| Why are you a believer? | ||||||
|
More and more people are discovering why -
don't you want to know too? |
||||||
|
I dont think it reduces feelings of
spirituality in any way to understand that they are based in brain
processes, just as it doesnt diminish my love for someone to know that the
feeling is caused by brain activity. Why should it? I know how a piano
works, but it doesnt detract from my appreciation of Mozart. - Paul Brooks, neuropsychologist and author, The Times, Dec 2006 |
||||||
|
Religion a Figment of Human Imagination |
||||||
|
Why children become
so attached to toys and comfort blankets |
||||||
|
Brain stimulation creates shadow person
|
||||||
|
Why 'imaginary voices' are male
|
||||||
| Ghosts in a machine What is it that triggers the brain to produce a religious experience? Jerome Burne investigates March 05, 2005 Jim lives in California and hes into an extreme sport. But hes not testing his limits with gravity or exhaustion. His equipment consists of a darkened room, a blindfold, heavy-duty earplugs and eight magnetic coils, linked to a PC and attached to his head with a Velcro headband. Jims arena is inner space. The envelope hes pushing is consciousness, using a set of experiences more commonly thought of as religious or spiritual. The coils and computer program, known as a Shakti headset, transmit magnetic pulses that stimulate regions of his brain linked with altered states of consciousness. At various times over the past year, Jim claims to have had out-of-body experiences, felt a state of oceanic bliss and sensed presences near by. Next weekend the inventor of the Shakti headset, Todd Murphy, will be one of the speakers at the Religion, Art and the Brain festival in Winchester, along with Sufi dancers, the music of John Tavener, psychologists, neuroscientists and pharmacologists. The focus of their talks will be: The evolution, experience and expression of the religious impulse what triggers the brain to produce it and why? For years brain researchers shied away from exotic experiences such as hallucinations, near-death experiences or intimations of the divine, on the grounds that there was no way to study them scientifically. But as consciousness has become an academically respectable topic, it has become harder to ignore altered states. If memory and imagination can be linked to the activity of groups of neurons, couldn t the experience of being at one with the universe just be the result of brain cells firing? Traditionally, one of the ways to stimulate these experiences has been with hallucinatory or psychedelic herbs and drugs a route that has been declared legally off-limits for individuals and researchers since the 1960s. But that is changing, too. Recently licences have been granted in the USA to study the medical benefits of using such outlawed drugs as Ecstasy and the peyote mushroom to treat psychological conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It may be a sign of the times that just before Christmas the US Supreme Court ruled that members of the New Mexico branch of a Brazilian church, Uniao Do Vegetal, should be allowed to use the hallucinatory herbal concoction ayahuasca in ceremonies. Ayahuasca has long been used by South American shamans and is renowned for the snake visions it induces. The poet Allen Ginsberg tried it in the 1950s in an attempt to expand his consciousness. I rushed out and began vomiting, he wrote, all covered with snakes, like a Snake Seraph, coloured serpents in an aureole around my body, I felt like a snake vomiting out the universe. Uncovering how a complex chemical stew triggers something as specific as serpentine visions would be a daunting scientific challenge, let alone identifying precisely which regions of the brain were involved. But for at least 100 years neurologists have been recording the bizarrely detailed altered states produced by very specific activity in the brains of epileptics. Recently, observations on epileptics have provided clues to the neural mechanism underlying out-of-body experiences (OBEs). I was in bed and about to fall asleep when I had the distinct impression that I was at ceiling level looking down at my body, began an article in the British Medical Journal last December. According to the author, Olaf Blanke, a the Swiss neuroscientist, 10 per cent of people experience OBEs but because epileptics, who have them as part of their seizures, keep on having them, it is possible to identify the brain regions involved. He concluded that they are the results of an interference with the tempro-parietal junction of the brain. This is the place, on both sides of the head, where two brain regions controlling vision and spatial awareness meet. The discovery that the uncontrolled firings of neurons in epileptics brains can trigger a range of altered states inspired Dr Michael Persinger, a neuropsychologist at the Laurentian University in Ontario, to see if he could replicate them in his laboratory by stimulating subjects temporal lobes with magnetic impulses. He designed and built Room C002B, otherwise known as the Heaven and Hell chamber, back in the mid-Eighties , in which over 1,000 subjects have now been induced to experience ghostly presences. Persingers chamber one of whose visitors was the British arch-atheist Professor Richard Dawkins (he experienced nothing) is what might be called a mainframe version of the portable Shakti equipment that Todd Murphy will be demonstrating at the conference. What others have experienced in Room C002B depended on their cultural or religious beliefs. Some saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Muhammad, or the Sky Spirit. Others, with more than a passing faith in UFOs, tell of something that sounds more like a standard alien-abduction story. The radical element of the Shakti headset is that it puts brain stimulation back in the hands of the individual rather than being something done to people in a lab. This may be the way of the future. As an American chronicler in this field, John Horgan, has remarked: Trying to understand mystical experiences without having one, is like a eunuch trying to understand sex. So far Murphy has sold about 100 headsets at about 130 each, including accessories, mainly to men aged 40 to 60 who are interested in general consciousness exploration. Most of them are not looking for extreme experiences like Jim. Instead, Murphy says: They just want to feel better or to deepen regular spiritual practices like meditation. Apparently, this particular route to religious experience isnt so popular with women, who make up only about 15 per cent of his clients. Now that religious experiences are edging into mainstream neuroscience, theories about what is going on are coming thick and fast. Dr Andrew Newberg, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, for instance, believes that the patterns of activity that show up on the brain scans of people praying or meditating fit well with the sort of experiences they report. The deeper the meditation, he says, the more active are the areas involved with both attention and powerful emotions. At the same time, an area at the back of the brain that orients you in time and space quietens down. The result is that the boundaries of the self fall