New Machines for Expired Ideas · 11 July 2007
I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.
And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation.
Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain... or "causes" of the brain's effects on the meditator (clearly, the research designers are confusing themselves). FMRI takes very cool pictures of parts of the brain lighting up. But that’s it. It’s cartographic--and primitive, in a sense. But since it’s new, it’s spawned literature on the “effects” of meditation—something forward-thinking neuroscientists have cared about since the Dalai Lama started talking to them 25 years ago and some innovative philosophers, economists and brain scientists set up the Mind and Life Institute.
Ok, that’s great. The new UCLA study I’m reading is typical. The scan shows that certain neurons light up when people “experience” negative emotions (produced by looking at other faces embodying negative emotions—I'm not even going to unpack the weird assumptions loaded into this research design), and that the brain’s emotion center calms down when a subject identifies and takes a distance from these represented emotions. According to one of the authors, “These findings… suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood....”
So ok, hold up.
First, the tautology problem. What’s the cause and what’s the effect here? They have essentially “discovered” that distancing yourself from bad moods… distances you from bad moods. The effect and the cause are the same. No wonder their findings are statistically significant.
Just because some neurons are involved does not make the neurons the “cause” of this whole process. They’re just part of the process—albeit the only part the researchers can quite recognize as real (and thus the one they identify as a “cause”).
The only reason the researchers think that the first phenom of mindfully identifying and detaching from an emotion is separate from the second phenom of the lights going dim in the emotion center is that they are crazy old dualists who believe thought is an gauzy ghost separate from the material “reality” of the brain. They imagine their finding is an instance of intention causing action… though any meditator could tell them that emotional experience and intention are inter-twined and mutually reinforcing. Sure, the meditator says: You can change your thoughts, but only after discovering how your thoughts are already changing you. One does not simply cause the other. And ultimately, thoughts themselves and the thinker’s immediate experience are not separate.
I wonder: if these scientists knew their own minds better from the inside, would the create more subtle, accurate concepts?
Second, and this is what irritates me, the main scientific excitement over this research stems from the assumption that experiential phenomena are only “real” if they have a measureable physical manifestation. Materialism 101. But thoughts and intentions are also real (I wouldn’t say they’re “things,” like The Secret says, but anyway). You can’t take pictures of intentions with FMRI machines, but on a practical, everyday, human basis, pretending thoughts aren’t real is some wicked reductionism. And that’s the thing: mind, subjectivity, interiority, thought—all these beautiful inner phenomena—do not reduce to neurons firing. Taking my cues from Bourdieu the master-synthesizer, I’d submit that the subjective (mind) and the objective (brain) sides of this picture are mutually constitutive and equally real. It’s just that you can’t take FMRI pictures of inner states per se.
The leading edge of western, and if I may, global, culture is rushing toward holistic understandings of mind-body. This shows up in social science’s sensitivity to embodiment, in athletes’ dedication to mental training, in the eastern-western culture of yoga, in the synthetic social theory that theorists of both mind and society are patching together, and in the dissipation (in certain cultural strata) of all kinds of mind-body practice.
Neuroscientists want to be a part of the revolution, as I’m seeing especially on the west coast—at places like the the UC Davis Shamatha Project, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Since they’ve got the biggest budgets and the shiniest tools, they’re likely to get an audience in defining the 21st century mind-body, but right now all they’re doing with it is advancing a new version of thought/brain dualism. This isn’t the same as reducing mind to brain, but it could easily go back in that direction.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
, integration
, markets-networks-society
, power of suggestion
, science
, self-deception
, social theory
, spirituality
Previous entry: Saturday XVIII / Next entry: What is fashion?
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
Isn’t the truth likely somewhere in between? As in, one day scientists will accept the limited scope of the scientific method and yogis will accept the non-metaphysical realities associated with Yogic techniques (a la chakras and glands)?
Posted by: cody · Jul 11, 02:11 AM · #
NICE. Very nice. You know I seek the middle path.
