The President’s Tweets and the Future of Shame

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

Last week the new Twitter account @POTUS of President Obama became a lightning rod for the worst in social media behavior. Within minutes of its setup, as reported in the New York Times, the account was flooded with vitriolic racist tweetPhoto Mar 06, 1 25 27 AMs, complete with hideous images, including one of Mr. Obama with his neck in a noose.  Many troubling issues arise from this shameful behavior, but at the center is shame itself.

 

Behavior on the Internet, Twitter, and other social media outlets has become shameless, and at the same time, these outlets are being used to publicly shame people, especially innocent high school students being electronically bullied by cruel classmates. Shameless behavior has no consequences, and social media and the Internet afford easy anonymity. Put these two elements together, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for anti-social trends that keep building and building.

(more…)

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

By Deepak Chopra, MD, and Jordan Flesher, MA Psychology

09516c8

The human mind can adapt to almost anything, but not chaos. No one can lead a completely random and chaotic life. The messy room of a teenager may look completely chaotic, but even there a decision was made. The choice was to be messy rather than straighten up the room, and as long as choices exist, true randomness isn’t in charge.

 

Yet clearly there are random events in Nature, and a vast body of science is based on them, from the random collision of atoms to the random mutations that drive Darwinian evolution. It’s hard to square the randomness in Nature with the incredible orderliness of human thought at its best (allowance must be made, unfortunately, for our own random impulses, which can be capricious, self-defeating, and violent.) Science tends to ignore the fact that the researcher who is driving to work in order to study random particles isn’t heading for a random place on the map. He is guided by purpose, meaning, and direction.

 

In the last few posts we’ve been looking at how to break this deadlock through synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. This is a perfect junction point, since “meaningful” has a purpose and “coincidence” is by definition random. What often accompanies experiences of synchronicity is a feeling of trust. The synchronous event seems to reveal to that there is a meaning, purpose, and direction “out there,” somewhere in a mysterious domain where the event was organized. This is what is meant when people say “Everything happens for a reason” – synchronicity is a reminder that randomness is being countered. But saying that everything happens for a reason isn’t provable. It exists as a shared belief, an article of faith, or wishful thinking, and sometimes all three.

(more…)

Remember Me – Support Cure Alzheimer's Fund Research

“The Voice” and the Neuroscientist Team Up to Fight Alzheimer’s.  After meeting in a television studio this unlikely pair has teamed up with Cure Alzheimer’s Fund for a worthy cause: Campaign Remember Me.  Proceeds from sales of the song and direct donations will support innovative research into the causes of the disease and the development of effective therapies to stop it. Because Cure Alzheimer’s Fund’s Board of Directors funds all the organization’s expense, every penny of every contribution goes directly to research.

 

[youtube]http://youtu.be/wv1bf7S2XV0[/youtube]

Powers of Mind: In Praise of Subtle Actions

By Deepak Chopra

 

At a time when the mass of headlines seem to be about the brain, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smarter computers, not enough is said about the mind. When reduced to a mechanism, the mind somehow is thought to turn into the brain, with no difference between them. It’s true that the brain seems to exhibit physical changes that correlate with every activity of the mind, and one day the word “seems” may no longer be necessary. The brain as mirror of the mind may be completely understood and mapped out.

 

It should be underlined, however, that neuroscience is far from understanding the mind’s subtlety, and the most sophisticated brain scans take broad swipes at mental processes–there is no fine detail. The same areas of the brain devoted to language will light up on an fMRI whether Shakespeare is writing a sonnet or a very bad poet is writing doggerel. There is no area of the brain that can remotely be detected in such detail that a researcher reading the scan can say, “Oh, that’s Mozart.” In fact, if you present our brain scan to a neuroscientist, he won’t be able to identify who you are, either. The broad strokes of current brain research yield interesting and medically valuable information, but they don’t come close to explaining the activity I’d call “subtle action.”

(more…)