Neural correlates of consciousness?

A brief history of mind

This is your brain on drugs

One morning last summer, in the midst of my research, a longtime colleague and friend showed up at my office door looking a bit out of sorts.

“Something's really wrong with my dad,” he said. “He's not himself.”

Having spent time with my friend's father over the years, I was well aware of the twenty-year battle with Parkinson's disease that had slowly eroded the dexterity and agility of this successful trial lawyer and former athlete. And I had more than once seen the look, somewhere between pain and confusion, that engulfed my friend's face when the disease suddenly took a turn for the worse. But today there was something different.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Is it the Parkinson's?”

“Sort of,” he replied. “Somehow his medication has gotten out of whack. He's doing the most bizarre things. Late last night, my brother found him standing in the front yard with a water pistol in his hand. He was convinced that he was protecting the house from a gang of marauders.”

“In Omaha?”

A smile momentarily broke his sobriety. “Yes. And when my brother found him, all he said was, 'It's about time you got here. I need some backup.'”

“How is he now?” I asked.

“They've got him in the hospital, and they're monitoring his medication, trying to figure out what went wrong. They have to keep him under constant supervision because whenever the nurse leaves the room, he tries to make a break for it.” He paused for a moment. “It just seems so delicate. What does it mean that the person you thought you knew can change so dramatically simply because their brain chemistry changes? What does that say about who we are?”

The relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness is one that, in the neuroscience age, is hard to get away from. As neurobiologists have deepened our understanding of the powerful neurochemicals that underlie our moods and motivations, words like adrenaline, endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin have become part of our vernacular. And for those who have spent any time studying the field, it has become increasingly difficult not to think of human behavior in chemical terms. In his 2004 book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, journalist Steven Johnson sums up the prevailing view: “Our personalities—the entities that make us both unique and predictable as individuals—emerge out of these patterns of chemical release.” Although part of the widespread confidence behind this view comes from observing cases like my friend's father, where a sudden chemical imbalance can cause a severe psychological disturbance, more of it has come from observations of the overwhelmingly positive transformations that attaining the right internal chemistry can bring about. Ever since the psychopharmacology revolution of the 1950s, when psychiatrists discovered the power of Thorazine to reduce even the worst symptoms of psychosis, the quest to chemically engineer mental health and well-being has been in full swing. Of course, most of us need look no further than our last trip to Starbucks or the local pub to see our own conviction in the benefits of chemically altered consciousness. But what if our power to chemically transform our experience went beyond a temporary release of inhibition or elevation of awareness? What if you could take a regular pill that would radically transform your personality, and even your sense of self, for the better? In the brave new world of psychopharmacology, even this bizarre possibility has become a reality.

We all probably know Prozac as the first and still most popular of the new genre of antidepressant medications to have swept the civilized world over the past two decades. By inhibiting the cellular reuptake of serotonin, this magic pill has proven overwhelmingly successful in lifting the spirits not only of the clinically depressed but of anyone simply wishing to feel a bit “better than well.” While this latter use, dubbed “cosmetic psychopharmacology” by psychiatrist Peter Kramer, raises many ethical issues and has been the subject of much heated debate, it is the results from Prozac's original clinical application that are of greatest interest here.

In his 1993 bestseller, Listening to Prozac, Kramer documents the cases of several patients who, after being prescribed the medication, experienced not only the expected elevation in mood but a wholesale transformation of their personalities. One such case was a woman named Tess who, in addition to being relieved from her depression, reported being simultaneously more at ease and more driven, less subject to emotional disturbance, and more extroverted, socially adept, and competent at her work. Two weeks after starting the medication, Kramer writes:

This new personality remained consistent for nine months—until Kramer took her off the medication. Although Tess did initially manage to hold on to some of her newfound confidence, she gradually began falling back into the personality traits that had characterized her life before Prozac. “I'm not myself,” she told Kramer after several months, at which point he promptly put her back on the medication.

Another patient, Julia, had experienced a similar transformation, following a stunning reversal of the obsessive-compulsive behavior that had been ravaging her family and work life. But when Kramer tried to lower the dose:

In reflecting on Kramer's accounts, Walter Truett Anderson writes in The Future of the Self, “What is particularly fascinating here is that in both cases, the women believed their 'real selves' to be what they had experienced during the short period of treatment and not the way they had been for the rest of their lives. Which, then, is the real self? And who decides?” Kramer himself, perhaps the single greatest advocate of cosmetic psychopharmacology, also found it hard to come to terms with this particular outcome of the treatment. “How were we to reconcile what Prozac did for Tess with our notion of the continuous, autobiographical human self?” These are big questions. And in light of the present inquiry, I would add one more: If a simple shift in brain chemistry can bring about such a dramatic transformation of the self, what aspects of our selves, or souls, do we imagine are outside the control of the brain? Like the study of brain damage, psychopharmacology also seems to suggest that we are more a product of our brains than most of us would like to think.

Neuroethics

If the study of brain damage and neurochemistry provides the beginnings of an outline of the profound link between brain and mind, powerful new brain scanning techniques promise to fill out the details in living color. By providing a picture of the brain's blood-flow patterns when engaged in particular activities, PET, SPECT, and fMRI scans are enabling researchers to map the regions of the brain like cartographers once charted the contours of the globe.

Through extensive imaging studies, neuroscientists have been able to identify nearly a dozen areas involved in different aspects of speech alone. And that pales in comparison to the thirty-plus different areas involved in specific aspects of vision. There is one area that recognizes vertical lines, another for horizontal lines, another for detecting motion, and another for the color blue. When it comes to face recognition, the picture gets even more complex. Would you believe that there are specific clusters of neurons that light up when presented with specific faces at specific angles—that, for instance, there is one tiny part of your brain dedicated specifically to your grandmother's profile, and another reserved for the ubiquitous mug of George Bush?

