Hi, guys. For those of you in the New York area, I wanted to highlight a phenomenal series of performances, exhibits, and speakers that are ongoing through April at the Rubin Museum:
There are many speakers and workshops that I’m excited about. One that is shortly upcoming is Dr. Eva Selhub’s presentation on “the Love Response” on Saturday, March 7th:
Eva Selhub The Love Response
Saturday, March 7 at 3:00 p.m.
Eva Selhub, M.D., discusses the physical benefits of deliberately evoking “The Love Response” – a series of biochemical reactions in the body that lower blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and adrenaline levels. Selhub is the senior staff physician at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is also a clinical instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. $12
Hey guys. I’m going to start a multi-part series to introduce some key concepts in neuro theory. I’ll be building toward some important ideas that inform the discussion of love and warm glow. I’m going to attempt at keeping this concise and meaningful—if it starts to feel a little bit dense, try to hang with me (or just throw a shoe at me). Much of the text for this particular post is taken from my personal website, where you can see the ideas nested into larger concepts of interest to me. To kick things off, let’s use part one of this series to synchronize our understanding about some current streams of neuroscientific thought.
MONISM
In late twentieth century neuroscience, the brain and mind came to be described as a unified entity. The internal experience of “mind,” it was formulated, is generated by the mechanical working of the physical brain. This concept of mind-brain “monism” overturned the idea known as “dualism,” in which mind and brain were considered distinct. The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes was the most famous proponent of “dualism:” Descartes postulated the mind to be a non-material, ethereal, conscious substance that communicated with the physical brain through the pineal gland. While Descartes made many brilliant contributions to a variety of fields, the rejection of Cartesian dualism and the acceptance of neural monism was necessary for an era of accelerated progress in understanding both brain and mind. No longer are epileptic fits signs of demonic possession; no more do we drill holes into the heads of schizophrenics to release evil spirits trapped therein.
QUANTUM
Quantum theory has a multitude of facets with deep, extensive implications for neuroscience. One of the basic principles of quantum theory, however, is that our physical universe is composed of energy and matter that are discrete. Or in other words, at their smallest level, energy and matter come in units. Taking monism to its logical extension, the entirety of cognitive and subjective experiences are created by physical matter and energy. Because physical matter and energy are themselves quantized, it follows that cognition, too, must ultimately be a process that is discrete. This is absolutely counterintuitive. Let me repeat it: because physical matter and energy are themselves quantized, neural monism dictates that cognition must ultimately be a discrete process, as well. Under the current parameters of neuroscientific thought, the future perspective of fully discrete consciousness is a logical inevitability. Frankly, if this doesn’t blow your mind, please think about it more slowly. The implications stretch beyond the physical sciences, and are destined to eventually revise our perspectives of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the humanities generally. The next posts in The Quantized Mind series will elaborate on these implications and explore some of the possibilities that extend from this paradigm shift.
CONCERNS
To some, monism seems like a cold or a threatening paradigm. I believe this sense of coldness and suspicion is largely created by a particular mistake that is prone to be made; namely, it may be inadvertently assumed that our realization that we can describe the mind and brain physically is the same as saying that we have already described all we need to know about them in our material models. If this pretentious imitation of monism feels like it robs us of our humanity, it is precisely because it does rob us! At the very least, it conceptually robs our humanities by grossly neglecting the rich matrix of dynamics and untapped layers of nuance that compose the remarkable phenomena of life. Humility is warranted to recognize that we are orders of magnitude away from fully describing the physical mechanisms that make the brain and mind work. At the same time, boldness is appropriate in anticipating the directions that our self-knowledge may lead. There is much to learn, discover, and theorize in this journey toward understanding the brain, and it is arguably our ultimate communal endeavor thus far in the inescapably human search for self-understanding and meaning.
Hey guys. Hopefully everyone is normalizing following the ecstasy or the agony of Valentine’s Day. I’ve had some really good conversation with people following the last post on social grid theory. Thank you for the emails and conversation—keep them coming.
