The Brain Needs Reinventing—Here’s How

By Deepak Chopra™ MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D.

We’re living in a golden age for brain research, which could revolutionize how we think, feel, and behave. Thanks to advanced brain scans like the fMRI, brain activity can be localized and even the most precise activity pinpointed. For example, researchers can spot the minuscule area in the visual cortex that, when damaged, prevents a person from recognizing faces, including his own.

Now the goal of neuroscience is to map the brain’s 100 billion cells and perhaps a quadrillion connections down to the tiniest detail. But what will we use the map for? One obvious area is medicine. The more we know about what goes wrong in Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, the closer we get to a cure. But the highest good would be to reinvent the brain.

“Reinvent” isn’t an exaggeration. Ten thousand years ago Homo sapiens had evolved the same genetic array that modern people inherit, which includes the same brain structure. But in the intervening millennia since then, there arose reading, writing, advanced art and music, mathematics, and science. Each advance required a new relationship between mind and body.

Human beings reinvent the brain as we go along, day by day. You are doing it right now. In short, the brain is a verb, not a noun. It is reshaped by thoughts, memories, desire, and experience.

If genes and a fixed structure of brain cells told the whole story, it would remain a total mystery why a cave dweller after the last Ice Age should have just the right complement of neurons to discover gravity or write a symphony. Now we realize that the human brain is far from fixed, at any level. New brain cells are being formed throughout life; trillions of connections between neurons are developed; and the genetic activity inside each neuron is dynamic, responding to every experience and every stimulus from the outside world.

The brain reflects human existence, which is open-ended. What makes us human is consciousness, which we silently shape simply by perceiving, thinking, wishing, ad exploring. We had to have a brain that is just as open-ended. Because it is dynamic, fluid, and ever-renewing, the brain is much more malleable than anyone ever imagined.

Consider a controversial British medical journal article from 1980 entitled, “Is the brain really necessary?” It was based on the work of British neurologist John Lorber, who had been working with victims of a brain disorder known as hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”), in which excessive fluid builds up. The pressure that results squeezes the life out of brain cells. Hydrocephalus leads to retardation as well as other severe damage and even death.

Lorber had previously written about two infants born with no cerebral cortex. Yet despite this rare and fatal defect, they seemed to be developing normally, with no external signs of damage. One child survived for three months, the other for a year. If this were not remarkable enough, a colleague at Sheffield University sent Lorber a young man who had an enlarged head. He had graduated from college with a first-class honors degree in mathematics and had an I.Q. of 126. There were no symptoms of hydrocephalus; the young man was leading a normal life. Yet a CAT scan revealed, in Lorber’s words, that he had “virtually no brain.” The skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells about a millimeter thick (less than 1/10 of an inch), while the rest of the space in the skull was filled with cerebral fluid.

This is an appalling disorder to contemplate, but Lorber pushed on, recording over 600 cases. He divided his subjects into four categories depending on how much fluid was in the brain. The most severe category, which accounted for only 10% of the sample, consisted of people whose brain cavity was 95% filled with fluid. Of these, half were severely retarded; the other half, however, had I.Q.s over 100.

These findings were not seriously challenged as being false or distorted. The controversy arose over how to explain them. Even now, when the old view of a fixed brain has been replaced, such radical adaptability is mystifying. But it seems undeniable that reinventing the brain is viable. Stroke victims are rehabilitated on that basis, training undamaged areas of the brain to take up functions lost from the stroke.

Once medical science accepts that the brain can be reinvented, there is no limit. Together with Dr. Rudolph E. Tanzi, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a leading researcher on Alzheimer’s, my efforts have been directed at how each person can relate to the brain in a new way. As we argue in our book, Super Brain, the most direct way to improve brain function is through the mind. The mind-body connection is powerful because our habits lead to brain changes. What you pay attention to, what your passion is, your approach to diet, exercise, stress, and even basic emotions like anger and fear – all of these things register in your brain and drastically shape its structure.

In the simplest terms, every experience is either positive or negative when seen as input for the brain. A brain that is processing positive input will grow and evolve much differently from a brain that processes negative input. This has always seemed intuitively right – we all know that children who are well-loved, for example, almost always turn out better than children who are abused. Now we have validation from neuroscience. the most important conclusion is that no one needs to submit to old conditioning. The past can be changed by changing the brain, just as the future can be shaped by how your brain is trained today. Reinventing the brain is much closer than you think.

