B. Alan Wallace's First Revolution in the Mind Sciences: Where's the beef?

A recent mailing from meditationlist (meditationlist@lists.wisc.edu) gives a link to a video recording of a lecture recently given by B. Alan Wallace at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA. (On June 1 I posted a condensation of ideas in his recent book "The Attention Revolution"... also see the brief biography at end of this post).

Wallace argues that John Searles position ( "Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain" ) represents an "Illusion of Knowledge." a modern physicalist resistance to using introspection or accepting discoveries made with it, in favor of focus on behavioral and neural correlates of mental phenomena. He suggests an analogy with medieval theological resistance to Galileo, the refusal to use the telescope or accept discoveries made with it. He thinks that there should be a long delayed revolution in the mind sciences, to finally take up the challenges of William James ("Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always..") and Wilhelm Wundt: ("The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation...."). He cites the 3,000 year old tradition of awareness training and introspection in Buddhism as one example of an appropriate approach to these goals (and in the discussion period he also mentions, Hindu, native american, and other meditative traditions.)

I'm entirely sympathetic with Wallace's goals and work, but I think that he's setting up a bit of a straw man in his extreme portrayals of physicalists or materialists (many of whom are quite open to any avenue of insight they can find). The problem I think is that his analogy with other scientific revolutions fails on the issue of universality and ability to reproduce basic introspective observations. Galileo's and Darwin's observations and measurements can be reproduced by anyone in any culture having appropriate equipment. In the period after William James' challenge and before the behaviorists' 50+ year death grip on progress in psychology a number of groups pursuing an introspective approach could not agree on many basic observations (Wallace commented on, but did not really address this issue in the discussion period). The introspective and meditative approaches associated with many different cultures and religions don't seem remotely close to yielding a unified introspective description of consciousness and our mental processes that transcends their cultural origins in the way that astronomy and biology do.

Still, I think that the Buddha was the first great human biologist in his astute descriptions of levels of human behavior that corresponds roughly to stages in the biological evolution of our own brains and behavior (see my "Beast Within" essay). The mutual reinforcement of ancient introspective and modern scientific traditions yields some robustness, and perhaps the prospect of an eventual union of materialistic and mentalistic perspectives. Perhaps this will yield the "consciousness meter," analogous to a telescope or microscope, than we are now lacking.

Biography:
Wallace is president of The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, authored, and contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion. Dr. Wallace is a primary contributer to meditation research projects, including the Cultivating Emotional Balance project and the Shamatha project.

Wallace's published works include Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Snow Lion, 1996), The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (Oxford, 2000), Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia University Press 2003), Balancing the Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist Approach to Refining Attention (Snow Lion, 2005), and Genuine Happiness: Meditation as the Path to Fulfillment (John Wiley & Sons, 2005)

http://alanwallace.org
http://sbinstitute.com

The Attention Revolution

This is the title of a book by Allan Wallace which gives systematic instruction in building our capacity for calm and simple attention. For most of us, life is a series of constant distractions and multitasking - many of us move well towards the clinical definition of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Drugs such as ritalin that calm and focus the mind are widely used.

Wallace presents meditative techniques developed by contemplatives for millennia that have attentional stability as their core element. They enhance the capacity for attention, and strengthen this mental ability as as we might strengthen our muscles through physical exercise. Their goal is to counter the oscillation between the restlessness and boredom, or between the agitation and dullness, of the untrained mind. I'm providing a longer than usual blog posting on this book, abstracting points from the book that seem most useful or interesting to me.

Wallace uses a 10- step framework or path provided by the 8th century Indian Buddhist contemplative Kamalashila in his classic work "Stages of Meditation." He makes interesting comparisons of the different approaches of several Buddhist traditions. The early steps emphasize mindfulness of breathing with relaxation, stability, and vividness. The practice of focused attention is essentially "non-multitaking"

Meditation is a balancing act between attention and relaxation. While sustaining attention on a focused object such as breathing there is no effort to block distraction that arise. They are simply noted and released to return to the object of attention. During what Wallace terms 'coarse excitation' the object is completely displaced from awareness for a period, while in 'subtle excitation' the object is held in mind while other thoughts, feelings and emotions are noted in the mind's periphery (like losing your radio station completely versus having it obscured by static or drift). In 'coarse laxity' attention detaches from the object and sinks into a spaced out vacancy, like having your radio reception fade out. In 'subtle laxity' attention remains but is of low intensity and vividness.

