Iain McGilchrist is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2012), a somewhat controversial book (see here, and here for McGilchrist's response, and a reply from the original critic), and the briefer version (31 pages), The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning (2012, Kindle only, $0.99).

Here is a review from Publisher's Weekly (from the book's Amazon page):

A U.K. mental health consultant and clinical director with a background in literature, McGilchrist attempts to synthesize his two areas of expertise, arguing that the "divided and asymmetrical nature" of the human brain is reflected in the history of Western culture. Part I, The Divided Brain, lays the groundwork for his thesis, examining two lobes' significantly different features (structure, sensitivity to hormones, etc.) and separate functions (the left hemisphere is concerned with "what," the right with "how"). He suggests that music, "ultimately... the communication of emotion," is the "ancestor of language," arising largely in the right hemisphere while "the culture of the written word tends inevitably toward the predominantly left hemisphere." More controversially, McGilchrist argues that "there is no such thing as the brain" as such, only the brain as we perceive it; this leads him to conclude that different periods of Western civilization (from the Homeric epoch to the present), one or the other hemisphere has predominated, defining "consistent ways of being that persist" through time. This densely argued book is aimed at an academic crowd, is notable for its sweep but a stretch in terms of a uniting thesis.

For those who want a little more about this book and its central thesis, I am also including the RSA Animates video excerpted from McGilchrist's talk and workshop at the RSA.

Iain McGilchrist - Anyone with Half a Brain Can See That! (at TEDxGhent)

Published on Jan 11, 2014


Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist and writer, committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise -- the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains. His talk 'The Divided Brain' was a Best of the Web pick by TED!

Here is the RSA Animate video - enjoy!

Uploaded on Oct 21, 2011

In this new RSA Animates, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society.

Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme. To view the full lecture, go here. RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to creating social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information about our research, RSA Animates, free events programme and 27,000 strong fellowship.

Find out more about the RSA
Join the RSA on Facebook

Nice talk by Cindy Wigglesworth at TEDxLowerEastSide.

The Roadmap to Nobility: Cindy Wigglesworth at TEDxLowerEastSide

Published on Jan 12, 2014


Cindy Wigglesworth is the author of SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence and the President of Deep Change, Inc. Cindy worked at Exxon in human resources management for 20 years. Seeing both the strengths and limitations of traditional leadership approaches, she left ExxonMobil to start her own business dedicated to developing the multiple intelligences of leaders and organizations.

Cindy is ambassador for Conscious Capitalism, and is quoted by Patricia Aburdene in her book Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism. Her passionate commitment is to help birth a new way of talking about spirituality that gets us beyond the barrier of "religion versus science" and lands us squarely in the "this stuff works!" category of applied wisdom.

Her corporate clients have included The Methodist Healthcare System (now a Fortune 100 best employer), BHP Billiton Petroleum, and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2013 (Greater Good Science Center)

From UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, here is a collection of 10 research summaries on topics related to having a meaningful life, for example the idea that a meaningful and healthy life is not the same as a happy life; or that mindfulness meditation can make people more altruistic (even when doing so has barriers) and that the emotional benefits of altruism are likely to be human universals.

There is some nice research summarized here - and for a nice change of pace, the news is good.

The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2013

Below are some of the most surprising, provocative, and inspiring findings published this past year.

By Jason Marsh, Devan Davison, Bianca Lorenz, Lauren Klein, Jeremy Adam Smith, Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas

January 2, 2014


The past few years have been marked by two major trends in the science of a meaningful life.

One is that researchers continued to add sophistication and depth to our understanding of positive feelings and behaviors. Happiness is good for you, but not all the time; empathy ties us together, and can overwhelm you; humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and morality, that changes in response to context. This has been especially true of the study of mindfulness and attention, which is producing more and more potentially life-changing discoveries.

The other factor involves intellectual diversity. The turn from the study of human dysfunction to human strengths and virtues may have started in psychology, with the positive psychology movement, but that perspective spread to adjacent disciplines like neuroscience and criminology, and from there to fields like sociology, economics, and medicine. Across all these fields, we’re seeing more and more support for the idea that empathy, compassion, and happiness are more than you-have-it-or-not capacities, but skills that can be cultivated by individuals and by groups of people through deliberate decisions.

In 2013, the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center is now part of a mature, multidisciplinary movement. Here are 10 scientific insights published in peer-reviewed journals from the past year that we anticipate will be cited in scientific studies, help shift public debate, and change individual behavior in the year to come.

A meaningful life is different—and healthier—than a happy one.

The research we cover here at the Greater Good Science Center is often referred to as “the science of happiness,” yet our tagline is “The Science of a Meaningful Life.” Meaning, happiness—is there a difference?

New research suggests that there is. When a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology tried to disentangle the concepts of “meaning” and “happiness” by surveying roughly 400 Americans, it found considerable overlap between the two—but also some key distinctions.

Based on those surveys, for instance, feeling good and having one’s needs met seem integral to happiness but unrelated to meaning. Happy people seem to dwell in the present moment, not the past or future, whereas meaning seems to involve linking past, present, and future. People derive meaningfulness (but not necessarily happiness) from helping others—being a “giver”—whereas people derive happiness (but not necessarily meaningfulness) from being a “taker.” And while social connections are important to meaning and happiness, the type of connection matters: Spending time with friends is important to happiness but not meaning, whereas the opposite is true for spending time with loved ones.

And other research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that these differences might have important implications for our health. When Barbara Fredrickson and Steve Cole compared the immune cells of people who reported being “happy” with those of people who reported “a sense of direction and meaning,” the people leading meaningful lives seemed to have stronger immune systems.

The emotional benefits of altruism might be a human universal.

One of the most significant findings to have emerged from the sciences of happiness and altruism has been this: Altruism boosts happiness. Spending on others makes us happier than spending on ourselves—at least among the relatively affluent North Americans who have participated in this research.

But a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggested that this finding holds up around the world, even in countries where sharing with others might threaten someone’s own subsistence.

In one study, the researchers examined data of more than 200,000 people from 136 countries; they determined that donating to charity in the past month boosts happiness “in most individual countries and all major regions of the world,” cutting across cultures and levels of economic well-being. It was even true regardless of whether someone said they’d had trouble securing food for their family in the past year.

When the researchers zeroed in on three countries with vastly different levels of wealth—Canada, Uganda, and India—they found that people reported greater happiness recalling a time when they’d spent money on others than when they’d spent on themselves. And in a study comparing Canada and South Africa, people reported feeling happier after donating to charity than after buying themselves a treat, even though they would never meet the beneficiary of their largess. This suggests to the researchers that their happiness didn’t result from feeling like they were strengthening social connections or improving their reputation but from a deeply ingrained human instinct.

