News - The Chopra Foundation

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.

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Do Your Emotions Help You or Hold You Back?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

Recently, a close friend of mine made the remark that our emotions for the most part are basic, primal, immature, and unevolved. Ever since then, I have been ruminating on the validity of this statement. If our emotions are basically primitive, then how they be our allies, especially on the path to personal growth? Might emotions be so backward that they are enemies of growth instead? Like most generalities, this one about the primitive nature of emotions seems to be equally true and untrue — and therefore, possibly a half truth. In nature’s scheme, nothing is wasted. The universe is a big jigsaw puzzle where everything seems to fit.

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Committed to helping create a more peaceful, just, sustainable, happier, and healthy world

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.”

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Celebrating the message of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Drs. Clarence B. Jones and Diane Nash joined our 2013 Sages and Scientists Symposium and share the history of the non violence movement and their continued commitment to social change.