NOTES

Chapter 1: Spirituality

1. My late friend Christopher Hitchens—no enemy of the lexicographer—didn’t share them either. Hitch believed that spiritual was a term we could not do without. It is true that he didn’t think about spirituality in precisely the way I do. He spoke instead of the spiritual pleasures afforded by certain works of poetry, music, and art. The symmetry and beauty of the Parthenon embodied this happy extreme for him—without there being any need to admit the existence of the goddess Athena, much less devote ourselves to her worship. Hitch also used the terms numinous and transcendent to mark occasions of great beauty or significance, and for him the Hubble Deep Field was an example of both. (I’m sure he was aware that pedantic excursions into the OED would produce etymological embarrassments regarding these words as well.) Carl Sagan also freely used the term spiritual in this way. (See C. Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random House. p. 29.)

I have no quarrel with Hitch and Sagan’s general use of spiritual to mean something like “beauty or significance that provokes awe,” but I believe that we can also use it in a narrower and, indeed, more personally transformative sense.

2. A. Huxley. [1945] 2009. The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West. New York: Harper Perennial, p. vii.

3. One can speak about Judaism without its myths and miracles—even without God—but this doesn’t make Judaism the equivalent of Buddhism. Buddhism without the unjustified bits is essentially a first-person science. Secular Judaism isn’t.

4. A. Rawlinson. 1997. The Book of Enlightened Masters. Chicago: Open Court, p. 38.

5. For an entertaining account of Blavatsky’s career, see P. Washington. 1993. Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon. New York: Schocken.

6. One wonders how it was possible for a charlatan like L. Ron Hubbard to acquire any following at all, because each story about him is more preposterous and embarrassing than the last. For instance, Hubbard claimed to have withdrawn one of his first books from publication “ ‘because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds’ ” (L. Wright. 2013. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. New York: Knopf). According to Hubbard, when he delivered this “dangerous text to his publisher, ‘The reader brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper.’ ”

There are many more laughs to be had at Hubbard’s expense. However, several readers who saw the original version of this endnote found it so funny that they had to be hospitalized. Regrettably, I’ve been forced to edit the text out of concern for the health of my readers.

7. A. Koestler. 1960. The Lotus and the Robot. New York: Harper & Row, p. 285. Koestler was also less than impressed with the spiritual efficacy of psychedelics. See A. Koestler. 1968. “Return Trip to Nirvana.” In Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967. London: Hutchinson, pp. 201–12.

8. C. Hitchens. 1998. “His Material Highness.” Salon.com.

9. Purists will insist on important differences among the various schools of Buddhism and between Buddhism and the tradition of Advaita Vedanta developed by Shankara (788–820). Although I touch upon some of these distinctions, I do not make much of them. I consider the differences to be generally a matter of emphasis, semantics, and (irrelevant) metaphysics—and too esoteric to be of interest to the general reader.

10. The research on pathological responses to meditation is quite sparse. Traditionally, it is believed that certain stages on the contemplative path are by nature unpleasant and that some forms of mental pain should therefore be considered signs of progress. It seems clear, however, that meditation can also precipitate or unmask psychological illness. As with many other endeavors, distinguishing help from harm in each instance can be difficult. As far as I know, Willoughby Britton is the first scientist to study this problem systematically.

11. Consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. We experience the contact as simultaneous, but we know that it can’t be simultaneous at the level of the brain, because it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel to sensory cortex from your fingertip than it does from your nose—and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this discrepancy in timing by holding these inputs in memory and then delivering the result to consciousness. Thus, your experience of the present moment is the product of layered memories.

12. F. Zeidan et al. 2011. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” Pain 31: 5540–48; B. K. Holzel et al. 2011. “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 537–59; B. Kim et al. 2010. “Effectiveness of a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Program as an Adjunct to Pharmacotherapy in Patients with Panic Disorder.” J Anxiety Disord 24(6): 590–95; K. A. Godfrin and C. van Heeringen. 2010. “The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Recurrence of Depressive Episodes, Mental Health and Quality of Life: A Randomized Controlled Study.” Behav Res Ther 48(8): 738–46; F. Zeidan, S. K. Johnson, B. J. Diamond, Z. David, and P. Goolkasian. 2010. “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training.” Conscious Cogn 19(2): 597–605; B. K. Hölzel et al. 2011. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry Res 191(1): 36–43.

13. Nanamoli, orig. trans., and Bodhi, trans. and ed. 1995. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

14. However one bounds the concept of enlightenment, there is no escaping the fact that most traditional accounts of it, Buddhist and otherwise, attribute a variety of supernormal powers to spiritual adepts. Is there any evidence that human beings can acquire abilities like clairvoyance and telekinesis? Apart from anecdotes offered by people who are desperate to believe in such powers, we can say that the evidence is impressively thin. Traditionally, gurus and their devotees have sought to have it both ways: The guru will display various siddhis (Sanskrit: “powers”) to entertain and persuade the faithful—but never in such a way as to meet the tests of true skeptics. We are invariably told that to produce miracles on demand would be a crude misuse of a guru’s office. The dharma (Sanskrit: “way” or “truth”), after all, is more precious and profound than worldly powers. No doubt it is. But this doesn’t stop most gurus from taking credit, or their devotees from bestowing it, whenever random coincidences occur.

15. M. Ricard. 2007. Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. New York: Little, Brown, p. 19.

Chapter 2: The Mystery of Consciousness

1. T. Nagel. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83.

2. One could argue that this notion of “trading places” is fraught with confusion, but Nagel’s notion of consciousness being identical to subjective experience isn’t.

3. It’s true that some philosophers and neuroscientists will want to pull the brakes right here. Daniel Dennett, with whom I agree about many things, tells me that if I can’t imagine the falsehood of a statement like “Either the lights are on, or they are not,” I’m not trying hard enough. However, on a question as rudimentary as the ontology of consciousness, the debate often comes down to irreconcilable intuitions. While I will try my best to unpack my intuition that the above statement cannot be false, at a certain point a person has to admit that he can’t understand what his opponents are talking about.

