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

More than six decades after Einstein’s death in 1955, his prestige is enormous and worrisome. It is enormous because relativity remains tremendously important and to this day, both the special and the general theories of relativity remain valid. It is worrisome because Einstein harbored a deep skepticism about quantum mechanics, even though quantum mechanics has been validated time after time experimentally and despite the fact that Einstein himself was one of the founders, receiving the Nobel Prize for the quantum photoelectric effect. The embarrassing fact is that quantum mechanics, which explains the behavior of the smallest level of Nature, cannot be reconciled with general relativity, which explains the behavior of the universe at the largest level. They are both right but not merged yet.

A recent article in New Scientist describes an incredibly elaborate experiment using light emitted from quasars, the most distant objects in the cosmos observable by optical telescopes on Earth, which attempted once and for all to refute Einstein’s objections to quantum mechanics. Titled “Einstein was wrong: Why ‘normal’ physics can’t explain reality,” the article hardly seems newsworthy to the general reader, but it is. The behavior of quanta-like photons, the particles of light, defies ordinary reality. Two paired photons, for example, remain linked (the technical term is entangled) no matter how far apart they are in space. If one photon changes a certain measurable quantity, the other instantaneously mirrors it in reverse. This involves the travel of correlations between the two far away photons between the two photons to travel faster than the speed of light, which is impossible according to relativity.

Leaving aside a more detailed description (which can be found in our book, You Are the Universe), what Einstein stood for is the principle known as realism, which holds that the universe is an independent object existing “out there” independent of any observer. There are various varieties of realism, but one way or another, they defend the common sense notion that what you see is what you get. The most common variety is local realism, which now seems to be refuted. Global realism is even stranger than anyone can imagine, so that for now is left out of physicists’ thinking.

Realism has taken many blows over the centuries. Since the sun doesn’t actually rise in the morning and set in the evening, the universe isn’t reliably what we see. Atoms and molecules were supposed to be tiny bits of things, the irreducible building blocks from which bigger things, up to the entire cosmos, can be constructed. But they were undercut by subatomic particles, which are even smaller, to the vanishing point. The fact that quanta do vanish as regular behavior, existing also as waves of pure potential, knocked realism for a loop–but not definitively.

Einstein still believed that there must be an underlying reality more normal than the weirdness of the quantum world that would explain how things really work. The New Scientist article, however, reaffirmed that no such force or influence exists, going back almost literally to the birth of the universe 13.8 billion years ago. Ancient photons from distant quasars behave exactly as quantum mechanics predicted they would. Case closed.

But closing the case on realism also closes the case on the common sense notion that what you see is what you get.  Nobody outside the specialized field of quantum mechanics is going to sacrifice the physical world “out there” on the basis of arcane theories and advanced mathematics, no matter how credible the calculations are. This is a loss, not just to science but to the understanding of the human race.

Quantum mechanics seems exotic, even esoteric, but it affords a glimpse of a new reality where there would be no contradiction with relativity. It takes a radical leap, however, to form the necessary concept behind this new reality.  What it takes is to adopt the necessary concept of oneness. If we knew without a doubt that reality operates as a whole, then Einstein’s instincts would be correct, even if his science didn’t hold up in the matter of quantum mechanics. There is an underlying reality, as he intuited. It reconciles the contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics by doing the simplest thing–in the state of oneness, no contradictions exist in the first place.

We can approach this with simple analogies. If you were an alien observing Homo sapiens for the first time, it would seem contradictory that human beings constantly exhibit opposite behaviors, loving and hating, laughing and crying, acting cruel and kind, creative and destructive.  Yet a single dimension–human nature–encompasses all these contradictions. They are not to be explained with separate theories, because no matter how extreme human behavior is, the same consciousness is the source of everything.

The second analogy has to do with the phenomenon of dreaming. In dreams any crazy thing can happen, and it does no good to formulate a theory about why elephants can fly in your dreams or trees vanish in the blink of an eye. The accepted dimensions of time and space are warped and fluid in a dream, too. Dreams can only be unified by waking up, at which point the inexplicable events that occur in dreamspace are revealed simply as aspects of consciousness while a person is dreaming.