Discovering the biological basis of speech and perception is, however, just the beginning. With experimental methodologies improving by the month, even the more complex aspects of our experience, such as emotion, reason, motivation, and will, are beginning to give up their secrets. In Mapping the Mind, science journalist Rita Carter writes: “It is now possible to locate and observe the mechanics of rage, violence, and misperception, and even to detect the physical signs of complex qualities of mind like kindness, humour, heartlessness, gregariousness, altruism, mother-love, and self-awareness.”

The profound implications of these findings are not lost on the neuroscience community. Indeed, one of the more interesting new areas of discussion is what has become known as neuroethics. According to psychologist Martha Farah, brain imaging in particular has opened up an ethical can of worms with its unprecedented ability to peer into the previously private reaches of the individual mind. For instance, with neuroimaging, it has now become possible to tell when someone is being deceitful, or even when they are deceiving themselves. Enter lie-detection 3.0. Scientists can also discern whether someone was involved in a crime by showing them objects from the crime scene and seeing how their brain responds. Welcome to the new forensics, as marketed by Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc. It's even possible to tell whether someone is an illegal drug user by showing them photos of drug paraphernalia and seeing whether the brain enters a “craving state.” Meet the new war on drugs.

Then there is what Farah refers to as “brainotyping.” Using these same methodologies, neuroscientists can now look behind the scenes of your persona and find out what sort of human being you really are. Do you secretly harbor racial prejudices? By watching your brain while you look at pictures of racially diverse faces, brain scanners can provide an answer. How about sexual preferences? By showing you a variety of erotic imagery, we can see who or what turns you (or your brain) on. (And don't bother trying to suppress your response. Your brain looks different when you do that too.) Are you a risk-taker? A pessimist? An introvert? Neurotic? Persistent? Empathic? Even such core personality traits as these are now laid bare before the new neurointerrogation.

Ethical issues indeed.

Within the discussion around neuroethics, however, there is a larger issue coming to the fore that some feel may rattle the very foundations of the way we think about ethics itself. In civilized culture, our ethical norms and even our legal system are built on the notion of individual responsibility. When judging the actions of another, we hold him or her accountable for having freely chosen those actions for good or ill. But if we look at the picture of the human being emerging from neuroscience, many feel that there is little in it to support the idea that we freely choose our actions. If our actions are entirely caused by the brain, and the brain is in turn shaped entirely by the interaction between genes and environment, where does free will enter the equation? This may seem like philosophical nonsense, given that one of our most basic human intuitions is our sense of our own freedom to choose. But prominent neuroscientists claim that this deterministic picture of human behavior has, in fact, been reinforced by a number of experiments that seem to show that our brain makes choices before we are conscious of having made them, that in fact, conscious will is an illusion.

This bizarre notion, which is widely held within the neuroscience community, is clearly not one that will go over easily with the public at large. In fact, on the controversy scale, it may run a close second to what is no doubt going to be the most hotly disputed neuroscience claim of all—the notion that, as Farah puts it, even our “sense of spirituality” is itself a “physical function of the brain.”

part three: the quest for a new paradigm

As my train surfaced just west of Penn Station, the light snow that had been with me since I left Massachusetts early that morning seemed to have picked up the pace. Settling in for the last two hours of my journey to Philadelphia, I pulled out the new issue of Time I had picked up at the newsstand. It was a “special Mind and Body issue” on “The Science of Happiness,” and as I started flipping through it, I almost immediately landed on a two-page spread featuring a large color photo of a meditating Buddhist monk with electrodes attached to his head. Fixing the electrodes to his shaven scalp was psychiatrist Richard Davidson, the “king of happiness research,” who observes the brain activity of meditators in an effort to understand the connection between meditative bliss and our prefrontal lobes. The article, entitled “The Biology of Joy,” was only the latest in a series of reports that have hit the popular press in recent years documenting the efforts of neuroscientists to understand the relationship between spiritual experience and the brain. The first, and certainly most memorable, was a Newsweek cover story in May of 2001: “God and the Brain: How We're Wired for Spirituality.” It was in that article that I first learned about the work of the man I was now on my way to Philadelphia to meet, the renowned meditation researcher Andrew Newberg.

A radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Newberg earned his fame by conducting brain imaging studies on meditators in the late nineties. His findings, published in two books, The Mystical Mind and Why God Won't Go Away (cowritten with his research partner, the late Eugene D'Aquili), were some of the first to capture on film the distinct changes that occur in the brain during spiritual experience. Since that time, he has made the rounds of the progressive talk show circuit, been featured in nearly every relevant magazine, been inundated with speaking requests from churches and medical schools alike, and appeared in the recent science-meets-spirit cult film What the Bleep Do We Know!?—all of which points to just how much public interest (or fear) there is regarding the possibility that even spirituality may have its roots in our cranium.

After meeting me in the hospital lobby and escorting me through a labyrinth of hallways to a small windowless office in the radiology department, Newberg turned his computer monitor toward me and said, “This is what I wanted to show you.” On the screen were two colorful images of what I assumed was a human brain. “The picture on the left,” he explained, “is the image of the subject's brain before meditation. On the right is what it looks like during meditation. In this case, the meditator was a Tibetan Buddhist, or, rather, an American Buddhist practicing a Tibetan form of meditation.”

In their initial studies, Newberg and D'Aquili worked with two main groups, one comprising eight American Buddhists doing a concentrative form of meditation and another made up of three Franciscan nuns practicing contemplative prayer. Although the results of their studies varied somewhat between the two groups, the overall picture was remarkably consistent. Not surprisingly, Newberg and D'Aquili found that during meditation or prayer, there was an increase in activity in the prefrontal lobes, a region responsible for such higher faculties as intention, will, and the ability to focus our attention. But it was another one of their findings, in particular, that seemed to create all the stir.

