Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice (On Being)

Leonard Mlodinow is the author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012), among other books. Some of the material in this episode is from Mlodinow's earlier book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008).

Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice

May 1, 2014

Fundamental forces of physics somehow determine everything that happens, as physicist Leonard Mlodinow has written, “from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy.” Yet he has intriguing perspective on the gap between theory and reality — and the fascinating interplay between a life in science and life in the world. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, he asks questions about our capacity to create our lives, while reflecting on extreme human cruelty — and courage.

Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview- Leonard Mlodinow - (mp3, 1:14:33)
• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist, and the author of several books including The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life. He's also written for television, including "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Production Credits

Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
Executive Editor: Trent Gilliss
Senior Producer: Lily Percy
Technical Director: Chris Heagle
Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Daniel Shaw - Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

I came across this article as I began a new book, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (2014), by Daniel Shaw. Here is the blurb for the book, which reveals why I picked this for my next read:

In this volume, Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, Daniel Shaw presents a way of understanding the traumatic impact of narcissism as it is engendered developmentally, and as it is enacted relationally. Focusing on the dynamics of narcissism in interpersonal relations, Shaw describes the relational system of what he terms the 'traumatizing narcissist' as a system of subjugation – the objectification of one person in a relationship as the means of enforcing the dominance of the subjectivity of the other.

Daniel Shaw illustrates the workings of this relational system of subjugation in a variety of contexts: theorizing traumatic narcissism as an intergenerationally transmitted relational/developmental trauma; and exploring the clinician's experience working with the adult children of traumatizing narcissists. He explores the relationship of cult leaders and their followers, and examines how traumatic narcissism has lingered vestigially in some aspects of the psychoanalytic profession.

Bringing together theories of trauma and attachment, intersubjectivity and complementarity, and the rich clinical sensibility of the Relational Psychoanalysis tradition, Shaw demonstrates how narcissism can best be understood not merely as character, but as the result of the specific trauma of subjugation, in which one person is required to become the object for a significant other who demands hegemonic subjectivity. Traumatic Narcissism presents therapeutic clinical opportunities not only for psychoanalysts of different schools, but for all mental health professionals working with a wide variety of modalities. Although primarily intended for the professional psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, this is also a book that therapy patients and lay readers will find highly readable and illuminating.

The developmental trauma angle is the piece that is most interesting to me as a therapist (so many of the clients I see suffered childhoods with narcissistic parents, and they carry wounds invisible to most people, including other therapists), but I am also interested in the cult leader/abusive teacher angle on this - for obvious reasons if you have been a long-time reader of this blog.

In the introduction to Traumatic Narcissism, Shaw mentions an article from 2003, Traumatic Abuse in Cults, and how popular and read that original article was on the web, where it is freely available.

Long-time readers are no doubt aware of my efforts to shine a critical light on a couple of abusive gurus in the integral spiritual community. This article explains their original wounding and how that gets played out in the abuse and subjugation of the follower/student.

So I found the 2003 article and want to share parts of it here, for you, so that you have a better sense of the risks inherent in being wooed by a narcissistic teacher, guru, or clergy member. And woo is the correct word - these people often are charming, charismatic, and use seduction as a means to bring you into their sphere of control.

Once once of these "teachers" gain a new follower, there is a progressive erosion of freedom, autonomy of both thought and feeling, and a coercive effort to isolate the follower from outside influence. For better understanding of how this control system works, see my post on Steve Hassan's BITE model of mind control.

So, then, here are parts of Shaw's 2003 article (the PDF is 31 pages). The original publication was in Cultic Studies Review, 2:2 (2003): 101-130.

It is worth mentioning that the "cult" Shaw was part of for 10 years (the Siddya Yoga group around its original guru, Swami Muktananda) is the same cult in which Marc Gafni's most loyal defender, Sally Kempton, was a leading member and public apologist, even after Muktananda's sexual abuse of students had been brought to light (see O Guru, Guru, Guru, an article the originally appeared in The New Yorker [pay-walled] and is fully reprinted at Leaving Siddha Yoga)..

Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

Daniel Shaw, CSW

Abstract

Using his ten year experience in Siddha Yoga under the leadership of Gurumayi, the author presents psychoanalytic conceptualizations of narcissism in an effort to develop a way of understanding cult leaders and their followers, and especially of traumatic abuse in cults from the follower's perspective. A psychoanalytically informed treatment approach for working with recovering cult followers is proposed, consisting of providing: 1) an understanding of the leader's extreme dependence on the follower's submission and psychological enslavement; 2) a clear, firm, and detailed understanding of the leader's abusiveness; and 3) an exploration of normative and/or traumatic developmental issues for the follower, as part of a process of making sense of and giving meaning to the follower's experience.

When I began graduate school in social work in September of 1994, it had been just two years since I moved out of the spiritual community, the ashram, I had lived and worked in for more than 10 years, up until my 40th birthday. In those two post-ashram years, while still considering myself devoted to the guru and the spiritual path I had chosen, I did a good deal of soul searching, much of it through the process of psychotherapy. One of the uses I made of psychotherapy was to explore my career options, and I eventually chose toseek the necessary education and training to become a psychotherapist myself. In my first social work field placement, many of the clients I was assigned described terrible histories of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in childhood, and in some cases were involved in ongoing abuse, either as perpetrators or victims. Many of these clients were struggling to recover from devastating addictions. Although my own life has been something of a bed of roses in comparison with the suffering these clients have known, I soon discovered I had a deeper connection to their experiences than I at first realized.

I had always portrayed my participation in Siddha Yoga (also known as SYDA), to myself and others, as an idealistic commitment to a noble spiritual path, dedicated to spiritual awakening and upliftment in the world. Just after school began, my perceptions were shattered when I learned of an incident concerning a friend of mine, a young woman just turned 21, who was sexually harassed in the ashram by one of its most powerful male leaders. When she sought help from Gurumayi, the now 48-year-old female Indian guru who is the head of the ashram, Gurumayi told the young woman, with contempt and disdain, that she had brought the harassment upon herself. Through her chief assistant, Gurumayi warned the young woman, "don't ever tell anyone about this, especially not your mother." The woman's mother, who had made substantial donations to the ashram over the years, was a long-time devotee of Gurumayi’s. After two years of intense inner conflict, the young woman finally did tell her story. As a result, many others began to speak out, eventually contributing to an extensive exposé of
SYDA in The New Yorker magazine (Harris, 1994). Published just two months after I started graduate school, the article revealed a Pandora's box of well-documented abuses by the leaders of SYDA that had been going on for more than 20 years.

