What are the neurological correlates of “one hand clapping”, the most famous Zen koan in the world?

First, the koan challenges the processing patterns occurring in the association areas of the brain, where input from various sensory subsystems is integrated. In this case, we are asked to dissolve the normal association made in this area between the aural clapping input and the visual input involving two hands.

Second, the koan seeks to perturb the normal mapping between the motor commands to move the arm and the visual and proprioceptive inputs that the arm is actually moving. Put simply: can we will one of our arms to move, and believe it did, without it actually moving?

V. S. Ramachandran discusses a related situation in his brilliant book, Phantoms in the Brain. He describes the phenomenon where stroke patients believe they can move, or have moved, limbs which are in fact paralyzed.

A new study supports the idea that meditation causes long-term physiological changes in brain structure. A summary is here. The full article from PNAS is here. Specifically, the researchers found that experienced meditators had extremely strong gamma wave patterns before meditating (baseline), and those patterns strengthened further during meditation (see brain on right in figure). They note that “these data suggest that massive distributed neural assemblies are synchronized with a high temporal precision”. A correlation also was found between length of meditation history and gamma pattern strength.

Many people have heard about how meditation supposedly promotes alpha waves. The authors of this study hypothesize that that may be an effect of mantra-based meditation, whereas their study focused on Tibetan-style compassion-oriented meditation.

This type of research, incredibly important and interesting, is still in its infancy. It’s encouraging that the government is supporting such research (through the National Institute of Mental Health, Mind-Body Center). There is so much yet to study and learn about the neurophysiological effects of meditation.

The Travel section of the Sunday New York Times had an article on Bhutan, with a great picture of the famed Tiger’s Lair, but not as good as the one we took when we visited in 1997. Actually, these pictures are of two different buildings: ours of the original, and the NYT’s of the monastery rebuilt after the tragic fire that destroyed it just a week after our visit.

First Deep Blue. Then Blue Gene. Now, Blue Brain.

Solve chess, next tackle the wonders of the gene, then unravel the mysteries of the brain for an encore?

Sort of. Deep Blue is now in a museum, an ultimately unsatisfying technological tour de force that accomplished little more than demonstrating that the complexity parameters of chess put it within reach of your average supercomputer.

And Deep Gene is not really designed to do anything with genes, although it’s been used to do molecular simulations. It’s cleverly named to create the image of a family of supercomputing projects, but in fact has nothing to do with Deep Blue, and at heart is a massive science fair project to see how many teraflops you get when you string together 32K nodes.

Blue Brain is the catchy name of the latest project, a partnership with a Swiss university (EPFL ) to use Blue Gene to model the human brain.

Although this project has been widely reported, most of the commentary has been at the level of calling the project a “virtual brain”, claiming for example

the hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness.

Wow, a thinking computer that’s also conscious.

But readers of Numenware will want to understand the research plan in a bit more detail. The first project is a cellular-level model of a neocortical column. They’ll simulate 10,000 neurons and 100 million synapses (yes, there really are that many synapses on 10,000 neurons). They’re going to use 8,000 nodes, so it would seem obvious to have one node per neuron, but that doesn’t appear to be the approach. They say the simulation will run in “real time”, but shouldn’t it be able to go faster? Of course they’ll have snazzy visualization systems. Hey, can I go for a “walk” among your neocortical columns?

From there, the researchers hope to go down—and up. They’ll go down to the molecular level, and up to the level of the entire neocortex. To do the latter will require a simplified model of the neocortical columns, which they hope to be able to derive from the first project. They’ll eventually move on the subcortical parts of the brain and before you know it, your very own virtual brain.

It’s undoubtedly true that this is “one of the most ambitious research initiatives ever undertaken in the field of neuroscience,” in the words of EPFL’s Henry Markram, director of the project. But I wonder if the kind of knowledge we gather about brain functioning from this project will be the same kind of knowledge we gathered about chess from Deep Blue.

Markram has a very micro focus. For instance, he has sliced up thousands of rat brains and stained them and stimulated them and cataloged them. And this whole project has the same intensely micro focus. That’s extremely valuable, but it’s like building a supercomputer simulation of how gasoline ignites in order to understand how a car runs, when we don’t even understand the roles of the carburetor and fuel pump and combustion chamber, to borrow an overused analogy.

For instance, I’m sure Blue Brain will cast light on the mechanisms underlying memory, but when these guys say “memory” they mean synaptic plasticity. What I want to know is how I remember my beloved Shiba-ken, Wanda, who was hit and killed by a car in Kamakura.

It seems to me we don’t need supercomputers to model the brain, although I’m sure they’ll be useful; we need concepts to model. The actual model could be no bigger than Jay Forrester’s ground-breaking system dynamics model of the world’s socioeconomic system. The problem is not the technology for modeling—it’s what we model.

The same goes for neurotheology. We desperately need a computer model, but before that—we need a theory.

Scientists have identified a brain-related gene which emerged in a place and time consistent with the historical Buddha, giving rise to the intriguing possibility that his enlightenment was aided by genetic factors.