4. The picture does not change (much) if you are a dualist who believes that brains are conscious only because consciousness is somehow inserted into them. There are many problems with dualism, but even a dualist should agree that consciousness appears to be associated only with organisms of sufficient complexity. Whether or not one is a dualist, one has no compelling reason to believe that there is something that it is like to be a tomato.

5. Saying that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to make a claim about its behavior or its use of language, because we can find examples of both behavior and language without consciousness (a primitive robot) and consciousness without either (a person suffering “locked-in syndrome”). Of course, it is possible that some robots are conscious—and if consciousness is the sort of thing that comes into being purely by virtue of information processing, then our cell phones and coffeemakers may be conscious. But few of us imagine that there is something that it is like to be even the most advanced computer. Whatever its relationship to information processing, consciousness is an internal reality that cannot necessarily be appreciated from the outside and need not be associated with behavior or responsiveness to stimuli. If you doubt this, read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997), Jean Dominique-Bauby’s astonishing and heartbreaking account of his own “locked-in syndrome,” which he dictated by signing to a nurse with his left eyelid. Then try to imagine his predicament if even this degree of motor control had been denied him.

6. Descartes is probably the first Western philosopher to make this point, but others have continued to emphasize it, notably the philosophers John Searle and David Chalmers. I do not agree with Descartes’s dualism or with some of what Searle and Chalmers have said about the nature of consciousness, but I agree that its subjective reality is both primary and indisputable. This does not rule out the possibility that consciousness is, in fact, identical to certain brain processes.

Again, I should say that some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, just don’t buy this. But I do not understand why. My not seeing how consciousness can possibly be an illusion entails my not understanding how they (or anyone else) can think that it might be one. I agree that we may be profoundly mistaken about consciousness—about how it arises, about its connection to the brain, about precisely what we are conscious of and when. But this is not the same as saying that consciousness itself may be illusory. The state of being completely confused about the nature of consciousness is itself a demonstration of consciousness.

7. “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” A. S. Eddington. 1928. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 276.

“The old dualism of mind and matter . . . seems likely to disappear . . . through substantial matter resolving itself into a creation and manifestation of mind.” J. Jeans. 1930. The Mysterious Universe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 158.

“The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality—the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical—as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously.” W. Pauli, C. P. Enz, and K. v. Meyenn. [1955] 1994. Writings on Physics and Philosophy. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 259.

“The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated not into the cloud of some obscure new reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the particle but rather our knowledge of this behavior.” W. Heisenberg. 1958. “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics.” Daedalus 87 (Summer): 100.

“We simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation and thought, however many textbooks . . . go on talking nonsense on the subject.” E. Schrödinger. 1964. My View of the World, trans. C. Hastings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–62.

8. F. Dyson. 2002. “The Conscience of Physics.” Nature 420 (December 12): 607–8.

9. I am grateful to my friend, physicist Lawrence Krauss, for clarifying several of these points.

10. If we look for consciousness in the physical world, we find only complex systems giving rise to complex behavior—which may or may not be attended by consciousness. The fact that the behavior of our fellow human beings persuades us that they are conscious (more or less) does not get us any closer to linking consciousness to physical events. Is a starfish conscious? It seems clear that we will not make any progress on this question by drawing analogies between starfish behavior and our own. Only in the presence of animals sufficiently like ourselves do our intuitions about (and attributions of) consciousness begin to crystallize. Is there something that it is like to be a cocker spaniel? Does it feel its pains and pleasures? Surely it must. How do we know? Behavior and analogy.

Some scientists and philosophers have formed the mistaken impression that it is always more parsimonious to deny consciousness in lower animals than to attribute it to them. I have argued elsewhere that this is not the case (S. Harris. 2004. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Norton, pp. 276–77). To deny consciousness in chimpanzees, for instance, is to assume the burden of explaining why their genetic, neuroanatomical, and behavioral similarity to us is an insufficient basis for it. (Good luck.)

11. The idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) a certain class of unconscious physical events seems impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are probably mistaken. We can say the right words: ”Consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.” We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles” and “2 plus 2 equals 7.” But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.

12. J. Levine. 1983. “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64.

13. D. J. Chalmers. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

14. This maneuver has its antecedents in the “neutral monism” (so dubbed by Russell) of James and Mach. It is a view I substantially agree with. Here is Nagel on the subject:

What will be the point of view, so to speak, of such a theory? If we could arrive at it, it would render transparent the relation between mental and physical, not directly, but through the transparency of their common relation to something that is not merely either of them. Neither the mental nor the physical point of view will do for this purpose. The mental will not do because it simply leaves out the physiology, and has no room for it. The physical will not do because while it includes the behavioral and functional manifestations of the mental, this doesn’t, in view of the falsity of conceptual reductionism, enable it to reach to the mental concepts themselves. . . . The difficulty is that such a viewpoint cannot be constructed by the mere conjunction of the mental and the physical. It has to be something genuinely new, otherwise it will not possess the necessary unity. . . . Such a conception will have to be created; we won’t just find it lying around. All the great reductive successes in the history of science have depended on theoretical concepts, not natural ones—concepts whose whole justification is that they permit us to replace brute correlations with reductive explanations. At present such a solution to the mind-body problem is literally unimaginable, but it may not be impossible.” (T. Nagel. 1998. “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.” Philosophy 73[285]: pp. 337–52.)

15. J. R. Searle. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992; J. R. Searle. 2007. “Dualism Revisited.” J Physiol Paris 101 (4–6); J. R. Searle. 1998. “How to Study Consciousness Scientifically.” Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 353 (1377).

16. J. Kim. 1993. “The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism.” In Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

17. C. McGinn. 1989. “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” Mind 98; C. McGinn. 1999. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Steven Pinker also throws his lot in with McGinn: S. Pinker. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, pp. 558–65. This is more or less where Thomas Nagel comes out, though he considers himself less pessimistic than McGinn: Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem.”

