Neuroscience and Spirituality

It's great to be here. I see many old friends and lots of new friends, and I want to thank Stephen and the staff of this conference and also False Prophet for making this space available to have this event.

This is really great, and when I come here to these things and see that we're all still kicking after so long, and so many young people as well, I have hope for humanity.

And we're living in an age when I think we can use all the hope we can get. So it's a pleasure to be here, very much.

I wasn't sure exactly of the context of this thing. I'm more used to talking to small classrooms with my PowerPoint and all that.

So I have a PowerPoint projector, and I spent a lot of time kind of, I'm not really an expert on this topic.

The topic is neuroscience and spirituality, and when it comes to neuroscience, I'm a poseur.

There are actual real neuroscientists in this audience, and they will probably think this is a pretty shallow kind of presentation.

But this is really just a quick overview, and if I've made really egregious mistakes, by all means, correct me.

This is kind of new. I'm really just an ethnobotanist, and I've sort of dabbled in the neurosciences.

Because of our common interests. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and hopefully there'll be some time for discussions and so on.

And I'm hoping and praying that the technology will cooperate, and if it doesn't, I have my faithful AV guy there who may have to replace this wireless mouse.

But we'll go with this for the moment.

So as you may know, I'm kind of loosely affiliated with a lot of organizations, and a couple of them are up here.

The Hefter Research Institute, which most of you are familiar with.

It's a non-profit organization interested in research into psychedelics and development of psychedelics as medicines.

We just had our...

Our annual or our semi-annual board meeting last weekend, and we had a fundraiser at one of our board members' house, and we're making progress.

We have a couple of studies involving psilocybin in terminal cancer patients.

I don't really need to belabor this, because I think you probably all are fairly informed on this, but it's working.

I mean, what started out as kind of a wild and crazy...

Vision, a decade ago, is now actually a semi-respectable, if not respectable, organization, and we're making progress.

We've had great fortune both in getting support within the community and also kind of navigating the very tricky regulatory waters that you need to navigate to do legitimate medical work with these substances.

So we're hopeful for the future.

And the other organization that is kind of my real job, my day job, I guess you could say, is the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.

And it is not a New Age cult.

It just sounds like one.

And what it really is is the Alternative and Complementary Medicine Program within the medical school at the University of Minnesota.

And it's a great bunch of people.

Mostly because...

They let me teach my courses and do pretty much whatever else I want to do.

You can get away with a lot in the context of such an organization.

So I teach ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology there.

And if anybody wants to know a little more about what they're all about, you can go to www.csh.umn.edu.

They've got a lot of things going on in the complementary medicine field.

So anyway.

All right.

So this is what's been called...

I can't really even see that.

So I'm not...

Maybe...

Hmm?

I was just...

It's nice if you can sort of see what you're showing.

All right.

Well, anyway.

Put the microphone up and sit over here.

That's a good...

Huh?

People hear that?

More or less?

I don't probably even need the microphone.

I've got a strong voice.

But, well, there it is.

And what is it?

It is both sort of the inside and the outside of the universe that we experience.

Experience itself, consciousness, spirituality, mind, whatever you want to term it.

All sort of comes and is filtered through this three-pound piece of gelatin and protein.

And it's a remarkable structure.

And it's a very hard structure to understand.

But, you know, in the course of history, it wasn't always that we thought that mind or consciousness was localized in the brain.

And I'm not even sure we understand that now.

But there...

There is a sort of emerging consensus that whether or not it's localized in the brain,

the brain certainly has a great deal to do with consciousness and with mind.

So, perhaps by looking at the brain in more detail,

we can understand more about what is this phenomenon called consciousness that we all experience,

that consciousness are us in a certain sense.

I guess one of the other things that might be worth remarking about when you think about the brain,

it's probably one of the most complex structures,

one of the most highly organized structures in the known universe.

Certainly in our universe, there is nothing more complex or more highly organized.

And there has been one of my kind of interesting speculations about consciousness.

Consciousness is that perhaps it is that consciousness is a function of order,

highly organized systems,

in the same way, perhaps, that gravity is a function of mass.

And just as when you accumulate a lot of mass in a small space, in a small enough space,

you get the black hole phenomenon.

It wraps space-time around itself and it plunges into...

It becomes the singularity.

And the interesting thing about the singularity is we can put a label on it, singularity.

But what that means is that we can't say anything about it.

Because within the boundaries of that singularity, all the laws of physics are abrogated.

Or we don't even know that.

We don't know what is going on inside the singularity.

And so, perhaps consciousness, as we experience it, is the same way.

When you accumulate enough order in a small enough space,

when you accumulate enough order in a small enough space,

maybe consciousness emerges as a property of that ordered system.

And if you look at the human brain, that's kind of the ultimate expression of this highly ordered system

and why it seems to partake of a level that's a little different from other forms of consciousness.

But to some extent, everything that's ordered has consciousness or mind as a property of it.

Well, who knows?

But that's just an idea, you know.

I mean, this sort of, you know, goes back to the notion, as far as Aristotle and even earlier,

that the brain and the mind are intimately related.

His notion that the brain was the place where all senses met in common,

from which our term common sense arises, sort of articulates this idea.

But it's difficult for us to step outside of our head.

How are we going to understand the brain and understand consciousness if we're within the cage?

How can you understand experience and the parameters of experience and the physical substrate,

if there is such, or the metaphysical substrates that give rise to it, if you can't get outside of it?

You know, so we have the classic situation that a fish,

might face in trying to understand water.

How can he or she, whatever the fish is, step out of the environment and look at it from the outside?

This is very difficult.

The brain is the filter that filters everything.

So how do you, how do you understand the filter?

And that's why it's difficult to study this kind of thing.

And not just we can study it, but understanding is,

elusive.

And we've seen historically the way that the concept of consciousness,

the mind, and its relationship to the brain and the body has evolved over time.

Descartes, the guy who came up with the,

I think therefore I am, cliche, good place to start.