In the two years prior to the publication of the article, I had slowly and painfully begun to acknowledge to myself and others that there were aspects of SYDA and its leaders that I found unethical and disturbing. In particular, I had witnessed and personally experienced Gurumayi verbally and emotionally abusing her followers, publicly shaming and humiliating those with whom she was displeased in cruel and harsh ways. I had heard her tell lies and witnessed her deliberately deceiving others. I witnessed her condoning and encouraging illegal and unethical business and labor practices, such as smuggling gold and U.S. dollars in and out of India, and exploiting workers without providing adequate housing, food, health care, or social security. I was aware that for many years, Gurumayi, and her predecessor, Swami Muktananda, had been using spies, hidden cameras, and microphones to gather information about followers in the ashram. I had heard whispers that Muktananda, contrary to his claims of celibacy and renunciation, had extensive sexual relations with female followers, which he then lied about and attempted to cover up with threats of violence to those who sought to expose him. Later, after I exited Siddha Yoga in 1994, I came to recognize in Muktananda’s and Gurumayi’s behavior toward their followers the hallmarks of abuse: the use of power to seduce, coerce, belittle, humiliate, and intimidate others for the ultimate purpose of psychological enslavement and parasitic exploitation.

I had deeply suppressed my doubts about SYDA for many years, but they suddenly and dramatically crystallized when I heard the story of the young woman I knew. In the phrase, "Don't ever tell anyone about this, especially not your mother," I heard a chilling echo of the voice of the incestuous father, the battering husband, the sexual harasser, the rapist. As Judith Herman says, in her seminal work entitled Trauma and Recovery (1992), "secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense" (p. 8). It was hearing these words, "Don't ever tell," that broke for me what Ernst Becker (1973) has called "the spell cast by persons -- the nexus of unfreedom." I recognized that, like many of my social work clients who were abused as children by their parents, I too had been subjected to abuse—by the person I called my guru.'

In this paper I will: 1) present a psychoanalytic conceptualization of the psychopathology of the cult leader; 2) discuss ways that cult leaders manipulate, abuse, and exploit followers; and 3) present theories about individual relational and also broader cultural factors that influence the individual’s psychological organization in ways that may contribute to vulnerability to cult participation. I draw from various psychoanalytic schools, including object relations (both Kleinian and Middle School), interpersonal, self psychology, intersubjectivity and contemporary relational schools. As a former participant in a cult, and now an observer of cults working as a psychoanalytic therapist with former cult members, it is my hope that the psychoanalytic formulations I discuss here will be helpful to others concerned with understanding cult phenomena.

* * * * *

The Psychopathology of the Cult Leader

Thought reform, or mind control, is another important component of my conceptualization of the seductive power of cults, although it is not a psychoanalytic concept. The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton (1987) studied the methods used by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War to turn war prisoners into willing accomplices, and called these methods thought reform (see also Hinkle & Wolff, 1976; Schein, 1956; Singer, 1979). Thought reform techniques are readily found in use in any cult, yet it is my belief, based on my own exposure to and study of various cults, that many cult leaders are not necessarily students of thought reform techniques. One might argue that meditation and chanting, for example, are techniques specifically designed to control others, and they can be. But they are also ancient traditional spiritual practices. Cult leaders who require their followers to perform mind-numbing, trance-inducing practices may do so while fully believing that such practices are for the greatest possible good of the follower. In religious philosophies that emphasize detachment and transcendence, for instance, trance states are highly valued as avenues toward these spiritual goals. Such religious “surrender”—to a sense of one’s wholeness, one’s connectedness to life, to a loving and creative spirit both within and without—is not necessarily the same experience as submission to the domination, control, and exploitation of a particular group and/or leader. The urge to surrender, as understood by Ghent (1990), a leading theorist of contemporary relational psychoanalysis, can be a move toward inner freedom, and does not necessarily lead to submission, or enslavement.

Cult leaders, however, practice forms of control, such as intimidation and humiliation, which demand submission. In Ghent’s view, masochistic submission is a perversion of surrender. Cult leaders often use the idea of surrender as bait, and then switch to a demand for submission. Nevertheless, in so doing, they may not actually be practicing mind control in any conscious way. They may simply be behaving in ways typical of pathological narcissists, people whose personalities are characterized by paranoia and megalomania—characteristics, by the way, that are readily attributable to one of the modern masters of thought reform techniques, the totalitarian dictator known as Chairman Mao. Totalitarian dictators study and invent thought reform techniques, but many cult leaders may simply be exhibiting characteristic behaviors of the pathological narcissist, with the attendant paranoia and mania typical of this personality disorder. Thought reform is the systematic application of techniques of domination, enslavement, and control, which can be quite similar to the naturally occurring behaviors of other abusers, like batterers, rapists, incest perpetrators, in all of whom can be seen the behaviors of pathological narcissism.

I base my formulation of the psychology of the cult leader in part on the daily close contact I had with Swami Chidvilasananda (Gurumayi) of Siddha Yoga between 1985 and 1992. I also support my hypotheses with information gained from extensive work with psychotherapy clients who have described their cult leaders’ behavior in detail, as well as on my extensive reading of biographical accounts of other leaders of cults [1]. I propose, following the profile of the pathological narcissist delineated by Rosenfeld (1971), a leading figure of the contemporary Kleinian school in London, and similar formulations from the American self psychological perspective of Kohut (1976), that the cult leader profoundly depends on the fanatic devotion of the follower. This dependency is deeply shameful to the cult leader, because, based on traumatic aspects of her own developmental history, any dependency has come to mean despicable weakness and humiliation to her. Developmental trauma in those who in later life can be termed pathological narcissists typically consists of being raised, by parents or other caregivers, under extreme domination and control, accompanied by repeated experiences of being shamed and humiliated. The pathological narcissist identifies with this aggression and comes to despise his own normative dependency, to be contemptuous of dependence, which is equated to weakness. Manically defending against deprivation and humiliation, he comes to believe that he needs no one, that he can trust only himself, that those who depend on others are weak and contemptible. Thus the cult leader, largely unconsciously, compensates for his inability to trust and depend on others, and defends against the intense shame he feels connected to need and dependency, by attaining control over his followers, first through seductive promises of unconditional love and acceptance, and then through intimidation, shaming, and belittling. This serves to induce the loathsome dependency in the follower, and the cult leader thus contrives to disavow his own dependency, felt as loathsome and shameful. By psychologically seducing, and then battering the follower into being the shameful dependent one, the cult leader maintains his superior position and can boast delusionally of being totally liberated from all petty, mundane attachments. These processes of subjugating others, and inducing in others what one loathes and seeks to deny in oneself are extreme forms of manic defense against the shame of dependency. 

In fact, the cult leader does not escape dependency. Instead, he (and also, in many cases, she) comes to depend on his followers to worship and adore him, to reflect his narcissistic delusion of perfection to him as does the mirror to the Evil Queen in the tale of Snow White. One of the ways in which this perversion of dependency is often enacted can be observed when the cult leader claims that because he needs nothing, he is entitled to everything. Thus, cult leaders claiming to be pure and perfect, without any need or attachment, use manic defenses to rationalize and justify their dependence on extravagant and grandiose trappings such as thrones, fleets of Rolls Royces, and the trust funds of their wealthy followers.

