Neuroimaging techniques are limited by their spatial and temporal resolution. fMRI has a spatial resolution of about 3-4mm. Now researchers have developed statistical techniques to narrow fMRI resolution down to less than a millimeter, fine enough to see the “orientation columns” in the primary visual cortex (V1), so named because each reacts to lines and edges at a particular orientation.

The research is described in an article in Nature Neuroscience, Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. The authors conclude their abstract with the observation

Our approach provides a framework for the readout of fine-tuned representations in the human brain and their subjective contents.

Much more of science than people realize is about computers processing massive amounts of data. Theories of the cosmos are basically just computers crunching numbers; the Hubble photos we see are massively computer enhanced. From an information theoretic point of view, it’s highly likely that orders of magnitude of additional useful information can be extracted from even the current generation of fMRI hardware, given the right algorithms. That’s the approach these researchers have taken, highlighting the importance of the field called computational neuroscience.

V1 is the part of the visual cortex at the back of your head which takes the first crack at signals coming in from your eyeballs. It’s just one synapse away from the retina. The interesting thing about this research was not just the ability to look at individual orientation columns, but how this ability was used. Subjects were told to focus on one of two overlapping grids of lines of different orientations. The researchers then used the enhanced scanning technique to verify that the relevant orientation columns were activated. This demonstrates how higher-level, conscious functioning (“attention”) can drive lower-level brain functions—the sort of top-down mechanism that Jeff Hawkins focuses on in On Intelligence.

I do have to object to the headline the NYT came up with for its article about this news: “Improved Scanning Technique Uses Brain as Portal to Thought”.

Now, we just have to hone in on the “God” columns in the temporal lobe, or wherever they are.

Religion is uniquely human.

Or is it? Finding precursors or analogs to human religious behavior in animals would represent an incredible step forward in understanding the evolutionary and neurological correlates of religion.

Perhaps our assumption that animals could not believe in God has prevented us from seeing their particular way of doing so. As Stephen Jay Gould writes in Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History:

Chimps…have long been the battleground for our search for uniqueness; for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction…between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long sought for our cosmic arrogance.

Intuitively, stating that only humans are religious has a dubious ring to it. We share a huge percentage of our genome with the primates. To me, it seems likely that we have simply failed to observe religious behaviors in animals, or, more likely, failed to correctly interpret them as religious.

We know that chimpanzees hold “funerals” for their dead, something humans would consider a religous ceremony. The chimp funerals involve

crying, displaying, and hurling rocks in all directions, the chimpanzees were embracing, mounting, touching, and patting tne another with big, nervous grins on their faces. Later, the chimpanzees stared at the body, one juvenile female for more than an hour.

Other than the mounting part, sounds like many funerals I’ve been to.

Another prototypical element of religous observance is ritual chanting or other rhythmic behaviors. It is known that chimps drum on hollow trees as a means of communication, but it has also been reported that such drumming may sometimes continue for hours—certainly much longer than necessary to alert your troupe to a nearby predator.

These and other observations of potentially religious behavior in animals could lead to the design of experiments impossible to carry out on humans. If in doing so we came to understand the neurological bases of the animals’ religious behaviors, we could then search for correlates in the human brain, roughly analogous to how scientists compared the FOXP2 language and speech gene in humans and chimps .

Of course, we can approach this problem from a different angle. A robust theory of neurotheoanthropology (the human equivalent of neurotheozoology) should provide us with clues to detecting religious behaviors in animals. Conversely, if a neurotheoanthropological theory does not provide such clues, that may indicate that it is flawed or circular. The neurotheology of Newberg and d’Aquili, for example, which I have not discussed here yet, seems to suffer from exactly that defect.

A toy theory and its application

Just to see how this would work, we’ll walk though a “toy” theory of neurotheology. In this theory, the development of the left-brained capacity to assign names to represent objects (or, more generally, to process symbols), while obviously of huge adaptive value, gave rise to an unending struggle on the part of the organism to reconcile the existential gap between the name and the named, or between the hemispheres if you will. In this theory, religion is an indispensable mechanism to soothe this tension, by engaging in a series of rituals which bring together the name and its referent in a temporary unity, or, in the hemispheric interpretation, leading to a particular type of information transfer across the hemisphere divide, or, possibly, causing physiological changes which promote such transfer.

Under this theory, if an animal can process names, which chimps can, it should have the existential tension, and is likely to have developed religious behaviors in response. The behaviors to look for would be those that would invoke some physiological change in brain state. Drumming on the tree is an obvious example, but chimps may also engage in meditative behavior—something the researcher sitting in his blind would hardly attribute to a chimp “just sitting there”. Other possible behaviors are those related to names and symbols, such as reorganizing and pondering objects.