away, creating an intense feeling of being at one with the universe, he says. So the big question for the conference becomes: Is the whole human range of spiritual and paranormal experiences no more than unusual patterns of brain activity? Persinger and Murphy seem to disagree on this one. Persinger was quoted recently in Time magazine as saying that: God is an artefact of the brain, while Murphy, interviewed for this article, was keen to emphasise that his aim was to enhance spirituality, not to replace it. Rita Carter, a scientific advisor to the festival and author of a popular book on neuroscience entitled Mapping the Mind, has described an occasion when she became at one with the gas fire and then the whole room and finally the entire universe. So was this no more than unstable temporal lobes in the same way that epilepsy is thought to be caused by instability in the brain or was there more to it than that? What researchers are finding is that there seem to be common brain pathways underlying all transcendental experiences, she says. Its the cultural interpretations that vary. But whats really challenging is that the research evidence is very strong that what we think of normal everyday reality is actually a construction of the brain. However, it is quite clear that the brain is also able to construct a version of reality that is quite unlike the survival-orientated normal, one. Now why on earth should it have evolved to do that and why is our culture so dead set against exploring it? Further reading: Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border between Science and Spirituality, by John Horgan (Mariner Books) |
||||||
| Tests of faith Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe? Ian Sample Thursday February 24 2005 The Guardian First for some figures. Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern world. Faith has long been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition, faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry. In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief to a hunch. It places the assumptions at the heart of many religions on the rockiest of ground. So why do so many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe. One factor in the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into the future and form memories developed. "When this happened, we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example, we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here? What happens when we die? Answers were needed. As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist turned psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Some believe that religion was so successful in improving group survival that a tendency to believe was positively selected for in our evolutionary history. Others maintain that religious belief is too modern to have made any difference. "What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer. Psychological tests Boyer has run on children go some way to proving our natural tendency to believe. "If you look at three- to five-year-olds, when they do something naughty, they have an intuition that everyone knows they've been naughty, regardless of whether they have seen or heard what they've done. It's a false belief, but it's good preparation for belief in an entity that is moral and knows everything," he says. "The idea of invisible agents with a moral dimension who are watching you is highly attention-grabbing to us." Childish belief is one thing, but religious belief is embraced by people of all ages and is by no means the preserve of the uneducated. According to Boyer, the persistence of belief into adulthood is at least in part down to a presumption. "When you're in a belief system, it's not that you stop asking questions, it's that they become irrelevant. Why don't you ask yourself about the existence of gravity? It's because a lot of the stuff you do every day presupposes it and it seems to work, so where's the motivation to question it?" he says. "In belief systems, you tend to enter this strange state where you start thinking there must be something to it because everybody around you is committed to it. The general question of whether it's true is relegated." While some continue to tease out the reasons for the emergence of religion and its persistent appeal, others are delving into the neuroscience of belief in the hope of finding a biological basis for religious experience. As a starting point, many studies focused on people with particular neural conditions that made them prone to experiences so intense, they considered them to be visions of God. At the University of California in San Diego, neuroscientist VS Ramachandran noticed that a disproportionate number of patients - around a quarter - with a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy reported having deeply moving religious experiences. "They'd tell me they felt a presence or suddenly felt they got the meaning of the whole cosmos. And these could be life-changing experiences," says Ramachandran. The feelings always came during seizures, even if the seizures were so mild, they could only be detected by sensitive electroencephalograms (EEGs). Between the seizures, some patients became preoccupied with thoughts about God. Ramachandran drew up three explanations he thought might explain why the patients with epilepsy seemed so spiritual. First, he considered that the upwelling of emotion caused by the seizure might simply overwhelm, and patients made sense of it by believing that something extremely spiritual was going on. Second, the seizure might prompt the left hemisphere to make up yarns to account for seemingly inexplicable emotions. The ability of the brain's left hemisphere to "confabulate" like this is well known to neuroscientists. Third, he wondered whether seizures disrupted the function of part of the brain called the amygdala which, among other tasks, helps us focus on what is significant while allowing us to ignore the trivial. Ramachandran decided to test a couple of patients using what is called the galvanic skin response. Two electrodes are used to measure tiny changes in the skin's electrical conductivity, an indirect measure of sweating. In most people, conductivity goes up when they are shown violent or sexual pictures, or similarly loaded words. In the test, Ramachandran found that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy responded very differently from others. Violent words such as "beat" and sexual words produced not a flicker, but religious icons and the word "God" evoked a big response. With only two patients involved in the study, Ramachandran says it is impossible to draw any conclusions, but if the results stand up to future testing, it might indicate that seizures in the temporal lobe strengthen certain neural pathways connected to the amygdala, meaning we attribute significance to the banal objects and occurrences. "If those pathways all strengthen indiscriminately, everything and anything acquires a deep significance, and when that happens, it starts resembling a religious experience," he says. "And if we can selectively enhance religious sentiments, then that seems to imply there is neural circuitry whose activity is conducive to