“If you look here at this area at the back of the brain,” Newberg said, pointing with his pen to a bright yellow blob of color, “you can see that it is much less pronounced during the meditation session than before. This is the posterior parietal lobe, what I call the orientation-association area. It's the part of the brain that allows us to orient ourselves in space, that gives us a sense of boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. What we hypothesized was that the sense of unity, or oneness, that people experience during meditative practice would be correlated with a reduction of activity in this area. And this is exactly what the neuroimaging shows.”

Hearing that the exalted mystical experience of oneness (what Newberg calls “absolute unitary being”) comes about through the reduction of activity in a specific part of the brain is the sort of thing that could, as they say, take all the fun out of it, and fast. So far, though, Newberg seemed too good-hearted to be angling for the ultimate reductionist coup. To make sure, I hit him with my big question straight up: “Do you think your research shows that religious experience is completely reducible to brain activity? Is God all in my head?”

By his expression, I could tell he was ready for this one. “It might seem that way,” he began, “but I don't think the research necessarily points to that conclusion. This may be a simplistic way of looking at it, but if I were to take a brain scan of somebody who is looking at a piece of apple pie, I can tell you what their brain is doing when they have the experience of seeing that apple pie. But I can't tell you whether or not that piece of apple pie exists in reality based on the scan. Likewise, if I take a brain scan of a Franciscan nun who has the experience of being in the presence of God, I can tell you what her brain is doing during the experience but I can't tell you whether or not God was really there, whether the experience represented a true reality. Neuroscience can't answer that epistemological question.”

As Newberg spoke further about epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—it became clear that for him, coming to grips with the philosophical and spiritual implications of his findings is at least as important as the findings themselves. “Let's say we were to take the materialist position that the only way we experience anything is through the brain. This means that the only way we can tell whether something is real is through our brain. The brain is the organ that discerns what is real. Okay, now this presents a slight problem for the materialist position because when people have mystical experiences, they universally report that they have experienced something that is more real than our everyday material reality. Which means that the brain perceives God, or pure consciousness, to be more real than anything else. So if the brain is what determines what is real and what isn't, and this is a universal experience of human brains across cultures, where does that leave us?”

In the course of our conversation, Newberg went to great lengths to make it clear that he is, in many ways, still agnostic on the big questions. But he also didn't hide the fact that the work he is doing is only the latest incarnation of a spiritual search that began in his youth—a fact that may account for his surprisingly nonmaterialistic interpretation of his own research. Although he acknowledged that his findings could easily be used to support a reductionist position, he feels that by experimentally demonstrating the reality of mystical experience, he is actually doing spirituality a service, perhaps even forcing science to take mysticism seriously for the first time. Indeed, what probably intrigued me most about Newberg was his conviction that mystical experience itself may have something to offer science that it desperately needs—the possibility of breaking the bounds of subjectivity and opening the door to a truly objective perspective.

“One of the limitations of science is the problem of subjective awareness,” he said at one point while giving me a tour of the scanning equipment used to conduct the research on the meditators. “Even with regard to our scientific studies and scientific measurements, science still has the problem of never really being able to get outside of our brain to truly know what is out there in reality. One of the reasons I've been so intrigued with spiritual experience is that it's the only state where one at least hears a description where a person claims to have broken the bounds of their own human self-consciousness and gotten into intimate contact with ultimate reality. And I think if that's the case, then as scientists, we have to look at that experience very, very carefully because that may be the only way of solving the problem of getting outside of the subjective mind.”

As he escorted me back out to the hospital lobby, I told Newberg more about the questions that had sparked my own recent inquiry into brain science. To my surprise, he said he wasn't particularly troubled by the mind/body problem or by the mounting neuroscientific evidence for materialism. “The belief that matter is primary provides a good basis for explaining the material world,” he said, “but it can give no clear answer as to where consciousness comes from. On the other hand, if we take a religious perspective and say that consciousness is primary, it's not so easy to explain the existence of matter. My own feeling is that perhaps consciousness and matter are two ways of looking at the same thing. But I think the bottom line is that we really don't know yet.”

My encounter with Newberg opened my mind in ways I hadn't expected. Whereas I had gone to him bracing myself for yet another piece of seemingly irrefutable evidence for the brain as the sole source of experience, I left with some new perspectives on the terrain and with a renewed confidence that our humanity can withstand the challenges of brain science. As a reputable neuroscientist, clearly Newberg was familiar with all the data I had come across, and no doubt a lot more. The fact that his own spiritual convictions hadn't been fazed and had even been bolstered by his studies of the brain seemed to suggest that there must be more to the story than the neuroscientific mainstream would have us believe.

As he reminded me, for all the evidence neuroscience seems to present for the case that the brain creates the mind, the reality is that nobody has yet been able to explain, let alone demonstrate, how it could actually do such a thing. The mind/body problem is as enigmatic as ever. And although this doesn't seem to be persuading the neuroscientific community at large to question its materialistic assumptions, as I would learn over the months that followed, there are a number of scientists on whom the implications of this fact have not been lost.

Emerging from the frontiers of a variety of scientific fields, there is a growing movement of pioneers who are seeking to counter the reductionist tendency in biology in general, and in brain science in particular. Convinced that the real problem of consciousness lies in the very way it is being approached, these new thinkers aim to root out the materialistic assumptions that are guiding the bulk of neuroscientific inquiry and replace them with a larger, more holistic paradigm capable of embracing the full complexity of human experience. Some are doing so by weaving elaborate alternative theories to account for the same data. Others are pushing the scientific edge with their own experiments attempting to demonstrate the existence of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by materialism. What they all have in common is a passion for preserving our humanity in the face of the mechanistic worldview, and a willingness to fiercely critique the dogmatic tendencies of scientific orthodoxy.

