cc >> Well, welcome everyone.
My name is Jeff Hardin. I'm a professor in the Zoology
Department and Religious Studies.
I'm also the faculty director for the Biology core curriculum
here on the UW-Madison Campus. On behalf of my Co-director,
Ron Numbers and Executive Director, Ron Binsley,
I'd like to welcome you to our fall semester presentation
of the Isthmus Society, entitled Neuroscience
of the Spirit. The Isthmus Society was founded
as a Metanexus local initiative, dedicated to promoting dialogue
between the sciences and religion on the UW-Madison
campus and within the Madison community.
And we gratefully acknowledge the support of several sponsors.
First, the Metanexus Institute; second, the Lubar Institute
for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions; and third,
New College Madison. We're very grateful for their
support, which makes all this possible.
We're also grateful to you for braving the elements
to be with us today. I think you're in
for a real treat. Before we begin, just one brief
reminder. If you'd like to receive email
notifications of upcoming Isthmus Society events, we would
like to get your email, so that we can send those to you.
We have a sign up here in front which we would appreciate
you adding your email address to on your way out this evening.
In addition you can go to the Isthmus Society Web site,
which is isthmussociety.org where you can find information
about the Isthmus Society, its board members
and upcoming events. Including some materials that
will be helpful for today's presentation, which you can
download afterwards. The last century has witnessed
an explosion in our understanding of how the brain
functions. From work done towards the end
of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century on synaptic
connections in the brain, to Roger Sperry's pioneering
work on interactions between various portions of the
brain in the mid-20th century. to modern techniques such as
single neuron recordings, PET scanning, functional MRI
imaging of the brain while it is active.
These kinds of approaches have revolutionized our understanding
of how the brain works. And the question that we present
ourselves, that presents itself to us because of all of these
enhancements in our understanding of brain function
is what is the significance of our understanding of brain
function in a modern scientific sense, for our understanding
of religious perspectives on the human person, and for
our understanding of what people are doing when they engage in
what we traditionally consider to be religious activities.
So, that's what we want to address today.
We have some outstanding plenary speakers to help us
address that. Our two plenary speakers will
each speak for approximately 45 minutes.
And our first plenary talk, Dr. Nancey Murphy,
a Christian philosopher from Fuller Theological Seminary
in Pasadena, will talk to us about how our modern
understanding of neuroscience might affect historical
conceptions of the human person, including such things
as our idea of the soul. In our second plenary talk,
Dr. Richard Davidson from the UW-Madison Psychology Department
will talk about some of his work in analyzing functional states
of the brain when it is engaging in certain kinds of activities,
which at least some people have considered to be part of
the religious dimension of the human person.
And then following our two plenary session talks, we'll
have a response by Steve Wald from the UW History of Science
Department. And he'll provide some
reflections on what we've heard this afternoon.
And following that, we'll open it up for general questions,
which can be posed to any of our panel participants.
So that's the rough schedule for today.
And let me begin then, by introducing our first speaker,
Dr. Nancey Murphy. A native of Nebraska,
Nancey received her bachelor's from Creighton University
and then went on to do PhD work in philosophy at the
University of California Berkeley, and received her
PhD in 1980. Then, apparently a glutton
for punishment, she went on for a second doctorate,
a Doctorate of Theology at the Graduate Theological Union,
also at Berkeley, which she completed in 1987.
Since 1989, Nancy has been a professor of Christian
Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary at Pasadena.
And Nancey's first book, "Theology in an Age
of Scientific Reasoning" received awards from
the Templeton Foundation, the American Academy of Religion
and I think really established her reputation as someone who
speaks to philosophical issues at the interface between
religion and science. Nancey currently serves on the
board of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences
in Berkeley. She's a member of the planning
committee for conferences on Science and Theology sponsored
by the Vatican Observatory. She's also an ordained minister
in the Church of the Brethren. Some of Nancey's recent
publications include, "Bodies and Souls
or Spirited Bodies," by Cambridge University Press;
a Co-edited volume entitled, "Evolution and Emergence:
Systems, Organisms, Persons," from Oxford University Press;
and "Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? A Philosophical and
Neurobiological Perspective on Moral Responsibility and
Free Will," from Oxford University Press.
That last work was Co-authored by a neuroscientist,
Warren Brown. So it is our great privilege
to have Nancey brave the weather from Pasadena to be with us.
Nancy. ( applause )
Well, since I'm not going to have a white Christmas,
I'll thank you for this Advent Christmas present.
Thanks so much to the Isthmus Society for the invitation to
be here, and your co-sponsors. Thanks also to Jeff, and
especially to Ron Binsley, who had the miserable job of trying
to find a time that Professor Davidson and I could
be together on the same day. And I think we found one day
in a whole calendar year, or something like that.
And I want to thank Steve in advance, assuming that you're
going to say very nice things about my paper.
( laughter ) How's that for a set up?
Well, I titled my talk "Science and the Soul."
And I begin with a question. What are human beings made of?
I know, muscle, bones, fat, all that stuff you study
in biology class. But is that all?
Most Christians, throughout most of their history have believed
that there is another part, generally called the soul.
This second part has been considered quite important.
It is often thought of that which is saved for eternal life.
It is thought to account for the capacity in this life to be
in relationship with God. Other religions have similar
concepts. The doctrine of reincarnation
in eastern religions presupposes the existence
of an immortal soul that lives a number of lives in a series
of different bodies. Increasingly though, our culture
is developing an understanding of the human person
that sees us as purely physical. Contributions to this view come
from sciences such as biology. The theory of evolution already
pointed many in this direction over 100 years ago.
Philosophers are increasingly arguing such a view.
The most dramatic evidence now comes from the neurosciences.
It seems to be the brain that does most if not all of what was
once attributed to the mind or soul.
So, we're heading for a major conflict between science
and religion, huh? Well, not.
My goal in this lecture to convince you that there is
another option for Christians. I will argue that a physicalist
account of the human person is compatible with Christian
teaching. In fact, more compatible with
original Christian teaching than dualism.
Note that I can only speak for one tradition,
my own Christian tradition. With some adjustments, what
I say here will be relevant to Jewish thought.
Also, I had a chance to lecture on this same topic in Iran
recently. And although all of the Muslims
in the audience were dualists, my research had shown
that there are actually a lot of precedence in Islamic
thought for physicalism. My lecture will have
four parts. First, I'll say a few words
about the historical background that makes it appear that
a conflict is brewing here between neuroscience
and Christianity. Second, I'll take a brief look
at the Bible and consider what it does, and more importantly
does not say on this issue. Third, I'll comment on one major
theological problem: What about life after death
if there is no soul? And finally, I'll reflect
on human distinctiveness in light of both science
and Christian teaching. So, section one, how history
has set us up for conflict. First, we do have to recognize
the fact, which I mentioned at the beginning, that most
Christians throughout most of their history, have held some
form of body-soul dualism. This has been the case,
at least from the 5th through the 19th centuries.
This view has had repercussions throughout Christian theology,
but it shows up most clearly in the expectation held
by theologians and ordinary believers alike, that we humans
come apart at death. The soul departs to be with God.
The body molders in the grave until the resurrection
of the dead, at which time body and soul are to be reunited.
This fact about the mainstream of Christian thought
would be enough to raise the specter of conflict.
But one particular strategy for reconciling Christianity
with Darwin's theories has made things worse for some.
It has sometimes been said that it is okay to believe that the
human body evolved from lower life forms, so long as one
maintains that the soul did not. And in fact, the soul is often
said to be a special creation of God.
Pope John Paul II in an address to Pontifical Academy of Science
presented to views of one of his predecessors.
He said, "Pius XII stressed this essential point.
'If the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living
matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.
Theories of evolution which consider the mind as emerging
from the forces of living matter are incompatible with the truth
about man.'" End of Pius XII.
Many Evangelical Protestants have made the same move.
Anyone who has adopted this strategy to reconcile scientific
and theological accounts of human origins ought to be
very nervous about current developments in neuroscience.
To show you why, I need to insert here a note
about terminology. Contemporary scientists and
philosophers talk about the mind and its relation to the brain.
Religious folk generally talk about the soul.
In my introduction, I was supposing that these
are the same. As a matter of fact, although
we have two different words in English, they could be used
interchangeable at the beginning of the modern period.
I've just found that if you ask contemporary believers, though,
what the soul is, they will not have very definite replies.
Therefore, it's helpful to look back at earlier writers
who did have a definite idea. My favorite is the Medieval
Theologian Thomas Aquinas. He produced a list of the higher
capacities, or faculties of the soul, that closely match
what contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers
would describe as mental capacities or operations.
