By Deepak Chopra, M.D., FACP, and Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy, Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School Director, Genetics and Aging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
Like a personal computer, science needs a recycle bin for ideas that didn't work out as planned. In this bin would go commuter trains riding on frictionless rails using superconductivity, along with interferon, the last AIDS vaccine, and most genetic therapies. These failed promises have two things in common: They looked like the wave of the future but then reality proved too complex to fit the simple model that was being offered.
The next thing to go into the recycle bin might be the brain. We are living in a golden age of brain research, thanks largely to vast improvements in brain scans. Now that functional MRIs can give snapshots of the brain in real time, researchers can see specific areas of the brain light up, indicating increased activity. On the other hand, dark spots in the brain indicate minimal activity or none at all. Thus, we arrive at those familiar maps that compare a normal brain with one that has deviated from the norm. This is obviously a great boon where disease is concerned. Doctors can see precisely where epilepsy or Parkinsonism or a brain tumor has created damage, and with this knowledge new drugs and more precise surgery can target the problem.
But then overreach crept in. We are shown brain scans of repeat felons with pointers to the defective areas of their brains. The same holds for Buddhist monks, only in their case, brain activity is heightened and improved, especially in the prefrontal lobes associated with compassion. By now there is no condition, good or bad, that hasn't been linked to a brain pattern that either "proves" that there is a link between the brain and a certain behavior or exhibits the "cause" of a certain trait. The whole assumption, shared by 99 percent of neuroscientists, is that we are our brains.
In this scheme, the brain is in charge, having evolved to control certain fixed behaviors. Why do men see other men as rivals for a desirable woman? Why do people seek God? Why does snacking in front of the TV become a habit? We are flooded with articles and books reinforcing the same assumption: The brain is using you, not the other way around. Yet it's clear that a faulty premise is leading to gross overreach.
The flaws in current reasoning can be summarized with devastating force:
1. Brain activity isn't the same as thinking, feeling, or seeing.
2. No one has remotely shown how molecules acquire the qualities of the mind.
3. It is impossible to construct a theory of the mind based on material objects that somehow became conscious.
4. When the brain lights up, its activity is like a radio lighting up when music is played. It is an obvious fallacy to say that the radio composed the music. What is being viewed is only a physical correlation, not a cause.
It's a massive struggle to get neuroscientists to see these flaws. They are king of the hill right now, and so long as new discoveries are being made every day, a sense of triumph pervades the field. "Of course" we will solve everything from depression to overeating, crime to religious fanaticism, by tinkering with neurons and the kinks thrown into normal, desirable brain activity. But that's like hearing a really bad performance of "Rhapsody in Blue" and trying to turn it into a good performance by kicking the radio.
We've become excited by a flawless 2008 article published by Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California Irvine. It's called "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem," and its aim is to show, using logic, philosophy, and neuroscience, that we are not our brains. We are "conscious agents" -- Hoffman's term for minds that shape reality, including the reality of the brain. Hoffman is optimistic that the thorny problem of consciousness can be solved, and science can find a testable model for the mind. But future progress depends on researchers abandoning their current premise, that the brain is the mind. We urge you to read the article in its entirety, but for us, the good news is that Hoffman's ideas show that the tide may be turning.
It is degrading to human potential when the brain uses us instead of vice versa. There is no doubt that we can become trapped by faulty wiring in the brain -- this happens in depression, addictions, and phobias, for example. Neural circuits can seemingly take control, and there is much talk of "hard wiring" by which some activity is fixed and preset by nature, such as the fight-or-flight response. But what about people who break bad habits, kick their addictions, or overcome depression? It would be absurd to say that the brain, being stuck in faulty wiring, suddenly and spontaneously fixed the wiring. What actually happens, as anyone knows who has achieved success in these areas, is that the mind takes control. Mind shapes the brain, and when you make up your mind to do something, you return to the natural state of using your brain instead of the other way around.
It's very good news that you are not your brain, because when your mind finds its true power, the result is healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth. The brain is totally incapable of such things. After all, if it is a hard-wired machine, there is no room for sudden leaps and renewed inspiration. The machine simply does what it does. A depressed brain can no more heal itself than a car can suddenly decide to fly. Right now the golden age of brain research is brilliantly decoding neural circuitry, and thanks to neuroplasticity, we know that the brain's neural pathways can be changed. The marvels of brain activity grow more astonishing every day. Yet in our astonishment it would be a grave mistake, and a disservice to our humanity, to forget that the real glory of human existence is the mind, not the brain that serves it.
Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi are co-authors of their forthcoming book Superbrain: New Breakthroughs for Maximizing Health, Happiness and Spiritual Well-Being by Harmony Books.
For more by Deepak Chopra, click here.
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>1. Brain activity isn't the same as thinking, feeling, or seeing.
Yes it is. How can it not be? What else do you have that is responsible for thinking, feeling or seeing?
>2. No one has remotely shown how molecules acquire the qualities of the mind.
