Learning Calm: Christians and mindfulness.

I was very recently asked by a Christian student at my university with regard to a set of meditation sessions I had just advertised under the title 'Learn Calm and Carry On'.  "May I ask based on what philosophy behind will the meditation be conducted?". This is the answer I quickly formulated, but it seemed to me that in brief it helped me to articulate why I do it. You may discern that I have answered more than the simple question as asked: coming from a Christian tradition which has sometimes been more wary of things like this, I judged that placing the answer within a broader context was needed.

The philosophy behind it, from my point of view, is slightly sophisticated. In overview; it is rooted in scientific research on exercises involving focus on breath and awareness of one's own consciousness. As the person who leads this particular package of exercises, and as a Christian I understand what I'm doing as in Christian terms. I think that self-awareness is an important discipline for Christians to develop in order for us to become aware of how we do and don't follow God's will (even into the recesses of our personal formation) and to help us to become more conscious of God's presence in our everyday life.

These exercises can help us to cultivate those awarenesses.

However, these sessions are open to people who don't necessarily share a Christian commitment because I think, based on the scientific evidence, that the exercises can help people develop better mental and emotional health and because I believe that Christian faith calls us to 'do good to all', offering something like this is part of a broader Christian outreach. I occasionally talk with people about how they link up with Christian faith. Within the sessions themselves, I just use exercises that can be accessed by a wide variety of people with no particular content that requires a specific faith commitment.

As a Christian I see mind-body wholism as a part of the heritage of our faith reaching back into Hebrew anthropology and exemplified in the philosophical commitments that the churches of the first four centuries recognised as consistent with Christian commitment. That mind-body wholism leads me to expect that by engaging in certain kinds of psycho-somatic exercises, people would gain some health benefits. It is no surprise, either, therefore, to discover that by engaging in exercises of this kind, Christians can also find things that can help to mature their own discipleship of Christ.

On a more personal note, my own engagement in these exercises came through recognising that the effects and some of the component parts were actually part of practice and experience of many Christians, myself included. It was just that taking them out of the familiar context of a specific spiritual tradition made them seem somewhat unfamiliar at first.

Now, of course, there are others who might lead a range of exercises such as I do who don't share a Christian faith. And, of course, they would have to work out for themselves how they square the scientific results with their own philosophies. In what I've written above, I hope I've given you an indication of how it seems to me that these exercises can fit within a Christian understanding of the world. 

Further comments

My response ended at the last paragraph, but a few further comments might be called for.  There is in this response an implicit view of the relationship between the philosophical entails of Christian commitments and the 'public square': I'm not an exclusivist in this respect: I think that because world-views are seeking to explain the world which is a common heritage, there are enormous overlaps of explanations. In fact, missionally, I see these as the reason we can, as Christians, engage in conversations about how we collectively 'do' society and expect that sometimes our views can gain some degree of collective acceptance -because there is common ground in the human experiences of ourselves, our bodies, minds and the world. But maybe that's another post ...

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson (who wrote Gilead ) has written a thoughtful crituque of reductionist accounts of the mind. The title could be a bit misleading as if it is making a case for disposing of inwardness when in fact it is more an expose of the way that inwardness is dispelled and why that is problematic. I enjoyed the cultural and historical contextualisation of some of the protaganists of reductionist ideas. I didn't find this examination as lucid as some others I've come across; it is written in an academic style -which reflects the genesis of the book as a series of lectures. Nonetheless, a helpful resource in considering the issues around how we understand the mind in a culture informed by science and popular mis-understandings of the scientific enterprise and results of it.

Notes and quotes

 primary assertions make other information either irrelevant or subordinate to kinds of explanation that serve the favored theory. What is art? It is a means of attracting mates, even though artists may have felt that it was an exploration of experience, of the possibilities of communication, and of the extraordinary collaboration of eye and hand. location 141

here—the emperors presided over a remarkably brutal society, brilliant as it was. As is usual, Russell blames Christian violence on the traditions of Jewish monotheism, not on the norms of the pagan civilization in which the faith took root. location 260

religion is indisputably a central factor in any account of the character and workings of the human mind. Does religion manifest a capacity for deep insight, or an extraordinary proneness to delusion? Both, perhaps, like the mind itself. location 275

The Gilgamesh epic was found in various forms throughout the ancient Near East. It is absurd to imagine that the most dramatic part of it could simply be atched into the Hebrew Genesis and no one would notice the plagiarism. To retell their story with changes would be to defend against its pagan theological implications, and also to address what are, after all, questions of very great interest. All this assumes that these ancients had an intellectual life, that they had meaningful awareness of surrounding cultures. location 416

