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For your consideration . . . . Sharon Begley wrote this piece for Newsweek. Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis is out to show that many - maybe most - of the X causes Y disease stories we see in the media are false - likewise with many of the take X and prevent Y disease studies.
Recent casualties include statins (like last week or so), vitamin D, and most osteoporosis drugs (last year they found that they rob calcium from the jaw, femur, and other bones).
If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.
But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.
Gallery: Medical Breakthroughs: The Good and the Bad
It’s a disturbing view, with huge im-plications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his role as one of medicine’s top mythbusters. “People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.
This is Ioannidis’s moment. As medical costs hamper the economy and impede deficit-reduction efforts, policymakers and businesses are desperate to cut them without sacrificing sick people. One no-brainer solution is to use and pay for only treatments that work. But if Ioannidis is right, most biomedical studies are wrong.
In just the last two months, two pillars of preventive medicine fell. A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. (Pfizer, which makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk factors is complicated”). In November a panel of the Institute of Medicine concluded that having a blood test for vitamin D is pointless: almost everyone has enough D for bone health (20 nanograms per milliliter) without taking supplements or calcium pills. Cost of vitamin D: $425 million per year.
Ioannidis, 45, didn’t set out to slay medical myths. A child prodigy (he was calculating decimals at age 3 and wrote a book of poetry at 8), he graduated first in his class from the University of Athens Medical School, did a residency at Harvard, oversaw AIDS clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health in the mid-1990s, and chaired the department of epidemiology at Greece’s University of Ioannina School of Medicine. But at NIH Ioannidis had an epiphany. “Positive” drug trials, which find that a treatment is effective, and “negative” trials, in which a drug fails, take the same amount of time to conduct. “But negative trials took an extra two to four years to be published,” he noticed. “Negative results sit in a file drawer, or the trial keeps going in hopes the results turn positive.” With billions of dollars on the line, companies are loath to declare a new drug ineffective. As a result of the lag in publishing negative studies, patients receive a treatment that is actually ineffective. That made Ioannidis wonder, how many biomedical studies are wrong?
His answer, in a 2005 paper: “the majority.” From clinical trials of new drugs to cutting-edge genetics, biomedical research is riddled with incorrect findings, he argued. Ioannidis deployed an abstruse mathematical argument to prove this, which some critics have questioned. “I do agree that many claims are far more tenuous than is generally appreciated, but to ‘prove’ that most are false, in all areas of medicine, one needs a different statistical model and more empirical evidence than Ioannidis uses,” says biostatistician Steven Goodman of Johns Hopkins, who worries that the most-research-is-wrong claim “could promote an unhealthy skepticism about medical research, which is being used to fuel anti-science fervor.”
Even a cursory glance at medical journals shows that once heralded studies keep falling by the wayside. Two 1993 studies concluded that vitamin E prevents cardiovascular disease; that claim was overturned by more rigorous experiments, in 1996 and 2000. A 1996 study concluding that estrogen therapy reduces older women’s risk of Alzheimer’s was overturned in 2004. Numerous studies concluding that popular antidepressants work by altering brain chemistry have now been contradicted (the drugs help with mild and moderate depression, when they work at all, through a placebo effect), as has research claiming that early cancer detection (through, say, PSA tests) invariably saves lives. The list goes on.
Despite the explosive nature of his charges, Ioannidis has collaborated with some 1,500 other scientists, and Stanford, epitome of the establishment, hired him in August to run the preventive-medicine center. “The core of medicine is getting evidence that guides decision making for patients and doctors,” says Ralph Horwitz, chairman of the department of medicine at Stanford. “John has been the foremost innovative thinker about biomedical evidence, so he was a natural for us.”
Ioannidis’s first targets were shoddy statistics used in early genome studies. Scientists would test one or a few genes at a time for links to virtually every disease they could think of. That just about ensured they would get “hits” by chance alone. When he began marching through the genetics literature, it was like Sherman laying waste to Georgia: most of these candidate genes could not be verified. The claim that variants of the vitamin D–receptor gene explain three quarters of the risk of osteoporosis? Wrong, he and colleagues proved in 2006: the variants have no effect on osteoporosis. That scores of genes identified by the National Human Genome Research Institute can be used to predict cardiovascular disease? No (2009). That six gene variants raise the risk of Parkinson’s disease? No (2010). Yet claims that gene X raises the risk of disease Y contaminate the scientific literature, affecting personal health decisions and sustaining the personal genome-testing industry.
Statistical flukes also plague epidemiology, in which researchers look for links between health and the environment, including how people behave and what they eat. A study might ask whether coffee raises the risk of joint pain, or headaches, or gallbladder disease, or hundreds of other ills. “When you do thousands of tests, statistics says you’ll have some false winners,” says Ioannidis. Drug companies make a mint on such dicey statistics. By testing an approved drug for other uses, they get hits by chance, “and doctors use that as the basis to prescribe the drug for this new use. I think that’s wrong.” Even when a claim is disproved, it hangs around like a deadbeat renter you can’t evict. Years after the claim that vitamin E prevents heart disease had been overturned, half the scientific papers mentioning it cast it as true, Ioannidis found in 2007.
