Does the Mind Create the Brain or Does the Brain Create Mind?

By Deepak Chopra, MD

 

Neuroscience has risen over the past few decades to a crowning place in medical science, due to two innovations, advanced brain scans like fMRIs and the completion of the Human genome Project in 2003. Brain scans allow us to peer into the activity of a living brain without surgery or having to use tissue from cadavers. A complete map of human DNA opens up the possibility of detecting and correcting genetic anomalies connected to a huge range of disorders, including those of the brain.

 

No one can argue against the value of these advances, but they have had their downside. In particular, the assumption that the brain is the same as the mind has become dominant, not just in neuroscience but in articles aimed at the general public. In the first place, it’s only natural that a burgeoning field of science will claim more success than it has achieved, so the bias of neuroscience in favor of making the brain the answer to everything probably is unavoidable. But advances in technology and medical treatments are not the same as solving the mind-body problem.

 

The mind-body problem centers on the relationship between two levels of experience. The level of mind brings feelings, thoughts, images, and sensations in a steady stream. These non-physical occurrences belong in the domain of consciousness. The body, including the brain but not restricted to it, exhibits parallel activity that is the correlate of mental activity. However, no one has proved in any generally accepted way that the mind creates the brain or vice versa. They arise simultaneously and display their own peculiar qualities.

 

It would surprise most people, but given a choice, we can do without the brain in everyday life, something that’s not true about the mind. By “doing without the brain,” I’m referring to a simple fact. Living as conscious beings, humans do not have insight or access to brain activity. Until the brain is exposed to examination, we do not know about neurons, synapses, axons, and ganglia, or about stem cells, the reptilian brain, the amygdala, hypothalamus, or cerebral cortex, just to mention some main areas of inquiry by neuroscience. Instead, we all exist at varying levels of awareness. There is an interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind. Enormous strides are made through creativity, genius, insight, contemplation, and self-awareness in all its phases.

 

This picture doesn’t depend on any knowledge of the brain as an organ, and yet in the current climate of opinion, we are told that everything will eventually come down to the brain, which is like saying that all the news in a newspaper can be explained by paper and ink. The brain is the physical instrument of mind, not the mind itself. Even to call the brain a privileged organ is misleading, because there is equally intelligent, coordinated activity going on in many places throughout the body, including the central and peripheral nervous system, the immune system, and the gut. Messaging going back and forth from the brain to every cell in the body depends just as much on how the receiver responds as on what the message says.

 

How the receiver responds is overwhelmingly a matter of life experiences, including your beliefs, expectations, conditioning, predispositions, imprints from past traumas, and family input from childhood. There is zero evidence that the brain has any of these experiences. It’s not your brain that loves music, wants a fulfilling relationship, has a short fuse, worries about the kids, or anything else. Experience happens to you, a self. The self is the only source of experience as well as the interpreter of it. Therefore, only by investigating the self will the mind-body problem eventually be solved. One thing, however, is certain. The brain isn’t going to tell us the answers we seek–it holds no secrets about truth, beauty creativity, intelligence, insight, or personal evolution.

 

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine.   discoveringyourcosmicself.com

 

 

Have Human Beings Stopped Evolving?

Untitled Design(8)

By Deepak Chopra, MD

No idea has become baked into the social fabric than Darwinism, and yet Darwin himself never meant this to happen. In his mind, he was scientifically describing “the descent of species,” a specific notion of how life forms changed over time. Evolution was a rebuttal of the prevailing concept that species were fixed–if honeybees, ferns, and pandas exist, they always had. The momentous discovery of fossils, among other things, offered irrefutable evidence that species could vanish, and more importantly, that current species had ancestors.

But the term “evolution” turned into a loose metaphor, quickly escaping the rules of science. And the most dangerous application of the metaphor was to human society, where certain ideas about everyday life became falsely linked with Darwinism. Here are the main distortions that enormous numbers of people believe in without thinking.

1. Nature is all about survival of the fittest; therefore, so is society.

2. Evolution works through bloody competition that weeds out the weak and favors the strong. This applies to human competition and makes violence amoral–Nature is working through us, the ultimate excuse for the powerful dominating the weak.