Thomas' list includes the five senses, four of what he called
internal senses, and I'll come back to these in a moment.
As well as emotion, the appetites, intellect and will.
It's enlightening to look at contemporary neuroscience
to see just how many of these capacities, which Thomas
attributed to the soul are now being studied
by neurobiologists. Most significant in my view
are localization studies, that is, research indicating
not only that the brain is involved in specific
mental operations, but that very specific regions or systems
correlate with very specific cognitive abilities.
Here is just a small sample of some of the results.
Vision depends on the transmission of signals from
the retina to the visual cortex, back of the head.
Smell involves transmitting signals from six kinds of
receptors to the olfactory lobes.
Some of the most intriguing pieces of research involve
Thomas' interior senses. Here are just a couple
of examples. One of the interior senses
in Latin is called the sensus communis, which is
the ability to collate the deliverances of the five
external senses in order to recognize a single object.
This sounds remarkably like the neuroscientist's
so-called binding problem. Another interior sense
is called the vis estimativa, which is the ability to
recognize something as useful, for example,
straw for building nests, or friendly or dangerous.
Joseph LeDeaux is well known for his investigations
of emotion. What he writes about
emotional appraisal is relevant to distinguishing this
estimative of power from the sensus communis.
"When a certain region of the brain is damaged, namely
the temporal lobe, animals or humans lose the capacity
to appraise the emotional significance of certain stimuli,
but without any loss in the capacity to perceive
the stimuli as objects. The perceptual representation
of an object, and the evaluation of the significance of an object
are separately processed in the brain.
In fact, the emotional meaning of a stimulus can begin
to be appraised before the perceptual systems
have fully processed the stimulus.
It is indeed possible for your brain to know
that something is good or bad before it knows
exactly what it is." So, in Thomas' terms,
the vis estimativa is a separate faculty
from the sensus communis and it works faster.
Memory has been much researched.
Long-term memory is conceived of as the result of patterns
of connections within neural networks.
Short-term memory is believed to be enabled by a system
of recurrent pathways, such that information is processed then
recycled and fed into the process again.
The hippocampus is known to be involved in converting
short-term to long-term memory. Language abilities are
associated with two regions of the neocortex
called Broca's Area and Wernikee's area.
Recall of words is even more precisely located.
Different regions seem to be involved for verbs,
proper names, common nouns, and even color terms.
The parietal lobes are involved in memory of faces.
The ability to recognize other people's emotions can be lost
as a result of brain damage, although there does not seem
to be a specific region responsible for this capacity.
Antonio Demasio has recently reported on victims of
localized brain damage, whose injuries or illnesses have
resulted in the specific loss of moral character.
That is, their intellectual capacities remain unaffected,
but they are unable to act in accord with
what reason tells them. This is particularly important
from a theological point of view.
For Thomas, it was the will, the ability to be attracted
to the good that accounted for human ability to be in
relationship with God. Note that none of this research
disproves mind body dualism or body soul dualism.
One can still argue that it is the non-material mind or soul
that is responsible for these functions, and that for some
reason, they are simply well-correlated
with brain activity. However, it is clear that the
burden of proof has shifted to the dualists to explain why
we need to postulate an additional entity, the mind,
when accounts in terms of brain activity are becoming
increasingly more powerful. Section two, what the Bible
says and doesn't say about the person.
The issue at hand has been an important one in biblical
studies in the 20th Century. By the middle of the century,
there was considerable agreement among Christian scholars on
the importance of distinguishing in theology between
the original Hebraic views and later, Greek
or Hellenistic views. One instance of such
a difference was a contrast between Greek dualism
and a Hebraic conception of the person that is much more
holistic and physicalistic. Scholars no longer draw the
distinction so sharply between Greek and Hebrew thought,
but nonetheless, there remains a near consensus that
the Hebrew scriptures do not promote dualism.
Now, if this is true, how could people have been
so mistaken for so long, for over 14 centuries.
One answer is translation. Early Christian's access to
the Hebrew bible was primarily through a Greek translation
called the Septuagint. It was very easy to impose
Hellenistic ideas on Hebrew texts simply by
the choice of translations. Then, the Greek was translated
into English, with the same meanings that Greek philosophers
would have given to those terms. To illustrate, let me read you
a few lines from the Psalms, as they were translated
in the old King James Version. Psalm 16: "For thou wilt not
leave my soul in hell." Psalm 25: "Oh, keep my soul
and deliver me, let me not be ashamed."
Psalm 49: "They that trust in their wealth like sheep,
they are laid in their grave, death shall feed on them,
but God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave."
So these passages fit quite nicely with the view
that while the body may decay in the grave,
God saves souls. It sounds exactly like
body soul dualism. However, there are a lot of
other references to the soul in the Hebrew scriptures that
don't fit the dualist picture at all.
Psalm 7: "Oh Lord my God, in Thee do I put my trust.
Save me from all them that persecute me, lest he tear
my soul like a lion, rendering it in pieces."
Psalm 22: "Deliver my soul from the sword."
Psalm 35: "Without cause, they have hid for me their net
in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul."
So this doesn't sound right. Souls are not capable
of being torn or stabbed. And it is bodies
that people throw in pits. Even stranger, a passage
from Leviticus: "And if any of the flesh of the sacrifice
of his peace offering is eaten at all on the third day,
it shall not be accepted. It shall be an abomination,
and the soul that eateth of it shall bear his iniquity."
Souls eating meat? What is going on here?
Well, it's widely agreed now, that the Hebrew word translated
soul in all of these cases, "Nephesh," didn't really mean
what later Christians had meant by soul.
In most cases, it's simply a way of referring
to the whole living person. Here is how a more recent
version translates some of these same passages.
Here is the King James: "For though wilt not leave
my soul in hell." New International Version:
"Because you will not abandon me to the grave."
King James: "Oh keep my soul and deliver me,
let me not be ashamed." New International:
"Guard my life and rescue me. Let me not be put to shame."
And finally, that strange Leviticus passage.
King James: "The soul that eateth of it
shall bear his iniquity." New International:
"The person who eats of it will be held responsible."
So the Hebrew word Nephesh is translated as person, life,
or just used as a way for a person
to refer to him or herself. It's also used of animals.
And here it's best translated as living being.
So those who have seen body soul dualism
in the Old Testament, including many early translators
have been reading it back into the texts,
not getting it out of the texts. The next question is,
what does the New Testament teach about body soul dualism?
This is a more difficult question, but the best answer
I have concluded is, nothing. Let me explain.
There are a number of issues on which the Bible
has clear teachings. There are other things that
the bible says in order to put forward those teachings.
For example, when Isaiah says that God will gather Israel
and Judah from the four corners of the earth, he doesn't mean
to teach that the earth has four corners.
That's a conception of geography and geology that he simply
assumed in making his prophecy. I believe that the New Testament
has a lot to teach about what it means to be human,
but does not mean to teach specific details about
how many parts we're made of: body and soul,
body, soul and spirit, or just one.
Just as in our own day, there were, in New Testament times,
a variety of ideas about the make-up of the person.
The various New Testament authors used different ideas
in order to make clear their teachings in other matters.
So if we try to go through the New Testament to see what
it teaches on this subject, we'll end up frustrated
and confused. Helpful support for this
conclusion comes from New Testament scholar
James Dunn. Dunn distinguished between what
he calls aspective and partitive accounts of human nature.
Dunn writes, "In simplified terms, while Greek thought
tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts,
Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person,
existing on different dimensions.
As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek
to conceive of the person partitively; whereas
it's more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the person
aspectively. This is to say, we speak of
a school having a gym. The gym is a part of the school.
But we say I am a Scott, my Scottish-ness
is an aspect of my whole being." So, the Greek philosophers
were interested in the question, what are the essential parts
that make up a human being? In contrast, for the biblical
authors, each "part" stands for the whole person,
thought of from a certain angle. For example, spirit
stands for the whole person in relation to God.
What the New Testament authors are concerned with then
is human beings in relationship to the natural world,
to the community, and to God. Paul's distinction between
spirit and flesh is not our later distinction
between soul and body. Paul is concerned with two ways
of living. One in conformity
with the spirit of God, and the other in conformity
to the old eon before Christ. So, it's better to say that
we have a spiritual dimension to our lives
and a fleshly dimension. We're not composed
of flesh and spirit. So, my conclusion is that a
holistic, physicalist account of the person, drawn from
contemporary science is not at all incompatible with the
picture we see of the nature of the human person in the Bible.