The situation isn’t hopeless. Geneticists have mostly mended their ways, tightening statistical criteria, but other fields still need to clean house, Ioannidis says. Surgical practices, for instance, have not been tested to nearly the extent that medications have. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a large proportion of surgical practice is based on thin air, and [claims for effectiveness] would evaporate if we studied them closely,” Ioannidis says. That would also save billions of dollars. George Lundberg, former editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that strictly applying criteria like Ioannidis pushes would save $700 billion to $1 trillion a year in U.S. health-care spending.
Of course, not all conventional health wisdom is wrong. Smoking kills, being morbidly obese or severely underweight makes you more likely to die before your time, processed meat raises the risk of some cancers, and controlling blood pressure reduces the risk of stroke. The upshot for consumers: medical wisdom that has stood the test of time—and large, randomized, controlled trials—is more likely to be right than the latest news flash about a single food or drug.
Cool - Roshi Joan and Evan Thompson - this means a new cycle of the Zen Brain Workshop is coming our way. Details below the podcast sounds cool, though, "Consciousness and the Fundamental Nature of Brain" - and full 2011 schedule is here.
Roshi Joan Halifax and Evan Thompson introduce the topic for the upcoming Zen Brain workshop, ‘Consciousness and the Fundamental Nature of Brain.’ Roshi Joan talks about the importance of continuous and sustained practice throughout all aspects of our lives.
Thompson uses Taoist metaphors to expand on this theme by exploring consciousness during the dream state, describing how dream and awake states are authentic and present-oriented.
Jan 09, 2011 — Feb 06, 2011 WINTER PRACTICE PERIOD - The Fundamental Nature of Mind Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD * Sensei Beate Genko Stolte * Sensei Kazuaki Tanahashi * Alfred W. Kaszniak, Ph.D. * Cliff Saron, PhD * Evan Thompson, PhD * John D. Dunne, PhD * Richard J. Davidson, PhD Includes dormitory lodging (upgrade available). Dana to teachers. Registration & Program Details
My dad speaks with a German accent. Or so I am told. I can't hear it. Nothing unusual about that. But this is an instance of a very important, yet poorly understand, human phenomenon: the Variation Effect (as I'll call it).
To bring the Variation Effect into focus, consider some examples:
How does one pronounce the word "thursday?" Well, they do it one way in London's cockney East End, and a different way in afro-caribbean Brixton. Different pronunciations abound in Brisbane, Brooklyn, Ashville, and British Columbia. There is no one way to say "thursday," or any other word for that matter.
Variety occurs not only at the level of regions and populations. The next time you are at a table with friends, or sitting at a bar, or in a shop, pay attention to the way people talk. You'll notice surprising variation in inflection, emphasis, contraction, rhythm, melody, volume, timbre, etc.
In fact, it's variation all the way down, even at the level of the individual. You choose your words and articulate your speech one way when you're talking to an elderly man in the nursing home, and another way when you're addressing students from the podium, or when you're discussing the quarterback's performance with other fans at the stadium. What counts as stylish, thoughtful, polite, sensitive, respectful, funny, generous varies from one setting to another, depending on, among other things, to whom you are talking, whether the conversation is professional, and so on. It is mark either of stupidity or arrogance to be unable or unwilling to accommodate one's manner of speech to the circumstances in which one finds oneself.
As variation plays a central role in biological evolution, it also plays a fascinating role in the evolution of languages, as Guy Deutscher tells in his delightful book The Unfolding of Language.
Consider: The French say pied, whereas we say foot. They say pere, where we say father. To our for, they have pour, and where we say first, they say premier. Systematically there is a correspondence between words with p sounds in French and words with f sounds in English. What explains this, say historians of language, is that the French and English languages descend from a common ancestor. For various reasons the French, but not the English, preserves the more ancient p-sound pronunciations that would have been used in this ancestral tongue. At some point in the last four hundred years or so, speakers of languages such as English, German and Danish, but not speakers of French, Italian and Spanish, started to say f whereas earlier we said p.
How did this transition from happen? What's remarkable is that the change goes unmentioned in the historical record. How can this be? First, how can people have failed to notice and remark on a steady systematic change in the way people talk? And second, how could they have failed to shut it down. Speakers love to criticize mispronunciation, and surely that's what saying f for would have sounded like, a big error!
One hypothesis is that the change was imperceptible because it was gradual. As Deutscher explains, leading linguists as recently as the middle of the last century thought this gradual-change thesis was plausible. But it isn't. It's ludicrous. As Deutscher remarks, there's p, there's pf, and there's f. How is gradual change supposed to mask those contrasts? You can hear the difference, can't you?
Some ideas are beautiful and the explanation Deutscher offers is a very beautiful indeed. The very question — why didn't people notice the sound change when it happened? — relies on the tacit assumption that there was ever a single way people pronounced the words in question. But there is no one way to pronounce these words or any other. The ground of linguistic reality is comprehensible variation. And so there never was a single or unified sound change.
