Brooks: Neural Buddhists - International Herald Tribune
more about Buddhism, the brain, religion vs atheism, religion vs science
I'm torn, in a way I like the idea that we can control our brain to some extent
however I don't like the fact that these new studies could explain why we feel such a sense of wonder sometimes
it's like looking behind the curtain at oz
or when the magician tells you their trick
where did I hear this recently, we don't want to know the trick, we prefer being surprised and being in wonder every time, and try to imagine how it is done, but we don't want the solution
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
active rewiring of the brain: actions and emotions
On the ted talks site there are sevral talks about the brain that I found very interesting, here's a sample. From the "tricks" that it plays on our perceptions (also this one on consciousness especially for the intro) because of its reliance on expectations from past experience due to its structural organization, (for that you might want to see Jeff Hawkins' talk (also see post on sine wave speech)), and how we can trick it by similar means during physical rehabilitation after a stroke or the loss of a limb (check this out if ever wondered about self awareness).
And speaking of self awareness, what happens when you lose it ?
Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist who has suffered a stroke, a hemorrage on the left side of the brain, and thus lost activity from her left side of the brain and she describes what that felt like. She describes is as the ultimate experiment for a neuroscientist, watch the brain as it misfunctions from the inside !! She can thus see the effects of disconnecting the left and right sides of the brain and she decribes what each side does. In the absence of activity from the left side of the brain she felt a connection to everything, she felt larger than her physical self. She decsribes it as a nirvana.
But then when you watch the talk by buddist monk Matthieu Ricard (described below) he shows recent results on MRI scans of buddist monks brains meditating on compassion and it is the left side of the brain that has a much higher level of activity compared to nonmeditating people..... the dalai lama talks about he importance of interconnectedness (see webcasts on his web site), but also on how it is important to know yourself, and that seems to be the job of the left side of the brain, so it seems to me that this means that you cannot have real compassion if you cannot put the interconnectedness from the right side of the brain in the context of your identity on the left side of your brain. (see here for an article based on the talk the dalai lama gave at the Society for Neroscience in 2005 and for further information on the scientific basis of the effects of meditation).
Christopher deCharms shows how new developments in brain imaging (MRI) has considerably increased the time resolution of imaging so that you can now follow the change in activity inside your brain as you think or move.... they have been using this for people suffering from chronic pain, to influence the dynamics of their own brain to control the perception of pain. The idea is that if you see a specific part of your brain lit up as a reaction to something you have done then you can repeat that action and recognize it and develop it, affecting the wiring in your brain. This is similar to how a violinist or an athlete by practice can rewire their brain for specific actions. And this practice we know does not necessarily need to be only physical, we can just think of the movements we need to make for our brain to learn them and reinforce their pattern and sequence to have a better coordination of all the motions necessary.
Something similar probably happens with our emotions.
Matthieu Ricard, a french buddist monk (formerly a molecular biologist), defines happiness and how we can work on our mind to control how much impact different emotions can have, and he describes some of the experiments that are now being done on "professional" meditators to measure how their brains are physically affected by their practice.
This is interesting because we often tend to give a lot of importance to our emotions, if I feel angry about this there must be a good reason for it and so I should act on it, and reinforce it in a feedback cycle by finding more reasons to support it. But we don't often stop to think of the validity of that emotion, its source. This can have detrimental effects on negative emotions such as anger, jealousy or depression, but also on positive emotions, where we go back and try to find reasons to validate those emotions so that we fall into illusions of happiness, we build a parallel universe where we don't see all that we don't want to see.
These seem to be innate instincts that are there because in the short term they may be very useful, but they have to be recognized as such.
In a future post I will develop more on the idea of how we can recognize the source of our emotional response and its dependence on our beliefs that were created by our culture, society and our environment (it's actually something my mother works on).
A lot of work has been done recently on how we make decisions (it is of interest for economists trying to make simulations of the market..), one interesting aspect of this work is that it suggests that we tend to validate our decision by discounting the alternative options as worse, we quickly convince ourselves that we made the right decision so that we stop wondering about it. There is still a lot of debate about this, but I think it is interesting that it is being studied. Related to this is the book Blink by malcolm gladwell for example.
And speaking of self awareness, what happens when you lose it ?
Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist who has suffered a stroke, a hemorrage on the left side of the brain, and thus lost activity from her left side of the brain and she describes what that felt like. She describes is as the ultimate experiment for a neuroscientist, watch the brain as it misfunctions from the inside !! She can thus see the effects of disconnecting the left and right sides of the brain and she decribes what each side does. In the absence of activity from the left side of the brain she felt a connection to everything, she felt larger than her physical self. She decsribes it as a nirvana.
But then when you watch the talk by buddist monk Matthieu Ricard (described below) he shows recent results on MRI scans of buddist monks brains meditating on compassion and it is the left side of the brain that has a much higher level of activity compared to nonmeditating people..... the dalai lama talks about he importance of interconnectedness (see webcasts on his web site), but also on how it is important to know yourself, and that seems to be the job of the left side of the brain, so it seems to me that this means that you cannot have real compassion if you cannot put the interconnectedness from the right side of the brain in the context of your identity on the left side of your brain. (see here for an article based on the talk the dalai lama gave at the Society for Neroscience in 2005 and for further information on the scientific basis of the effects of meditation).
Christopher deCharms shows how new developments in brain imaging (MRI) has considerably increased the time resolution of imaging so that you can now follow the change in activity inside your brain as you think or move.... they have been using this for people suffering from chronic pain, to influence the dynamics of their own brain to control the perception of pain. The idea is that if you see a specific part of your brain lit up as a reaction to something you have done then you can repeat that action and recognize it and develop it, affecting the wiring in your brain. This is similar to how a violinist or an athlete by practice can rewire their brain for specific actions. And this practice we know does not necessarily need to be only physical, we can just think of the movements we need to make for our brain to learn them and reinforce their pattern and sequence to have a better coordination of all the motions necessary.
Something similar probably happens with our emotions.
Matthieu Ricard, a french buddist monk (formerly a molecular biologist), defines happiness and how we can work on our mind to control how much impact different emotions can have, and he describes some of the experiments that are now being done on "professional" meditators to measure how their brains are physically affected by their practice.
This is interesting because we often tend to give a lot of importance to our emotions, if I feel angry about this there must be a good reason for it and so I should act on it, and reinforce it in a feedback cycle by finding more reasons to support it. But we don't often stop to think of the validity of that emotion, its source. This can have detrimental effects on negative emotions such as anger, jealousy or depression, but also on positive emotions, where we go back and try to find reasons to validate those emotions so that we fall into illusions of happiness, we build a parallel universe where we don't see all that we don't want to see.
These seem to be innate instincts that are there because in the short term they may be very useful, but they have to be recognized as such.
In a future post I will develop more on the idea of how we can recognize the source of our emotional response and its dependence on our beliefs that were created by our culture, society and our environment (it's actually something my mother works on).
A lot of work has been done recently on how we make decisions (it is of interest for economists trying to make simulations of the market..), one interesting aspect of this work is that it suggests that we tend to validate our decision by discounting the alternative options as worse, we quickly convince ourselves that we made the right decision so that we stop wondering about it. There is still a lot of debate about this, but I think it is interesting that it is being studied. Related to this is the book Blink by malcolm gladwell for example.
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