Notes from "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness," by Alva Noë

Are you your brain, or something else?


In this book Alva Noë presents his well-informed view of modern thinking and research on consciousness and the brain. He does not subscribe to the mainstream consensus.

Sparrows, Nature & Nurture

I walk among the shadows of my memories and in the distance I see a boy playing in the hay mow of an Iowa barn built over a century ago by his ancestor.

David Chalmers: The Easy and Hard Problems of Consciousness

The following discussion is from David Chalmers site. His page remains but the link I had for this material no longer exists.

"Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind.

Thomas Metzinger: What Is Behind Our Talk About The Self

Here is an excerpt of an interview between Ginger Campbell, MD, and Thomas Metzinger, PhD, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Dr. Campbell: I guess I was really wanting to start with the working definition that you gave in your book. Why in the book did you pick the phrase “consciousness is the appearance of a world” as your working definition? I’m going to assume it’s a working definition, since that’s the way you defined it in the book.

Dr. Metzinger: For a popular accessible book I needed a simple working definition—and “the appearance of a world” is just that. It happens when you wake up in the morning: a world appears to you.

What Will You Be Thinking 30 Seconds From Now

Cogito, ergo sum, said Descartes. I think, therefore I am. I=ego. If you do the thinking, why don't you know what you will think 30 seconds from now? If "I" think, why do "I" try to control "my" thoughts?

Descartes had it backward. I am, therefore I think. Over centuries, this has proved hard for people to "get" but once "gotten" it becomes rather like riding a bicycle. A natural place of rest, a balance, is discovered.

Am-ness is the source of your being. Pure subject; no objects.

Nothing objective for science to find. Because consciousness proves eternally elusive as an object, some insist that the scientific paradigm is not flawed. It's just that consciousness does not exist.

Rather than focus on what objective neuroscience study can reveal, they insist that only by the non-existence of consciousness can the paradigm be saved for the study of mind/brain. Go figure.

Know Thyself and Theodore Dalrymple

On the one hand we have some people seeing advances in understanding the brain, mind, and consciousness as holding marvelous possibilities for humankind. On the other, we have those who believe that like all holy grails here is merely hope for one more. Theodore Dalrymple attended a neuropsychiatric conference and listened to smart, brilliant people, and came away with his own ideas about the future of the science of consciousness.

"Neuroscience, it seems to me, is the current most hopeful candidate for the role of putative but delusory answer to all Mankind's deepest questions: what is Man's place in Nature, and how should he live. What is the good life, at least in the western world?" Elsewhere he writes, " But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally."

In thinking about the conference, Dalrymple remembered patients who asked him why they drank so much. Dalrymple spoke to them of statistical correlations between the price of alcohol and the frequency of consumption. This did not satisfy a patient as to why he or she drank.

Dalrymple: "The fact is that, however many factors you examine, you cannot fully explain behaviour, not even relatively simple behaviour. And if you cannot explain relatively simple behaviour, how are we to explain the immense, indeed infinite, variety of human behaviour?"

I recognize that I am jumping from behavior to consciousness, but I believe the corrolary is revealing. In reading Dalrymple I was reminded of a statement by John Haught mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Haught said of Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness that it was only one way to understand. Haught pointed out three ways of looking at a pot of water being heated for tea. (1) Electrons in the water are moving around, becoming increasingly excited or that H2O molecules are transitioning from a liquid to a gaseous state. (2) I turned on the gas burner under the pot. (3) I wanted tea. Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is the kind that belongs to number one, yet there are three points of view for the same phenomenon.

Dalrymple does not speak of three options, but observes that explaining behavior is manifestly complicated. More.

Theodore Dalrymple: And So, Why Do You Behave Like That?

Let me see, first there was Freud, who would launch people into a new world of self-understanding. He is now passé. I recall a book by behaviorist B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he claimed that both are illusory attributes and the sooner we stop believing in them the better. Skinner was a highly respected public and academic intellectual in his day, but his ideas have faded into the background.

Of course, there was also the Steady State Theory of the universe's origin. Then along came the Big Bang. Way back when, there was the ether. A brainy Swiss patent-office examiner put that one to rest. What else? The patent-office examiner said God does not play dice with the universe, but quantum physics revealed that apparently He does. With breakthroughs in quantum physics, humankind was headed for brave new horizons. Then that cussed wave form collapse could not be understood and Heisenberg had to formulate his Uncertainty Principle. More recently, we have string theory, which presently is hanging by a thread for many.

