We complete our three-part examination of Landmark Forum from the religiobiological perspective (Part I, Part II), wherein we ponder the plausibility of Landmark’s efficaciousness based on the neurotheological or religiobiological assumption: that religious experience and development is correlated with biology and/or neurology.

Body-mind aspects. The religiobiological assumption would lead us to expect religions and personal development programs to be more effective to the extent they address the body side of the body-mind issue. This could range from rules or practices for eating, to various forms of physical practice. Zen, for instance, has its kinhin walking meditation, as well as its ōryōki eating system. A high level of religious or personal development would seem to be impossible without a smooth integration of body and mind, and thus we would expect the religion or program to talk about it or address it through its practices.

Landmark Forum completely ignores the body side of the equation. Of course, so do many other religions and systems, but the fact remains that here, at least, we find no particular support for Landmark’s promised effectiveness.

Philosophy. I’ll go out on a limb here and attempt to summarize the Landmark philosophy.

1. People form and then get stuck in suboptimal identities and worldviews.
2. The present contains the seeds of myriad possibilities.
3. Language creates reality.
4. Things are meaningless.

Philosophy—we could equally well call it ideology, or theology, or theory—forms an integral part of most religious frameworks, although in some, like Zen, it plays a lesser role. It can serve as a a guidepost and motivator and provide context to experiential development. From a religiobiological standpoint, philosophy per se is suspect in terms of its religious effect since its higher-level cortical impact is unlikely to (or we don’t know how it might) lead to any long-term changes in neurobiological structure. In order for it to be an effective part of the religion or system, at a minimum it needs to be sustained and highly coherent and targeted.

In Landmark’s case, the teaching of the philosophy is not sustained, by definition, since the program lasts only three days, although there are a number of follow-on programs. Nor, in spite of my basic sympathy for the four points above, is it coherent or targeted. It’s more like an appetizer platter.

Although it’s not my role here to critique the Landmark philosophy, I do have to object to or comment on some of these ponits.

Point 1—that people form and become prisoners of their identity and concepts—is hardly new, but certainly worthwhile to present, especially to a demographic that probably has spent little or no time pondering such things. But Landmark presents this in a vacuum, the entire discussion assuming a disembodied “I” outside the process that is apparently free of misshapen identities but explored no further.

Point 2—that language creates reality (this is not my interpretation—Landmark itself says “language may in fact be what brings that world into being”)—is actually wrong. Doubtless language is a powerful instrument for channeling and reinforcing ideas, and calling attention to that fact is useful. But as a Go player, for instance, I know the sequence of moves I plan in my mind is perfectly real, long before it takes any linguistic form, if indeed it ever does.

Point 4—that nothing means anything—is startling in the lack of connection to anything else coming before or after it on the platter. And given Landmark’s focus on terminology, or “distinctions”, it’s doubly odd that they would present this as the linchpin of their philosophy without bothering to talk about what “meaning” means.

Summary. From the religiobiological standpoint, we find nothing in particular about the Landmark program that would indicate it’s likely to be effective.

So why, to revisit the issue raised in our second post, do so many people feel they have benefited from programs such as Landmark Forum? One commentator sums it up well:

The programs have given people a positive direction and focus, and surrounded them with like-minded folks for reinforcement. They have helped them achieve peace of mind or to accomplish goals they had been unable to accomplish heretofore. They have helped with personal relationships with spouses and children or helped them justify getting out of relationships with their friends and family. The program has forced them to be more self-conscious, forced them to think and examine their lives, something most people don’t do on an ordinary Tuesday. Any time a rational person reflects on his or her life, or on some of the bigger issues in life, it feels good or it puts things in perspective. Either way, it is usually satisfying.

In other words, even if you interpret my three-part analysis as weakening Landmark’s claim to being effective (as opposed to the alternative, namely weakening the religiobiological assumption), Landmark seems to be a perfectly good program for a certain category of people and is almost certainly worth the time and money for them.

Recap. Below I bring together the six aspects that I identified in this series as being relevant in examining any framework from the religiobiological stance.