Whoever controls the definition of mind controls the definition of humankind itself, and culture, and history. location 467

I would argue that the absence of mind and subjectivity from parascientific literature is in some part a consequence of the fact that the literature arose and took its form in part as a polemic against religion. And it has persisted, consciously or not, in a strategy for excluding thought of the kind hospitable to religion from the possibility of speaking in its own terms, making its own case. Metaphysics in general has been excluded at the same time, even from philosophy, which since Comte has been associated with this same project of exclusion. The arts have been radically marginalized. In its treatment of human nature the diversity of cultures is left out of account, perhaps to facilitate the making of analogies between our living selves and our hypothetical primitive ancestors, so central to their argument, who can only have been culturally very remote from us indeed. When history is mentioned, it is usually to point to its follies and errors, which persist to the degree that the light of science has not yet fallen over the whole of human affairs. location 514

At this point, the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism. location 538

Darwin, famously influenced by Malthus, made the competition for limited resources an elemental, universal principle of life, and, in The Descent of Man, folded tribal warfare into the processes of evolution, a notion which meshed nicely with colonialism and with the high esteem in which Europeans of the period held themselves. location 558

My point being that another proper context for the interpretation of Phineas Gage might be others who have sufered gross insult to the body, especially those who have been disfigured by it. And in justice to Gage, the touching fact is that he was employed continually until his final illness. No one considers what might have been the reaction of other people to him when his moving from job to job—his only sin besides cursing and irritability—attracts learned disapprobation. location 654

The meme is not a notion I can dismiss out of hand. It seems to me to describe as well as anything does the obdurate persistence and influence of the genre of writing I have called parascientific. This piece of evidence for its reality might not please its originators, who always seem to assume their own immunity from the illusions and distractions that plague the rest of us. location 833

have come to the conclusion that the random, the accidental, have a strong attraction for many writers because they simplify by delimiting. Why is there something rather than nothing? Accident. Accident narrows the range of appropriate strategies of interpretation, while intention very much broadens it. Accident closes on itself, while intention implies that, in and beyond any particular fact or circumstance, there is vastly more to be understood. Intention is implicitly communicative, because an actor is described in any intentional act. Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism overshot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension. location 889

 philosopher John Searle objects to the commonly held conception that “suggests that science names a specific kind of ontology, as if there were a scientific reality that is different from, for example, the reality of common sense.” He says, “I think that is profoundly mistaken.” And he says, “There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation location 903

little that is modern departs as cleanly from its precursors as myth would have us believe. location 924

Rereading Freud, I have come to the conclusion that his essays, and therefore very central features of his thought, most notably the murder of the primal father with all its consequences, were meant to confute theories of race and nation that were becoming increasingly predominant as he wrote. location 1007

Freud’s highly polished, deeply troubled Vienna, for many years seeming to sustain a perilous equilibrium between the strict imperatives of social order and the raw frictions of group conflict, bears more than a little resemblance to the Freudian self. To hope for more, for something to compare with the rootedness and authenticity for which the racial nationalists yearned, would risk destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium that for Freud is the closest approach human beings can make to their natural condition. location 1105

we come upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell upon it. This contention holds that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization. location 1159

If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which every conclusion returns, it is just this—that the mind is not to be trusted. The conversation in the larger culture to which I have referred, the variously lamented loss of spiritual authenticity, assumes that civilization has alienated Europeans from their essential selves and corrupted their experience. location 1228

 There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms. location 1260

 According to E. O. Wilson, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbor a nonphysical mind.” Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue-in-cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. location 1273

the human brain as case in point. How strange it would be, then, that this accident, this excess, should feel a tropism toward what Pinker himself calls “the truth.”

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series) Marilynne Robinson

Neuroscience and consciousness

I think that this is pretty much the same argument as John Searle makes against reductionism of mind to brain.

Even if neuroscience one day tracks every single neuron firing in real time, you won't be watching consciousness. You'll have more precise correlations to play with, yes. But people will still experience pain and say "Ouch!", not "Oh, no worries: it's just neuron cluster 148 lighting up." Face to faith: When we meditate or use our powers of perception, we call on more than just a brain :

 And the article notes that the hard problem remains -the insideness of what we experience  isn't merely physical. This leaves -in terms of options for philosophical approaches- dualism or emergent monism. I still tend towards the latter.

