Enlightened Neuroscience? Or Neuroscience Light?

The Being Human conference took
 place in San Francisco on March 24, 2012. 

I was drawn like a moth to fire by the neuro-stars (astrocytes!) who were in San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts March 24, at Being Human 2012: VS Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and Paul Ekman all together at this one-day conference. There was a slightly New Age feel to the promotional material, which promised participants would "explore and experience how our perception, feelings and emotions, as well as our cognitive functions and social interactions, shape the experience of our daily lives." But you'd have to have read between the lines to see the Buddhist-meditation-practice-oriented agenda. I suppressed my skeptical reflexes long enough to swallow the soda on hand--an antidote to RedBull--called Just Chill. And I'm very glad I did. Once I swallowed, the "experience" was mostly great.

The leitmotif was an exploration (and, frankly, a celebration) of the bi-directionality of the mind-body connection. Eagleman talked about how much of what we consider conscious directed behavior is actually driven by unconscious forces "hidden under the hood." Ekman, famous for creating a taxonomy of human facial expressions, and the world's authority on deceit, discussed 1) the human propensity to lie, 2) our ineptitude for lying, and 3) our even greater ineptitude for lie-detection in others. "Detecting the lies of others," he points out, "can come at a great cost." We lie to each other, he said but we also lie to ourselves about the lies of others. Sound like the ingredients for the Buddhist notion of dukkha, or the suffering characteristic of the unenlightened life?

Ramachandran insists that the importance of mirror neurons, or "Ghandi neurons," as he calls them, has not been exaggerated by popular neuroscience but is still, "if anything, underplayed" in its importance. He gave a captivating talk about Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, in which the body's haywire response to pain caused by a hairline fracture in a person's hand can lead to stroke-like symptoms in their brain.

Ramachandram, a red blooded materialist and no mystic, was asked if mirror neurons could explain the telepathy-like shared experience of people meditating together. He said simply, No. But then went on to describe a meeting he's had with a Tibetan monk in whose presence he immediately felt  almost unbelievably happy, hopeful, and light. It was a profound experience, Ramachandran said, and he thought it was probably explicable at least partly through a mirror neuron-induced empathy response the the monk's own blissful state of mind.

My guard snapped back up in the final afternoon session (the Just Chill must have warn off) as the explicitly Buddhist-meditation-practice agenda came out of the closet when Tibetan lama, Galek Rimpoche presented. He was certainly likable enough, but his message was vague and off putting in this context. He did not know much about science, he acknowledged, but he was more and more certain that it was all confirming the Buddha's teaching. Maybe so, but Galek Rimpoche was certainly not prepared to prove it. And without some kind of validation, it gave the conference a kind of evangelical flavor reminiscent of another science-religion forum I'd attended. When I covered the opening of the Creationism Museum in Kentucky for Salon.com, Ken Hamm, the evangelical leader of that stupefying testament to self-deception, tried to unify the messages of science and religion by proclaiming that it was high time to show that "every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."  Holy cow! Are we deceiving ourselves, others, or both when we try to contort the conclusions of science back into the shapes of religious relics?

 Maybe it would be nice for some if Buddhism and neuroscience were complementary, and it probably is. But it's goofy, or much worse, to suggest they are the same thing.

Nap v. Med: Don't Sweat It.

"The Rememberer"

For great audio of a sleeping cat's brain listen to this episode of Radio Lab at 3 minutes and 45 seconds. Better yet, listen to the whole thing and learn many facts and theories about sleep, including one fine explanation for the evolutionary popularity of having two brain hemispheres. Titled "Sleep," it's from Season 3 (2007), but listen anyway; old Radio Labs don't die, they just grow stronger. 

The point of the sleeping cat sound: there is a storm of neuronal activity going on in the sleeping brain. Just because sleep is beautiful, doesn't mean it isn't hard work. That's true at midnight and in the middle of the afternoon, when I do my sweetest and most productive snoozing. Twenty minutes sometime between two and three o'clock and my 49-year-old brain feels fourteen again. There are coherent neuroscientific explanations, and more and more sleep scientists are describing them. For example, a Berkeley study led by psychologist Matthew Walker shows an hour-long nap dramatically boosts and restores brain power. He says, among other things, it refreshes the hippocampus' ability to form new memories. 

On the other hand, the most emailed piece in yesterday's New York Times was titled "How Meditation  May Change the Brain," by Sindya N. Bhanoo. It points to a new study published in the January 30 issue of the journal Psychiatry Research Neuroimaging  finding that people who meditated for about half an hour a day for two months had increased gray matter in their hippocampi (read "memory machines") and and reduced gray  matter in their anygdalae (read "road-rage machines.") That can't be bad. 

But which is better, napping or meditating? Neurocience has not weighed in yet. So take you're pick. If you're too type-A to snooze on the clock, go ahead and sit instead. Either way, you're doing your brain a favor.

As a bonus for those who've read this far. here's a lovely piece by novelist Cathleen Schine, in RealSimple, about the blissful benefits available to those willing and able to sleep while others work.