David Perlmutter, M.D. - Neurogenesis: How to Change Your Brain

Cool post - we could all use a few new brain cells. One of the approaches mentioned here, curcumin, is now being studied for use in neuro-degenerative disorders and may prove valuable since it is a powerful anti-inflammatory.

Exercise is another powerful stimulant of new brain cells, but it seems that cardio is better than weight training, unless you keep your pace and heart-rate up to make the weight training simulate cardio (which I already do with my clients).

As an aside, SSRI antidepressants also cause neurogenesis, so while they are often not effective for depression, they have other uses.

Neurogenesis: How to Change Your Brain

David Perlmutter, M.D. - Board-Certified Neurologist and author of upcoming book, "Power Up Your Brain."

"In adult centers the nerve paths are something fixed, ended, immutable. Everything may die, nothing may be regenerated."
-- Santiago Ramon Y Cajal, "Degeneration and Regeneration in the Nervous System," 1928

This long-held tenet, first proposed by Professor Cajal, held that brain neurons were unique because they lacked the ability to regenerate.

In 1998, the journal Nature Medicine published a report indicating that neurogenesis, the growth of new brain cells, does indeed occur in humans. As Sharon Begley remarked in her book, "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," "The discovery overturned generations of conventional wisdom in neuroscience. The human brain is not limited to the neurons it is born with, or even the neurons that fill in after the explosion of brain development in early childhood."

What the researchers discovered was that within each of our brains there exists a population of neural stem cells which are continually replenished and can differentiate into brain neurons. Simply stated, we are all experiencing brain stem cell therapy every moment of our lives.

As one might expect, the process of neurogenesis is controlled by our DNA. A specific gene codes for the production of a protein, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which plays a key role in creating new neurons. Studies reveal decreased BDNF in Alzheimer's patients, as well as in a variety of neurological conditions including epilepsy, depression, schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Fortunately, many of the factors that influence our DNA to produce BDNF factors are under our direct control. The gene that turns on BDNF is activated by a variety of factors including physical exercise, caloric restriction, curcumin and the omega-3 fat, DHA.

This is a powerful message. These factors are all within our grasp and represent choices we can make to turn on the gene for neurogenesis. Thus, we can treat ourselves to stem cell therapy by taking control of our gene expression.

Physical Exercise
Laboratory rats that exercise have been shown to produce far more BDNF in their brains compared to sedentary animals. And there is a direct relationship between elevation of BDNF levels in these animals and their ability to learn, as one might expect.

With this understanding of the relationship of BDNF to exercise, researchers in a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, entitled "Effect of Physical Activity in Cognitive Function in Older Adults at Risk for Alzheimer's Disease," found that elderly individuals engaged in regular physical exercise for a 24-week period had an improvement of an astounding 1,800 percent on measures of memory, language ability, attention and other important cognitive functions compared to an age-matched group not involved in the exercise program.

The mechanism by which exercise enhances brain performance is described in these and other studies as sitting squarely with increased production of BDNF. Just by engaging in regular physical exercise, you open the door to the possibility of actively taking control of your mental destiny.

Caloric Restriction
In January, 2009, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science published a study entitled "Caloric Restriction Improves Memory in Elderly Humans." In this study, German researchers imposed a 30 percent calorie reduction on the diets of elderly individuals and compared their memory function with a similar age group who basically ate whatever they wanted. At the conclusion of the three-month study, those who ate without restriction experienced a small, but clearly defined decline in memory function, while memory function in the group consuming the calorie-reduced diet actually increased, and fairly profoundly. In recognition of the obvious limitations of current pharmaceutical approaches to brain health, the authors concluded, "The present findings may help to develop new prevention and treatment strategies for maintaining cognitive health into old age." What a concept. Preventive medicine for the brain.

Curcumin
Because curcumin, the main active ingredient in the spice turmeric, increases BDNF, it has attracted the interest of neuroscientists around the world. Interestingly, in evaluating villages in India where turmeric is used in abundance in curried recipes, epidemiological studies have found that Alzheimer's disease is only about 25 percent as common as in the U.S. There is little doubt that the positive effects of enhanced BDNF production on brain neurons is at least part of the reason why those consuming curcumin are so resistant to this brain disorder.

DHA
Like curcumin, DHA enhances gene expression for the production of BDNF. In a recently completed double-blind interventional trial, 485 healthy older individuals (average age 70 years) with mild memory problems were given a supplement containing DHA from marine algae or placebo for six months. Lead researcher of the study, Dr. Karin Yurko-Mauro, commented, "In our study, healthy people with memory complaints who took algal DHA capsules for six months had almost double the reduction in errors on a test that measures learning and memory performance versus those who took a placebo ... The benefit is roughly equivalent to having the learning and memory skills of someone three years younger."

Harnessing the expression of our DNA is empowering, and the tools to better brain health are available to us all -- right now!

Sources:

Results of the MIDAS trial: Effects of docosahexaenoic acid on physiological and safety parameters in age-related cognitive decline. Karin Yurko-Mauro, Deanna McCarthy, Eileen Bailey-Hall, Edward B. Nelson, Andrew Blackwell, MIDAS Investigators

Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, July 2009 (Vol. 5, Issue 4, Supplement, Page P84).

David Perlmutter, MD, FACN, ABIHM is a Board-Certified Neurologist and Fellow of the American College of Nutrition who received his M.D. degree from the University of Miami School of Medicine where he was awarded the Leonard G. Rowntree Research Award. After completing residency training in Neurology, also at the University of Miami, Dr. Perlmutter entered private practice in Naples, Florida.