Ah, but don't despair. A bold new group of men and women has emerged. They are highly confident they will find the answer about consciousness. Trumpet fanfare and drum roll, please. Enter: neuroscientists and neurophilosophers who will explain why you feel like you.

Theodore Dalrymple sees this kind of confidence as more than bothersome. Consider the issues of free will, the self, the soul, and human nature. Neuroscience and neurophilosophy have staked out the turf on these topics, and certainly it is turf that will unsettle the public mind, undermine the common weal. Some of the findings will have profound and unsettling implications for individuals and societies, in part because of public misconceptions, in part because researchers make arrogant claims without concern for religious as well as ethical and moral implications for societies and people. If neuroscience teaches us anything, it is that human beings are not ruled by reason.

Dalrymple attended a neuroscience conference and found great optimism toward unraveling the mysteries of consciousness and the brain. He does not seem especially impressed. More

Music, Emotion, and Memory

Music points to the role emotion plays in memories. You are driving home from work and you hear a song on the radio. Suddenly, memories come flooding back of your first date, or your first prom, and there you are, seemingly in another time as your hands guide the steering wheel down the road. The neuroscientist would tell you that for all your nostalgia, these are bio-chemical tags in your brain. The more the bio-chemistry, the more powerful the feeling. Read at Discover. The article is quite interesting. It reminds me of that old quantum physics question: how can particles be waves, and waves, particles? How can feelings and memory be chemistry and chemistry be feelings and memory? The short answer, for me anyway, is that reductionism can bring us to understandings but also to quandaries. The parts are not the whole.

Put it differently: sound waves vibrate my ear drums, a form of bio-mechanical engineering. I don't sense any of that. I hear music. In the passage from brain to mind, we may be looking for a physical link that does not exist. Could the consciousness we perceive as mind be as fundamental as gravity? Gravity is an emergent property from mass (substrate particles). Is consciousness an emergent property from some substrata as yet unidentified? This still leaves the world of our feelings unexplained. I believe it will remain so. Rather like the eyes, which see as a kind of cyclops, trying to visually perceive themselves as two.

John-Dylan Haynes: Free Will as Implausible?

Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes, has more than a proposition. He has evidence. How are we to construe the evidence? He has something to say on it. "We think our decisions are conscious," he says, "but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."

What data? At the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, Haynes is pioneering research that collects it. In the April Nature Neuroscience, he reports on the research. To determine what goes on moments before people sense they've reached a decision, he and his colleagues monitored neural currents in the brains of student volunteers as they decided. The "decision" could be random, reached quickly or slowly, as to whether to push a button with their left or right hands.

Seven men and seven women, 21 to 30 years old, were tested. Using an fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imager, the team used pattern-recognition software to analyze the results of neural changes relative to thoughts.

Inside the brain scanner, the subjects watched random letters pass across a screen. They pressed a button with their right hand or a button with their left hand. Then they marked down the letter that had been on the screen in the instant they had decided to press the button.

The data? Up to the moment of being conscious of a decision, brain behavior signals were identified that let researchers know when the students had "decided" to press a button. These signals occurred on average 10 seconds before the students knew it themselves. About 70% of the time, the researchers could also predict which button the students would push.

Benjamin Libet's earlier experiments found roughly a half second delay between the impulse and the act. This, too, raised important questions about our belief in our ability at conscious decision.

Found in Nature Neuroscience and the WSJ.

Robert Lee Hotz at the WSJ Science Journal has this to say:

Dutch researchers led by psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam recently found that people struggling to make relatively complicated consumer choices -- which car to buy, apartment to rent or vacation to take -- appeared to make sounder decisions when they were distracted and unable to focus consciously on the problem.

Moreover, the more factors to be considered in a decision, the more likely the unconscious brain handled it all better, they reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science in 2006. "The idea that conscious deliberation before making a decision is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us," Dr. Dijksterhuis said.

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

Benjamin Libet & Free Won't**

Hold out your arm. Look at it. Now bend your hand at the wrist. Do it whenever you want. Do it a few times.*

How did this process begin? Was it you? Was it these words?

In 1985, neuro-scientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment related to this.

With electrodes connected to their wrists and scalps, his subjects had brain waves recorded as they watched a clock with a spot revolving faster than a second hand. Like you, they were told to flex their wrists whenever. They were also told to note the spot's position at the time they decided to do so. They stated where they saw it, and Libet correlated their observations with data recorded by electrodes at wrist and scalp.