 

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book and national bestseller, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential (Harmony Books), unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books, September 22, 2020) will help to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and joyful living. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com
RUDOLPH E. TANZI, PH.D. is the Vice-Chair of Neurology, Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit, Co-Director of the Henry and Allison McCance Center for Brain Health, and Co-Director of the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also serves as the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi discovered several Alzheimer’s disease genes, including all three early-onset familial Alzheimer’s genes, and serves as director of the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is also developing therapies for treating and preventing AD using human mini-brain organoid models of the disease, pioneered in his laboratory. Dr. Tanzi has published 600 papers, received numerous awards and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. Dr. Tanzi is a New York Times bestselling author, who has co-authored “Decoding Darkness” and three bestsellers with Deepak Chopra: “Super Brain”, “Super Genes”, and “The Healing Self”.

Did Life Create the Universe?

By Deepak Chopra, ™ MD

No matter how life began on Earth—there are still some huge gaps in our knowledge about that—it seems indisputable that the universe set up the conditions for life. But a radical twist has now been offered by the prominent stem-cell biologist Robert Lanza and theoretical physicist Matej Pavšič in their deliberately startling new book, The Grand Biocentric Design. As Lanza bluntly declares in the book’s introduction, “Life is not a product of the universe but the other way around.” Lanza calls this theory “biocentrism,” which he introduced in his 2010 book of the same name.

On the face of it, saying that life created the universe is preposterous as long as the Big Bang and all the accepted steps leading to the creation of Earth are true. Yet what if they are just the assumptions of a current scientific model or paradigm? By definition a paradigm shift calls into question the rock-solid assumptions on which the previous paradigm rests.

Biocentrism aims to topple any version of reality based on physicalism, the doctrine in science that roots reality in physical objects from quarks to galaxies and on to multiple universes. Physicalism created the modern world of science and technology. But having reached the horizon where time, space, matter, and energy come into existence, physicalism reached a dead end. This was (and still is) the last thing anyone expected. In place of a crowning, all-embracing Theory of Everything, investigators found themselves faced with logic-defying questions.

What came before time? What lies outside space? How did matter acquire a mind, or is it the other way around?

These questions are self-contradictory. Logically there cannot be anything before time, because “before” is a time-bound concept. There cannot be anything outside space, because “outside” is a space-bound concept. To break out of self-contradiction, you have to abandon spacetime causality which science is extremely loath to do. Asking a scientist to abandon physical causality is like asking the Pope to be an atheist.

Biocentrism challenges the bedrock dogmas of physical science, and it does so by putting mind ahead of matter. The prime mover in creation is consciousness, the invisible creator behind the mask of the physical universe. This notion isn’t novel to Lanza and Pavšič, but their new book details the argument in unsurpassed detail.

The pivotal chapter in The Grand Biocentric Design is “How Consciousness Works,” and the pivotal sentence in the chapter is this: “Consciousness encompasses all of reality—the two are essentially synonyms.” Although the authors make much of the dead-end that physicalism has reached, and about how mainstream science stubbornly resists any challenge to its deepest long-held assumptions, all of us are involved in the declaration that reality is consciousness.

Like the serpent devouring its tail, we are back to a saying from Vedic India that is thousands of years old: “As you are, so is the world.” Lanza and Pavšič go into intricate detail to support this conclusion, which the ancient seers arrived at solely through introspection. But the two paths join on a level playing field, over which flies a banner proclaiming “Only consciousness can explain consciousness.” The irreducible fact of the universe, in other words, isn’t a thing, no matter how small and exotic the thing is (e.g., quarks, Higgs boson, superstrings). The irreducible fact, in human reality at least, is that we exist as conscious beings.

Nothing can get around this fact (which was stated in a 1931 interview by Max Planck, the renowned German physicist who first named the quantum). What biocentrism involves, once the door to the new paradigm is flung open, is process. Physicalism was a whiz at unlocking the processes by which the laws of nature operate. However, when faced with explaining how lumps of matter, namely, the quadrillions of organic molecules in the human brain, manage to think, physical explanations become a mere waving of hands.

The needle of a thermostat on the wall traces the rise and fall of the temperature in a room, but thermostats don’t create temperature. Brain imaging can detect in fine detail how brain activity parallels mental activity. Certain parts of the brain will light up when you get very angry, while other parts will light up when you meditate, have sex, feel depressed, and so on. But brain cells don’t create thought. At bottom a brain cell is activated by the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane. It isn’t possible to start there and draw a reasonable line of explanation to thoughts, feelings, sensations—indeed the entire world “in here” that is the domain of consciousness.

By turning to the processes by which consciousness operates, The Grand Biocentric Design provides a wealth of evidence in support of the notion that everything in existence is consciousness modifying itself. The book’s two-pronged approach, calling upon both biology and physics, is one of its strengths and also one of its most unique points. If these two branches of science can’t be unified in a single theory, biocentrism won’t satisfy either biologists or physicists.

