Tag: neuroscience

Self and No Self

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

No Selfie

Many years ago, I began a meditation practice, sparked by curiosity and vague, middle-aged worries about stress and blood pressure. To my surprise, it quickly became a regular part of my life. I restlessly explored many forms of meditation and meditation groups, eventually coming to the San Francisco Zen Center. Before long, I found myself seated on a black cushion in the meditation hall each morning at 5:30. Twenty years later, and 2,500 miles away, I have a much more relaxed schedule, but I am still at it.

What is it like to meditate? This is a question I am constantly asked. Would a philosopher or scientist say there’s a distinct state of consciousness with its own special qualia? I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been doing it wrong, but meditation has never given me an experience that I would call altered consciousness. I’ve come to think the more interesting question is not what meditation feels like moment to moment, but what it is like to be a meditator, to live a life punctuated by these quiet, unremarkable moments of sitting still.

There are many ways our minds can store the details of our experience. We put facts and figures in one place, sensory experiences in another, and skills and procedures in yet another. There is a special kind of memory, called episodic memory, that holds not just the information about an event, but also a sense of our being there. Recalling episodic memories gives us a faint sense of time travel. These are the memories we can reinhabit. We remember a beach vacation as if we can feel the warm sand between our toes, hear the gulls above, and sense the light breeze on our skin. They have a lived-through quality, a presence that feels like “me.”

I have a torrent of episodic memories from my time in San Francisco, where I had just started a new job. I felt like a tourist; every street, every café, every meeting at the new company introduced a parade of unfamiliar faces. My memory was overloaded with experiences and sensations. It felt like my life had entered a new incarnation, complete with a new cast of characters I had to learn. As I stepped into a new role, I became, to some extent, a different person as I adapted to meet new duties and responsibilities. I was surrounded by people who each had hopes and expectations that I would be a good employee, a respectable colleague, and a friend. These hopes and expectations exerted palpable influences on my sense of self.

In the meditation hall, expectations were few. Read more »

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

An Embodied Mathematics

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

The Stepped Reckoner, a calculating machine invented by philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1674

Is mathematics created or discovered? For over two thousand years, that question has puzzled philosophers and mathematicians alike. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates encourages an uneducated boy to “discover” a geometrical truth simply by answering a series of guided questions. To Plato, this demonstrated that mathematical knowledge is innate, that the soul recalls truths it has always known. The intuitionists of the early twentieth century, however, rejected this idea of eternal forms. For thinkers like Poincaré and Brouwer, mathematics was not revelation but construction: an activity of the human mind unfolding in time.

The debate continues today in an unexpected new arena. As artificial intelligences start to generate proofs, conjectures, and even entire branches of formal reasoning, we are prompted to ask again: what does it mean to do mathematics? Current systems excel at symbol manipulation and pattern matching, but are they truly thinking in any meaningful way, or just rearranging signs? The deeper question is how humans do mathematics. What happens in the brain when a mathematician recognizes a pattern, intuitively sees a relation, or invents a new kind of number?

In what follows, I’ll trace that question from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and then to the newest foundations of mathematics. We’ll see that mathematical invention may be the natural expression of the brain’s recursive, embodied intelligence, and that this perspective could transform how we think about both mathematics and AI. Read more »

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Psychoanalysis 2.0

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

I began my psychiatric training in 1990, the year that marked the start of a program called the “Decade of the Brain.” This was a well-funded, high-profile initiative to promote neuroscience research, and it succeeded spectacularly. New imaging techniques, molecular insights, and psychopharmacological discoveries transformed psychiatry into a vibrant biomedical science. The program brought thousands of careers, including my own, into the neurosciences.

Despite its progress, the Decade of the Brain also widened an existing rift. This was the large gap between the psychoanalytic tradition and the biological sciences. The divide wasn’t new. Freud started with neurology but shifted to psychoanalysis when the brain sciences of his time couldn’t fully explain the complexities of the mind. For the first half of the 20th century, psychoanalysis was the main way to understand mental illness. Then, in the 1950s, new psychiatric drugs appeared: chlorpromazine for psychosis, lithium for mood disorders, and antidepressants for depression. For the first time, it seemed possible to treat mental illness by directly targeting the brain, rather than long-term therapy or institutional care.

By the time I was a resident, these diverging traditions had opened into a chasm. On one side was biological psychiatry, focused on neurotransmitters, neuroimaging, and cognitive-behavioral treatments, with outcomes that could be measured and tested. On the other side were psychoanalysis and its branches: attachment theory, object relations, and the investigation of unconscious conflicts through language, narrative, and symbolism. They had become separate languages, spoken within distinct professional communities, each wary of the other. There were occasional efforts at rapprochement, but little sustainable progress. By the end of the Decade of the Brain, reconciliation seemed almost impossible. I was fortunate to be in a training program that had a research track, allowing me to work in a lab, but I also had mentors who were distinguished analysts. It was like being in two different residencies.