He was preoccupied with the pineal gland,

which is now historically,

re-emerged to become, again, very important, possibly,

in understanding the basis of consciousness.

But he, he postulated that the pineal gland,

which is a tiny endocrine gland in the middle of the brain,

in the absolute middle of the brain,

sometimes made analogous to the third eye.

And it is in the right spot.

If you drilled a hole right there and right there in the middle of the skull,

you would be very close.

Very close to the pineal gland.

And it does have eye-like properties in some ways.

But he claimed that the pineal gland was the receptor of all sensory input.

And then through a series of strings,

it was connected to muscles.

It was connected to the ability to respond to the environment.

And so it was sort of like the puppet theory of consciousness.

All mediated by this, by this controlling center,

which he equated to the pineal gland.

Steven, does anybody have any water?

I knew I was going to...

So as we've looked at the way the understanding of the brain has evolved over time,

it gets sort of progressively more, more complicated,

which you would expect as empiricism.

And actually, as in the second slide I showed,

people became enthusiastic about describing what is actually out there in nature.

And the naturalist cadavers willingly or unwillingly,

devoted their body parts and their brains to the early anatomists,

who didn't really think of themselves as scientists.

I mean, science emerged later as even under that term.

They were more, they thought of themselves as natural philosophers.

People who were trying to learn from nature.

And as people, as models of the brain,

it kind of, the perception of it changed as a place where there was a repository for the spirit.

And that's kind of on the upper slide, this early notion of da Vinci's drawing.

There was an early notion that the mind-body is run by humors,

which were sort of variously conceived as gases or liquids.

It wasn't quite clear.

You find very much the same sort of notions in Chinese medicine and other traditional medical traditions.

But in the West, it came out of Galen's notion that, you know,

everything is controlled by these vapors or these fluids kind of floating around the body.

And there was this idea that within the brain, the brain, there wasn't much happening in the brain.

It was mostly empty inside your head, but it was a repository for,

for these gaseous vapors that occasionally had to escape out into the world.

Well, as people started looking more at the empirical structure of the brain,

the picture got considerably more complicated, as you can see by the picture below.

And in the 19th century, there came to be this understanding that,

now,

only was the brain a very complicated structure but there was an effort made

to segment the brain and to kind of map brain structures onto functions. What

part of the brain controlled memory, what part of the brain controlled you know

love or lust or what part of the brain controlled you know all of the

behavioral and spiritual aspects that goes into complex human behavior. So one

early example of that was phrenology which was really a kind of a 19th

century pseudoscience but that postulated that by essentially by

measuring the bumps on your head you could determine personality type and

they had you know all of these complex maps about where on the skull

corresponding to places within the brain these different functions were located.

So I think it's really important to think about that.

So this was really kind of a attempt to kind of a stepping stone along the way

toward what eventually emerged as modern neuroanatomy which plays much the same

types of games but hopefully is a little more empirically based. I mean if

you contrast this three-dimensional figure here with the cross-section of

brain structures with da Vinci's drawing.

In back of it you can see how much our concepts have changed over time.

So now we have we're still a long way from figuring it out I don't want anyone

to get the impression that we have it figured out we don't and any time.

In just about any discipline or any tradition when someone tells you they've

got it figured out that's pretty much when I walk away because.

There's a lot left but we do know.

A few things we have succeeded in localizing in sort of defining anatomically different

parts of the brain.

And sort of mapping in a crude way certain functions onto these different parts.

And this just shows some of the main parts like Wernicke's area has to do very much with

language.

Production and process.

Processing.

The visual cortex the part of the brain that processes visual information shows up at the

back of the brain.

The temporal lobe the temporal temporal meaning it's located in the temporal area turns out

to be maybe a key area in certain functions related to consciousness.

And so on.

So we're getting a progressively more complete.

Sort of.

Map of of these different parts of the brain and and through neurophysiology and other

techniques and toys that we're inventing we can look at these.

The functions of these areas and progressively more detailed way so we are learning.

Slowly.

And what one of the things we're learning and here I have to refer to my notes because

I I can't memorize all this stuff.

But.

One of the things that we're learning is that where is that the the human brain.

And to a certain sense all mammalian brains are are at least three brains and they work

together and they are evolutionarily related as well in that the lower brains the so-called

brain stem.

And the midbrain are evolutionarily lower.

Evolutionarily lower.

And so.

So.

And they were.

They were more complex.

And they they were more complex as well.

They were more complex.

So the human brain is more ancient than this kind of over expressed them and hypertrophy

for brain.

Which is kind of that characteristic both curse and blessing of the human condition.

And in some sense and evolutionary accident I mean we could go on all day about how this

how this happens.

But it is really the kind of.

It's really.

Evolutionarily what sets our species aside.

from everyone, from other species.

I mean, it's an evolutionary accident in that it happened very quickly in evolution.

There's just this explosive, almost literally overexpression of the cortex,

of the forebrain in evolutionary time over a couple of million years.

And what triggered that, we don't know,

or what led to it, probably a variety of factors.

I don't think it's as simple as we started eating mushrooms

and suddenly got smart.

But I think that these psychedelic molecules were out in the environment,

and I think that they did play probably some kind of role.

I'm not really here to convince you one way or the other of that.

But how this came about, we don't know.

But that it came about has made all the difference

in the sense that, as a result,

a species emerged on the planet that is kind of the chaos factor

in kind of the evolutionary unfolding of life on this planet.

I mean, it's pretty clear we're either going to wreck it

or we're going to sustain it.

And it's still up for grabs.

But I just wanted to mention some of these structures.

To give you an idea, I'm going to give you an idea.

I'm going to give you an idea.

I'm going to give you an idea of where the state of the art is

or where the current understanding is

in trying to localize these parts of the brain

and map functions onto parts.

So I'm just going to kind of read this out.

And I don't have a pointer, so it would be easier.

But this part here, you've got the forebrain,

the midbrain, and the hindbrain.