Then what happened? All there is and ever was is variation, but what does change, over time, is the frequency of different forms or pronunciations across the field of variations. People didn't change the way they talked. What changed was the number of people who talked one way relative to those who talked another.
And this explains why we didn't notice the sound change. This is an example of the Variation Effect. We have great facility adapting to, accommodating and ignoring variation.
Did you notice when "bad," in the mouths of certain speakers, starting meaning "good," or, to go back in time, when "cool" started to mean stylish and positive? I hear my student describe a book as sweet and I know he means something very different from what my mother would mean if she were to describe the very same book as sweet. We are fluent and adaptable when it comes to different ways of talking here and now, and so, with all the more reason, we are not nonplussed by changes in the frequency distribution of different ways of talking. Meaning changes are not one-off occurrences, like heart attacks. They are gradual shifts in the behavior of lots of people against a background of unceasing variation.
Or consider a visual example: What does this tomato look like? Well, it looks one way from up close, when I hold it in my hand. It looks entirely differently when I look at it from across the room, or when it is sitting on a pile of two hundred tomatoes in the grocery store. And so likewise, its color looks one way under the store's fluorescent overheads and entirely differently in day light, or in the yellow tungsten lighting in the kitchen at home.
How does it really look? There's no such thing.
The point is not that the tomato isn't really red, or that there isn't in fact a single word thursday. It's that to perceive entities or properties such as these is to be knowledgeably or skillfully sensitive to patterns or stuctures of variation — to the ways how things look, or how words sound, predictably changes as circumstances change.
To perceive a word is to perceive something that is, of its basic nature, open to varieties of ways of showing up. A word that could only be pronounced one way (by one person? on a single occasion?) would not be a word at all. And to perceive a colored object is to understand — practically, not intellectually — that how it looks would vary in reliable ways were the lighting, or one's angle of viewing, to change. That's just what it is to have a certain color. It's to be a locus of possible visual variation of a certain style.
To perceive or cognize the world at all is to be sensitive the way patterns of variation allow for invariance to show up for us. We achieve access to that which is invariant (the color, the word) not because we are blind to variation, but because we are so fluent in our mastery of variation that we can let it recede for us and rest in the background.
And this fluent mastery of ever-present variation — the Variation Effect — is the hallmark of understanding.
Steven's newest book is titled Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. From Darwin to YouTube, Johnson asks the questions, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines.
The participatory turn as the most significant philosophical turn since Kant Michel Bauwens 17th January 2011 The title above is inspired by a review of the book edited by Jorge Ferrer and Jacob Sherman, The Participatory Turn. The first excerpt is from a review by Chris Clarke in Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network, 101 (2009); The second excerpt is from George Adams and appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. The third is perhaps the most important from a contemporary ‘peer to peer’ point of view, and answers the key question: what is the link between spiritual democracy and political democracy. (Source: Gleig, Ann and Boeving, Nicholas G. Spiritual Democracy-Beyond Consciousness and Culture [Review of the book The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies] Tikkun 23(4): 64) 1. Chris Clarke:
“This participatory baton carried by Tarnas was then taken up in 2002 by Jorge Ferrer (Revisioning Transpersonal Theory) from the standpoint of the study of religion. Now in The Participatory Turn he is joined by 10 other authors to present a powerfully convincing picture of what may be the most significant philosophical turn since Kant. Ferrer’s work stands amongst modern reactions to the scandal of religious diversity. How can it be that the major religions claim access to absolute truth, and yet appear to teach contradictory accounts of what this truth is? Indeed, how is it that respected teachers such as the Dalai Lama and Thomas Merton can be deeply versed in interfaith studies and still advocate their own distinct path? The standard answer in the past has been that the religions are many paths ascending the same mountain; that as each path progresses towards increasingly general concepts, so these concepts converge into a single apprehension of reality. Ferrer, however, has summarised with great care and academic rigour the shift towards the position that this is not the case. Rather, the paths remain essentially different. He quotes the Dalai Lama’s view that even within Buddhism the ultimate goals of different spiritual schools are essentially different. Unity does exist, but it is achieved only after the path has ended and all concepts and linguistic expressions have been deconstructed and one is left not with “reality” as it has been classically understood in the West, but mystery. Rather than “many paths up one mountain”, Ferrer advocates the metaphor of “many rivers leading to one ocean”, an ocean that represents not “things as they really are” but rather “the overcoming of narrow self-centredness and thus a liberation from corresponding limiting perspectives”. From this viewpoint religious diversity is not a scandal that invalidates religion, but it becomes the essential clue to the world. Following this clue, Ferrer proposes that diversity is a necessity, because existence is not pre-given, but is always a creation in which we participate, in