Self Comes to Mind: framework for corporisational identity?

On the whole, as a Chiristain taking seriously the Hebraic heritage of affirmation of matter and body and of a holistic orientation, I'm sympathtic and not particularly threatened by Damasios's perspectives. So Im interested to read this review of his latest book. The reviewer makes a really helpful summary of the basic thesis:

consciousness emerges only when – to quote the book's title – self comes to mind, so that in key brain regions, the representational maps of sensory experience intersect with the encoded experiences of past that self provides. This, enabled by the evolution of language, makes possible autobiographical memory – the narrative of our lives that we humans all possess and which is the basis for consciousness. This, briefly summarised, is the latest version of Damasio's theory

If this is rough;y right with regard to humans and other animals and if I'm barking up the right tree in thinking about the Powers /corporisations by analogy with human persons, then reading the above description as a possble description of corporisations is helpful. 'Brain' may have to be though of as systems for processing information and keeping records in a corporisation. Language may be systems of communication and it is easier now to conceive of a corporisation having a sense of self borne of history, records, data, missiosn statements and the like.

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio - review | Books | The Guardian

On the quiescence of travelling toddlers

My grandchild often gets me thinking. Today, for instance, she woke up early, full of beans and a constant source of activity and attention. And we decided to take her into town. We decided to walk in and that she would therefore be in her pushchair (it did seem to us that asking her to walk 2 miles was a bit much for a 3 year-old). But then the everyday 'miracle' occurs, as it does so often and with so many toddlers: she was quiet and simply sat there for the walk down, for the walk around town in various shops and the walk back. Ne'ery an attempt towards active play. It was like she'd reached an altered state of consciousness.

And, on reflection, that's what I suspect it was: a quasi-trance state. Then my further question occurs: how come? Why is it that toddlers and babies tend to go quiet when travelling in these sorts of ways? Well, to me an evolutionary psychological hypothesis seems plausible. The children (and their parents, probably) who survived predation on the savannah would be the ones who stayed quiet when travelling. Then that begs the question: how would kids who cannot yet consistently form the kind of complex concepts we often express as 'if ... then ...' based on an abstract conditional ('if I make a noise /remain quiet') and a hard-to-conceptualise consequent ('we will/not attract the attentions of leopards') know to stay quiet and still? This is a question about what would cue them, presumably at something like an instinctual level. I would hypothesise that the rhythm (of walking or similar) and sight of of moving scenery cues/primes a transformation of consciousness to one that doesn't' need entertaining and is able to damp down the felt need for food or 'grooming'/interaction.

If this were so, then a further question-complex arises: does this instinct survive childhood, and if so, how does it show itself? This is even more speculative, of course, but I'm going to hazard a -hopefully- educated guess.

When I go for a walk I tend to find that my state of mind is not quite the same as 'normal'. In fact I often find that going for a walk enables my mind to produce ideas and solutions to problems that I've not achieved with conscious and focused attention to them in an office or meeting. So is this the same or a derived state of mind to that I think that our toddler grandchild seems to go into when in her pushchair? And if it is is it a good state for more discursive and creative way of thinking? Does it help meditative practice? (Seems to).

Media habits of young people may make them drink more; What should be done?

I can remember, back in the 80's I used to get told that there was no evidence that what people watch significantly altered their behaviour. It seems that those days are gone:

Media habits of young people may make them drink more; What should be done?: There is a well-documented link between watching programmes that show alcohol, such as TV reality shows, and increased drinking

My position was based really on two things; one was the 'common sense' self observation that the things I fill my thoughts with tend to become the things that I seek out in real life and that I tend to notice and become involved with. This, it seemed to me, was pretty much what was endorsed by the apostle Paul as the basis for learning to focus our thoughts in what is wholesome and to eschew thinking centred in less-than-wholesome things.

I'm now also linking this with meditation disciplines which, among other things, seek to train us to be able to give attention rather than simply having it captured and to create positive thinking patterns rather than simply reactive and unwholesome...

