Mind over Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz and Neuroplasticity

Mindfulness Affects Brain Matter: Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Mind over matter, anyone? The question would be rejected by those who endorse the modern view of consciousness, which appeals to hard-liners in cognitive science, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, or behavioral genetics, all of whom would support some material explanation for consciousness. These approaches consider as defective and retrograde any appeal to a non-material explanation. Along comes Jeffrey Schwartz, neuroscientist and Research Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, who has worked with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients, and who has a wholly different take on consciousness after finding that OCD people can free themselves from the disorder. ( See his book, Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.) He has written another book, this one with Sharon Begley. Its title is italicized in the header for this article. Schwartz is also a practicing Buddhist. Here he is on materialist explanations:

LOOKING BACK, IT SEEMS INEVITABLE that advances in brain science during the 20th century led almost all people esteemed as "scientifically literate" to believe that eventually all aspects of the human mind would be explained in material terms. After all, in an era when the unquestioned cultural assumption was "for science all causes are material causes," how could one be expected to think differently? What's more, tremendous advances in brain-imaging technologies during the last two decades of that most materialist of centuries enabled scientists to investigate the inner workings of the living human brain. This certainly seemed to further buttress the generally unexamined and often smugly held belief that the deep mysteries of the brain, and the "laws" through which it created and ruled all aspects of the human mind, would someday be revealed.

Thus arose the then virtually hegemonic belief that human beings and everything they do are, like all other aspects of the world of nature, the results of material causes--by which the elites of the time simply meant results of material forces interacting with each other. While primitive, uneducated, and painfully unsophisticated people might be beguiled into believing that they had minds and wills capable of exerting effort and rising above the realm of the merely material, this was just--as Daniel Dennett, a widely respected philosopher of the day, delighted in putting it--an example of a "user illusion": that is, the quaint fantasy of those who failed to realize, due to educational deficiencies or plain thick-headedness, that "a brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances." Were you one of the rubes who believed that people are capable of making free and genuinely moral decisions? Then of course haughty contempt, or at best pity, was the only appropriate demeanor a member of the intellectual elite could possibly direct your way.

On a societal and cultural level the damage such spurious and unwarranted elite opinions wreaked on the world at large was immense. For if everything people do results solely from their brains, and everything the brain does results solely from material causes, then people are no different than any other complicated machine and the brain is no different in principle than any very complex computer. If matter determines all, everything is passive and no one ever really does anything, or to be more precise, no one is really responsible for anything they think, say, or do.

What's more, if anything they think, say, or do causes problems for them or society at large, then, the sophisticates of that thankfully bygone era believed, the ultimate way to solve the problem would be to make the required changes in the brain that would make it work the way a properly functioning machine is supposed to. This naturally led to the widespread use of drugs as a primary means of treating what generally came to be called "behavioral problems."

After all, if the brain is the final cause of everything a person thinks, says, and does, why bother with old-fashioned and outdated notions like "self-control" or even "making your best effort" to solve a problem? If the brain is the ultimate cause underlying all the problems, then the sophisticated thing to do to rectify things is to give a chemical (or even place an electrode!) that gets right in there and fixes things. "God helps those who help themselves?" Not in the real world, where science knows all the answers, sneered the elites of the time.

Happily for the future of humanity, in the early years of the 21st century this all started to change. The reasons why, on a scientific level, grew out of the coming together of some changes in perspective that had occurred in physics and neuroscience during the last decades of the previous century. Specifically, the theory of physics called quantum mechanics was seen to be closely related, especially in humans, to the discovery in brain science called neuroplasticity: the fact that throughout the lifespan the brain is capable of being rewired, and that in humans at least, this rewiring could be caused directly by the action of the mind.

Work using new brain-imaging technologies of that era to study people with a condition called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) played a key role in this development. OCD is a medical condition in which people suffer from very bothersome and intrusive thoughts and feelings that give them the sense that "something is wrong" in their immediate surroundings--usually the thought or feeling that something is dirty or contaminated or needs to be checked because it isn't quite right.

This is what is called an obsession. The problem the medical condition causes is that although the sufferers generally know this feeling that "something is wrong" is false and doesn't really make sense, the feeling keeps bothering them and doesn't go away, due to a brain glitch that was discovered using brain imaging. Sufferers often respond to these gut-wrenching thoughts and feelings by washing, checking, straightening things, etc., over and over again, in a desperate but futile attempt to make things seem right. These futile repetitive acts are called compulsions.

In the 1990s it was discovered that OCD sufferers were very capable of learning how to resist capitulating to these brain-related symptoms by using a mental action called "mindful awareness" when confronting them. In a nutshell, mindful awareness means using your "mind's eye" to view your own inner life and experiences the way you would if you were standing, as it were, outside yourself-most simply put, it means learning to use a rational perspective when viewing your own inner experience.

When OCD patients did this, and as a result came to view the bothersome intrusive thoughts and feelings just as medical symptoms that they had the mental power to resist, they found they were empowered to direct their attention in much more useful and wholesome ways by focusing on healthy and/or work-related activities. Over several weeks, and with much mental effort and faith in their ability to overcome the suffering, many OCD patients were found to be capable of regularly resisting the symptoms. . . .

In the early years of the current century brain imaging was used to reveal many similar and related findings. For instance, people with spider phobia, or people viewing stressful or sexually arousing films, were found to be entirely capable of using mental effort to apply mindful awareness and "re-frame" their perspective on their experience. By so doing it was clearly demonstrated that they could systematically change the response of the brain to these situations and so cease being frightened, stressed, or sexually aroused, whatever the case may be.

This latter finding was realized by some at the time to be potentially relevant to teaching sexual abstinence strategies to adolescents--for if you have the power to control your brain's response to sexual urges, then practicing sexual abstinence in arousing situations will not only strengthen your moral character; it will also increase your mental and physical capacity to control the workings of your own brain--an extremely wholesome and empowering act!