Section three, what about life after death?
Here is where the difference between physicalism and dualism
will have a big impact. It's one thing to read
the scholars' commentaries on the history.
It's quite another to talk about these things at a funeral.
I mentioned a minute ago that one of the clearest places
dualism has had an impact is on what Christians think will
happen at death. This was brought home to me very
personally when mother and I went to my father's grave
for the first time. "He's not really here,"
she said. "Oh, yes he is,"
I thought. But fortunately,
I kept my thoughts to myself. I recognize the comfort it
brings to imagine that loved ones are really not dead
but just gone. However, I stand with
the majority of contemporary scholars in saying that such
a view is not part of original Christian teaching
about life after death. The original view was that
the whole person dies, but that the whole person will later,
at the end of history, be raised from death.
The model of this death and resurrection, of course,
is that of Jesus. Paul writes to the church
of Corinth that if Christ has not been raised, your faith
is futile, and those who have died in Christ have perished.
But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who have died.
In our day, it is difficult to talk about resurrection.
This has to do with the question of how there could ever be
historical evidence for such a strange thing.
If we find resurrection unimaginable, that's just about
right, because we can't have any clear idea of something beyond
the life of the present age. We get only a variety
of suggestive pictures from scripture.
The problem was difficult in Paul's day, too,
but for different reasons. The idea of resurrection of the
body was already available at the time in some Jewish circles,
so this was a conceivable prospect for Jews,
but simply disbelieved by many. However, it must have appeared
positively ridiculous to many of the Gentile Christians whose
exposure to Greek philosophies and other Mediterranean
religions had led them to believe that they already had a
soul, destined for immortality. And that the religious quest
was to liberate the soul from the encumbrances
of the body. Why then should one hope
to have the body restored after the liberation
that comes with death? So, we can see that there are
two different accounts of life after death
available in Western philosophies and religions.
One is the more common notion that humans possess
an immortal soul, which will survive death.
The other is the now strange expectation that the entire
person will be raised, or one might say re-created
at the end of history. Many Christians have worked out
a hybrid in which the soul survives in an intermediate
state, awaiting the return of it's body at the end.
I'm claiming though, that the original Christian view
was simply death followed by bodily resurrection.
On this view, nothing of value is lost if one adopts
a physicalistic account of the person, and such
an account appears to be closer to original Christian teaching.
Section Four, human distinctiveness.
I now turn to my final topic. This is a reply to the question,
if humans are, as evolutionists tell us, closely related
to other animals, and if as contemporary neuroscience
suggests, we have no immortal soul distinguishing us from
the animals, then what makes us distinctively human?
The way to put this question is not in terms of special parts,
but in terms of special capacities.
Let me go back to Pope John Paul's address to the
Pontifical Academy of Science. He spoke not of the creation
of the soul as did Pius XII, but of "The moment of transition
to the spiritual." Science cannot determine this
point, he says, but it can determine, at the experimental
level, a series of valuable signs indicating what is
specific to the human being. In addition, philosophical
analysis can reflect on what is distinctively human.
The Pope lists metaphysical knowledge, self-awareness
and self reflection, moral conscience, freedom,
aesthetic experience, and religious experiences.
But only theology, he says, can bring out the ultimate
meaning of these characteristics according to the creator's plan.
What then are the capacities that are most distinctive
of our humanness? What does it look like
to reflect scientifically on this question?
And what does it look like to reflect theologically?
A number of scientists studied the higher primates, and
from these studies, we could construct lists of things
we can do and they cannot. As it turns out, most of the
differences are matters of degree, rather than the presence
and total absence of certain characteristics.
However, small differences in basic capacities interact
to produce huge differences in final outcome.
For example, apes can be taught rudimentary forms of language.
There's a debate over the question whether chimpanzees
possess self-awareness, one of the distinctives listed
by the Pope. Do chimps recognize themselves
in a mirror? Do they recognize themselves
in a mirror? Higher animals have emotions,
but ours are more finely modulated.
Animals can be angry, but they can't experience righteous
indignation. So here are some features that
are associated with our sense of what it means to be human,
and animals share rudimentary forms of them.
What matters is the way that these enhanced capacities
interact in human life. For example, put together
our clear sense of self with finely tuned emotions and
subtle linguistic abilities and we have immensely different
capacities for inter-personal relationships.
Now what does theology have to say about human distinctiveness?
Here, the question is not so much what it is that makes
us different from animals, although differences have to be
presupposed. The question is rather what is
it about us that makes us important to God?
I would list pretty much the same qualities that the Pope
did, but here I'll focus on just one, our capacity
to be in relationship with God. A number of neuroscientists have
began to study the role of the brain in religious experience,
and that's what you'll hear about next, I understand.
What are we to make of this? Does this mean that God
affects people's brains? I've been surprised by the
number of my students who object that without a soul
there would be no way for God to relate to us.
It is true that Christians have for centuries believed
that their relationship with God takes place within their souls.
This is an inheritance from Augustine.
It's a common notion found across cultures that humans
have both and outer and an inner self.
What Augustine added was to describe the soul
as an inner space, and most peculiarly, that he created
the image of one's true self being able to enter into
that inner space. The metaphor of entering into
one's own self or soul, in order to find God, has shaped the
whole of Western spirituality from that point onward.
But notice how strange it is, I, the real I, am somehow inside
of myself, not just that I am my soul and my soul is inside
my body, rather, the real I is inside my soul.
So, let us grant that this has been a typical way
of envisioning our relationship with God, but it is clearly
only a picture or metaphor. How does a physicalist envision
the interaction between God and humankind?
And here I have to say that the brain imaging studies
of people at prayer is not entirely wrong-headed.
If one is a physicalist, as I am, it's not surprising that
brain regions are involved in religious experience.
In fact, some regions would have to be.
My objection to some of the earlier studies though, is that
they usually don't begin with very comprehensive
understandings of religious experience itself.
St. Ignacius Loyola, who founded the Jesuit order
in the 16th Century, was one of the most sensitive observers
of the ways in which God interacts with humans.
Using typical dualist imagery, he wrote on rules for perceiving
and knowing in some manner the different movements
which are caused in the soul. Putting aside the imagery,
contemporary commentators speak of movements of one's heart,
motions affecting one's interior life, a certain impetus
in one's life, or a feeling for or against some course
of action. Some of these are to be
attributed to the Holy Spirit. Those that "inflame the person
with love for God, or with sorrow for sin, that increase
faith, hope, and charity and produce an inner,
interior joy that attracts to heavenly things."
Another set of movements which Ignatius calls desolation
are "movements towards things low and earthly.
The unquiet of different agitations and temptations,
lack of confidence, hope and love, and when one finds oneself
all lazy, tepid, sad, and as if separated from one's
creator and Lord." Now it just happens that I
was preparing a lecture on Ignacius' account of religious
experience, and in that morning's New York Times,
there was a long article on a small part of the brain
called the Insulae. All mammals have these brain
structures. They collect information
on bodily conditions, such as hunger, cold, injury and
produce motivations such as finding food or seeking shelter.
Damage to the Insulae can lead to apathy, loss of libido,
and even of the ability to tell fresh food from rotten.
Now, humans have evolved two innovations that take this
system of reading bodily states to a new level.
For one, humans have a hugely expanded area in the front.
It is here scientists say that simple bodily states
are recast as social emotions. A bad taste or smell is sensed
in the Insulae as disgust. A sensual touch from a loved one
is transformed into delight. The frontal insulae is involved
in love and hate, gratitude and resentment,
self confidence and embarrassment,
trust and distrust, empathy and contempt,
approval and disdain, pride and humiliation,
truthfulness and deception, guilt and atonement.
Second, human insulae's have a large number of a special kind
of neuron called von-economo neurons that appear to be
crucial for turning feelings and emotions
into actions and intentions. So here is a small prune-sized
brain structure that is essentially involved in what
Ignacius would call movements within the soul.
On the one hand, repentance for sin, impulses toward
what is perceived as good. On the other hand, temptations
to fulfill bodily cravings, lack of confidence,
and feeling lazy, tepid and sad. If the physicalist hypothesis
is that God affects us by affecting our brains,
then this is the location or structure where God
is very likely to be active. Contemporary spiritual
writer Maurine Conroy, after describing Ignacius'
own conversion writes, "All this occurred from the inside out.
God moving deep within him produced differences in
affective responses, changes in deep seeded attitudes, thoughts,
and feelings and a shift in behavior."
Notice that she says "deep within."