Libet measured three factors: the action's beginning, the moment of decision, and the Readiness Potential, which began a certain brain wave pattern. This pattern involves the brain's plans to carry out an action.

Okay, so what did he find out? This. The decision to act was recorded as taking place at some 200 milliseconds before the Readiness Potential, which occurred some 550 milliseconds before the action.

So what?, you ask. Only this. A decision to act did not start the process. It did not come before the Readiness Potential. It can be construed as an effect of the Potential as cause. The decision was determined, then, and not a function of free agency.

Surprised? Did you expect a different sequence, this one?: first, the decision to act, then the planning stage, otherwise known as Readiness Potential, followed by the action. Instead, the Readiness Potential preceded the decision. Understood one way, no decision caused the brain to get ready to act. The brain got ready, then gave the appearance that a decision was made.

Some who study this experiment can liken the sense of decision to a hood ornament over a truck engine, symbolic rather than instrumental of a driving force. Libet found one, Readiness Potential, two, decision, three, action. The Readiness Potential led to the action, with the decision to act as a result of the Readiness Potential. In their view, with true free will a decision should have generated the preparation to act, culminating in the Readiness Potential.

Others say that had the decision sprung into consciousness without anything preceding it, the event would have been like God in the Book of Genesis saying of the void, Let there be light! Something would have come out of nothing. We can deem it natural that something comes from something, in this case a decision from a Readiness Potential. Obvious proponents of something from something are scientific determinists. This handily dispenses with subject-object duality and explains all through a physical monism.

With a different argument, somebody might say that a neatly simple scientific experiment causes reductionist absurdity when applied to anything so complex as human agency—or free will, if you prefer. People daily engage in behavior more complex than moving their wrists. They raise children, handle office politics, respond to political news. These involve conscious experiences, not simple brain events which the Libet experiments record. The correlation of conscious experience to brain events is highly problematic.

Still, one interpretation is that while Libet's subjects thought they were deciding, they actually saw an internal replay of a decision that had already occurred. They did not initiate an action but thought they had. They thought their decision had caused the action, although the Readiness Potential may have caused the decision to act. No choice, here, they would argue. No volition, just a series of processes.

If Libet's subjects didn't have free will, they did have a kind of free won't. That is, he told them that they could veto an action. Instead of flexing a wrist, they could stop the movement. He discovered an action could be vetoed, but the subjects only had one tenth second (100 milliseconds) to do so. In short, they could not initiate an action and could only overrule any impulse if they were alert and acted instantly. This is reminiscent of Zen teachings about alertness as the road to freedom.

(Of this experiment, and its implications, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett* is reputed to have said "I want more freedom than that." *(Freedom Evolves, Elbow Room, Consciousness Explained, and other books.) In short, this does not mean he refuses to accept the facts but believes that they can be interpreted differently.)*( Slightly revised from a 2003 post.)

** Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. have conducted experiments that call into question Libet's findings. According to their view, the Readiness Potential only pays attention to decisions being made and does not mean that one is "decisionally" aware of his action after the fact. In short, the Readiness Potential is misconstrued as to its role.

Echolocation: Bats, Dolphins, and Ben Underwood, Who Is Blind

Echolocation: Bats, Dolphins, and Ben Underwood, Who Is Blind

"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

One morning when he was 2, Ben woke up and told his mother, "Mom, I can't see anymore, I can't see anymore." His mother knew he had an incurable retinal cancer, and put his hands on her face. She replied, "Baby, yes, you can see. . . . You can see with your hands." She told him that he could see with his hands and his nose and his ears. She had three other children and could not afford to treat his blindness as a handicap.

So Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters.

Done for popular consumption, most media accounts of Ben are hyped and do not address deeper questions about the brain's ability. Neuroscientists no longer believe the occipital cortex is useless in the blind; rather, it can activate through learned echolocation. It creates images with or without eyes.

Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. It is called echolocation, using sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light. Echoes can inform Ben as to the position of objects, how big they are, their general shape, and how solid they are. Positioning determines distance and whether it is left or right, high or low, front or back. In shape, Ben tells if it is tall or short and wide or narrow. Ben may recognize a pole because it is tall and narrow. A building is tall and very broad. A pillow is soft and not dense.