Perhaps animal religion will be the topic of the research winning one of the increasing number of prizes in neuroscience, such as the Peter Gruber Prize, first awarded last year, or the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience scheduled to be awarded in 2008.

As mentioned in an earlier post , I’ve completely redone my translation of Dōgen’s Genjō Kōan, entitled “Unfolding Puzzle”. I have now put up the entire translation on-line (PDF).

Of course, the book is still available as an attractive, printed 32-page booklet from Lulu .

Another excerpt:

Sometimes, God shows us a world replete with wisdom and foolishness, daily practice, life and death, saints and sinners. Other times, the clarity and the confusion and the living and the dying and the saints and the sinners and everything else all vanish into namelessness. The true way naturally transcends such opposites. It joins life with death, wisdom with foolishness, the ordinary with the divine. Be that as it may—the blossoms you adore will wither and fall; the weeds you abhor will flourish and sprawl.

750 years ago, Dogen repudiated religious discimination between the sexes, saying, “The desire to hear Dharma and the search for enlightenment do not necessarily rely on the difference in sex.”

I wish more of our current religious “leaders” had figured this out.

Dogen also had trenchant comments to make on sexual objectification:

Some people, foolish to the extreme, think of a woman as nothing but an object of sensual pleasure…A Buddhist should not do so. Both man and woman become objects, and thus become equally involved in defilement.

Dogen made these comments in the Raihai Tokuzui fascicle of Shobo Genzo. Translations are by Hee-jin Kim, from Dogen, Mystical Realist.

You’ve got neurons all up and down your alimentary canal. They monitor digestion and track enzyme levels. They control peristalsis. They give you that tight feeling in your stomach when you’re scared. And they’re responsible for bringing back up that bad burrito you had.

This is the “enteric nervous system” (ENS), dubbed the second brain by Dr. Michael D. Gerson, author of the book by the same name. It’s the neural equivalent of the second steering wheel at the back of a fire truck. Consisting of hundreds of millions of neurons, it’s a miniature version of the brain in your head, embedded along your entire digestive tract from esophagus to anus.

One hundred years ago, Dr. Byron Robinson, an early ENS researcher, waxed poetic in his book “The Abdominal and Pelvic Brain”:

…in the abdomen there exists a brain of wonderful power maintaining eternal, restless vigilance over its viscera. It presides over organic life. It dominates the rhythmical function of viscera…it has the power of a brain…it is the center of life itself.

The study of this abdominal brain has important real-world applications. The ENS has been tied to migraine headaches, autism, Alzheimer’s, and even depression—although you’d probably be depressed too if you had irritable bowel syndrome. Understanding the intelligence in the gastrointestinal tract could be key to solving these stubborn medical riddles. For instance, in one study a thorough bowel cleansing resulted in notable improvement in children suffering from autism.

Then there are the rarer diseases such as the horrifying Chagas disease found in Mexico and South America, where a parasite crawls under your skin, triggering an autoimmune response which attacks the ENS, eventually leading the intestines to self-destruct.

What are the implications for those of us interested in biology and God? Will enemas help propel us to enlightenment? I hereby christen this field neurogastroenterotheology, after “neurogastroenterology”, the term for study of the abdominal brain itself.

Religion is intimately connected with the digestive system. For instance, the three major monotheistic religions all have a tradition of fasting. This is commonly interpreted as an pseudo-ascetic practice, but could the real point be to give your abdominal brain a rest? Catholicism also calls its holy days “feasts”, and of course has communion, although that probably wouldn’t be enough food to kick the ENS into gear.

Zen aficionados don’t meditate on a full stomach—the common wisdom being that that ensures your stomach isn’t stealing blood flow from your real brain. But perhaps there is a more direct connection to the state of absorption. After all, many biological theories of meditation hold that the samadhi-like state derives from understimulation (or overstimulation, depending on who you ask) or the parasympathetic nervous system, or balance between it and the sympathetic nervous system. Well, the ENS is often regarded as the third non-cerebral nervous system, after the sympathetic and parasympathetic, so maybe it is involved in the pattern of lowered stimulus in meditation. In addition, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are connected to the enteral nervous system; they are the pipeline over which it talks to the brain in our head, much like two networked computers, in one analogy.

Perhaps those Buddha statues with big fat stomachs are trying to tell us they had achieved intestinal satori. And the focus on the hara (stomach) in Zen is certainly no coincidence—except instead of focusing on it you can focus with it, now that you know it’s got a mind of its own.

Intriguingly, the digestive system is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, which is in turn associated with religious-like behaviors such as thinking that you’re Jesus.