Both have proven valuable over the years, but I never expected them to converge. However, today, circumstances appear to be shifting. A merging of neurobiology, computational neuroscience, and neuroimaging has created a new paradigm: active inference. For the first time, we can start to identify strong links between analytic models of the mind and biological models of the brain. Read more »

Wednesday, February 19, 2025

An ingenious new treatment for schizophrenia

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Molecular structures of xanomeline and trospium chloride. Note the positive charge (indicated by a +) on trospium chloride that restricts its actions to outside the brain.

Drugs for mental illness are notoriously hard. Human biology is complex, and the brain is even more complicated. We now have a good understanding of the basic mechanisms of neurotransmission, but the drugs we have for treating disorders like depression, anxiety and psychosis are often “spray and pray” approaches, either targeting the wrong mechanisms of dysfunction or targeting too many or too few. Antidepressants often stop working. Anti-anxiety medication can do little more than sedate. And many antipsychotic drugs have prohibitive side effects.

Nevertheless, there are rare cases when genuine breakthroughs occur in the field. Thorazine famously emptied out the cruel mental asylums of the 1950s and 1960s. L-DOPA provided genuine benefits for Parkinson’s patients. And there is no denying that the new generation of antidepressants works at least occasionally for a subset of patients. Last year one such potential breakthrough seemed to fly under the radar of breathless news dominated by politics and social issues. If its promise holds up, it could herald a new kind of treatment for schizophrenia.

As is well known, schizophrenia is a serious form of psychosis that is characterized by disordered thinking, hallucinations and impaired speech and expression. The disease profoundly impacts the quality of life of afflicted individuals, including being able to sustain social relationships and professional goals. In severe cases, as made infamous by the case of Michael Laudor, even high-functioning schizophrenics can become a fatal threat to themselves or others. Estimates of the prevalence of schizophrenia in the United States range from 0.25%-0.64%.

All drugs work by blocking or improving the function of proteins or receptors. Receptors in the brain include those that regulate the function of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. Neuropharmacological drug discovery starts with identifying these receptors and then discovering molecules that selectively inhibit or activate them. For instance, most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) which increase the concentration of serotonin by blocking its re-absorbption and improving a sense of well-being. Read more »

Monday, November 6, 2023

Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. Well, he added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and tons of new studies with updated technology. It’s kind of refreshing to read a book about the problem with kids today without a single mention of phones, but it feels a little sloppy. Goleman is a science journalist without a clinical practice in psychotherapy as far as I can tell. While his book is about how to be smart according to the front cover, it’s also being used in psychotherapy. It’s a fast, engaging read, but I have some concerns about the content and application.

The book outlines the need for emotional intelligence (EI) to be overtly taught to children, explains the psychoneurology of EI, argues for the primacy of emotional intelligence for success, adds in the need for emotional supports, and ends with a call for parents to be better educated as well. The principle underlying Goleman’s text is that there are four specific domains, adapted from Salovey & Mayer, that emerge from the activity of our brain circuits that have more of an impact on our general well being than does our intelligence: self-awareness, self-management (formerly motivation and self-regulation), empathy, and skilled relationships. Goleman explains that people will be better off emotionally, relationally, and vocationally if they develop their emotional intelligence to identify and understand their feelings as they happen, manage them effectively, understand other people’s feelings, and relate to others more positively. With a calm mind, people can make better decisions, which positively affects all other aspects of their life. Goldman has used these domains to help to develop educational programs to teach children Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) in the schools through the CASEL organization. I feel like it goes without saying  that being able to manage our emotional experiences helps in other aspects in our lives, so I’m all in at this point. Read more »

Monday, October 9, 2023

Faulty Wiring

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere long-term.

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn’t the result of an accumulation of things.

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I’d forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I’d come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits – that we all do – or else we’ll literally shop ’til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse’s Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering. Read more »

Monday, March 15, 2021

“The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness” By Mark Solms

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey

For several years I enjoyed discussions about neuroscience with a friend (now deceased) who was a top rock climber. He and his buddies, when not performing solo climbs with torn shoulder muscles and sleeping on cliffside bivouacs, would listen to Sam Harris and talk neuroscience. We have conquered mountains, was their creed; now we will take on the mind. Because of this, and despite the fact that many top neuroscientists are women, and that many neuroscientists come across as gentle and balanced individuals, I got the idea of neuroscience as a slightly competitive macho sport. I grew up among mountains and as a young person I was fond of the Hopkins lines:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed…

Men and women are now fathoming these mind cliffs and, here and there, claiming first ascents.