1. Talking (vs. doing). What is the balance between talking/preaching and doing?
2. Language (terminology). Does the system define and use a coherent terminology mapping to its worldview and practices?
3. Practice. Is there a structured, regular practice which would correlate to long-term neurobiological development?
4. Therapy. Does the system deal, directly or indirectly, with traumatic or damaging life experiences which can hinder early stages of development?
5. Body-mind aspects. Does the system address the body side of the body-mind equation?
6. Philosophy. Is the philosophy coherent, targeted, and sustained?

Clearly, there is ample room to improve on this list.

As Numenware’s readership grows (thanks!) and its identity grows stronger, it has now moved to its own domain: www.numenware.com, obviously. Your existing links and feeds should be redirected transparently.

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the A-bomb dropped on Nagasaki, I’ll share some relevant passages from Bobby and the A-Bomb Factory.

President Truman, in a diary entry from July 25, wrote: “This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.

“He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.”

Many of the scientists did not want to drop the second bomb, or even the first. But Groves had been adamant. Consumed by the desire to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt his success in building the monstrous new weapon, he lobbied vigorously for its use. Finally the military managed to convince Truman to drop the bomb on a real target, instead of making a demonstration like many scientists recommended, but Truman insisted the target be military. Fortunately, that took candidates like Kyoto and the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo out of the running. Unfortunately, it was then an easy end-run for the military to claim that Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was a military target, since of course, both cities did contain factories producing war materiel. The orders that went out on the very same day of Truman’s diary entry, July 25, made no mention of military vs. civilian targets, and simply designated the entire cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among others, as targets.

The bomb detonated over Hiroshima, “Big Boy,” was a uranium bomb, which Hanford had nothing to do with. It was dropped on August 6 1945. Riding along in a separate plane, named “The Great Artiste” and carrying monitoring equipment, was a certain Major Charles William Sweeney. Three days later Sweeney, commanding a B-29 named “Bock’s Car” after its usual pilot, Capt. Frederick Bock, dropped “Fat Man,” so named for its pudgy shape, over Nagasaki, a little Japanese port town on the southern island of Kyushu. Nagasaki was not really a strategic target, other than being where a Mitsubishi plant had produced some of the torpedoes used at Pearl Harbor. When Fat Man was ignited, conventional explosives violently squeezed the softball-sized capsule of Hanford plutonium inside until its density reached the point of supercriticality, causing a nuclear explosion. The fierce blast wind, heat rays reaching several thousand degrees, and deadly radiation generated by the explosion crushed, burned and killed everything in sight and reduced the entire area to a barren field of rubble. Hanford’s plutonium had performed its work admirably.

Bock was much less creative in naming his plane than one Capt. George Marquardt, who came up with the cute moniker “Up an’ Atom” for the weatherplane he flew along on the run.

Fat Man almost did not make it to its August 9 date with destiny. There was a firing unit on Fat Man’s front that needed to be connected to a cable going through the bomb’s innards to a radar antenna on its tail that detected when the bomb was at the right altitude to ignite. Technicians in the Marianas from where the flight was to take off were trying to hook up the bomb on the night of August 7 when they discovered to their horror that both connectors were female; somebody had threaded the cable through the bomb backwards! There wasn’t enough time to disassemble the bomb and reverse the cable. Without telling anyone, the two got a soldering iron and some extension cords. They secretly, and very carefully, removed the two plugs on the cable and swapped them so everything fit.

The technicians evidently did their job well, since the bomb detonated as planned. Sweeney recalls that as he watched the bomb falling free on its forward arc, the somewhat bizarre thought flashed through his mind: “It’s too late now. There are no strings or cables attached. We can’t get it back, whether it works or not.” The mushroom cloud was “multicolored…intense…angry…mesmerizing…breathtaking…ominous.”

The Academy for Neuroscience and Architecture has as its mission to “build intellectual bridges between research on the brain and those who design places for human use”. That sounds promising.

In addition to the architecture of K-12 learning spaces (less-cluttered, better-lit classrooms promote learning) and hospitals (green walls help healing), the group is focusing on a topic of interest to Numenware readers: religious spaces. If this research succeeds, then as their web page says:

future generations of school children, hospital patients, office workers, and worshippers in sacred places will have their environments more carefully tuned to their needs and desires.

One wishes this group all the best. As Alison Whitelaw, one of its founders, wrote: “The prospect of designing rooms, buildings and public spaces that are in tune with human biology could have far-reaching social, personal and economic benefits.”

