Super Brain (37 page)

The creative source is a field of infinite possibilities.

That field is everywhere, including inside your own awareness.

Capture the source of pure awareness, and you will have all possibilities within your reach.

This sequence represents knowledge that is thousands of years old, coming from sages who were Einsteins of consciousness. Once you return to your source, which is pure consciousness, you regain control over qualia. If you are receiving negative messages about your life—which can be negative thoughts “in here” or negative events “out there,” these are all qualia. Which means that they can be changed if you change your consciousness.

Regaining control over qualia is the key to reshaping the brain and your personal reality at the same time. Sages and seers in the Eastern tradition would greet this argument with a smile and a shrugged “of course.” In a materialistic age, it makes jaws drop.

By now, some readers may be crying foul play. Here they are reading a brain book, and suddenly the brain has vanished! It has been replaced by all-pervading consciousness. Skeptics will have none of it (believe us, we’ve butted heads with them). They won’t budge from a stubborn insistence that consciousness
is
the brain. But Hoffman doesn’t back down. He picks up this book’s basic premise, that you are the user of your brain, not the other way around, and takes it to the limit: “Consciousness creates brain activity and the material objects of the world.” In other words, we aren’t machines that learned to think; we are thoughts that learned how to make machines. Once you accept this, the entire reality illusion explodes.

Consciousness Outside the Brain

Having gotten this far, which side do you think is right? If you believe that your brain is the creator of consciousness, then the materialists can win every argument. And not just materialists—also atheists, who believe that the mind dies when the brain dies. We can include too those people who have no ax to grind against God but simply accept that rocks are hard, water wet, and so on, all the commonsense experiences that hold the everyday world together. But the truth will out, and if it’s true that consciousness comes first and the brain second, there has to be evidence for it.

Let’s turn, then, to experimental proof. As early as the 1960s, pioneering researchers T. D. Duane and T. Behrendt demonstrated that brain-wave patterns of two distant individuals can sync with each other. The experiment involved the EEGs of identical twins. (This was decades before modern brain-imaging techniques like MRIs.)

In order to test anecdotal reports that twins share the same feelings and physical sensations, even when they are far apart, the researchers altered the EEG pattern of one twin and observed the effect on the other. In two of fifteen pairs of twins, when one twin closed his eyes, it produced an immediate alpha rhythm not only in his own brain but also in the brain of the other twin, even though he kept his eyes open and was sitting in a lighted room.

Were they participating in a shared mind, which is what some identical twins feel (although not all)? Striking anecdotes reinforce this finding. In his probing book,
The One Mind
, Dr. Larry Dossey presents the Duane-Behrendt study and relates a story in support:

One case involved the identical twins Ross and Norris McWhirter, who were well known in Britain as co-editors of the
Guinness Book of Records
. On November 27, 1975, Ross was fatally shot in the head and chest by two gunmen on the doorstep of his north London home. According to an individual who was with his twin brother Norris, Norris reacted in a dramatic way at the time of the shooting, almost as if he too had been shot “by an invisible bullet.”

Related studies prove that one mind can connect with another, as indicated by brain-wave correlations. (Rudy himself is a fraternal twin with his sister Anne. To his amazement, when he has a sudden urge to call her, he finds that she is feeling physically or mentally under the weather—somehow he senses that something is wrong.) Not just twins—nursing mothers are in sync with their babies and healers with their patients. In the framework of materialism, the
existence of healers is scoffed at, but Dossey cites a pioneering study of native Hawaiian healers led by the late Dr. Jeanne Achterberg, a physiologist of the mind-body connection who was fascinated by anecdotes that native healers often did their work from a distance.

In 2005, after a two-year search, Achterberg and her colleagues gathered eleven Hawaiian healers. Each had pursued their native healing tradition for an average of twenty-three years. The healers were asked to select a person with whom they had successfully worked in the past and with whom they felt an empathic connection. This person would be the recipient of healing in a controlled setting. The healers described their methods in a variety of ways—as praying, sending energy or good intentions, or simply thinking and wishing the highest good for their subjects. Achterberg simply called these efforts distant intentionality (DI).

Each recipient was isolated from the healer while undergoing an fMRI of their brain activity. The healers were asked to randomly send DI at two-minute intervals; the recipients could not have anticipated when the DI was being sent. But their brains did. Significant differences were found between the experimental (send) periods and control (no-send) periods in ten out of eleven cases. For the send periods, specific areas within the subjects’ brains “lit up” on the fMRI scan, indicating increased metabolic activity. This did not occur during the no-send periods. Dossey writes, “The areas of the brain that were activated included the anterior and middle cingulate areas, precuneus, and frontal areas. There was less than approximately one chance in 10,000 that these results could be explained by chance.”

Buddhism and other Eastern spiritual traditions view compassion as a universal condition, shared by the human mind as a whole. This study offers support by showing that compassion being sent by one person can exert measurable physical effects on another person at a distance. Empathic bonds are real. They can cross the space that seems to separate “me” from “you.” This connection isn’t physical; it’s invisible and extends outside the brain.

Thinking this way doesn’t come naturally anymore, although over 80 percent of people, if asked whether God exists, still say yes. God must have a mind if he (or she) exists, and it would be impossible to argue that God’s mind was created inside the human brain. It makes people uncomfortable to shake their worldview, however, even when the evidence—from physics, brain studies, and the experience of sages and seers for thousands of years—offers a new reality. Since a new reality would benefit every one of us, let’s go into the lion’s den and show why consciousness could not
possibly
be created by the brain.