The book’s lofty aims and deep explorations could have been too daunting for non-scientists, but The Grand Biocentric Design is accessible and engaging, in short, a very good read. Nearly a century ago the eminent English physicist-astronomer Sir James Jeans declared that “the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” To this day it remains a daring venture to follow up the implications of that statement. No one has gone further, or more convincingly than Lanza and Pavšič do here. If it ever becomes accepted wisdom that “the universe as mind” is true, The Grand Biocentric Design will be looked upon as a significant milestone along the way.

When the mathematical philosopher Bertrand Russell declared, probably apocryphally, that only three people in the world (including Russell, naturally) understood Einstein’s mind-bending theory, few doubted it.

Relativity explained how objects larger than atoms and subatomic particles behave, while quantum mechanics explained how the very smallest things behaved, taking the scope of physics from smaller than the smallest to larger than the largest, to borrow an ancient Sanskrit phrase. By the 1970s a common assumption arose that physics was on the verge of a Theory of Everything that would reduce the mechanics of space, time, matter, and energy to a unified set of equations.

That the Theory of Everything never arrived, that the confidence of fifty years ago would unravel into a crisis that has shaken physics to its roots, is the starting point of The Grand Biocentric Design.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, Total Meditation (Harmony Books) helps us to achieve new dimensions of stress-free living and a joyful life. For the last thirty years, Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution and his next book, TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com

The Future of Wellbeing and Technology

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Additional Research & Information

 

William Bushell, Ryan Castle, Michelle A. Williams, Kimberly C. Brouwer, Rudolph E. Tanzi, Deepak Chopra, and Paul J. Mills.

Meditation and Yoga Practices as Potential Adjunctive Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and COVID-19: A Brief Overview of Key Subjects

The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, June 2020

Editor’s Note: As an acute condition quickly associated with multiple chronic susceptibilities, COVID-19 has rekindled interest in, and controversy about, the potential role of the host in disease processes. While hundreds of millions of research dollars have been funneled into drug and vaccine solutions that target the external agent, integrative practitioners tuned to enhancing immunity faced a familiar mostly unfunded task. First, go to school on the virus. Then draw from the global array of natural therapies and practices with host-enhancing or anti-viral capabilities to suggest integrative treatment strategies. The near null-set of conventional treatment options propels this investigation. In this paper, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California-San Diego, Chopra Library for Integrative Studies, and Harvard University share one such exploration. Their conclusion, that ‘‘certain meditation, yoga asana (postures), and pranayama (breathing) practices may possibly be effective adjunctive means of treating and/or preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection’’ underscores the importance of this rekindling. At JACM, we are pleased to have the opportunity to publish this work. We hope that it might help diminish in medicine and health the polarization that, like so much in the broader culture, seems to be an obstacle to healing. —John Weeks, Editor-in-Chief, JACM

 

Copyright @ Deepak Chopra

The Spread of “Stranger Than We Can Think”

By Deepak Chopra,TM MD and Menas C. Kafatos, PhD

As we go about everyday life, we are embedded in a mystery no one has ever solved. The mystery was voiced by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Werner Heisenberg: “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” (There are variants of the quote that use “reality” for “universe,” and the remark has also been attributed to other famous scientists, but the gist is always the same.)

If we take this remark seriously, it turns out to be truer today than it was in 1900 when the quantum revolution began and the revolutionary new theory of quantum mechanics was put together. How can reality be stranger than we could possibly think? Look at the framework of your life. You pick up your morning coffee, and instantly you are acting in space and time. Your perception of the cup in your hand depends upon the five senses as communicated through the brain. You can think about anything you fancy as you sip your coffee.

These might not seem so mysterious, but there is one mystery after another nested inside everyday experience. Science can reach no consensus on the following:

  • Where did time come from?
  • Why do properties of physical objects have their origin in invisible waves of probability of observation?
  • Where does a thought come from?
  • How did matter transform into mind?
  • Is consciousness solely a human trait or is it everywhere in the universe?

The pioneers of quantum physics weren’t the first to ask such questions, but quantum physics got to the nub of how the physical universe is constructed. Everything in existence emerges from ripples in the quantum field, and underlying these ripples is an invisible or virtual domain that goes beyond spacetime, matter, and energy. In the virtual domain, the universe and everything in it is a field of infinite possibilities, and yet the virtual domain cannot be observed directly. As a result, contemporary physics can take us to the horizon of reality, the womb of creation, but it cannot cross the boundary between us and our source of existence.