In fact, they argue, the nearly universal emotional benefits of altruism suggest it is a product of evolution, perpetuating behavior that “may have carried short-term costs but long-term benefits for survival over human evolutionary history.”

Mindfulness meditation makes people more altruistic—even when confronted with barriers to compassionate action.

In March, the GGSC hosted a conference called “Practicing Mindfulness & Compassion,” where speakers made the case that the practice of mindfulness—the moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and surrounding—doesn’t just improve our individual health but also makes us more compassionate toward others. Coincidentally, just weeks after the conference, two new studies bolstered this claim.

The first study, published in Psychological Science, found that people who took an eight-week mindfulness meditation course were significantly more likely than a control group to give up their waiting-room seat for a person on crutches. This was true despite the fact that other people in the waiting room (who were secretly working with the researchers) didn’t acknowledge the person in need or make any gesture to give up their own seats; prior research suggests that this kind of inaction strongly deters bystanders from helping out, but that wasn’t the case when the bystanders had received training in mindfulness.

A few weeks later, another study published in Psychological Science echoed that finding. In this second study, which was unrelated to the first, people who had practiced a mindfulness-based “compassion meditation” for a total of just seven hours over two weeks were significantly more likely than people who hadn’t received the training to give money to a stranger in need. What’s more, after completing their training, the meditation group showed noticeable changes in brain activity, including in networks linked to understanding the suffering of others.

“Our findings,” write the authors of the second study, “support the possibility that compassion and altruism can be viewed as trainable skills rather than as stable traits.”

Meditation changes gene expression.

Are genes destiny? They certainly influence our behavior and health outcomes—for example, one study published in 2013 found that genes make some people more inclined to focus on the negative. But more and more research is revealing how it’s a two-way street: Our choices can also influence how our genes behave.

In 2013, a collaborative project between researchers in Spain and France and at the University of Wisconsin found that when experienced meditators meditate, they quiet down the genes that express bodily inflammation in response to stress.

How did they figure this out? Before and after two different retreat days, the researchers drew blood samples from 19 long-term meditators (averaging more than 6000 lifetime hours) and 21 inexperienced people. During the retreat, the meditators meditated and discussed the benefits and advantages of meditation; the non-meditators read, played games, and walked around.

After this experience, the meditators’ inflammation genes—measured by blood concentrations of enzymes that catalyze or are a byproduct of gene expression—were less active. Blood samples from the people in the leisure-day condition did not show these changes.

Why does this matter? The researchers also looked at their study participants’ ability to recover from a stressful event. Long-term meditators’ ability to turn down inflammatory genes, it turns out, predicted how quickly stress hormones in their saliva diminished after a stressful experience—a sign of healthy coping and resilience that can potentially lead to a longer life.

This is good news to people who come from a family of stress cases who are stress-prone themselves: There are steps you can take to mitigate the impact of stressful events. Hard as it may be to find time or get excited about meditating, mounting evidence suggests that it can offer more concrete advantages to a healthy life than the leisurely activities we more readily seek.

Mindfulness training improves teachers’ performance in the classroom.

For educators grappling with students’ behavioral problems and other sources of stress, new research suggested an effective response: mindfulness.

Although mindfulness-based programs are not uncommon in schools these days, they’ve mainly been deployed to enhance students’ social, emotional, and cognitive skills; only a handful of programs and studies have examined the benefits of mindfulness for teachers, and in those cases, the research has focused largely on the general benefits for teachers’ mental health.

But in 2013, researchers at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds broke new ground when they studied the impact of an eight-week mindfulness course developed specifically for teachers, looking not only at its effects on the teachers’ emotional well-being and levels of stress but also on their performance in the classroom.

They found that teachers randomly assigned to take the course felt less anxious, depressed, and burned out afterward, and felt more compassionate toward themselves. What’s more, according to experts who watched the teachers in action, these teachers ran more productive classrooms after completing the course and improved at managing their students’ behavior as well. The results, published in Mind, Brain, and Education, show that stress and burnout levels actually increased among teachers who didn’t take the course.

The researchers speculate that mindfulness may carry these benefits for teachers because it helps them cope with classroom stress and stay focused on their work. “Mindfulness-based practices offer promise as a tool for enhancing teaching quality,” write the researchers, “which may, in turn, promote positive student outcomes and school success.”

There’s nothing simple about happiness.

Who doesn’t want to be happy? Happy is always good, right?

Sure. Just don’t be too happy, OK? Because June Gruber and her colleagues analyzed health data and found that it’s much better to be a little bit happy over a long period of time than to experience wild spikes in happiness. Another study, published in the journal Emotion, showed how seeking happiness at the right time may be more important than seeking happiness all the time. Instead, allowing yourself to feel emotions appropriate to a situation—whether or not they are pleasant in the moment—is a key to long-lasting happiness.

In a study published earlier in the year in the journal Psychological Science, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kristin Layous found that not all research-approved happiness practices work for everyone all the time. “Let’s say you publish a study that shows being grateful makes you happy—which it does,” Lyubomirsky recently told us. “But, actually, it’s much harder than that. It’s actually very hard to be grateful, and to be grateful on a regular basis, and at the right time, and for the right things.” She continued:

So, for example, some people have a lot of social support, some people have little social support, some people are extroverted, some people are introverted—you have to take into account the happiness seeker before you give them advice about what should make them happy. And then there are factors relevant to the activity that you do. How is it that you’re trying to become happier? How is it that you’re trying to stave off adaptation? Are you trying to appreciate more? Are you trying to do more acts of kindness? Are you trying to savor the moment? The kind of person you are, the different kinds of activities, and how often you do them, and where you do them—these are all going to matter.

The bottom line might be that if happiness were really that simple, we’d all be happy all the time. But we’re not, and that appears to be because there is no rigid formula for happiness. It’s a state that comes and goes in response to how we’re changing and how our world is changing.

Gratitude can save your life.

Or at least help lessen suicidal thoughts, says a study published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Across a four-week period, 209 college students answered questions to measure depression, suicidal thoughts, grit, gratitude, and meaning in life. The idea was to see if the positive traits—grit and gratitude—mitigated the negative ones. Since depression is a large contributing factor to suicide, they controlled for that variable throughout the study.