For the cult leader, his ability to induce total dependence in followers serves to sustain and enhance a desperately needed delusion of perfect, omnipotent control. With many cult leaders, (e.g., Shoko Asahara [Lifton, 1999]), the dissolution of their delusion of omnipotence exposes an underlying core of psychosis. Sustaining a delusion of omnipotence and perfection is, for the cult leader, a manic effort to ward off psychic fragmentation. Again it is useful to consider that this kind of pathological narcissism and defensive mania is often seen in persons whose childhood development was controlled by extremely dominating, often sadistic caregivers, or whose developmental years were characterized by traumatic experiences of intense humiliation. Cult leaders then create elaborate rationalizations for their abusive systems, while unconsciously patterning those systems from the templates of their own experiences of being abused.

Cult leaders succeed in dominating their followers because they have mastered the cruel art of exploiting universal human dependency and attachment needs in others. The lengthy period of dependency in human development, the power that parents have, as God-like figures, to literally give life and sustain the lives of their children, leaves each human being with the memory, however distant or unconscious, of total dependency. Cult leaders tap into and re-activate this piece of the human psyche. Followers are encouraged to become regressed and infantilized, to believe that their life depends on pleasing the cult leader. Cult leaders depend on their ability to attract people, often at critically vulnerable points in their lives, who are confused, hungry, dissatisfied, searching. With such people, cult leaders typically find numerous ways to undermine their followers’ independence and their capacity to think critically.

In a religious cult, the leader is perceived as a deity who is always divinely right, and the devotee, always on the verge of being sinfully wrong, comes to live for the sole purpose of pleasing and avoiding displeasing the guru/god. The leader's displeasure comes to mean for the member that he is unworthy, monstrously defective, and, therefore, dispensable. The member has been conditioned to believe that loss of the leader's "grace" is equivalent to loss of any value, goodness, or rightness of the self. As the member becomes more deeply involved, his anxiety about remaining a member in good standing increases. This anxiety is akin to the intense fear, helplessness, loss of control and threat of annihilation that Herman, in her discussion of psychological domination, describes as induced in victims of both terrorists and battering husbands:

The ultimate effect of these techniques is to convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance. The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only fear of death but also gratitude for being allowed to live. (Herman, 1992, p. 77)

Extending this formulation to cult leaders and followers, the cult leader can be understood as needing to disavow her dependency and expel her dread of psychic dissolution, which she succeeds in doing insofar as she is able to induce that dependency and fear in the follower. The bliss that cult members often display masks their terror of losing the leader’s interest in them, which is equivalent for the follower to “a fate worse than death.”

Herman's motivation for writing Trauma and Recovery was to show the commonalities

between rape survivors and combat veterans, between battered women and political prisoners, between the survivors of vast concentration camps created by tyrants who rule nations, and the survivors of small, hidden concentration camps created by tyrants who rule their homes. (Herman, 1992, p. 3).

Tyrants who rule religious cults subject members to similar violations.

To recapitulate, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the cult leader unconsciously experiences his dependency needs as so deeply shameful that a delusion of omnipotence is developed to ward off the toxic shame. It is urgent to the pathological narcissist, who knows unconsciously that he is susceptible to extreme mortification (the sense of “death” by shame), that this delusion of omnipotence be sustained. Manic defenses help sustain the delusion, but in addition, followers must be seduced and controlled so that the loathsome dependence can be externalized, located in others and thereby made controllable. The leader can then express his unconscious self-loathing through his “compassion” (often thinly disguised contempt) for his followers’ weakness. Manically proclaiming his own perfection, the leader creates a program of “purification” for the follower. By enlisting the follower to hold the shame that he projects and evacuates from his own psyche, the cult leader rids himself of all shame, becoming, in effect, “shameless.” He defines his shamelessness as enlightenment, liberation, or self actualization. It becomes important to the cult leader, for the maintenance of his state of shamelessness on which his psychic equilibrium depends, that there be no competition, that he alone, and no one else in the group, feels shameless. So while apparently inviting others to attain his state of perfection (shamelessness) by following him, the cult leader is actually constantly involved in inducing shame in his followers, thereby maintaining his dominance and control. I have called this sadomasochistic danse macabre the “dark side of enlightenment” (see Shaw, 2000).


Note:
[1] There are those who would consider Freud a cult leader, and psychoanalysis, his invention, a cult (e.g., Storr [1996]). While I think that equating Sigmund Freud to, say, Jim Jones, is absurd on its face (and Storr takes far too complex a view to make so reductionist an assertion), it is true that generations of psychoanalytic thinkers following Freud have struggled to evaluate and reform residues of positivism, determinism, and authoritarianism in psychoanalytic theory and practice (see especially Fromm [1959], and Mitchell & Aron [1999]). Today, many increasingly prominent psychoanalytic schools are actively seeking to expose and reject authoritarianism in theory and treatment. These include the following contemporary schools: object relations, interpersonal, relational, intersubjective, postmodern, feminist, and contemporary self psychology, to name a few. In fact, one of the most radical critiques of psychoanalytic authoritarianism comes from one of the leaders of its most orthodox institutions, Owen Renik, the editor of Psychoanalytic Quarterly (see Renik, 1993).

 

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) received a lot of praise, and it was also dismissed as "hallucinatory" by Robert Epstein in Scientific American.

People pay more attention to facts that match their beliefs than those that undermine them. Pinker wants peace, and he also believes in his hypothesis; it is no surprise that he focuses more on facts that support his views than on those that do not.

So watch the talk below, given at UC Berkeley in February, but just posted on the UCTV Channel, and see if you agree with Epstein or with Pinker.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Published on Apr 29, 2014


Believe it or not, violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species existence. Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker presents the data supporting this surprising conclusion, and explains the trends by showing how changing historical circumstances have engaged different components of human nature. Recorded on 02/04/2014. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [5/2014] - (Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)

W.R. Klemm - Our Godless Brains: Emerging Science Reveals Mind-Blowing Alternatives to a Higher Power

 

From Salon, here is an excerpt from W.R. Klemm's new book, Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate (2014).

Here is the text from the publisher to promote the book:

How the mysterious three-pound organ in our heads creates the rich array of human mental experience, including the sense of self and consciousness, is one of the great challenges of 21st-century science. Veteran neuroscientist W. R. Klemm presents the latest research findings on this elusive brain-mind connection in a lucidly presented, accessible, and engaging narrative.

The author focuses on how mind emerges from nerve-impulse patterns in the densely-packed neural circuits that make up most of the brain, suggesting that conscious mind can be viewed as a sort of neural-activity-based avatar. As an entity in its own right, mind on the conscious level can have significant independent action, shaping the brain that sustains it through its plans, goals, interests, and interactions with the world. Thus, in a very literal sense, we become what we think.

Against researchers who argue that conscious mind is merely a passive observer and free will an illusion, the author presents evidence showing that mental creativity, freedom to act, and personal responsibility are very real. He also delves into the role of dream sleep in both animals and humans, and explains the brain-based differences between nonconscious, unconscious, and conscious minds.

Written in a jargon-free style understandable to the lay reader, this is a fascinating synthesis of recent neuroscience and intriguing hypotheses.

From SciBooks - What's New in Science Books (timely reviews of new science books):

“Against researchers who argue that conscious mind is merely a passive observer and free will an illusion, the author presents evidence showing that mental creativity, freedom to act, and personal responsibility are very real.”