Body is part of the mind: movement changes thought

Add this to the growing evidence that our minds are not hermetically sealed from our somatic presence but rather our bady contributes to our mind and helps to form it. Body Movements Can Influence Problem Solving, Researchers Report: "This emerging research is fascinating because it is demonstrating how your body is a part of your mind in a powerful way. The way you think is affected by your body and, in fact, we can use our bodies to help us think".
This would appear to be the facility that is strong in kinaesthetic learning (and probably shows that it's a spectrum thing rather than +/- thing). Of course it is harmonious with the Christian/Hebrew holistic mind-body thing (and less conducive to neo-Platonic and gnostic world-views). It adds further experimental evidence to the thesis of 'Philosophy in the Flesh' and adds to the problematising of Cartesian dualism. On the other hand, it would seem to encourage the emergent view of mind

Violent Media Numb Viewers to others' pain

More evidence that gigo applies to the human mind: violence and uncaringness viewed creates a numbness to others' suffering. The overview is here: Violent Media Numb Viewers To The Pain Of Others and a quote to give you the flavour: "'These studies clearly show that violent media exposure can reduce helping behavior,' said Bushman, professor of psychology and communications and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research.
'People exposed to media violence are less helpful to others in need because they are 'comfortably numb' to the pain and suffering of others, to borrow the title of a Pink Floyd song,' he said."
Now the question really is whether the methodology allows the claims; the results look pretty conclusive.

Language, savants, animals and thought

At first this article might look like a slightly esoteric bit of brain science about animal and human brains and minds. However, it has important consequences for the way that language is significant for human development. Do Animals Think Like Autistic Savants?: "Since animals do not have verbal language, they have to store memories as pictures, sounds, or other sensory impressions.' And sensory-based information, she says, is inherently more detailed than word-based memories. 'As a person with autism, all my thoughts are in photo-realistic pictures,' she explains. 'The main similarity between animal thought and my thought is the lack of verbal language.'"
Which would make the taxonomic dimension of human language pretty significant. The information loss of language is one of the significant features enabling rapid information transfer. I'm wondering how this interrelates with the detailed memories in the AS-person like Grandin but that's maybe a less-important issue for the focus on the effects of language on human mind and cognition.

It also occurs to me that this seems to give potential confirmation to the MBTI distinction between people who prefer to perceive detail first and those who prefer ideas to be in the lead role (between S's and N's respectively).

'Truthiness' -it ain't buffy

The title gives a good bit away: Unanimous Union: The Mind And Body Together Lean Toward 'Truthiness': Tests on answering ambiguous questions have shown, among other things, an interesting human bias:
“These dynamic data showed that participant arm movements had lower velocity and curved more toward the alternative response box during ‘no’ responses than during ‘yes’ responses—suggesting that we experience a general bias toward assuming statements are true,"
Must think about that more in relation to "Did God really say...?"

And then there is the wholistic thing: body and mind seem closely linked in this.

Diet Linked To Cognitive Decline And Dementia

in the 1970's, we were called cranks for advocating that diet might help in preventing many health problems. Nowadays, all our Christmasses come close together. "Research has shown convincing evidence that dietary patterns practiced during adulthood are important contributors to age-related cognitive decline and dementia risk." This is especially important for those of us who want to be able to harvest our intellectual endeavours in old age and maybe produce some work that is of lasting value...
Diet Linked To Cognitive Decline And Dementia:

Podcast on The Spiritual Brain

Denyse O'Leary in a Canadian radio interview about the difficulties of materialistic monism. There is some good stuff here in terms of her being quite good at saying important things simply. May help you decide whether you want the book. I reiterate that this is an important apologetics issue and I predict will become increasingly a topic of debate between theists and others.
Click here to get your own player.


Intelligent Design The Future

Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives To Break From Habitual Responses, Study Finds

I probably don't need to say much about this, but it's interesting. "Findings support previous suggestions that political orientation may in part reflect differences in cognitive mechanisms."
I suppose the question that lurks for me is how churches can hold together people whose cognitive mechanisms differ. While it is likely that individual congregations will reflect one style or another, how do we hold together over regions and internationally?
My other question is about how these cognitive mechanisms arise and how deeply rooted are they? In other words do people change them; indeed can they? Are we born conservative or liberal or is it a function of upbringing and education? I will clearly have to look out for other research. Any readers have any leads?

PS no sooner had I written this than my RSS feeds brought me this article which, if not answering the question, asks pertinent questions about methodology and concludes: "I am wondering whether the test actually captures not political opinion as such but the speed of assimilation and adaptation to one's environment. People who are at odds with their environment may need more structured thinking patterns in order to survive. In that case, we should expect to see the results reversed in Utah (where the liberal must keep repeating over and over, "small families are a blessing, small families are a blessing, gay is okay, gay is okay"). Perhaps someone will try it, if they haven't already."
Fair comment, and a timely reminder that checking methodologies is important in interpreting such data.
ScienceDaily: Liberals More Likely Than Conservatives To Break From Habitual Responses, Study Finds:

Brains and minds: not a direct connection

Report of a brain scientist who experimented with electro-stimulation of brains while patients were conscious (and before you think something unethically Nazi, recall the scene from Hannibal was somewhat based on fact in terms of the fact that the brain itself does not feel pain). There was an interesting set of results in terms of sense of agency.