I wanted to use this post to introduce a relatively new field in the social sciences; namely, the positive psychology movement.
Positive psychology is a branch of study that examines what goes right in life. While much of psychological science has been traditionally concerned with pathologies and disorders, positive psychology is interested in the virtues and the excellencies of human life and society.
Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, championed the shift toward positive psychology in 1998 when he was serving a term as president of the American Psychological Association. Positive psychology deals directly with topics related to human happiness, and explores with scientific rigor a matrix of attitudes, phenomena, and behaviors such as gratitude, creative flow, and positive social motivation, to name just a few.
This is an exciting field of investigation for a number of reasons. For starters, it logically follows that by increasing the basic understanding of how excellence, happiness, and positive social engagement occur, we will be able to more effectively cultivate these elements in our own lives and in society generally. Further, for people who want to deliberately cultivate a lifestyle of serving and helping others, positive psychology provides a firm, objective foundation for thinking about quality of life issues that move beyond simple alleviation of suffering (as vitally important as that is)—it enables us to start talking more seriously about the phenomena of joy and thriving.
For more intro to positive psychology, check out the following TED talk by Dr. Seligman:
Happy February to you. Word on the street is that our furry friend Puxatony Phil did in fact see his shadow yesterday, indicating that winter will stretch another six weeks longer. On the bright side, at least it means our carbon emissions haven’t pushed us over a warming tipping point, right?
Before we talk too much more about carbon, though, let’s actually talk for a bit about silicon. I mentioned in the last post that I am going to start taking the blog in some theoretical directions in order to build a Love-Revolution philosophy in real-time with each of you. Your contributions and thoughts whether through emails or blog comments are all valued and welcomed.
A few years ago, I attended a presentation in which a gentleman was explaining the huge problems that bio scientists are bumping up against. In trying to model problems like protein folding, the tremendous volume of data is overloading their computational power. In other words, the amount of information handling that is required even for relatively simple protein problems requires super-computer levels of processing power to run.
To cheat the problem, the lab started soliciting home computer users to lend some of their computer power for the greater good, and—VUALA—a virtual supercomputer was born.
Apparently this concept of linking smaller machines to achieve the processing power of greater machines has been formally dubbed “grid computing,” and has been called “the next big thing” in computing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing)
The concept of uniting smaller processing centers to create a mega-processing conglomerate has wonderful implications for social dynamics: imagine social units deliberately linked together in a networks that maximally employ the intelligence of the parts to create a more powerful emergent intelligence of the group. I’m referring to this idea as a “social grid,” borrowed from the idea name for “grid computing.” According to the idea of a social grid, it is logical outcome that the microcultures that are best linked with one another socially have the highest probability for creating a higher net intelligence.
Someone recently told me about a project underway at Harvard to examine similar principles: http://groupbrain.wjh.harvard.edu/background.html
If anyone else has links, references, or ideas to contribute to this line of thought, by all means, please share.
The way that I see it, there are great synergies between pursuing higher levels of compassion and charity in our social units, while at the same time pursuing higher levels of function and problem-solving. In other words, Love-Revolution isn’t just about feeling good about what we do; it is about doing it a whole lot better—together.
Hey guys. I’m going to start a multi-part series to introduce some key concepts in neuro theory. I’ll be building toward some important ideas that inform the discussion of love and warm glow. I’m going to attempt at keeping this concise and meaningful—if it starts to feel a little bit dense, try to hang with me (or just throw a shoe at me). Much of the text for this particular post is taken from 
The concept of uniting smaller processing centers to create a mega-processing conglomerate has wonderful implications for social dynamics: imagine social units deliberately linked together in a networks that maximally employ the intelligence of the parts to create a more powerful emergent intelligence of the group. I’m referring to this idea as a “social grid,” borrowed from the idea name for “grid computing.” According to the idea of a social grid, it is logical outcome that the microcultures that are best linked with one another socially have the highest probability for creating a higher net intelligence.
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