In January 2010 Ray Tallis, who is described as a polymath, atheist, and physician, mounted a pointed challenge to “the brain comes first” position. His article in the journal
New Scientist
was titled “Why You Won’t Find Consciousness in the Brain.” As a “neuroskeptic,” Tallis attacks the most basic evidence that makes scientists believe that the brain creates consciousness: those by-now-familiar fMRI scans that show regions of the brain lighting up in correlation with mental activity. At this point the reader already knows a good deal about them. Tallis repeats some of the points we’ve been making.

One of the first things a scientist is taught is that a correlation isn’t a cause. Radios light up when music plays, but they don’t create music. Likewise, one could argue that brain activity doesn’t create thoughts, even though we now can see which areas are lighting up.

Neural networks map out and mediate electrical activity. They aren’t actually thinking.

Electrical activity isn’t the same as having an experience, which is what happens in consciousness.

Warming to his subject, Tallis offers other very telling challenges, such as the following. Science hasn’t come close to explaining how it is that we can see the world as a whole but can also pick out details if we want to. Tallis calls this “merging without mushing.” You can look into a crowd and see it as a sea of faces, for example, but you can also pick out a face you recognize. “My sensory
field is a many-layered whole that also maintains its multiplicity,” writes Tallis. No one can describe how a neuron has this ability, because it doesn’t.

Asking the brain to “store” memory is impossible, Tallis contends. Chemical and electrical reactions happen only in the present. A synapse fires now, with nothing left over from the previous minute, much less the distant past. After the firing is over, the chemical signals that cross the synapse reset to their default position. The brain can strengthen certain synapses while weakening others through a process called
long-term potentation
. This is how certain memories become hardwired, while others do not. The question is whether the brain is capable of remembering what it did in the past, or is it actually consciousness that does this. Salt can dissolve only at the moment when you stir it into a glass of water. It can’t store a memory of dissolving in water in 1989.

Tallis notes that there are even more basic issues, such as the self—no brain location has been found for
I
, the person who is having an experience. You simply know that you exist. Nothing lights up in your brain; no calories are expended to keep your sense of self going. For all intents and purposes, if the self had to be proven scientifically, a skeptic could examine brain scans and prove that there is no
I
, except that obviously there is, brain scans or not.
I
is actually operating the whole brain. It is creating pictures of the world without jumping into the picture, just as a painter creates paintings without jumping into them. To say that the brain creates the self is like saying that paintings create their painters. It doesn’t hold up.

Then there is the initiation of action. If the brain is a biological machine, as materialists agree (a famous phrase from an expert in artificial intelligence dubs the brain “a computer made of meat”), how does the machine come up with new, unexpected choices? The most powerful computer in the world doesn’t say “I want a day off” or “Let’s talk about something else.” It has no choice but to follow its programming.

So how can a machine made of neurons change its mind, have a spontaneous impulse, refuse to behave reasonably, and do all the other tricky things we do on a whim? It can’t. This leads to free will, which strict determinism must deny. We all feel free in a Chinese restaurant to pick one dish from column A and another from column B. If every reaction in the brain is predetermined by the laws of chemistry and physics—as brain scientists insist—then the food you will order a week from now, or ten years from now, must be beyond your control. Which is absurd. Are we prisoners of the laws of physics or prisoners of our own blind assumptions?

Tallis’s reasoning is devastating, but it was easy to dismiss as philosophy, not science. (To echo a familiar phrase that crops up when a scientist’s thinking wanders beyond the accepted borders, “Shut up and calculate.”) Neuroscience can chug along without answering such challenges, using the defense that each riddle will be solved sometime in the future. No doubt many will (and Rudy is part of the effort). Unless the link is made to show how atoms and molecules learned to think, however, the scientific picture of reality will be fatally flawed.

We feel that the burden of proof has been met. The thorn patch has been crossed. What’s left is to show how you can master the qualia in your life. Negative signals can be turned into positive ones. More important, you can embrace the next step in your own evolution.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
WELL-BEING

Happiness is hard to attain and even harder to explain. But if you want to experience a state of well-being—defined as overall happiness and good health—the brain must send positive messages instead of negative ones. What does
positive
mean? It has to be more than a surge of pleasurable impulses when you have a nice experience. Cells need positive messages in order to survive. So let’s define positive as a qualia state. If the quality of your life is constantly being enhanced, its sights, sounds, tastes, and textures will always be shifting, but instead of being a chaotic mixture, there will be a lifelong trend in the direction of well-being.

The ingredients of well-being are yours to create and maintain. The controls exist “in here.” Take two people who have identical work, incomes, houses, social background, and education. Included in these things are years of experience. But each person processes their experience differently. At fifty, Mr. A feels tired, restless, a bit bored, and cynical. His enthusiasm for life is starting to wear out. He wonders if anything new will revive his spirits. Mr. B, on the other hand, feels young, engaged, and vital. He sees new challenges around the corner. If you asked, he would say that fifty is the best time in his life.

Clearly the two men have a markedly different level of well-being. What made the difference? In terms of the brain, all experience must be processed through chemical pathways, much as the raw energy in food is metabolized. Chemical processing looks the same in every healthy cell. If you could measure metabolism by watching every molecule of water, glucose, salt, and so on passing through the cell membrane, the quantities being used would be so close that any two people should be processing experiences the same way. But they
aren’t. The metabolism of experience—which is what your brain is doing—depends on the quality of life, not the quantity. That’s why we have leaned so heavily on qualia.

Well-being is a state in which experience has the following overall quality as it is metabolized in the brain:

You subtly feel that everything is okay.