Tags: David Perlmutter, Neurogenesis, How to Change Your Brain, DHA, exercise, curcumin, Caloric Restriction, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, brain, Health, Psychology, nutrition, exercise, Huffington Post, neuroscience, brain cells, stem cells, hippocampus

Peter Greenaway - New Possibilities: Cinema is Dead Long Live Cinema

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway looks at cinema language, and his contention that cinema is dead or evolving. He shows many examples from his own avantgarde cinematographic imagery. Series: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities [11/2010]

Greenaway is one of my favorite directors, so this is a huge treat. If you have never seen his films, here are a few of my personal choices (for first timers, I recommend starting with The Pillow Book - it is maybe the most "normal" of his films that I have seen - Prospero's Books, based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, is awesome, as is Drowning by Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover):

• Drowning by Numbers (1988, 118 min)
• The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989, 124 min)
• Prospero's Books (1991, 129 min)
• The Pillow Book (1996, 126 min)
• 8½ Women (1999, 118 min)

Tags: UCTV, Filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, cinema language, cinema is dead, cinema is evolving, avantgarde, cinematographic imagery, film, creativity, cinema, Art, Drowning by Numbers, The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero's Books, The Pillow Book, 8½ Women

TEDxChCh - John Marshall Roberts - The Global Urgency of Everyday Empathy

An excellent TEDx Talk from John Marshall Roberts on the need for empathy as a necessity of human survival. His most recent book is Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries.

In this talk, John Marshall Roberts makes the case for empathy, drawing on history, humility, and a hearty dose of humor.

John Marshall Roberts is a bestselling author, social scientist, and CEO of Worldview Learning. He has crafted his career around converting corporations and communicating with cynics. Through strategic communications and values-based messaging, John helps leaders develop the empathy skills required to inspire common vision for causes that matter. His recent book Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries draws on his knowledge of systems theory and developmental psychology to enable socially conscious marketers, business leaders, and activists to win over objectors and inspire radical collaboration.

About TEDx, x = independently organized event

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized. (Subject to certain rules and regulations.)

Tags: TEDxChCh, John Marshall Roberts, The Global Urgency of Everyday Empathy, TED Talks, Igniting Inspiration, A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries, Worldview Learning, Psychology, culture, empathy, community

Authors@Google: Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers on Collaborative Consumption

Another excellent presentation from Google's author series.

What is Collaborative Consumption? And who is doing it? Collaborative Consumption is the organized sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping through online and real-world communities. From social lending (Zopa) to car sharing (Zipcar) and co-working (HubCulture), from peer-to-peer rental (Zilok) to collaborative travel (Air BnB) and neighborhood sharing schemes (WeCommune)... people are already using the principles and dynamics of Collaborative Consumption—without even knowing it. Along the way, they are getting the same fulfillment and benefits of actual ownership while saving money and lowering their environmental impact. Today, more and more consumers are opting for access over ownership, and use over possession.

The philosophy behind this idea is not new—carpooling, staying with friends and relatives when traveling, checking a book out from library—are age-old examples of Collaborative Consumption. But today, propelled by web-enabled technologies and economic and environmental imperatives, a surge is taking place with new sharing models and business opportunities emerging every day. The authors explore this phenomenon with numerous examples, and by dividing companies and organizations into three systems (see a detailed list on the following page and on their site):

Producer service systems:

* Pay for the benefit of using a product without needing to own the product outright. Disrupting traditional industries based on models of individual private ownership (examples include Zipcar and Netflix)

Redistribution markets:

* Redistribute used or pre-owned goods from where they are not needed to somewhere or someone where they are. (examples include Craigslist, eBay, and SwapStyle)

Collaborative lifestyles:

* It's not just physical goods that can be shared, swapped, and bartered. People with similar interests are banding together to share and exchange less tangible assets such as time, space, skills, and money. (examples include: Coachsurfing, Urban Garden Share, and LendClub)

Rachel Botsman writes, consults, and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing, and on how it can transform the way we live. She received her BFA (Honors) from the University of Oxford, and undertook her postgraduate studies at Harvard University. She has consulted to businesses around the world on brand and innovation strategy. As a former director at the William J. Clinton Foundation, she spearheaded major public-private partnerships with Nickelodeon, Rachael Ray, and the NBA.

Roo Rogers is a serial entrepreneur with five successful startups currently in the marketplace. He is currently the director of Redscout Ventures. He has a combination of operational and venture capital expertise and works across multiple consumer sectors, including media, transportation, and beverages. Roo has a BA from Columbia College and a Masters in Economics from University College London. Roo sits on the board of two nonprofits: Médecins du Monde UK and The Bronx Community Charter School. He currently resides in New York City.

Tags: Authors@Google, Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers, Collaborative Consumption, collaboration, consumers, conscious consumption, society, culture, Redistribution markets, collaborative lifestyles

Language Shapes Our Reality

Does language shape reality, or does reality determine language? Four new articles on four different sites suggest that how we experience the world is determined by the language we speak and with which we think.

I'm offering just a bit of each article -please follow the title link to see the whole article.

Lost in Translation

New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish

By LERA BORODITSKY

The Gallery Collection/Corbis: 'The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?

Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

* * * * *

Lost in Translation

We don’t shape language, language shapes us

by Joan O’C. Hamilton, from Stanford - September-October 2010

Image Gallery

Linzie Hunter / www.linziehunter.co.uk

Lera Boroditsky’s journey to answer one of psychology’s most intriguing and fractious questions has been a curious one. She’s spent hours showing Spanish speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking, and paper ripping. She’s scoured campuses for Russian speakers willing to spend an hour sorting shades of blue. She’s even traipsed to a remote aboriginal village in Australia where small children shook their heads at what they considered her pitiable sense of direction and took her hand to show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile. Yet she needs little more than a teacup on her office coffee table to explain the essence of her research.

“In English,” she says, moving her hand toward the cup, “if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, ‘She broke the cup.’ ” In Japanese or Spanish, however, intent matters, she explains.

If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. But if the act were an accident, Boroditsky says, a smile dancing across her lips as she translates from Spanish, the speaker would essentially say, “The cup broke itself.”

The question is: Does the fact that one language tends to play the blame game while the other does not mean that speakers of those languages think differently about what happened?