Combine these two analogies and you come close to how realism can be replaced with a more valid conception of the “real” universe. Such a universe is unified by taking place in human experience and by having its source in consciousness. Perhaps this is the case for a global realism that current physics is reluctant to touch. In our book we take several hundred pages to unfold a “one reality” view of Nature and the universe. A considerable number of physicists are inching closer to such a view, we believe, in particular by accepting that consciousness is as fundamental in the cosmos as gravity or electromagnetism.

The “one reality” hypothesis reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics by not insisting on a universe separate from the observer. In some way, like it or not, human observers must be present for the universe to exist.  Each version of the universe that has emerged since the ancient Greeks has mirrored where human consciousness stood at the time. The universe evolved with us. That is an absurd statement to anyone who stubbornly clings to an outside existing reality, as realism does, yet the universe has been unreal for a very long time. It has no valid foundation in anything found “out there” without the participation of human beings. 

For realism to finally give way requires another step–ending the division between mind and matter. There is no mind “in here” and matter “out there,” but only consciousness adopting different modes that we arbitrarily call objective and subjective. As long as this arbitrary distinction is defended, physics will be stymied by self-created contradictions. There is a perspective that erases those contradictions, and once we adopt it, the era of the human universe can emerge, offering answers not dreamed of today in mainstream science.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com 

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, and climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness. He holds seminars and workshops for individuals, groups and corporations on the natural laws that apply everywhere and are the foundations of the universe, for well-being and success. His doctoral thesis advisor was the renowned M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. He has authored 325 articles, is author or editor of 19 books, including The Conscious Universe (Springer), Looking In, Seeing Out (Theosophical Publishing House), and is co-author with Deepak Chopra of You are the Universe (Harmony). You can learn more at http://www.menaskafatos.com 

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

By now there’s widespread acceptance and abundant research to show that the placebo effect is real. In fact, every drug gains some of its effect with many patients by dint of placebo–expecting to get better makes the drug work better. Subtract the placebo effect, and many drugs have little efficacy.

 

This fact has stared medicine in the face since 1962, when the Food and Drug Administration demanded that every new drug prove its clinical benefits. To subtract the placebo effect, a typical drug test involves giving the control group a sugar pill while the other half of the trial take the new drug. In the area of painkillers–placebos are at their most powerful with pain–more than 90% of new drugs cannot pass the test of working better than a sugar pill. Among those drugs that do pass, the gap that separates them from sugar pills, which was once 27%, has narrowed to an average of 9%.

 

Placebo is actually growing stronger, and yet by and large the average doctor considers placebos fake medicine shelled out by unscrupulous physicians taking advantage of a patient’s gullibility. Even doctors who are more enlightened see the risk of placebos as too high, since the effect is unpredictable–you don’t know in advance which patient will benefit and how much.

 

And so matters have stood for decades.  Even when it was noted that popular antidepressants often are no more effective than a sugar pill, it was considered damaging to reveal this fact to patients–what if they lost faith in the drugs they were taking? To which one might answer, maybe they should lose faith if it is misplaced or exaggerated.

 

Everyone involved was waiting for a “real” scientific result, one that would reduce the placebo effect to a molecule that could be quantified (with the hope of turning it into a drug, naturally). In recent years a brain enzyme known as COMT has been linked to people who respond well or not to placebos, and CMOT can be traced to a specific gene. Bingo! With hopes of acquiring respectability, the placebo experts are now in search of as many other molecules that might form a whole complex–the so-called placebome–that at last gives a biochemical solution to a centuries-old mystery.

 

(the entire story is told in a long online article, “What if the placebo effect isn’t a trick?”)

 

Not only is COMT considered a breakthrough, but it comes as a tremendous relief to the scientific mind that placebos are just as materialistic as aspirin and penicillin. But putting placebo through the scientific wringer is likely to fall very sort of achieving great results, just as mapping the human genome has not led to an avalanche of successful genetic treatments.

 

Placebo doesn’t fit the molecular model for one simple reason: it depends upon consciousness. In fact, consciousness intervenes every step of the way. Highly important is whether the patient trusts the doctor, how warm, confident and reassuring the doctor’s manner is, and most vital, the manner in which the body and mind turn the word “This will make you better” into a healing response.