By clicking, Ben avoids curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he can't see the hoop, he can sink a basketball through the basket. He plays video games by distinguishing sounds. He is writing a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. He roller blades, plays foosball and skate boards. His eyes are artificial, so they see nothing. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there -- the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben is not the only blind person who has developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other bind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. He can describe the awesome beauty of a wilderness scene. James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of a tapping cane to travel around the world.

In an earlier post, I did a piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it. V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, has a plausible explanation for Young's ability.

Though we have explanations for Ben's ability, not nearly enough research has been done on this phenomenon and, despite remarkable progress, the brain itself remains a largely unexplored frontier, an unknown continent. We look out into space and imagine black holes and time warps, but an entire universe also lies in the other direction.

I am left with mystery.  Sadly, this amazing boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes.

Tom Wolfe: Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died

Tom Wolfe in His
Characteristic
White Suit

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. (1930 – 2018), was a New Journalistic, and prolific author who wrote, to name a few, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,  The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities,  A Man in Full, I Am Charlotte Simmons,  and Back to Blood. Here is what he had to say about modern brain science and how human beings may soon perceive themselves as without free will, a self, or a soul.

“Brain imaging was invented for medical diagnosis. But its far greater importance is that it may very well confirm, in ways too precise to be disputed, certain theories about ‘the mind,’ ‘the self,’ ‘the soul,’ and ‘free will’ that are already devoutly believed in by scholars in what is now the hottest field in the academic world, neuroscience. . . .

“Already there is a new Darwin, or perhaps I should say an updated Darwin, since no one ever believed more religiously in Darwin I than he does. His name is Edward O. Wilson. . . . Every human brain, he says, is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ‘an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.’ . . .

“Feminist protesters invaded a conference where Wilson was appearing, dumped a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, over his head, and began chanting, ‘You're all wet! You're all wet!’ The most prominent feminist in America, Gloria Steinem, went on television and, in an interview with John Stossel of ABC, insisted that studies of genetic differences between male and female nervous systems should cease forthwith.

“But the new generation of neuroscientists are not cautious for a second. . . . they express an uncompromising determinism.

“They start with the most famous statement in all of modern philosophy, Descartes's ‘Cogito ergo sum,’ ‘I think, therefore I am,’ which they regard as the essence of ‘dualism,’ the old-fashioned notion that the mind is something distinct from its mechanism, the brain and the body. (I will get to the second most famous statement in a moment.) This is also known as the ‘ghost in the machine’ fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly ‘self’ somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations. Neuroscientists involved in three-dimensional electroencephalography will tell you that there is not even any one place in the brain where consciousness or self-consciousness ( Cogito ergo sum ) is located. This is merely an illusion created by a medley of neurological systems acting in concert. The young generation takes this yet one step further. Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system--and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth--what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from? What ‘ghost,’ what ‘mind,’ what ‘self,’ what ‘soul,’ what anything that will not be immediately grabbed by those scornful quotation marks, is going to bubble up your brain stem to give it to you? I have heard neuroscientists theorize that, given computers of sufficient power and sophistication, it would be possible to predict the course of any human being's life moment by moment, including the fact that the poor devil was about to shake his head over the very idea. . . .

“Since the late 1970s, in the Age of Wilson, college students have been heading into neuroscience in job lots. The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1970 with 1,100 members. Today, one generation later, its membership exceeds 26,000. . . .

“Why wrestle with Kant's God, Freedom, and Immortality when it is only a matter of time before neuroscience, probably through brain imaging, reveals the actual physical mechanism that sends these mental constructs, these illusions, synapsing up into the Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the brain?

“Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's ‘God is dead.’ The year was 1882. . . . ‘The story I have to tell,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘is the history of the next two centuries.’ He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of ‘wars such as have never happened on earth,’ wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. . . .

“A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? . . .

“This sudden switch from a belief in Nurture, in the form of social conditioning, to Nature, in the form of genetics and brain physiology, is the great intellectual event, to borrow Nietzsche's term, of the late twentieth century. . . . .

“Meantime, the notion of a self--a self who exercises self-discipline, postpones gratification, curbs the sexual appetite, stops short of aggression and criminal behavior--a self who can become more intelligent and lift itself to the very peaks of life by its own bootstraps through study, practice, perseverance, and refusal to give up in the face of great odds--this old-fashioned notion (what's a boot strap, for God's sake?) of success through enterprise and true grit is already slipping away, slipping away...slipping away...

.” . . . Where does that leave self-control? Where, indeed, if people believe this ghostly self does not even exist, and brain imaging proves it, once and for all? Orthodoxy Today

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.)