Almost all the recent models that have gained popularity, including superstrings, the multiverse, and dark matter and energy, exist in so-called mathematical space, or Hilbert space, in recognition that they are not going to yield direct empirical evidence that can be perceived with our senses. Astrophysics had already gotten used to the fact that just 4% of the created universe is accounted for by the matter and energy visible to the eye or to telescopes. With dark matter and energy added in, most of what we see is not really what the universe consists of.

Leaving the technicalities aside, it has become far more difficult to foresee that the human mind can fully comprehend the nature of reality when so many crucial aspects are beyond the setup that our brains can grasp. The thinking mind needs the brain in order to operate, and the brain is a creation in spacetime consisting of matter and energy, that are in spacetime. We wear mind-made manacles. When this fact dawned on the late Stephen Hawking, he ruefully conceded that scientific models might no longer describe reality in any reliable or complete way.

When we discussed these issues in our book, You Are the Universe, the title reflected another approach entirely. Instead of founding the universe on physical things, however small, or even ripples in the quantum field, which are knowable only through advanced mathematics, reality can be grounded in experience. Everything we call real is an experience in consciousness, including the experience of doing science. Mathematics is a very refined, complex language, but there is no language, simple or complex, without consciousness.

The vast majority of scientists will continue to engage in experimentation and theoretical modeling without this venture into “metaphysics,” which is a no-no word in science (a famous put down when things get to speculative is “Shut up and calculate”). But it was quantum physics that brought the mystery of reality into the laboratory in modern terms, even though Plato and Aristotle also wondered about what is real.

A younger generation has proved more open-minded, and a growing cadre of cosmologists now hold to the notion of panpsychism, which holds that mind is built into reality from the start. This is a huge turn-around from the view that mind evolved out of matter here on Earth as a unique creation. The fact is that nobody in the physicalist camp could explain how atoms and molecules learned to think—creating mind out of matter was dead on arrival, even though the vast majority of scientists still hold on to this view as an assumption or superstition.

Ironically, to say that reality is stranger than we can think isn’t confined to the queer behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. You cannot think about consciousness, either, any more than the eye can see itself or the brain know that it exists (without cutting through the skull to see the brain from the outside). A fish cannot know that water is wet unless it jumps out of the sea and splashes back down again. We cannot think about consciousness without a place to stand outside consciousness, and such a place doesn’t exist in the entire cosmos.

The source of space isn’t inside space; the source of time isn’t in time. Likewise, the source of mind isn’t inside the mind. The ceaseless stream of sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts that run through your mind are the products of consciousness. Consciousness itself has no location. It is infinite, without dimensions in space and time, unborn and undying. Can you really think about such a thing as consciousness? And yet you know without a doubt that you are conscious. This is what allows us to make peace with reality being too strange to think about.

We can simply drop the “strange” part. Reality can be founded on knowing that you exist and that you are aware. Existence is consciousness. If science is dedicated to the simplest, most complete explanation of things, existence = consciousness is the simplest and most complete explanation. There is no need for religious or spiritual beliefs in order to accept this foundation for reality, since it is based on what science has arrived at. By removing our outdated allegiance to “things” existing independently of consciousness, the basis of reality can be seen clearly. In our everyday life we navigate with existence and consciousness at our side, indivisible, secure, inviolate, and unchallengeable. A whole new future may spring from accepting this simple but awe-inspiring fact.

 

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. Author, physicist and philosopher, he works in quantum mechanics, cosmology, the environment and climate change and extensively on philosophical issues of consciousness, connecting science to metaphysical traditions. Member or candidate of foreign national academies, he holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the universal principles for well-being and human potential. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 334 articles, is author or editor of 20 books, including The Conscious Universe, Looking In, Seeing Out, Living the Living Presence (in Greek and in Korean), Science, Reality and

The Surprising Success of Wholeness

By Deepak Chopra™, MD, Tiffany J Barsotti, MTh, Paul J. Mills, PhD

As the notions of “holistic” and “wholeness” became popular in recent decades, they also turned into a paradox. People who focused on holistic health, diet, and wellness found themselves to be cut off from people who didn’t care about such things (which is the majority). Trying to be holistic wound up making you separate, which is the opposite of being whole. The meditation/wholefoods/yoga people are a splinter group from the McDonald’s/Monday Night Football/TGIF people.

Perhaps a misunderstanding lies at the bottom of this situation. Wholeness people tend to feel that they are waiting for non-wholeness people to catch on, a little like non-smokers and teetotalers waiting for chain-smokers and beer drinkers to catch on. This divide disappears, however, once you realize that you cannot make yourself whole, while on the other side of the coin you cannot make yourself unwhole. Everyone is whole already.