A quote from Wallace: "While the main force of your awareness is directed to the meditation object with mindfulness, this needs to be supported with the faculty of introspection, which allows for the quality control of attention, enabling you to swiftly note when the mind has fallen into either excitation or laxity. As soon as you detect either imbalance, take the necessary steps to remedy it. Your first antidote to excitation is to relax more deeply; to counteract laxity, arouse your attention."

Mindfulness in modern psychological accounts, and also the Vipassana (contemplative ingiths) tradition of Theravada Buddhism (Southeast Asia), refers to the moment to moment awareness of contents passing through the mind that does not label or categorize experiences. This differs from the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist version that "characterizes mindfulness as bearing in mind the object of attention, the state of not forgetting, not being distracted, and not floating." (If I read the text correctly, what the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist practice calls 'introspection' is similar to the mindfullness of the Theravada Buddhist practice.. indeed, yes, see page 120). Both are similar to what psychologists call 'metacognition.' The central point seems to be that one has the goal of keeping in mind a single object, such as an aspect of breathing, and then notes perturbations of that process by transient excitation or laxity. The mind watches itself.

The fifth step in the 10 step framework moves away attention to breath and to the practice of "settling the mind in its natural state," that is, without the distraction of it being carried away by thoughts and sense impressions. Eyes are left open to allow the conceptually superimposed demarcation between inner and outer to erode. Thoughts come and go, but because you are not distracted by them and don't grasp onto them, your awareness remains still. This is called the fusion of stillness and movement. This practice strengthens the psychological immune system, so that previously upsetting thoughts are now handled with greater composure.

As lapses between thoughts increase in length, awareness increasingly hovers in a kind of empty space or vacuum devoid of personhood. (My own experience leads me to feel that that this is the intuitive experience of our brain's 'self-generator' in a more quiescent state, with the generation of emotions or self models greatly attentuated). The loss of the normal sense of who you are can cause fear and dread, but this can pass as one realizes "there is no danger in the empty, luminous space of awareness. You have nothing to lose but your false sense of an independent, controlling ego." (cf. my "I-Illusion" essay on this website.)

In both the Theravada and the Indo-Tibetan traditions of Buddhism, cultivation of bare attention or concentration combined with introspection or mindfulness leads to experiential realization of the ground state of the psyche, "the ground of becoming," which supports all kinds of mental activities and sensory perceptions, as the root of a tree sustains the trunk, branches, and leaves. The "natural state" of the mind, according to Buddhist contemplatives, is bliss, luminosity, and nonconceptuality. Wallace makes descriptions of bliss and luminosity that suggest to me correlations with parasympathetic (mellowing out) versus sympathetic (arousal) activity in our autonomic nervous systems.

There is an enduring debate among the schools of Tibetan Buddhism over the nature of primordial consciousness - whether the 'enlightened consciousness' is something that is cultivated or something that is merely uncovered. In either case, it is accessed by first refining one's powers of attention, and then using that ability as an aid in exploring and purifying the mind through first person observation.

Shamatha is the tenth and final stage of attentional development, and can be reached at will by experienced practioners. Wallace quotes Dudjom Lingpa: "Eventually all coarse and subtle thoughts will be calmed int he empty expanse of the essential nature of your mind. You will become still in an unfluctuating state, in which you will experience joy like the warmth of a fire, clarity like the dawn, and non-conceptuality like an ocean unmoved by waves."

Sounds good to me. Guess I'm not quite there yet!!

Stressing out or Chilling out changes how our genes are expressed in an immediate and dynamic way.

Bittman et al., in "Recreational music-making modulates the stress response and alters individual gene expression," have followed the expression of 45 genes associated with stress, immune, and inflammation responses after one hour of a stress induction protocol (solving a 500 piece puzzle while being told at 10 minute intervals that other subjects were doing better). Subjects were then split into three groups for a further hour: one continued the stressful situation, the second read a newspaper, and the third participated in a recreational music making session (the clavinova connection). In the latter group 19 genes expression changes caused by stress were significantly reversed. None were reversed in the group continuing the stress test and 6 reversed in the group just reading a newspaper.