religious belief. It's not that we have some God module in our brains, but we may have specialised circuits for belief." At the University of Pennsylvania, radiologist Andrew Newberg has cast a wider net to scan the brains of people performing all manner of spiritual activities. By injecting radioactive tracers into the veins of nuns, Buddhists and others, he has constructed brain maps that show how different practices affect neural processing. "What comes out is there's a complex network in the brain and depending on what you do, it is activated in different ways," says Newberg. "If someone does Tibetan Buddhist mediation they'll activate certain parts of their brain, but if you have a nun praying they'll activate slightly different parts, with someone doing transcendental mediation activating other areas again." Newberg uncovered the neural processing behind the religious experience of "oneness" with the universe. Blood flow drops off in the parietal lobe, a brain structure that helps us orient ourselves by giving us a sense of ourselves. "We think this latter step is critical," says Newberg. "What seems to be happening is that as you block sensory information getting into the parietal lobe, it keeps trying to give you a sense of self, but it no longer has the information to do so. If that happens completely, you might get this absolute feeling of oneness." Newberg has been criticised for his investigations into the essence of spiritual experience - the most vehement attacks coming from atheists. "Some people want me to say whether God is there or not, but these experiments can't answer that. If I scan a nun and she has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what's going on in her brain, but I can't tell you whether or not God is there," he says. Religious groups point out that there is more to religion than extreme experiences. It is a criticism Newberg acknowledges. "The problem is, the people who have these experiences are so much easier to study," he says. As neuroscientists unpick the biological mechanisms behind religious experience, others are considering what to do with the information. At Laurentian University, Todd Murphy and Michael Persinger are developing devices they think can stimulate parts of the brain to enhance spiritual experiences. Others see the possibility for drugs designed to boost spirituality. Newberg says this would be underpinning a practice that has existed for hundreds of years with scientific understanding. "If you talk to a shamen who takes a substance so they can enter into the spirit world, they don't think that diminishes the experience in any way," he says. Intriguingly, many scientists, while stressing that they have set out to explore religion rather than disprove its basis, say that no matter what they uncover about the nature of spiritual experiences, mass religious belief will continue. The fastest growing religions in the US are the Mormon church and Scientology, both popular, according to Boyer largely because they are new. In other parts of the world, more fundamentalist religions succeed because they give a clear vision of the world. "For two centuries, there's been competition between churches and in the free market of religion, the products get better and better as people want different things," says Boyer. "Will science be the death of religion? As neuroscience, it's interesting to see how brains can create very strange states of consciousness, but in terms of threatening religion, I think it'll have absolutely no effect." Further reading Darwin's Cathedral , University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226901351 David Sloan-Wilson argues religion is evolution at work Religion Explained ,Vintage, ISBN 0099282763 Pascal Boyer on religion as a tool for social integrity Brain-wise Bradford Book, ISBN 026203301 Patricia Smith Churchland on the neural basis of religion What Is Good? ,Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 0297841327 AC Grayling on humanity's search for a moral code |
||||||
| We are the final frontier Copernicus, Darwin, Crick and Watson changed the way people see themselves. Ian Sample asks leading scientists what comes next Ian Sample Thursday February 10, 2005 Guardian Humans have always thought of themselves as special, and with good reason. As far as we know, we are alone in the universe in churning out great works of art and literature, in formulating the laws of physics, and in creating the spectacle that is morris dancing. But our view of ourselves as the pinnacle of life has suffered huge blows at the hands of science. Every now and again comes an idea so revolutionary that it rocks the foundations on which our hubris is built. At the University of San Diego, California, VS Ramachandran, director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition, points to three major upheavals in scientific thinking that have served to remind us that we are not so special after all. First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Instead, he relegated our planet to one of many orbiting the sun. Copernicus wasn't the first to come up with a heliocentric model of the solar system, but his description was backed up with mathematics that meant it was taken far more seriously. "At once, the whole notion that Earth was special was rendered obsolete and that must have been pretty humbling," says Ramachandran. If Copernicus ruffled feathers by saying the Earth wasn't special, Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren't special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection, immediately suggesting that humans were just another kind of animal. "It meant we weren't the crowning glory of evolution, we were just hairless apes that happened to be slightly cleverer than our cousins," says Ramachandran. "It was a great shock. Victorian women fainted when they heard about it." Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. According to Ramachandran, it led to a further challenge to human arrogance. We were, in short, simply vessels of self-replicating molecules, whose only purpose was to pass them on to another generation. So what's next? What will be the fourth revolution? And will it, like those before, force us to question once more what it means to be human? To find out, Life put the question to some of the world's top scientists. The leading candidates for the next revolution are enthralling, depressing and mind-boggling. Seth Shostak, of the alien-hunting Seti organisation in California, believes that we will become the first species to invent our successor, intentionally demoting ourselves to intellectual second fiddle. Others say we will finally understand the workings of the mind, and with it grasp fully the nature of self. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City University of New York, believes that we will discover parallel universes, perhaps floating just inches away from our own. Elvis Presley might even be alive and well in one of them, he says. The Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield sees a bleak future. We will see a melding of man and machine, she says, leading to the demise of the individual. Whatever shape the next revolution takes, it may help humans to understand their condition rather than knock it down further. "The big question is why these revolutions don't make us profoundly sad. We're reduced to bags of chemicals with no free will, living on a normal planet, but people still find that exciting," says Ramachandran. "I think it's because with greater understanding, we see ourselves as part of some grander scheme. We're part of something larger than ourselves and once we identify with that, it is not degrading, it's ennobling." 