The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [86]
Chopra fired back that I had reversed the causal arrow: it is the ethereal nonphysical mind that causes the physical brain to rewire itself—no mind, no brain. In his book, Chopra defines neuroplasticity as “the notion that brain cells are open to change, flexibly responding to will and intention” and that “mind is the controller of the brain.” Chopra is especially fond of quantum physics, and on such shows as this he loves to dazzle audiences with quantum pseudoscience, which is when you string together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and assume that explains something in the regular macro world in which we live. “The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom,” Chopra wrote in Life After Death. “Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron.”38
Baloney. The microscopic world of subatomic particles as described by the mathematics of quantum mechanics has no correspondence with the macroscopic world in which we live as described by the mathematics of Newtonian mechanics. These are two different physical systems at two different scales described by two different types of mathematics. The hydrogen atoms in the sun are not sitting around in a cloud of possibilities waiting for a cosmic mind to signal them to fuse into helium atoms and thereby throw off heat generated by nuclear fusion. By the laws of physics of this universe, a gravitationally collapsing cloud of hydrogen gas will, if large enough, reach a critical point of pressure to cause those hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms and give off heat and light in the process, and it would do so even if there were not a single mind in the entire cosmos to observe it.
When we are dealing with such topics as the afterlife, there is the problem of fuzzy language in using words such as mind, will, intention, and purpose. Chopra writes, for example, “Neurologists have verified that a mere intention of purposeful act of will alters the brain. Stroke victims, for example, can force themselves, with the aid of a therapist, to use only their right hand if paralysis has occurred on that side of the body. Willing themselves day after day to favor the affected part, they can gradually cause the damaged sites in the brain to heal.” Chopra also cites the work of UCLA neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz, an expert on OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), who has apparently had as much success controlling the obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors of patients using talk therapy as others have using Prozac, and that brain scans allegedly show that “the same impaired regions that become more normal with Prozac also become more normal with talk therapy.”39
But what does it mean to “will” something, or to “intend” it, or to have “purpose”? Like mind, these are just words used to describe thoughts and behaviors, which are all driven by neural activity—every single one of them. There is not a behavior you perform or a thought you think that does not have a neural correlate to it. No neurons or neural activity, no thoughts or behaviors. Period. Calling a series of neural firings by a network of neurons “will” or “intention” or “purpose” does nothing to explain the process. You might as well say “he zlotted his leg to lift,” or “she xekoned her hand to move.” To describe neural activity as “zlotted” or “xekoned” is as meaningless as saying that it was “willed” or “intended.” Saying that patients “talked” about their obsessions and compulsions and in the process improved does not explain how or why they improved. What we need to know is what neural activity involved in talking interacted with the neural activity