And the hindbrain at the bottom there

is the forebrain.

It's the oldest part of the brain evolutionarily.

And it includes these three main structures,

the medulla oblongata, the pons, and the cerebellum.

And sorry that these words are so confusing.

This all came out of the Greek and Latin

when that's what neuroanatomists at the time used.

But the medulla oblongata is kind of the motor control center of the brain.

It controls autonomic functions such as our breathing

and our heartbeat, our salivation,

it's pretty much independent of conscious control.

Although indirectly, we can of course control some of those things.

But the medulla oblongata is like an autonomic control system

that makes sure all systems are functional more or less.

And when its function is interrupted,

you're in big trouble because you're dying.

The pons contains a duct through which the cerebral cortex communicates

to the cerebellum.

So this is the pons.

This contains also the motor neurons that control things like your facial expression

and your mastication, ability to chew, and things like that.

And you'd be surprised how much of the brain is controlled,

is devoted to controlling things like the facial muscles.

And not too surprising because that's intimately tied into language.

The cerebellum, which is located on the dorsal surface,

that is the hind surface of the hind brain,

controls things like posture balance and autonomic muscle contraction.

So that's kind of like your balance center.

Now when we go to the next evolutionary part of the brain, the midbrain,

we can look at substructures there too.

And it contains centers for receiving and integrating,

a lot of different types of sensory information.

It's kind of the auditory, visual, integration and relay station.

And if you look at a lot of these different brain structures,

you find that they're, you know, roughly you can say many of them are involved

with receiving signals and sending signals out.

But then where the really important action is going on is

where these signals are integrated and kind of synthesized into something that makes sense,

i.e. our experience.

So the midbrain and the hindbrain together constitute this thing called the brain stem.

And that's basically where all messages, or most messages,

enter and leave the body through the spinal cord.

Controls involuntary reflexes, autonomic body functions like breathing.

It also helps to maintain alertness.

It has functions in whether we're,

you know, a little bit more dozy or more awake.

Hopefully, most of you are not dozy.

We haven't had lunch yet.

But the forebrain is where it begins to get more interesting

and more pertinent to conscious functions.

It's involved in things like pattern recognition and image formation, memory, association,

our ability to learn, emotional expression, that kind of action,

which we experience.

.

You know, inseparable and intimately linked to our experience of being human

and interacting with other humans is pretty much mediated by the forebrain.

And the forebrain is made up of the diencephalon and the telencephalon.

Again, these older Greek words.

And the diencephalon contains two integrating centers, the thalamus and the hypothalamus.

I hope you can see this.

I hope you can see this chart because I can't keep, see it that seriously.

But the thalamus is kind of important for maintaining the body's internal environment.

Another homeostatic mechanism controls a lot about body temperature.

For example, it helps process sensory signals except olfactory signals,

which are processed somewhere else.

Controls blood pressure, controls, so it has to do a lot with our wake-sleep cycle.

And controls the pituitary gland, which is another master gland in the body,

which is shown up here, kind of a teardrop-shaped gland that hangs down from the thalamus.

And the pituitary gland is always prominently shown in these diagrams

and the pineal gland is almost never shown.

So it sort of gets short shrift.

That's part of the reason is we know a lot less, but it's also deeper in the brain.

So it's harder to depict it.

And the hypothalamus below the thalamus is located at the base of the brain.

And this has to do with our body temperature again, with our osmotic balance,

with regulating electrolyte balance in our body.

The tail encephalon contains the cerebral cortex.

And this is this enormous,

over-expressed hypertrophied structure that we think of as, you know, mediating much of

consciousness, and it does, but it works very closely with many of these structures in the

midbrain as well. The frontal cortex is bilaterally symmetrical. It's divided into two hemispheres,

as you know. It's about 85% of the mass of the brain, so the brain in humans is roughly 1,500

grams, and the cerebral cortex is most of that. And then the two hemispheres are connected by this

band, very dense, broad band of fibers called the corpus callosum, and they're like a switching

system.

So the two hemispheres are connected by this band of fibers called the corpus callosum, and they're

two hemispheres can communicate with each other. And as you probably know, in some cases of

epilepsy, sometimes they surgically separate those things. They actually will sever the

connection between the hemispheres, and it does dampen down some of the epileptic behaviors,

but it leads to some very strange effects, too, in terms of perception and ability to

by looking at things like that. In other words, you can recognize objects. You can for example, hold

a ball or a block of wood in your hand. You can not only know what it is, you can draw a picture of it,

but you can't name it and things like that. So by looking at things like that, this is how we partly learn more

about what is going on in the brain and how brain structures and functions do relate to consciousness,

sadly, I guess, or in some ways, fortunately, a lot of people have farther across the person they know and

look closer to the person they know. When I look closer it's very empiezaehandic. The mental system in yourself is very, very sure to recognize a

Fortunately, a lot of what we know about the brain comes from looking at brain injuries

and what happens to people's perceptions and behaviors and so on

when they get odd and exotic brain injuries of various types.

So the cerebral cortex, these two hemispheres,

contain sensory and motor areas involved in processing of information

and the integration of information, as we said.

And the cerebral cortex controls sensations, reasoning, memory, problem-solving, and voluntary actions,

at least to the extent that we have been able to localize those functions to different parts of the brain.

So if we look closer at these hemispheres,

where a lot of the activity is done by the brain,

where the action is, you can subdivide these into basically five lobes.

This is classically how it's done.

The frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital lobes.

The frontal lobe is the largest, and it controls speech, thought, consciousness, and voluntary body movements.

Well, that's a big statement.

I'm not sure it does control consciousness,

but it controls some important functions related to consciousness.

The parietal lobe controls sensations such as touch, pressure and pain, texture, and position.

And also within the parietal lobe is a neural map of our motor functions,

the so-called, sometimes called the cortical homunculus,

essentially a representation within the brain of the structure,

of our body.