18. Whatever its relation to the physical world, consciousness seems to be conceptually irreducible, because any attempt to define consciousness or its surrogates (sentience, awareness, subjectivity) leads us in a lexical circle. One of the great obstacles to understanding consciousness probably lurks here: If an adequate, noncircular definition of consciousness exists, no one has found it. The same can be said about any idea that is truly basic to our thinking. The reader is invited to try to define the word causation in noncircular terms. Consequently, many philosophers and scientists change the subject whenever the discussion turns to matters of consciousness—conflating it with attention, self-awareness, wakefulness, responsiveness to stimuli, or some other, more tractable and less fundamental aspect of cognition. These digressions are often inadvertent and rarely aim at a reductive definition of “consciousness.” Where they do, as in the case of (analytical) behaviorism, they invariably seem false and question-begging.

19. Be it “40-Hz coherent activity in thalamocortical pathways” (R. Llinas. 2001. I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; R. Llinas et al. 1998. “The Neuronal Basis for Consciousness.” Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 353[1377]); “cross-regional integrations of neural activity” involving the brain-stem reticular formation, the thalamus, and somatosensory and cingulate cortices (A. Damasio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace); “selectional reentrant activity of groups of neurons in the [thalamocortical] core” (G. M. Edelman. 2006. Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press); “quantum-coherent oscillations within microtubules” (R. Penrose. 1994. Shadows of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press); “the interactions of specialized, modular components in a distributed neural network” (J. W. Cooney and M. S. Gazzaniga. 2003. “Neurological Disorders and the Structure of Human Consciousness.” Trends Cogn Sci 7[4]); or some other physical or functional state.

20. To see the impasse more clearly, it might be useful to consider a neuroscientific account of consciousness that proceeds with the usual buoyant disregard for this philosophical terrain. The neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi claim that it is the intrinsic “integration,” or unity, of consciousness that provides the best clue to its physical character. In their view, consciousness is a “unified neural process” born of “ongoing, recursive, highly parallel signaling within and among brain areas.” (Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi. 2002. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books; G. Tononi and G. M. Edelman. 1998. “Consciousness and Complexity.” Science 282[5395].) Accounting for why the highly synchronous activities of generalized seizures and slow-wave sleep do not suffice for consciousness, the authors provide another criterion: The “repertoire of differentiated neural states” must be large rather than small. Consciousness, therefore, is intrinsically “integrated” and “differentiated.” The fact that over a long enough time scale, the entire brain may be said to display such characteristics demands another caveat—because the entire brain cannot be the locus of consciousness. Thus, the authors declare that such integration and differentiation must occur within a window of a few hundred milliseconds. These criteria together constitute their “dynamic core hypothesis.”

Tononi and Edelman have done some fascinating neuroscience, but their research demonstrates how forlorn any empirical results seem when hurled against the mystery of consciousness. The problem is that such work does nothing to render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. While Tononi and Edelman are probably aware of this fact, they nevertheless announce, arms akimbo, that “a scientific explanation of consciousness is becoming increasingly feasible.” (G. Tononi and G. M. Edelman. 1998. p. 1850.)

Why would the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness be a matter of “a distributed neural process that is both highly integrated and highly differentiated”? And why should the time course of such integration be a few hundred milliseconds? What if it were a few hundred years? What if distributed geological processes gave rise to consciousness? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that they do. This would not explain how consciousness emerges. It would be nothing short of a miracle if mere integration and differentiation among processes in the earth sufficed to make the planet conscious. Is the linkage between neural synchrony and consciousness any more intelligible? No—apart from the fact that we already know that we are conscious.

Consider some other possibilities for emergence: Let us say that there is something that it is like to be a coral reef battered by waves of precisely 0.5 hertz; there is something that it is like to be a 150-mile-per-hour wind gust laying waste to a trailer park (but only if the trailers are made entirely of aluminum); there is something that it is like to be the sum total of New Year’s resolutions left unfulfilled. How could such diverse “brains” possibly give rise to consciousness? We have no idea. And yet, if we stipulate that they do, their powers are no less comprehensible than those of the brains we have in our heads. But they are not comprehensible at all, of course—and that is the problem of consciousness.

21. Cited in C. Sagan. 1995. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, p. 272.

22. This distinction was obvious to many thinkers even before vitalism was discredited. C. D. Broad (1925) summed it up with admirable precision:

The one and only kind of evidence that we ever have for believing that a thing is alive is that it behaves in certain characteristic ways. E.g., it moves spontaneously, eats, drinks, digests, grows, reproduces, and so on. Now all these are just actions of one body on other bodies. There seems to be no reason whatever to suppose that “being alive” means any more than exhibiting these various forms of bodily behaviour. . . . But the position about consciousness, certainly seems to be very different. It is perfectly true that an essential part of our evidence for believing that anything but ourselves has a mind and is having such and such experiences is that it performs certain characteristic bodily movements in certain situations. . . . But it is plain that our observation of the behavior of external bodies is not our only or our primary ground for asserting the existence of minds and mental processes. And it seems to me equally plain that by “having a mind” we do not mean simply “behaving in such and such ways.” (Cited in A. Beckermann. 2000. “The Reductive Explainability of Phenomenal Consciousness.” In Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions, ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 49).

23. Another way of stating the matter is that if, as all physicalists believe, there is a necessary connection between the physical and the phenomenal, we would not expect to see evidence for it—apart from the reliability of correlation itself. If we are told that phenomenal state X is really brain state Y, we must ask, “By virtue of what is this identity true?” The answer must be that one cannot find X without Y or Y without X. But this disgorges two further facts: Such an identity can be established only by virtue of empirical correlations, and the phenomenal term is in no way subordinate, with respect to defining what a state is, to its physical correlate. As Donald Davidson said, “If some mental events are physical events, this makes them no more physical than mental. Identity is a symmetrical relation.” (D. Davidson. 1987. “Knowing One’s Own Mind.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 61.) Brain state Y is identifiable as phenomenal state X only by virtue of its X-ness.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the neural correlates of conscious states seem liable to be a far more heterogeneous class of events than I have indicated. This raises the issue of multiple realizability: the possibility that different physical states may be capable of producing consciousness. Finding one such state (or class of states) to be reliably correlated with consciousness would not necessarily reveal anything about the possibilities of consciousness in other physical systems. Multiple realizability is especially problematic for any theory that seeks to reduce consciousness to a specific type of brain state (i.e., any “type-type identity” theory of consciousness). In neuroanatomical terms, we know that a limited form of multiple realizability must be true, because different species of birds and mammals perform many of the same cognitive operations with importantly different neuronal architectures. Of course, it is conceivable that only human beings are conscious, or that consciousness may be instantiated in precisely the same neural circuits in dissimilar brains—but both these propositions strike me as extremely doubtful.

