The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [87]
Most likely what we are observing in neuroplasticity is a neural network feedback loop whereby one cluster or series of neurons fires in a particular pattern that we describe as “will” or “intention” or “purpose,” and these in turn interact with another cluster or series of neurons that are associated with the activity lost due to brain damage in that area. This signals dendrites to develop new synaptic connections, and the brain is therefore “rewired.” We know from biofeedback research that talking or thinking about a particular problem sets up a feedback loop (either positively or negatively) that alters the neurophysiology of the brain. There is nothing mystical, paranormal, or woo-woo about any of this, but using such fuzzy language is unhelpful when we want to understand the underlying causal mechanisms of belief.
No one uses fuzzy language more adroitly than Deepak Chopra, who has an uncanny knack for stringing together words and phrases so that it actually sounds like something intelligible is being said. For example, what do you make of this explanation for near-death experiences? “There are traditions that say the in-body experience is a socially induced collective hallucination. We do not exist in the body. The body exists in us. We do not exist in the world. The world exists in us.” Or this nugget on life and death: “Birth and death are space-time events in the continuum of life. So the opposite of life is not death. The opposite of death is birth. And the opposite of birth is death. And life is the continuum of birth and death, which goes on and on.” Uh? Read it again … and again … it doesn’t become any clearer. When I asked what happened to little James Leininger’s soul if his body was now occupied by the soul of a World War II fighter pilot, Chopra offered this jewel of Deepakese: “Imagine that you’re looking at an ocean and you see lots of waves today. And tomorrow you see a fewer number of waves. It’s not so turbulent. What you call a person actually is a pattern of behavior of a universal consciousness.” He gestured toward our host. “There is no such thing as Jeff, because what we call Jeff is a constantly transforming consciousness that appears as a certain personality, a certain mind, a certain ego, a certain body. But, you know, we had a different Jeff when you were a teenager. We had a different Jeff when you were a baby. Which one of you is the real Jeff?” Jeff Probst looked as confused as I felt.
At one point in the show, when asked how he as a medical doctor and man of science deals with medical miracles that seem to border on religious and spiritual domains, Sanjay Gupta began by offering natural explanations, such as this one for the near-death experience: “The tunnel, for example, that potentially can be explained away by a lack of blood flow to the back of the eye. You start to lose your peripheral vision, see a tunnel. Bright lights, sort of the same thing. Even the seeing of deceased relatives, perhaps, that is a very cultural thing, for example, in Western cultures. In eastern Africa, people who are having near-death experiences tend to see things that they wish they had done in life. That tends to be their cultural thing they have.” But then Gupta fell into the trap of the argument from ignorance (“if there isn’t an explanation then there cannot be an explanation”) when he said, “When I was researching this for a long time, I thought I was going to explain it all away physiologically. But things that I heard and validated and subsequently believed convinced me that there were things that I could not explain. There were things that were happening at that moment, that near-death experience moment, that simply could not be explained with existing scientific knowledge.”
So what? Ignorance or incredulity simply means that we cannot explain every mystery we encounter. That’s normal. No science can throw a comprehensive