So the physicalist question is was it deep within his soul,
or deep within his brain. Some interpreters of the
neuroscientific study of religion take it to show
that religious experience is nothing but a brain event.
I'm often asked by media people to comment, and I always point
out that these studies say nothing about the existence
or non-existence of God. But I've never found
a better way to put it than neuropsychologist
Malcolm Geeves. Making inferences from brain
states could become risky business.
Consider for example the likely state of the brain
of Sir Henry Watton. Watton describes fishing
as a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits,
a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts,
a moderator or passions, a procurer of contentedness.
Geeves responds, "Such a description might suggest
a brain state similar to some forms of religious meditation.
However, it would be hazardous to suggest that because
Sir Harry Watton's selective brain activity resulted from
his focus on fish, therefore it proved the existence of fish."
So, neither is brain imaging going to provide evidence for
or against the existence or action of God.
So what are we to make of all of this?
My claim in this lecture is that biblical studies,
philosophy, and neuro-science are all pointing in the same
direction, towards a physicalist account of the person.
Humans are not hybrids of matter and something else.
They are purely physical organisms.
As I noted, it would be easy at this point to fall into the
reductionist's era of claiming that religious experience
is nothing but a brain process. Instead, we should say that
it is our complex physical organization, along with our
social relations, that enable our morality, rationality, and
even our religious awareness. Neuroscience will help to
explain these capacities, but it cannot explain them away.
James Dunn's account of Paul's conception of human nature
makes a fitting conclusion. He says, Paul's conception of
the human person is of a being who functions within several
dimensions. As embodied beings we are
social, defined in part by our need for and ability to enter
into relationships, not as an optional extra, but as a
dimension of our very existence. Our 'flesh-ness' attests to our
frailty and weakness as mere humans.
The inescapable-ness of our death, or dependence on
satisfaction of appetite and desire, our vulnerability
to manipulation of these appetites and desires.
At the same time, as rational beings, we are capable of
soaring to the highest heights of reflective thought.
And as experiencing beings, we are capable of the deepest
emotions and the most sustained motivation.
We are living beings, animated by the mystery of life
as a gift, and there is a dimension of our being at which
we are directly touched by the profoundest reality within
and behind the universe. Paul would no doubt say in
thankful acknowledgement with the Psalmist, I praise you,
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Thank you. ( applause )
Thank you, Nancey. Our second plenary speaker
is Dr. Richard Davidson. A native of Brooklyn, Ritchie
received his undergraduate degree from New York University,
and in 1976 he received his PhD from Harvard University
in Psychology. Since 1984, he's been on the
faculty here at UW-Madison in the Psychology and Psychiatry
departments, where is he currently Vilas Research
Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and director of the
Laboratories of Effective Neuroscience and the Waisman
Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior.
Ritchie's lab specializes in brain function as it relates
to emotion. And you will no doubt hear that
in his talk. His lab uses modern quantitative
electro-physiology, Positron Emission Tomography
or PET scanning, and functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging, or MRI, to monitor brain states as part of his
research. In the early 1990s,
Ritchie made headlines when at the personal request
of the Dalai Lama, he conducted research
on the effects of meditation on the brain in Tibetan Monks.
Ritchie has won numerous awards. These include The American
Psychological Association Scientific Contribution Award
in 2000. In 2006 Time Magazine named him
as one of its 100 Most Influential People
for that year. And in November of this year,
Ritchie was named Person of the Year by Madison Magazine.
You may have seen him in the Lotus position at
the local bookstore near you. ( laughter )
It's my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Richard Davidson.
( applause ) >> Thank you very much.
Thank you all very much. It's a pleasure to be here
and to talk a little bit about our work which is relevant
to this general theme. I want to thank the organizers
of the Isthmus Society for making this event possible.
I'll think we'll have some interesting discussion.
I know that my friends in the animal rights movement have
handed out a leaflet, which I will address in the questions
and answers period. They have been following me
around very persistently. And I welcome the opportunity
to address the issues, the important issues
which they raise, but I'll do that later.
What I'd like to do today is to give you a feel for this area
which I actually don't conceptualize as the interface
between science and religion, because what this focus of mine
is really about, is the cultivation of certain virtues
of mind that have been important in many of the traditions.
And the study of how strategies and methods in those
contemplative traditions can actually cultivate some of
these qualities like genuine happiness.
This is the cover of a Time magazine that featured
some of our work on this topic. And this is the cover
of the National Geographic. This was a photograph taken in
our lab, and as was mentioned in the introduction, we have had
a remarkable project ongoing in our lab, that is directly
stimulated by conversations with the Dalai Lama to
investigate the brain function of meditating Monks who have
spent years training their mind. So what is of great interest
to us is that these are contemplative traditions,
which have developed specific methods for training the mind
to cultivate virtuous qualities like happiness, like compassion,
kindness and altruism. And the basic import of my talk
is to suggest that based on these contemplative traditions,
these are qualities which are best regarded as skills
which can be trained, and they can be trained because of the
very fact of neuroplasticity. That is, the brain is the organ
that is built to change in response to experience, and
there are particular practices which will stimulate the brain
to change in specific ways, including in the insulae
that Nancey beautifully set up for me.
So, this is the cover of a program that was a small meeting
that was held in Darsala, India, that the Dalai Lama asked me
to organize on the topic of neuroplasticity, where we
brought the world's leaders in this area, a small number
of them together with the Dalai Lama to talk about
the issues that are arising from this area of neuroscience,
which is really probably the most compelling insight
I would say of all of neuroscience in the last decade.
The study of the mechanisms by which the brain can change
in response to experiencing and in response to training.
These are just some pictures from that meeting.
It is very unusual. This is unlike any other
scientific meeting when you're sitting next to the Dalai Lama.
It's a lot more intense than being grilled at your
doctoral orals. This is just a shot
of the setting itself. So, what I want to do today
is to make two big points. I'm just going to put this
up here so I can see it. The first is that people differ
in the extent to which they express many of these virtuous
qualities like happiness, loving kindness, compassion,
clarity of attention. And these differences,
as I'll show you, are associated with different underlying
biological characteristics. The second point is that these
qualities can all be regarded as the products of skills
that can be enhanced through mental training.
And the contemplative practices, and particularly the ones
I've studied that are derived from Buddhism, provide
very specific, highly detailed instructions for how to
transform the mind and thereby change the brain.
And these are training procedures which we believe
and we have shown now induce plastic changes in the
brain which can be tracked with modern science.
And there is no appeal to anything outside of mainstream
science to understand how this happens, and I certainly believe
that this information enriches the experience of practitioners.
And it's been our experience in the study of these practitioners
that they are deeply interested in how their brains have changed
as a consequence of this kind of training.
So, the rest of my talk is mostly going to be focused on
these issues. But before I introduce them,
I just want to talk a little bit about happiness in particular
since it is a topic that has been central to a number
of recent popular books. And also because in our country,
happiness is also an unalienable right.
So just to remind all of you of these words that were penned
in 1776, it's a little hard to imagine with the current
administration, but in fact, happiness is in fact,
or the pursuit of happiness is something that is very much
a part of our country. Happiness also can be
a matter of life and death. These are actually data from
a longitudinal epidemiological study that was conducted
in Finland with approximately 30,000 individuals who were
studied over a 20 year period. And what these findings simply
show, if you look in the column all the way over to the right
is that if you just ask people how happy or unhappy they are
and follow them over a 20-year span, the individuals who report
themselves to be very unhappy, what this 10.8 means is they
have a more than 10-fold risk of committing suicide
within that 20-year period compared to those who reported
themselves to be very happy. And so these are qualities which
make a difference in a very real way in the lives of people.
Happiness is also associated with a biological profile
that is health enhancing. These are findings from
a British study that appeared in the of the National Academy
of Science in 2005. And what is shows is that
on a number of major systemic biological systems,
including neuro-endocrine, cardiovascular and
immune processes, that those individuals who report
themselves to be very happy have a profile on these
biological indices that is health promoting, and
that will confer resilience in the face of certain
biological challenges. So these are not ephemeral
subjective states. They are biological states
which have consequences for illness and health.
One of the questions which is frequently asked is how
malleable is happiness. And there is a whole tradition
of research, which basically argues that we're all born
with specific set points for these qualities, and that
there is nothing much we can do about it.
Some people are kind of grumpy, and other people are really
glowing, and that's just who we are, and you can't really
do much to change these traits. And there is some evidence that
is consistent with these ideas. I'll show you in the next
three slides, evidence which is used to support
these kinds of conjectures. This is not brain data
that I'm going to show you, but I promise you it's real data.