Whatever one’s ontological bias, the meaningfulness of correlation depends on the belief that a causal linkage (if not identity) exists between physical states and subjective experience. And yet, correlation is itself the only basis for establishing this linkage. This is not merely a case of Humean angst with respect to causation: We are blind to the physical causes of phenomenal events to a much greater degree than we are to the physical causes of physical events. In fact, Hume’s skepticism about our knowledge of causation has not aged very well. Even rats appear to intuit causal connections beyond mere correlations. One can also argue that our ability to pick out individual events in a temporal sequence, or to group events into categories, is the product of causal reasoning. (See M. R. Waldmann, Y. Hagmayer, and A. P. Blaisdell. 2006. “Beyond the Information Given: Causal Models in Learning and Reasoning.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15[6]; M. J. Buehner and P. W. Cheng. 2005. “Causal Learning.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. K. J. Holyoak and R. G. Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press.) When I break a pencil, the force applied to it by my hands and its subsequent breaking are correlated, but not merely so. There is much to be said about the microstructure of pencils that makes their brittleness, and hence the observed correlation, intelligible. With consciousness, however, the link appears to be brute. As Chalmers and others have noted, the question remains: Why should such events in the brain be experienced at all? (D. J. Chalmers. 1995. “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.” Sci Am 273[6]; Chalmers, The Conscious Mind; D. J. Chalmers. 1997. “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4[1].) But this does not stop neuroscientists and philosophers from trying to simply ram through explanatory analogies that don’t quite fit.

24. W. Singer. 1999. “Neuronal Synchrony: A Versatile Code for the Definition of Relations?” Neuron 24(1).

25. For doubts on this point, see M. N. Shadlen and J. A. Movshon. 1999. “Synchrony Unbound: A Critical Evaluation of the Temporal Binding Hypothesis.” Neuron 24(1).

26. Prinz also observes that binding and consciousness are fully dissociable. J. Prinz. 2001. “Functionalism, Dualism and Consciousness.” In Philosophy and the Neurosciences, ed. W. Bechtel et al. Oxford: Blackwell.

27. A. Polonsky et al. 2000. “Neuronal Activity in Human Primary Visual Cortex Correlates with Perception During Binocular Rivalry.” Nat Neurosci 3(11); G. Rees, G. Kreiman, and C. Koch. 2002. “Neural Correlates of Consciousness in Humans.” Nat Rev Neurosci 3(4); F. Crick and C. Koch. 1998. “Consciousness and Neuroscience.” Cerebral Cortex 8; F. Crick and C. Koch. 1999. “The Unconscious Humunculus.” In The Neural Correlates of Consciousness, ed. T. Metzinger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; F. Crick and C. Koch. 2003. “A Framework for Consciousness.” Nat Neurosci 6(2); J. D. Haynes. 2009. “Decoding Visual Consciousness from Human Brain Signals.” Trends Cogn Sci 13(5).

28. Statistics available at www.gallup.com.

29. G. M. Bogen and J. E. Bogen. 1986. “On the Relationship of Cerebral Duality to Creativity.” Bull Clin Neurosci 51.

30. J. E. Bogen, R. W. Sperry, and P. J. Vogel. 1969. “Addendum: Commissural Section and Propagation of Seizures.” In Basic Mechanisms of the Epilepsies, ed. Jasper et al. Boston: Little, Brown; E. Zaidel, M. Iacoboni, D. Zaidel, and J. E. Bogen. 2003. “The Callosal Syndromes.” In Clinical Neuropsychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press; E. Zaidel, D. W. Zaidel, and J. Bogen. Undated. “The Split Brain.” www.its.caltech.edu/~jbogen/text/ref130.htm.

31. M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry. 1965. “Observations on Visual Perception after Disconnexion of the Cerebral Hemispheres in Man.” Brain 88(2); R. W. Sperry. 1961. “Cerebral Organization and Behavior: The Split Brain Behaves in Many Respects Like Two Separate Brains, Providing New Research Possibilities.” Science 133(3466); R. W. Sperry. 1968. “Hemisphere Deconnection and Unity in Conscious Awareness.” Am Psychol 23(10); R. W. Sperry, E. Zaidel, and D. Zaidel. 1979. “Self Recognition and Social Awareness in the Deconnected Minor Hemisphere.” Neuropsychologia 17(2).

32. R. Sperry. 1982. “Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres. Nobel Lecture, 8 December 1981.” Biosci Rep 2(5).

33. R. E. Myers and R. W. Sperry. 1958. “Interhemispheric Communication through the Corpus Callosum: Mnemonic Carry-over between the Hemispheres.” AMA Arch Neurol Psychiatry 80(3); Sperry, “Cerebral Organization and Behavior.”

34. M. S. Gazzaniga, J. E. Bogen, and R. W. Sperry. 1962. “Some Functional Effects of Sectioning the Cerebral Commissures in Man.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 48.

35. Zaidel et al., “The Callosal Syndromes”; Zaidel, Zaidel, and Bogen, “The Split Brain.”

36. K. R. Popper and J. C. Eccles. [1977] 1993. The Self and Its Brain. London: Routledge.

37. See C. E. Marks. 1980. Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and the Unity of Mind. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books; J. E. Bogen. 1997. “Does Cognition in the Disconnected Right Hemisphere Require Right Hemisphere Possession of Language?” Brain Lang 57(1).

38. T. Nørretranders. 1998. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. New York: Viking.

39. V. Mark. 1996. “Conflicting Communicative Behavior in a Split-Brain Patient: Support for Dual Consciousness.” In Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates, ed. S. Hameroff, A. W. Kaszniak, and A. C. Scott. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

40. Sperry, “Some Effects of Disconnecting the Cerebral Hemispheres.”

41. J. J. Schmitt, W. Hartje, and K. Willmes. 1997. “Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Recognition of Emotional Attitude Conveyed by Facial Expression, Prosody and Propositional Speech.” Cortex 33(1).