* * * * *

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

By GUY DEUTSCHER

Published: August 26, 2010

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

* * * * *

This article is presented whole since it is essentially a press release:

Language appears to shape our implicit preferences

Study of bilinguals hints language may help create, not just convey, thoughts and feelings

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 3, 2010 -- The language we speak may influence not only our thoughts, but our implicit preferences as well. That's the finding of a study by psychologists at Harvard University, who found that bilingual individuals' opinions of different ethnic groups were affected by the language in which they took a test examining their biases and predilections.

The paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to possess another soul," says co-author Oludamini Ogunnaike, a graduate student at Harvard. "This study suggests that language is much more than a medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well."

Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations people may be unaware they possess, have been shown to predict behavior towards members of social groups. Recent research has shown that these attitudes are quite malleable, susceptible to factors such as the weather, popular culture -- or, now, by the language people speak.

"Can we shift something as fundamental as what we like and dislike by changing the language in which our preferences are elicited?" asks co-author Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. "If the answer is yes, that gives more support to the idea that language is an important shaper of attitudes."

Ogunnaike, Banaji, and Yarrow Dunham, now at the University of California, Merced, used the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT), where participants rapidly categorize words that flash on a computer screen or are played through headphones. The test gives participants only a fraction of a second to categorize words, not enough to think about their answers.

"The IAT bypasses a large part of conscious cognition and taps into something we're not aware of and can't easily control," Banaji says.

The researchers administered the IAT in two different settings: once in Morocco, with bilinguals in Arabic and French, and again in the U.S. with Latinos who speak both English and Spanish.

In Morocco, participants who took the IAT in Arabic showed greater preference for other Moroccans. When they took the test in French, that difference disappeared. Similarly, in the U.S., participants who took the test in Spanish showed a greater preference for other Hispanics. But again, in English, that preference disappeared.

"It was quite shocking to see that a person could take the same test, within a brief period of time, and show such different results," Ogunnaike says. "It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different answer."

In the Moroccan test, participants saw "Moroccan" names (such as Hassan or Fatimah) or "French" names (such as Jean or Marie) flash on a monitor, along with words that are "good" (such as happy or nice) or "bad" (such as hate or mean). Participants might press one key when they see a Moroccan name or a good word, and press another when they see a French name or a bad word. Then the key assignments are switched so that "Moroccan" and "bad" share the same key and "French" and "good" share the other.

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first posited in the 1930s that language is so powerful that it can determine thought. Mainstream psychology has taken the more skeptical view that while language may affect thought processes, it doesn't influence thought itself. This new study suggests that Whorf's idea, when not caricatured, may generate interesting hypotheses that researchers can continue to test.

"These results challenge our views of attitudes as stable," Banaji says. "There still remain big questions about just how fixed or flexible they are, and language may provide a window through which we will learn about their nature."

###

Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji's work was supported by Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Mellon Mays Foundation.

Tags: Psychology, brain, language, perspectives, bilingual, preferences, thought, mind, consciousness, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Roman Jakobson, Lera Boroditsky, Joan O’C. Hamilton, Lost in Translation

NPR - The Evolving Minds Of Humans (Antonio Damasio)

NPR Science Friday spoke with Antonio Damasio about his new book, Self Comes To Mind: Constructing the Conscious Mind, which I am about to order - I have been awaiting this since I saw him last spring at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.

No transcript until tomorrow most likely.

The Evolving Minds Of Humans

November 12, 2010

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Talk of the Nation

[21 min 47 sec]

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November 12, 2010

Why do humans have consciousness? In his new book, Self Comes To Mind, neurologist Antonio Damasio argues that consciousness gave humans an evolutionary advantage. Damasio describes the differences between self and mind, and traces the evolutionary path of the human brain.

Tags: Psychology, brain, consciousness, evolution, Self, NPR, Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, Ira Flatow, Self Comes To Mind, neurology, neuroscience, Antonio Damasio, books, mind, Constructing the Conscious Mind

Shrink Rap Radio - #251 – Mindfulness and psychotherapy with Patrick Thornton

Cool podcast - mindfulness is all the rage in the psychology and psychotherapy worlds these days. Interesting to see how someone who was an evangelical Christian came to a Buddhist form of mindfulness practice and psychotherapy.

Shrink Rap Radio #251 – Mindfulness and psychotherapy with Patrick Thornton

In 1975, Patrick Thornton, PhD, who had been an evangelical clergy at the time, left the church because, as he often will say—quoting the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah— “the bed [was] too short to stretch out on, and the covering so narrow that [he could not] wrap himself in it.” He applies this quote to the doctrine and dogma of the church.

Having left the church, Patrick still had a longing for spiritual direction and practice. Through the writings of Thomas Merton, especially his biography, The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton, and The Zen And The Birds of Paradise, and the writings of another Catholic priest, William Johnston—The Mysticism of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing, Christian Zen, and Mirror Mind: Spirituality and Transformation)—Patrick developed a deep interest in contemplative practice.

From that influence, he wanted to learn about contemplative practice through direct experience. Finding a flyer advertizing a beginning class in Insight Meditation in the early ’80s, he took the 6-week course, and came home to the practice. In ‘91, Patrick attended a 28-day silent residential retreat with Zen Master Thich Nhât Hânh at Plum Village, France, where he received ordination and was given the dharma name, Chân Bî Hânh (“True Compassionate Practice,” or literally, “To Suffer Compassion”).

In ’92, Patrick met Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living and Where Ever You Go There You Are), and with Sylvia Boorstein, a founding teacher with Spirit Rock Meditation Center, taught his first Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program for physicians. Since then, Patrick has taught Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Cognitive Therapy for thousands of patients, and medical and mental health provider, at medical centers and residential retreats on the West Coast and in the Heartlands.