He found that he could elicit all kinds of things from electrically stimulating the brain- memories, emotions, movements of the body, etc. The mental processes elicited were remarkably vivid.Yet in all instances, patients knew that the evoked response was not caused by their own will. Penfield called it 'double consciousness'. Patients always saw the response from a third person perspective, as well as experiencing the response in the first person. Patients always knew that the response was done to them, not by them. Penfield noted that patients always experienced their own responses as observers, as well as participants, and they could always distinguish their own coincident experience from the simultaneous induced response. There always remained a first-person subjectivity that was untouched by electrical stimulation of the brain.

I'm still thinking about this, but I don't think it poses any basic problem to the emergentist account I suspect is about right: that mind is an emergent property of socialised and embodied brains and as such is non-linear and dynamic and perhaps even 'holographic'...

Filed in:

Culture Influences Brain Cells

This is certainly intuitively believable for many of us, and so it's another example of the science confirming what we strongly suspected. And it's down to the mirror neuron system again from an experiment testing responses to people from differing cultures and racial backgrounds gesturing at a USAmerican test audience. The conclusion based on the results is stated in the article in this way: "it appears that neural systems supporting memory, empathy and general cognition encodes information differently depending on who's giving the information--a member of one's own cultural/ethnic in-group, or a member of an out-group, and that ethnic in-group membership and a culturally learned motor repertoire more strongly influence the brain's responses to observed actions, specifically actions used in social communication."
Culture is more deeply embedded in who we are than some might think. Taken with what I picked up and blogged yesterday, it amounts to recognising that different cultures produce different minds and brains. It indicates that in some, perhaps many, areas, culture plays a determinative role in behaviour, even seemingly unreflective behaviour.
ScienceDaily: Culture Influences Brain Cells: Brain's Mirror Neurons Swayed By Ethnicity And Culture:

Emotional Memories Can Be Suppressed With Practice

Further evidence of the plasticity of the brain, in this case enabling people to deal with difficult memories. It could also end up feeding into the repressed memories debate.

"These results indicate memory suppression does occur, and, at least in nonpsychiatric populations, is under the control of prefrontal regions," the researchers wrote in Science. The most anterior portion of the prefrontal cortex highlighted in the study is a relatively recent feature in brain evolution and is greatly enlarged in humans when compared to great apes, said Depue.

The study showed the subjects were able to "exert some control over their emotional memories," said Depue. "By essentially shutting down specific portions of the brain, they were able to stop the retrieval process of particular memories."

Is your brain really necessary?

Maybe not, lookee.

The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no
brain at all. Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5
centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of
cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus

Actually this is not so much of a surprise in the light of the kind of thing that Antonio Damasio says in 'The Feeling of What Happens'. What it may do is undermine a kind of 'physical basis' for anthropoligical dualism where 'mind' is secreted by brain. It may be that mind is better thought of as an emergent quality of humanity (including the social aspects); a view more in consonance with alleged Hebraic modes of thought on related matters and certainly likely to be grist for the mill of cultural uptake of holistic thinking.

Now, I'm must admit that I'm not sure I can go as far as Rupert Sheldrake, but it certainly makes you think. And on the basis that an extreme idea is good for shaking our thinking up ...

what on earth is the brain for? And where is the seat of human intelligence? Where is the mind?
The only biologist to propose a radically novel approach to these questions is Dr Rupert Sheldrake. In his book A New Science of Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past. Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.

Intriguing, though, at present, very 'out there'. For a less esoteric approach, Mindful Hack draws our attention to some musing of AJ Meyer:

A static hologram basically can be thought of as a global associative read only memory.[1] That is, the data are not stored at specific addresses as in the digital computer, instead they are stored globally. Much of human memory also appears to have a similar global character. Studies done by Adey with rabbits seemed to indicate that there appeared to be some sort of globalized phase modulation in the rodent's brain waves as they learned mazes. In my talk I made a presumptuous jump and suggested that human memory might have a dynamic holographic structure, that is, a global associative read and write memory.

And, in fact, if Damasio is right, we have to take in not just the brain but the whole nervous system and endocrine system, in crude; the whole body.

Is your brain really necessary?
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