3. If you are weak, you deserve to fail. Nature demands that survival be ruthless in order to strengthen a species.

4. Poverty is a sign of weakness in the evolutionary scheme.

5. Lower species evolve physically, but once evolution reached the level of early humans, evolution began to apply to psychology, emotions, and social behavior.

There are other offshoots of this main mistakes, but let’s stay with them. The most pernicious application of the evolution metaphor crops up as a justification for inequality. Racism dictates that some races are superior and others inferior. Sexism dictates that men are powerful and women comparatively weak. Free market fanatics push the notion that money shouldn’t be

wasted on the poor, aged, or sick because it is the obligation of such groups to fend for themselves in open competition. Pushed to such limits, the doctrine of social Darwinism, as it came to be called in the nineteenth century, can justify almost any kind of power grab or ruthless competition. As we’ve learned in this country quite recently, the appeal of social Darwinism remains both widespread and powerful. Millions of people feel the attraction of a white male portraying himself as a strong man who is a winner instead of a loser–all are masked Darwinian terms.

The irony is that Homo sapiens long ago left “the state of nature,” the naked arena where physical evolution takes place. In the state of nature, two things determine if a species survives: the ability to compete for food and to mate. Food is the most basic need for survival; mating passes on genes that would otherwise disappear from the gene pool. For thousands of years human beings have consciously departed from these two driving forces.

1. We care for our sick, weak, and old rather than letting nature takes its course.

2. We resort to medicine to wipe out and control fatal diseases that would thin the population if left untreated.

3. We have economies that spread food to every corner of the globe. People can buy the food they otherwise couldn’t raise.

4. Concepts of justice punish those who use violence to harm others or steal what they want.

5. We override who is physically strong or weak with weapons and bullets, allowing us to harm and kill at a distance.

These are only a few of the ways human beings escaped the arena where survival of the fittest rules (not that Darwin ever used that phrase, or espoused it). Some of humanity’s post-evolutionary traits are negative to the point of being horrifying, like the development of weapons of mass destruction, suicide bombers, and even suicide itself. Where evolution promotes physical survival, our ability to willingly end life has been a curse that people volunteer to place on themselves through war, crime, and violence of every stripe. Other post-

evolutionary traits like charities and hospitals exist as symbols of the benefits of escaping the state of nature.

There are evolutionists who continue to maintain that Darwinism applies to human beings, particularly in the two related fields of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, but those applications have their own skeptics. Let’s set them both aside. Because post-evolution has brought good and ill effects to humanity, and because the metaphor of evolution is still powerful, the crucial question is whether we still want to evolve and if so, how? In its crudest form, the evolutionary metaphor is still about survival, so future evolution depends on such survival issues as the ecology, global climate change, and nuclear weapons.

In less crude form, the evolutionary metaphor is synonymous with progress, and almost everyone in modern society wants progress to continue, despite pull-backs by radical jihadists who yearn for a return to the illusion of religious purity, white supremacists who yearn for equally illusory racial purity, and xenophobes who push ultra-nationalism following a third illusion, that a single nation can isolate itself from the tide of globalism.

Yet the most compelling reason to seize the evolutionary metaphor is to promote post-evolution, to win even more freedom from the state of nature. This largely happens individually as the evolution of consciousness, a notion that was ridiculed fifty years ago, but which now drives the aspirations of millions of spiritual seekers. Having abandoned formal religion, these people have turned inward to find their own path to higher consciousness, and if that term is too elevated or alien, there is the search for inner peace, love, creativity, joy, and fulfillment. Long ago, human beings made the most radical evolutionary leap in history, turning away from physical evolution to mental evolution–hence the amazingly rapid development of the higher brain (cerebral cortex) from which all language, morality, and rational thought emerged.

There is no reason to assume that our consciousness can’t keep evolving, but there is no evidence that the brain needs new structures physically. The brain has enough flexibility

already to set us free by our own choice. We choose to evolve or not, to explore new domains of the mind or retreat into old, outmoded ones. In the end, the reason that Darwinism is the best of theories and the worst of theories comes down to how the theory is used. We are no longer Darwinian creatures, but as a metaphor evolution traces a path that applies to the best and worst possibilities in us.