'We will invent our successors' Seth Shostak, senior astronomer, Seti Institute, California The amount of computing power you can buy for 1,000 doubles every 18 months. It's hardly speculative to declare that by 2020, your desktop will have more operational horsepower than a human brain. Many people who work in the field of machine intelligence believe that, with the right arrangement of hardware and software, you really can build a thinking machine. Not just a device that beats everyone at chess: a machine that can write fiction, do physics research, or be amusing at parties. If you doubt this, then you are forced to concede that there's something miraculous going on under our hats. Is there some good reason that one organ of the body - the one in your skull - has a function that can't be replicated? That's hubris of a fine sort; a kind of self-defence concocted by the very organ under examination. It strikes me as likely that, sometime this century, we will build a thinking computer. That machine will run the planet. Competitive pressures will ensure this (if we don't have a machine running our society, we'll fall behind those that do). We will no longer be the smartest things on Earth. Our mantle of superiority will be donned by our own creations. Then what? Will the machines get rid of us? A machine that dwarfs our intelligence might regard us as we regard budgies or goldfish: diverting. Our role as second intellectual fiddle may be to serve as pets for the sentients in charge. All of this would be dismaying enough if it were merely a science fiction story. But I suspect that the first steps will be taken by mid-century. We could well be the last generation of humans to dominate Earth. 'We will understand the human mind' John Sulston, founder of the Sanger Institute, Cambridge Along with the late Francis Crick (see The Astonishing Hypothesis), and many others, I expect that in the coming century we shall understand in a general way how the human brain gives rise to what we perceive as the human mind. The solution will be interesting, very complex, but not in the end mysterious. It will be a great philosophical challenge to take on board, but we shall succeed because of our tremendous ability to adapt. We should not be humbled by any of these revolutions. We should rather feel, first, a modest pride in our ability to achieve such understanding, and more importantly, a huge sense of collective responsibility in what we do with it. A humility that disclaims responsibility for its actions is dangerous, and offers a real risk that our wonderful journey of exploring the universe will be cut off just as we are beginning in earnest. 'The existence of parallel universes' Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, the City University of New York The next revolution will be proof of the existence of the multiverse. Think of fish in a very shallow pond. They live in a two-dimensional world and feel comfortable swimming forward, backwards, left and right. But there are other ponds, and in some they could swim up and down, too. Physicists believe that we spend our lives in a little pond of three dimensions, thinking smugly that's all there is, but there are other ponds out there. These universes might be right next to us, perhaps hovering inches above our own. Some of these universes could look just like ours. I've been asked if Elvis Presley is alive in one of these parallel universes and it cannot be dismissed. Maybe Elvis Presley is still alive in a parallel universe and, as outrageous as it sounds, we physicists actively discuss these kinds of questions. It's mind-boggling. 'We will change our genetic makeup' Norbert Gleicher, director of the Centre for Human Reproduction, Chicago The next revolution will come from a combination of huge advances in genetics and stem cell research. It will lead to a more egalitarian society. Assuming that all humanity has access to these advances, everybody will benefit from regenerative medicine, which means we'll cure disease at an accelerated rate, we'll live longer and finally we'll be able to affect our genetic makeup. Once we can affect our genetic makeup we'll become more similar to one another because everybody will want the same thing. We are not at the point yet where we can define genetically what makes Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player that ever lived, but theoretically, in the not too distant future, we'll understand what it was in the genetic makeup that made him such a talent. While genetics is not everything, we will be in a position to say that if somebody has these genes, that person's ability to jump or play music, or do other things will be advanced. Once we identify the genetic background for any kind of human capability, we can, at least theoretically, manipulate the genetic makeup of humans by substituting that genetic background into the makeup of the person. It raises huge ethical issues. There are strong voices in the community who do not wish mankind to achieve these abilities. But we're in an accelerated evolutionary phase and I don't think it can be stopped. 'We will find out if we are alone' Colin Pillinger, head of planetary and space sciences, Open University The question I think we have the best chance of answering is, are we alone? Only 17% of people believe that we are unique; the other 83% believe that we can't possibly be the only ones. Look at the elements that are most abundant in the cosmos: hydrogen, helium and oxygen, making the most common compound water. Next come carbon and nitrogen. So, four out of the five most common elements throughout the cosmos can make the organic compounds we all know and love. That says to me that life is an accident waiting to happen. We would be completely and utterly arrogant to think that life hasn't originated elsewhere in this great cosmos. What would be really fascinating would be if we were to go to another planet and find life based on another code, other than DNA. That would really be wiz-bang stuff. How can we answer the question? We have to rule out receiving a message at one of our radio telescopes saying: "Excuse me, hello, we're calling from somewhere in the distant universe to let you know we're here." We don't have the telescopes to check for life on planets round distant stars, so the first step is finding out if there is life in the solar system. How long until we discover that? In 2009, if they let me launch Beagle 3. 