Current priorities for the group apparently include doing research (neuro-imaging of people looking at buildings) and doing databases. What seems to be missing is any hypotheses about the potential relationship between neuroscience and architecture, whether sacred or profane. One section of the group’s website does include some “hypotheses” but they are limited to the circular, such as “the sequence of brain activations as one processes a place of worship may bring about a spiritual feeling”, or “a [religious] space may evoke a spiritual feeling, resulting from the mystery or surprise of the arrival, that becomes a meaningful religious experience.”

I must admit to some doubts about this enterprise. I have visited the new Cathedral here in Los Angeles and it is a competent, pleasant building. But I can’t imagine the building itself stimulating some kind of spiritual experience. A spire points to the sky—reminding us of God. But this begs the question of what we think God is or why he is in an “upward” direction. The experiences of people attending masses in that building, I would think, are dominated by the music, the words, the rituals, the symbols, and the religious authority figures, not the shape of the building.

Remember that church buildings as we think of them are specific to the types of large-scale organized religions that evolved in the political and economic environment in the West. Wide swaths of world-wide religious behavior do not involve buildings at all, other than perhap the shaman’s hut. So any neurotheological theory of architecture would first have to explain what’s different about the brains of billions of people who do just fine without any architects around to design big buildings for them to worship in.

Timur’s astonishingly beautiful Registan buildings in Samarkand include mosques, but were mainly about him strutting his wealth and power (as is the case, indeed, with many other “religious” buildings). Pachacuti, the legendary Incan ruler, built the fabulous gold-encrusted Coricancha temple in his capital Cuzco, but it was not a place of worship per se; instead, the mummies of the dead rulers were kept there. Thailand’s Emerald Buddha is housed in a temple of moderate architectural interest, but the main focus, it goes without saying, is the statue itself.

When we talk about computational models of neurotheology, what do we mean?

What first springs to mind is to model an individual brain, or more likely brain/body system, to model the biological processes associated with a religious experience. Modeling transcendance, if you will. But could we tell that in fact what is being simulated is a religious experience? Humans know they are having or had religious experiences by being, at some level, conscious of them. But we can hardly build an entire mechanism of consciousness into our computer model. And even “pure” transcendant religious experiences have historical and social backgrounds, or, to put it another way, occur within the context of certain memories, which even Blue Brain could not model. All in all, a tough problem.

More tractable would be to integrate a coarse statistical model of individual religious experience with a sociological model. In other words, we would model religious experiences, large and small, but at the population level. Some percentage of religious experiences are at the breakthough level that can jumpstart an entire new religion, whereas others might suffice to rejuvenate or sustain a religion, if experienced by enough adherents.

Once a religion has started, we would apply sociological modeling techniques to model its spread and/or decline as the system of doctrines or cermonies that religions inevitably settle into, albeit leavened by periodic awakenings that serve to inject new energy into the religion for some period of time.

The model involves two distinct categories of data. The first relates to the statistical frequency, intensity, and types of human religious experience. I’m not aware of any data on that topic. Our goal would be derive hypotheses for those values, hopefully ones that could be cross-validated, either by working backward through the model from the sociological data mentioned below, or by running multiple scenarios to find one or more that are consistent with the sociological data.

The sociological data I am referring to, which should be relatively easy to capture, is primarily the distribution of sizes of religious groups over time, as well as other peripheral data such as conversion rates.

A flavor of the sociological side of the model can be gained from Simulating the Emergence of New Religious Movements, a paper which crudely models the formation and growth of religions. I can’t agree with the premise that NRM (new religious movement) founders are “rational agents who obtain various social advantages such as reputation enhancement and increased respect from other utility maximizing rational agents who buy their solutions”, but the seeds of one half of the model I propose—the sociological side—are there.

I hereby name this particular approach computational socioneurotheology™.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neuroreport reports research showing that meditation thickens your cortex.

We know that meditation changes brain wave patterns. But could that be due to changes in the brain’s physical structure? That’s the question the researchers asked. They stuck the meditators in an MRI machine, measured their cortical thickness (how?), and found it had increased.

From the abstract:

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess cortical thickness in 20 participants with extensive Insight meditation experience, which involves focused attention to internal experiences. Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Finally, the thickness of two regions correlated with meditation experience. These data provide the first structural evidence for experience-dependent cortical plasticity associated with meditation practice.