In the middle of his new book The Hidden Spring, Mark Solms quotes Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” This could describe the thinking behind The Hidden Spring: to make the complex theory within as simple as possible, without dumbing it down so much as to be meaningless. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking—on the one hand Solms is addressing the “hard problem” of consciousness with his own relatively controversial theory; on the other hand he’s trying to explain general concepts of science (falsifiability, Bayesian theory, the free energy principle, Markov blankets, etc.) to a reader who might not know them, so as to guide them through his thinking.

Solms is successful, to my mind, but there remains the question: Who is the general reader (I salute you, General Reader) to whom he says the book is addressed, and whom he advises to ignore the endnotes aimed at academics? I suppose I qualify as a General Reader, as I have neither a math nor a science background, though I did compulsively read all the endnotes. One needn’t be familiar with the arguments of Nagel and Chalmers or Andy Clark’s predictive processing, as Solms summarizes their arguments clearly; on the other hand it probably doesn’t hurt to have some background, and I suspect the “general” reader who comes to this book will do better with at least an acquaintance with these things. Read more »

Monday, August 5, 2019

The Return of the Repressed: Freud Sneaks Back into Neuroscience

Posted on by Joan Harvey

by Joan Harvey

Our expectations sculpt neural activity, causing our brains to represent the outcomes of our actions as we expect them to unfold. This is consistent with a growing psychological literature suggesting that our experience of our actions is biased towards what we expect. —Daniel Yon

Because consciousness is something common to all of us, it is also interesting to many of us, though we may lack both philosophical and scientific backgrounds. And while many regular people are interested to some degree in the workings of their mind, those who have experimented with drugs and meditation may be even more curious about the latest research. From a fairly young age I’ve had a fair amount of experience with both psychedelics and meditation, though certainly not consistently through my life. And, for a while, I had separate conversations with two different persons—one heavily into psychedelics and one a longtime Zen practitioner—about some of the general books on consciousness.

Among the three of us, our biases sometimes came to the fore. Andy Clark’s book on predictive processing has a very sexy title—Surfing Uncertainty–and some very difficult, academic text—my Zen friend found it unreadable, and attributed this to the fact that Clark is not a meditator. My friend, in turn, had me read some recent books on consciousness with a Buddhist bias, which I disliked for their slanted view (though I have had a regular meditation practice at times). Of course the psychedelic expert liked Michael Pollen’s book How to Change your Mind, as did we all. And we all particularly liked Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel. Though not much discussed in the book, perhaps Metzinger’s background in both meditation and psychedelics unconsciously played into our appreciation. We could relate to his ideas of conscious experience as a process and a tunnel through reality, as well as his discussion of transparency, the name he gives for the way we are unaware of the medium through which information reaches us. All of us were (the Zen practitioner has since died) atheist materialists (though also all familiar with plenty of ecstatic, mystical, and irrational states which we felt had a purely physical basis), and intuitively Metzinger’s position made sense to us. The “ego tunnel,” as Metzinger says, is a complex property of the neural correlates of consciousness, the “neurofunctional properties in your brain sufficient to bring about a conscious experience.” He also locates out-of-body experiences and other related phenomena squarely in the physical, as opposed to metaphysical, world.

But my beloved grandmother was a Freudian psychoanalyst, and due to her (and alone in my family, and among most of my friends) I became interested in Freud. Read more »

Monday, July 22, 2013

Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the Brain

Posted on by Jalees Rehman

by Jalees Rehman

Stopwatch.06.jpg4c4d5258-02ae-4e67-bb40-71ea134b660dLargerA child drops a chocolate chip cookie on the floor, immediately picks it up, looks quizzically at a parental eye-witness and proceeds to munch on it after receiving an approving nod. This is one of the versions of the “three second rule”, which suggests that food can be safely consumed if it has had less than three seconds contact with the floor. There is really no scientific basis for this legend, because noxious chemicals or microbial flora do not bide their time, counting “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand,…” before they latch on to a chocolate chip cookie. Food will likely accumulate more bacteria, the longer it is in contact with the floor, but I am not aware of any rigorous scientific study that has measured the impact of food-floor intercourse on a second-to-second basis and identified three seconds as a critical temporal threshold. Basketball connoisseurs occasionally argue about a very different version of the “three second rule”, and the Urban Dictionary provides us with yet another set of definitions for the “three second rule”, such as the time after which one loses a vacated seat in a public setting. I was not aware of any of these “three second rule” versions until I moved to the USA, but I had come across the elusive “three seconds” time interval in a rather different context when I worked at the Institute of Medical Psychology in Munich: Stimuli or signals that occur within an interval of up to three seconds are processed and integrated by our brain into a “subjective present”.

Read more »