Into the light

Perhaps the most intriguing challenge to the neuroscientific mainstream is emerging from the growing body of research into what physician Raymond Moody dubbed “near-death experiences,” or NDEs. Throughout the ages and across cultures, people have reported a variety of mystical phenomena surrounding the dying process. But with the technological explosion of the twentieth century, one medical advance in particular has opened a significant window into the phenomenology of dying—namely, our ability to resuscitate people, to bring them back from the dead. Beginning with Moody's work in the early seventies, over the past several decades, a number of researchers have been exploring this terrain, yielding a remarkably consistent picture of what happens when people make a temporary sojourn through death's door.

Thanks to Oprah and other mass media coverage of the phenomenon, most of us are by now familiar with the basic outline. Upon being pronounced dead, these patients experience themselves outside of the body witnessing the scene of the accident or operating room from above. From there, at some point they begin moving into darkness, or sometimes a dark tunnel, at the other end of which they are met by deceased relatives and perhaps a “being of light” who then prompts them to undertake a review of their life. In most cases, there is an encounter with “the light,” which is usually accompanied by feelings of overwhelming joy, love, and peace, after which they either discover or decide that it is not their time to die and are returned to their body. Although not all NDEs contain all of the above elements (in fact, some patients even report harrowing encounters with hellish realms, quite the opposite of the more common positive NDE), for most who have the experience, it is a life-transforming event, leading to a radical change in values and a loss of the fear of death.

It's easy to understand why these experiences would have such a profound psychological and spiritual impact. After an episode like that, who could doubt the existence of consciousness beyond the body and the reality of life after death? Indeed, given the widespread media attention these accounts have received, it may well be that NDEs are as responsible as televangelism for the continued widespread belief in the afterlife in contemporary America. And if we take them seriously, they certainly seem like good reason to question the notion that consciousness resides entirely in the brain. However, as neuropsychiatrist and renowned near-death researcher Peter Fenwick points out, “The simple fact that people have these experiences does not in itself prove anything one way or the other regarding the existence of consciousness outside the brain.” Simply put, how do we know the NDE is not just a brain-generated illusion? According to the “dying brain hypothesis” as put forward by psychologist Susan Blackmore, all of the specific phenomena associated with the classic NDE can be accounted for by established brain responses to the “severe stress, extreme fear, and cerebral anoxia” that would naturally accompany a brush with death.

Yet riddled throughout the NDE literature are accounts that seem to suggest that there is more going on in these experiences than can as yet fit into the materialist picture. For instance, several physicians and nurses have reported patients being able to describe in detail events that happened when they were clearly unconscious, comatose, or even clinically brain dead. In one widely reported case, a postoperative patient correctly identified the nurse who had removed his dentures and the drawer she had placed them in—while he was in a coma. In another, an unconscious patient had an out-of-body experience after which she accurately described a tennis shoe she had seen on the outside ledge of a third-floor hospital window. But the most dramatic case to date is probably the now-famous story of an Arizona woman named Pam Reynolds. In a last-ditch attempt to save Reynolds from a brain aneurysm that threatened her life, doctors performed a rare and dangerous “standstill” operation in which they lowered her body temperature to below sixty degrees Fahrenheit, stopped her heart and respiration, and drained all the blood from her body and brain. Her EEG was a flat line, and her brain stem showed no response to the “clickers” placed in her ears. She was, by any reasonable definition, dead. Yet following her recovery from the operation, doctors learned that not only had she undergone a classic NDE, but she was also able to recount with astonishing accuracy many of the details of the operation, from the surgical instruments used to the conversation between the surgeons and nurses.

So far, the research into NDEs has been largely anecdotal, and as yet, no one has provided the kind of independent verification of data that would stand as scientific proof. But it is anecdotal cases like these that have inspired researchers to focus their inquiry on documenting with increasing rigor those NDEs that could provide hard evidence that something more than the brain is at work. In the cardiac ward, where death regularly comes and goes, they have found their laboratory. As Peter Fenwick puts it,

Fenwick and other NDE researchers agree that further research is required before the case can be closed with any certainty. But initial results from several large, multihospital cardiac ward studies are highly supportive of the notion of a nonmaterial mind. If future studies are able to provide adequate empirical evidence, it will indeed raise some very big questions about consciousness and the brain.

A mind field

If the mind is not contained in the brain, then just where exactly is it? The traditional dualist answer, around since Descartes' time, is that it is a separate immaterial substance that interacts with the brain and body in some mysterious way. Trying to figure out how this interaction occurs is what launched the debate over the mind/body problem in the first place. But today, thanks to advances in scientific theory over the past century and a half, some new ways of thinking about the matter are starting to emerge.

For renegade biologists like Rupert Sheldrake, one of the most powerful tools for understanding the workings of life and mind is the physical notion of the “field,” first introduced to science by Michael Faraday in the nineteenth century. “From electromagnetic fields to gravitational fields to quantum matter fields, these field theories have taken over physics in such a way that everything is now seen as energy within fields,” Sheldrake told me one afternoon at his home in north London. “As the philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper put it, 'Through modern physics, materialism has transcended itself, because matter is no longer the fundamental explanatory principle. Fields and energy are.' So what I'm asking is, When we come to the mind and the brain, what if the brain is a system that's organized by fields as well?”

According to Sheldrake, consciousness, or mind, is best understood as an information field that is anchored in the brain but extends far beyond it, that in fact, extends wherever our attention goes. “The field of a magnet isn't confined to the inside of a magnet. It stretches out beyond its surface. The field of a cell phone stretches out beyond the surface of the handset. So my point is that the fields on which mental activity depend interact with the brain and are rooted in the brain, but they're not confined to the brain any more than any of these other fields are confined to the material object they're associated with.”