That’s great, because I’ve been really worried about that age-related cortical thinning thing.

The article itself is available only by subscription, but according to a news report on the findings:

Most of the brain regions identified to be changed through meditation were found in the right hemisphere, which is essential for sustaining attention. And attention is the focus of the meditation.

Dogen, in his later years, emphasized that to find the truth you would have to leave your family and join a monastery, but this study was of regular people with jobs and families who meditated just 40 minutes per day on average.

It seems obvious that a thicker cortex is a “good” thing, but why? Is it that new brain cells have grown, or simply that the intra-neuronal geometry and distance changes? Which layer of the cortex grew thicker, and how does that tie into theories of cortical functioning? Finally, if the cortex grows thicker presumably some other parts of the brain are getting compressed—which ones, and with what effect?

New Rules, Bill Maher’s new book, has shot up the bestseller list. It’s pretty funny. The really funny thing, though, is how little content it has—about one, one-sentence joke per page. The jokes are supposed to be about the way things have changed (hence the title).

I like Bill. I ran into him at the West Hollywood Book Fair last Sunday where he was signing his books. I’m sure his TV program is funny even though I don’t watch it because I don’t get HBO . He’s a indispensable antidote to much of the political silliness going on today.

But unfortunately most of the jokes in his new book are just stupid. Or ignorant. Take this one:

Sumo is not a sport—it’s an eating disorder.

Leaving aside what this has to do with being a “new rule”, what’s our friend Bill doing engaging in dime-store humor about Orientals? What’s next, jokes about buckteeth? Has he ever seen a sumo match or bothered to learn anything about the sport?

Perhaps he’d like to wrestle with Chiyonofuji, the great yokozuna whose 31 championships are second only to Taiho’s and whose body fat ratio would probably put Bill to shame. “Wolf”, as he was known, could lift Bill up with one hand and drop him on a pile of remaindered copies of “New Rules”. Or going back a bit further, perhaps Bill would like to wrangle with Wajima, another yokozuna who weighed in at a scrawny 132kg during his heyday in the ‘70s, when I first visited Japan.

Or maybe Bill would like to learn about the scores of kimarite winning techniques. Bill could even widen his horizons and learn about how sumo and sumo-like sports are popular thoughout Asia, notably in Korea and Mongolia, where it is said to date back to Genghis Khan. And instead of pandering to the ill-informed image of sumo wrestlers as fat bozos with an “eating disorder”, he could learn about their food culture and their remarkable chanko nabe stew.

MeaningofLife.tv is a fascinating site that has videos of interviews with major thinkers—Daniel Dennett (shown), Freeman Dyson, Steven Pinker—on all of our favorite topics, including evolution of religion, consciousness, mystical experience , free will, and death.

For instance, you can listen to Andrew Newberg, whose book Mystical Mind we were unkind to in a recent post, on the topic of why meditate, but I’m sure that’s only one of the interviews you’ll want to listen to.

Alien visitations, odd as they are, have something in common with religion: people believe in them. Why do people have the belief they were abducted by aliens? How do those beliefs relate to beliefs they or other people have about anything, including God? If we understood the neurological mechanisms underlying why people believe they were abducted by aliens could we understand why they believe in other things, including God?

Today the New York Times published an article entitled Explaining Those Vivid Memories of Martian Kidnappers, talking about the forthcoming book Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens by Susan A. Clancy. According to the cover blurb, “Clancy argues that abductees are sane and intelligent people who have unwittingly created vivid false memories from a mélange of nightmares, culturally available texts, and a powerful drive for meaning that science is unable to satisfy. This book is not only a subtle exploration of the workings of memory, but a sensitive inquiry into the nature of belief.”

The Times comments: “Although it focuses on abduction memories, the book hints at a larger ambition, to explain the psychology of transformative experiences, whether supposed abductions, conversions or divine visitations.”

Unfortunately, Clancy failed to gather information about the “abductees” religious lives, but now realizes this was a mistake. As the Times notes: “The warmth, awe and emotion of abduction stories and of those who tell them betray strong spiritual currents that will be familiar to millions of people whose internal lives are animated by religious imagery.”