During this period, he has also served as a direct provider and executive director with community and hospital based hospice programs, and as clinical director for the San Francisco Cancer Support Center. He has also been a conference presenter on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy with such programs as Aging, Spirituality and Death at St. Mary’s in San Francisco, the Redwood Psychology Association in Santa Rosa, the VA Post-Doctoral Conference in Palo Alto, and most recently, the American Psychotherapy Association in Orlando, Fl. Over the years, he has had a keen interest in the intersection of Spirituality, Psychology and Neurology.

Patrick has a private practice in Santa Rosa, CA.

A psychology podcast by David Van Nuys, Ph.D.

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Posted on November 11, 2010

Tags: Psychology, meditation, contemplation, therapy, David Van Nuys, Patrick Thornton, Shrink Rap Radio, Mindfulness, psychotherapy, Buddhism, spirituality, contemplative practice, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

Discussing concepts of social medicine relevant to the research fields of psychosomatic medicine

This is an interesting editorial/review article from the open source journal, BioPsychoSocial Medicine - here the authors look at the relative absence of social in the biopsychosocial approach, and proposes some avenues for exploration. This is model is the closest thing we currently have to an integral medical model that is widespread and in use.

Bio-psycho-social medicine is a comprehensive form of medicine bridging clinical medicine and public health

Mutsuhiro Nakao

BioPsychoSocial Medicine 2010, 4:19doi:10.1186/1751-0759-4-19

Published:	5 November 2010

Abstract (provisional)

The journal, BioPsychoSocial Medicine, was launched in January 2007, and more than three and a half years have passed since the start of publication. A total of 70 articles have been published, as of August 2010, but the number of those directly discussing issues of public health or social medicine is relatively small. Psychosomatic medicine, or biopsychosocial medicine, encompasses all aspects of the interrelationships between the biological, psychological, social, and behavioral factors of health and illness, and is not limited to mind and body connections in humans. Thus, it is meaningful that social aspects of health and illness are discussed in the current issue of this journal. The purpose of this special series is to introduce important concepts of social medicine relevant to the research fields of psychosomatic medicine.

The complete article is available as a provisional PDF. The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production.

Tags: concepts of social medicine, research fields, psychosomatic medicine, Health, BioPsychoSocial, medicine, society, BioPsychoSocial Medicine, editorial, biological, psychological, social, behavioral, factors of health and illness

Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsense

This was posted at The Philosopher's Magazine recently - I suspect that Hacker's perspective is more common than one might guess in looking at all the research being done in the realm of neuroscience.

Hacker’s challenge

Written by: James Garvey | Appears in: Issue 51

Posted by: TPM ⋅ October 25, 2010 ⋅

Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsense

Peter Hacker

So long as people read Wittgenstein, people will read Peter Hacker. It’s hard to imagine how his work on the monumental Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations could possibly be superseded. He spent nearly twenty years on that project (ten of them in cooperation with his friend and colleague Gordon Baker), following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps, and producing a large number of important articles and books on topics in the philosophy of mind and language along the way. Nearer the end than the beginning of a distinguished career as an Oxford don, at a time of life when most academics would be happy to leave the lectern behind and collapse somewhere with a nice glass of wine, Hacker is in the middle of another huge project, this time on human nature. He also seems keen to pick a fight with almost anyone doing the philosophy of mind.

This has a much to do with his view of philosophy as a contribution to human understanding, not knowledge. One might think that philosophy has the same general aim as science – securing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in – even if its subject matter is more abstract and its methods more armchair. What is philosophy if not an attempt to secure new knowledge about the mind or events or beauty or right conduct or what have you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely.

“Philosophy does not contribute to our knowledge of the world we live in after the manner of any of the natural sciences. You can ask any scientist to show you the achievements of science over the past millennium, and they have much to show: libraries full of well-established facts and well-confirmed theories. If you ask a philosopher to produce a handbook of well-established and unchallengeable philosophical truths, there’s nothing to show. I think that is because philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality.”

His account of the nature of philosophy is Wittgensteinian through and through. It’s a conception of philosophy which regards philosophical problems as confusions in language rather than deep mysteries encountered in the world. The job of the philosopher is to make these conceptual errors clear to us and in so doing help us out of our muddles. Philosophical questions aren’t solved; they’re dissolved. There is knowledge here, in a sense, but it’s not the sort of knowledge most philosophers think they are pursuing.

“By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing. The world doesn’t have scaffolding. Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.”

Because he thinks of philosophy is a quest for understanding, on Hacker’s view it can’t be transmitted from generation to generation as knowledge can. Each generation has to earn insight, has to face its own obstacles and work out an understanding for itself. This strikes a chord. I wonder about the present generation and what Hacker thinks might get in the way of our understanding.

“The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong. It goes hand in hand with the thought that philosophy is in the same business as science, as either a handmaiden or as the vanguard of science. This prevailing scientism is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience. The associated misconceptions have started to filter down into the ordinary discourse of educated people. You just have to listen to the BBC to hear people nattering on about their brains and what their brains do or don’t do, what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.”

In the last decade Hacker has turned his attention from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind, dealing with what he sees as a whole raft of conceptual confusions in cognitive neuroscience. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which he co-authored with the neurophysiologist M. R. Bennett, works through a number of tangles in detail. As we talk about some of them, I begin to see that there is a straight line from his Wittgensteinian thoughts about the nature of philosophy to his work on the mind.

“It has often struck me as ironical that Wittgenstein is criticised for being a quietist. It is true that he said philosophy leaves everything as it is. This has wrongly been interpreted as meaning that according to Wittgenstein philosophy is impotent – that it is powerless to affect anything at all. This is a gross misinterpretation of what he wrote. It also seems to me the exact opposite of the truth. What Wittgenstein says should be left alone is the grammar of our language. It’s not our business to devise better grammars. Our business is to tidy up linguistic or conceptual confusions rooted, among other places, in existing grammar. What we can do is clarify and disentangle conceptual confusions in the sciences. Of course, that’s what I tried to do with Max Bennett in the neuroscience book. I wish more people were engaged in this kind of enterprise. There are far too many philosophers who take their task to be to sing the Hallelujah Chorus to the sciences. It seems to me we should be serious, and one hopes helpful, conceptual critics of the sciences.”