And if you've looked at neuroanatomy text,

you've probably seen this odd representation of the body,

where the lips and the face are 90% of the cortical homunculus,

and the rest of it is kind of like an atrophied,

withered part of the brain controlling the rest of the body.

So much of the parietal cortex is devoted to the body.

So much of the parietal cortex is devoted to controlling our facial muscles.

And the occipital lobe is located at the back of the head,

and is involved in things like vision and hearing,

also in reading.

Sorry, vision and reading.

The temporal lobe is involved in things like hearing, speech memory,

sight memory, and music memory.

Also, I dare say mathematical functions,

because there is a lot of overlap between that,

and things like music.

Each temporal lobe now also has neuronal connections to the ears,

which you would expect.

And then there's a structure called the insula,

which is not shown,

which is located deep within this sylvan fissure,

these cracks between the lobes,

and that is where smell, olfactory input is thought to be controlled.

Don't worry, this is the end of the anatomy.

I'm not going to, it's not going to be like that all the way.

But I thought since we're talking about the brain,

it might make sense to kind of chart the territory and get some idea.

And again, I'm saying I'm not by any means an expert on this.

So here's another sort of way to look at it,

a more tabular sort of accounting for it,

where you can map functions.

Which are shown on the right there,

two particular functional areas of the cortex and particular lobes of the cerebrum.

So you have things like the language areas.

Two areas of the brain emerges very important there.

One is Broca's area, the so-called speech center,

which has to do with our ability

to produce speech, to articulate,

to make our mouths move in speech,

to utter these small mouth noises that my brother was fond of talking about.

These inherently meaningless expostulations of air,

and yet from that we get meaning.

And part of that has to do with the other area,

Wernicke's area,

which can take these signals,

process them,

and translate them into something more or less corresponding hopefully to what I just said.

Your brain will translate into some model that's more or less close to that,

so that we understand each other.

And then these different areas involve speech production,

involve voluntary actions.

I don't really have to go through it.

You can see for yourself.

So there's been progress,

especially within the last few decades of the 20th century in understanding the brain.

So do we know where the soul is now?

Do we know where consciousness is or where is mind?

Which one of these lobes contains the soul?

I don't think we can really answer that question.

Even at this point.

There's really no better artist than Alex Gray to kind of illustrate the conundrum here.

Where does the brain stop and consciousness begin,

or does consciousness kind of fan out into the continuum?

We don't really know the answer where the soul is.

We have a much better understanding of the structures of the brain.

We can map functions of the brain.

But do we know where the soul is?

Not really.

All we can do is sort of make some guesses.

We've got some good guesses.

We're beginning to understand it.

And we have some marvelous new toys.

Human beings are very good at sort of probing the universe and inventing toys.

And if we can probe the universe using gadgets,

gadgets, then we're really happy. And so, you know, clever people have developed different

toys, different technologies, if you want to call them, for probing the brain. One of

the questions we really, this isn't one of them, by the way, this is an artist's conception,

but I put it in there because I thought it well illustrated the idea of, to my mind,

a question that remains unanswered. But with our sort of pantheist animist bias, if you will,

it's a question worth pondering, which is, is the brain a generator of mind? Is it a generator of

consciousness? Or is it more like a receiver of consciousness? Is consciousness, maybe mind or

consciousness, is something like radio waves. It just kind of permeates the continuum. But if you

have a question that remains unanswered, it's a question worth pondering, which is, is the brain

have a sufficiently sophisticated receiver, if you have a Bose stereo system or whatever,

you can tune in to the right wavelengths.

So that's a different way of looking at the brain.

I think neuroanatomists and people with that sort of perspective think of the brain as

something that generates consciousness, but maybe that's not what it is at all.

Maybe it's just a way to tune in to something that is kind of inherent in the universe.

Certainly a lot of the pantheist and animist traditions have this intuition, that mind

is everywhere, that everything is conscious, that the smallest sand grain or even electron

has a certain quality of consciousness to it.

Okay.

So we have developed lots of different, what you might call, neurotechnologies, different

ways to image the brain and probe the brain and try to get some answers out of it and

try to figure out, try to, in a sense, look, it's, again, we're faced with this conundrum

of the filter, looking at the filter.

What's my limit on time?

Okay.

So what's the limit on time?

One fifty.

You're done?

Hmm?

Oh.

Lots of time.

One fifty, not one fifty.

Oh, well.

No problem.

Okay.

So if we look at what we might call neurotechnologies, we can actually kind of divide them into

a couple of categories.

One is all the toys, the gee whiz gadgets that we've developed within the 20th century

for kind of monitoring brain functions and examining them.

Things like electroencephalography, computerized axial tomography, PET, positron emission tomography,

and all these different, very often ways of imaging what's going on in the brain and

imaging either brain structures or functions or both.

But then coupled with that, we have what are very ancient technologies that have been around

for a long time, what you might call altered state technologies.

And these are not gadget-oriented generally at all.

I mean, the most complex gadget that you might use to practice this is perhaps a psychoactive

plant or a psychoactive molecule, although they don't all certainly involve those things.

You have things like psychedelics, which is not at the top of the list, well, not

by design.

It's just that you have shamanism, you have meditation, you have prayer.

But these are kind of techniques that people have developed over centuries to alter states

of consciousness.

So we can put these together.

We can say, practice these sacred technologies or these altered state technologies, and

then we can put the helmets on or put you in the MRI and see what is going on in the

brain.

What is it doing when you're meditating or when you're on a psychedelic and so on?

So we can hopefully learn from some of that.

Here's one example.

This is electroencephalography, which has gotten much more sophisticated in the last

few years.

A lot of brain activity, as we know, is electrical activity.

And what electroencephalography does is basically measure these waves of electrical polarization

and depolarization that kind of constantly travel across the brain.

And the way you do that is by doing this.

By just putting a lot of electrodes in different spots on the skull, the systems we have now

are a lot more sophisticated.

We can measure many channels at the same time.