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Reality Is Structured in Consciousness

By Deepak Chopra, MD

One of the most surprising survivors in our society, long counted out as either moribund or dead, is philosophy. The “love of truth,” as the Greek term describes, was defeated by science and its love of facts. So it was unexpected when the New York Times ran an op-ed piece titled “If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?” (March 6, 2017) by the veteran English philosopher Roger Scruton.

Untitled Design(5)

The piece begins by nodding toward the tradition of endowing human beings with a soul, a supernatural spark that sets us apart from the animals, and quite realistically Scruton notes that “Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off that idea.” Although a popular belief in the soul is very much alive, our official secular culture and its primary source of knowledge, science, totally dismisses it.

What then? Scruton uses a split-the-difference tactic, arguing that although we are undeniably animals who evolved from primitive ancestors, we aren’t just animals. We are special creatures, beginning with our sense of morality. Modern philosophy, therefore, continues to ask the same questions about human specialness as ancient philosophy, searching for the true secret of being human. Scruton looks first to morality as a truth about being human, which most people would sympathize with.
“We believe that people have rights, that they are sovereign over their lives, and that those who live by enslaving or abusing others,” he writes, “are denying their own humanity.” But this appeal seems doomed, I think, because in a secular society truth and facts are the same, and for every nice thing that makes humans special, there are savage behaviors that place us far below the animal kingdom. Genocide, whether we like it or not, is just as human as compassion.

Scruton has more to say, but I think there’s an essential point he misses. Placing science up against philosophy doesn’t hold water, because science is itself a philosophy. The noted senior physicist George Ellis has pointed out quite sharply that when scientists disdain metaphysics, as the vast majority do, they are ignorant of the fact that their view of Nature is also metaphysical. To say that we live in a random universe, for example, is just as metaphysical as saying that the universe was made by God. Arguing than human begins are a mere speck in the cosmos, accidents of evolution that probably got repeated on hundreds or thousands of planets in other galaxies, declares a truth about humanness that is philosophical in its ramifications.

So splitting the difference with science isn’t going to breathe new life into philosophy. Scruton winds up with a fuzzy declaration that is unscientific but also inadequate philosophy: “…as persons we inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature.” There’s nothing helpful in this, because things we cherish in our “life-world,” like love and compassion, are still going to be reduced to scientific explanations that for better or worse will rule the argument for a long time, just as they rule the argument now. If science is actually a philosophy, the critical question is this: which philosophy is the best one to live by?

The current crisis in physics doesn’t feature the word philosophy, but the predicaments are absolutely philosophical. Let me sketch in just one critical problem, which might be called the fudge factor. Fudging can imply dishonesty or taking shortcuts, but not in this case. Rather, certain numbers and explanations serve as placeholders while science awaits a new model–or even a new perspective on reality–to fill in the gaps. With the “discovery” of so-called dark matter and dark energy, physics has tried to fill in an enormous gap between theory and reality. Certain phenomena like the speed at which galaxies are rushing away from one another, cannot be explained away with new data. To fill in an enormous discrepancy, particularly in the cosmological constant, one of the most fundamental mathematical calculations in physics, dark matter and energy came along quite conveniently. Neither has ever been observed or directly measured. There is a strong feeling that their structure may be totally alien to the accepted structure of time, space, matter, and energy in the visible (non-dark) universe.

Since fudging the numbers requires such a huge adjustment, it was necessary to re balance creation so that 96% of it is dark, while the visible universe, including all the matter contained in stars, planets, galaxies, and interstellar dust, amount to only 4% of the total. This means that reality is largely unknown, for even though it’s accepted in many circles that a special particle known as a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) may forge a link with the known universe, no one has ever detected such a particle. Like the multiverse and superstring theory, dark matter and energy may be unknowable. All of these structures are totally mathematical, existing as creations of human consciousness. They provide no data or measurements. Therefore, if you are a radical skeptic, the whole superstructure of modern physics may be just a huge fudge factor.