One of his larger criticisms of contemporary neuroscience concerns the way it characterises the activities of the brain. Dualists about the mind and brain – those who hold that there are thinking substances like souls in the world as well as all the ordinary physical stuff – say that the mind sees and thinks and wants and calculates. Contemporary neuroscience dismisses this as crude, but Hacker argues that it just ends up swapping the mind with the brain, saying that the brain sees and thinks and wants and calculates. He says, “Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems. On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations.”

But don’t we talk this way, harmlessly, all the time? When we say that our computer wants to install an update, that it does not recognise the printer, we’ve adopted what Daniel Dennett calls “the intentional stance”. We explain and predict what the computer might do as though it were a rational agent with desires and intentions. We can skip the unnecessary details of hardware and software, quickly work out that we need to install a driver, and get on with our lives. In speaking like this no one thinks a computer really, literally wants to do anything. Maybe neuroscientists don’t actually think that some region of the brain really remembers or thinks or fears. It’s just a useful fiction. It enables us to get on with the work. Where’s the harm in that?

“If that were all it was, it would be perfectly harmless, but I don’t think that is all the neuroscientists and cognitive scientists who say this are asserting. The fact is that if you look from one domain of cognitive neuroscience to another you will find that the operations of the brain thus conceived are being advanced as explanations for human behaviour, for our thinking, believing, seeing, hoping and fearing. That’s wrong, because it’s no explanation. If someone wants to know why poor old Snodgrass, as the result of some lesion, can’t do something that normal people can do, and you say that his brain can’t do it, you haven’t advanced any explanation at all. One cannot explain why someone cannot see by saying that his brain cannot see. One cannot explain why someone behaves in a certain way by suggesting that his brain tells him to. Cognitive defects can indeed sometimes be explained by reference to damage to the brain – but not by reference to cognitive deficiencies of the brain, since the brain has no cognitive powers at all. There is no such thing as a brain’s thinking, wanting, reasoning, believing or hypothesizing.”

The thought that philosophers of mind and cognitive neuroscientists are talking sheer nonsense recurs several times in Hacker’s treatment of their conception of consciousness. I want to pin him down on the expression “what it’s like”, because he might be on to something. The phrase appeared in Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What is it Like to be a Bat?”, and the words are invoked almost everywhere in philosophy of mind, even by scientists with philosophical ambition. Nagel puts his point succinctly: “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism”. When many philosophers and neuroscientists try to say what consciousness is or capture what it is about consciousness that gives them trouble, they talk about how experiences feel, about what it’s like for the subject. Hacker thinks it’s all a muddle. In fact, he says, there’s nothing it’s like to be you. As I line up a question by paraphrasing his reasons for saying this, I leave too much out, and he corrects my omission generously with an image owed to Wittgenstein.

“Those are some of the reasons. Any decent philosophical problem is held in place not by one mistake or confusion but by a whole range. Wittgenstein has a wonderful metaphor: if you shine strong light on one side of a problem, it casts long shadows on the other. Every deep philosophical confusion is held in place by numerous struts, and one cannot demolish the confusion merely by knocking one strut away. One has to circle around the problem again and again to illuminate all the misconceptions that hold it in place.” We consider several of the struts in question, including the ones I missed out.

“You can ask any human being having an experience ‘What was it like for you to have that experience?’ Most commonly the answer is: ‘Nothing in particular.’ What was it like to see the lamp post? What was it like to see your shoes?’ – ‘The experience was quite indifferent!’ Sometimes the answer would be, ‘It was wonderful, marvellous, joyful, jolly good or revolting, disgusting, awful’–and so on. If you want to generalise over that, engage as Nagel does in second-level quantification, the result is not ‘There is something which it is like to experience such and such’, but ‘There is something which it is to experience such and such, namely wonderful, awful, exciting, boring’. Why? Because the answer to ‘What was it like for you to do it?’ isn’t ‘It was like wonderful’ – unless we’re in California – but rather ‘It was wonderful’. So it is a plain confusion to think that for any given experience of a conscious creature, there is something that it is like for the creature to have that experience. Sometimes there is something that it is to experience this-or-that – most of the time there isn’t. That’s one pair of mistakes.”

“Another kind of mistake is a systematic confusion between the qualities of an experience and the qualities of the objects of an experience. The question ‘What was it like for you to love Daisey?’ can be given an answer by specifying the hedonic character of the experience of being in love with her. It may have been wonderful, or heart-breaking. The question ‘What is it like to see something red?’ has no such answer. Seeing a red button, for example, is neither wonderful nor heart-breaking, neither exciting nor boring – it simply lacks any hedonic quality. But philosophers in the so-called consciousness studies community are prone to try to characterise the experience by reference to the qualities of the objects of the experience – as if the ‘redness of red’ were a quality of the experience of seeing a red thing.” He growls: “The redness of the red! That’s not what it’s like for you to see red. That’s what you see! What’s it like to see red? For the most part, nothing at all. Maybe seeing that wonderful red sparkle of that fantastic flower was intoxicating. Well then, it was intoxicating to see it. What you saw was the colour. It was the experience that was intoxicating. People confuse the object of experience with the positive or negative hedonic quality of the experience.”

The final confusion he identifies concerns the suggestion that what is unique to conscious beings is that there is something that it is like for them to be the beings that they are. Philosophers say, for example, that there is not anything that it is like for an ink-jet printer to be an ink-jet printer, nothing it is like for a brick to be a brick. However, there does seem to be something it is like for a bat to be a bat. There is something it is like for us to be humans. There is something it is like for you to be you, and for me to be me. There seems to be a meaningful distinction here between conscious things and everything else. For perhaps most philosophers of mind, this “what it is like” is the core of the mystery of consciousness.