And we can, by studying the patterns of brain waves with different states such as sleep,

deep meditation, excitement, and so on, we can make correlations that may help us there.

So that's one example.

Thank you.

Another example is the use of telemetry.

And telemetry, as I said before, is the use of telemetry to define certain states of consciousness,

states of mind, or correlated with certain electrical states in the brain.

Not surprising.

Electroencephalography's been around for a long time.

It's old, but it's been used.

Here's another older technology that's becoming kind of supplanted now.

This is computerized axial tomography.

build up an image of brain structures by taking x-ray pictures of slices of the brain and

thin slices, that is the computer slices it up and then builds up a three-dimensional

image by looking at x-ray images.

It's not used so much anymore, I mean it is still used medically but many newer techniques

are preferable to it because the problem with this is you have to put x-rays on your

brain and that's not such a good idea.

It's very useful for as a preliminary way to for instance look at brain tumors or to

detect brain tumors which you can see there in that picture on the right that mass down

there is a rather large brain tumor.

Interestingly enough the current most kind of common practice is to look at x-ray images

of the brain.

The common application of CAT is not so much in neuroscience but actually in homeland security.

Those people putting these bags through that machine, that's a CAT scanner and so when

you go to the airport your luggage will not be CAT scanned.

I hope that we do not live to see a day when your brain will be CAT scanned when you go

to the airport but I'm not so sure.

.

Given the way things are going hopefully they will have at least a less invasive technique.

Something perhaps like this I can imagine having to have an MRI when you step up to

the security gate at the airport that will in 10 or 20 years be able to tell you or even

less than that be able to give our intrepid homeland security agents kind of an idea

of what you're thinking.

.

I'm not sure we want machines to read our minds and so this is another exam I don't mean to scare

you we're all scared enough but I think it's something that we have to think about we have

to think about the applications of this technology because one of the things I mean wonderfully of

medical applications and as a tool in basic neuroscience who could argue with that but then

we we humans have this you know perverse ability to take a good thing and and perverted into a bad

thing or a you know more sort of morally and ethically ambiguous type of thing but anyway

MRI magnetic resonance imagery and the variation of it called functional MRI which is essentially

a movie version a real-time version of brain function

has kind of supplanted cat scanning and other types of techniques because it gives you such

detailed resolution of brain structures and to a certain degree of brain functions it's based

on a magnetic technology so it's not so dangerous as x-rays and basically based on measuring the

magnetic signal from protons in primarily in water

in brain structures so this this particular drawing here shows the activation of certain

brain areas in a patient that's been treated with antidepressants after several weeks of treatment

and of course it can all be computer process to highlight those and that's that's what this shows

these those red areas are the areas that supposedly are activated so this is a

really quite useful window onto structure and function of the brain another another gee whiz

technology is pet positron emission spectroscopy as you can see it has a

much lower resolution than MRI but it tells you different things it can tell

you basically by putting a molecule into by injecting a molecule into the

brain which is the brain which is the brain which is the brain which is the brain which is the brain which is the brain

which is usually glucose which has been tagged with an atom that emits positrons those strange

quantum things that are the opposite of electrons as it decays these are very short-lived isotopes

short-lived radio isotopes and as you all probably know glucose is the food of the brain it

does not feed on anything else

and so what pet basically measures it will measure those areas of the brain

where the most glucose is being consumed which corresponds to metabolic

activity so if you want to know you know I'm thinking about buying an SUV

for example you can put me in a cat scan and say oh what part of his brain

lights up when he thinks about buying an SUV or what part lights up when he

thinks about

chocolate cake or other things.

And so you can actually correlate brain activity

to the consumption of glucose in different parts of the brain.

So this is useful.

And again, you get these kind of morally questionable technologies.

There's a whole technology called neural imprinting now

or neural fingerprinting, I think it's called,

which would be the kind of thing they might apply

at airport security gates.

But of course, the advertising industry is way ahead.

They're already developed this thing called neural marketing

where they can take focus groups, show them products,

and monitor their brain functions.

And then they can figure out how to more efficiently tweak

those parts of the brains that react.

Okay.

Another important technology is SPECT,

which is, I didn't have an animated version of that.

I couldn't find one.

But SPECT is similar to PET in that it involves putting radioactive molecules

into the brain, and then as those things decay, you get an image.

Unlike PET, which usually involves glucose, although not always,

you can do interesting things with pharmaceuticals.

You could, for example, put LSD.

Or some other molecule, Prozac.

Or some other molecule with the right label into the brain.

And then do a SPECT scan and see where that molecule is distributed.

Where does it go in the brain?

Where does it bind?

How long does it take to be metabolized and excreted and so on?

And here, the detector, the signal that is detected is gamma rays.

So that's the other thing.

Okay.

The other one detected positrons.

The PET scan detects positrons.

This detects gamma rays, which are even worse than X-rays.

Even more powerful and destructive to tissues than X-rays.

Of course, the amounts that are actually put

into the brain are infinitesimally tiny.

And it's not something that you do every day.

It's something you do for hopefully a medical reason.

So these things give us essentially windows

on the brain, ways to poke and probe the brain to watch what the brain does

when it's doing various things, whether that be meditating or sleeping or thinking or,

you know, whatever it might be.

So they can then link these things to these altered state technologies,

these by and large very ancient technologies, and perhaps get a more complete picture

of what's going on.

Well, of course, psychedelics are, you know, really useful in this respect.

Molecules like LSD and the whole gamut of psychedelic molecules,

in some sense, are molecular probes of consciousness.

We can design variations on these molecules,

and then we can see how do these variations change the subjective effect.

And we can also look at how they interact with brain receptors.

Most brains, a lot of brain activity, as you know, has to do with receptors.

And a lot of how drugs work has to do with the fact that they bind to specific receptors

in the brain, and then they elicit effects that way.

So that's what this thing on the right shows.

It shows an LSD molecule nestled.

It's nestled within the receptive pocket of this protein.

These are conceptualizations, mathematical reconstructions.