And it's based on tens of thousands of individuals
who are looked at aggregated together.
In the first question that we asked is whether marriage
can buy you happiness, and here is the answer.
( laughter ) So, at ".0" here, is where
people actually get married, and this is a proxy
for happiness on the y-axis, a measure of life satisfaction.
And what the data show is that on average, if you average over
tens of thousands of people, you actually do get a bump
in your happiness at the point which you're married.
But look what happens as you go progressively further away.
And five years post-marriage, you're actually doing worse
than when you began. ( laughter )
Now, you know there are lots of counter examples.
I recently celebrated my 31st wedding anniversary,
so there are clear exceptions, but these are what the average
data show if you aggregate across tens of thousands
of people. So, what about the flip side?
Does widowhood produce unhappiness,
and here is the answer. What you see is that you take
a big hit, but remarkably, people bounce back, and
they pretty much get to their "set point"
after a couple of years. And of course the question
that we are most obsessed with in our culture is this question.
Whether money can buy you happiness,
and here are what the data show. At least in the United States.
If you do cross-national comparisons, the data are more
complicated. And I don't want to mislead you,
individuals who reside in countries that are
extremely poor, are in fact less happy than, on the average,
than people in the United States.
But if you just look within the United States,
this is what you see. So these are data plotted
from 1945 to 2000. And if you plot the real income
per head, that's this line that's going up,
and that's just a testament to economic success
in our country. If you superimpose on that
any kind of measure you want, this is the percentage of people
who report themselves to be very happy.
It's totally flat. It does not track the economic
success of our nation at all. These are orthogonal when you
look at it within this culture. And so many people, when they
see data of this sort say, okay, these are major social
and economic kinds of factors. Does this mean that we're
all stuck at our respective set points, or can happiness,
compassion, and loving kindness be enhanced?
And what I'll suggest to you today is that because of
neuroplasticity, all of these qualities are best regarded
as skills which can in fact be enhanced.
And the data that I've shown you are interesting,
and they certainly represent what the average is,
but if we took the cultivation of happiness and
the cultivation of qualities like compassion and kindness
as seriously as we take the cultivation of certain cognitive
skills in this country. Or, if we took the cultivation
of these virtuous qualities even as seriously as most
middle class Americans now regard physical exercise.
If we practiced the cultivation of these mental qualities
even a few times a week, because of plasticity in the brain,
it is my firm contention that these are qualities
which will be enhanced, and will have rippling effects
throughout our culture, and will make a real difference.
So what's the evidence for this?
Well there is a lot of data now on neuroplasticity
which underscores that the brain can change in response
to experience. And this evidence is present
in many different domains. Time does not permit me
to detail this evidence. I just will mention
a couple of these domains. Musical training is one case.
It's obvious to anybody that if you pick up a violin
and have never played, you're not going to be able
to play it well. It requires practice.
Practice in playing the musical instrument we now know induces
discernable plastic changes in the brain.
These are both functional changes, as well as actual
structural changes. The anatomy of the brain changes
in response to musical training. We also know that this occurs
in motor skills, in any kind of complex sport.
You can't expect to play golf, or to play tennis, and do it
reasonably if you're doing it for the first time.
We all know that it requires practice to cultivate these
kinds of skills. That kind practice induces
discernable, objective, plastic changes in the brain.
We know that maternal behavior toward offspring will induce
plastic changes in the brain in those offspring.
In fact, in studies that have been done at the animal level,
we know that the way a mother behaves toward it's offspring
will actually affect the expression of genes
in the brain of those offspring. And those gene expression
changes persist for the entire life of the organism.
So, a mother, by her behavior toward her offspring
will literally change the gene expression, wittingly
or unwittingly in her infant. And it's my contention that
if we are doing this mindfully and intentionally with the goal
of enhancing these positive qualities, we will change
gene expression for the better and not for the worse.
We also know that things like stress impairs one of
the most important mechanisms of plasticity, and that is
neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the growth
of new brain cells. This is a fact that was once
considered pure fiction. When I was a student, we were
taught that the brain was different from other organs
in the body. We all know that if we
injure our skin, it heals and new cells form.
We're all taught that the brain is different, that cells
in the brain are on a program of irrevocable cell death,
and development is a process of cell death.
We're born with a fixed complement of neurons,
this dogma held. And there were no new neurons
that were formed. We now know that that is
definitively wrong. It is a fact that there are
new brain cells that are grown every day in a normal human
adult brain. And that's called neurogenesis,
and that process occurs the entire life of a person.
Neurogenesis occurs throughout life.
Now we know that stress, mental stress, can impair
neurogenesis. And the flip side of that, which
has not been systematically studied, but which clearly
is an implication, is that if you reduce stress
and you cultivate calmness, you will actually facilitate
neurogenesis. Exercise, physical exercise in
animal models has been found to actually promote neurogenesis.
So, these are all ways in which plasticity has been studied
in the recent past. One of the important things
that we've been interested in is the extent to which people
can learn to better regulate their emotions through
contemplative practices. And what I show you here
is just a hypothetical figure of two individuals,
person A and person B. And imagine that there is
some stressful life event which occurs around this point here,
and the way I've drawn this, person B recovers much more
quickly compared to person A. And you can plot different
physiological measures on the Y-axis and you see
very similar kinds of trends. They may be on different
time scales. But what this kind of figure
depicts are differences among people in how rapidly
they may settle, if you will, following a stressful event.
And clearly, the pattern depicted for person B
is a pattern that we would consider to be one associated
with more resilience. And what I would suggest to you
is that this is a pattern which can be learned.
So, if I show you a picture like this, most American college
students cringe with disgust when they're shown this picture.
If I instead gave you a simple contemplative practice, which
cultivated compassion for those who are suffering, and where you
were trained instead of withdrawing from an image like
this, you would want to approach an image like this, and have an
immediate disposition to want to do everything you could to help.
It totally changes the way the brain responds
to a picture like that. So these are data just showing
that the response in an important brain area for emotion
called the amygdala can be dramatically modulated by
one hour of training, one hour,
based upon this kind of very simple reframing
of this kind of image. So, I want to now turn to
the impact of more systematic training of the mind
on brain signals that are associated with emotion,
as well as tension that I'll talk about.
And these are just some pictures from our lab of some remarkable
human beings who have spent at least 10,000 hours
of their adult life in formal meditation,
training their mind. All of these people have done
a minimum of one three-year retreat, where they
spent three continuous years, every single day,
seven days a week, for a minimum of eight hours a day,
often much more, in systematic training of the mind.
Many of these individuals have spent much more time than that.
So the range in our actual study went from 12,000 to about
62,000 hours of formal practice. Another one of these
individuals. We spent a lot of time
talking to these people. And this person who is sitting
next to me here, is a particularly unusual monk.
He has been a Tibetan Buddhist Monk since 1967.
He also holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Pasteur
Institute, where he worked with the Nobel Laureate.
And so he comes with very unusual credentials, and
has been a very important bridge between the world of science
and the world of contemplative practice.
This is us in the lab, as I'm about to give him
some instructions for a meditation period.
And one of the really wonderful things about working with these
experts is that they are so highly trained, that the unusual
and often not so conducive environment in the laboratory
for meditating is really something that they don't mind
at all. It's pretty irrelevant to them.
They can meditate in the most difficult of circumstances,
including in an MRI scanner. So, this is just after he
came out of an MRI scanner. He was in there for more than
three hours, and most people don't look like this
when they just first come out. ( laughter )
And so he is really, he's been one of our star subjects
so to speak, and he has been in the scanner probably
five or six times now, maybe even more, sometimes for
four to five hours at a time. And he really doesn't
find that environment to be particularly aversive.
This is just another shot of monks who helped us actually
run our experiments. Now, I'm just going to share
with you a little bit of these data, and many of our early
findings have already been published.
There's still a lot that is in the works, but we began
with very simple paradigms, where we had practitioners
meditate and alternate those periods of meditation
with a neutral resting period. We probed those periods with
the presentation of very strong emotional sounds, in certain
cases, for example sounds of a bloodcurdling scream.
And when most people hear sounds like this they get jangled,
their brain gets high jacked, if you will, by the strong
emotional stimuli. And this is kind of analogous
to what you might think of as this is the brain equivalent
of a cardiac stress test. You know, when you go to
a cardiologist and he or she will challenge your heart
by going on a treadmill or on an exercise bike to
look at cardiovascular function. Here, we are challenging
the brain with strong emotional stimuli in a way that's
analogous to a physical stress. So, one of the things that has
been very important in our work is to study compassion
and the voluntary generation of compassion.