'Humans become a collective intelligence' John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences and author of The Infinite Book, Cambridge University We as a species have entered a new phase of evolution with the appearance of the world wide web. We share information collectively. You can find out almost anything you want to know at the click of a button, and this happened suddenly, nobody predicted it. This is a collectivisation of human information. Once you start to act with other people, you can do things you couldn't do as an individual. You become a connected intelligence and just like joining computers together, that increases your effectiveness and power. Most people rely on the web for information to the extent that the memorisation of facts and figures and information is no longer required. In some ways, it's probably not a good thing, but it's how it is. For scientists, it means the world is now one giant research group. 'We'll understand thoughts and feelings' Steven Pinker, professor of psychology, Harvard University My choice would be what the late Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" - the idea all our thoughts and feelings consist in physiological activity in tissues of the brain, rather than in an immaterial soul. Thinking is neural computation; wanting and trying are neural cybernetics (feedback systems, like your thermostat). All this means that humans are not special in having an essence that is separate from the material universe. It means no life after death. That, in turn, means no divine rewards or punishments in a world to come. It means that our minds, not just our bodies, were descended from those of apes and shaped by the morally indifferent forces of natural selection. It means that responsibility can't be equated with the notion of free will, if free will is conceived as autonomous choice utterly disconnected from any chain of cause and effect. It means that we may acquire new technologies to enhance mood, memory, thinking and personality by chemical means. It will take some time for many people to readjust their notions of meaning and morality to this revolution from cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. 'The end of the individual' Susan Greenfield, neuroscientist, Oxford University The merging of carbon and silicon systems, such as the growing of neurons in integrated circuits, could be the next revolution. It would challenge our whole notion of living versus innate things. Many new technologies could lead for the first time to a "de-individualisation". Up until now, especially in the west, there's been an emphasis on nurturing the individual. This rise and rise of the individual might be the natural consequence of 20th century so-called progress, but the new revolution will challenge that for the first time. If you're constantly in front of a computer screen, you're the passive recipient of lots of information. You're just a consumer, living at that moment, having an experience, pressing buttons and reacting, but not having a life narrative any more. You're not defined by your family, or by what you know, or by specific events in the real world, because most of your time is spent in cyberspace. So what are you? Could it be that we just become nodes on a much larger collective thought machine? 'What if God lives in a part of our brain?' Nancy Rothwell, neuroscientist at Manchester University The previous revolutions haven't necessarily made our place less significant. We are just discovering the complexity of the natural world. The fact we can begin to understand these concepts at all shows how advanced we are. A breakthrough would be in understanding the complex functions of the brain, emotions, consciousness and imagination and how they are formed. We might even find that there is a biological basis for religion. Suppose we discovered that God "lived" in a particular part of the brain, and that religion was a biological function which had evolved to help us through difficult times. It's not impossible. For some, it would be fascinating and curious, for others it would just be dismissed. But others might find it very difficult indeed - it would shake their world. 'What it means to be a person' V S Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego The next revolution will be understanding the organ that made all the previous revolutions possible. Your mind, your ambitions, your love life, even what you regard as yourself, all of it is the activity of little wisps of jelly in your head. Once we figure out the code, that's going to be a big revolution and another humbling experience. The ultimate triumph of the human mind is to understand what the mind is. We'll understand what it means to will an action, what it means to be a person, what is the self. People say that if you know all that, it'll be terrible, but just because you know the rules, it doesn't mean that you can predict what everyone's going to do. That may happen some day, but in the next hundred years, we'll just know the ground rules. Knowing the laws of physics doesn't tell you exactly how a wave is going to break when it hits the shore. How did the mind emerge from this jelly? Once we figure that out, we'll have a more mature understanding of the relation between mind and brain, and the nature of the self, which I think is the last great frontier. 'Conscious machines' Igor Aleksander, professor of neural systems engineering at Imperial College London I think the next big revolution will be machine consciousness. There are buzzes in our head which are neurons firing away to give us a sensation of the world and our place within it. There must be a way of replicating that. The assumption that as soon as you've made a conscious machine, you've made an evil machine, is absolute rot. If a machine is truly conscious, it'll be conscious of missions it's been given. A conscious machine will be aware of its own mission without worrying too much about trying to take over the world. If we come up with something that's conscious, it'll be unimpressive. The things we'll build, even if they have mechanisms of consciousness inside them, may not be that much better than what we have around already. But if you take the classical idea of the mind and the body, that's going to take a knock. It seems the majority of people think consciousness is something intractable, that we can never understand it. I think we can. Certainly in 10 to 15 years' time, anyone who says consciousness is so mysterious, no science will ever touch it, will look a fool. 'Higher dimensions' Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist, Harvard University We might find out there are more than three dimensions of space. What is special about three dimensions? We've found that space can have higher dimensions in some places and lower dimensions where we are, so three dimensions might just be a peculiar property of where we are. It's possible that there are extra dimensions and that we live on an object called a brane, which is a membrane in higher dimensional space. Just like a bead on a wire that can only move in one direction or the other, it could be that the three dimensions we see are special because they're the dimensions along the brane we are on. We're extremely close to finding out if extra dimensions exist. At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider will look for particles which will be evidence of those extra dimensions. A lot of people will struggle with what it means to have extra dimensions. You can't see them, you can't experience them, so, to some extent, everyone will be disturbed by it. One amazing thing is that this expands your imagination. 