diverse ways. More precisely, Ferrer and his co-editor Jacob Sherman argue for “an enactive understanding of the sacred, seeking to approach religions phenomena, experiences and insights as cocreated events.” In other words, they “suggest that religious and spiritual phenomena are ‘participatory’ in the sense that they can emerge from the interaction of all human attributes and a nondetermined spiritual power or creative dynamism of life.” Presented baldly, as I have just done, without the context that the editors carefully develop, this formulation is hard to grasp; so I will enlarge on some of their concepts. “Enactive” is a term drawn from the influential work of the biologist Francisco Varela on the evolutionary of organisms. The word describes the way in which an organism, when sufficiently complex, can manifest a genuine agency, initiating a particular response to a particular selection of external stimuli. The organism thereby breaks open the chains of cause and effect with a novel causation, and at the same time asserts its own particular sensitivity to the selected stimuli, thus creating a primitive form of “meaning” within the relationship between the organism and its environment. In the human case, the word “enactive” emphasises the active nature of what is being done, in contrast to the passive sense usually carried by “experience”. Varela’s emphasis on action is also echoed in Ferrer and Sherman’s phrase “all human attributes” in the quotation above: we are not just speaking here about a mental experience, but it could be any combination of attributes such as intuitive, emotional, bodily and so on. The use of the words “cocreated” and “nondetermined spiritual power” are an attempt to express the idea that this action extends outside oneself, but without presuming in advance anything about what exists outside oneself. The action is not a purely internal imagination, but neither is it an interaction with any external entity to which one could ascribe in advance any existence or any nature. The act of participation itself defines and specifies what it is that is other than the self. “Participation” introduces a category that goes beyond the older philosophical concepts of thing-in-itself and reality. It describes an action of the whole person that transcends the duality between self and other. It becomes clear as the book unfolds that, though the editor’s definition of the participatory turn is phrased in terms of “religious experience”, its implications extend to a domain much wider than that which is traditionally implied by these words. This particular sense of participation engages with science and complexity theory through the idea of enaction. The stress on multiple human attributes reflects a celebration of multiplicity that links with feminist spirituality as well as body-based and indigenous spirituality. The approach not only challenges previous philosophical concepts but reconstructs them. And it reunites the internal (contemplative) and external (active) spiritual paths. Clearly many books would be required to do justice to all this, yet this volume does an excellent job of at least touching on all these, and exploring quite a few in detail. I can mention only part of this below. Jacob Sherman, the co-editor has a chapter in his own right surveying the history of the multifaceted term “participation” from Plato to the present day, which helps a lot in fleshing out the idea. Aquinas plays a pivotal role in this history by exploring the dynamic act-of-being (esse) as distinct from “being” as “what something is” (essentia), a distinction that he obtained from Avicenna and Al-Farabi. According to Aquinas, everything has being (esse) through participation in absolute being, which is of course identified by him with God. Sherman stresses that this participation is dynamic, and not a merely a logical matter: as Aquinas puts it, “the act of being is the most intimate reality in any being, and that which is most profound in all things.” Since being comes from participation, and participation is a movement out from oneself, “to be created is to be fundamentally ecstatic”. Participation flows through the chain of being (as Dionysius had described earlier) so that “beings are dyadically constituted as an inseparable polarity of substantial existence in themselves and for others.” Participation thus builds a universe that is fundamentally relational. At this point in the history, however, participation is unidirectional, with “being” descending from God as the sole creator. Meister Eckhart takes this one step further in recognising that human artistic activity is in itself creative, and that by participating in God the human and God “work one work”. On this conception we give being as well as receiving being in a two-way participation. Sherman then traces this line of thought to Schelling and thence to modernity. (This theme of humanity participating with God in the evolution of creation is fascinatingly taken up in detail by Les Lancaster in a chapter on Kabala.) Although the image of the ocean with many rivers emphasises plurality, it is definitely not the case the “anything goes”. Ferrer insists that there are genuine ethical distinctions to be made in terms of “a variety of markers and practical fruits.” There is a whole area here of relating ethics to the concept of participation which is only sketched at this stage, principally through the chapter by Beverly Lanzetta on feminine theosis (deification) in the writings and life of St Teresa of Avila, and by Donald Rothberg in a chapter on relating inner and outer transformation in Buddhism. Ethics also arise implicitly from the notion of participation in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s teaching, paraphrased here by William Chittick in the saying: “the divine face turned towards each thing is identical with the thing’s face turned towards God” (reminding us of Eckhart’s “The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me”). This suggests that in a participatory, relational cosmos the only alternatives may be either to love others as ourselves or to hate others as ourselves.”