This protein is located in the surface of the nerve cell at the synapse.

And so it can only fit in certain ways.

These molecules have a kind of a lock and key relationship to their receptors.

They'll only fit certain ways.

And so you can study a lot about how,

how to use these things.

And so this is a very interesting example.

Meditation is another sacred technology.

Sacred altered state technology.

A way to communicate with your deeper self.

I don't have to belabor that with this audience.

I like Alex Gray's sort of representations.

I tend to use his images a lot.

With his permission, by the way.

Because he really, really likes to use images.

He likes to use images.

sort of gets how intimately these conscious and super conscious processes are related

fundamentally to biology. Biology is the ground of our being. So we can use meditation. We can

use prayer. And prayer is not unlike meditation. That's another sacred technology. Another

technology that focuses on inner states and the kind of communication with the transcendental

aspect of the self. But where meditation often is an inner focusing, prayer almost always or

very often presupposes a communication with something outside the self. But they have in

conscious that there's a transcendence of the self, a suppression of the ego, and a communication or

a

, a relationship with something perceived to be larger than the self. And at this point, I think maybe

it's good to remind you that all of this is still going on in the brain. I mean, this is the brain that's

doing all this. So in some sense, none of it's really outside the self, or maybe it is. But, you know,

this is the filter. And we have various ways to modulate the filter. So we can ask, you know, big

questions. What is consciousness?

Is consciousness in the brain, or does the brain merely detect it? What is the self? And where is the self located? Is it

located in the brain? Is it located somewhere else in the universe, a few feet in front of me? Who knows? Big

questions. Nobody has the answers. So we're free to speculate. And we're good at that. I want to talk a little bit about some of the research,

on this. This is an interesting fellow, a neurologist at the brain cognition lab at

UCSD, University of California at San Diego. And if any of you are familiar with his book

Phantoms in the Brain, you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, I highly recommend

it. He has learned a great deal about the brain by studying people with different types

of brain injuries. He's kind of an Oliver Sacks type character. And he talks about consciousness

and what he calls qualia. Qualia is kind of our subject experience of self, our experience

of being in the world, if you will. And he's been fascinated by what kind of brain processes

have to integrate together and work together to create.

This sense that we have of being localized in space and time, most of the time, and pretty

much a coherent entity, our subjective point of view. So that's really what he is trying

to get a handle on by looking at these different types of brain injuries where qualia is seriously

disrupted in some ways.

Okay.

People who have lost limbs, for example. Or people, you know, if you look into the

literature of neurology, you find there are all sorts of really unusual conditions. You

know, conditions, for example, where people are absolutely convinced that they're dead.

You know, or that, you know, they didn't lose an arm. Their arm is over there lying

on the bed across the room from them. But it's still their arm.

Just wild stuff that he talks about. But in trying to understand this, he's kind of put together

this notion that the brain, our subjective self, is not really one self. It's many selves.

About seven, in fact. And they work together. And they crosstalk and communicate with each other.

So that the whole is kind of synthesized into this whole.

To this delusion of being a coherent self. Different parts of the brain handle different

aspects of the self-function. And the whole thing, by our ability to synthesize all this

input and output together, is synthesized into a coherent whole. You know, much like

a film, for example. I mean, a film is just a series of still pictures. But if we run

it at the right speed, we have an illusion that it's all running smoothly.

And that's really what it is. They essentially, these different parts of the self, create a

simulation of subjective experience. They create a simulation of reality. And that's

what we experience. One of his findings that's very interesting to me is how little of the

brain has to do with creating this illusion or this hallucination.

If you will. That we call consciousness. Most of the brain, we're never aware of its function.

It's just kind of doing housekeeping things. And only a few structures of the brain really

participate in sort of creating this ongoing process that we experience as the self. More

like a symphony than anything else. Or the ongoing movie that we're each living through

that we call...

Our conscious experience that we call subjective experience. So he's kind of, you know, all

this model building, he's kind of broken it down into these seven types of self. One

is the embodied self that's responsible for your body image, your sense of boundaries

between you and the outside world. And that is pretty much mappable to the parietal lobes

and the projections into the frontal lobes.

The second type of self is the self of the brain. The passionate self governs personality

and emotions and those types of functions. And that has been traced or is largely controlled

by the temporal lobes and a structure within the limbic system called the amygdala. And

the executive self is the self that is kind of the eye function or not the eye function

but more the decider, the thing that makes decisions and acts on things. And that has

been mapped to the cingulate gyrus and projections to the motor cortex. Never mind these terms.

It's just that there are, you know, certain functions that he's been able to correlate

with these different functions. There's the mnemonic self, our story, our sense of space

and time, our personal history. And that is linked intimately as memory is to the hippocampus,

that part of the brain that, part of the midbrain that is involved in the encoding

of memories and to the amygdala and to the temporal lobes. You see that these structures

keep coming up in different contexts. There are relatively few of them. There's the unified

self, which is responsible for the filling in the gaps, the telling essentially ourselves

the fairy story that is our life.

The story that narrates what's going on so that we can make sense of what's going on.

And the amygdala and the anterior cingulate gyrus participate in that. There's the visual

self, the self that tracks things in the environment, tracks responses, has, modulates

perception and that sort of a thing. We can thank the anterior cingulate gyrus, the thalamic

nuclei in the brain stem for all this.

This is the part that keeps us from sort of wandering off and, you know, stepping in

front of buses and things like that. Very evolutionarily useful not to do that. And

then finally there's this conceptual and social self, the sort of I function, our

self in relation to our fellow beings. And those functions are mediated by the cerebral

hemispheres.

Well, I'm not laying this out to you as, you know, this is a, you know, this is a

model. This is the model of consciousness because I think all models are provisional.

But models can be useful in terms of kind of articulating and understanding. And all

models are working models until something better comes along. So this is an interesting

way to kind of understand this, how we construct this hallucination that is reality, which of

course, as Lily Tomlin says, reality is a crutch.