Hacker argues that this is a muddle. He says that questions about what it’s like to be a something require contrast classes. “You can ask what it is like for an X to be a Y, but not what it is like for an X to be an X. If the question takes the form ‘What is it like for a human being to be a human being? – that amounts to no more than ‘What is it like to be a human being?’ This question has lost the ‘for someone’. It means no more than “What is human life like?” – and that has a pretty easy, if rather vague, answer. What’s it like for a bat to be a bat? Since bats can’t be anything other than bats, all that means is ‘What is the life of a bat like?’ Any decent zoologist can no doubt tell you in considerable detail what bats do, what they enjoy, and what frightens them. That’s what the life of a bat is like. There’s nothing mysterious here.”

“It looks mysterious because it’s modelled on ‘what’s it like for an X to be a Y?’”. He goes into character for a moment: “Daddy, what was it like for you to be a soldier in The Second World War? All sorts of stories follow. Daddy, what’s it like for you to be a human being? What on Earth is this question? The question is illegitimate. It’s stepped over the bounds of sense. The requirement is that there be a difference between the X and the Y. What’s it like for a woman to be a surgeon? Perfectly decent question. What’s it like for a woman to be a woman?”

He’s warmed to his subject, but now he trails off, his hands open, and he quietly leans back in his chair. I think he has chosen to pass over this enormous part of contemporary philosophy of mind in silence. I do take the point. If “what it’s like for an X” expressions need contrasts in order to make sense, and Nagel has left that bit unspecified, then Nagel’s version is nonsense. As a result we have an expression that looks sensible, but when we try to use it or answer questions based on it, we find that we can’t. The thought is that there is something it’s like for a bat to be a bat, but I can’t say what it is. There’s a bit of the world which has to exist – there must be something it’s like for a bat to be a bat – but I can’t describe it. Worse, I can’t describe it even if I have all the physical facts about a bat at my disposal. Is there something non-physical I don’t know? Is dualism true? The mystery closes in from every side.

Go read the whole article.

Tags: brain, mind, consciousness, Philosophy, The Philosopher's Magazine, Peter Hacker, James Garvey, neuroscientists, talking nonsense, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, human nature, cognitive science

Research Articles Link Dump - 11/11/2010

Here is another clear of the tabs - a whole series of articles from Science Codex that I think are interesting, but haven't had a chance to share yet. Enjoy - and follow the title links to read the whole article.

Dangerous PFCA chemicals in food wrappers likely migrating to humans

Posted On: November 8, 2010

University of Toronto scientists have found that chemicals used to line junk food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags are migrating into food and being ingested by people where they are contributing to chemical contamination observed in blood.

Perfluorinated carboxylic acids or PFCAs are the breakdown products of chemicals used to make non-stick and water- and stain-repellant products ranging from kitchen pans to clothing to food packaging. PFCAs, the best known of which is perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), are found in humans all around the world.

"We suspected that a major source of human PFCA exposure may be the consumption and metabolism of polyfluoroalkyl phosphate esters or PAPs," says Jessica D'eon, a graduate student in the University of Toronto's Department of Chemistry. "PAPs are applied as greaseproofing agents to paper food contact packaging such as fast food wrappers and microwave popcorn bags."

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Differences in human and Neanderthal brains set in just after birth

Posted On: November 8, 2010

The brains of newborn humans and Neanderthals are about the same size and appear rather similar overall. It's mainly after birth, and specifically in the first year of life, that the differences between our brains and those of our extinct relatives really take shape, according to a report published in the Nov. 9 issue of Current Biology.

The findings are based on comparisons of virtual imprints of the developing brain and surrounding structures (known as endocasts) derived from the skulls of modern and fossilized humans, including that of a newborn Neanderthal.

Philipp Gunz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explained that the differences researchers observe in early brain development likely reflect changes in the underlying brain circuitry. It is that internal organization of the brain that matters most for cognitive ability.

"In modern humans, the connections between diverse brain regions that are established in the first years of life are important for higher-order social, emotional, and communication functions," Gunz said. "It is therefore unlikely that Neanderthals saw the world as we do."

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Study: Tai Chi relieves arthritis pain, improves reach, balance, well-being

Posted On: November 7, 2010

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – In the largest study to date of the Arthritis Foundation's Tai Chi program, participants showed improvement in pain, fatigue, stiffness and sense of well-being.

Their ability to reach while maintaining balance also improved, said Leigh Callahan, PhD, the study's lead author, associate professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a member of UNC's Thurston Arthritis Research Center.

"Our study shows that there are significant benefits of the Tai Chi course for individuals with all types of arthritis, including fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis," Callahan said. "We found this in both rural and urban settings across a southeastern state and a northeastern state."

Callahan will present these results on Monday, Nov. 8, at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Rheumatology in Atlanta.

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Play with your kid, for their mental health's sake

Posted On: November 8, 2010

Learning a hobby or other complex task in childhood with assistance from a trusted adult may help guard against the emergence of a personality disorder (PD) later on in life, reports a study in the current issue of the journal, Development and Psychopathology.

Spending time with a child by reading with them, helping with homework or teaching them organizational skills helps to foster better psychological health in adulthood.

"The strong interpersonal connectedness and social skills that children learn from having active, healthy engagements with adults fosters positive psychological development," said lead study author Mark F. Lenzenweger, a distinguished professor of clinical science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. "With it, a child develops his or her affiliation system – their connection to the world of people. Without it, the way a child connects with other human beings can be severely impaired. And as I found out, it is this impairment that predicts the appearance of schizoid personality disorder symptoms in emerging adulthood and beyond."

Lenzenweger says that the real importance of his findings is that it underscores the value of actively engaging a child during their formative years – which is particularly relevant in this age of day care, TV, videos, and web-based virtual reality games.

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This one is huge - to be able to reduce the risk on Type-I Diabetes onset is a tremendous step forward, and further proof that epigenetics may be more powerful than genetics.