2. George Adams:
“Ferrer presents the participatory vision as a corrective to the errors of the diametrically opposed perspectives of reductionist constructivism and non-reductionist naïve perennialism. Ferrer accepts the post-modern epistemological position of the constructivists (typified by Steven Katz), which claims that there are no unmediated spiritual experiences, and that all such experiences are laden with the cultural baggage brought to the experience by the experiencer. However, Ferrer – contra Katz – argues (quite logically) that accepting the presence of cultural influences as determinants of the content of religious experiences does not necessarily lead to reductionisms which bracket or deny either the reality of the experienced spiritual reality or its creative impact on spiritual knowing. Ferrer agrees with the perennialists that a spiritual reality does exist and that humans directly experience this reality (thus embracing an epistemological stance of “mediated immediacy”). However, unlike the perennialists, Ferrer rejects the notion that there is a fundamental, universal experience underlying all claims to religious experience. Perennialists tend to claim that all religious experience is the same, but its expression varies according to cultural influences. Ferrer argues (against the constructivists) that religious experience beyond cultural-linguistic construction really does occur, but (against the perennialists) it is not the same experience clothed in culturally influenced language and concepts. Rather, religious experience is infinitely varied…and it is here where the role of participation is introduced. Ferrer argues that every religious experience is an event in which a culturally conditioned human being interacts, or participates, with an infinitively? varied and mysterious spiritual reality, and this interactive “participatory event” by necessity leads to multiple ways of experiencing the sacred. For Ferrer, spiritual experience always involves an element of reciprocity, in which the human experiencer with his/her culturally-conditioned biases and pre-conceived modes of interpretation encounters a similarly complicated and multi-valent sacred reality, where the resultant interactive “participation” between the two, in which neither party is a static entity, produces an endless array of spiritual experiences. Hence, Ferrer’s participatory vision is based on a radically pluralistic model. If one understands religious experience as a participatory event, it follows that there will be a plurality of accounts of this experience: in a sense, for Ferrer, all religious experiences are different, yet all are still valid. This is nicely characterized by Ferrer when he replaces the often cited perennialist analogy of religious experience as “many rivers leading to the same ocean” by his own analogy of religious experience as contact with “an ocean with many shores.” (138) Two other significant aspects of Ferrer’s participatory vision bear mention with reference to its impact on the scholarly study of religion. First, Ferrer calls for a rejection of the decidedly culturally-biased Western notion that objective rationality is the only valid means of knowledge. Rejecting the notion of the epistemic superiority of objective rationality, Ferrer instead recommends a “multidimensional cognition” which includes all modes of human knowing, including those that derive from not only the rational mind but also those that derive from the heart, spirit, and body. Secondly, and following from the previous point, Ferrer argues that scholars of religious experience also need to become practitioners of religious experience in order to understand the phenomenon about which they claim to be experts. Ferrer poses the painfully logical question: How can one claim to understand a type of experience which one has never had? How can one understand an internal experience while standing on the outside, safely distanced from the experience? As Ferrer puts it, “One needs to be open to being personally transformed in order to access and fully understand many spiritual knowledge claims.” (138) Both of the above positions presented by Ferrer have enormous, and to some, threatening implications for the status quo in the scholarly study of religion, and are deserving of further exploration.”
3. Ann Gleich and Nicholas Boeving: From Ontological/Spiritual Democracy to Political Democracy Excellent in-depth review at tikkun.org, May/June 2009.
“Implicit in the participatory turn is an extension of democracy from the political to the ontological realm. Here we extend the thought of social theorist Anthony Giddens, who has traced the growth of democracy from the political sphere to the world of family, relationships, and sexuality. The latter have been radicalized through what Giddens calls a “democracy of the emotions.” This denotes how the traditional concept of marriage as an economic contract constituted by an inherent gender inequality has been replaced by the “pure relationship,” which is characterized by equality, intimacy, and communication. Pointing out that all of these qualities are inherently democratic, Giddens illuminates the striking parallels between the pure relationship and public democracy. There are similarly striking parallels between political/emotional democracy and a participatory sensibility. As noted, the participatory turn is fundamentally a rethinking of the relationship between the human and the metaphysical. In this approach, a top-down authoritarian model of divinity is replaced by a more intimate and equal partnership and democratic redistribution of creative power. Also, just as the rejection of prescribed and oppressive gender roles is central to a democracy of the emotions, so the feminist stress on sacred immanence, wholeness, and relationality is central to the participatory turn. Ontological hierarchy—whether in the theistic guise of God as Lord and Father or an elitist perennialism—has too often reflected, generated, and justified social and political systems of domination. While the radically democratic dimensions of the participatory turn have been celebrated by John Heron and Jeffrey J. Kripal, a further exploration of its democratic influences and implications will support the full manifestation of its liberative promise. Hence, just as Giddens calls for a further democratizing of political democracy, we call for a deepening of the ontological democracy implied within a participatory ontology. Included in this call is the question of who is admitted to, as well as left out from, the ostensibly round ontological table to which Ferrer and Sherman invite us. Those of us lucky enough to share our lives with animal companions don’t need to read the latest groundbreaking research “proving” the authenticity of their inner emotional lives to know that they have them. They, like us, are conscious beings with an awareness of others. And consciousness, inasmuch as it participates in the mystery our editors invoke, is the crux upon which this model rests. So, to put it rather bluntly: what happens when they die? The problem of atheism is equally ignored. After all, what does the spiritual path (ultimate) look like when spirit itself is denied? It’s not that Ferrer and Sherman’s model can’t account for animals or atheists; it potentially could, but they simply don’t go there. One hopes that in the future such quandaries will be afforded greater attention, as these are the kinds of theoretical knots that, once unraveled and reworked, only strengthen a model and lend it greater appeal and explanatory power. Thinking about the participatory turn as a type of ontological democracy also sheds light on other ethical dimensions. Far from weakening family duties and obligations, Giddens insists a democracy of the emotions fosters and demands more responsibility. The same applies to participatory ethics: the move from a monarchical to a democratic ontology also necessitates a re-envisioning of ourselves from children under the Lord/Father to individuated adults in relationship with the mystery. Many will undoubtedly decry this as Promethean and hubristic. As Ferrer recognizes, to claim that human creativity influences the nature and workings of the mystery may sound arrogant or inflated. Yet with power comes responsibility. And foremost among our responsibilities, Ferrer declares, is to evaluate the different co-constructed religious worlds: “because such [worlds] are not simply given but involve us as agents and cocreators, we are not off the ethical hook where religion is concerned but instead inevitably make cosmo-political and moral choices in all our religious actions.”
