My latest read is a double biography of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. (It’s titled, rather creatively, “Freud & Jung.”) Currently, I’m in the Freud section. Freud was known to be an atheist and rather dismissive of religion (hence my warm feelings for him.) Freud even wrote an entire book dismissing religion called “The Future of an Illusion.” When he sent a copy to religious friend, the friend reproached him for not understanding the true source of contentment found in religion. Freud reported…

This, he [the religious friend] says, consists in a particular feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, in which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded — as it were, ‘oceanic’.

Of course, keen eyed readers of this blog have seen this feeling described before. In one blog post I described the book “My Stroke of Insight” in which…

…the author describes feelings of spiritual transcendence after suffering a serious left brain stroke. She describes feeling liquid, connected to the universe, and at some points incapable of delineating where her physical self ends and the rest of her environment begins.

The specificity of terms is interesting here. Freud’s friend described feeling “oceanic”, while this book’s author describes feeling “liquid.”

I also once mentioned a Los Angeles Times article on the use of LSD to treat various ailments. The article reported…

Delany said her “trip” awakened a deep and reassuring sense of “knowing.” She came to see the universe and everything in it as interconnected. As the music in her headphones reached a crescendo, she held her breath and realized it would OK — no, really easy — not to breathe anymore. She sensed there was nothing more she needed to know and therefore nothing she needed to fear about dying.

Can this sensation be explained in neurological terms? Again, quoting my post on “My Stroke of Insight”…

Today, I find myself scanning through an old New Yorker article, “God on the Brain.” (September 17, 2001.) The piece discusses the brain scans of Tibetan Buddhists and Franciscan nuns taken “before and at the peak of their transcendent feelings.” It notes…

Beforehand, the scan’s computer portrays the brain’s activity as a palette of fierce reds in rich yellows. During meditation or prayer, however, a marked color change was noted in a small region of the left side of the cerebrum called the parietal superior parietal lobe, which is just behind the crown of the skull. The flaming reds have turned into deep azure, signaling a substantial decline in activity.

You may have heard the anecdote that when European ships first appeared on the horizon of the New World, the natives could not see them. The argument is that these ships were so unlike anything they had ever seen, so uncategorizable by their brains, that they were rendered invisible. (I’ve heard similar accounts of Western ships appearing on African shores.) You probably thought, “what fools they must’ve been to not be able to see something. They were thoroughly deserving of their centuries of subjugation.”

I was just emptying the dishwasher. I finished, then looked in and noticed that I had not removed a butter tray. The butter tray seldom gets washed and as a result is usually not part of a dishwashing session. In this sense, when placed in the dishwasher, it become something of a foreign object. Was my brain responding to the sight of the dishwasher tray in the same way the brains of native Americans responded to those ships?

Here’s another example that everyone can relate to. I was missing a book. I went into my bedroom to look for it, but even before I entered the room, I was thinking “there’s no way it could be here.” It wasn’t. I searched the rest of the house, then gave the bedroom a second try. There was the book in plain sight, on my desk. Because I had no expectation of finding it there, it had become invisible. Or, it’s possible that the house is haunted by a poltergeist who jokingly removed the book from my view, then returned it to my desk. It seems quite likely that when the next houseguest appears, the poltergeist will use its supernatural abilities to increase the pressure on that person’s head, causing their head to explode and bits of their brain to fly out across the dinner table.

As should be obvious, I’m currently reading yet another book on the mind and its relation to pain/healing. This one is called “Healing and the Mind” by Bill Moyers. (It’s based on a PBS series he did of the same name.)

Mindfulness comes up a lot in this book. Mindfulness is essentially a meditative practice of paying attention to the moment – of really tasting tastes, hearing sounds, seeing colors etc. And practiced mindfulness seems to have a pretty good track record of calming the mind and mitigating pain.

So what’s going on here? How can simply paying attention decrease something as nagging and annoying as pain. In thinking about this, I’m reminded of a theory I’ve mentioned before: the 40 bit limit. What’s that? This site has a good review.

…researchers now believe that each second, the human body gathers and processes well over a million bits of information.  (A bit is a basic unit of binary, yes/no, storable information.) Yet studies have demonstrated that human consciousness can process only between 10 and 40 bits per second.  This means that an enormous amount of sorting, analysis, and prioritization has occurred subconsciously before some minute portion of sensory data becomes available to our momentary consciousness. 

In essence, you have a limited amount of bits that you can focus on things. My thinking is that when practicing mindfulness you are allocating your bits towards core sensations and away from interior chatter and pain. (On a related note: When I was really struggling with arm pain I would often notice that it would go away during meals. It probably wasn’t really going away but rather I was focusing my attention on the delicious tastes generated by my vast culinary skills.)

I’ve reported several times here about my reading of the book “My Stroke of Insight” by a neuroscientist who had a stroke and was able to provide a thorough description of the experience. Her stroke knocked out a significant part of her left brain, and she reported a feeling of losing her sense of physical self — of literally being unclear where her body ended and the rest of the world began.

I’ve also commented on a particular New Yorker article that reported on the brain scans of people in meditation or prayer. What was noted is that a portion of the left brain’s parietal lobe — known to be integral to our ability to locate ourselves in physical space — became quiet.

So, it looks like this particular chunk of the brain is integral to our physical definition of ourselves, and when this chunk is “quieted” people seem to fall into this sense of “I’m a part of the universe” feeling.