 Give it a read and see what you think - I am a bit underwhelmed by this excerpt.

Our godless brains: Emerging science reveals mind-blowing alternatives to a higher power

Science has yet to uncover many mysteries of the mind. But there are more reasons than ever why God isn't necessary

W.R. Klemm
Saturday, Apr 26, 2014

 

(Credit: akindo via iStock)

• Excerpted from Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate

Physics is the mother science. As such, it holds the greatest power for discovering the true nature of the universe and life within it. Physicists these days seem preoccupied with astronomical issues, such as the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. But some physicists venture into the realm of biology, claiming that their unique experimental and mathematical skills give them special insight into matters of life and death.

I just hate it when physicists write about biology. They sometimes say uninformed and silly things. But I hate it just as much when I write about physics, for I too am liable to say uninformed and silly things—as I may well do here.

To digress briefly, I am reminded of the communication gap between people of science and everybody else, as so powerfully discussed by C. P. Snow in his classic book “Two Cultures.” These days, within science there are also two cultures: physical science and biological science, and they don’t always speak the same language. The language of physics, for example, relies heavily on mathematics, which is rarely mastered by biologists.

For most of my career, biology was generally considered a “soft” science, unworthy of the same stature as physics and chemistry. The discovery of DNA structure gave biology new respect in the “hard science” community because DNA is simple, as clearly explainable as chemistry, and easy to measure with mathematics. But the rest of biology is still a second-class science. I remember my College-of-Science dean, a nuclear physicist, refused to allow me to offer a course in sociobiology, based on E. O. Wilson’s classic text, because the he did not consider such studies to be real science. He also objected to my publishing with experimental economists on the same grounds.

It’s hard for biologists to argue with physicists. Often physicists listen with detached bemusement because biologists can’t explain life with mathematics. Physics could not exist without math. Sometimes I think physicists get too enamored with math. I get the impression that they think that describing and predicting phenomena with equations is the same as explaining why and how such phenomena occur. Take the most famous equation of all, E = mc2. Just what does that equal sign mean? It implies that the variables on each side are the same. But is mass really identical to energy? True, mass can be converted to energy, as atom bombs prove, and energy can even be turned into mass. Still, they are not the same things. Not only are the units of measurement different, but the equation is only descriptive and predictive. It does not explain how mass converts to energy or vice versa.

The limits of math become more troublesome when physicists try to explain the origin of the universe. Math does not really explain how a universe can exist without a first cause. True, physicists invoke the “big bang,” a massive explosion of supercondensed matter. They call this the “singularity,” as if that explains things any better. Whatever words, or math, they use, they cannot explain what created the supercondensed mass in the first place. Where did that mass come from? If it was created by energy, where did that come from? You can see that such questions create an infinite loop of effects that have a cause. Scientists call this “infinite regression,” which is an untenable way to explain anything.

Even if you invoke the idea of a creator god, where did that god come from? So, you see, physicists and the rest of us are stuck with the unsatisfying conclusion that something can be created from nothing. I have only read one explanation for how this might happen, which I will discuss shortly, but it makes no sense to me.

Surely, many mysteries of the universe and of life itself are well hidden. Science is in the business of revealing hidden realities. What we call religious beliefs may be among those realities. Maybe we should revisit the view of the ancient Greek philosophers who held that there is “true” reality hidden by what we think is reality.

Today, physicists are starting to see previously unseen realities, as I am about to summarize. Such unseen realities may well include unknown kinds of matter and energy that give rise to mind. Maybe there is a counterpart mind, operating in parallel in a way that electrodes and amplifiers or magnetic imaging scanners cannot detect.

Only a few neuroscientists argue that the human mind is not materialistic. Neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary have written a whole book to argue the point. Their “Spiritual Brain” documents many apparent mystical experiences. These authors use the existence of such mental phenomena as intuition, will power, and the medical placebo effect to argue that mind is spiritual, not material. None of this is proof that such experiences have no material basis. Their argument seems specious. They have no clear definition of spirit, and they do not explain how spirit can change neuronal activity or how neuronal activity translates into spirit. They dismiss that the mind can affect the brain because it originates in the brain and can modify and program neural processes because mind itself consists of neural process.

Sometimes we don’t see hidden realities even when they are right under our nose. Consider water, for example, which before the advent of science was grossly misunderstood. Now we can explain how water exists in several states: liquid, vapor, solid. You and I are mostly water. My point is that our mental essence may also exist in several states. At the moment, the only one you and I know about is the state of nerve impulse patterns. Just as water has no way to know which state it is in, I (so far at least) can only know about my impulse-pattern state.

By now readers know brains make sense (pun intended). That is, we know enough about the brain to know that conscious mind may someday be explained by science. We already know enough about the nonconscious mind of the brainstem and spinal cord to realize that what we call mind has a material basis that can be explained by science. Science may someday be able to examine what we today call spiritual matters. Consider the possibility that “spirit” is actually some physical property that scientists do not yet understand.

The idea of a material, biological basis of conscious mind may be offensive to those who believe in the mysteries of the soul and eternity. After all, many people of faith refuse to accept science’s doctrine of evolution. To these believers we could say that one of the least mysterious ways God works in the world is through the laws of chemistry and physics that govern the universe and all living things. Even God has to have methods for doing things. Educated believers surely have to admit the possibility that God created these laws as a way to create the universe and even the human mind. Otherwise, from that perspective, what are the laws for? Nobody knows how these laws came to be or why they exist.

Many scientists are not sanguine about their belief in a material mind. For example, one scientist-engineer, Paul Nunez, has suggested that some yet to-be-discovered information field might interact with brains such that brains act like a kind of “antenna,” analogous to the way the retina of the eye can be thought of as an antenna that detects the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we call light.

To me, other possibilities for discovering material attributes of “spirit” seem more likely. Modern physics, especially quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, dark matter, and dark energy, has already shown that not even physicists understand what “material” is. I will now summarize the more likely possibilities for hidden realities of mind.

Quantum Mechanics (QM). Quantum mechanics is so weird that Einstein called it “spooky science.” Ironically, there remains a spooky weirdness in Einstein’s own relativity theories, which I will get to momentarily.

The heart of the QM enigma lies in the apparent fact that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time. But that is not quite correct. What has been demonstrated experimentally is that photons or electrons can have characteristics of both waves and particles at the same time. Where the wave and/or particle is located depends on whether or not its location is pinned down by observation. That observation includes instruments, not just the human eye.

Moreover, the waves are actually mathematical wave functions of the probability of where a particle is located. The shape of the probability of the wave function as it evolves can actually be quantified by the so-called Schrödinger equation. When we observe where a particle is located, the probability function “collapses,” going from zero percent probability for all the locations where the part is not found to 100 percent for the place where it is observed.