This is an interesting discussion around new research on the cognitive and moral capabilities of infants. Some of their discussion references Paul Bloom's recent article in the New York Times Magazine on The Moral Life of Babies (great article - highly recommended).
Researchers say that Salvia is the most potent hallucinogen known to science - and that there may be some serious medicinal uses for its active constituent, salvinorin A. A pretty high percentage of people who use it once never want to repeat the experience. My guess is that if you use salvia as your first experience with hallucinogens/entheogens that you are not likely to want to repeat such an intense and overwhelming experience - the brief high is very much different than the serotonin-based hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin.
An article posted at AOL News earlier this month offers a good introduction to the drug and its possible medicinal benefits.
Doctors hope further studies of salvia, a powerful hallucinogen that is sometimes smoked by recreational users, will unlock treatments for a variety of neurological disorders including Alzheimer's disease and illnesses that cause chronic pain.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital recently completed a study that examined the effects of salvia or salvinorin A, on humans. "It is unlike anything that exists," Dr. Matthew Johnson, lead study researcher, psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins University, told AOL Health.
Johnson believes that gaining information about how salvia affects the brain could lead to medical advances and the creation of new drugs to treat a variety of illnesses and conditions that affect the brain.
Salvia divinorum is the active ingredient in salvia, which resembles marijuana and, according to researchers, is the most powerful hallucinogen in nature. This study, which appears online in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, is the first controlled trial to be conducted on humans.
The study participants were two men and two women who had previous experience with hallucinogens. The volunteers smoked the drug in 20 sessions over the course of two or three months.
They inhaled a range of doses of the drug in pure form and were asked to rate its strength. Due to the extreme effects of this often controversial drug, participants were allowed to take breaks when needed and were told they could completely withdraw from the study at any time.
Participants reported they had an awareness of where they were after smoking the drug, but they also had a feeling of "leaving this reality completely and going to other worlds or dimensions and interacting with entities," Johnson told ABC News. The participants also showed no changes in heart rate or blood pressure, and the study concluded that the drug has no physically adverse effects on otherwise healthy people.
According to an animal study, salvinorin A activates opioid receptors in the brain. When salvinorin A acts on these receptors, a person feels high. Addictive drugs, such as morphine, also stimulate opioid receptors. However, salvinorin A stimulates another type of receptor called the kappa opioid. "It is unique in the way it affects the kappa system," explains Johnson. "Salvinorin A selectively hits the kappa receptors and affects them more cleanly than any other drugs." Because of their structure, salvia molecules have smaller impact on the brain's processes, and have less potential for addiction.
Johnson says there are many possibilities for the use of this drug. "Right now, we're just understanding its basic effects on humans," says Johnson. Future studies and research will provide more information on the possibilities for this new drug.
Salvia is legal to buy and sell in many U.S. states; however, the U.S. Department of Justice's Drug Enforcement Administration has labeled salvia a drug of concern. To date, 13 states have adopted legislation that bans or regulates the use of salvia. In addition, legislators and federal officials in many other states are considering regulating the drug.
NPR's Morning Edition also discussed this study - and spoke with Dr. Matthew Johnson, who led the Johns Hopkins study.
There's a long history of trying to turn mind altering drugs like LSD into something that would be useful for therapies. Scientists are trying to do that with the latest popular hallucinogen. It's called Salvia Divinorin. It's been in the news lately because teen idol Mylie Cyrus was apparently caught on video smoking it.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
There's a long history of scientists trying to turn mind-altering drugs into something that would make a useful therapy. Now they're trying to do that with a hallucinogen that is legal in many states and becoming more popular. It's been in the news lately because teen-idol Miley Cyrus was caught on video apparently smoking it. Some scientists believe the active ingredient could turn out to be valuable for treating problems such as drug addiction, chronic pain and manic depression.
NPR's Joe Palca reports.
JOE PALCA: Salvia divinorum is a plant. It's a member of the mint family. Smoking it sends users on an otherworldly voyage.