It's a crutch for people who can't handle drugs. There's some truth to that because

we are drugs if you think about it. Our brain is full of drugs and our bodies are, too.

And so, you know, when we're more or less in consensus reality or in our own reality,

we kind of have this sensory neural interface, I call it. You're getting data of all kinds

from the environment, most of which we're not aware of. We're aware of a particular

tiny fraction of it. We're aware of the part that we need to process consciously in order

to survive. The part, again, that keeps us from stepping off the curb in front of buses.

And based on that, we have different types of output with we interact with the real world

with other people in several ways. We don't know what the real world looks like. You know,

we don't, we, you know, what we know is that we have a model of the real world that we're

dealing with.

And that's the internally created model. Fortunately, we're pretty sure that the model of the real

world corresponds closely enough to the real world that we're able to survive, interact

with physical things, and not step off cliffs and things like that. But the degree to which

the model and the real world, I mean, I suspect, and I think many physicists and others suspect,

the actual real world is pretty unknowable.

We really have no idea what the real world is.

We don't know what it looks like. So then we can change the signal in a certain sense.

And the model of the real world changes, sometimes a lot, sometimes just a little.

We can take drugs, for example. We can substitute, you know, a different neurotransmitter-like

molecule in our brain. The perception of the real world changes quite drastically. The

real world, presumably, doesn't really change. But our perception, our modeling, our perception,

changes. We can take drugs. We can meditate. We can have genetic problems. Is that ten?

Okay. We can have genetic, I don't know if they're problems, but we can have genetic

endowments such as synesthesia, ability to translate one sense into another, which some

might think of as an enhancement of perception and perhaps it is. Or we can have color blindness

or we could be like an insect.

able to see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Depending on our sensory, the modulation of this sensory

neural input, our model of the world changes quite radically. So another question is, you know,

where is God? Why do we have this sense of some higher power outside of us? Is that a brain

function? Do we have a God detector built into our brain, or is it more like a God generator?

We can actually get a handle on this in some sense. You can take the sort of radical

reductionist position that Bertrand Russell took, who was a famous philosopher and mathematician

and atheist, and I suspect a major curmudgeon as well, who said there is no difference between

someone who eats too little and sees heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees

snakes.

So that's kind of like, I mean, he wasn't buying any of it. He just thought it was all

based. You could also look at Andy Newberg's work, some of you are familiar with. Very

interesting. He is looking at using these different imaging technologies to look at

different types of spiritual experience. As in meditation, looking at using SPECT, he

has shown that people in states of deep meditation,

though it's a little bit more common, in a couple of states, the amount of time that

people spend on meditation is half the time, the total amount of time that we spend in

meditation.

They have a mind that is kind of like a good thing, as opposed to the mind that is kind

of like a little thing.

So don't be surprised if something happens to you and you work with a kind of nervous

phenomenon, some kind of physical activity, I guess.

those functions are dabbed down in states of deep meditation.

So it helps perhaps to contribute to this sense of infinite boundlessness,

you know, the ocean of mind that is characteristic of meditation.

Another group of researchers in Montreal is looking at the so-called unio mystica,

the sense that, which comes usually after years of meditation,

of being, kind of having a union with God.

It's Carmelite nuns practice this or strive for it for much of their lives,

and it's almost like an orgasmic, you know, sense of union with God.

It's something that they will spend years trying to achieve and may never achieve.

But what they, this group has found is that much the same areas in the parietal lobes,

in the temporal cortex, are involved in this experience.

They put these nuns into an MRI and say, okay, have the unio mystica.

Well, it's not quite that simple because you can't just call that forward, you know.

And I don't know how many of you have ever been in an MRI, but I hear that they're quite noisy.

So I don't know.

So a lot of people have said this research is bunk, potentially,

because you can't just call this up at will.

Another interesting guy, Michael Persinger at Laurentian University has gone sort

of the one step beyond this, where instead of measuring these states,

he actually says you apply the right kind of electromagnetic

and other energies to the brain.

You can create, you can create these experiences.

It's all electromagnetic energy.

So he's created this thing called, you know, the brain.

It's called the God machine, or the God generator.

And basically, it involves putting a very low level magnetic field across the cranium.

And people have, people experience this in an isolation chamber.

And he claims that you can have a sense what he, everything from alien abduction

to seeing your ancestors, to being in the presence of God.

And he claims that.

And he claims that what it really is, is a sort of a disruption.

Normally, we're, our two hemispheres work independently.

And although there's communication between them, it's subliminal.

We're not aware of it.

But he says that sort of obviates that.

And you get a much more sort of conscious sense of the function of your, of your right hemisphere.

And most people, the subdominant hemisphere, where all these, you know,

more metaphysical things go on.

Okay.

So, he has developed this thing.

A lot of journalists have written about it.

Some are not buying it.

There's an interesting book by John Horgan, which I highly recommend to all

of you called Rational Mysticism, that describes his experience.

He had a transient spiritual experience.

Persinger's work and construction of the God machine grew out of his,

his interest in temporal lobe epilepsy, which is a really very interesting kind of effect.

Most epileptics, we think, most, we think of epilepsy as something that affects the muscles.

And you have a seizure and you're rolling around on the floor and all of these types of things.

But temporal lobe epilepsy is really a different thing.

It expresses itself in a different way where the effects of temporal lobe epilepsy can be very much

like transcendent meditative states.

Transcendent ecstatic states, senses of unboundedness.

They can also be terrifying.

They're not, not everybody is really equipped for that kind of thing.

And depending on your sort of response to it, you can say this is wonderful or this is too much.

Again, psychedelics are the analogy here.

Five minutes.

I'm not going to make it in five minutes.

I should.

We have lunch after this, right?

Okay.

Well, here's, temporal lobe patients have certain personality states.

There are certain things characteristic of it.

A sense of having a divine presence.

A sense that everything has cosmic significance.

These are kind of personality characteristics of TLE patients.

And, as well, prophets.