Grit, said the authors, is “characterized by the long-term interests and passions, and willingness to persevere through obstacles and setbacks to make progress toward goals aligned or separate from these passionate pursuits.” It stands to reason that someone with lots of grit wouldn’t waste much time on suicidal thoughts.

But what about gratitude? That entails noticing the benefits and gifts received from others, and it gives an individual a sense of belonging. That should make life living—and, indeed, the researchers found that gratitude and grit worked synergistically together to make life more meaningful and to reduce suicidal thoughts, independent of depression symptoms.

As the authors note, their study has huge clinical implications: If therapists can specifically foster gratitude in suicidal people, they should be able to increase their sense that life is worth living. This new finding adds to a pile of new research on the benefits of gratitude. Saying “thanks” can make you happier, sustain your marriage through tough times, reduce envy, and even improve physical health.

Employees are motivated by giving as well as getting.

Over the past two decades, work satisfaction has declined, while time spent at work has significantly increased. Not a good combination!

Would paying people more money help? Some studies have shown that rewarding employees for their hard work and late nights at the office with a bonus will make things a little better and quiet dissatisfaction. But in September, through the collaborative research of Lalin Anik, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton, Elizabeth W. Dunn, and Jordi Quoidbach, we learned that employee bonuses might have the most positive effects when they’re spent on others. The researchers suggested an alternative bonus offer that has the potential to provide some of the same benefits as team-based compensation—increased social support, cohesion, and performance—while carrying fewer drawbacks.

Their first experiment focused on broad, self-reported measures of the impact of prosocial bonuses on an employee’s job satisfaction. They were either given a bonus to spend on charity or were not given a bonus at all. Those who gave to charities reported increased happiness and job satisfaction. The second experiment was conducted in two parts—both focused on “sports team orientation” by looking at the difference between donating to a charity or a fellow employee—and attempted to see if these improved actual performance. In the first part of the experiment, these participants were given $20 and told to spend it on a teammate or on themselves over the course of the week. In the second part of this experiment, they were instructed to spend $22 on themselves or on a specified teammate over the course of the week. Both of these experiments found more positive effects for givers than those who spent the $22 on themselves.

This collaborative research indicates that prosocial bonuses can benefit both individuals and teams, on both psychological and “bottom line” indicators, in both the short and long-term. So when you receive your bonus this year, you might want to think twice before buying those pair of shoes you’ve been dying for, instead consider spending it on someone else—because, according to this research, you’ll probably be much happier and more satisfied with your job.

Subtle contextual factors influence our sense of right and wrong.

An out-of-control train will kill five people. You can switch the train onto another track and save them—but doing so will kill one person. What should you do?

A series of experiments published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that on one day you’ll divert the train and save those five lives—but on another you might not. It all depends on how the dilemma is framed and how we’ve been thinking about ourselves.

Through the train dilemma and other experiments, the study revealed two factors that can influence our moral decisions. The first involves how morality has been defined for you, in this case around consequences or rules. For example, when researchers asked participants to think in terms of consequences, some readily diverted the train, thus saving four lives. On the other hand, those who prompted to think in terms of rules (e.g., “thou shalt not kill”) let the five die. But that factor was influenced by another that depends on memory and whether your past ethical or unethical behavior is on your mind—a memory of a good deed might make you more likely to cheat, for example, if urged to think of consequences. It’s the complex interaction between those two factors that shapes your decision.

That wasn’t the only study published during the past year that revealed how susceptible we are to context. One study found that people are more moral in the morning than in the afternoon. Another study, cleverly titled “Hunger Games,” found that when people are hungry, they express more support for charitable giving. Yet another experiment discovered that thinking about money makes you more inclined to cheat at a game—but thinking about time keeps you honest.

The bottom line is that our sense of right and wrong is heavily influenced by seemingly trivial variables in memory, in our bodies, and in changes within our environment. This doesn’t necessarily lead us to pessimistic conclusions about humanity—in fact, knowing how our minds work might help us to make better moral decisions.

Anyone can cultivate empathic skills—even psychopaths.

In daily life, calling someone a “psychopath” or a “sociopath” is a way of saying that the person is beyond redemption. Are they?

When neuroscientist James Fallon accidentally discovered that his brain resembled that of a psychopath—showing less activity in areas of the frontal lobe linked to empathy—he was confused. After all, Fallon was a happily married man, with a career and good relationships with colleagues. How could he be beyond redemption?

Additional genetic tests revealed “high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy.” What was going on? Fallon decided he was a “pro-social psychopath,” someone whose genetic and neurological inheritance makes it hard for him to feel empathy, but who was gifted with a good upbringing and environment—good enough to overcome latent psychopathic tendencies.

This self-description found support in a study published this year by Swiss and German researchers, which showed education levels and “social desirability” seemed to improve empathy in diagnosed psychopaths. Another new study found that empathy deficits don’t necessarily lead to aggression.

It seems that psychopaths can be taught to feel empathy and compassion, though they have a disability that makes developing those skills difficult. When a team of researchers looked at the brain activity of psychopathic criminals in the Netherlands, for example, they discovered the predictable empathic deficits. But they also found that it made a difference in their brains to simply ask the criminals to empathize with others—hinting that empathy may be repressed rather than missing entirely in people classified as psychopaths. For some, at least, it may help a great deal to lift that repression.

Psychopathy remains an intractable mental illness and social problem—this year’s studies of treatment did not reveal a magic bullet that would turn psychopaths into angels. But we can take heart in the fact that if they can develop empathic skills, anyone can.

Editing Your Life's Stories Can Create Happier Endings (NPR)

The topic of this NPR episode from All Things Considered is one of the premises of narrative therapy, a useful form of cognitive therapy based on the tendency of the human mind to make sense of the world through narrative (story telling).

Editing Your Life's Stories Can Create Happier Endings

by Lulu Miller
January 01, 2014 | 8 min 54 sec

• Download
• Transcript

It was a rainy night in October when my nephew Lewis passed the Frankenstein statue standing in front of a toy store. The 2 1/2-year-old boy didn't see the monster at first, and when he turned around, he was only inches from Frankenstein's green face, bloodshot eyes and stitched-up skin.

Daniel Horowitz for NPR

The 4-foot-tall monster terrified my nephew so much that he ran deep into the toy store. And on the way back out, he simply couldn't face the statue. He jumped into his mother's arms and had to bury his head in her shoulder.

For hours after the incident, Lewis was stuck. He kept replaying the image of Frankenstein's face in his mind. "Mom, remember Frankenstein?" he asked over and over again. He and his mom talked about how scary the statue was, how Lewis had to jump into her arms. It was "like a record loop," my sister said.