The research was done by scientists at the Howard Hughes Medican Institute and is reported here. Or, you may prefer the New York Times version.

The gene in question, known as ASPM, is associated with brain size (this gene was identified due to its role in causing microcephaly—shrunken brains). Such a gene is of obvious interest, since increase in brain size is a hallmark of human evolution. The researchers had already done phylogenetic studies showing that these genes were more evolved in humans than in apes.

In the latest research, in a sample of humans from around the world, the scientists found unusually common groups of “haplotypes” (genetic variants), but also slight variants from those common haplotypes, indicating that their evolution was ongoing. This gave rise to the headlines in your local newspaper screaming “Evolution of Brain Continues!” Well, why would anyone have thought it had ever stopped?

The most intriguing part of the research was how it walks back in time , using the statistical characteristics of the genetic variations, to estimate when—and where (based on the geographically diverse group of subjects)—the current dominant form of the gene evolved. For ASPM, the conclusion was that that a new allele emerged 5,800 years ago. and occurs more frequently in in a band running east-to-west from the Mediterranean to India.

The scientists muse that 5,800 years ago was when writing emerged in those regions, and agriculture , and settlements, and wonder if a connection could exist there. I’m more interested in the uncanny match with the time and place of the historical Buddha.

If we believe that genetic changes and resulting changes in brain size or structure could predispose people to reaching transcendant states or making progress on religious paths, some interesting neurotheological conclusions could follow. We could in theory develop genetic tests to identify good candidates for spiritual training. We would want to reverse the trend for advanced practitioners to remove themselves from the gene pool by becoming celibate—perhaps a monks’ sperm bank could be set up. Most interestingly, we may have grounds for optimism that as humans and their brains continue to evolve, as long as we don’t kill ourselves first, evolution will eventually bring the race to a perfected neural state where everyone can enjoy divine grace.

In The Meditative Mind, a worthwhile tour of major meditative traditions, Daniel Goleman (picture, Wikipedia entry) quotes Joseph Goldstein, a teacher of insight meditation:

It’s simple mathematics: all meditation systems either aim for One or Zero—union with God or emptiness. The path to the One is through concentration on Him, to the Zero is insight into the voidness of one’s mind.

I’d like to do some brain scans to illuminate this simple division of styles. One would expect that One-based meditation would involve parts of the brain associated with identity and boundaries, the Zero-based style pattern-matching and categorization.

If any readers know of similar kinds of research, I’d love to know about it.

Your eyes are always moving, in quick, sharp, jumps, several times a second. These movements are called saccades. You need to make these visual jumps since you can only see well right at the center of our eyes (“fovea”). Saccades can be exploratory, or confirmatory in nature. Even babies make saccades (more slowly, though).

My mind is also always moving in quick, sharp jumps, several times a second. What is the name for these? I’ll call them saccades as well: mental saccades. Like oculomotor saccades, they are both exploratory and confirmatory. Some people might call them “thinking”, but I don’t think they are “thinking” any more than visual saccades are “seeing”.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these mental saccades, just as there’s nothing wrong with visual saccades, which are indispensable to our visual perception. But there’s certainly such a thing as excessive mental saccadic activity.

(An aside: it would not surprise me if there were common mechanisms behind visual saccades, mental saccades, and possibly other types of saccades. What would be the equivalent of an aural saccade?)

Meditation slows and damps mental saccading. As a result the limited energy available for new synapse formation, instead of being consumed in excessive mental saccading, can be applied to higher-level cortical areas underlying the development of new behaviors and insights.

Vladimir Nabokov is fond of literal translations—and he is certainly someone we should pay attention to.

The Nov. 7, 2005 issue of the New Yorker, in a great article by editor David Remnich entitled “The Translation Wars”, from which much of the content of this post is lifted, talks about Nabokov’s ideas on translating, from Russian to English in particular.

Personally, I concur wholeheartedly with Cervantes, who is quoted in the article:

Reading a translation is like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind; you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you canot fathom their original lustre.

I myself have viewed many such tapestries from the rear.

Now on to Nabokov. He says of all the sins of a translator

The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. Ths is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as palgiarists were in the show-buckle days.

He goes on to say that when translating his intent is to provide the reader with a literal-minded “crib, a pony. And to the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everyhting: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, and even grammar.”

So he’s “transposing” now, instead of “translating”? He captured his philosophy of translation in a pithy poem, also published in the New Yorker, way back in 1955:

What is translation? On a platter / A poet’s pale and glaring head, / A parrot’s speech, a monkey’s chatter, / And profanation of the dead. / The parasites you were so hard on / Are pardoned if I have your pardon, / O Pushkin, for my strategem. / I travelled down your secret stem, / And reached the root, and fed upon it; / Then, in a language newly learned, / I grew another stalk and turned / Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet, / Into my honest roadside prose—/ All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

The noted critic Edmund Wilson (Wikipedia), Nabokov’s erstwhile friend, begged to differ. Reviewing Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Onegin (Wikipedia ), he accused him of “bald and awkward language”, a desire to “torture both the reader and himself”, “sado-masochism”, “actual errors in English”, an “unnecessarily clumsy style”, “vulgar” phrases, inaccurate transliteration, a “lack of common sense”, and “serious failures of interpretation”. Hmmm. Sounds like some Dogen translations I know. (Later Wilson admitted that these criticisms were “more damaging” than he had intended.)