But beyond the math, some particles, like photons, are clearly waves that oscillate at particular frequencies. The physics community was rocked in the 1920s by experiments that showed that electrons, known at the time to be subatomic particles, behaved like common waves, interfering with each other when their waves overlapped, much as two ripples in water do as the ripples move into each other. Electron interference seems to depend on a wave from one place crossing another wave from another place. How can that be? Max Born in 1927 found the answer: the waves are not physical waves but probability waves. Specifically, the size of a probability wave at any given point of location is proportional to the probability that the electron is located at that location. Stated in another way, the wave function tells us the probability of finding a particle at any given point of space. A profound consequence is that the probability wave applies to all locations in the universe.

Some of the experimentally demonstrable spooky things about QM include a seeming influence on elementary particles from distant parts of the universe with no time delay (called entanglement), particles jumping from one place to another without ever locating in places in between like successive frames in a motion picture (called tunneling), that particles can be in more than one place at the same time, and that the behavior of a particle is governed by its being observed or measured impersonally by instruments.

Knowing about QM is not the same as understanding it. Even Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a bedrock of QM theory, has recently been called into question.

A key enigma in QM is that we can only observe a tiny subset of what actually exists. In QM theory, you can’t make a complete observation, even remotely with instruments, of an object or event without disrupting its actual existence. The location of an object, for example, is one of several states: it may here or several places there. But in QM these states are specified as wave functions, not “here” or “there.” Wave functions are probability statements. The object has, for example, a 75 percent chance of being in one place and a 25 percent change of being in another. Where it actually is depends on whether or not we detect its location. This is confusing I know, but I will let physicists do the apologizing.

To date, there is no compelling evidence that QM operates at levels beyond subatomic particles. But how can we be sure? QM might even be a basis for what we would otherwise think of as nonmaterial consciousness. Indeed, views on QM consciousness are published in scientific journals, and one journal is devoted exclusively to QM consciousness.

The most recent idea I have read is that Shannon’s information theory lies at the heart of QM and can explain how something can emerge from nothing. Information, quantified as “bits” (0 and 1) is inversely proportional to the probability of an occurrence (with probability measured on a logarithmic scale). I always wonder why physical scientists like to express things in inverse relationships. Anyway, the equation says that “information” has only two properties: an event and its probability of happening. The equation applies to any kind of event, from occurrences today to the moment the universe came into being.

Moreover, the amount of information contained in an event is directly proportional to how unlikely it is to occur. Unlikely events do happen, and their rarity gives them the most information.

Physicist Vlatko Vedral, in his “Decoding Reality,” asserts that QM can resolve disputes over whether the world is random or deterministic. The enigma is that quantum events are random, but large objects behave deterministically (that is, are effects with causes). The key point is that quantum events can also be deterministic (quantified by the Schrödinger equation). For example, experiments using a beam-splitter mirror show that a photon can seem to be in two places at the same time (that is, that it has gone through the mirror and has also been reflected by it). But when you try to detect where the photon is, it will randomly appear in only one place (behind the mirror or in front of it). The mere act of observing, even if you do it indirectly with some kind of instrument, affects where the photon is. If that is not spooky, what is?

The corollary is that this science seems to suggest that we humans create reality by observation. This point of view is philosophical solipsism, which was championed by Walter Seegers in a book chapter he wrote for an earlier book of mine. Seegers was a pioneer in the discovery of many of the mechanisms of blood clotting. Along the way, he came to the philosophical conclusion that science does not exist except in our own minds. He approvingly quotes Arthur Eddington, “We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And Lo! It is our own.” In the solipsistic view, the conscious sense of self discussed earlier now has a new dimension beyond developing events along the continuum of womb to tomb.

Vedral’s view of reality is a little different. He has not explicitly integrated QM into solipsism, nor has anybody else as far as I know. But some of the ideas seem related. Vedral’s main point is that random events can exist as a deterministic reality when they occur without being detected—as was likely the case at the birth of the universe when there was presumably nothing around to do the detecting. Today’s reality is supposedly created by our observation, either directly or remotely via instrumentation.

QM gives a new dimension to information theory, for now quantification can be done in terms of “qubits,” which can exist in multiple states as any combination of yes or no, on or off, and the like. This view of reality assumes the universe is digital. But my experience with biology, especially brain function, is that life is analog. Analog properties vary continuously, not as digital events of on or off. We use digital sampling and measurement of life events as a convenience. In fact, it is so convenient that we come to mistakenly believe that the world really is digital.

The first thing that qubits have to explain is the first law of thermodynamics, which says that energy—and by extension, matter—cannot be created from nothing. The universe supposedly arose from the big bang explosion of supercondensed matter. Where did that matter come from? To explain the inexplicable, Vedral speculates that subatomic particles exist only as the labels we use to describe the outcomes of experimental observations. He claims that “any particle of matter . . . is defined with respect to an intricate procedure that is used to detect it.” If particles only exist in the presence of a detector, then the nothingness of the pre-universe developed a reality only when something that could detect a reality appeared. Sounds like gibberish to me. What was that first detector? Where and how did it appear?

There are multiple scholars who think consciousness may someday be explained by QM. With great trepidation, as a biologist suggesting to physicists how to study this matter, I would advise focusing on the wave function aspects of QM. Brain electrical currents, which are the currency of thought, still have magnetic properties, even though the current is carried by ions not electrons. There are sophisticated imaging devices that can monitor such magnetic fields, and they are used to produce a magnetoencephalogram.

Relativity. Einstein never came to grips with QM. I’ve had physicists tell me that had Einstein seen the evidence gathered since his death, he would surely have become a believer in what he had called “spooky science.” Yet Einstein’s own discoveries have their own spookiness. His theories have stood such a long test of time that some scientists are lured into thinking they understand relativity better than they actually do.

Most people know that Einstein discovered relativity. First, there was special relativity, which held that time is a fourth dimension that is relative depending on the location and speed of objects used as a frame of reference, that increasing speed of an object causes time to slow down, and that the only constant time is the speed of light. And of course there is the famous E = mc2 equation that holds that mass and energy are interconvertible. Most of these seemingly wild ideas have been experimentally verified.

But nobody talks about the possible relevance of these ideas to brain function and consciousness. Of course, relativity effects are measurable only at high speeds. Does anything in the brain moves at high speeds? What about the propagation of voltage fields associated with nerve impulses? The brain does have a high-speed passive spread of voltage fields from multiple moving ionic currents.

Also, what about the energy generated as electrons whip through protein chains in mitochondria? Only some of the energy is trapped in phosphate bonds of adenosine triphosphate. We assume that all the other energy is lost as heat. How can we be sure relativity is irrelevant to energy capture? Energy is well established as crucial for consciousness.

Many years later Einstein added variable movements and gravity to his theory to produce the general theory of relativity. In this perspective, time and space are wedded in an inseparable space-time continuum in which space is filled with the gravitational forces of stars and earths that cause space to bend and stretch “the fabric” of space-time. Think of space as a three-dimensional rubber sheet that is bent where bowling balls (stars and planets) occur within it. We think we know what this means on cosmic scales. What does it mean at the level of cells in the brain and the microgravity of their cellular mass and the time course of their chemical activities?

An added complication is that recent research confirms Einstein’s original conjecture that gravity exists as ripples in the curvature of space-time that propagate as a wave, traveling outward from the source. Thus, we should think of gravity radiation as a form of energy release by objects with mass. There is a group at my own Texas A & M University actively engaged in study of such radiation.