But then, suddenly, Lewis' story completely changed. My sister was recounting the tale to the family: how they left the store, how they had to walk by Frankenstein. And then — "I peed on him!!" Lewis blurted out triumphantly, with a glint in his eyes.

In that instant, Lewis had overpowered Frankenstein — if only in his mind.

"Well, your nephew is a brilliant story editor,'" says psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia.

Wilson has been studying how small changes in a person's own stories and memories can help with emotional health. He calls the process "story editing." And he says small tweaks in the interpretation of life events can reap huge benefits.

This process is essentially what happens during months, or years, of therapy. But Wilson has discovered ways you can change your story in only about 45 minutes.

Wilson first stumbled on the technique back in the early 1980s, when he found that a revised story helped college students who were struggling academically. "I'm bad at school" was the old story many of them were telling themselves. That story leads to a self-defeating cycle that keeps them struggling, Wilson says.

The new story Wilson gave them was: "Everyone fails at first." He introduced the students to this idea by having them read accounts from other students who had struggled with grades at first and then improved. It was a 40-minute intervention that had effects three years later.

"The ones who got our little story-editing nudge improved their grades, whereas the others didn't," Wilson says. "And to our surprise ... those who got our story-editing intervention were more likely to stay in college. The people in the control group were more likely to drop out."

Similar interventions have also helped students feel like they fit in socially at college and have helped parents to stop abusing their kids.

The idea is that if you believe you are something else — perhaps smarter, more socially at ease — you can allow for profound changes to occur.

You can even try story-editing yourself at home with these writing exercises. Simply pick a troubling event. And write about it for 15 minutes each day for four days. That's it.

These exercises have been shown to help relieve mental anguish, improve health and increase attendance at work.

No one is sure why the approach works. But Wilson's theory is that trying to understand why a painful event happened is mentally consuming. People get stuck in thinking, "Why did he leave me?" or "Why was she so disappointed in me?" Or for Lewis, "Where did that scary Frankenstein face come from?"

As you write about the troubling, confusing event again and again, eventually you begin to make sense of it. You can put those consuming thoughts to rest.

So as you look forward to changing yourself this year, consider looking back on whatever your Frankensteins may be. And if you squint your eyes a little and turn your head just a bit, you may see that your leg was lifted. That maybe you did pee on him after all.

Nociceptin: Nature's Balm for the Stressed Brain

A new study was able to demonstrate the importance of the brain's stress-damping system, known as the nociceptin system. According to Wikipedia:

Nociceptin is an opioid-related peptide, but it does not act at the classic opioid receptors (namely, mu, kappa, and delta opioid receptors), and its actions are not antagonized by the opioid antagonist naloxone. Nociceptin is a potent anti-analgesic. Nociceptin is widely distributed in the CNS; it is found in many regions of the hypothalamus, brainstem, and forebrain, as well as in the ventral horn and dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Nociceptin acts at the Nociceptin receptor (NOP1), formerly known as ORL-1. The receptor is also widely distributed in the brain, including in the cortex, anterior olfactory nucleus, lateral septum, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, central gray, pontine nuclei, interpeduncular nucleus, substantia nigra, raphe complex, locus coeruleus, and spinal cord.

The new study shows that nociceptin anti-stress system to prevent and even reverse some of the cellular effects of acute stress in an animal model. The idea now is to know how to trigger this system so that we can use it therapeutically - it seems it would be really helpful in working with PTSD.

Full Citation: 
Ciccocioppo, R, de Guglielmo, G, Hansson, AC, Ubaldi, M, Kallupi, M, Cruz, MT, Oleata, CS, Heilig, M, and Roberto, M. (2014, Jan 8). Restraint Stress Alters Nociceptin/Orphanin FQ and CRF Systems in the Rat Central Amygdala: Significance for Anxiety-Like Behaviors. Journal of Neuroscience, 2014; 34 (2): 363 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2400-13.2014

Nociceptin: Nature's Balm for the Stressed Brain

Jan. 8, 2014 — Collaborating scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Camerino in Italy have published new findings on a system in the brain that naturally moderates the effects of stress. The findings confirm the importance of this stress-damping system, known as the nociceptin system, as a potential target for therapies against anxiety disorders and other stress-related conditions.

"We were able to demonstrate the ability of this nociceptin anti-stress system to prevent and even reverse some of the cellular effects of acute stress in an animal model," said biologist Marisa Roberto, associate professor in TSRI's addiction research department, known as the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders.

Roberto was a principal investigator for the study, which appears in the January 8, 2014 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

A Variety of Effects

Nociceptin, which is produced in the brain, belongs to the family of opioid neurotransmitters. But the resemblance essentially ends there. Nociceptin binds to its own specific receptors called NOP receptors and doesn't bind well to other opioid receptors. The scientists who discovered it in the mid-1990s also noted that when nociceptin is injected into the brains of mice, it doesn't kill pain -- it makes pain worse.

The molecule was eventually named for this "nociceptive" (pain-producing) effect. However, subsequent studies demonstrated that, by activating its corresponding receptor NOP, nociceptin acted as an antiopioid and not only affected pain perception, but also blocked the rewarding properties of opioids such as morphine and heroin.

Perhaps of greatest interest, several studies in rodents have found evidence that nociceptin can act in the amygdala, a part of the brain that controls basic emotional responses, to counter the usual anxiety-producing effects of acute stress. There have been hints, too, that this activity occurs automatically as part of a natural stress-damping feedback response.

Scientists have wanted to know more about the anti-stress activity of the nociceptin/NOP system, in part because it might offer a better way to treat stress-related conditions. The latter are common in modern societies, including post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the drug-withdrawal stress that often defeats addicts' efforts to kick the habit.

Reducing the Stress Reaction

For the new study, Roberto and her collaborators looked in more detail at the nociceptin/NOP system in the central amygdala.

First, Markus Heilig's laboratory at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the NIH, measured the expression of NOP-coding genes in the central amygdala in rats. Heilig's team found strong evidence that stress changes the activity of nociceptin/NOP in this region, indicating that the system does indeed work as a feedback mechanism to damp the effects of stress. In animals subjected to a standard laboratory stress condition, NOP gene activity rose sharply, as if to compensate for the elevated stress.

Roberto and her laboratory at TSRI then used a separate technique to measure the electrical activity of stress-sensitive neurons in the central amygdala. As expected, this activity rose when levels of the stress hormone CRF rose and started out at even higher levels in the stressed rats. But this stress-sensitive neuronal activity could be dialed down by adding nociceptin. The stress-blocking effect was especially pronounced in the restraint-stressed rats -- probably due to their stress-induced increase in NOP receptors.