According to researchers:

Temporal lobe seizure activity usually arises in or involves the amygdala. It is not surprising, therefore, that patients who have seizures involving the temporal lobe have GI symptoms, since discharges arising in the amygdala can be transmitted to the gut via dense direct projections to the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus. In addition, sympathetic pathways from the amygdala to the GI tract can be activated via the hypothalamus…there are direct sensory pathways from the bowel via the vagus nerve to the solitary nucleus of the medulla which is heavily connected to the amygdala. These can be activated during intestinal contractions.

Another researcher notes:

Another example of the abdominal connection in epilepsy is the aura which is common in certain types of epilepsy. For example, temporal lobe epileptic seizures frequently begin with an aura. In neurological terms, an aura is actually a mild seizure which precedes the primary seizure. It can be thought of as a warning that a seizure is about to happen. Most often, auras manifest as an altered consciousness or peculiar sensation. The most common aura is of vague gastric distress, ascending up into the chest.

All this is quite circumstantial, so we’ll have to add ENS-related topics to our program for neurotheology research. A better understanding of our gastro-brain might allow us to revise the meditation instructions Dogen gave us in Fukanzazengi for the first time in 750 years.

This post continues our project, which started with this post, of adopting the religiobiological stance in looking at the Landmark Forum.

Therapy. Especially in the earlier periods, the Forum focuses on your human relationships, notably broken ones. It urges you to patch things up now with that estranged father or sister, to the point of calling them on your cell phone during the next break. Participants then volunteer to stand in front of the group and talk about these personal problems, resulting in some riveting Dr. Phil moments, in no small part thanks to the savvy, unyielding, quick-on-the-feet, penetrating probing of the facilitator.

Examples:

• the boy who finally forgave his mother and father for trying to raise him white, even though he was obviously mixed, the product of his mother’s amorous dalliance with a black lover

• the distraught wife who forgave herself for exposing her two small children to the horribly traumatic experience of 30 FBI agents bursting into their house at 6am to arrest her drug-dealing husband, whom she had believed when he said he was going straight

• slightly less tragically, the girl who wondered why her boyfriend wouldn’t commit when all she had done was left him at the altar two years earlier

• finally, the boy whose Hispanic father abandoned him, completely alone, to wander the streets, at the age of 9

These stories are moving to the point of tears.

It is this aspect of Landmark that has led some to categorize it as a form of large-group awareness training. Being in front of a large audience, and getting their feedback, unquestionably raises the efficacy of this therapeutic process. And I personally have no doubt that many of these people underwent genuine transformations, although as with most transformations there is the danger of backsliding and need for consolidation that one hopes some kind of follow-up would address.

From a religiobiological standpoint, to my knowledge no has elucidated the neurological mechanism underlying emotional fixations or constantly revisited past traumas—this was the project, after all, that Sigmund Freud gave up on. At the risk of circularity, it would seem undeniable that there is some such schematic substrate which is altered by emotional catharsis. There is little doubt that such catharsis, and thus such neurological changes, are experienced by some Landmark attendees, although probably just those who take advantage of the opportunity to “share” in front of the group and have the benefit of direct interaction with the leader. (The conclusion for would-be Landmark attendees would to be sure to “share”.)

However, there is more to the process of personal growth than merely breaking through emotional pathologies. The breaking through is better seen as a kind of necessary first step, like removing a tree that’s blocking the road. As I interpret the structure of the three-day Landmark experience, and in light of the fact that the emotional components come earlier in the training, that’s also how Landmark itself positions it. So while we can note the apparent success of these dramatic five-minute metamorphoses for those who participate in them, and hypothesize that they are having some kind of neurobiological effect, this alone is not sufficient to conclude that Landmark’s overall effectieness is religiobiologically plausible.

We will continue our examination of Landmark in one final post. But before we leave the topic, what about the issue mentioned by one reader, that a huge majority of attendees surveyed said that the Forum changed their lives for the better?

These survey results deserve close scrutiny. There is no baseline to compare against, the results are completely self-reported, and there is a built-in bias on the part of the participants towards justifying their own expenditure of time and money. At a minimum, they would need to normalized against results from participants in other programs or religions. For instance, how many Baptists feel that their religion improves their lives?

The study in question was apparently carried out by IMC, Inc., but who paid for it? Like any survey, the results can be spun in a number of ways. For instance, the Yankelovich survey reported that “more than 30% of participants thought the Forum did poorly or only fairly in improving their overall effectiveness” (my wording).

The numbers are also biased to the extent the participants are self-selected. For what it’s worth, the largest percentages are 25-34, some college. Another study revealed that prospective participants were significantly more distressed than than their peers and had a higher level of impact of recent negative life events. I am merely saying that the results should be interpreted in this context.