Approaching the mind/body problem in this way, Sheldrake feels, allows for an explanation of both the voluminous body of data that shows the dependence of consciousness on brain function and the mysterious evidence from his own studies of telepathy and other psi phenomena that seem to point to the ability of consciousness to reach beyond the parameters of the skull. “So, just as the field around the cell phone will be changed if you oblate a component or cut a wire in the handset, so the fields around the brain and the fields within the brain would be affected by changes in or damage to the physical components. But that doesn't prove that those fields are entirely limited to what's happening inside the brain.”

Indeed, in the course of my research, the most common metaphor I encountered among those seeking to counter materialism's robust claims was a notion first put forward by William James: the analogy of the brain as a kind of receiver/transmitter for consciousness. In Sheldrake's words:

If I switch on my TV set to PBS and if you measure different bits of the tuning set, you'll find that certain bits are resonating at certain frequencies. If I switch it to another channel, like Fox News, there will be measurable frequency changes in the various bits of the TV. But that doesn't prove that all the content of PBS programs and Fox News is generated inside that bit of the TV set. I think that the thinking behind a lot of neuroscience claims is as naïve as that, because it's based on the assumption that it's all inside the brain. Therefore the next question is: Which bits of the brain explain it? But if the brain is not like that, if the brain is more like a tuning system and a center for coordinating our actions and our sensations, then there's no reason to assume that all our mental activity is confined to the inside of the head.

How exactly would such a receiver/transmitter model work in the case of the NDE, when the patient shows no brain activity at all? One idea, expressed by Dutch cardiac surgeon and NDE researcher Pim van Lommel is that “the informational fields of consciousness and memory are present around us as electrical and/or magnetic fields, but these fields only become available to our waking consciousness through our functioning brain and other cells of our body.” According to van Lommel, when brain function is lost, these information fields continue to exist. Hence, brain-dead patients can still experience identity, attention, cognition, memory, and emotion. But these experiences will be brought into our waking consciousness only when brain function is restored.

Admittedly, such ideas, like those of other researchers on the frontiers of science, are far from being accepted by the academic mainstream. In fact, in speaking with Sheldrake, it became clear that he gave up trying to directly convince the scientific orthodoxy of his ideas a long time ago and is instead focusing his efforts on igniting a sort of parapsychology revolution among the masses. Through his recent popular books The Sense of Being Stared At and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and his new participate-at-home email telepathy experiments, he is trying to awaken in the public an interest in exploring the mysteries of consciousness that surround them every day. His hope is that with enough popular support for the idea of psychic phenomena, the scientific establishment will have to start to take seriously the powerful evidence that he claims has been accumulating in parapsychology labs for decades.

The universe inside your head

“Evidence is not the issue,” the voice on the other end of the line said calmly. “We have plenty of evidence. But evidence alone is not enough. What we need now is a theory.” I was speaking with Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and one of the leading voices in parapsychology, or “psi research,” today. Having begun his parapsychology career in the mid-eighties doing government-classified research at SRI International (formerly part of Stanford University), Radin has worked in psi labs at a number of universities and spent several years as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is perhaps best known for his 1997 book The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. In it, he presents an accessible and comprehensive overview of all psi research to date, including several meta-analyses of data from multiple studies that, taken together, make a persuasive case for the reality of such effects as psychokinesis, remote viewing, clairvoyance, telepathy, and distant healing—all of which seem to lend some support to the idea that the mind cannot be entirely contained within the brain.

In studies of psychokinesis, or “mind-matter interaction,” for instance, researchers have found over thousands of trials that subjects can influence the output of electronic random-number generators to a statistically significant degree simply through the power of intention. “Remote viewing” research, much of it funded by federal agencies including the CIA, has shown that skilled psychics can accurately describe remote locations in controlled tests with odds against chance of over a billion to one. And despite recent controversies that have erupted around the field of “distant healing,” studies suggest that “intercessory prayer” on behalf of others who don't know they're being prayed for can reduce secondary infection rates and hospital stays among AIDS patients, reduce the risk of complications during heart surgery, and even improve pregnancy rates for in vitro fertilization (results no doubt responsible for the 2.3 million dollars spent by the U.S. government on prayer research in recent years).

Psi research, like most frontier or “fringe” sciences, has been fiercely attacked by skeptics claiming research design flaws, inadequate samples, and experimenter bias. So I was curious to ask Radin what body of research he felt made the most irrefutable case for the existence of psi. While he was quick to point out that “nothing in science is irrefutable,” for the most convincing single body of data, he soon landed on the phenomenon of telepathy. Most of us have at some point been surprised to find ourselves seemingly picking up on another's thoughts, or knowing who was calling before we picked up the phone, or in this internet age, preparing to send someone a question via email only to receive their response before we sent it. While skeptics readily reduce all such phenomena to chance, a substantial body of research has been accumulating that aims to show just how far beyond chance they actually are.

The most potent evidence to date, according to Radin, surrounds what are known as “the ganzfeld experiments.” Hypothesizing that reduced sensory input would place subjects in a more receptive state, in the 1970s researchers developed a basic, easily replicable experiment in which one subject, a “sender,” views a single image for a period of time and attempts to send it telepathically to another subject, a “receiver,” who has been “prepared” by spending ten to twenty minutes in a state of sensory deprivation. After this, the receiver is then shown a series of four images and attempts to identify the sent image from among them. If chance were the only factor involved, this would predictably lead, upon multiple trials, to a twenty-five percent success rate. But in the thirty years since its inception, this experiment has been replicated in over thirty-one hundred sessions across dozens of laboratories, producing an average success rate of thirty-two percent. For those not familiar with statistics, that might sound only mildly interesting. By the standards of science, however, it is nothing short of astonishing, showing odds against chance of over a trillion to one. “The magnitude of the effect is small, but it's stronger than the experiments that convinced the medical establishment that aspirin reduces the risk of heart attacks,” Radin explained. “And telepathy is only one of many areas of successful psi research. This is why I'm saying that no amount of evidence alone is going to be enough. The implications for the current scientific paradigm are just too great.”