 

Placebo, contrary to popular myth–and my own understanding from medical training–doesn’t need to fool the patient. You can show the patient a sugar pill, tell him that placebos are quite effective in some people, and the placebo effect still has a good chance of kicking in. Nor is pain the only symptom that can be relieved with placebo. A wide range of chronic disorders are responsive. You can perform sham knee surgery and find that placebo makes some patients’ knees improve.

 

The translation of words, promise, expectation, and a warm relationship with your doctor are not molecular. Music moves us emotionally, and you can trace brain chemicals like dopamine in a chain of effects related to feeling good. But dopamine doesn’t explain music. In fact, if you reduce music to molecules, the music vanishes. Just take a pill and cut out the middle man, in this case, Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles.

 

Once it goes through the wringer, the same thing will happen with placebome. Consciousness will be thrown out, leaving only molecules. That would be a terrible waste. The reason placebos start a chain of physical responses that trigger the healing response is that consciousness makes the link possible. I hold that the bodymind is a single thing, consciousness in the constant process of unfolding in different modes. One mode we call brain or body or mind, but in reality there is only one thing: the process of supporting life as a conscious creative process. Get at the heart of this mystery, and much more than placebo will reveal its secrets.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

The complexity of the human body has fascinated medical science, and every new discovery leads to a new level of complexity. Now it is no longer possible to talk about depression, for example, as a general disorder or cancer as a single disease. It may be that the brain of each depressed patient is depressed in its own unique way, and the leading research on cancer is heading towards personalized drugs targeted to each patient’s highly specific genetic variation of cancer.

Does increasing complexity actually clarify things? The traditional disease models taught when I was in medical school are fraying around the edges, and some disorders, such as schizophrenia, have no localized cause. There is no known cause for schizophrenia. The general public thinks that you catch a cold because of exposure to the cold virus. But in fact direct contact with the cold virus gives only a 1 in 8 chance of catching cold.

If we try to make sense of this confusion, it turns out that almost every disorder is enveloped in a cloud of causes. In this cloud swirl a number of factors that can make you prone to illness:

• Genetic predisposition
• Immune status
• External pathogens such as bacteria and viruses
• Stress
• Psychological deficit (e.g., depression, brief, loneliness)
• Age
• “Control by host”

The last thing, control by host, is a kind of X factor that explains, all things being equal, why one person gets sick while someone else in the same circumstances doesn’t–our bodies have an invisible means of fending off sickness or giving in to it that is unexplained.

 

The cloud of causes is easy to list, which puts medical knowledge far ahead of where it used to be. But it was much easier simply to assume that germs or genes cause illness. With simple explanations now undermined, we’re stuck with a gamble of risks. Too many causes–none of them being absolute causes–makes the whole picture fuzzy. It doesn’t make sense that our own bodies should be a mystery to us.

The body will only start to make sense when certain basic facts are accepted:

1. Body and mind are not separate. They should be considered as one thing, the bodymind.
2. The body isn’t a thing. It is an ongoing continuous process.

3, The healthy state of the bodymind is dynamic balance, known as homeostasis.

4. Homeostasis is so powerful that it takes chronic imbalance to throw it out of whack, over a long period of time, years before any symptoms appear.
5. The chief causes of imbalance are stress and chronic inflammation.

These facts are beginning to sink in over the past decade, and one result has been the rise of the self-care movement. Doctors are in the business of diagnosing symptoms and then proceeding to offer a remedy. The actual causes of disease start affecting us years and sometimes decades before symptoms appear. Each of us has to tend to self-care. Certain ways of doing this are well known, such as a diet of natural whole foods, avoiding alcohol and tobacco, and taking regular exercise.

What has been missed is that the bodymind has priorities. If you exercise and turn it into work as you grind out each gym session, if you feel stressed at work, and eat fast food on the run, which of these things is good or bad for you? A stressful workout session is still stress. A diet high in fat and sugar leads to inflammation. Unless you know how to prioritize the same things your bodymind prioritizes, you are gambling with your own wellness in the long run.

