Investigating the Mind 2005 is an exciting conference scheduled for November in DC, the theme being “The Science and Clinical Applications of Meditation.” It is sponsored by the Mind & Life Institute, founded by the Dalai Lama and a neuroscientist to “create a rigorous dialogue and research collaboration between modern science, and Buddhism,” and co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Georgetown University Medical Center.

This is the 13th conference. The 12th was held last year in Dharamsala, India, under the theme “Neuroplasticity: the Neural Substrates of Learning and Transformation.” The 11th conference , which was the first open to the public, was held in conjunction with the MIT McGovern Institute of Brain Research.

From the announcement:

Recent studies are showing that meditation can result in stable brain patterns and changes over both short and long-term intervals that have not been seen before in human beings and that suggest the potential for the systematic driving of positive neuroplastic changes via such intentional practices cultivated over time. These investigations may offer opportunities for understanding the basic unifying mechanisms of the brain, mind and body that underlie awareness and our capacity for effective adaptation to stressful and uncertain conditions.

edge.org asked 119 scientists and futurists: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Two answers impressed me deeply. The first is by Donald Hoffman of UCI (picture), which I excerpt here:

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.

He goes on to point out that the nature of user interfaces is to simplify and symbolize:

Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, contributed this:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-improtance—so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ life.

Indeed. If we realized our true significance we’d just walk in front of a bus and forget about it.

The “Mozart effect” is now firmly ensconced as a mass culture meme. But what is the precise mechanism at work?

Rauscher and Shaw[1] believe that listening to music helps ‘organize’ the inherent cortical firing patterns, serves as an ‘exercise’ for exciting and priming the patterns and their sequential flow, and enhances the ‘symmetry operations’ among them.

The “inherent patterns” here refer to the built-in spatial-temporal firing patterns of the “trions”, Shaw’s idealized cortical mini-columns which, according to his theory, form the common neural language of the cortex.

Interestingly, the researchers then propose extending the scope of the experiments to chess. They muse that listening to Mozart should produce short-term enhancement of analytic chess exercises, while “somewhat different” music would be necessary to enhance performance of creative exercises. In our own research, of course, we would substitute Go for chess.

Previous post on neuromusicology .

[1] Rauscher, Frances H., Shaw, Gordon L., Ky, Katherine N. Listening to Mozart enhances spatial-temporal reasoning: towards a neurophysicological basis, Neuroscience Letters 185 (1995) pp. 44-47.

Shinjin datsuraku (身心脱è?½) is Dogen’s trademark phrase. It’s said to be a phrase his teacher Nyojo was fond of; some say it’s the phrase which Dogen became enlightened upon hearing. It is found throughout both Shobogenzo and other writings by Dogen. English translations invariably render this as casting off body and mind. Reading these translations you can almost hear the translators saying to themselves, great, there’s something I don’t have to think about how to translate, and the readers saying to themselves, my, what a very Zen-like thing for Dogen to say. But this translation is not just wrong, it’s harmful. I’m just imagining all the poor Zen students sitting there on their cushions trying to figure out how to cast off their bodies and minds like the book says!

Chinese has thousands of two-character words, each of whose meanings is some composition of the meaning of the individual characters. Take seishi (生死), composed of the characters for “life” and “death”. Superficially, we have no clue what the compositional semantics are. It could be “and”, yielding the meaning life and death. But the meaning could just as easily be living death, life vs. death, the unity of life and death, life then death, or death via life. In other cases, the two characters mean approximately the same thing and the effect of combining them is emphasis.

In the compound shinjin, the first shin means physical body, the second kokoro (mind, heart, spirit). The “default” compositional semantics are “and”, giving us mind and body. But wait. Let’s apply the test of common-sense that so many translators fail to. Is it logical that Dogen would be telling us to let our “mind and body” fall away? How can we possibly let our body fall away? And Dogen teaches, in Bendowa among other writings, that the very concept of a body-mind distinction is a fallacy, so why would he be talking about something which he himself doesn’t think exists dropping away? Dogen, the down-to-earth teacher who instructs us to just sit, is now suddenly telling us to enter some kind of disembodied state?

It makes far more sense that Dogen would be using the term shinjin in the sense of the distinction between body and mind, whether or not that was a common sense in medieval Japan, or a sense he or his teacher pioneered. What needs to be cast off, or rather dropped off, then, is not a non-existent mind, or a body that is who we are, but rather the mistaken dichotomy between them. Or our fixation on that dichotomy.

As for datsuraku, or totsuraku as it’s sometimes spelled. I don’t think the meaning of this word has changed very much during the last 800 years. Its meaning in modern Japanese is drop out (of a race, or school).

That’s why my translation of shinjin datsuraku is drop out of the body/mind game.

Having no force; invalid; or, of little importance. The word Bob should have known but didn’t as the antonym for effectual on the GREs (guessed and got it right anyway though).

Coming soon to a mobile phone near you: ringtones that enhance brain functioning.