Dietary intervention can prevent the disease process leading to Type 1 diabetes

Posted On: November 10, 2010

A Finnish study confirms the hypothesis that infant feeding plays a role in the initiation of the disease process leading to type 1 diabetes in children carrying increased genetic disease risk.

The study population comprised 230 newborn infants with at least one family member affected by type 1 diabetes and a predisposing genotype based on screening cord blood at birth. The participants were randomized into two groups; the infants in the intervention group were weaned to a highly hydrolyzed casein-based formula (Nutramigen, Mead Johnson Nutrition), while those in the control group were weaned to a regular cow's milk-based formula supplemented with 20% Nutramigen to make the two formulas comparable in terms of smell and taste. The intention was that the participants should be exposed to their study formula for at least 2 months by the age of 6 months, or if exclusively breast-fed up to that age by the age of 8 months.

The study participants were observed up to the age of 10 years for the appearance of diabetes-predictive autoantibodies and progression to type 1 diabetes. Twenty-five children (12%) developed at least two diabetes-predictive autoantibodies out of the five tested for, which marks a high risk of presenting with clinical diabetes. Seventeen children tested positive for two or more autoantibodies had been randomized to the control group (16%), whereas seven belonged to the intervention (casein hydrolysate) group (7%). Nine children (8%) in the control group presented with clinical diabetes by the age of 10 years, while four of those (4%) who had been exposed to the casein hydrolysate progressed to clinical disease

Professor Mikael Knip of the Hospital for Children and Adolescents, and University of Helsinki, who has been responsible for the analyses of diabetes-predictive autoantibodies states: "The study showed that the safe and simple dietary intervention applied in this pilot trial was capable of reducing the emergence of diabetes-predictive autoantibodies by about 50% by age 10 in the participants carrying increased disease risk. The current study population does not provide sufficient statistical power to definitely conclude whether an intervention of this type will reduce the frequency of clinical type 1 diabetes, although the preliminary data are promising."

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Yoga's ability to improve mood and lessen anxiety is linked to increased levels of a critical brain chemical

Posted On: November 11, 2010

New Rochelle, NY, November 11, 2010—Yoga has a greater positive effect on a person's mood and anxiety level than walking and other forms of exercise, which may be due to higher levels of the brain chemical GABA according to an article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online.

Yoga has been shown to increase the level of gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a chemical in the brain that helps to regulate nerve activity. GABA activity is reduced in people with mood and anxiety disorders, and drugs that increase GABA activity are commonly prescribed to improve mood and decrease anxiety.

Tying all of these observations together, the study by Chris Streeter, MD, from Boston University School of Medicine (Massachusetts) and colleagues demonstrates that increased GABA levels measured after a session of yoga postures are associated with improved mood and decreased anxiety. Their findings establish a new link between yoga, higher levels of GABA in the thalamus, and improvements in mood and anxiety based on psychological assessments. The authors suggest that the practice of yoga stimulates specific brain areas, thereby giving rise to changes in endogenous antidepressant neurotransmitters such as GABA.

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Study finds the mind is a frequent, but not happy, wanderer

Posted On: November 11, 2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.

Tags: Science, Health, nutrition, tai chi, yoga, mind, Psychology, anxiety, GABA, brain, type-1 diabetes, epigenetics, children, play, mental health, arthritis, balance, well-being, neanderthal, PFCA, xenoestrogens

Columbia University Press Blog - An Interview with B. Alan Wallace

Cool - and thanks to the press for sending me a heads up that they had posted this. Here is a little taste of the interview, with is posted in support of this new book, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, due out in the fall of next year.

November 9th, 2010 at 7:34 am

An Interview with B. Alan Wallace

The following is an interview with B. Alan Wallace, author of Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice coming out Fall 2011.

In this interview Wallace reflects on some of the major ideas and themes that have informed his work. And for the time being, you can read some of his other works Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, and Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground.

Question: How does Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic differ from your previous books?

B. Alan Wallace: In this new book I synthesize many of the themes addressed in my earlier works, but I also focus more clearly on specific issues such as areas of confrontation and collaboration between Buddhism and science, the role of semantic information and meaning in the natural world, human nature, the question of free will, a Buddhist model of mental health, Buddhist methods of attentional training and contemplative inquiry, and the role of skepticism in Buddhism and how it may help break down ideological barriers that currently inhibit the scientific imagination. All too often, skepticism is applied only to others’ beliefs, but a central theme of Buddhism is that it is our own false beliefs and assumptions that lie at the root of our own unrest and discontent. So the primary focus of our skepticism should be inwardly directed, rather than aimed at other’s beliefs. My own encounter with Buddhism and science has helped me enormously in this regard, and I hope this book will likewise be of service to others in their open-minded pursuit of greater understanding.

Q: How did your background in science inform your experiences as a Buddhist monk?

BAW: My background in science traces back to my education when I was 13 years old and was deeply inspired by a science teacher to devote my life to the study of ecology and wildlife biology. This was my aim during my high school years and during the first two years of university education. Then at the age of 20, my interests turned more toward Buddhist philosophy and meditation, and a year later I left university and for the next 13 years devoted myself to the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, first in India and later in Europe and America. But the spirit of open-minded inquiry, skepticism of commonly accepted beliefs and assumptions, and the emphasis on experiential investigation—which are the great strengths of science at its best—has powerfully influenced my engagement with Buddhism. Here for the first time I found a spiritual tradition that welcomed such pragmatism, constructive skepticism, and empiricism. So this allowed me to unite my scientific interests and spiritual aspirations.

Q: How do you characterize your skepticism?

BAW: I aspire to the skepticism of the Buddha, who challenged many of the religious and philosophical assumptions of his era.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: Columbia University Press, Blog, Interview, B. Alan Wallace, Buddhism, books, Science, skeptics, Religion, physics, Buddha, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic, Manifesto, Mind Sciences, Contemplative Practice, meditation, consciousness

Stuart Kauffman on the Adjacent Possible (and the Current Actual)

Very interesting article from NPR's 13.7 Blog on science and culture. Stuart Kauffman is the always thought provoking author of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion and his earlier book, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Here he suggests we need a different perspective to solve some of our problems.