Finally, biologist Roberto Ciccocioppo and his laboratory at the University of Camerino conducted a set of behavioral experiments showing that injections of nociceptin specifically into the rat central amygdala powerfully reduced anxiety-like behaviors in the stressed rats, but showed no behavioral effect in non-stressed rats.

The three sets of experiments together demonstrate, said Roberto, that "stress exposure leads to an over-activation of the nociceptin/NOP system in the central amygdala, which appears to be an adaptive feedback response designed to bring the brain back towards normalcy."

In future studies, she and her colleagues hope to determine whether this nociceptin/NOP feedback system somehow becomes dysfunctional in chronic stress conditions. "I suspect that chronic stress induces changes in amygdala neurons that can contribute to the development of some anxiety disorders," said Roberto. Compounds that mimic nociceptin by activating NOP receptors -- but, unlike nociceptin, could be taken in pill form -- are under development by pharmaceutical companies. Some of these appear to be safe and well tolerated in lab animals and may soon be ready for initial tests in human patients, Ciccocioppo said.

Here is the abstract from the original article, which is hidden from public view behind a paywall.

Restraint Stress Alters Nociceptin/Orphanin FQ and CRF Systems in the Rat Central Amygdala: Significance for Anxiety-Like Behaviors
Roberto Ciccocioppo1, Giordano de Guglielmo1, Anita C. Hansson2, Massimo Ubaldi1, Marsida Kallupi1,3, Maureen T. Cruz3, Christopher S. Oleata3, Markus Heilig4, and Marisa Roberto3

Author Affiliations

1. School of Pharmacy, Pharmacology Unit, University of Camerino, Camerino 62032, Italy,
2. Institute of Psychopharmacology at the Central Institute of Mental Health, Medical Faculty Mannheim/University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg 68159, Germany,
3. Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California 92037, and
4. National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1108

Author contributions: R.C., A.C.H., M.H., and M.R. designed research; R.C., G.d.G., A.C.H., M.K., M.T.C., C.S.O., and M.R. performed research; A.C.H. and M.U. analyzed data; R.C., M.H., and M.R. wrote the paper.

Abstract

Corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is the primary mediator of stress responses, and nociceptin/orphanin FQ (N/OFQ) plays an important role in the modulation of these stress responses. Thus, in this multidisciplinary study, we explored the relationship between the N/OFQ and the CRF systems in response to stress. Using in situ hybridization (ISH), we assessed the effect of body restraint stress on the gene expression of CRF and N/OFQ-related genes in various subdivisions of the amygdala, a critical brain structure involved in the modulation of stress response and anxiety-like behaviors. We found a selective upregulation of the NOP and downregulation of the CRF1 receptor transcripts in the CeA and in the BLA after body restraint. Thus, we performed intracellular electrophysiological recordings of GABAA-mediated IPSPs in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) to explore functional interactions between CRF and N/OFQ systems in this brain region. Acute application of CRF significantly increased IPSPs in the CeA, and this enhancement was blocked by N/OFQ. Importantly, in stress-restraint rats, baseline CeA GABAergic responses were elevated and N/OFQ exerted a larger inhibition of IPSPs compared with unrestraint rats. The NOP antagonist [Nphe1]-nociceptin(1–13)NH2 increased the IPSP amplitudes in restraint rats but not in unrestraint rats, suggesting a functional recruitment of the N/OFQ system after acute stress. Finally, we evaluated the anxiety-like response in rats subjected to restraint stress and nonrestraint rats after N/OFQ microinjection into the CeA. Intra-CeA injections of N/OFQ significantly and selectively reduced anxiety-like behavior in restraint rats in the elevated plus maze. These combined results demonstrate that acute stress increases N/OFQ systems in the CeA and that N/OFQ has antistress properties.

A Calm Look at the Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience – Mirror Neurons (Wired)

Mirror neurons, if you believe the hype, are the keys to learning (both procedural and affective), empathy, altruism, intersubjectivity, and a host of other complex skills. In the article below, Christian Jarrett offers a summary for a recent scientific paper on mirror neurons and what we currently know (and don't know) - beyond the hype.

Here is the abstract by J.M. Kilner and R.N. Lemon for the study being reviewed:

Mirror neurons were discovered over twenty years ago in the ventral premotor region F5 of the macaque monkey. Since their discovery much has been written about these neurons, both in the scientific literature and in the popular press. They have been proposed to be the neuronal substrate underlying a vast array of different functions. Indeed so much has been written about mirror neurons that last year they were referred to, rightly or wrongly, as ‘‘The most hyped concept in neuroscience’’. Here we try to cut through some of this hyperbole and review what is currently known (and not known) about mirror neurons.

Good stuff - and a little needed clarity. From Wired.

Full Citation:
Kilner, JM and Lemon, RN. (2013, Dec 2). What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons. Current Biology, Volume 23, Issue 23, R1057-R1062.

A Calm Look at the Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience – Mirror Neurons

By Christian Jarrett
12.13.13


Image: Mark Dumont/Flickr
Last year I suggested that mirror neurons are the most hyped concept in neuroscience. Discovered in the 90s by neuroscientists in Italy studying monkeys, these are motor cells in the brain (involved in the control of movement) that are also activated – mirror-like – by the sight of the same movement by others. Thankfully a new open access review has just been published that provides us with a calm update on what we know so far about these fascinating cells.

First, here’s some background on the hype. Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran says these cells shaped our civilisation; in fact he says they underlie what it is to be human – being responsible for our powers of empathy, language and the emergence of human culture, including the widespread use of tools and fire. When mirror neurons don’t work properly, Ramachandran believes the result is autism.

For the record, a detailed investigation earlier this year found little evidence to support his theory about autism. Other experts have debunked Ramachandran’s claims linking mirror neurons to the birth of human culture. The activity of mirror neurons can be altered by simple and brief training tasks showing that these cells are just as likely to have been shaped by culture as the shaper of it.

The exaggerated and oversimplified story about mirror neurons has been swallowed whole by the media and much of the public. For a blast of this neuro-bunk try searching for “mirror neurons” on the Daily Mail website. For instance, the paper ran an article earlier this year that claimed the most popular romantic films are distinguished by the fact they activate our mirror neurons. Another claimed that it’s thanks to mirror neurons that hospital patients benefit from having visitors. In fact, there is no scientific research that directly backs either of these claims, both of which represent reductionism gone mad.