42. J. Blair, D. R. Mitchell, and K. Blair. 2005. The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

43. Most of the studies involved have relied on the Wada test, in which sodium amobarbital is injected into the left or right carotid artery, temporarily anesthetizing the hemisphere on the same side. Researchers have found that anesthesia of the left hemisphere is often associated with depression, whereas anesthesia of the right can lead to euphoria. The literature on stroke has tended to support this lateralization of mood, correlating left-hemisphere strokes with depression, but some studies have put this interpretation in question. See A. J. Carson et al. 2000. “Depression after Stroke and Lesion Location: A Systematic Review.” Lancet 356(9224); D. W. Desmond et al. 2003. “Ischemic Stroke and Depression.” J Int Neuropsychol Soc 9(3).

Research on normal brains has shown that negative emotions such as disgust, anxiety, and sadness tend to be associated with right-hemisphere activity, whereas happiness is associated with activity on the left. However, it might be better to think about these emotional asymmetries in terms of “approach” and “withdrawal,” because anger, a classically negative emotion, is also correlated with activity in the left hemisphere. (E. Harmon-Jones, P. A. Gable, and C. K. Peterson. 2010. “The Role of Asymmetric Frontal Cortical Activity in Emotion-Related Phenomena: A Review and Update.” Biol Psychol 84[3]: 451–62.)

The lateralized presentation of films suggests that the right hemisphere is more responsive to their emotional content, particularly if it is negative. (W. Wittling and R. Roschmann. 1993. “Emotion-Related Hemisphere Asymmetry: Subjective Emotional Responses to Laterally Presented Films.” Cortex 29[3].) It is also faster than the left to recognize the emotional charge of individual words (stupid, beautiful), and in people suffering from depression, it shows a performance bias for negative words. (R. A. Atchley, S. S. Ilardi, and A. Enloe. 2003. “Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Processing of Emotional Content in Word Meanings: The Effect of Current and Past Depression.” Brain Lang 84[1].) The fact that primates lack direct connections between the right and left amygdalae (regions in the temporal lobes that are especially sensitive to emotionally significant events) suggests an anatomical basis for lateral differences in mood. (R. W. Doty. 1998. “The Five Mysteries of the Mind, and Their Consequences.” Neuropsychologia 36[10].) The role of the amygdala in our emotional lives, particularly with respect to fear, is very well established. (Joseph E. LeDoux. 2002. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Viking.)

44. Popper and Eccles, The Self and Its Brain.

45. Zaidel, Zaidel, and Bogen, “The Split Brain.”

46. Myers and Sperry, “Interhemispheric Communication through the Corpus Callosum.”

47. Bogen, “On the Relationship of Cerebral Duality to Creativity.”

48. R. Puccetti. 1981. “The Case for Mental Duality: Evidence from Split-Brain Data and Other Considerations.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: 93–123.

49. W. James. 1950 [1890]. The Principles of Psychology (Vol. I). Dover Publications, p. 251.

50. However, as Dennett points out, it can be difficult (or impossible) to distinguish what was experienced and then forgotten from what was never experienced in the first place. See his insightful discussion of Orwellian versus Stalinesque processes in cognition: D. C. Dennett. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, pp. 116–25. This ambiguity is largely attributable to the fact that the contents of consciousness must be integrated over time—around 100–200ms. (Crick and Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness.”) This period of integration allows the sensation of touching an object and the associated visual perception of doing so—which objectively arrive at the cortex at different times—to be experienced as though they were simultaneous. Consciousness, therefore, is dependent upon what is generally known as “working memory.”

Many researchers have drawn this connection: J. M. Fuster. 2003. Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press; P. Thagard and B. Aubie. 2008. “Emotional Consciousness: A Neural Model of How Cognitive Appraisal and Somatic Perception Interact to Produce Qualitative Experience.” Conscious Cogn 17(3); B. J. Baars and S. Franklin. 2003. “How Conscious Experience and Working Memory Interact.” Trends Cogn Sci 7(4). And the principle is somewhat more loosely captured by Edelman’s notion of consciousness as “the remembered present”: G. M. Edelman. 1989. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.

51. L. Naccache and S. Dehaene. 2001. “Unconscious Semantic Priming Extends to Novel Unseen Stimuli.” Cognition 80(3). Though several studies indicate that the priming stimulus must at least be attended to: M. Finkbeiner and K. I. Forster. 2008. “Attention, Intention and Domain-Specific Processing.” Trends Cogn Sci 12(2).

52. M. Pessiglione et al. 2007. “How the Brain Translates Money into Force: A Neuroimaging Study of Subliminal Motivation.” Science 316(5826).

53. P. J. Whalen et al. 1998. “Masked Presentations of Emotional Facial Expressions Modulate Amygdala Activity without Explicit Knowledge.” J Neurosci 18(1); L. Naccache et al. 2005. “A Direct Intracranial Record of Emotions Evoked by Subliminal Words.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 102(21).

54. D. L. Schacter. 1987. “Implicit Expressions of Memory in Organic Amnesia: Learning of New Facts and Associations.” Hum Neurobiol 6(2).

55. L. R. Squire and R. McKee. 1992. “Influence of Prior Events on Cognitive Judgments in Amnesia.” J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 18(1).

56. M. M. Keane et al. 1997. “Intact and Impaired Conceptual Memory Processes in Amnesia.” Neuropsychology 11(1).

57. Other phenomena distinguish consciousness from our unconscious mental lives. For instance, certain people suffer a condition called “blindsight,” which results from damage to their primary visual cortex. As a matter of conscious experience, they are blind (or blind within a region of their visual field), and yet they can accurately describe the visual properties of objects. They experience this as purely a matter of guessing—after all, they have no experience of seeing—but they manage to “guess” with near perfect accuracy. They are seeing without knowing that they are seeing. (L. Weiskrantz. 1996. “Blindsight Revisited.” Curr Opin Neurobiol 6[2]; L. Weiskrantz. 2002. “Prime-Sight and Blindsight.” Conscious Cogn 11[4]; L. Weiskrantz. 2008. “Is Blindsight Just Degraded Normal Vision?” Exp Brain Res 192[3].)