For Radin, who has been battling skeptics for over twenty years, the accumulation of more data has, at this point, become a side issue. “This evidence, evaluated by the same standards as used in the behavioral, social, and medical sciences, establishes that psi effects are real,” he explained. “The only reason that it's not accepted by the mainstream is that there is no clear, theoretical reason to accept it. It's not accepted because people don't know how to explain it.”

When I spoke with Radin last winter, he was hard at work on his next book, Entangled Minds, in which, in addition to updating the results of psi research over the past seven years, he plans to present a new theory that he hopes will open the door for the scientific establishment to begin to take psi seriously. Like many theorists attempting to explain the unexplainable, he is looking to the mysterious world of quantum physics for answers. “Ultimately the mystery in psi is a mystery about physics,” Radin told me. “The mystery is that something somehow got inside your head that didn't come through the ordinary senses, and that transcends time and space in some strange way. That mystery is about physics. It's not about biology, and it's not about psychology or neuroscience.”

Drawing on the well-established idea of “quantum entanglement,” Radin is proposing the existence of what he calls “bioentanglement.” In a nutshell, quantum entanglement is the notion that seemingly separate subatomic particles, once they've been in contact with one another, will, in fact, remain connected even across space and time. This connectedness, or “nonlocality,” was first demonstrated experimentally in 1972, and in the three decades since, Radin explains, physicists have been learning more and more about how widespread the phenomenon is. “It is far more pervasive and robust than anyone had imagined even a few years ago. And for me, the question is: What does that mean about the fabric of the world that we live in? What I think it means is that if in fact things are entangled, and if all that is required for two things to become entangled is some contact at some point in their history, then everything in our universe ought to be entangled, because cosmologists tell us that it all came from one source, the big bang.”

Extending this idea of quantum entanglement out of the subatomic and into the “macro” realm is a controversial move, and one that, so far, most mainstream physicists are not yet ready to make. But for Radin, the notion of bioentanglement may provide a way of understanding phenomena that seem impossible to explain within a classical materialist worldview:

The view from above

In their quest to counter the reductionist tendencies of materialism, frontier scientists like Radin and Sheldrake are by no means fighting a solitary battle. In recent years, philosophers, theologians, cosmologists, and even mainstream cognitive scientists have joined the fray, developing powerful critiques and alternative theories that attempt to expand the frame of our thinking about the mind and brain.

Philosophically speaking, one of the more intriguing ways around materialism—and indeed around the mind/body problem itself—is the increasingly popular, albeit ancient, theory of panpsychism. Advocated by a diverse range of thinkers from David Chalmers to theologian David Ray Griffin, this idea, and its close bedfellow panexperientialism, navigates the mind/body conundrum by asserting that consciousness, or experience, is a fundamental property of the universe that can in some form be found everywhere—all the way down to the most elementary particles. According to panpsychism, there is no need to try to figure out how consciousness arises from the complex human brain, because consciousness has been interwoven with matter from the beginning. But before you start imagining rocks having late night talks, note that the idea is not that pebbles and molecules and quarks are conscious in the way that we are, but that they would have some form of what Chalmers would call “protoconsciousness” or what Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as “interiority.”

One advantage of this way of thinking is that it allows for the notion that consciousness is something that develops along a continuum of increasing depth and complexity. Instead of seeking for that magical circuit in the animal or human brain that suddenly gave birth to consciousness, panpsychists argue that consciousness has been developing steadily as an inherent part of the process of evolution. The more complex the organization of matter has become, the more complex the level of consciousness it has been able to sustain. Since the human nervous system is the most complex piece of hardware on the planet, it's no surprise that it is accompanied by the most complex form of consciousness. Though still eschewed by most mainstream philosophers and scientists, this view is gaining ground, particularly among the alternative intelligentsia, in large part because it provides a potentially nonreductionistic framework for understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain (even if some of its proponents, like Chalmers, use it as an argument for the possibility of conscious machines—if all matter is conscious, after all, why couldn't a supercomplex computer be as conscious as you or me?).

But probably the weightiest attempt to counter reductionism—and the one closest to the mainstream—comes from a broad category of theorists who look to the relatively new science of complexity, or emergence, to explain the brain's relation to the mind. For these scientists and philosophers, the notion that consciousness emerges from the activities of the brain is not in question. To say that consciousness can be reduced to the brain, however, is another matter. As Rita Carter describes it, emergence, simply put is “the idea that a complex system can produce something that is more than the sum of its parts.” How exactly that happens is, well, complex. The basic idea is that interactions between lower-order phenomena can give birth to higher-order phenomena with properties that cannot themselves be reduced to the lower-order interactions. Just as the wetness of water cannot be found in the hydrogen and oxygen molecules that make it up, so the complex qualities of mind, like reason, decision making, reflection, and emotion, cannot be found in the behavior of our neurons. The appeal of this approach is that while it does not deny the biological roots of mind, it nonetheless acknowledges the validity of higher orders of human experience as having a reality of their own.

Among proponents of emergence theory are many religious thinkers seeking a philosophically and scientifically respectable way to preserve the sanctity of our higher human faculties. But it has also found adherents among materially inclined philosophers and scientists who are not satisfied with reductionist explanations. As philosopher John Searle writes: “Consciousness is irreducible not because it is ineffable or mysterious, but because it has an essentially subjective first-person mode of existence and therefore cannot be reduced to third-person phenomena. The traditional mistake that people have made in both science and philosophy has been to suppose that if we reject dualism . . . then we have to embrace materialism. But . . . materialism is just as confused as dualism because it denies the existence of subjective consciousness as a thing in its own right.”