 

In The Healing Self my co-author Rudy Tanzi from Harvard Medical School and I delve deeply into the whole issue of lifelong wellness, but the upshot is that the whole cloud of factors turns on the same pivot point which is consciousness. The human body will only make compete sense when it is seen as a mode of consciousness in physical form. I know this can sound alien to the typical view of the body as a kind of complicated machine, but in practical t terms, if you want to maintain lifelong wellness:

1. Tend to stress by reducing it and removing undue pressure from your life.
2. Increase your sense of safety, security, and belonging.
3. Learn to trust how you feel.
4. Stay away from toxic work environments and personal relationships.
5. Put a high priority on 8 hours of continuous good sleep every night.
6. Find means of social support so that you are not isolated.
7. Deal with signs of depression and anxiety early on.
8. Set time aside every day to do something you truly enjoy.
9. Learn the value of play and creativity.
10. Check to make sure that you are actually happy and do what it takes to remain that way.

 

This checklist is very different from the usual risk factors for avoiding disease. those factors are still relevant, but they don’t lead to lifelong wellness. The keys to lifelong wellness are just being discovered, and so far, too few people know what they are or how to take advantage of them. The checklist above makes for a good start.  Every day you either support the bodymind’s healing response or undermine it. By knowing what a healing lifestyle actually is, you are taking the most important step toward a life that is fulfilling here and now. As long as “here and now” remains fulfilled, so will your entire life.

 

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

 

By Deepak Chopra, MD and P. Murali Doraiswamy, MBBS

The celebrity inventor, thinker, and entrepreneur has joined other voices who worry about a future dominated by supercomputers and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In a widely publicized podcast, Musk announced that Neuralink, a company he cofounded, plans to announce in a few months a brain-machine interface breakthrough that’s “better than anyone thinks is possible” This would be a device implanted in the brain that would communicate thoughts directly to digital sources like the Internet. In parallel, 60 Minutes aired and then re-aired a story about the futurist Media Lab at MIT where one of the researchers had already devised a headset that can turn mental activity into a message that appears on a computer screen. One aspect of this brain-to-digital conversion is that someone can do a Google search simply by thinking about it and then seeing the answer on the computer.

Musk’s motivation seems to be his fear of the existential threat of AI to humans, which echoes similar fears voiced by leading scientists, including the late Stephen Hawking. What is envisioned is the emergence of supercomputers that not only can out-perform the human brain in speed, storage, and complexity of calculation—none of which exactly looms like a Frankenstein monster—but will somehow cross a borderline to acquire independent “will,” or a simulation of this. What might follow, the worriers fear, is a race of supercomputers with their own agenda, and in keeping with many sci-fi plots, humans will no longer be necessary.

Imagination is free to run wild once this surmise is accepted as a real possibility. Computers could shut down the power grid, destroy the banking system like super hackers, and weaponized themselves, override the nuclear codes to wipe out feeble, backward, fallible human beings. Even though such a scenario feels far-fetched, Musk wants to head it off by continuing to keep humans relevant for the foreseeable future.

His brain-machine link aims to do just that. A “whole brain interface” that totally immerses our cerebral cortex in the hyperspace of computers will, Musk claims, increase the long-term relevance of humans while also, as a side benefit, help detect brain diseases. Such a defiant stance in stark contrast to the capitulation represented by another Silicon Valley savant, Anthony Levandowski, known in Silicon Valley as a pioneering visionary in AI and for his contribution to driverless cars. Levandowski gained media attention in 2017 by founding the first AI church, which he named The Way of the Future. He is searching for adherents and foresees an AI godhead as not ridiculous but inevitable. As Levandowski told an interviewer from Wired magazine, “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” What saves The Way of the Future from being a lampoon is the enormous impact that AI is going to have everywhere. The Wired interviewer writes, “Levandowski believes that a change is coming—a change that will transform every aspect of human existence, disrupting employment, leisure, religion, the economy, and possibly decide our very survival as a species.”

Everyone is free to worry about a hollow, dehumanized AI future, but what the first thirty years of the digital age has shown is that the greatest threats come from human hacks, identity theft, cyber-theft, and social media mischief like bullying and fake news. But AI futurists have mechanized the threat and the solution instead.

Neuralink is in many ways the grandest of all of Elon Musk’s enterprises. His vision of an implanted “digital brain layer” would interface with the neocortical and limbic layers of the human brain to allow our 100 billion neurons to effortlessly communicate with the Internet at ultra-high bandwidth. Such a device would also allow someone outfitted with the device to communicate with everyone else in the world just through their thoughts (Star Trek fans know this as the Vulcan mind meld). Eventually, once we are all brain-connected, smartphones, email, Instagram, etc. would be outmoded relics of the past.