58. S. Harris. 2004. The End of Faith, New York: Norton, pp. 173–75, 275–77; S. Harris. 2010. The Moral Landscape. New York: Free Press.

Chapter 3: The Riddle of the Self

1. Nanamoli. 1995. Majjhima Nikaya: Culamalunkya Sutta. Boston: Wisdom Publications. p. 534.

2. It is occasionally said that spiritual practice leads to the experience of “bliss” and that consciousness itself is inherently blissful. How are we to understand this? The term bliss does not get much use in Western discourse—and should one ever have occasion to utter it, it will place one’s listeners immediately on their guard. Even with reference to sex the word smacks of grandiosity, as though one were asserting something unique about one’s capacity for pleasure. A contemplative who speaks of “spiritual bliss” seems to be making an unusual claim to pleasure, to be luxuriating in obscure stirrings of his nervous system, and this does not engender respect anywhere but among the similarly engorged. One who would spend hours each day absorbed in the bliss of meditation seems rather like a heroin addict or an onanist who has transcended the use of his hands. To find a fount of bliss somewhere within one’s nervous system is simply undignified.

But an empirical claim here stands to be tested. The claim is that consciousness, prior to self-representation, is intrinsically “blissful.” It is not a matter of a gross thrill or a constant feeling of joy, but there is a feeling tone to consciousness, and once realized, it can be felt to permeate every aspect of experience. This is how it can be said in the teachings of Buddhist and Hindu Tantra that “desire arises as bliss,” for indeed it can—if desire is recognized as a mere inflection of consciousness. Of course, if desire is not recognized but merely felt, then it arises as a problem to be solved by the acquisition of its object. It is in this sense that desire is generally described as an obstacle to meditation.

3. D. Parfit. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 279–80.

4. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, for instance, saw the problem quite clearly:

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. . . . Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience which is pleaded for them; nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explained. For, from what impression could this idea be derived? . . . If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea. . . . For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. (D. Hume. Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Section 6.)

5. R. A. Emmons and M. E. McCullough. 2003. “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2): 377–89.

6. Needless to say, I packed at first light and found a new hotel. Upon checking in, I described my morning’s ordeal to the man at the front desk, expecting him to be amused to hear how bad things were under the roof of one of his competitors: The rat was not only in my room, it was in the bed, under the covers. He remained silent for a long moment, looking vaguely bored. I began to wonder if I had misjudged his English. “We have rats too,” he said, as he handed me my key.

7. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. 2004. Rainbow Painting. Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe Publications, p. 53.

8. M. Botvinick and J. Cohen. 1998. “Rubber Hands ‘Feel’ Touch That Eyes See.” Nature 391(6669): 756.

9. V. I. Petkova and H. H. Ehrsson. 2008. “If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping.” PLoS ONE 3(12): e3832.

10Thought insertion is the sense that thoughts are being placed in one’s mind by others. The delusion of control is the belief that one’s actions and impulses are being controlled by an external force (such as a television or alien beings).

11. Charles Darwin seems to have been the first to perform a test of this sort, by merely exposing two orangutans to a mirror. The modern version of this test was brought into prominence by the work of Gordon Gallup in the 1970s.

12. For a related argument, see A. Morin. 2002. “Right Hemispheric Self-Awareness: A Critical Assessment.” Conscious Cogn 11(3): 396–401.

13. N. Breen, D. Caine, and M. Coltheart. 2001. “Mirrored-Self Misidentification: Two Cases of Focal Onset Dementia.” Neurocase 7(3): 239–54.

14. D. Premack and G. Woodruff. 1978. “Chimpanzee Problem-Solving: A Test for Comprehension.” Science 202(4367): 532–35; C. D. Frith and U. Frith. 2006. “The Neural Basis of Mentalizing.” Neuron 50(4): 531–34; U. Frith, J. Morton, and A. M. Leslie. 1991. “The Cognitive Basis of a Biological Disorder: Autism.” Trends Neurosci 14(10): 433–38; S. Baron-Cohen. 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; K. Vogeley et al. 2001. “Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Theory of Mind and Self-Perspective.” Neuroimage 14(1), Pt. 1; D. C. Dennett. 1987. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

15. J. Delacour. 1995. “An Introduction to the Biology of Consciousness.” Neuropsychologia 33(9): 1061–74; E. Goldberg. 2001. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press; F. Happe. 2003. “Theory of Mind and the Self.” Ann N Y Acad Sci 1001: 134–44; M. Iacoboni. 2008. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; M. Merleau-Ponty. 1964. The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; V. S. Ramachandran. “The Neurology of Self-Awareness.” Undated. Edge.org; J.-P. Sartre. [1956] 1994. Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Gramercy Books.

16. K. Vogeley et al. 1995. “Mind Reading: Neural Mechanisms of Theory of Mind and Self-Perspective” and P. C. Fletcher et al. 1995. “Other Minds in the Brain: A Functional Imaging Study of ‘Theory of Mind’ in Story Comprehension.” Cognition 57(2) use the same story as a stimulus. Saxe and Kanwisher also take the same basic approach: R. Saxe and N. Kanwisher. 2003. “People Thinking about Thinking People: The Role of the Temporo-parietal Junction in ‘Theory of Mind.’ ” Neuroimage 19(4).

17. Sartre, Being and Nothingness.

18. It seems intuitively obvious that there is a necessary connection between having a sense of self (as opposed to a perfectly nondualistic perception of the world) and the social experience of “self-consciousness.” The latter phenomenon appears to be an inflection of the former—in the same way that feeling an object’s hardness is just a special case of feeling its solidity. As with so much that interests us about the world, there seems little chance of our proving this connection in a rigorous way. It falls to anyone who would dissociate these concepts to describe a case of self-consciousness that does not entail the experience of selfhood, and an experience of selfhood that does not admit of the possibility of self-consciousness.