What the panpsychists and emergence theorists share is a conviction that materialism's failure to adequately account for the actual complexities of human experience is itself reason to leave it behind. In this sense, they can be seen as part of a larger movement of holistic thinkers for whom partial, compartmentalized explanations of the phenomena of life and consciousness are no longer satisfying. Insisting that the only satisfactory theory will be one that addresses the multiple levels and dimensions of our humanity—from neuronal firing to cosmic consciousness—these new, more integral theorists are attempting to forge a science that while remaining true to the results from the laboratory is equally true to the realities of our lived experience. As Templeton prize–winning cosmologist George Ellis told me:

Taken together, these alternative theories seem to present a formidable case for the scientific establishment to reckon with. But the materialistic bias in Western science runs deep. And just how exactly it might be overturned remains anybody's guess. With approaches ranging from Radin's theory-making to Fenwick's search for more evidence to Sheldrake's parapsychology-for-the-masses, there is certainly no shortage of good ideas. Yet some feel that one of the more intriguing candidates for the proverbial back-breaking straw lies in the nature of the mind/body problem itself. As futurist and popular science author Peter Russell suggests in From Science to God, “I now believe this is not so much a hard problem as an impossible problem—impossible, that is, within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a 'paradigm shift.' ”

Is it possible that it will be science's failure to solve the mind/body problem that will ultimately lead to materialism's undoing? Could neuroscience's bold attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the human psyche be that one step too far that brings the entire edifice crashing to the ground? It is of course far too early to say, but if such an eventuality were to unfold, given the mythic implications, it would no doubt give the gods—and perhaps even Icarus—a good chuckle.

conclusion: a higher order

As I sit writing these words, several of my hundred billion neurons are firing off messages to some of the fifty thousand other neurons they're each connected with—a microscopic electrochemical fireworks display that makes Coney Island on the Fourth of July look like a candelabra. With the recognition that the end of my project is in sight, a cascade of noradrenaline molecules dripping across the synaptic gaps between axons and dendrites quickens my pulse, bringing a renewed alertness and excitement. There is delight, too, which suggests that a serotonin squall is probably under way, with perhaps a dopamine shower for good measure. To keep up with the demands of the task, my frontal lobes are working overtime, drawing support as needed from the language areas in the temporal lobes and the memory networks wired throughout the cortex. My right hemisphere is appreciating the sense of the whole picture coming together. My left is grinding away to make sure the logic actually does hold together.

At the same time, on another level, I am thinking about what to say next. I'm reflecting on the points I've made, the examples I've used, the larger context I've set for the article, and what I ultimately want to communicate in its final few pages. I'm also thinking about who might end up reading it, and wondering what questions you might have at this point that I could still try to answer.

On still another level, I feel myself to be participating in a larger creative process that seems to have its own trajectory—one that was born when life first began to reflect on its own nature, or perhaps even long before, and that seems intent on continuing as long as there are conscious entities willing to partake in its unfolding.

How all of these levels fit together may be life's greatest mystery. And if indeed it can be solved at all, at our current rate of progress it doesn't seem likely that it will be giving up its secrets any time soon. Still, in the face of such multilayered complexity, one can't help but feel compelled to reach for synthesis, whether it's God or the neurons that are doing the compelling.

As I struggle to come to terms with my yearlong journey into the world of neuroscience and beyond, it's as if I'm staring down a hallway lined on both sides with images. On the left wall, I see Phineas Gage, his personality forever shattered by a loss of frontal lobe tissue. On the right, Pam Reynolds, returning from the other side of brain death with memories of the operation intact. On the left, I see my friend's father, Tess, and Julia, all swaying with the changing chemistry of their brains. On the right, Radin's and Sheldrake's psi research, pointing to the mystery of consciousness beyond the cranium. On the left, there are Roger Sperry's split-brain patients, trapped in a perpetual struggle between the two “centers of consciousness” sharing their skull. On the right, field theory, panpsychism, holism, and emergence theory, all insisting that it's time to leave an unworkable materialism behind.

By any stretch, it's a challenging picture to make sense of. And if I spend long enough on either side of the hallway, I find it all too easy to forget about the story on the other wall. Finding a worldview big enough to include it all does seem to be the elusive quarry of this quest—for the field as a whole, and for any individual who wants to come to grips with it.

For my own part, the easiest theories to rule out are those on either extreme. I find the materialist notion that the mind is an irrelevant byproduct of brain function about as plausible as the dualistic idea that consciousness is some ghostly ethereal substance that exists entirely independent of the brain. The truth, it seems, must lie somewhere in between. But where exactly?

Panpsychism holds a certain allure, not only because it does away with the mind/body problem, but because it seems to validate a basic intuition—that whatever consciousness is, it must have been around since the beginning. But what exactly it would mean for a salt crystal to have “interiority” is still a bit beyond my ken.

Sheldrake's idea that the mind lives in mental fields extending out from my head also seems intriguing, in this case because it seems to provide some explanation for those mysterious spontaneous experiences of telepathy and for the powerful experience of collective consciousness that seems to arise when people gather in groups. Just how the brain's neural network could function as a “tuning system” for consciousness, however, is still something I'm struggling to visualize.

I'm also tempted to go with some version of the emergence idea, as it seems the closest to hard science to say that consciousness in some way comes out of the brain. But as one philosopher pointed out to me, “Until someone explains how emergence occurs, we might just as well say God did it.”

And speaking of God, there is, of course, still the possibility, asserted throughout the mystical traditions, that consciousness came first and once it reached a certain level of complexity, matter emerged. As tantalizing as I find these sorts of explanations, though, they ultimately just replace one hard problem with another: How could something as ephemeral as consciousness give rise to something as concrete as a physical brain? And why did it need to?