It is widely speculated that any whole-brain interface is decades away, although implanted devices are cutting edge in prosthetic research, aiming to enable amputees to send signals to a robot arm or leg as effortlessly as thinking. Musk and others face many ethical issues (do you want somebody to invade the privacy of your secret thoughts?) and technical problems such as biocompatibility, bandwidth, decoding of brain signals, safety, hacking, etc. But never underestimate Elon Musk – Neuralink may well hyper-accelerate the nascent brain-machine interface industry much as his other companies, SpaceX and Tesla, have done.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that a whole brain Neuralink becomes available by 2050. Would a fully interfaced global community expand what it means to be human? Today the main threat to humankind is not AI but our divisiveness. We are bitterly estranged

by race, religion, politics, income, opportunity, and tribalism. Being linked to a prejudiced mind will accelerate this divisiveness at a speed barely hinted at by the current toxic behavior rife on social media.

Futurism is starkly divided between optimists and pessimist. To the optimists, being wired into someone else’s whole brain holds out the promise of fully understanding that person and seeing life as close to their experience as another person possibly can. Syrian refugees huddled helplessly in camps can be ignored as repetitive TV images on the evening news, but not if you are inside their brains. Empathy, one hopes, would become urgent and immediate.

The United Nations and other institutions have placed some hope in virtual reality as a means to close the empathy action gap. One can point to high level meetings where privileged attendees wore virtual reality apparatus that transported them to the pitiful situation of a refugee child; they were moved to tears. And in a more recent experiment done by Stanford scientists, research participants who underwent a VR experience on the harsh realities of losing one’s job, were much more likely to show long-lasting empathy to homeless people (compared to a control group that just read about the poverty and homelessness). But the technology remains imperfect. The core issue is whether technology is the key to transforming human behavior, since after all, the motivation to be compassionate and charitable exists in some people without any technological aid and doesn’t move other people at all.

Pessimists might point out that such technology could just as well be used for manipulating people to do harmful things and may likely strengthen false beliefs. Repeated experiments in social psychology have shown how hard it is for people to change false beliefs

despite being shown hard facts disproving such beliefs. Indeed, in one such experiment when asked if their false belief for an unjust war had changed, it had—they became more stubbornly entrenched in their support for the war. Such an outcome shouldn’t surprise us—it is human nature to resent being made wrong, and having the facts thrown in your face only increases the insult.

But there are other experiments in social psychology that run counter to this one. Psyches are malleable, particularly among children. White children who participate in role reversal with black children have been shown to become more racially tolerant. A child who has grown up in grinding poverty and becomes rich as an adult may become a philanthropist—or a miser. Philanthropy can also be motivated by a lack of greed and a willingness to share, even if the generous person grew up in a prosperous house.

It is unlikely that technology per se has the capacity to alter human nature. Social media is already a very mixed experiment in communal exchanges. Certainly the anonymity of social media has broken down norms of civility and restraint. Sexuality has become more a transaction, usually very temporary, than a part of courtship and marriage. In a world where nothing is forbidden, where everyone can see the most horrific, ghoulish, disturbing sights with the stroke of a key, the outcome is unpredictable. Perhaps, as in life before the digital age, every outcome will ensue, only at accelerated speed and with instantaneous impact.

The best outcomes are included in this. As the rise of micro-loans and crowd sourcing indicate, huge changes can occur by making our best impulses come to fruition at high speed. The rise of smartphones and the Internet in countries where opportunity is blocked by

repressive government, harsh mores, sexism, tribal hatred, and daily violence, comes as a boon and a force for liberation. And if a modern Buddha, Christ, or future Dalai Lama could be wired in, who knows? Elon Musk might usher in a universal age of enlightenment.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, founder of The Chopra Foundation and co-founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation, and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism.  He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are The Healing Self co-authored with Rudy Tanzi, Ph.D. and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.  www.deepakchopra.com

P. Murali Doraiswamy MBBS, FRCP is a leading physician and brain scientist at Duke University Health System where he is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, as well as a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. Murali is also a member of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development and an affiliate of the Duke Center for Applied Genomics and Precision Medicine. He is an advisor to leading businesses, advocacy groups and government agencies, and serves as the Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Neurotechnology. He also co-chaired the Forum’s 2018 Generation AI workshop.