A simple observation is enough to clarify why wholeness is inescapable. Imagine someone sitting at a computer doing a task. You cannot see the monitor, so you don’t know what their task is. The physical body you see is a person; the thinker responding to the computer screen is a person. The two must co-exist, uniting two sides of reality, physical and mental. This union defines everyone’s existence. You were born whole, and the only thing that separates you from a random stranger is what you decide to do with your wholeness.

Here we are looking beyond lifestyle, although that would seem to be the most glaring difference between people. Instead, how you use your wholeness primarily centers on something else: awareness. Someone in the meditation/whole foods/yoga group can be miserable, conflicted, and anxious while someone in the other group is content, loving, and secure. Clearly awareness is involved in this difference, but how?

The problem is that everyone, with the tiniest fraction of exceptions, lives as if they are not whole. There are all kinds of reasons for this, but chief among them is that almost everyone, however competent they are at the business of living, knows next to nothing about how awareness works. We live with mental activity every waking moment, but all our thinking, feeling, and sensing reveals very little about the nature of the mind itself. We are left with a version of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” because the human mind is the source of the best and worst things that life has to offer.

To resolve this state of confusion, there have been quiet steps taken by researchers interested in holistic medicine, the wellness movement, psychotherapy, and spirituality. Different as these fields might be, each researcher has taken heed of what the groundbreaking psychologist Abraham Maslow called self-transcendence. Instead of being satisfied with an everyday life guided by the ego’s demands, duties, and desires, in the process of self-transcending (going beyond the ego) the individual begins to experience more holistic levels of their own consciousness. Maslow’s self-transcendence is akin to the concept of self-realization, often espoused by Eastern traditions.

The general public doesn’t’ yet realize that wholeness has become a surprising success story, which can be scientifically verified. Here are some highlights from a number of fields.

  • Mainstream medicine is being surpassed by a better way to keep people healthy. As the scientific evidence grows, with over 100,0000 studies to date, complementary and alternative medicines have become much more accepted in the West. Something new is evolving called Integrative Health, where being healthy is a state of body, mind, and spirit.
  • Spirituality has been brought into the fold. Supporting someone’s spiritual health is understood to be crucial for establishing wellbeing. A cue is being taken from Eastern medicine, in which meditation and yoga are as beneficial to wellbeing as any medical prescription, and much more useful in preventing future problems.
  • Mediation works, in a very big way, but it opens the door to a wider domain. Beyond inner peace and quiet is wholeness, now generally called nondual awareness. Freed of all the demands of mental activity, a person experiences what it is like to be aware in a simple, present-moment fashion.
  • “Who am I?” is being reframed. Instead of identifying with the “I” that constantly deals with the ups and downs of life, one learns how to remain centered in nondual awareness. An agitated state is exchanged for a steady state. “I am” is the baseline, not “I think, feel, and do.”
  • Existence has become a solid foundation of life. It might seem that “I am” is a poor relation to “I think, feel, and do,” but the actual experience of “I am” brings about a deep realization. Awareness is the source of love, compassion, creativity, personal growth, purpose, and meaning. From this foundation, thinking, feeling, and doing are infused with spiritual value, and well-being is nurtured throughout the whole person.

Integrative Health is not an invention or discovery but a journey back to who we really are. It’s only natural to see that life is better when it is lived with far less attachment to the drama of pain and pleasure, ups and downs, failure and fulfillment. Nondual awareness brings the needed detachment that allows us to respond from a deeper self, one that is always connected to our source in pure awareness. These are profound matters, but the state of wellbeing is natural to the whole person. In that light, the surprising success of wholeness needs to be shouted from the rooftops, especially in the turbulent times we find ourselves in.

DEEPAK CHOPRA™ MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a modern-day health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 89 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His 90th book, Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, unlocks the secrets to moving beyond our present limitations to access a field of infinite possibilities. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”
TIFFANY J. BARSOTTI, MTh, is an internationally renowned medical intuitive, clinician and researcher of subtle energy and biofield therapies. With spiritual and intuitive guidance, she serves as an integrative practitioner working alongside physicians and other allied health professionals.
PAUL J MILLS, PhD, is Professor and Chief at the University of California San Diego’s (UCSD) Department of Family Medicine and Public Health and Director of the UCSD Center of Excellence for Research and Training in Integrative Health. He is Director of Research for the Deepak Chopra Foundation, with a focus on meditation and yoga within the context of Traditional Medical Systems. In the early 1980s, he published some of the earliest scientific research on meditation. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, US News and World Reports, Consumer Reports, The Huffington Post, Gaia TV, and WebMD, among others.