This tension between literal and interpretive translations pervades the entire translation world as it applies not just to novels but even computer manuals. (I don’t think I’d like my Japanese digital camera to come with a manual translated by the Nobel laureate author of “Lolita”.) But one can’t help feeling that the people having this war of words are missing the point—or at least failing to clearly state, or more likely understand, the groundrules: the nature and intent of translation itself.

I’m deeply interested in this discussion because I’ve translated, and am still translating, the 13th-century Japanese Zen master Dogen. The more I work on Dogen, the more I move toward the interpretive side. In the next post, I will go through a specific passage from Dogen as a means to shed light on the true nature of the interpretive decisions the translator must make, across the entire lexical/syntactic/semantic spectrum, and how they relate to the purpose and meaning of the translation.

Meditation can stabilize your perception. In a new study, Tibetan monks donned special helmets which fed conflicting images into the left and right eyes (“binocular rivalry”). Normally the brain fluctuates back and forth between the images. But during and after meditation, the monks were able to stabilize on one image or the other, or a combination.

This was the result reported by J. D. Pettigrew of the University of Queensland and other researchers in Meditation alters perceptual rivalry in Tibetan Buddhist monks, in correspondence recently published in Current Biology.

The light blue and dark blue bars in the graph above indicate the percentage of subjects where the “rivalry switch rate” either slowed down or stopped after (middle bar) and during (right bar) meditation.

This is intriguing research, but raises many additional questions which I hope the scientists will address in future research:

1. Only 50% of the monks reported this phenomenon. Why?
2. What governed which of the conflicting images the monks stabilized on? Some monks stablized on one, some on the other, and some on some combination.
3. Why did the effect occur only with “one-point” meditation, focusing on a single object, and not with so-called “compassionate” meditation?
4. What is the hypothesized mechanism? The authors merely note that focused styles of meditation have been associated with changes in neuroal activity in prefrontal regions of the cortex, which in turn have been implicated in sustained attentional rivalty.

The writers conclude:

This study offers an initial contribution towards increased understanding of the biological processes underlying meditation and rivalry, while additionally highlighting the synergistic potential for further exchange between practitioners of meditation and neuroscience in the common goal of understanding consciousness.

Hee-Jin Kim’s Eihei Dogen, Mystical Realist is a scholarly work by a respected Dogen scholar, placing Dogen’s thought in the context, primarily, of Buddhist philosophy and its history.

I enjoyed the early parts of the book, describing Dogen’s life. Here’s an interesting account of his enlightenment experience:

In 1225, a decisive moment of enlightenment in Dogen’s life came at long last during an early morning zazen session at geango (i.e., the three-month intensive meditational retreat). In the course of mediation, a monk next to Dogen inadvertently had fallen asleep. Upon noticing the monk, Ju-ching thundered at him: “In zazen it is imperative to cast off the body and mind. How could you indulge in slepping?” This remark shook Dogen’s whole being to its very core, and then an inexpressible, ecstatic joy engulfed his heart. In Ju-ching’s private quarters that same monring, Dogen offered incense and worshiped Buddha. This unusual action of Dogen prompted Ju-ching to ask: “What is the incense-burning for?” The disciple exuberantly answered: “My body and mind are cast off!” “The body and mind are cast off” (shinjin-datsuraku), jointed the teacher, “cast off are the body and mind” (datsuraku-shinjin). Thus, Ju-ching acknowledged the authenticity of Dogen’s enlightenment.

I was also interested in Dogen’s visit to my old home town of Kamakura (Wikipedia Wikitravel) during late 1247 and early 1248, where he preached before Hojo Tokiyori (Wikipedia). According to Kim, “there are different speculations as to what Dogen recommended to or discussed with Tokiyori during his stay in Kamakura.” I’d also like know where he stayed: could it have been at Enkakuji, the huge, dignified Rinzai temple in North Kamakura?

I have to admit to most of the rest of this book flying over the top of my head. It’s copiously annotated and clearly authoritative. It’s just that I’m not that interested in Buddhist philosophy—for instance, how Dogen’s concept of Buddha-nature differed from that of some Indian guy from the second century. Here’s a flavor:

Thus, temporal passage in the intra-epochal whole of a realized now, as Dogen saw it, was perhaps best descrbed in terms of the Hua-yen philosophy of simultaneity.

Kim uses his own translations of Shobo Genzo which are, unsurprisingly given his lifetime of Dogen study, superior to virtually all existing published translations. Examples:

As you maintain such efforts throughout the months and years, you further cast off those months and years of efforts (from Dotoku).

Many sages do not realize that “cutting” consists in cutting entwined voines with entwined vines. Nor do they understand entwining entwined vines with entwined vines…a vine seed grows into branches, leaves, flowrs, and fruits that are intertwined in harmony with one another (from Katto).

I can recommend this book, but primarily to those with scholarly aspirations.