I do marvel at yogis’ abilities to spiritualize their injuries. Yet, in a sense, sometimes a pulled hamstring is just a pulled hamstring.
As for including chakras in the category of non-metaphysical reality… :) Well, I don’t want to tread the neuroscientific path of materializing spirituality, either. Of the many maps for the chambers of the inner body, I’m ok with the chakras being relatively metaphorical. I don’t want to reduce that to nerve centers and glands because too much beauty and truth would be lost.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 11, 02:50 AM · #
...one day scientists will accept the limited scope of the scientific method…
Some do and some don’t. You can lead a “scientist” to his brain but you can’t make him use it properly. This business about the sciences “explaining” things makes me want to jump up and down and scream. Sciences are created to allow us to exploit the effects of phenomena. They almost never explain what the phenomena actually ARE.
I’ve been reading a book by a physicist who’s convinced the ambiguities in the predictions by quantum physics directly suggest alternate realities such as those of the sufis. It does make for some entertaining reading and it helps motivate me to meditate so I don’t blow my gaskets.
Posted by: Carl · Jul 11, 10:09 AM · #
Great post. As a social psych PhD, I am a scientist, and I love using scientific methods to explore and analyse behaviour. And as a yogi, I was originally really interested in conducting research into mindfulness and meditation. However, the reduction that was required to investigate the process really turned me off. Increasingly, in social psych, I am underwhelmed by research that is done with the fMRI, and I wonder what we could do with all that cash in other ways…
Posted by: Sally · Jul 11, 01:28 PM · #
Is the idea of uniting prana and apana dualistic? Isn’t there a sort of inevitible dualism in everything we do or don’t do? Are we actually looking at two ends of the same stick, two points on the same spectrum? I think its OK that they (who are those head nerds anyways?) are fooling around with these machines. It probably won’t get us (as in the human race et al) very far into individual mental interiors for the same reason as my eye can’t see itself nor my tongue taste itself. Its a different territory: lands and and worlds the can only be experienced unescorted (kaivalyam being the ultimate destination). The idea conjures up the old self reference paradox as in who are you and who wants to know. Yet it might provide some unexpected and impactful glimpse into things completely unrelated to the mind-real-vs.-ideal debate and we would never know unless we try. Or an insight may be gained that might lead to decreased sentient being suffering. Then again it could possibly increase suffering. But we are human and therefore curious and I wonder where that would light up under the greying hairs and other such matters.
Posted by: e&sj · Jul 11, 04:15 PM · #
THE REAL WANKER REVEALED!
Posted by: OWW · Jul 12, 01:09 AM · #
Boo Hoo!
Ol’ Gil is just trying to make people laugh, not trying to make any deep points. Please give an old sales dog another chance! At least install a widget or two!
Posted by: OWW · Jul 12, 04:09 AM · #
Sally, that is really interesting. Thanks for the note.
Doc Equanimity, hello,
Yes, I’m all for the head nerds’ fooling around with machines, and the accidentally useful discoveries this might yield. And sure, self/world duality characterizes much of my daily existence (though I try to increase the time in other zones—found in anything from asana to sex to writing to music… on good days). We can’t get from A to B without some duality, as neo-advaitins who flunk out of school soon discover.
But concepts matter, and conceptualizing the brain as “causing” the mind not only cheats us of subtler forms of understanding, but sets up nasty practical implications. For example, if a person’s depression is the “effect” of, rather than co-phenomenal with, her low serotonin levels, the natural thing to do is correct the “condition” with drugs, rather than address the more inward “causes” of depression—e.g. a dearth of meaningful relationships, a life of endless consumer greed, or a lack of good work. One ends up like Gary, the character in The Corrections, who is hopelessly alienated from himself and spends his time obsessing about correcting hormone levels instead of considering why he might be depressed. Researchers think dualistically; big pharma seizes on this and amplifies it through doctor "training" and advertising; and pretty soon: our self- understandings and relationships, they have a-changed. So concepts matter.
XO
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 12, 07:33 AM · #