This is so central to the Dalai Lama's message.
And compassion is a quality which we believe can be enhanced
through mental training. And it gets enhanced through
mental training by changing certain circuits in the brain.
The Dalai Lama, since about age four, has been doing
very specific mental exercises every single day that are
designed to enhance compassion. These are very simple exercises.
They don't require that you that you have any specific
religious belief. They will work in an atheist
and they will work in a Christian.
And so, they are specific tools for training the mind
to cultivate these qualities. And in the words of Matthieu
Ricard, this is what he said that they were doing in this
experiment, "...is to generate the state in which love
and compassion permeate the whole mind, with no other
consideration, reasoning or discursive thoughts.
This is sometimes called 'pure compassion.'"
Now, you've seen those commercials on television
where they warn kids "don't try this at home."
Well, it's not that you shouldn't try this at home,
by all means try it at home. The likelihood of actually
being able to do this is not very good, unless
you have a lot of training. It's hard to hold the mind
in such a state without distraction, and a lot of the
mental training that these individuals do is preparatory
to enable them to hold such a state for such a long
period of time. Now these are just raw
brain signals that show changes in the brain during this
particular kind of meditation. This is a resting state
and this is a meditation period. You don't need even any fancy
computer analysis to see that there is a big difference,
this is brain electrical signals and when the practitioner
begins to start meditating. There is a dramatic discernable,
robust, highly consistent and highly replicable change
in these brain signals that we see.
This has now been replicated in two other independent
laboratories, and it's an extremely robust finding.
And it shows changes in the gamma frequency band of the EEG,
which is a very high frequency band that is associated with,
in previous work, with states of focused attention, with
binding of perceptual input. But typically, when gamma
has been seen in the human brain signal, recorded from the
scalp in previous experiments, it only is observed for a very,
very brief period of time. These observations that we made
in these long-term practitioners have never before been seen
in the human brain. And that is,
for this kind of duration. This just quantitates
some of these parameters. I won't go into the details,
but I'd be happy to talk about that in questions
and answer periods. One of the things we did is
find that the length of training over a practitioner's lifetime
strongly correlates with the magnitude of these signals.
So, this just shows that those practitioners who have had
more lifetime hours of training, this number here is 60,000
this is our practitioner with 62,000 hours of practice.
They show a much more dramatic enhancement
of these gamma signals. Relevant to Nancey's comments,
we see big time changes in the insulae when we look
with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in response to
these emotional stimuli that we probe the meditation
periods with. The solid red line
is the meditation practitioners, the longtime practitioners,
while they're meditating. The dotted red line is
the longtime practitioners when they are not meditating.
And the solid blue line is a group of control participants,
age-matched controls who were taught the same meditation.
They've been meditating for two weeks.
They show a little change compared to their baseline
state. So even after two weeks of
practice, there is some change, but it is not nearly as robust
a change as we see in the long-term practitioners.
There are other parts of the brain that change as well.
This is a very interesting area of the brain called the
temporal-parietal junction. It has been linked very, very
strongly in previous studies to empathy, and taking
the perspective of another. There is a dramatic enhancement
of activity in this region of the brain when the practitioners
are doing compassion. Now, one of the questions
which we're frequently asked is can ordinary people do this?
We're now in the middle of a study.
We have initial data from one set of participants
that we've tested, where we've looked at two weeks
of compassion training, just two weeks where we've
had people practice daily in an intervention that
we delivered over the Internet. And the comparison group was
taught cognitive reappraisal. This is derived
from cognitive therapy. They had the same length
of training. They had the same contact.
It was delivered over the Internet.
And so, there were two active groups, and we're interested
in changes in the brain that may be produced by just this
two weeks of training. The elements of this
compassion training for these novice practitioners were these.
They were asked to contemplate and visualize in the suffering
and in wishing the freedom from suffering for a loved one,
for themselves, for a stranger, for a person with whom
they've had some difficulty, and for all beings.
They repeated phrases to themselves.
The most common phrase used is, "May you be free from suffering.
May you experience joy and ease."
These are said silently. They are instructed to notice
the visceral sensations, particularly in the area
of the heart when these phrases are repeated.
And they're specifically instructed to feel
the compassion emotionally and not simply to repeat
the phrases cognitively. And this is basically
the design of this study. I won't go into these details,
but we challenged them with pictures of human suffering
of the sort that I showed you, when they're in
the brain scanner. We also gave them a number
of questionnaires that were designed to get at
aspects of compassion. So this is one example.
This is a self-compassion scale. "I try to see my failings
as part of the human condition." "When I'm feeling down,
I try to approach my feelings with curiosity and openness."
And what we see is systematic changes on some of those scales,
where the group that received just two weeks of compassion
training shows significantly greater increases in these
scales, compared to the practitioners who are trained
in cognitive reappraisal. We also asked them a question
about the extent to which they want to approach the individuals
who they are shown who are suffering.
And the individuals who receive the compassion training show,
report a much greater willingness and interest in
approaching those individuals. And finally, here comes
the insulae again. The compassion group shows
increased activation of the insulae, compared with
the cognitive training group, dramatic difference between
these groups in the magnitude of insulae activation.
Another scale that we used comes from a colleague of mine
here at Wisconsin, Carol Riff who developed scales
of well being. This is from one of her scales.
"When I look at the story of my life, I am pleased with
how things have turned out." "In general, I feel confident
and positive about myself." And it turns out that among
those in the compassion training group, the greater
the activation in the insulae, the more they report well-being
on these scales. This is what these findings
show. So the greater the signal in the
insulae, the higher the levels of well-being on the scale.
Now, one of the unusual things we did in this study, this was
a study done on University of Wisconsin undergraduates.
And we paid them a substantial chunk of money for participating
in this study, because it involved multiple sessions.
They had to log on every day to do the training.
We paid them $165.00 to participate in this study.
And we told them at the end of the study that they have
an opportunity to donate some percentage of the earnings
that they will receive, somewhere between zero and $165
to a charitable cause of your choosing.
And this was not any kind of deception.
This was real. And we actually had them execute
the transaction online. And what you can see here is
that the greater the activation in the insulae among
the compassion group, the more they donated.
The more actual money they donated.
This is an astoundingly high correlation.
And so, it turns out that just two weeks of compassion training
affect the brain in this way and produce changes in the
real behavior that may make a difference.
Now I'm not going to take time to talk about attention
other than to just read this one quote from William James.
And then I'm going to skip over this section on attention
in the interest of time. I want to make sure there's
plenty of time for discussion. But in the contemplative
traditions, particularly those derived from Buddhism,
there is a strong emphasis on training attention, which is
really the foundational skill that enables everything else
to happen. To stabilize attention,
to develop a clarity of awareness.
And William James, in his remarkable chapter on attention
in The Principles of Psychology,
had a very clear insight about the potential utility
of training attention. He said, "...the faculty
of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and
over again, is the very root of judgment, character,
and will. No one is compos sui
if he have it not. An education which should
improve this faculty would be the education par excellence."
The italics are in the original. They are not mine.
"But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical
directions for bringing it about."
William James clearly recognized that potential training was so
important for the cultivation of virtue.
He didn't know how to do it. The contemplative traditions
really offer us prescription for exactly how to do it.
And there's a host of evidence to indicate
that these practices work. They change the brain,
and they change behavior. And there's a whole bunch of
data, all of which is published if you log onto our Web site.
You can download these articles. You can just Google me,
and you'll find it. And there are dramatic changes
in attention that can be produced.
And I'll just mention one other finding I started earlier on
by suggesting that happiness and the cultivation of these
virtuous qualities may actually have beneficial effects
on your health. And in one study that we did,
we gave people an influenza vaccine, and we looked at
antibody titers mounted in response to the vaccine,
which gives you a good index of the extent to which
the vaccine is working. And this is a study that we did
in novice practitioners, eight weeks of training.
We administered the flu shot to the meditators and to
a control group at the end of the study.
And this is what the data show. The subjects in the meditation
group actually show significantly greater antibody
titers mounted in response to the vaccine, compared to a
carefully matched control group. And we further found that
changes that were produced in the brain strongly predicted
the magnitude of changes that were seen in the immune system,
suggesting that there were beneficial consequences
in systemic biology that may be associated with the cultivation
of these virtuous qualities. So, let me just end
with some final reflections and conclusions.
I've suggested to you that compassion, loving kindness
and other related characteristics are best
regarded as trainable skills. Mental training to enhance
these skills changes both the brain and the body.