TOS (website), an ultra-cool Japanese company rolling out mobile lifestyle technology, has added Kiseki-no Chaku-uta (Wondrous Ringtones) to its well-known “Maho no Melo-land” (Magic Melody Land) library of ring-tones.

These ring-tones are specially designed by Dr. Hideto Tomabechi (picture), a Japanese with a Yale Ph.D who later studied machine translation and has now morphed into an all-round very digital guy (see his Japanese-language blog).

Unfortunately, we’re left with few details about the new brain-altering ringtones, other than the vague

Specified programs were used to create these sound tracks with several psychological experimental results of Dr. Tomabechi. It is programmed to get the expected effect by listening to those sounds over and over everyday.

If we complete our theory of neurotheology, then we will definitely publish ringtones which make you feel closer to God every time you hear them.

What can we learn about translating Dogen from the problem of translating medieval Japanese poetry? Carl Kay (website , pictured), Harvard-trained Japan scholar, entrepreneur, and author, recently shared with me his senior thesis from nearly 30 years ago, entitled “The Translation of Classical Japanese Poetry.”

Kay lavishes praise on Kenneth Rexroth (Wikipedia entry ), a critic, essayist, and translator of poetry. Says Kay, “…a reader of Rexroth’s translations experiences the freshness and intensity of the work…[Rexroth] concentrates on conveying the poetic experience.” Compared to scholars who are “concerned exclusively…with the meanings of the words [and whose translations] are as limited in their own way as translations that focus on other levels of the poetry”, Rexroth’s versions “capture the ‘meaning’ as clearly as the scholars but preserves the poetic intensity, the glow of the language, the force of syntax and rhythm that scholars often fail to bring over.”

Although poetry is clearly a different genre than Dogen’s writings, the two have more in common than you might think. Dogen brought a strong poem-like sensibility to his essays, in diction, cadence, word choice, and sentence structure. I would assert that the aspects of Rexroth’s translations praised by Kay are every bit as relevant when it comes to Dogen.

Kay takes issue with the translations of Brower and Miner, who were active in translating classical Japanese poetry in the mid 20th century, accusing them of “using” translation of Japanese poetry as a “vehicle” for their own analysis—for answering the question of what the poems “say”. “Considerations of the poetic experience are subordinated to an understanding of what the poem refers to outside of itself. The emphasis is not on the poem, but on cultural information. [Their] translations often blur into analysis…Their translation seems to be written to be appreciated by other scholars.”

Carl’s entire analysis applies as is to nearly all current translations of Dogen. The translators are not conveying the Dogen experience to us, but rather seem almost to be preaching at us, using Dogen as a weapon.

I will present more of Carl’s insights about translation in future posts.

Siddartha Gautama was enlightened at age 35, whereas Jesus of Nazareth’s breakthrough came at the age of 33. What is it about the early-to-mid-thirties anyway?

Neurologically, we can surmise that cumulative synapse formation after thirty-plus years of life brings about some kind of critical mass where the brain is primed for the massively transforming experience that these religious leaders had. What is the nature of this nerual “readiness”, and what type of synaptic development processes could lead to it over a period of three decades? And in what way, if any, does continued brain development after that time act to lessen the likelihood of such quantum leaps in consciousness?

58% of the American population now say that God’s importance in their lives ranks 10/10. Church attendance is up.

Good news? Hardly. For one thing, while spending more time sitting in church we are still electrocuting retarded black teenagers and killing Iraqi civilians with smart bombs. And much of the increased interest in things spiritual is frittered away listening to lectures in buildings with stained glass windows or dabbling in ESP, UFO’s, astrology, or yoga.

On a related note, in 2001 59% of all Americans said they were deeply interested in the meaning and purpose of life—a higher percentage than other societies, and up from 46% in 1995. What accounts for this fixation? In his new book, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception, Wayne Baker presents a novel theory: we are desperately trying to resolve the contradiction between the traditional and the self-expressive.

A contradiction which is uniquely American, as the fascinating World Values Survey shows. According to the four surveys carried out in 80 countries over the last 25 years, the USA ranks below zero on the traditional vs. secular/rational scale—far below our industrialized sister countries and at the same level as Poland. (Japan is tops here.) At the same time, America falls on the high end of the survival vs. self-expression scale, which you would expect given its level of economic development. The chart below shows this in the form of the so-called Inglehart Values Map.

Baker is saying, in other words, Americans’ fixation on meaning and purpose is pathological, a desperate, misguided, and ultimately futile attempt to bridge the gap between an almost medieval religious traditionalism and the self-expressive possibilities of modern society.

I shall have more to say about Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence in later posts, but for now I wanted to share his refreshingly hylomorphic views on reality (pp. 63-64):

All our knowledge of the world is a model…This is not to say that the people or objects aren’t really there. They are really there.

Can we trust that the world is as it seems? Yes. The world really does exist in an absolute form very close to how we perceive it. However, our brains can’t know about the absolute world directly.

Jeff is right on target. Personally, though, I wouldn’t use the phraseology “very close”, preferring instead something like “substantially well-mapped”.