All this work came together when physicist Henry Stapp realized that a basic principle of quantum mechanics, which because of the nature of the brain at the atomic level must be used for proper understanding of the brain's inner workings, explains how the action of the mind changes how the brain works. A well-established mechanism called the quantum zeno effect (QZE) readily explains how mindfully directed attention can alter brain circuitry adaptively. Briefly, we can understand QZE like this: The mental act of focusing attention tends to hold in place brain circuits associated with whatever is focused on. In other words, focusing attention on your mental experience maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. . . .

The rest, as they say, is history. Once a solid scientific theory was in place to explain how the mind's power to focus attention could systematically rewire the brain, and that the language of our mental and spiritual life is necessary to empower the mind to do so, the materialist dogma was toppled. We may not have all lived happily ever after in any simplistic sense, but at least science is no longer on the side of those who claim human beings are no different in principle than a machine. More. If that link fails, click here for the article with omitted paragraphs. (From a defunct site, World on The Web, 3 April 2004, Volume 19, Number 13)

(In a spirited debate with Michael Schermer on C-Span2, Schwartz drew from the Buddhist concept of Dependent Origination to help explain his view of volition.)

Organic and Inorganic Matter: Zen Master Dogen and Physicists

Organic and Inorganic

In his Shobogenzo, Dogen (1200-1253), profoundly realized and brilliant, does not speculate about time and being but speaks about them out of his deep experience. In his section "Being-Time" he states that time occurs because man disposes himself and takes this disposition as the world. As Dogen puts it, "Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself." Here is another example: "In your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow and move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds, thousands, and myriads of eons, you have not devotedly studied the Buddha way."

He views the world not as inert-matter, not as inorganic, but as an organic whole. In a different sense, physics describes organic patterns. This means that particles, bits of matter, are organic energy. Non-scientists think of anything organic as living. This, of course, is not the intent of describing particles that way.

But what can be said about the organic as distinct from the inorganic?

Think about a rock and a human being. My apologies for the rather morbid example, but it serves my explanation. Drop a rock from a cliff, then drop a human being from it. As matter, organic or inorganic, they are both governed by the same law of falling bodies.

The big difference between the rock and the person is that the rock is lifted, held in the hands, then dropped. The person will put up a mighty struggle before going over the edge. One does not act while the other does. To what do we attribute this action?

At least two explanations occur. One is that the human looks ahead, which is to say he has time-consciousness. He can foresee death. He is time-bound while the rock is not.

But perhaps in certain instances some kinds of matter can also look ahead. When photons are fired through two slits, then through one, the particles exhibit a peculiar behavior, which can be interpreted as knowing in advance which slit will be open. (See Wheeler, delayed choice and time and Schrödinger's Cat.) Physicist Henry Stapp puts it this way: "The central mystery of quantum theory is ' How does information get around so quickly? ' " ("Are Superluminal Connections Necessary?," Nuovo Cimento, 40B, 1977)

Another explanation. Human reaction occurs much more quickly than does inert matter's. Iron reacts to oxygen by forming rust. Sodium reacts to chlorine by forming sodium chloride. Both people and inert matter are time-bound and both respond in different lengths of time. The rock will fall without struggle, markedly different than the person, but one cannot say of the human that he alone is time-bound--only that he can look ahead, which is not a property of the rock.

An additional explanation is that human beings have choice. The struggle occurred because the individual chose to struggle. Perhaps. Certainly humans respond through an intricate complex of factors. Today much empirical evidence indicates that the individual is programmed by genes, and by environment (maybe even by the Big Bang some fifteen billion years ago). The individual puts up a fight because the struggle to survive, as one example, is innate and can be found in all life forms, from plants, with tropisms to turn from pain, to animals, with immediate responses.

For this brief commentary I have lumped together applications of the term organic but, even were they treated separately, a central question would remain. Can we clearly delineate between the organic and the inorganic? Is it more instructive to think of everything as organic? Neils Bohr concluded that both organic and inorganic matter are constructs which cannot be used simultaneously in the same situation. Nonetheless both are required for a complete complementarity description of a quantum event.

To maintain a distinction between inorganic and organic, we must reduce things to less than they are. By themselves neither sodium nor chloride is novel, yet together they produce salt, an emergent property, which cannot be fully explained by its parts. The DNA in our bodies has never died, but instead emerged into new properties out of bacteria swimming in primordial seas. (See One Life.) In each case, where does the inorganic end and the organic begin?

Douglas Harding has pointed out that to think of this planet as a life-infested rock is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-infested skeleton. How can the organic and inorganic be separated? (See his link under Consciousness in the sidebar.)

We are imprisoned by a way of seeing, to include distinguishing between organic and inorganic. In the exercise of intellect, we must distinguish, and should, as reason is a noble faculty, but we should also understand that we and every organism create our own environment. Our knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. We "know" the world into a translation of events as bodily processes via the nervous system and brain. Bees can tell the position of the sun by observing a patch of blue sky. Bats echolocate their flight path with a kind of sonar.

Dogen does not answer any question directly, but instead poses new ways of being aware. Of dichotomies such as that between organic and inorganic, he points out our tendency to category awareness: "The flowers depart when we hate to lose them; The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow." He promotes a different way of seeing with such questions as these: "Is there a real basis inside or outside your body now? Your body with hair and skin is just inherited from your father and mother. From beginning to end a drop of blood or lymph is empty. So none of these are the self. What about mind, thought, awareness, and knowledge? Or the breath going in and out, which ties a lifetime together: what is it after all? None of these are the self either." (Gakudo Yojinshu*, written in 1234. * Guidelines For Studying The Way.)