And this growing body of evidence provides a scientific
underpinning for the contemplative practices
of many of the great spiritual traditions, and can lead to
a more widespread incorporation of these practices
into the major institutions of our culture, including
education, and medicine, and other major societal venues.
And let me end with one of my favorite quotes.
This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who wrote this
in a letter offering some advice to a friend where he said,
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the
Universe, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of
prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
And let me end by just expressing my gratitude
to the many people in my lab. I just sort of stay
out of the way these days. These are the people
who really do the work. And also to His Holiness,
the Dalai Lama. Thank you.
( applause ) >> Thank you very much, Ritchie.
We'd like now to open it up for some questions
from the audience. And Ron, I'm not sure exactly
how we ought to do this. Should we bring some chairs
up front, I suppose, so that the speakers don't have to stand
during all of this. You can stand to stand?
Okay, Nancey can stand and Ritchie is mic'ed.
And it would be very helpful to use the mic, yeah.
And actually if people could repeat the question, as I
understand it after hearing it, that would be helpful
to everyone. >> Just a comment or question
for Dr. Davidson. Surely training and skills are
very important. You demonstrated that
beautifully, but I don't know if you want to suggest that
that's all there is to these great traditions.
I would think that there's no Buddhist Monk that's
meditated 10,000 hours that doesn't have core beliefs
in certain truths of Buddhism, or a nun who has prayed for
10,000 hours that doesn't believe certain Christian
beliefs, or somebody works in a lab for 10,000 hours,
unless you believe something about science.
The best example of this, I think, is the life of the Buddha
who after years of meditation, reached a dead end.
He's going to die under the Bode tree.
And enlightenment for him was four noble truths, not
of healing, not of meditation, but thoughts about this is
the way that reality is. So, I'd just say, maybe you
didn't mean to suggest this, but that would be something
that couldn't be left out. And probably at some point,
you reach a dead end. You won't reach the 10,000 hours
unless you do have some core beliefs.
I think it's a very good point, and I appreciate
you raising it. I certainly didn't mean
to suggest that these kinds of training practices are all
there is to these traditions. And I think the belief systems
to which you refer may be very, very important.
From a scientific perspective, it's still an open question
as to how important they are for the production of certain kinds
of changes of the sort that I'm describing.
That is, the enhancement for these kinds of virtuous
qualities. The Dalai Lama himself, in
his book on secular ethics, has argued that you can take these
practices and take them from their religious context, and
give them to all people, and they will have beneficial
effects irrespective of their beliefs.
Now, that has not been studied scientifically.
We don't really know the extent to which that is true, but
that is something that he has staked out a very strong claim
about. And so, I certainly share
your view that these beliefs are extremely central
to these traditions. How important they are for the
production of these kinds of changes we just don't know.
Two more questions to raised. Compassion--
Compassionate. It seems also possible to say
something like, perhaps, hatred is a good thing
in some contexts. And perhaps even other--
would be able to-- these particular emotions?
Well, I think that actually that these two questions
are importantly related. These practices are embedded
within an ethical framework. And there is a belief system
associated with that ethical framework that holds
that emotions like hatred are destructive.
And that's not something that should be cultivated.
From the perspective of neuroplasticity though, it
certainly, I think, is possible to cultivate emotions
like hatred, and certainly I think the republicans
have been masters of cultivating fear.
( laughter ) And so I think that we've seen,
I think, unfortunate examples of how destructive emotions
have been cultivated in our culture.
And so, I completely agree with you.
But I also think that it is why when these practices are taught,
even if they're taught in a religious framework,
they are typically taught and I certainly believe they
should be taught within an ethical framework that
places certain values on these qualities that I described.
I have a question for Nancey. I've never thought very highly
of the soul, so I'm not too sad that it doesn't exist.
( laughter ) But I am concerned a little bit
about the reaction to this notion.
Are there traditions within Christianity that you think
would be the most receptive to this physicalist approach,
or do you think that this idea of needing, especially at
the time of death, some notion that consciousness continues
is so powerful and so strong that despite your biblical
and philosophical evidence, and scientific evidence, that
you're going to lose big time. >> Well, to a great extent,
there's just a range among people, pretty much across
the board in religions, as to how anxious they are about
holding on to whatever they've been taught at the beginning.
But I do find that the Seventh Day Adventists,
as you well know, are very open to these ideas, because
they have taught conditional immortality
throughout their history. >> That's one small cult.
That's not a cult. Those are some of my favorite
people to speak to. Other people that I also find
easy to talk to about these issues are Catholics, because
if you've got a background in official Catholicism, and
you talk about the soul, not as a separable entity,
but as a form of the body you can kind of start working
toward a physicalist position from there, because it's not
a radical dualism. Other groups that I find very
open to what I have to say are my own radical reformation
traditions, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Brethren,
because when you tie the contrast of emphasis
on the soul and saving the soul for another realm to a neglect
of the physical world that we're living in now, and tie
physicalism to an appreciation for our own physicality, which
means our own relatedness to other people, which means
our relatedness to the physical earth.
There is a lot of hope that recovering a physicalist
anthropology will help us recover a more full-scale ethic
than has been exhibited in many of the centuries of Christianity
where the emphasis was so much on saving souls
for another world, instead of saving this world.
If the soul or the mind is really just a manifestation
of the body, what happens to free will?
Well, you'll just have to buy my most recent book,
it's called... ( laughter )
Thank you for the opportunity for the commercial.
That is a huge issue. I started working with my
colleague in neuro-psychology, Warren Brown, on these issues
about 15 years ago. And we got together a group,
and we put out a little book called, "Whatever Happened
to the Soul?" And we all claimed that we
were non-reductive physicalists. But I'm a philosopher,
and I knew that we really didn't have the answer to the question
of how you can avoid reductionism.
And so, Warren and I decided that we would work on a serious
book on neuro-psychology and philosophy of mind,
particularly aiming to answer the questions
of moral responsibility and free will.
And what we concluded is, it's not so much an issue
of determinism, it's an issue of whether you're a neurobiological
reductionist, and so that's exactly what we focused on.
And I do think that not so much because of our own work,
but because there were so many resources being developed
over the last 7-10 years that are calling reductionism
into question. I believe that we've been able
to gather enough resources there to answer the charge that
physicalism equals reductionism equals no human freedom.
It's called, "Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?"
Just to quickly follow up, do you address the work
of Benjamin Libet? >> No, we don't do that, because
my impression is that there were a number of other
neuroscientists and philosophers who had treated that adequately.
I would like to address my question to you, Richard.
Respected geneticists that I know have estimated for me
that perhaps 80% of our behavior is coming from our genotype
and some minor portion, 20% is from our environment.
And you're discussing environmental practices
that can alter our behavior, compassion, loving kindness.
Do you think there are genes that govern these behaviors?
In the mouse, a gene was described that controlled
maternal nurturing. Are there genes that impose
a basic nature on us, and are you modifying them?
Are there people for whom compassionate training
is impossible? >> So, just to repeat
the elements of the question, you began by suggesting
that some have argued that 80% of our behavior is controlled
by our genotype, and so how can environmental influences
of the sort that I'm describing play such an important role.
And the second part of the question was directed toward
the issue of genes for pro-social behavior.
An example was given of genes that appear to be important
to maternal behavior, and does that have anything to do
with the kind of work that I was describing.
And finally, the last part of the question was, are
there individuals for whom compassion training
just won't work? So, those are all wonderful
questions. Let me just begin with
the first question. I think that assigning a number
to the percentage of our behavior that is
"genetic" is frankly, rubbish. Just pure rubbish.
It is inconsistent with what we now understand
in molecular genetics. The reason I say that is because
there is a whole burgeoning field of epi-genetics.
Epi-genetics is the study of modulation of gene expression.
And we know that you can take, I mean, for example at
the animal level, if you take a rat that's been genetically
bread to be high anxious, and you cross-foster it,
you raise it with a mother who exhibits a lot of nurturance.
And in the rodent world, it's expressed as high levels
of licking and grooming, probably something that wouldn't
be bad for humans to do, either.
( laughter ) So, if you do that,
it changes the gene expression of the specific gene that codes
for the gluco-corticoid receptor which is a very important part
of stress neurobiology. And so it basically doesn't
matter that that rat has a genetic propensity
for high anxiety. You have literally changed
the expression of the very genes that the genotype is specifying
for this trait of anxiety. Now, it's not to say that--
I don't want to leave you with the misleading impression
that genotype doesn't matter. I think it does matter.
