer models to validate the plausibility of those mechanisms (this subfield known as “computational neurotheology”).

Our subjects need not be limited to meditators from the Buddhist school. One interesting possibility is to study the effect of meditation on various motor impairments; down the road one might hope for results useful in dealing with Parkinson’s or apraxic disorders. Christianity has a rich tradition of meditation-like mental training and prayer practices, which should also be integrated into this research.

A small amount of research exists on this topic, much of it on Transcendental Meditation (see an excellent searchable bibliography at the “Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation” site):

• Warshal D., Effects of the Transcendental Meditation Technique on Normal and Jendrassik Reflex Time. Perceptual & Motor Skills 50:1103-6, 1980

• Robertson DW, The Short and Long Range Effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on Fractionated Reaction Time. J Sports Med Physical Fitness 23(1):113-20, Mar 1983 (link)

• Williams, L.R., and P.G. Herbert, “Transcendental Meditation and Fine Perceptual Motor Skill.”, Perceptual and Motor Skills 43, no. 1 (1976): 303-309.

• Williams, L.R., and B.L. Vickerman, “Effects of Transcendental Meditation on Fine Motor Skill,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 43, no. 2 (1976): 607-613.

• Wood, C.J., “Evaluation of Meditation and Relaxation on Physiological Response during the Performance of Fine Motor and Gross Motor Tasks,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 62, no. 1 (1986): 91-98.

• Wood, C.J., “Meditation and Relaxation and Their Effect upon the Pattern of Physiological Response during Performance of a Fine Motor and Gross Motor Task,” Dissertation Abstracts International 44, no. 5-A (1983): 1378.

• Blasdell, K.A., “The Effects of the Transcendental Meditation Technique upon a Complex Perceptual-motor Task,” in Scientific Research on the Transcendental Meditation Program: Collected Papers, Vol. 1, eds. D.W. Orme-Johnson and J.T. Farrow. New York: M.E.R.U. Press, 1977.

• Jedrczak, A., M. Toomey, and G. Clements, “The TM-Sidhi Program, Age, and Brief Tests of Perceptual-motor Speed and Nonverbal Intelligence,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 42, no. 1 (1986): 161-164.

• Rimol, A.G., “The Transcendental Meditation Technique and Its Effects on Sensory-motor Performance,” in Scientific Research on the Transcendental Meditation Program: Collected Papers, Vol. 1, eds. D.W. Orme-Johnson and J.T. Farrow. New York: M.E.R.U. Press, 1977.

• Telles, S., B.H. Hanumanthaiah, R. Nagarathna, et al., “Plasticity of Motor Control Systems Demonstrated by Yoga Training,” Indian Journal of Physiology & Pharmacology 39, no. 2 (1994b): 143-144.

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 . 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.