Even if you aren’t willing to take that spectacular leap, even everyday subatomic particles like electrons are not objective, free-standing things like a loaf of bread or a tree. Being dual in nature, electrons exhibit “thingness” when they are observed but exist the rest of the time aswaves of potentiality with no fixed qualities of any kind. This is a bedrock fact of quantum physics going back to its early days over a century ago. To stitch together a marriage of convenience between the everyday world of big objects and the quantum world of very tiny ones (which are dubiously called objects in the first place), it was necessary to erect a wall separating the two domains. This détente isn’t scientifically convincing, but at least it was reassuring. Quantum events could continue to be “spooky action at a distance” while the everyday world chugged along normally.

Only now it appears that the everyday world of big objects is probably quantum in nature, too. Big objects move so slowly, however, that we are fooled by their appearance of solidity. In reality, nothing is fixed, solid, firmly in place, or unchanging. Every piece of creation is caught up in the same process of flow, unpredictability, and spookiness. Without going into details, let’s admit that the fudge factor, which attests to a huge mismatch between theory and reality, upends science’s claim to hard-headed facts. Science is a collection of concepts created in the human mind, just like philosophy. Electrons exist because in our species of consciousness, we gave them a name attached to a concept, and one of the concepts was to call electrons objects or things. In another mode of knowing–perhaps possessed by “dark” thinkers in a domain we can’t conceive of-electrons are totally different, if they exist at all. All of these ideas are explored in great detail in a new book , You Are the Universe I co-wrote with physicist Menas Kafatos.

Over the past century philosophy has capitulated to science, and all of us, whether we realize it or not, live according to the philosophy that science espouses. Because of science’s triumphant discovery of new technologies, we assume that its philosophy must be right. This is like a medieval person who happened to see an airplane fly overhead then rushes to tell his priest that God is real. Technology isn’t the doorkeeper of truth. There is really only one viable way forward. A livable philosophy must be based on a foundation in reality, and for that purpose, the only way we know anything is through consciousness. Reality is an activity in consciousness, whether it’s a matter of falling in love or creating the concept of an electron. Until everyone begins to explore a consciousness-based approach to reality, the pursuit of science and philosophy will both be hobbled.

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, Clinical Professor UCSD Medical School, researcher, Neurology and Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 85 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are You Are the Universe co-authored with Menas Kafatos, PhD, and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. discoveringyourcosmicself.com

Hitching a Ride on the Cosmos

By Deepak Chopra MD and Menas Kafatos, PhD

The universe and the human brain have something important in common. The inner workings of both are invisible. At this moment you have no perception of what’s happening in your brain; neural activity is unknown to the mind of the person to whom the neurons belong without the invention of brain scans to reveal that activity, and then only crudely. Imagine, being a master of a house and not knowing or seeing what is inside the house.

linkedin-sfo

At first blush the universe doesn’t appear to be that way, tens to hundreds of billions of stars in as many as two trillion galaxies, although not directly observable with the naked eye can be studied with big telescopes such as the Hubble space telescope. But no matter how finely you dissect physical objects, whether the object is a drop of water or a massive nebula, in reality the inner workings of objects are totally invisible. The phrase used by physicists is “something out of nothing,” which refers to the fact that ground zero for creation is a void, the quantum vacuum. On that basis, both the brain and a star and an atom are examples of something coming out of nothing.

 

In our book You Are the Universe , we explore what might be emerging besides physical objects and the energy states they occupy. For it’s obvious that the brain doesn’t simply produce electrical and chemical activity at random. It somehow is tied to our inner world of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and images. Using these, we experience a three-dimensional world. So everything in that world is dependent on experience; if there is a reality outside what we can experience (including the extended perception of microscopes, telescopes, particle accelerators, and so on), such a reality will be as inaccessible as a dark hole.

(more…)

Good News: You Aren’t a Biological Robot

By Deepak Chopra, MD and Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD

We live in a golden age for neuroscience, and new findings about the brain emerge almost by the month. with huge government backing, one foresees the day, which could be quite soon, when every significant region of the brain is correlated with all the things we use our minds for. But as often happens with exciting frontiers, there’s a tendency to exaggerate the conclusions being reached.