But all studies of gravity radiation are done at the macro level of the universe. Does not our own body have mass? The molecules within our body have mass. Do they not have microgravity radiation? If so, what does such radiation do? Gravity waves oscillate, in theory at a variety of frequencies. Could this have anything to do with rhythms in the brain? Most scientists would probably discount such possibilities because gravity waves are so weak. But the ones we study, from distant galaxies, are weak because they are so far away. The mass in our body may emit weak gravity that is close at hand.

Moreover, think about the implications of general relativity’s “continuum.” That implies infinity. Our being and life locate on this space-time continuum. Maybe death is just one (temporary) point on the continuum.

String Theory. Physicists agree that relativity and quantum mechanics are in conflict, yet both theories stand on solid experimental ground. A major thrust of physics research today is devoted to finding how to reconcile these two views of the universe. String Theory is one of several mathematical approaches to resolving the conflicts. String theory holds that ultimate reality exists not as particles but as miniscule vibrating “strings” whose oscillations give rise to all the particles and energy in the universe and—nobody mentions—in our brain! The requirement for oscillation in vibrating strings should resonate with our emerging understanding of the role of oscillation in brain function and also with what was said above about gravity waves. What information is contained in the vibrating strings inside the atomic particles of neurons? Where did the vibrating strings come from? If string theory is correct, it will likely have great explanatory power for all living matter.

Parallel universes. Mathematically, string theory only works correctly if there are 11 dimensions or “universes.” If there are such parallel universes, where are they “out there?” Some physicists imagine our universe like an expanding bubble inside a froth of space that is spawning multiple universe bubbles. Moreover, like foam in beer, each bubble might contain some portion of the properties of the parent source of froth.

Does the matter of our bodies simultaneously exist in more than one universe? Can bubbles in the froth of multiple universes interact, perhaps through quantum entanglement, or even coalesce? Perhaps what happens in our own inner universe of the brain is mirrored in another universe.

These esoteric ideas are gradually coming within the scope of experimental science. The new Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the Swiss-French border is designed to test string theory among other things. If the theory is correct, the collider should generate a host of exotic particles we never knew existed. One example is the Higgs boson, tentatively confirmed in 2013.

Another line of evidence might come from the Planck satellite to be launched by the European space satellite consortium. Some string-theory models predict that there is a specific geometry in space that will bend light in specific ways that the satellite is designed to detect.

String theory is not accepted by all physicists. But most agree that the known facts of physics do not fit any alternative unifying theory. Whatever theory emerges from accumulating evidence, it will, like Darwin’s theory of evolution, revolutionize our thinking about the world and our life.

Dark matter. One of those parallel universes may be right under our nose. I’m talking about the massive amount of “dark matter,” which astronomers believe to have mass because they see light being bent, presumably by gravity. This light bending occurs in regions of space where there is no observable matter to generate the gravitational force. This unseen matter is also inferred because it is the only known way to account for the rotational speed of galaxies, the orbital speed of galaxies in clusters, and the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies.

Last Spring, a fifteen-month census of the universe’s matter by the European Space Agency calculated that this invisible matter accounts for 26.8 percent of the universe and that our ordinary matter accounts for only 4.6 percent. Everything else is energy.

Another thing to ponder: galaxies differ in their amount of dark matter, depending on the size of the galaxy. The really interesting questions deal with possible interactions of dark matter and detectable matter. Are they totally independent? Or do they interact in some way we don’t know about?

If dark matter is spread around the universe, and living things are created out of the matter of the universe, shouldn’t some dark matter reside inside of us? Are properties of regular matter mirrored in dark matter? Is any part of us mirrored in dark matter? Similar questions could be asked about dark energy. 

Dark energy. In 1998, two teams of researchers deduced from observing exploding stars that the universe is not only expanding but doing so at an accelerating rate. Forces of gravity should be slowing down expansion, and indeed they do seem to hold each galaxy together. But the galaxies are flying away from each other at incredible, accelerating speed.

Think of the “big bang” theory as a supercondensed hand grenade, which when it explodes sends shrapnel in all directions. The difference is that when the universe was born the pieces of its shrapnel (stars and planets, organized as galaxies) started accelerating as they moved apart.

The only sensible way to explain accelerating expansion is to invoke a form of energy, a “dark” energy that we don’t otherwise know how to observe, that is pushing galaxies farther apart in a nonlinear way. Clearly, this dark energy is by far the most powerful force in the universe.

Why wouldn’t some of that dark energy be within us? If so, it would obviously have to be present in relatively miniscule amounts, lest we blow up. All that we know is that energy has to be absorbed by its target to have any effect. When we get a sun burn, for example, enough of the sun’s energy is absorbed in our skin to damage it. In the case of radiation, like x-rays and gamma rays, the absorption is ionizing: that is, electrons are knocked out of atoms as the energy is absorbed, leaving positive ions in the wake. An x-ray print shows the image created as a result of the rays that passed through your tissue hitting the photosensitive molecules in the film to darken them. Bone, for example, appears white because it is more likely to absorb x-rays and not allow them access to the photographic plate. Gamma rays have much more energy, and when they are absorbed by tissue they can cause greater damage, even setting up DNA changes that can lead to cancer.

So what about dark energy? To push galaxies apart, it must impart some of its energy to the cluster of stars and planets to give them a push. What must dark energy be doing to us? Obviously, its push is not greater than the gravity that keeps us fixed to earth. But if that energy is absorbed by the galaxy, surely some of it must be absorbed in us. But what could such absorption do? Would such dark energy interact with the regular energy that we know about—like the energy in our brain? Could it act on consciousness?

There are still larger questions. Science is still trying to explain how ordinary matter and energy arose from the “big bang.” Science does not even know how to start investigating where dark matter and dark energy came from.

Excerpted from “Mental Biology: The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate” by W.R. Klemm (Prometheus Books, © 2014). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. 

More W.R. Klemm.

Hip-hop mogul, master entrepreneur, and best-selling author Russell Simmons stopped by Google recently to discuss his newest book, Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple. I had no idea he was into meditation - maybe he can bring a different demographic into the world of meditation, which is disturbingly white in this country.

Russell Simmons, "Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple" | Talks at Google

Published on Apr 29, 2014


Master entrepreneur, original hip-hop mogul, and New York Times bestselling author Russell Simmons shares the most fundamental key to success—meditation—and guides readers to use stillness as a powerful tool to access their potential.

In the New York Times bestseller Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All, Russell Simmons proved that to be rich is more than just having money in the bank—wealth is about balance, joy, and conscientious living.

In Success Through Stillness: Meditation Made Simple, Simmons shows the connection between inner peace and outward success through interviews with other successful leaders in various industries, and how learning to be still has been instrumental in his own career. Simmons attributes his meditation practice with changing his life for the better and says that there is no "bad" way to meditate, only different forms for different people.