'Humans are less miraculous than we thought' Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science The sets of rules, or programs, underlying how humans work are no more sophisticated than the ones occurring elsewhere in nature. Nowadays, the most common assumption about the special status of humans is that it must be something to do with the level of intelligence or complexity that we exhibit. Intuition tells us that getting the kind of seemingly sophisticated, rich behaviour we see in humans and society must take a lot of fundamental rules and ideas. But this may not be the case. In a computational view of the universe, everything is run according to set fundamental "programs", analogous to computers carrying out the rules contained in software programs. But while software programs might be very complex with several million lines of code, the programs in nature could be very simple - maybe one line or less. Even these simple programs seem to produce essentially the same richness that you would expect in vastly more complicated programs and in the kind of things that happen in nature. There's a whole universe of these possible simple programs and we have only had experience with, and studied in detail, a very small collection of them. If it's possible to get so much from so little, we get to hold in our hands the very rules of the universe. Which means that there's nothing about the universe that is fundamentally beyond human understanding. On the other hand, it perhaps seems a little unfortunate that there's nothing more. There's nothing miraculous that can go on in our universe or, more importantly, in humans. Interviews by Ian Sample, David Adam, Alok Jha and Simon Rogers Three lessons in humility Science has a way of painting God out of the picture, and putting humankind in its place. Nicolas Copernicus launched the Copernican revolution in about 1530: Galileo continued it; Isaac Newton completed it more than a century later. It began innocently, when Copernicus tried to make a timetable for the positions of the planets. The calculations added up best if he assumed that the sun was the centre of the universe and that the Earth, like Mars, Venus and Jupiter, was just another planet. This upset the Ptolemaic scheme, which for more than a thousand years placed the Earth at the centre. Christian theology also had the Earth at the centre. So Copernicus offended both the Catholic Church (which listed his book as banned until 1835) and the reformer Martin Luther. Cosmologists now talk of the Copernican principle, which is that there is nothing special about planet Earth, in space or time. Humans are just little specks of sentience on an accidental planet in a corner of the cosmos. The Darwinian revolution, too, was a 100-year story, and it began long before Darwin. Religious orthodoxy called for a young universe, specially created with its present inhabitants. But miners, canal engineers and natural philosophers kept finding puzzling evidence of creatures that existed long before human history. Geologists such as Hutton and Lyell proposed an ancient Earth, subject to continuous change. Charles Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace, quite independently) went a stage further: life itself was ancient, and subject to continuous change, in which random mutations in inheritance were selected or dismissed by the pressures of the environment. This, too, shocked some churchmen. But humans now see themselves as just another evolutionary by-product, cousin to the apes. The clinching proof of this has been in the DNA revolution, launched 50 years ago. Where did these mutations happen and how were they transmitted? In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick began to crack the riddle. They revealed the structure of a long molecule, detectable in almost every living cell, which spelled out the genetic code. Comparison of DNA in living humans provides clues to ancestral kinships. It also confirms that all life is linked to one last universal common ancestor. Science has exposed the machinery of creation, and taught humans a lesson in humility. None of this, however, yet explains why the universe began, or how and why life started in the first place, seemingly only on one planet. |
||||||
| 'We Can Implant Entirely False
Memories' Laura Spinney on our remembrance of things past... The Guardian - UK, 12-7-3 You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you? Alan Alda had nothing against hard-boiled eggs until last spring. Then the actor, better known as Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, paid a visit to the University of California, Irvine. In his new guise as host of a science series on American TV, he was exploring the subject of memory. The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened. Alda was the unwitting guinea pig of Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability since Richard Nixon was sworn in as president. Early on in her research, she would invite people into her lab, show them simulated traffic accidents, feed them false information and leading questions, and find that they subsequently recalled details of the scene differently - a finding that has since been replicated hundreds of times. More recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility because, among other things, real life tends to be more emotionally arousing than simulations of it. So these days she takes her investigations outside the lab. In a study soon to be published, she and colleagues describe how a little misinformation led witnesses of a terrorist attack in Moscow in 1999 to recall seeing wounded animals nearby. Later, they were informed that there had been no animals. But before the debriefing, they even embellished the false memory with make-believe details, in one case testifying to seeing a bleeding cat lying in the dust. "We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big." She has persuaded people to adopt false but plausible memories - for instance, that at the age of five or six they had the distressing experience of being lost in a shopping mall - as well as implausible ones: memories of witnessing demonic possession, or an encounter with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers character, and as the Los Angeles Times put it earlier this year, "The wascally Warner Bros. Wabbit would be awwested on sight", at Disney. Elizabeth Loftus' research has obvious implications for the reliability of eyewitness testimony. And it was as a result of her findings that in 1994 she co-wrote her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, and took a strong stand in the recovered memory debate of the 90s, for which she was reviled by those who claimed to have uncovered repressed memories of abuse - alien, sexual or otherwise. The American Psychological Association (APA) now takes the line that most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them, and that it is rare (though not unheard of) that people forget such emotionally charged events and later recover them. But it states that, "Concerning the issue of a recovered versus a pseudomemory, like many questions in science, the final answer is yet