Of course, the statement “I’m a part of the universe” is the kind of thing hippies are always saying thus it should be mocked and distrusted. My sense is that there’s no real spiritual event happening, but simply that one’s “sense of self” (by this I mean sense of physical self) is a sense like proprioception (our general sense of where parts of our bodies are) or our sense of whether we’re upside down or not (vestibular function.) When this sense is removed, all sorts of funny things happen.

Now, Jill Bolte Taylor, the author of “My Stroke of Insight” would probably disagree. I seem to recall that in her book that she did ascribe to her experience a certain kind of spirituality. In a “sense”, she felt that this sense of “everything is connected” was not merely a neurological tic, but a real, valid experience.

I don’t fully buy this, but I was considering the following this morning. When we look around the world, we see things as separate objects. “This is a book, this is a dog, this is a ham sandwich etc.” But we recognize these objects can have parts removed and still fall under the same classification. For example, I can tear some pages out of a book and it’s still a book. I can surgically remove a dog’s tail and it’s still a dog. Objects are made up of lesser parts. And of course the same is true with the human body. I am one person, but that one person is made up of lungs, heart, skin, bones etc. And those parts break down into cells, and cells can be broken down into molecules, molecules into atoms, and atoms can be broken apart into various quantum particles like protons and neutrons etc. And in between these various units is empty space. (The space between these small units is invisible to our eyes, of course.)

Now we know that these various units can affect each other. On an organ level, the brain can release hormones that travel through the bloodstream to the heart and cause the heart to beat faster. Inside the cell body, different cell structures interact with each other. The same with molecules, atoms, quarks and so on. The “stuff” of the world is constantly interacting with “other stuff.”

Okay, so we realize that objects can be reduced to a much smaller units and these units interact with each other. We also see a lot of interaction in the larger plane of existence most of us operate in. A dog barks at cat, and the cat runs away. I throw a rock at a glass jar and it breaks apart. I tell my girlfriend she’s a whore and this starts a series of physiological changes including increased heartbeat and tears rolling out of her eyes. (And possible slapping.) Again, we’re dealing with “stuff” interacting with “other stuff.”

However, we, as humans, recognize certain forms of stuff as “objects” but not others. I understand a Swiss watch is made up of a number of mechanical parts interacting. And I view that watch as a machine. However, if I throw a rock at a jar, or insult my girlfriend, you could argue I am also part of a machine — a thing made up of “parts” (of which I am one part). To call one thing a “watch” but not call another thing something like “guyinsultinggirlfriend” seems like a rather arbitrary distinction. If anything, the rule is that we recognize objects made up of units that are close together, but we don’t recognize objects that are made up of units with a lot of space between them. (I can think of various exceptions to that second part: we recognize that cities are made up of people, buildings, cars etc. The same point could be made about planets, or galaxies etc.)

There’s another factor here relevant to how we view human beings (and probably most intelligent lifeforms.) We recognize the concept of ego. I happen to associate the collection of cells and organs that make up myself as being connected to my desires, drive, will and what not. Because those units all serve under my ego (well, sort of) I group them together. But what is ego? You could argue it’s both a psychological construct and a physiological construct (e.g. that part of the brain that was lost during Taylor’s stroke.) But it’s hard to argue that it’s “real” in any meaningful sense. Thus, if our sense of what qualifies as an object is based upon either a rather unimportant distinction of how far apart things are from other things or whether the object possesses the ethereal ego, then our distinctions really aren’t all that meaningful. And, thus, we are all connected. Just as parts of the Swiss watch interact with each other, I can interact with a dog who barks at a cat who claws a scientist who accidentally releases a biological weapon that kills all life on earth. It’s merely stuff interacting with other stuff.

I am the new God of the universe!

During my trip overseas I spent some time reading an interesting book called “The Head Trip.” It’s another book in the string of neuroscience/consciousness books I’ve been perusing. The author, Jeff Warren, spends a lot of time discussing the role of expectation in our interactions with ourselves and our environment. When the more interesting observations related to this is the success of placebo medical treatments. As is probably obvious, these are situations where doctors give people suffering from some particular malady a harmless pill and say, “you should start to feel better in X weeks.” A surprising number of people, greater than chance, do improve. And the reverse is also too. (To some degree, stories of people affected by the voodoo curses can probably be explained by their expectation that the voodoo curse was going to take its effect on them.)

Expectation can operate on other levels. While writing the book, Warren tried hypnosis and similar consciousness altering experiences. He found when the hypnotist seemed unsure of their abilities and incapable of inspiring confidence, he would not enter the hypnotic state. But when hypnotized by a seeming “professional” he more easily fell into a trance. His expectations of the process seemed to affect the outcome.

This makes me recall an experience I had years ago. I walked into a bar (surprise!) and started up a conversation with some people playing shuffleboard. They invited me to play a few games and I totally ruled! I was making shots that were blowing people away. However, I’ve played the game since then, and never achieved what I did in that first game. This is the kind of thing people often refer to as beginners luck.

So what role does expectation play in this? When I played that first game of shuffleboard, I had no sense of what I was capable of. I simply did my best and played the game. But, as years went on, I watched other people play, and analyzed what they did, and the world of shuffleboard became more familiar to me. As a result, I developed expectations about what was possible and what wasn’t.

Alternately, this leads us to consider the possibility that we’re capable of far more than we think, and it’s the expectations placed on us by ourselves and others that limit us. Ultimately, I think anything is possible… with love.