In this new book, Russell Simmons guides readers into finding greater clarity and focus, and explains how to be healthier in both mind and body. Simmons breaks down what he's learned from masters of meditation into a guide that is accessible to those unfamiliar with the practice.

The State of the Economy and How to Fix It - Omnivore

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, yet another collection of cool links - this one is focused on economics, the recession, and the American work life.

The state of the economy and how to fix it

Apr 29 2014  | 9:00AM

• George S. Rigakos and Aysegul Ergul (Carleton): The Pacification of the American Working Class: A Time Series Analysis. 
• Is the workplace prison or sanctuary? From dark 19th-century quarters to Silicon Valley playground, the office has long divided opinion. 
• Sophie McBain in why we should all be working less. 
• Catherine Rampell on treating wage theft as a criminal offense. 
• Ben Casselman on how the biggest predictor of how long you’ll be unemployed is when you lose your job. 
• Manufacturing is doing great, but not for workers — here’s what that means. 
• Annie Lowrey on how the recovery has created far more low-wage jobs than better-paid ones. 
• People think we're in a recession — don't blame them. 
• Why is the recovery so agonizingly slow? Mark Thoma wants to know. 
• The road to recovery: Tom Streithorst on the state of the economy and how to fix it. 
• 50 years into the War on Poverty, hardship hits back. 
• Disgorge the cash: J.W. Mason on how capitalists are self-sabotaging because they're always looking to cash out. 
• Joshua Hanan and Justin Eckstein on the American debt crisis and Twitter. 
• In this new gilded age, we should remind ourselves of a central guiding purpose of America’s original antitrust law, and use it no less boldly. 
• James Surowiecki reviews Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters by Walter A. Friedman. 
• The government was crucial after all: Jeff Madrick reviews The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato and Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State by William H. Janeway. 
• David Cay Johnston on why Thomas Jefferson favored profit sharing.

Carrie Arnold - Ants Swarm Like Brains Think (via Nautilus)

From Nautilus, Carrie Arnold studies ant colors to understand how what occurs in the synapses of neurons. Here is Mark Goldman's recollection.

“As I watched films of these ant colonies, it looked like what was happening at the synapse of neurons. Both of these systems accumulate evidence about their inputs—returning ants or incoming voltage pulses—to make their decisions about whether to generate an output—an outgoing forager or a packet of neurotransmitter,” Goldman said.

The concept that connects the ants and the neurons is called feedback.

Each of the brain’s 86 billion neurons can be connected to many thousands of others. When a neuron fires, it sends a signal to nearby neurons that changes the probability that they will also fire. Some neurons are excitatory, and increase the chances that other neurons will fire. Others are inhibitory, and reduce this chance. A combination of inputs from a given neuron’s neighbors will determine if it fires. If two neurons make each other fire often, the synapse between them (a small gap across which chemical or electrical signals are passed) will strengthen, so that they can more readily provide feedback to each other.

It's a fascinating article.

Ants Swarm Like Brains Think

A neuroscientist studies ant colonies to understand feedback in the brain

By Carrie Arnold | Illustration by Jonathon Rosen April 24, 2014

Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo, N.M. Long before the first rays of sun hit the desert floor, a group of patroller ants was already on the move. Their task was to find out whether the area near the nest was free from flash floods, high winds, and predators. If they didn’t return to the nest, departing foragers would know it wasn’t safe to go search for food.

When the patrollers returned and the first foragers did leave, they scattered in all directions, hunting for the fat-laden, energy-rich seeds on which the colony depends. Other foragers waited in the entrance of the nest for the first wave to return. If lots of food were nearby, foragers would return and depart quickly, creating a massive chain reaction. If food was scarce, however, the second group of foragers might not leave the nest at all.

“It’s a brilliant system. The ants can take advantage of sudden windfalls of food but they don’t waste energy and resources if there’s nothing there,” said Gordon, who is an ecologist at Stanford University.

The behavior of each individual in the group is set by the rate at which it meets other ants and a set of basic rules. Its behavior alters that of its neighbors, which in turn affects the original ant, in a classic example of feedback. The result is astonishing, complex behavior. “Individually, an ant is dumb,” Gordon says. She gazes off into the distance and inhales sharply. “But the colony? That’s where the intelligence is.”

About 110 miles from Gordon’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., Mark Goldman studies a different kind of complex, emergent behavior. Goldman is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis. For most of his life, he was never particularly interested in ants. But when he traveled to Stanford in 2012 to plan some experiments with a colleague who had recently attended one of Gordon’s talks, something clicked.

“As I watched films of these ant colonies, it looked like what was happening at the synapse of neurons. Both of these systems accumulate evidence about their inputs—returning ants or incoming voltage pulses—to make their decisions about whether to generate an output—an outgoing forager or a packet of neurotransmitter,” Goldman said. On his next trip to Stanford, he extended his stay. An unusual research collaboration had begun to coalesce: Ants would be used to study the brain, and the brain, to study ants.

 

Ant land: Deborah Gordon has been returning to this New Mexico landscape for years to study its ants. Carrie Arnold 

Each of the brain’s 86 billion neurons can be connected to many thousands of others. When a neuron fires, it sends a signal to nearby neurons that changes the probability that they will also fire. Some neurons are excitatory, and increase the chances that other neurons will fire. Others are inhibitory, and reduce this chance. A combination of inputs from a given neuron’s neighbors will determine if it fires. If two neurons make each other fire often, the synapse between them (a small gap across which chemical or electrical signals are passed) will strengthen, so that they can more readily provide feedback to each other.

“This is where you get the saying that ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together,’ ” says Dmitri Chklovskii, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But what is often not appreciated about this adage is that wiring also requires the second neuron to send a message to the first that it, too, has fired.

“The only way the upstream neuron knows that the second neuron fired is that it produces a feedback spike. This helps the synapse make the decision to get stronger,” Chklovskii says. Feedback is where the similarity with ants begins. “Feedback loops are everywhere on every level. They allow the system to realize that what it used to be doing isn’t working any more, and to try something new.”

Both ants and brains actually rely on two types of feedback, held in a delicate balance: negative (or inhibitory) feedback, and positive (or excitatory) feedback. “Negative feedback tends to cause stability. Positive feedback tends to cause runaway behavior,” said Tomer Czaczkes, an ant biologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “These two simple rules make something very powerful.”

The foraging response to food is an example of a positive feedback loop, and familiar to anyone who has had a picnic ruined by a line of ants marching in single file toward their meal. But knowing when not to leave the nest and risk predation and dehydration may be just as important as knowing when to take advantage of a windfall of seeds. At low levels of an input (a small amount of food, for example) positive feedback dominates. At high levels of input, negative feedback dominates, helping to prevent runaway processes.

Such runaway processes can represent a significant danger to the colony. Czaczkes mentions a tale involving the South American army ant, which unlike the harvester ant, relies on pheromones for navigation. In 1936, ant biologist T.C. Schneirla watched a group of army ants fall into an “ant death spiral” as they created a pheromone trail completely around a large tree. The lead ants, Schneirla noted in a 1944 paper, discovered and followed their own pheromone trail. More and more ants joined in, following an endless positive feedback loop around the same tree, continuing for days through pouring rain until the ants began to die from exhaustion.