It sets initial propensities. But I also very fervently
believe that we have just not undertaken the right
kinds of experiments to know what the further reaches
of human plasticity are, and the extent to which gene expression
can be altered in the brain. I just don't think we know
the answers to that at this point in time.
So, I think the healthy response would be to be agnostic.
There is a recent major behavior genetic study,
which just came out of the UK. It was just published
a couple of weeks ago. And it was a very large-scale
longitudinal study with monozygotic and dizygotic twins
to look at issues of inheritability.
And one of the major insights from that study is that
the stability of behavior from one age to the next
appears to be more under genetic control,
but the change in behavior from one age to the next
appears to be strongly environmentally influence.
Not surprising, but there's very compelling evidence
to indicate that. And so, you know I think
that we need to do the right kind of training, and
intensive training, I think, has a very important role.
Another question that you asked, are there some people
for whom compassion training may not work?
I don't really think we know the answer to that.
There may be a group of people who, in psychiatric jargon,
would be called psychopaths, for whom compassion training
may not be helpful. But these are individuals who
have documented abnormalities in certain brain circuits
that in part underlay empathy and other such qualities,
and so it may be that this kind of training wouldn't be
particularly effective in those individuals.
Although it hasn't been tried, so I don't think we can say
with any certainty. >> I'm not quite sure
how to this. It's not a question, but what
is the nature of identity then, and the continuity of one's
existence, in the case where we reduce things without being
reductionistic to physicality. Because, then you have people
say, well I'm the same person although I lost my arm,
I lost my leg, I lost my frontal lobe,
whatever part. And yet, things are different,
if it's physical. And so, it seems like this
issue kind of overlaps all of the comments
that you've made today, perhaps the three of you.
Well, philosophers have debated the criterion
for personal identity for years. And they're talking about the
simpler question of just what counts as you being you over
the course of your lifetime. For Christians like me,
you've got the more complicated question of what would
constitute me being me after the resurrection,
when I'm decidedly going to be different,
at least I hope. What it turns out to be
is that there isn't any single criterion.
Our bodies obviously change immensely from birth,
to full maturity, to death. And so you've got, in a sense,
a continuous spacio-temporal physical object.
But we know that the actual materials of it are almost
all replaced within a seven-year cycle, so it can't just be
the same criteria as for a physical object.
The other major criterion is the memory criterion.
But when we find an amnesiac who happens to wander home
after five years, and doesn't have a scrap of memory
will still recognize, this is Uncle Joe.
So, the bodily criterion is what we use to fill in
when the memory criterion doesn't work anymore.
So actually, we're always using a combination of these,
all the time, but it doesn't matter, because they tend
to be identical. They tend to correlate.
When we've got peculiar thought experiments, well,
what if we switch my brain with my sister's,
which is me from then on? There aren't any answers to that
question, because it's just a thought experiment.
But when I talk about what will constitute me being myself
after the resurrection, that's a very serious question.
And I think that we all know what we mean when we talk about
people having pretty stable personalities over time.
I always joked that if my late husband came back in a woman's
body, I would still know from all of the personality traits
that it's Jim, you know, people just are like that.
So you know, character, also our personal relationships
with others constitutes as who we are.
And if you believe in God, if you believe in resurrection,
then God's relationship to me is the primary thing that would
constitute me as who I am. But then there is also simply
the continuity of consciousness. When you wake up in the morning
you don't have to go and look in your appointment book
and look up your business card to find out who you are.
So I'm assuming that after resurrection, we'll just know
that I am I. >> Dr. Davidson, you've spoken
very frequently on the benefits of decreasing personal suffering
within the self, and increasing compassion,
but I can see potential for increasing personal suffering
if one cannot respond constructively to the object
of great suffering. And so I wonder to what end
is all of this? Is is simply to make ourselves
more comfortable, or is there some larger, activist moral
framework in which we're called to reduce some sort of quotient
of suffering by some sort of means of counting.
Wonderful question. I think most people heard it,
but let me just repeat the essence of it.
And the question was being asked whether, initially,
the first part of the question had to do with the potential
negative impact of this kind of training of being overwhelmed
with the suffering of others, and not being able
to appropriately act. And the second part,
related part, is this kind of training embedded in a framework
of relieving the suffering of others,
and sort of a call to action. Let me just first begin
to answer that with an empirical finding.
And that is that one of the surprising parts of the brain
which is strongly activated by compassion training
of the sort that I described, which I didn't have time
to go into, are the motor areas of the brain.
Despite the fact that the practitioners
are perfectly still. And this was a real anomaly
when we first observed it. And we've observed it repeatedly
when we have discussed this with the long-term practitioners.
According to their view, this makes complete sense
because they understand the practice to be
one of action preparation. So that they are utterly
prepared to act as soon as suffering is encountered.
And so, the purpose of these practices is not at all
to make one feel better, but it is explicitly to relieve
the suffering of others. That's a central motivation,
so it very much is a call to action, and the changes
that are observed in these motor regions of the brain,
I think, is a very interesting neural-- that may be associated
with the disposition to approach and engage
rather than to simply withdraw. And I also want to just say
that I think compassion is very different than empathy,
the way empathy has been defined in the psychological literature,
it is the experience of the same emotion
that another is experiencing. If you are with someone
who is in pain, and you are experiencing the same pain,
it may not be the most adaptive emotional state for you
to actually help that other individual
to relieve their suffering. And so, we think that compassion
is probably very different than empathy, although
the cultivation of empathy may be a very important
developmental stage in the accentuation of compassion.
My question and comments is directed to Mr. Davidson.
I'm one of those animal rights people you mentioned earlier.
But don't worry, I'm not stalking you, and I don't know
where you live. You don't have to call the cops
on me. But during your presentation,
like all those slides that you were showing,
they were all, I'm assuming, based on human studies.
I didn't see anything that was obvious, that was being done
on human primates, so I really, and other people,
medical experts, etc., also share the same viewpoints,
who really fail to see any kind of a direct link between
studying non-human primates and human beings, as well.
I really seriously doubt that if you stop studying
the primates-- If you stop studying
the primates, you really won't have anything to lose.
I mean, you've made a lot of great strides, and you've
gotten a lot of great results by just studying the humans.
So why continue? I mean, there's a lot of money
that is involved with primate experiments, etc.
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to this question.
And it's a question which will inevitably persist.
And I really welcome the opportunity
to address it directly. Let me just first say that
99% of the research that we do is with humans.
The work that we do with non-human primates
is really a tiny slice of what we do.
But I feel that it is a very important slice.
It's a slice that I'm proud of. It's a slice
that I will defend. And it's a slice
that I think is crucial. And I say that because
in addition to the kind of work that I describe, we also
are working on some devastating human diseases.
One of the diseases that we study is depression.
Depression is the second most common cause of morbidity
and mortality worldwide. We also study other disorders,
like Autism. These are very costly,
devastating disorders that are responsible for massive amounts
of human suffering. We have made a decision, and
I've made a personal decision that and when I study those
disorders, will do everything I can in ways that I think
are the most beneficial to help promote new knowledge,
to develop better treatments with the aim of reducing the
suffering of these individuals. In my best judgment, there
are certain kinds of studies in non-human primates that are
crucial in order to advance this science.
I don't do these kinds of studies routinely.
I do them extremely selectively. But when they are done,
I do them with as much awareness as I can muster, and with
as much intelligence in terms of making these decisions.
And also with as much gratitude and compassion for the beings
that we are working with who are dedicating their time
to help us better understand these issues.
I should also say that the work that we do
with non-human primates has pioneered the development
of methods that are, for the most part,
non-invasive methods. Now I know that you've been--
That in the literature you received, there are studies
that we do that involve lesions of the brain.
I can tell you that there are now treatments for depression
that are being based directly on these studies
that actually involve surgery to the brain for patients
who have intractable mood disorders,
whose lives have been devastated by these conditions.
And so I am proud of this work.
I feel it really does importantly contribute
to the alleviation of suffering. I do it extremely judiciously,
and I try to do it with an attitude of gratitude
and awareness. I think that a lot
of animal research that's done is done in a more cavalier way.
I have spoken out in many forums to help reform the way
animals are treated in research. I think that we could, in
general, be doing a much better job than we're currently doing.
And so my use of these animals in no way condones treatment
as usual. But, I think it's necessary.
And in fact, I would say that those who advocate
the cessation of animal research are irresponsible.
The elimination of research in animals are irresponsible.
With that, let me thank all of our speakers
for an outstanding session. Thank you all for coming.
( applause )