to be known." And the debate simmers on. Several new lines of evidence suggest that the interaction between memory and emotion is more complex than was thought. Powerful emotions, it seems, can both reinforce and weaken real memories. We may be able to actively degrade painful memories. And false memories, once accepted, can themselves elicit strong emotions and thereby mimic real ones. To try to tease apart these complex relationships, the psychologist Daniel Wright and his colleagues at the University of Sussex have been looking into what it is that makes some people more susceptible to false memories than others. On average, studies show that around a third of those subjected to the "misinformation effect" wholly or partially adopt a false memory, but it seems to depend on both the person and the memory. Alan Alda swallowed the hard-boiled egg story, to the extent that he declined to eat one at the UCI picnic, but he wasn't taken in by Bugs Bunny in Disneyland. In one study published last year, 50% of volunteers were persuaded they had taken a ride in a hot-air balloon when they had not. But when Kathy Pezdek of the Claremont Graduate University, California, tried to make people believe they had received a rectal enema, she met with almost universal resistance. Amid all this variability, Wright's group did find one significant correlation - though it was not dramatic: those who were more vulnerable to false memories also tended to suffer more frequent lapses in attention and memory. The trouble is, he says, "People who have been traumatised also tend to score higher on tests of lapses in memory." Their traumatic experiences may contribute to their forgetfulness, but their forgetfulness may lay them open to memory distortion - so true and false become harder to disentangle. Among the symptoms suffered by victims of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are chilling flashbacks. But, says Michael Anderson of the University of Oregon, "People who suffer PTSD represent a very small fraction of the people who experience trauma. The great majority of people who experience trauma never develop PTSD and eventually are able to adapt in the face of these events." He argues that they do so by suppressing the memory, and that this suppression gradually erases it. Two years ago, Anderson's group showed that people who deliberately try to keep a word out of their mind find it harder to recall later than if they had not suppressed it. Counter- intuitively, this form of forgetting seems more likely to occur when people are confronted by reminders of the very memory they want to avoid. Anderson says an extreme example of this might be a child who is forced to live with an abusing care-giver, and must put the memory of abuse to one side in order to interact with that care-giver. "If people continue to work at it, the amount of forgetting grows with repetition and time," he says. At the annual meeting of the US Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans last month, Anderson's group presented new data on how this "motivated forgetting" might arise in the brain. When people tried to suppress memories for certain words while having their brains scanned in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, not only did the researchers see a dampening of activity in the hippocampus, a structure known to be critical for memory formation, but the frontal cortex was highly active. Since the frontal cortex is important for conscious control, they believe that neurons here may be suppressing the representation of the unwanted word in the hippocampus, and in the process impairing its memory. However, Anderson admits that his experiments ignore the effect of a memory's emotional intensity on a person's ability to suppress it. And there is plenty of evidence that memory for emotionally charged events can be enhanced - albeit at a cost. Also last month, Bryan Strange of the Wellcome department of imaging neuroscience at University College London and colleagues showed that people were more likely to remember a word if it was emotionally arousing - "murder" or "scream", say - than if it was neutral. And the words most likely to be forgotten were neutral ones presented just before emotionally arousing ones. The effect was more pronounced in women than in men, and both the enhanced memory for the emotional word and the forgettability of the preceding neutral one could be reversed by dosing the volunteers in advance with the drug propranolol. Propranolol, a commonly prescribed beta-blocker, interferes with the neurochemical pathway thought to be responsible for making emotionally arousing events more memorable - the beta-adrenergic system - and it has already been used experimentally in the treatment of patients with PTSD. In one study, published in October, Guillaume Vaiva of the University of Lille and colleagues offered prop- ranolol to victims of assault or motor accidents shortly after their traumatic experience, and then invited them back for psychological testing two months later. On their return, almost all the patients exhibited some symptoms associated with PTSD, but they were twice as severe among those who had not taken the drug. The finding that propranolol can be effective at blocking memory when given after an event as well as before is important because, as Loftus explains, "In the real world you can't be there to exert your manipulations right at the time an event is happening, but you can get on the scene later." It has been proposed that propranolol should be offered to victims of rape as a standard measure to prevent them developing PTSD. But could it also be used to erase false memories - for instance, "recovered" memories of alien abduction - that nevertheless elicit all the physiological responses associated with harrowing, real memories? "If the formation of false memories depends on beta-adrenergic activation, then it would seem very possible that propranolol administration could affect them," says the UCI neuro- biologist Larry Cahill, who has also investigated the effects of the drug in PTSD patients. But Ray Dolan of UCL, a co-author with Bryan Strange of the study on memory for emotional words, points out that not all false memories have a common basis. If they are interpolations into gaps in memory, such as the gap that opened up before the presentation of an emotionally arousing word, or possibly the gap into which Alan Alda inserted a memory of having over-indulged in eggs, then it is conceivable the drug would work. But, says Dolan, "Other classes of false memory, for example, where the memories are fantasies or out-and-out fabrications, would be immune to propranolol." The idea of doctors having the power to wipe the memory clean sends shivers down many people's spines. False memories could safely be erased, perhaps, assuming there was a reliable way of differentiating them from true ones. Although brain-imaging techniques highlight some differences in patterns of brain activation when a person recalls a true as opposed to a false memory, these are statistical differences only. "We are so far away from being able to use these techniques to reliably classify a single memory as being real or not real," says Loftus, "Yet that is what the courts