A brief search on Twitter also shows how far the concept of powerful empathy-giving mirror neurons has spread into popular consciousness. “‘Mirror neurons’ are responsible for us cringing whenever we see someone get seriously hurt,” the @WoWFactz feed announced to its 398,000 followers with misleading confidence earlier this month. “Mirror neurons are so powerful that we are even able to mirror or echo each other’s intentions,” claimed self-help author Dr Caroline Leaf in a tweet sent a few weeks ago.

In fact we do not yet have the research to show that mirror neurons are vital for human empathy, and there are reasons to believe that empathy is possible without them. For starters, we are able to comprehend the intentions behind the actions of other people or animals even if we’ve never performed, or are incapable of performing, their actions ourselves. Many brain damaged patients who can no longer produce speech are still able understand it. There are other patients who have lost the ability to express emotion yet can still understand the emotion of others.

Now a pair of neuroscientists in London have published a welcome review in the respected journal Current Biology entitled “What we know currently about mirror neurons.” In contrast to the hype that usually surrounds these cells, James Kilner and Roger Lemon at UCL have taken a calm, objective look at the literature.

They acknowledge that it is difficult to interpret mirror neuron activity in humans (using brain imaging) and so they focus on the 25 papers that have involved the direct recording of individual brain cells in monkeys. This research reveals that motor cells with mirror-like properties are found in parts of the front of the brain involved in motor control (so-called premotor regions and in the primary motor cortex) and also in the parietal lobe near the crown of the head.

Reading their paper it soon becomes clear that the term “mirror neurons” conceals a complex mix of cell types. Some motor cells only show mirror-like responses when a monkey sees a live performer in front of them; other cells are also responsive to movements seen on video. Some mirror neurons appear to be fussy – they only respond to a very specific type of action; others are less specific and respond to a far broader range of observed movements. There are even some mirror neurons that are activated by the sound of a particular movement. Others show mirror suppression – that is their activity is reduced during action observation. Another study found evidence in monkeys of touch-sensitive neurons that respond to the sight of another animal being touched in the same location (Ramachandran calls these “Gandhi cells” because he says they dissolve the barriers between human beings).

Importantly, Kilner and Lemon also highlight findings from monkeys showing how the activity of mirror neurons is modulated by such factors as the angle of view, the reward value of the observed movement, and the overall goal of a movement, such as whether it is intended to grasp an object or place it in the mouth. These findings are significant because they show how mirror neurons are not merely activated by incoming sensory information, but also by formulations developed elsewhere in the brain about the meaning of what is being observed. This is not to detract from the fascination of mirror neurons. It does show they are not the beginning of a causal path. Rather they are embedded in a complex network of brain activity.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting Kilner and Lemon’s useful summary of where we are at regards identifying mirror neuron function in humans. While Ramachandran and others have been quick to find the roots of humanity in these cells, the reality is that we’re only at the early stages of establishing whether mirror neurons exist in humans. Single-cell recording of the kind used in monkeys is too invasive to be performed in people, other than in exceptional circumstances (such as during required brain surgery). The single study of this kind published to date did find evidence for mirror neurons in the human frontal cortex and temporal lobe.

Brain imaging studies with humans have also reported what looks like mirror neuron activity in many of the same brain regions identified in monkeys. However, many of these papers only looked at the observation of actions, so they can’t determine if the same brain regions are involved in both action and observation. Other brain imaging studies have exploited the principal of adaptation – neurons get less responsive the more they’re activated. If a brain region has mirror properties there should be signs of this fatigue after action performance and observation – in fact the results are mixed with two of five adaptation studies failing to find evidence of mirror-like properties. This could be because mirror neurons don’t show adaptation, but we’ll have to see.

James Kilner and Roger Lemon are to be applauded for providing this much needed overview of the field. No doubt about it – mirror neurons are an exciting, intriguing discovery – but when you see them mentioned in the media, remember that most of the research on these cells has been conducted in monkeys. Remember too that there are many different types of mirror neuron. And that we’re still trying to establish for sure whether they exist in humans, and how they compare with the monkey versions. As for understanding the functional significance of these cells … don’t be fooled: that journey has only just begun.



~ Christian Jarrett is a cognitive neuroscientist turned science writer. He’s editor of The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog, staff writer on their magazine The Psychologist, and a columnist for 99U. He’s also author of The Rough Guide to Psychology, editor of 30-Second Psychology, and co-author of This Book Has Issues. His next book due in 2014 is Great Myths of the Brain.

Read more by Christian Jarrett
Follow @Psych_Writer on Twitter.

David P. Barash - Over Time, Buddhism and Science Agree

From the ever-interesting Nautilus, evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology (University of Washington) David P Barash offers a brief and interesting overview of his most recent book, Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science (2013).

Over Time, Buddhism and Science Agree

Understanding the impermanence of everything—including ourselves.

By David P. Barash | Illustration by Chad Hagen
January 9, 2014

 

I REMEMBER my grandfather commenting—wry amusement tinged with grim resignation—that what made him finally feel old was seeing his children reach middle age. I was a child then. Now I see my own children, not quite middle aged, starting to have children of their own.

Becoming a grandparent is quite lovely, an affirmation of continuity and a front-row-seat to watch (and even, on occasion, participate) as life itself is conveyed into the future. But aging is also our most undeniable memento mori, a reminder not so much of life as one’s own eventual death. My grandfather’s death frightened me as few things have since, except for the recurring recognition (usually at night, alone, in the dark) that his life, everyone’s life, even—astoundingly—my own, is short indeed.

All things, especially living ones, are marinating in the river of time. We see and understand that our bodies will wear out and we will die. At least that’s how it looks through the lens of Western science, where all things come to an end, winding down in a final surrender to entropy. But there’s another perspective, surprisingly in harmony with science, that helps us revisit that huge and ancient terror—fear of time itself—in a new and perhaps even reassuring way. And that is the perspective offered by Buddhism.

For Buddhists, the “center cannot hold,” as the poet W.B. Yeats pointed out, because it doesn’t exist as something rigidly separate from everything else. Nothing is permanent and unchanging, ourselves included. Attempting to cling to a solid, immutable core of a self is a fool’s errand because time not only creates anarchy, it provides the unavoidable matrix within which everything—animate and inanimate, sentient and insensate—ebbs and flows.

As Buddhists see it, and as scientists increasingly agree, all organisms are necessarily, unavoidably—even marvelously and gloriously—impermanent. In Sanskrit, the word for impermanence is anitya. To understand anitya is to achieve something remarkable: opening a door onto the accord between modern western science and ancient eastern wisdom.