In the case of neuroscience, the overreach is immense, because from many quarters brain researchers keep piling up evidence for very misguided conclusions. All revolve around the notion that we are prisoners of brain activity, in essence trapped inside the chemical and electrical activity of brain cells. Since this activity follows totally deterministic laws, it must follow that we do the same. In the latest wrinkle of “biology is destiny,” our brains have turned us into biological robots. untitled-design

An extreme statement of this position recently appeared in the New York Times, where Robert A. Burton, former chief of neurology at the University of California San Francisco, writes, with damning finality, “. . . it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the experience of free will (agency) and conscious rational deliberation are both biologically generated illusions.” (Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/opinion/a-life-of-meaning-reason-not-required.html)This isn’t a novel idea, but the fact that others have touted it doesn’t add any validity.

On the face of it, Dr. Burton had to use “conscious rational deliberation’ to write his article, so such a thing obviously exists. He has trusted an illusion to tell him that his own thinking is an illusion, which is totally self-contradictory. If it seems puzzling that a biological robot, however complicated its hard wiring in the brain, could produce the output of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt, the reason is that no robot did produce that output–the human mind did.

Getting neuroscientists to back away from the biological robot thesis is difficult, because the vast majority align themselves with an unproven assumption, that the brain produces the mind. Burton admits in his article that no one has any idea where thoughts comes from, yet he proceeds to assure us where they don’t come from, the mind. Brain is all; mind is simply one of its more intriguing byproducts. This is the fallacy of instrumentality, the same as saying that because musical instruments produce music, they also compose it. A piano doesn’t compose ragtime, and there is no proof that the brain produces thought.

All we can say with certainty is that the brain’s physical activity delivers precise correlations with mental activity. Burton makes much of the finding that if you electrically stimulate regions of the brain associated with disgust or empathy, people will experience those feelings. Yet long ago the pioneering Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield stimulated the motor cortex of patients undergoing brain surgery. As a result of stimulating neurons responsible for activating arm muscles, for example, the patient’s arm would fly up automatically.

Yet Penfield, a great proponent of mind over brain, was astute enough to ask the conscious patients if they had raised their arm. The answer was always no. Instead, patients said something like, “My arm just flew up.” This is enough to show that all of us separate the actions we freely choose from autonomic responses. We can’t be fooled about this. We never say, “My mouth ate some food” or “My hand wants to play the violin.” All the complicated findings in neuroscience are instrumental only. They tell us the equivalent of showing that music can’t be played without musical instruments. The piano is capable of nearly infinite patterns of notes when you consider tempo, dynamics, phrasing, melody, and harmony. This activity is the physical correlation of music, not music itself. The brain’s nearly infinite patterns aren’t thinking, either.

Until neuroscience can actually tell us where thoughts come from, until the link is made between the electrochemical firing of a brain cell and subjective experience, nothing valid can be said about how mind and brain are related. Their relationship has to be holistic. Instead of insisting, as neuroscience does, that brain produces mind, or taking the opposite position, that the mind creates the brain, there is no cause-and-effect between them. They are simultaneous phenomena. A thought is instantly registered in the mental and physical domain.

Where did they both come from? A single source, which is consciousness itself. In fact, brain and mind are two aspects of this deeper reality, where consciousness is the only “stuff” that’s ultimately real. At the moment, however, the concept that we are pre-determined, mechanistic brain puppets is pure science fiction. Decades ago someone joked that figuring out the brain is like putting a stethoscope to the outside of the Astrodome to figure out the rules of football. The fact that various brain experts now take the joke seriously indicates a bad misunderstanding of both brain and mind.

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. The World Post and The Huffington Post global internet survey ranked Chopra #17 influential thinker in the world and #1 in Medicine. Chopra is the author of more than 80 books translated into over 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest books are Super Genes co-authored with Rudolph Tanzi, PhD and Quantum Healing (Revised and Updated): Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. www.deepakchopra.com

Dr. Rudolph Tanzi is the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit and Vice-Chair of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Tanzi discovered several Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genes and directs the Alzheimer’s Genome Project. He is now actively developing therapies for treating AD based on knowledge gained from genetics and lifestyle interventions. Dr. Tanzi has published over 475 papers and has received the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award, Potamkin Prize, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award, and was on the 2015 TIME100 Most Influential People in the World list. He also co-authored the New York Times Bestseller, “Super Brain” and “Super Genes” with Dr. Deepak Chopra.