19. Ramachandran, “The Neurology of Self-Awareness.”

20. J. T. Kaplan and M. Iacoboni. 2006. “Getting a Grip on Other Minds: Mirror Neurons, Intention Understanding, and Cognitive Empathy.” Soc Neurosci 1(3–4): 175–83; I. Molnar-Szakacs, J. Kaplan, P. M. Greenfield, and M. Iacoboni. 2006. “Observing Complex Action Sequences: The Role of the Fronto-Parietal Mirror Neuron System.” Neuroimage 33(3): 923–35.

21. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, pp. 132–45; M. Iacoboni and M. Dapretto. 2006. “The Mirror Neuron System and the Consequences of Its Dysfunction.” Nat Rev Neurosci 7(12): 942–51.

22. M. Dapretto, M. S. Davies, J. H. Pfeifer, A. A. Scott, M. Sigman, S. Y. Bookheimer, and M. Iacoboni. 2006. “Understanding Emotions in Others: Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.” Nat Neurosci 9(1): 28–30.

23. J. S. Mascaro et al. 2012. “Compassion Meditation Enhances Empathic Accuracy and Related Neural Activity.” In Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. September 5. doi:10.1093/scan/nss095. While findings of this kind are certainly interesting, the jury is still out on the significance of mirror neurons. And we should not forget that despite the presence of mirror neurons in their brains, monkeys lack language and TOM. They also show very little in the way of empathy.

Chapter 4: Meditation

1. M. A. Killingsworth and D. T. Gilbert. 2010. “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.Science 330: 932.

2. M. E. Raichle et al. 2001. “A Default Mode of Brain Function.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98(2): 676–82.

3. A. D’Argembeau et al. 2008. “Self-Reflection across Time: Cortical Midline Structures Differentiate between Present and Past Selves.” Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 3(3): 244–52; D. A. Gusnard et al. 2001. “Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Self-Referential Mental Activity: Relation to a Default Mode of Brain Function.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98(7): 4259–64; J. P. Mitchell, C. N. Macrae, and M. R. Banaji. 2006. “Dissociable Medial Prefrontal Contributions to Judgments of Similar and Dissimilar Others.” Neuron 50(4): 655–63; J. M. Moran et al. 2006. “Neuroanatomical Evidence for Distinct Cognitive and Affective Components of Self.” J Cogn Neurosci 18(9): 1586–94; G. Northoff et al. 2006. “Self-Referential Processing in Our Brain: A Meta-Analysis of Imaging Studies on the Self.” Neuroimage 31(1): 440–57; F. Schneider et al. 2008. “The Resting Brain and Our Self: Self-Relatedness Modulates Resting State Neural Activity in Cortical Midline Structures.” Neuroscience 157(1): 120–31.

4. K. Vogeley et al. 2004. “Neural Correlates of First-Person Perspective as One Constituent of Human Self-Consciousness.” J Cogn Neurosci 16(5): 817–27. One study compared Eastern and Western differences in self-representation and found that while both groups showed more midline activity when applying personal adjectives to the self than to another person, Chinese subjects also showed the same effect for judgments about their mothers. The experimenters interpreted this to mean that the Chinese harbor a more collectivist conception of the “self.” Y. Zhu et al. 2007. “Neural Basis of Cultural Influence on Self-Representation.” Neuroimage 34(3): 1310–16.

5. Y. I. Sheline et al. 2009. “The Default Mode Network and Self-Referential Processes in Depression.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106(6): 1942–47.

6. J. A. Brewer et al. 2011. “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(50): 20254–59; Véronique A. Taylor et al. 2011. “Impact of Mindfulness on the Neural Responses to Emotional Pictures in Experienced and Beginner Meditators.” NeuroImage 57: 1524–33. Psilocybin reduces activity in these brain areas as well, and to an extraordinary degree: Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al. 2012. “Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 23.

7. E. Luders et al. 2012. “The Unique Brain Anatomy of Meditation Practitioners: Alterations in Cortical Gyrification.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6:34; P. Vestergaard-Poulsen et al. 2009. “Long-Term Meditation Is Associated with Increased Gray Matter Density in the Brain Stem.” Neuroreport 20: 170–74; S. W. Lazar et al. 2005. “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness.” Neuroreport 16: 1893–97; Eileen Luders et al. 2012. “Global and Regional Alterations of Hippocampal Anatomy in Long-Term Meditation Practitioners.” Human Brain Mapping 34(12): 3369–75.

8. A. Lutz et al. 2012. “Altered Anterior Insula Activation During Anticipation and Experience of Painful Stimuli in Expert Meditators.” Neuroimage 64: 538–46.

9. F. Zeidan et al. 2011. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” Pain 31: 5540–48.

10. R. J. Davidson and B. S McEwen. 2012. “Social Influences on Neuroplasticity: Stress and Interventions to Promote Well-Being.” Nature Neuroscience 15(5): 689–95.

11http://www.news.wisc.edu/22370.

12. C. A. Moyer et al. 2011. “Frontal Electroencephalographic Asymmetry Associated With Positive Emotion Is Produced by Very Brief Meditation Training.” Psychological Science 22(10): 1277–79.

13. S.-L. Keng, M. J. Smoski, and C. J. Robins. 2011. “Effects of Mindfulness on Psychological Health: A Review of Empirical Studies.” Clinical Psychology Review 31: 1041–56; B. K. Holzel et al. 2011. “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 537–59.

14. J. S. Mascaro et al. 2012. “Compassion Meditation Enhances Empathic Accuracy and Related Neural Activity.” In Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8(1): 48–55.

15. O. M. Klimecki et al. 1991. “Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect after Compassion Training.” Cerebral Cortex 23(7): 1552–61.

16. M. E. Kemeny et al. 2012. “Contemplative/Emotion Training Reduces Negative Emotional Behavior and Promotes Prosocial Responses.” Emotion 12: 338–50.

17. M. Sayadaw. 1957. Buddhist Meditation and Its Forty Subjects, trans. U Pe Thin. Buddha Sasana Council Press; M. Sayadaw. 1983. Thoughts on the Dhamma. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society; M. Sayadaw. 1985. The Progress of Insight, trans. Nyanaponika Thera. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

18. R. Maharshi. 1984. Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi. Tiruvanamallai: Sri Ramanashramam, p. 314.

19. D. Godman, ed. 1985. Be as You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. New York: Arkana, p. 55.

20. E. Mach. 1914. The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical. Chicago: Open Court, p. 19.

21. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett. 1981. The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul. New York: Basic Books, pp. 23–33.