Re-Imagining Society: Are We Trapped By Old Ideas?

November 1, 2010

by Stuart Kauffman

We always live in a world we partially construct for ourselves by a ring of ideas. This holds true for the society that shapes us and that we shape. In this blog I want to sketch familiar ideas that frame us, and will critique them in later blogs.

We can begin 4,900 years ago with Abraham, breaking the idols in his father’s idol shop, and his putative role in inventing monotheism. With that shift from polytheism, the ancient Jews culled 100,000 years of beliefs in multiple gods to be appeased, with their conflicting egos - think of the Greek gods and their strife - into a single Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting in the ongoing becoming of the universe: “In the Beginning was the Word...”, Genesis, our current religious Abrahamic creation myth among three billion of us on this planet.

The ancient Jews lived stubbornly with Yahweh, debating the interpretations of His Laws, and sought to live righteously with those commandments. They were a people deeply of history, namely, their own as the Chosen People with their God, who would also love their non-Jewish neighbors.

The Greeks were universalists, seeking universal laws. Think of Archimedes running through the streets: Eureka!, as he understood floatation. The Greek universalist culture was deeply at odds with the particularist Hebraic culture rooted in historicism.

Skip to glorious Newton. In three laws of motion and a universal law of gravitation, the invention of the differential and integral calculus, he gives us, in a stunning integration, a Greek-spawned view of the world, classical physics. In this view, still workable in many settings, given the initial and boundary conditions of a system of particles, or billiard balls, the future evolution of those particles is entirely determined and knowable by integration, hence deduction as Aristotle would want, of the differential equations given initial and boundary conditions.

Skip to Laplace and his Demon: Such an intelligence, if knowing the positions and momenta of all particles in the universe, could know from Newton’s laws, the entire future and past of the universe.

So with Newton, we arrive at both reductionism, seen first clearly in Laplace and in our Dreams of a Final Theory, as Steven Weinberg wrote not long ago, and we become frozen with the conflict between the Creator Agent God and that God’s Creativity acting forever in the open becoming of the universe, for that God is a free willed one on the one hand, and classical physics on the other. If we are to be modern in that 17th Century world of Newton and thereafter, the tension between religion and science is enormous. We are left with either Deism, or a God of the Gaps retreat of religion.

This gives rise to the foundations of both our secular society, our loss of spirituality as we cleave to science as telling us what the world really is, and the rise of capitalism with the invention of banking and the Industrial Revolution unleashed by physics then chemistry.

The birth of secular society is also the child of our beloved Enlightenment, unleashed by about fourteen thinkers whose aims were to shut down the irrational and antiscientific bounds of the clerics, and unleash the power of reason and science to tell us what the world really is, and, via reason, to make forever progress is mastering nature for our benefit, and build a perfect society. With the Enlightenment, the sacred wanes into the dwindling gaps of the God of the Gaps.

In this vein, Locke was a close friend of Newton and from Locke we get, in the United States, and now around the world, a unique political philosophy: Our Constitution with its three branches of government, Exectutive, Legislative, Judicial, in a hoped for constant tension of counterbalancing forces which - Newton like - would sustain an ongoing equilibrium of power.

But notice something deep: The Hebraic idea of life in living history is not part of our Constitution. We do not have a “theory of history,” even with Hegel and Marx trying, and Kant, before them, seeking laws of history. Lacking a theory of history, we do, however, have in our Constitution, derived also from British Common Law, the concept of the gradual, hopefully wise, evolution of our laws as history unfolds.

So here is a new conflict: On the one hand, classical physics says the becoming of the universe is either a becoming that is deterministic, Newton and Laplace, or there is no becoming at all in Einstein’s four dimensional spacetime, only geometric world lines.

On the other hand, we grope with the sense that we do live in a world of open becoming: As I have noted before, the invention and wide sale of the main frame computer enabled the invention and wide sale of the personal compute,r which in turn enabled the invention and wide sale of word processing, which enabled the storing of computer files, whose wide use enabled the storage and sharing of files, which enabled the invention and wide use of the Web, which enabled selling things on the web, which enabled content on the web, which enabled Google.

This is a constant becoming in what I call the Adjacent Possible of the econosphere. The Adjacent Possible is like a forever expanding house, where passing via a particular door from a room to another room, opens new doors in the Adjacent Possible which we explore in, for example, the explosion of goods and services in our economy in the past 50,000 years, rising from perhaps 1,000 goods to billions. The economists have no theory for this explosion, which has created our technological present beyond stating that research brings new inventions. I will hold that this is a strongly impoverished understanding of the unfolding of economic history, in which the current Actual opens new possible opportunities in the Adjacent Possible, both for human life and for the biosphere's historical evolution.

One deep question is the ontological status of this Adjacent Possible of the economy. Is it a wisp of our imagination? When the young entrepreneur presents his business case to the venture capitalist, are the possibilities and countervailing risks he presents that may convince the VP to invest, mere “imaginings?” Or, I will very tentatively suggest, perhaps this Adjacent Possible is ontologically real, so reality consists of the Actual and the Possible, as Aristotle suspected and Alfred North Whitehead believed. This will, I think, lead us to the mysteries of quantum mechanics as part of stepping beyond our familiar framework.

But the first, firmer step beyond the grip of these framing ideas will be to examine whether we can have sufficient natural laws for the evolution of the biosphere, econosphere, and history. I will claim that we cannot have such sufficient natural laws, with, I believe, widespread consequences for our views of ourselves, thus our full humanity and the society we may want to enable that humanity.

Tags: Science, culture, perspectives, economics, Environment, Enlightenment, Re-Imagining Society, Are We Trapped By Old Ideas?, society, NPR, 13.7 Blog, Stuart Kauffman, Adjacent Possible, Current Actual, complexity, biology