Dr. MATTHEW JOHNSON (Johns Hopkins Medical School): Some people would speculate that it's another dimension. Others would describe it as the spirit world.
PALCA: Matthew Johnson studies hallucinogenic drugs at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. He says people who smoke salvia describe a high very different from other mind-altering drugs.
For example, people on the drug psilocybin - what makes magic mushrooms hallucinogenic - are aware of the real world around them and can function in it. During the brief-but-potent high, people on salvia can barely move, and they feel as if they've left planet Earth.
Dr. JOHNSON: A completely different reality where they're interacting with things they're either calling entities or angels or figures that have even given themselves names in this otherworldly experience.
PALCA: Johnson wanted to see if there were any physical side effects to this mental trip. So he invited people who had used other hallucinogens to try salvia and looked to see if there were any potentially harmful spikes in heart rate or blood pressure.
Dr. JOHNSON: Under the conditions of the study, it did appear to be a physiologically safe drug.
PALCA: At least for the things Johnson measured. But he says while the drug may not be harmful physically, it can be mentally.
Dr. JOHNSON: There's the psychological toxicity. That is to say, this is a strong drug and people can do strange, potentially dangerous things when they're on it.
PALCA: So why study this drug? Well, in addition to the weird trip it takes you on, it tends to make people feel icky, kind of depressed. And that depressive quality may be useful in therapies. Here's how.
Salvia belongs to a class of drugs that activate something called the kappa opioid receptor. Heroin and morphine also activate opioid receptors, but they activate the mu opioid receptor.
Dr. ELENA CHARTOFF (McLean Hospital): When you activate the mu receptor, like you do with heroin or morphine, you get a euphoric - you get a rush, a high.
PALCA: Elena Chartoff studies opioid receptors at McLean Hospital in Boston.
Dr. CHARTOFF: But when you activate the kappa receptor with a drug, you get kind of the opposite effect, that depressive-like effect.
PALCA: The depressive effect might be used to counteract the mania of manic depression or negate the appealing effects of narcotics as a way to control drug addiction.
Salvinorin A, the active ingredient in salvia, has a powerful effect on the kappa opioid receptors. Chartoff says scientists are looking at ways to take molecules like Salvinorin A...
Dr. CHARTOFF: And altering them using a chemistry to develop compounds that have all the beneficial properties, but don't have the disadvantages.
PALCA: Hallucinations are generally considered an unwanted side effect in drug therapies. But pharmacologist Bryan Roth of the University of North Carolina says those properties may be useful for neuroscientists.
Dr. BRYAN ROTH (University of North Carolina): One of the things to me that's interesting about drugs that are hallucinogens is they alter the way we see reality.
PALCA: Roth is trying to figure out which brain circuits Salvinorin A acts on -where in the brain we decide what's real and what's not.
Dr. ROTH: You know, what could be more important than how we view reality, right?
PALCA: That's a hard one to argue with.
Joe Palca, NPR News, Washington.
Finally, an article on Huffington Post by Dr. Harold Koplewicz offers his own perspective on this drug - and he believes we must regulate the drug - which I oppose for ALL entheogens. This is only a part of the article - the most relevant part.
Salvia is legal because its method of action -- how it affects the brain -- is so novel that it is unrelated to any of the drugs currently regulated or outlawed by the federal government. But this is also why it should not be outlawed entirely -- because of the possible research benefits, which often, sadly, shrivel up when the government decides to outlaw instead of regulate.
The point is that this plant is telling us things we didn't know about how drugs interact with the brain. Its psychoactive ingredient, Salvinorin A, appears to target a single specific receptor in the brain that is implicated in a variety of psychiatric disorders. Down the road, this could lead to treatments for everything from depression and schizophrenia to addiction and even diarrhea. If the hallucinogenic side effects are removed or mitigated, derivatives of salvia or related chemicals could provide a path towards new psychopharmacological treatments for mental illness, and we must protect that promise.
In no way am I calling salvia a possible "medication" -- as it naturally occurs and is used to "trip," it is what we call a drug of abuse. But there is a possibility that research can yield valid, even life-saving medical treatments.
So it's important not to make a mistake here: Salvia is a powerful hallucinogen -- it must be regulated. But we don't know enough about it to say how it should be regulated. We must balance the need to keep our children safe with the imperative to explore its potential for breakthrough medications.
We must be reasonable, as we have not always been in the past, while still being vigilant.
We live in a quantum world. We may not know this, we certainly don’t sense it, but yes, below this experiential construct we call reality—continuous and orderly— there is a very different one, obeying a very different set of rules. To think that we are ourselves quantum creatures, made of tiny atoms vibrating frenetically at submicroscopic distances, is at least weird. The big challenging question is how to go from that world of tiny things that can’t even be called “things”—in the sense of having a well-defined spatial extension like a chair or a car—to trees, people, and stars.
Often, I use the far-away-beach image to explain the transition from quantum to everyday perception: from far away, a sandy beach looks smooth and continuous. But up close we discern its graininess, its discrete nature. The image works well until you get close to the sand. There, of course, you simply see the grains of sand; you don’t see any quantum-like behavior because the grains themselves are made of more than a trillion billion atoms.