In his book, Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg—one of the commanding figures in the development of modern quantum physics—wrote that “in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.” Contrary to Rudyard Kipling’s injunction, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” I have found, as a trained biologist, that some of the most fruitful developments in modern thinking occur precisely where the twain of biology and Buddhism meet.

Even inanimate objects that appear solid and persistent are revealed by modern physics to be in a constant state of flux. An iron bar is mostly empty space, and even the ostensibly solid, sub-atomic particles occupying that space are either moving so rapidly as to be unimaginable or, alternately, exist as clouds of probability rather than as stationary monuments to permanence.

With living things, the world is even less fixed. As Yeats observed: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Biologists as well as Buddhists know that living stuff is always dancing, constantly replenished by, and created from, nonliving components. At every moment, our existence takes place only on the instantaneous, knife-edge of Now, which can never be captured and held immobile.

The story goes that as a young man, the Buddha sought to overcome the imperfections of the real world—sickness, old age, and death—by following the path of traditional Hindu asceticism, mortifying the flesh and nearly starving himself. His eventual enlightenment, however, is said to have involved recognition that all things are temporary, ever-changing, and impermanent. Unlike Christ, who promises eternal life, the last words of the Buddha reportedly began, “Decay is inherent in all things.”

But even decay—an unavoidable consequence of time impacting the real world—isn’t something to regret. As the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and scholar, Thich Nhat Hanh, put it, impermanence (anitya) is intimately tied to continuity. “Look back,” he counsels, “and you will see that you not only exist in your father and mother, but you also exist in your grandparents and in your great grandparents.” Look again, and you will see we “have been gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants,” he writes. “Nothing can be born and also nothing can die.” To understand this, and to do so deep in our ever-changing bones, may forever change our sense of time and what it means to participate in life on earth.

AGING is undoubtedly the most apparent and unavoidable manifestation of how anitya is both revealed by time and produced by it, how impermanence is manifest in every body. Precisely how bodies age is the domain of biological gerontology, which studies such events as the increased accumulation of somatic mutations, reductions in tissue elasticity, increase in autoimmune responses, and diminished length of telomeres (end-pieces of chromosomes that can be likened to the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces, and which evidently protect chromosomes as they undergo cell division). Most human cells poop out after about 60 or so replications, apparently in conjunction with the loss of telomeres, which become a bit shorter with every bout of mitosis—although it isn’t clear whether aging-related decrepitude results from this reduction in telomere length, or vice versa.

Whatever the causative sequence, there is no fountain of youth. We can reduce the rate of decline by eating healthy foods, reducing stress, and exercising regularly. But the effect, at best, is to slow the process, never to stop it altogether. To be a museum conservator, exercise fanatic, or just a dedicated daily dental flosser is to be more Sisyphus than Ponce de León.

But this is too pessimistic. A Buddhistically informed view suggests that even as everything changes over time, this very impermanence is connected to a deeper kind of persistence. One of the more striking visual demonstrations of this is the practice among Tibetan monks of constructing gorgeous sand mandalas, complex designs and patterns laboriously built over many days, after which they are ceremoniously swept away. Proxies for ourselves, mandalas symbolize the impermanence of everything, no matter how lovely, complex, treasured, or important.

 

 Sands of Time: Tibetan Buddhist monks create a mandala of colored sand, a symbol of impermanence.DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images

Some years ago, while waiting for a wilderness permit at a Forest Service ranger station in the small town of Sedro Woolley, Wash., I overheard a radio message sent in by a ranger: “Dead elk in Agnes Creek decomposing nicely. Over.” The ranger was ecologically sophisticated as well as Buddhistically accurate. Although a decomposing elk might not be everyone’s idea of “nice,” the process is as necessary to a healthy ecosystem as it is unavoidable. (The “over” was an especially nice touch.)

For another good example of biological anitya, one that overturned prior biological dogma, consider Dolly, who famously emerged as the world’s first artificially cloned sheep. Before Dolly, it was widely held that once vertebrate cells had fully differentiated—becoming, say, muscle or skin or, in the case of Dolly’s “mother,” mammary gland tissue—they were permanently fixed and couldn’t become a different kind of cell.

Dolly was created when an already differentiated nucleus was implanted into an enucleated egg cell, and a new animal emerged, complete with a full array of distinctly different cell types. Cell differentiation is evidently not a one-way street, as previously believed. One of the things built into life itself is, ironically, impermanence and the capacity to change.

The reality of anitya extends to whole genomes, which are permeable to genes introduced from other lineages. This is why we can put cold-resistance genes from halibut into frost-vulnerable tomatoes. (Whether we should is another question.) Even without high-tech human intervention, the evolutionary reality of continuity among all living things is inseparable from the fact that all lineages have themselves evolved—that is, they have changed over time, and continue to do so. The seemingly rigid boundaries between cells and within species are flexible and inconstant. Living things do not simply have the capacity for impermanence; rather, at what we might oxymoronically call their “core,” they are profoundly and deeply impermanent and ever-changing.

What about whole organisms taken in their entirety? After all, each halibut, hickory tree, or human being appears to be distinct and fixed in time—or at least identifiable as this object, this creature, this person. But each “this” is largely an artifact of our own limited perception of time and its impact. Wait long enough, give time the opportunity to work its way, and every living thing changes, undergoing embryogenesis, growth, senescence, and finally death. In short, time will tell.

Question: When a Buddhist nun goes to a beauty parlor, what is she is likely to get? Answer: an impermanent.

IT would seem, nonetheless, that living things struggle to defy anitya, to resist change. The technical term among physiologists is “homeostasis,” the process whereby organisms maintain their internal environment within limits. This is notably true of mammals, which possess various adaptations to keep their internal temperature independent of the outside environment. At least as important, however, is the internal chemical environment: not too acid, not too alkaline, enough sodium, potassium, and calcium. Without a precisely stable Goldilocks balance, life ceases.

In a narrow sense, that is a defiance of anitya. But the physiological constancy required by life can only be achieved in what physicists label an “open system,” which receives regular inputs of energy and material from elsewhere. In the case of living things, this means that even the temporary, seeming defiance of impermanence can only occur via a never-ending introduction of new stuff. In the short term, that means energy-carrying molecules that permit respiration and metabolism; in a longer perspective, that means proteins and other substances involved in growth, maintenance, and repair.