And, sages.

And, probably 40% of the people in this room are temporal lobe epileptic.

So it's a good thing, you know.

They tend to be obsessed with theological and metaphysical issues.

They have an inflated sense of self-important.

They're egocentric and argumentative.

They often write, you know, obsessively.

obsessively, they write long screens on all sorts of things, and they have transient amnesia,

or they recall minute details of events. And typical statements of transcendent patience.

Suddenly it was all crystal clear to me, right? There is no longer any doubt anymore.

This is the moment I've been waiting for all my life. And finally, I have true insight into the nature of the cosmos.

So there's something going on, clearly. Here's some famous people in history that most likely had temporal lobe epilepsy.

Because the other side of it was all these people were not only sort of famous for their transcendent visions,

they were also famous for their tempers.

And...

Rage, uncontrollable rage is very much sort of a characteristic of that, too.

So, here's another neural theology, shamanism, which we all know about the archaic techniques of ecstasy.

Now I'm really having to hurry.

A lot of common elements are found in shamanic practices the world over, this idea about soul loss, soul travel,

contact with the spirit world, death and rebirth. You see this in all these traditions.

And Michael Winkelmann, who is an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico,

argues that these universals are really traceable to the commonality of brain structures.

That is, sort of the neurochemical conditioning of experience that makes it possible for all these common threads to run through

shamanic experience.

It involves, again, activation of the limbic system, activation of certain neurotransmitters like the opiates.

Well, now we get to serotonin and more into the psychedelic areas.

There is serotonin on the right, what you might call the fundamental molecule of consciousness,

the master neurotransmitter, not the only one by any means, but important.

And it arises from...

a group of neurons in the brain stem and pretty much arborizes all throughout the brain.

And there have been some interesting studies lately on different serotonin subtypes.

There are many types of serotonin receptors.

Serotonin is the neurotransmitter, but it has many different types of receptors.

And since I don't have any time, I'm not going to go into this, but this is just a schematic of the synapse.

And there's a lot going on at the synapse.

Basically, the thing at the top is the presynaptic neuron from which the serotonin is released,

crosses that little gap and interacts with various types of receptors on the postsynaptic neuron.

This is just a schematic.

And then that pipe there is the reuptake transporter where the serotonin...

Think of it as a vacuum where the serotonin is sucked back up into the presynaptic neuron.

And you can manipulate that to drugs like Prozac, as we all know.

The so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are like monkey wrenches for that.

You throw a monkey wrench in there and the serotonin doesn't get taken back up.

Well, there's been an interesting study on serotonin with respect to serotonin 1A receptors, one of these subtypes.

A group has found that people with...

religious or spiritual inclinations have a lower density of the 1A receptors.

So there has been an attempt to link spiritual experience to serotonin receptors.

Okay. Should I just stop?

Should I keep going? Who wants me to stop?

There's a word pop-up thing that...

Oh, if people... What should we do? Should I...

I'm actually not too far from the end.

Anyone who wants to go to the workshop, maybe we should just let them do that or what?

Three?

Boy, how about five?

Okay, here we go.

I'll just go as fast as I can.

Of course, we know that psychedelics interact primarily with serotonin receptors.

And so these are these molecular probes that let us...

look into consciousness.

Here is psilocybin using PET scans.

And interestingly enough, I'm not going to read all this.

That would take too long.

But the take-home lesson is that psilocybin and many other psychedelics

essentially activate these same areas in the temporal lobe and the limbic system

that meditation, prayer, and so on activate.

So there's definite involvement of these temporal systems.

Here is Dr. Sascha Shulgin, who you all probably know is...

The Shulgin's here.

Well, that's too bad because I wanted to personally thank him.

And I think we can all thank him for the work that he's done over decades.

He is really a pioneer.

Why he has not gotten the Nobel Prize for this work, I have no idea.

Well, I have an idea, actually.

It's too good.

He has done more to kind of define the neurochemical basis of consciousness

than all these PET researchers and all that.

And whenever I think of him working in his little tiny laboratory

with the spiders in the corner and the leaves blowing under the window,

I am really cheered by that notion because he is a pioneer.

And his pioneering work was structure-activity relationships,

defining the relationships between the structure

of these molecules and our own experience of these molecules.

Structure-activity relationships, a simple compound like mescaline, for example,

can be tweaked in various ways.

And this is what Shulgin did over many decades,

develop hundreds of these compounds and test them

with a trusted group of very experienced psychonauts.

And what he found was that very...

I mean, he found many things,

and he's documented all this quite extensively, as you know.

But take-home lesson is that trivial changes

in the molecular structure of these compounds

can have enormous effects on their subjective effects,

ranging from being completely inactive to being a mega-hallucinogen.

You can take a relatively small, relatively weak compound like mescaline

and turn it into something like DOM, which is much more potent.

Much more long-lasting.

And he's done this for a whole series of things.

And I just have enormous admiration for what he's done.

DMT is another compound that you're all aware of.

And it's very interesting.

It's the simplest, one of the simplest hallucinogens, structurally speaking.

And it's only a couple steps away from tryptophan, an essential amino acid,

which means that it's everywhere.

It's in nature, it's in hundreds of plants, probably thousands of plants.

It's in the human brain, it's in the pineal gland, it's in the spinal fluid.

And it's a big headache to the DEA,

who would like to define this as a controlled substance.

I don't know how you're going to control a substance that permeates all of nature.

But that won't stop them from trying.

And the DMT experience

has been likened to the near-death experience.

Very much elements of death and rebirth when you smoke it.

It produces a very short-acting, intense kind of experience.

And it has even been suggested that secretion of DMT from the pineal at the moment of death

may mediate the near-death experience.

Hmm?

Okay.

Let me see.

Where do I want to...

All right.

That's it.

Sorry.

I was too long.

Thanks.

I'm sorry I get...

I just can't shut up, you know?

Thank you very much, Dennis.

Before we break for lunch, I have a couple of announcements.