This means that we are essentially blind to what exists at the very core of physical reality. All we have is our measurements, and they give an incomplete picture of what’s really going on.
Quantum mechanics (QM) revolves around the famous Uncertainty Principle. In practice, it imposes a fundamental limitation on how much we can know of the material particles that make up the stuff of the world. This is not to say that QM is flaky science; quite the opposite, it’s the most powerful theory we have, able to describe in great detail the results of experiments dealing with the world of the very small. In fact, most of modern technology, from DVDs and iPhones to GPSs, depends in very basic ways on our knowledge of the quantum world.
The problem with QM is not with what we know about it, but with what we don’t know about it. And since what we don’t know challenges our intuitive notions of how the world should be, there is a lot of tension among scientists on how to interpret the many quantum mysteries. At its very core, and intimately related with the Uncertainty Principle, QM establishes an inseparable relationship between what is being observed and the observer. Contrary to “normal” reality, where a table exists whether we look at it or not (yes, trees do fall in the forest when no one is looking), in the quantum world existence is determined by the act of “looking”: an object, say, an electron, is only real once someone or something (a detector) interacts with it. That is, before the measurement, we can’t say if that particular electron exists.
Since we define reality by what exists, this would imply that we, or whatever machine is doing the detecting, are ultimately responsible for determining what exists. Namely, reality is determined by interacting with it.
Kind of perplexing, especially when we contrast this with a plain table—here today and here tomorrow (if no one pushes it away or burns it). Or with your body, which tomorrow will look pretty much like it does today. Somehow, large aggregations of tiny quantum objects acquire a different kind of behavior, that we identify as our “everyday” reality of macroscopic objects.
If the essence of reality is defined by our interactions with it, then we must come to grips with two points: first, that “mind” occupies a central place in the order of things. That is, without mind there is no reality. (Not sure how an amoeba would react to this statement, but then again, it wouldn’t.) Many thinkers claim that this centrality of mind is crucial to understanding the world. Even more, that this “mind” reflects some property of the universe as a whole, us being just a part of it. Second, since we acquire information of the world through measurement, and our sense of what is real depends crucially on this information, information is the very essence of reality. Physicist Seth Lloyd, in his book Programming the Universe, argues this last point, proposing that the universe as a whole is a quantum computer. This is in the same vein of the “It from Bit” notion suggested by the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler.
Although I can see the appeal of these ideas, I can’t say I embrace them entirely. The notion that there is a universal mind, or even that our minds or that mind in general defines physical reality, seems to imbue the cosmos with a teleology that, to me, is just a modern, scientifically-inspired, metaphor for God. (Of course, you could also argue that Zen thinking does something similar; but you won’t find there the notion of cosmic purpose, i.e., of a “god.”) I prefer to see the emergence of mind—and so far the only one we know is ours—as the product of a series of random evolutionary accidents and cosmic asymmetries. To me, the wonder is that mind exists at all, given all the adversity toward life we see in the cosmos. (The universe is a pretty hostile place.)
The second point—that information is at the essence of physical reality—confuses me. I like to think that we are the ones who ascribe meaning to the material patterns we see in Nature. Every piece of matter has information in it, the “recipe” that explains how the different parts are assembled to create the whole. In a sense, through the physical sciences, we act as decoders of this information. But I don’t see how this information precedes matter. Unless you start calling the physical and chemical interactions that make up stuff “information.” But then, it all becomes semantics. Information is with matter, it can’t exist without or before it. You may get the parts that can be assembled into a watch and, without knowing how to build one, make a meaningless mess out of them. There is a huge number of ways in which these parts can be assembled, but only one will make it into a working watch. For this reason, I’d argue that “mind” (understood as the ability to purposely give form and function to matter) precedes information: we created the notion of information to help us make sense of the world.
There must be much more to reality than what we know. The question is whether we will ever grasp its elusive essence—if there is one—or if we must be content with an improving, but incomplete, picture.
Here are four short videos from Thoughtware.tv on various views of the quantum universe - ranging from the science behind Stephen Hawking's rejection of God to the view that the reality is a mathematical structure, eternal and unchanging.
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Stephen Hawking stated that the formation of our universe no longer required a god. Here is an introduction to the science behind his statement. Source.
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Brian Cox and Leonard Susskind discuss how String Theory allows for extra dimensions and a multiverse.
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Dr. Seth Lloyd, a self-described "quantum mechanic" and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, says the universe itself is a giant quantum computer — computing itself. Interview recorded in November 2010 at the Institute for Quantum Computing, University of Waterloo. www.iqc.ca.
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MIT Cosmologist Max Tegmark introduces his theory that reality is a mathematical structure, unchanging and eternal - an idea that pushes physics into the realm of philosophy.
Doctors hope further studies of salvia, a powerful hallucinogen that is sometimes smoked by recreational users, will unlock treatments for a variety of neurological disorders including 