22. Ibid., p. 30.

Chapter 5: Gurus, Death, Drugs, and Other Puzzles

1The Gateless Gate (Japanese: Mumonkan). http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/zen/mumonkan.htm.

2. G. Feuerstein. 2006. Holy Madness: Spirituality, Crazy-Wise Teachers, and Enlightenment. Rev. and expanded ed. Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, p. 108.

3. F. FitzGerald. 1981. Cities on a Hill. New York: Touchstone.

4. P. Marin. 1979. “Spiritual Obedience.” Harper’s (February), p. 44.

5. E. Weinberger. 1986. Works on Paper. New York: New Directions, p. 31.

6. C. Trungpa. 1987. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Boston: Shambhala, pp. 173–74.

7. For instance, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otGQqO2TYMI.

Osho was by no means the absolute worst the New Age had to offer. There is no question that he harmed many people in the end—and perhaps in the beginning and middle as well—but he wasn’t simply a lunatic or a con artist. Osho struck me as a very insightful man who had much to teach but who grew increasingly intoxicated by the power of his role and then went properly bonkers in it. When you spend your days sniffing nitrous oxide, demanding fellatio at forty-five-minute intervals, making sacred gifts of your fingernail clippings, and shopping for your ninety-fourth Rolls Royce, you might wonder whether you’ve wandered a step or two off the path to liberation.

8. Harris, The End of Faith, pp. 295–96.

9. G. D. Falk. 2009. Stripping the Gurus. Toronto: Million Monkeys Press.

10. See, for example, D. Radin. 1997. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New York: HarperEdge.

11. E. F. Kelly et al. 2007. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, p. 372.

12. Ibid., p. 374.

13. Ibid., p. 371.

14. Even supposed evidence for rebirth—such as when a person, usually a child, is alleged to recall facts that prove he or she is the reincarnate personality of a deceased person—seems impossible to disentangle from the question of psi.

15. E. Alexander. 2012. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. New York: Simon & Schuster, jacket quote.

16. E. Alexander. 2012. “Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience of the Afterlife.” Newsweek.

17. A. E. Cavanna et al. 2010. “The Neural Correlates of Impaired Consciousness in Coma and Unresponsive States.” Discov Med 9(48): 431–38.

18. Alex Tsakiris. 2011. “Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander’s Near-Death Experience Defies Medical Model of Consciousness.” Skeptico. November 22. http://www.skeptiko.com/154-neurosurgeon-dr-eben-alexander-near-death-experience/.

19. Terence McKenna. 1992. Food of the Gods. New York: Bantam Books, pp. 258–59.

20. The general differences between neurosurgeons and neuroscientists may explain some of Alexander’s errors. The distinction in expertise is very easy to see when viewed from the other side: If a neuroscientist were handed a drill and a scalpel and told to operate on a living person’s brain, the result would be horrific. From a scientific point of view, Alexander’s performance is no prettier. He has surely killed the patient, but the man won’t stop drilling. In fact, he may have helped kill Newsweek, which announced immediately after his article ran that it would no longer publish a print edition.

21. A wide literature now suggests that MDMA can damage serotonin-producing neurons and decrease levels of serotonin in the brain. There are credible claims, however, that many of these studies used poor controls or dosages in lab animals that were too high to model human use of the drug.

22. Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al. 2011. “Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. December 20. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/17/1119598109.

23. Terence McKenna is one person I regret not getting to know. Unfortunately, he died from brain cancer in 2000, at the age of fifty-three. His books are well worth reading, but he was, above all, an amazing speaker. It is true that his eloquence often led him to adopt positions that can only be described (charitably) as “wacky,” but he was undeniably brilliant and always worth listening to.

24. It is important to note that MDMA doesn’t tend to have these properties—and many people would say that it shouldn’t be considered a psychedelic at all. The terms empathogen and entactogen have been used to describe MDMA and other compounds whose effect is primarily emotional and pro-social.

25. I should say, however, that there are psychedelic experiences I have not had that appear to deliver a different message. Some people have experiences that, rather than being states in which the boundaries of the self are dissolved, appear to transport the self (in some form) elsewhere. This phenomenon is very common with the drug DMT, and it can lead its initiates to some startling conclusions about the nature of reality. More than anyone else, Terence McKenna was influential in bringing the phenomenology of DMT into prominence.

DMT is unique among psychedelics for several reasons. Everyone who has tried it seems to agree that it is the most potent hallucinogen available in terms of its effects. It is also, paradoxically, the shortest-acting. Whereas the effects of LSD can last ten hours, the DMT trance dawns in less than a minute and subsides in ten. One reason for such steep pharmacokinetics seems to be that this compound already exists inside the human brain and is readily metabolized by monoaminoxidase. DMT is in the same chemical class as psilocybin and the neurotransmitter serotonin (but, in addition to having an affinity for 5-HT2A receptors, it has been shown to bind to the sigma-1 receptor and modulate Na+ channels). Its function in the human body remains unknown. Among the many mysteries and insults presented by DMT, it offers a final mockery of our drug laws: Not only have we criminalized naturally occurring substances such as cannabis, but we have criminalized one of our own neurotransmitters. Many users of DMT report being thrust under its influence into an adjacent reality where they are met by alien beings who appear intent upon sharing information and demonstrating the use of inscrutable technologies. The convergence of hundreds of such reports, many from first-time users of the drug who have not been told what to expect, is certainly interesting. It is also worth noting that these accounts are almost entirely free of religious imagery. One appears far more likely to meet extraterrestrials or elves on DMT than traditional saints or angels. I have not tried DMT and have not had an experience of the sort that its users describe, so I don’t know what to make of any of this.

26. Of course, James was reporting his experiences with nitrous oxide, which is an anesthetic. Other anesthetics, such as ketamine hydrochloride and phencyclidine hydrochloride (PCP), have similar effects on mood and cognition at low doses. However, these drugs differ from classic psychedelics in many ways—one being that high doses of the latter do not lead to general anesthesia.

27. W. James. 1958. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: New American Library. p. 298.