have to do." True memories, too, can get out of control and become destructive, leading to PTSD and other anxiety disorders. But they start out as an important self-defence mechanism - teaching you, for instance, that too many hard-boiled eggs are bad for you. Erasing them completely could be dangerous. In the end, says Loftus, it will come down to personal choice. "What would you rather be in the world, sadder but wiser, all too well remembering the horrors of your past and feeling depressed, or perhaps not remembering them very much and being a little happier?" Further reading The Myth of Repressed Memory by Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, 1996 paperback (St Martin's Press, New York). ISBN 0312141238 American Psychological Association website with links to questions and answers about memories of childhood abuse: www.apa.org/pubinfo/ Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control by Michael C Anderson and Collinn Green, Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, 2001 (Nature, 410 [6826], 366-9) ------------------------------------
Neuroscientists admit that by administering beta-blockers like Propranolol,
they can induce false memories in susceptible people, particularly
those who have suffered a traumatic experience,
(torture) leaving them "open to memory distortion
- so true and false become harder to disentangle" but for what
purpose? |
||||||
|
Demon Haunted
Brain Occasionally one of my monthly columns in Scientific American ("Skeptic") draws an extraordinary amount of mail. The March column, entitled Demon-Haunted Brain, is one of those. The general criticism was that just because apparent paranormal phenomena can be replicated through brain stimulation of various types does not mean that the paranormal phenomena are not real. Here is the column, or you can just go to http://www.sciam.com and download it there (along with the latest column on cloning entitled "I Clone" that includes my analogue to Asimov's three laws of robotics in the "three laws of cloning"; as well as all past columns) If the brain mediates all experience then paranormal phenomena are nothing more than neuronal events Five centuries ago demons haunted our world, with incubi and succubi tormenting their victims as they lay asleep in their beds. Two centuries ago spirits haunted our world, with ghosts and ghouls harassing their sufferers all hours of the night. Last century aliens haunted our world, with grays and greens abducting captives out of their beds and whisking them away for probing and prodding. Today people are experiencing out of body experiences, floating above their beds, out of their bedrooms, and even off the planet into space. What is going on here? Are these elusive creatures and mysterious phenomena in our world or in our minds? New evidence indicates that they are, in fact, a product of the brain. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger, in his laboratory at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, for example, can induce all of these experiences in subjects by subjecting their temporal lobes to patterns of magnetic fields (I tried it and had a mild out-of-body experience). Similarly, the September 19, 2002 issue of Nature, reported that the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues discovered that they could bring about out-of-body experiences through electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe of a 43-year old woman suffering from severe epileptic seizures. In initial mild stimulations she reported "sinking into the bed" or "falling from a height." More intense stimulation led her to "see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." Another stimulation induced "an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two meters above the bed, close to the ceiling." In a related study reported in the 2001 book Why God Won't Go Away, researchers Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili found that when Buddhist monks meditate and Franciscan nuns pray their brain scans indicate strikingly low activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe, a region of the brain the authors have dubbed the Orientation Association Area (OAA), whose job it is to orient the body in physical space (people with damage to this area have a difficult time negotiating their way around a house). When the OAA is booted up and running smoothly there is a sharp distinction between self and non-self. When OAA is in sleep mode--as in deep meditation and prayer--that division breaks down, leading to a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, between feeling in body and out of body. Perhaps this is what happens to monks who experience a sense of oneness with the universe, or with nuns who feel the presence of God, or with alien abductees floating out of their beds up to the mother ship. Sometimes trauma can trigger such experiences. The December 2001 issue of Lancet published a Dutch study in which of 344 cardiac patients resuscitated from clinical death, 12 percent reported near-death experiences, where they had an out-of-body experience and saw a light at the end of a tunnel. Some even described speaking to dead relatives. Since our normal experience is of stimuli coming into the brain from the outside, when a part of the brain abnormally generates these illusions another part of the brain interprets them as external events. Hence, the abnormal is thought to be the paranormal. These studies are only the latest to deliver blows against the belief that mind and spirit are separate from brain and body. In reality, all experience is mediated by the brain. Large brain areas like the cortex coordinate imputes from smaller brain areas such as the temporal lobes, which themselves collate neural events from still smaller brain modules like the angular gyrus. This reduction continues all the way down to the single neuron level, where highly-selective neurons, sometimes described as "grandmother" neurons fire only when subjects see someone they know. Caltech neuroscientists Christof Koch and Gabriel Kreiman, in conjunction with UCLA neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried have even found a single neuron that fires when the subject is shown a photograph of Bill Clinton. The Monica neuron must be closely connected. Of course, we are not aware of the workings of our own electrochemical systems. What we actually experience is what philosophers call qualia, or subjective states of thoughts and feelings that arise from a concatenation of neural events. It is the fate of the paranormal and the supernatural to be subsumed into the normal and the natural. In fact, there is no paranormal or supernatural; there is only the normal and the natural--and mysteries yet to be explained.
It is the job of science, not
pseudoscience, to solve those puzzles with
natural, not supernatural, explanations.
Michael Shermer is publisher of
Skeptic magazine (
www.skeptic.com
) and author of Why People Believe Weird
Things, now in a revised edition. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
In Search Of God Are our religious feelings just a product of how the
brain works? Bob Holmes meets the researchers who are trying to explain our most sacred
thoughts | ||||||