“Relying only on positive feedback can get you stuck like this,” said Czaczkes. He would later show that positive feedback was balanced by negative feedback in the black garden ant, and that negative feedback allowed for rapid adaptation to the environment.

Similar feedback networks are found in the brain, both at the level of individual neurons and of the whole brain. Just as the discovery of a cache of seeds by one or two harvester ants can trigger a massive exodus from the nest, the entry of a few sodium ions into a neuron can trigger a massive influx. This positive feedback raises the voltage of the neuron past a certain threshold, causing it to fire and temporarily stop the influx of sodium ions, while simultaneously letting potassium ions flood out.

The activity of individual neurons induces electromagnetic fields around the brain that can be recorded with electroencephalograms (EEGs). The EEG signal, too, is a form a positive feedback. Scientists at Yale University applied a weak electric field to a piece of ferret brain that was producing slow but regular brain waves, similar to what happens during deep sleep. This field, they found, could strengthen the existing surges of neural activity in the brain tissue, causing ripples to become tsunamis. When the scientists applied the opposite electric field to brain tissue that was experiencing regular waves of neural activity, they were able to disrupt this feedback loop.1

While these feedback processes in the brain are known to exist, they are hard to observe—much harder than analogous feedback processes in ant colonies. So Gordon and Goldman forged an ant-brain alliance. To get it started, they focused on one particular aspect of ant behavior: the number of interactions it would require for an ant to leave the nest and start foraging.

Passing the baton: Returning forager ants interact with outgoing ants by touching antennae. An accumulated experience of interaction stimulates the outgoing foragers to leave the nest, analogous to the way that the accumulated input from other neurons stimulates a neuron to fire. Deborah Gordon, Stanford University

In August 2013, Gordon returned to the same desert scrubland straddling the border of Arizona and New Mexico that she has visited each summer for 30 years. Armed with a map and a clipboard, she strode over the packed dirt and patches of thick grass to begin her experiments. As she walked past harvester ant colonies, she greeted them like old friends. “Happy birthday, Colony 330. You made it another year,” she said as she scribbled a note on a piece of paper, never breaking stride.

Flanked by a group of undergrads and Ph.D. students, Gordon arrived at a nest she had marked 889 with a piece of rusty wire and a stamped metal tag. Everyone set down their equipment, which included everything from large plastic buckets to umbrellas to peanut butter. Gordon removed a roll of blue duct tape decorated with pictures of SpongeBob SquarePants. The students immediately began tucking shirts into pants and jean legs into socks. Then, they carefully wrapped SpongeBob tape around ankles, wrists, and waist—anywhere the ants might be able to deliver a nasty bite. Neuroscience research had never looked quite like this before.

After taping their clothes, the students set up two video cameras. One was aimed at the opening of the nest, a hole in the ground that looks like it could have been drilled by a pencil. Another was aimed at a square about three feet from the nest entrance, measuring about one foot on each side, and with rocks at the corners. Armed with a plastic spoon filched from the cafeteria of the Southwestern Research Center that morning, Gordon began to enlarge the tiny nest entrance. Then cameras started rolling.

For 20 minutes, the group recorded the harvester ants going about life as usual, leaving the nest in search of food and bringing seeds back home. Then, Gordon focused her attention on the square. Like a Cordon Bleu chef pinching a bit of salt, Gordon expertly grabbed the ants in the square between thumb and forefinger, dropping them into a plastic bucket. The cameras kept rolling as the normally bustling ant entrance went eerily still.

“The ants aren’t getting feedback from their nestmates,” she explained. “No one is coming in, so the ants inside aren’t getting the signal to leave.”

Gordon and her team found that it took just three seconds for harvester ants to start leaving the nest faster, after their nestmates began returning in droves with food.2 The opposite reaction was much slower: If foragers didn’t return for four to five minutes, ants near the entrance fled deeper underground. The team also measured how long it took the colony to return to normal after being disrupted.

Numbers like these are precious information for Goldman. Like ants, neurons also have first and second responders. When a neuron fires, it releases neurotransmitters that are housed in containers called vesicles. One pool of vesicles, called the “readily releasable pool,” lives right at the cell membrane and is the first to be released. The vesicles in this pool, however, are few in number and can quickly be depleted. If firing rates continue at a moderate level, a second pool of vesicles called the “recycling pool” is brought into action, and very intense rates will summon a third pool called the “reserve pool.”

A returning forager is like an incoming action potential; a potential forager in the ant colony is like a synaptic vesicle. These potential foragers also appear to be arranged according to their proximity to the tunnel entrance. Those further back are similar to the recycling and reserve pools. Just as a potential forager has to decide whether to leave the nest in search of food, the synapse has to decide whether to release a vesicle.

Goldman believes he can use ant data to understand the foraging behavior of the desert ants and the ways in which it is similar to or different from vesicle recycling. To understand ant foraging behavior, he is using a mathematical construct called a stochastic accumulator. This model sums the inputs that the ants receive inside a certain time window, in a way that takes into account the inherent randomness of the environment. In synapses, the chemical signals that trigger ant foraging behavior are replaced by electrical signals that trigger the release of neurotransmitter, and the leave/stay decision of the ant is replaced by the release/don’t release decision of the synapse.

For her part, Gordon is hoping for more precise mathematical models of ant behavior. She hopes it will help her understand how differing responses to interactions at the level of individual ants may lead to differences among colonies. For example, colonies that forage less when conditions are dry are more likely to produce daughter colonies. This adaptation may result from ants requiring more interactions with their nestmates before leaving the nest to forage. “Gathering food can be really risky,” Gordon said. “It actually benefits the colony to show restraint, because they’re not wasting resources.”

In the months since her return from New Mexico, Gordon has spent many of her days watching her newly collected videos. Together with her team of postdocs, graduate students and undergrads, she counts the ants as they swarm around the colony entrance. Each ant arrival receives a sharp click on the stopwatch-like counter the students use, so that the analysis sounds like a machine gun battle in the corner of her Stanford laboratory. With each click, one species moves closer to understanding another—and itself.


~ Carrie Arnold is a freelance science writer living in Virginia. She has covered many aspects of the living world for Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, NOVA, and other publications.

References

1. Fröhilch, F. & McCormick, D.A. Endogenous electric fields may guide neocortical network activity. Neuron 67 (1), 129-143 (2010).

2. Pinter-Wollman, N., et al. Harvester ants use interactions to regulate forager activation and availability. Animal Behaviour (2013). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.05.012.

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky (UCSB)

From UCTV (UC Santa Barbara), Jan Nederveen Pieterse, professor of Global Studies and Sociology at UCSB, interviews linguist and social/political activist. As always, Chomsky is interesting and erudite.

A Conversation with Noam Chomsky

Published on Apr 28, 2014


Jan Nederveen Pieterse in conversation with Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher and political commentator. Chomsky is Emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT. Jan Nederveen Pieterse is professor of Global Studies and Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Series: "Carsey-Wolf Center" [5/2014] - (Visit: http://www.uctv.tv/)