Why do I feel an urge to write about how the mind works?

Here are some sentences trying to put together one motivation for doing this website and this mindblog....and for working up a new web essay titled "The Merging of Minds" .. about how our behavior is unconsciously regulated by our social brains and their mirroring systems. If you are reading this (I don't know whether the counter on this web page is monitoring real people or web-bots) I would appreciate any expression of interest or disinterest. (Feedback on this site is very close to zero).

Some sentences of rationale:

Understanding the biological processes that generate our sense of self, our feelings, and our connections to each other reveals engines of our behavior previously hidden from our awareness. Using our awareness to get partial glimpses of those engines in action can loosen their iron grip and let our behaviors be more spontaneous and competent.

I want to cast this material in the form of the lived body understanding it as it plays out in our self observed moment-to-moment behavior, in addition to the more conventional expository writing. This was the point of the self exercises in my "Biology of Mind" book.

Power of Prayer? - apparently not.....

Herbert Benson, author of "The Relaxation Response" and researcher into medical effects of relaxation and prayer has just published, along his coworkers, some long awaited results: "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer." (American Heart Journal Volume 151, Issue 4 , April 2006, Pages 934-942). There have been several claims that prayer by strangers could ameliorate the condition of patients at another location (by unknown or supernatural forces...). Over ten studies have been carried out over the past six years with mixed results, but none approached the scientific rigor and number of patients involved in Benson's study.

Not only were there no effects of prayer, but the third of the subjects who were informed that they were being prayed for did slightly worse (performance anxiety?)

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

More on how meditation may increase the thickness of some cortical areas

An interview with Sandra Lazar. in Science and Consciousness Review. "The most significant ... difference was in the right anterior insula. The right anterior insula has been identified in many studies of emotion processing, as well as in studies of attention and cognition. It has also been shown to be involved in modulating physiology, and has strong connections with other brain areas that are more centrally involved in these processes (for example the amygdala, brain stem and frontal cortex). It is thought to relay and integrate these signals between the various areas, in order to influence behavior (i.e., it connects emotional regions with the decision-making part of the brain, so that emotions can influence your decisions). It is not yet clear what increased thickness means; those experiments are just beginning. However we hypothesize that increased thickness will correlate with increased ability to perform certain tasks that require the integration of emotion and cognition --- for example, handling stressful situations.

Mindful awareness and my frontal lobes?

A note by Sara Lazar et al. in Neuroreport proposes that mindful awareness meditation causes increases in the thickness of areas of the frontal lobes associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing (the sample size is small). It is known that brain areas associated with other skilled activities such as juggling or playing the piano increase in size with practice.

I find it difficult to communicate my experience of mindful awareness. It seems like a contentless animal kind of openness that observes mind products such as thoughts, feelings, and emotions as they rise and decay, sensing itself as distinct from completely being them. This is very different from my usual more immersed self that feels itself to be completely defined by those thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This losing of a normal self, paradoxically, yields a platform for acting in the real world that others experience as a strong presence of self. One description would be that this platform is continually making such distinctions as that between being an angry person and noting the process of angry-ing as it appears and disappears. (I try to expand on this in Mindstuff: a guide for the curious user)

Replace religions with contemplative science?

From the Mind and Life Institute web site:
Huffington Post.com recently posted an article about a silent meditation retreat recently held in Barre, Massachusetts. The retreat, sponsored by the Insight Meditation Society and the Mind and Life Institute, was specifically designed for the scientific community: physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and clinicians. Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith", wrote the article, "A Contemplative Science," to chronicle his experience as a participant at the retreat.

Harris poses the premise that the retreat "could mark the beginning of a discourse on ethics and spiritual experience that is as unconstrained by dogma and cultural prejudice as the discourses of physics, biology, and chemistry." Since more retreats for scientists are planned, Harris further says, "we could be witnessing the birth of a contemplative science."