Perhaps the most promising and ultimately satisfying theories are the integral ones that acknowledge the essential reality of different levels and dimensions of existence, allowing interiors and exteriors, consciousness and matter, to be seen as different sides of the same event, neither reducible to the other. Where mind and brain are concerned, however, even the most integral theories have thus far been unable to explain how the two interconnect, leaving the mind/body problem a mystery for another day.

In the course of my research, one thought experiment I've grown quite fond of is imagining that my consciousness really is being generated by my brain. Think about it—this whole three-dimensional experience of sound, color, thought, feeling, and movement all somehow arising out of the organic functions of this wrinkled slab of tofu-like substance in your head. It seems hard to imagine, but if it were true, what would that say about the nature of matter itself? In fact, if I think about it in this way long enough, I start to wonder which would really be more earth-shattering—to find out that the brain doesn't create the mind, or to find out that it does.

What does seem clear to me at this point is that no matter how much we learn about how the brain shapes our experience, we probably don't have to worry about losing our humanity in the process. As George Ellis and others have elucidated, there are levels of who we are that simply cannot be understood by looking at our neurons alone. Although we may not lose our humanity to neuroscience, however, it does seem likely that as research progresses, we will have to let go of a few ideas—possibly even some big ones—about what our humanity is made of. The great specter of brain science is that it will demonstrate that we are merely conscious organic machines, that all of our experience and behavior originates in the brain. Based on the evidence from frontier science alone, it doesn't seem likely at this point that it will quite be able to do that. But let's say that it were able to show that most of our behavior and experience is rooted in the brain. What would that mean? Well, for starters, we'd have to come to terms with the fact that we're a lot more organic machine than we'd like to think—that, as much as we savor the nuances of our personal wishes, aspirations, and personalities, most of our responses are driven by genetic and social conditioning wired into our brains on a level we cannot see.

Now, if you look at that statement carefully, you might notice that it starts to look a lot like a sort of twenty-first-century version of how spiritual luminaries have been describing the human predicament for the last two or three millennia. From the Buddha's elaborate teachings on the conditioned nature of mind to twentieth-century Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff's proclamation that “man is a machine,” a central thrust of mystical teachings throughout the ages has been a call to transcend our conditioned, mechanistic existence and discover a freedom that lies beyond all conditioning. And according to sages across traditions, the first step to doing so has always been facing just how deeply conditioned and machine-like we are. So, in an ironic turn of events, brain science just might end up supporting humanity's spiritual aspirations in a way no one expected. By exposing the impersonal mechanisms behind our cherished personalities, it may inadvertently be helping to clear the way for the discovery of that which the great masters have always said lies beyond them.

And what about “that which lies beyond”? What about the great mysteries of consciousness—of paranormal phenomena and mysticism? Will brain science have anything to teach us about those? In this case, the weight of the evidence would seem to suggest that the answer is probably “no.” Whatever it is that is still paying attention when the brain is flatlined during NDEs, whatever it is that allows us to perceive at a distance in telepathy and other psi experiences, and more importantly, whatever it is that reveals itself in mystical experiences—that, I would dare to speculate, is probably not going to be reducible to our synapses.

In the case of our mysterious capacities to sense, know, and feel beyond the limits of our skulls, as Radin pointed out, these are ultimately questions of physics rather than of biology or neuroscience. The operative question, in this case, is: How is information being transferred through space and time in a way that bypasses the ordinary senses? Whether we explain that with Sheldrake's notion of mental fields or with Radin's “bioentanglement,” in either case, we are well outside the realm of the neuron.

Where mysticism and spirituality are concerned, however, I think the issue is somewhat different. For although there are certainly a number of New Age physicists who would argue that mysticism, too, is a matter of physics, based on everything I've seen, I think that here we are dealing with something of a higher order—an order that by its very nature cannot be reduced to the levels below it. This is the testimony of mystics across the ages, and there is nothing in neuroscience as of yet that seems equipped to refute it.

Now, the fact that neuroscience alone cannot refute the existence of that higher order does not in itself make it any easier to prove that such an order exists. There are certainly many who would argue vehemently that we have no scientific reason to believe in the claims of religion and mysticism, however forceful or enduring they might be. Pointing to research like that of Andrew Newberg, they would assert that biology is perfectly sufficient to explain the experience of spirituality. But, as Newberg himself made clear, what they would be missing is the fact that those who have had even a taste of mystical experience universally report that experience to be “more real” than anything else they've experienced. Materialists could, of course, counter that such subjective perceptions have no place in the quest for objective knowledge. However, even if we take the materialist position that the brain is the sole mediator of experience and the final arbiter of truth, we are left with the fact that human brains across the ages have universally concluded that the spiritual reality glimpsed in mystical experience is in fact of a higher order than the ordinary reality we experience every day.

And this leads us to what may be the most interesting point of all. For as Newberg's research demonstrates, there is little doubt that the brain is at least a big part of what is enabling us to perceive that higher order. This means that, in what may be the greatest miracle we know, life somehow managed to evolve an organ capable not only of reflecting on itself but of perceiving something higher than itself—perceiving, even, that which many believe to be the very source and creative driver of the cosmos. Looked at in this way, the brain suddenly starts to seem a lot less like some frightening organic computer that we'd do well to distance ourselves from and a lot more like a rather mysterious and even spiritual event in its own right. After all, if it can do all that, who knows what kind of genius and untapped potential live within its folds? Given that human evolution is still in its early days, it in fact seems likely that the awesome powers of the human brain have only begun to reveal themselves. If we can use our gray matter to avoid destroying ourselves, we may find that the story of humanity's higher potentials is just getting started.