Finally, a note on the positioning of this entire endeavor. I am not trying to criticize Landmark or praise it or say it is good or bad. The point is simply to examine it to see if there are any obvious aspects which could tie in with a neurologically-based theory of religion or personal development. As a reader rightly pointed out, if we find no such aspects, and we haven’t yet, that could just as easily be interpreted as casting doubt on the religiobiology project as a whole or as indicating that there may be types of religious/developmental phenomenon that do not have neural correlates, as that Landmark is unlikely to actually be as effective as claimed.

Does Landmark Forum seem likely to affect your brain? If so, how? This question is an example of the religiobiological stance , an approach for analyzing phenomena related to religion. (“Religion” here has a broad interpretation which encompasses the personal growth that Landmark claims to enable.) If we can identify ways in which Landmark could affect your brain, that makes it more plausible that it actually does have a long-term impact on behavior or happiness, and of course the converse is true as well.

We will split this analysis into two posts.

The Landmark Forum is a three-day seminar, put on by Landmark Education, which claims to be specifically designed to bring about positive and permanent shifts in the quality of your life. These shifts, it says, will be the direct cause for a new and unique kind of freedom and power. 94% of participants surveyed said The Landmark Forum made a profound, lasting difference in the way they live their lives. Nearly a million people are said to have undergone the training. Landmark Education offers a number of other follow-up programs, but here we will confine ourselves to the Forum.

Let’s jump right in and take the religiobiological stance in addressing some of the major aspects of the Landmark Forum.

Talking. Although the Landmark website characterizes the forum as a “conversation” or even a Socratic dialog, rather than a “lecture”, in fact the 45 hours or so are dominated by the facilitator (picture is of Jerry Baden) talking at the 200 or so attendees. It’s actually jarring to some extent, to hear the leader announce that he is going to have a “conversation” and then proceed to talk for the next 15 minutes.

The talking is occasionally interrupted by questions from other attendees, or by quick interludes of sharing with surrounding participants.

In general, mere talking is a very poor bet for causing any meaningful neurostructural changes, even when the person doing the talking is an engaging, charismatic speaker as all Forum leaders are, unless it is talking about something of huge emotional significance. Therefore, Landmark’s focus on one-way oral communication would argue against its potential effectiveness, from the religiobiological stance.

Language . Throughout the Forum new terminology is introduced, such as “get it” for in-depth and/or visceral understanding; “racket” for repetitive, self-defeating behavior patterns; “possibility” for seeds of future potentiality embedded in the present; and “distinguishing” for identifying and highlighting a useful concept.

In my opinion, the centrality of language processing in the higher human brain layers is such that new terminology can, in fact, act as a lens leading to new modes of perception and consequent neurological change. Unfortunately, Landmark’s new terminology is both piecemeal and overused to the point of meaninglessness. For instance, “distinction” is used for any old concept. Taking the religiobiological stance, then, the promise offered by Landmark’s new terminology to correlate to neuroplastic events remains unfulfilled.

Practice. One way to apply the religiobiological stance is to start with known ways to affect neurophysiology and see if the phenomenon being examined might contain anything related. The single most well-known way to change your brain in a religiously meaningful way is some sort of sustained meditation, concentration, or mindfulness.

We see nothing even vaguely reminiscent of such a practice in Landmark, either done within the seminar or taught to participants to do on their own later. The only part of the Forum that has meditational tinges to it is a single exercise involving closing your eyes and experiencing fear. Adopting the religiobiological stance in looking at Landmark, then, we find no ongoing exercises of the type that could be expected to reliably result in structural changes in the brain.

We will continue this discussion in the next post.

I’ve often thought over the years of coming up with a new ideographic written language. Now I find a man named Charles K. Bliss has already done this, creating something called Blissymbols (or “Semantography”).

One useful-looking book is Heffman’s Biosymbolics: Speaking without Speech, which talks about using Blissymbols to help handicapped children to communicate.

For more information, visit Douglas Crockford’s site (Blisssymbolics link is on the left). (You may also want to check out his amazing materials on Javascript, of which he is doubtless the most advanced practitioner in the world.)

TODO: Check out languages mentioned by Umberto Eco in his book The Search for the Perfect Language.

There have been any number of proposals for visual alphabets, some quite recent. We might cite Bliss’s Semantography, Eckhaardt’s Safo, Janson’s Picto and Ota’s Locos Yet, as Noth has observed, these are all cases of pasigraphy (which we will discuss in a later chapter) rather than true languages. Besides, they are based on natural languages. Many, moreover, are mere lexical codes without any grammatical component (p. 175).

Crockford comments that semantography (Blissymbolics) does not belong to the class of visual alphabets that Eco is dismissing.

Branch of zoology that studies the behavior of animals in their natural habitats.

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 .