Has anyone seriously asserted that 'molecules' acquire qualities of the mind? I don't think so.
>3. It is impossible to construct a theory of the mind based on material objects that somehow became >conscious.
*Sigh* The old-as-the-hills 'argument from personal incredulity'. A convincing explanation of consciousness may be currently out of our grasp, but that doesn't mean it's 'impossible'. We'll get there, maybe sooner than we might expect.
>4. When the brain lights up, its activity is like a radio lighting up when music is played. It is an obvious >fallacy to say that the radio composed the music. What is being viewed is only a physical correlation, not >a cause.
A stupid and fundamentally flawed analogy. Where is the 'music' coming from then? Somewhere outside the brain, from a (analogous) transmitter? Agree that the metabolic activity we currently measure may well be an epiphenomenon of 'true' neural activity, but to suggest such activity arises from elsewhere is demonstrably false.
1) How do YOU know that when activity in the brain happens, that thoughts aren't being formulated?
2) How do YOU know that the brain is like a radio (and the overall analogy is accurate)?
You mentioned that a "depressed" brain cannot heal itself. The whole concept of neuroplasticity is that the brain is constantly incorporating new phenomena and physically changing - why couldn't this account for improvements? This kind of ignores the entire premise of SSRI's and why physical changes to neurotransmitter concentrations makes marked changes in mood.
Deepak also ignores the obvious connection between reported consciousness of an individual and physical interventions - interventions like trauma to the brainstem, general anesthesia, etc. If consciousness does not have a physical component, why is it incredibly easy to manipulate with physical means??
We can do a lot of tinkering with muscles. It doesn't mean that your motor activities are equal with your muscles: they come from the brain. We can cut this pathway and take control ourselves of the muscles of the patient, but that doesn't mean the activity is coming from the muscles. In fact, it is coming from new set of brains... and a new set of minds.
Glad there is someone to point out the "mind is material" stuff.
So, in short, not only is the brain completely inert matter and nothing more, the mind too is just a tool, a mirror displaying an apparent reality. While consciousness supports and enlivens the whole thing.
And there is nothing but this reflection.
So the mirror encompasses all.
And when it encompasses all,
It too disappears.
The brain as a material base mediates mind.
Mind mediates thought
And thought mediates awareness
And awareness reflects.
But the reflection is empty.
And Amriti the deathless is homeless.
It cannot be found.
It is not in one place or within time.
It remains without a home.
Many of the statements presented seem to be bald-faced assertions. If one wants to argue against a reductionism of the mental to the physical -- which I believe can be done -- it takes more than declaration.
Perhaps more space should be dedicated to such arguments.
Cordially,
Edward G. Rozycki
Given the fact that life presents every one of us with evidence to the contrary every single day, it must be an exhausting illusion to maintain, and all for the sake of being able to continue to believe that you're less than you really are.
Its possibly quite self evident that plasticity in the neurons comes from healthy habits, via food and exercise so that optimal blood flow will combine a Nature and Nurture situation in neuronal deficient areas.....to quote an old adage - A healthy mind (brain) in a healthy body and vice versa.
On what basis has be concluded that healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth happen in the mind and not the brain. To reinforce this he says the brain is incapable of this. How does he know??? Where is this mind he refers to situated. How do we nurture it and tend to it? By reading his manifold mumbo jumbo books??
It all makes perfect sense when the mind and the brain are one and the same.......
George
http://youtu.be/qySx8tSs8BQ
I see people more as vessels for a variety of meme's, ideas, emotions, cultures, ideals that surround us invisibly just beneath the level of our awareness.
The mind seems to be where the details get worked out. After we are already out to "prove" something. People seem permeable and high influence-able. It's not just a logic system but a highly dynamic network of drives and desires. Ranging from pure survival instinct to a passion for emotional clarity and enlightenment and everything in between.
To say you are just a brain seems to indicate a closed information gathering system. But you are influenced by the people you pass on the way to work, the quality of the air you breathe, how much love you have given and received. You are not your brain, but in so many ways, people are more like "brains" than ever before.
Maybe neuroscientists are brains and the rest of us are much more.
Dunno if I'll get to the end. So far I'm on page 8. Hoffman writes, "Although the actual file in the computer is a complex array of voltages and magnetic fields ...".
That's not what the file is.
This is shown by the fact that the file can be in memory (voltages and charges), saved on the hard drive (magnetic fields but no voltages), or (at least in principle) put through a 1960s punch-card machine so that it's recorded as little holes in pieces of stiff paper -- and it's the same file.
The file is an abstraction.
The various ways the file can be stored are related to the file itself, somehow-or-other. I call the relationship "instantiation": it doesn't actually fit the technical use of the word in computer programming, but I don't have a better word for it. Whatever you call it, that somehow-or-other is not the full mind-body problem, but bears a more than casual resemblance to it.
The fact that Hoffman confuses the file with its instantiation doesn't bode well for the rest of the paper.