Paradoxically, maintaining a state of apparent constancy (i.e., life) requires continual openness to change, in this case exchange with an organism’s environment. When that exchange ceases, so does life; although even then, every body continues to change, whether via decomposition, incorporation into another body, or incineration. Recall that elk undergoing its mandatory changes oh so nicely.

Let’s consider that elk—or ourselves—in an earlier and more sprightly state, and look at two phenomena essential to that condition we call “alive”: respiration and digestion/metabolism. We regularly inhale about a half liter of air, relatively high in oxygen and low in carbon dioxide. Our bodies combine some of that oxygen with food molecules we earlier consumed, generating energy. The half-liter that we subsequently exhale contains less oxygen and more CO2, a by-product of metabolism. “New” atoms are incorporated into our bodies at every moment, and “old” ones are rearranged, while some are pushed out. Every few days we essentially recycle ourselves, reminiscent of an old advertising jingle for milk, “There’s a new you coming every day!” Except it’s more like every hour, minute, second, instant.

Then, of course, there is evolution, the process that has produced and underlies all life. Evolution is change—change in the make-up of a lineage over time. Although certain organisms have evolved rapidly (human beings, elephants, bacteria), others do so slowly. They include such peculiar creatures as coelacanths (lobe-finned fishes believed extinct before one was caught in the deep ocean off Madagascar in the 1930s), tuataras (peculiar lizards found only on several islands off the coast of New Zealand), or horseshoe “crabs” (closely related to spiders and which appear not to have changed significantly in a few hundred million years). But even these “living fossils” have themselves evolved—that is, changed over time—compared to their ancestral, soft-bodied pre-Cambrian ancestors, just as they will continue to do so—or go extinct—when their environment changes.

What about genes themselves? Aren’t they permanent rather than temporary? As Richard Dawkins effectively popularized in his book, The Selfish Gene, bodies are merely temporary structures constructed by their constituent genes, for their—the genes’—benefit. Bodies, suffused as they are with anitya, come and go, whereas genes go on and on, catapulted into the future either as offspring or in the bodies of other relatives. One chapter in Dawkins’ book is titled “Immortal Coils.”

Although the potential immortality of genes is an effective simile, it is not strictly true. Biologists know that some genetically based traits are “highly conserved,” which means they are unlikely to change over time. These include the commands undergirding such basic intracellular activities as how energy is derived from hydrocarbon molecules, and the coding system by which nucleic acids are translated into proteins. The fidelity with which these genes are accurately replicated between generations is remarkable, but also not surprising, given that errors in such fundamental processes are quickly selected against, leaving the unchanged to persist.

But not forever. Mutations happen. On average, genes mutate at a rate of about once in a million replications. Given enough time, errors are inevitable. Given changes in their environment, beneficial mutations are selected for, while hurtful ones are selected against. Everyone’s eventual and unavoidable death has been dramatically expressed by W. Somerset Maugham as “The Appointment in Samarra.” Even genes do not—and cannot—escape their appointment with anitya.

 

This Mortal Coil: Even genes, selfish as they are, are subject to mutation and change.

Most mutations result from incorrect base pairings, involving the four key molecules of heredity: adenine (A), cytosine (C), thymine (T), and guanine (G), when by accident they fail to line up according to the normal pattern of A-with-T and C-with-G. By contrast, the remarkably rigid spiral backbone of DNA—which gives rise to its double helix structure—consists of repeating sugar and phosphate groups, which are more stable than the base pairings, since the former rely on “regular” chemical bonds whereas the latter occur via weaker “hydrogen bonds.”

But even here, change is inevitable, although presumably less consequential. Hydrogen atoms that are ubiquitous throughout DNA molecules are constantly switching places with other hydrogen atoms in their immediate surroundings; the resulting “hydrogen exchange” is well documented, insuring that even a non-mutated DNA molecule is something of a shape-shifter, even when it is ostensibly resting. So even the most unchanging component of potentially immortal DNA is immersed in anitya, constantly refashioning itself.

ZEN koans are riddles intended to shake seeker-monks free of their excessive dependence on linear thought processes. A famous koan asks the novitiate to describe her face before she was born. A good answer these days would have something to do with DNA, but it would also have to incorporate ebb and flow, process and pattern, contingency and probability, a paradoxically permanent state of impermanence.

Over time, anitya is manifested at many different levels: the ecological flux of biogeochemical cycles, the unavoidable conveyor belt of birth to aging to death, and the instantaneous transformations in all parts of living organisms. While our illusion of permanence may be fostered by our sense of continuous memory, psychologists now understand that memories are not only frequently incorrect but as impermanent as our physical substance.

From a scientific perspective, there is every reason for biologists to join with Buddhists in rejecting what the latter call svabhava, fixed and unchanging essence. At our deepest, molecular levels, we have no essence. “Time is the substance I am made of,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”

In Eastern mythology, the story is told about a king who called his Wisdom Council together and asked for an observation that would always be true, for all living things, at all times. They agreed upon the following: “This too shall pass.” The universal recipe for anitya is as simple as it is inevitable: Start with the stuff of the world, then marinate in tincture of time.

When Alice Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, a New York Times editorial observed that the writer “can do anything with time that she wants, hasten it, elide it, slow it down. But when we put the story down, we feel that time has happened to us.” My grandfather felt that time was happening to him most keenly when he saw its impact on those around him, especially those he loved, who were much younger than he was, and should have been less impacted by it.

But the truth, of course, is that time happens to all of us, well, all the time! And a Buddhist perspective helps us to understand and even revel in the impermanence that results.


~ David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science (Oxford University Press).

The Mind Report - Laurie Santos and Katherine Milkman: Cognitive Science of New Year's Resolutions

From bloggingheads.tv, this episode of The Mind Report looks at the science behind why most people fail to maintain their New Year's Resolutions.

The Mind Report

Recorded: Jan 7 | Posted: Jan 11, 2014

Laurie Santos (Yale University) and Katherine Milkman (Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania)

• The cognitive science of New Year's resolutions   4:05
• When you should start a new diet   3:18
• Seeking your next "fresh-start moment"   3:39
• Temptation bundling, or exercising with "The Hunger Games"   5:58
• How to build good habits   5:02
• More tips on sticking to your resolutions   3:37

Play entire video

FOLLOW: Laurie Santos Katherine Milkman

Download:   wmv | mp4 | mp3 | fast mp3

Links

• Katherine's paper, "The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior"
• Katherine's paper on temptation bundling (PDF)
• StickK.com

The Mind Report | Jan 11, 2014 | Laurie Santos & Katherine Milkman