Abstract: The science of the Mind has made many strides in the last fifty years. The latest is the discovery of the fact that the brain can and does change itself; using related neural networks to replace damaged neural networks. This expands the cognitive behavior management methods of addressing psychological deficits and distortions to add methods to address physical and neurological concerns. We offer here six plus one propositions to consider. Are these axioms of a new acceptance of the Mind?
We begin with a rather pragmatic definition of consciousness: The ability of a living entity (matter which seeks energy, stores and then utilizes it as its own energy) to become aware of and focus (attend) on an internal or external stimulus and to select a self-identified appropriate response and with proper feedback, reselect the response.
This is not intended to be a profound idea, but merely to focus your thoughts on the issues at hand. Much of cognitive behavior management is concerned with just this definition of consciousness. Each of these propositions needs to be attended to and explored for yourself. If any of them are considered by you to be true, it should set in motion an exploration to support or disprove your thoughts. You will need energy and deep thinking to do so effectively.
We offer propositions of scientific thought that go back to 1908. Each has a relationship to all of the other propositions and each is given some evidential support. If they are all axioms [statements of self-evident truth], then we enter a new era of human growth and progress.
Proposition I: – “There is good evidence that we can gain a degree of conscious control over virtually any population of neurons, provided that we receive immediate conscious feedback from the neural activity.”
Bernard J. Baars - 1988Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human cognitive architecture and consciousness. He made the above statement in his book, A Cognitive Theory Of Consciousness, NY: Cambridge University Press 1988.
This is a powerful proposition, which suggests that under the right circumstances, an individual can control the totality of his human experience. Consider the following –
In 1982, with the help of three Tibetan Buddhist monks, a team of scientists has demonstrated that (body) temperature can be raised by almost 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The three monks were experienced practitioners of the Tibetan Buddhist meditational practice called Tum-mo yoga that requires that neophytes practice the meditative feats by drying ice-cold wet sheets draped over their bodies. In contests held during cold Himalayan nights, the person who dries the most sheets before dawn is considered the winner. The authors were Herbert Benson, John W. Lehmann, Mark D. Epstein of Harvard, Ralph F. Goldman of the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, M. Malhotra of India’s National Institute of Sports and Jeffrey Hopkins of the University of Virginia.
If the Mind can be trained to accomplish such a feat, what are the limits? How powerful is this proposition in light of specific evidentiary experience?
The key, of course, is the immediate conscious feedback. Can we have immediate conscious feedback on all of the automatic functions of the body? What is the feedback on the functioning of the liver or the spleen? I don’t know; I don’t know if there is even the possibility of such a feedback. But if there were, I am willing to bet that a human being could be trained to control its function.
Proposition II: – “[I] further proclaimed that the body was God’s drugstore and had in it all liquids, drugs, lubricating oils, opiates, acids and anti-acids, and every sort of drug which the wisdom of God thought necessary for human happiness and health.”
Andrew Taylor Still – 1908Howard Brody, reports this proposition from Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of osteopathy, in the book, The Placebo Response 1997, in which he thoroughly explores and reports the proposition. Dr. Brody describes the body’s ‘inner pharmacy’ without the religious jargon, but uses his book to outline the immense power of the placebo. In the process he notes that only the personality traits of acquiesce and anxiety seem to correlate to the effect, but explores expectancy [Expectancy Theory] and conditioning [Conditioning Theory], and other factors to theorize how best to understand how the process occurs and how to make the process more effective.
Brody points out that the very same body processes and chemicals operate in the placebo response and in self-healing or spontaneous recovery. “In spontaneous recovery, the body goes about its business unaided; no message from our minds or from other person’s minds comes to stimulate the process. In the placebo response, we presume that a message has made an impact on the mind, which then turns on new chemical pathways, or at least accentuates and strengthens the pathways that are already operating.”
What he apparently does not recognize is that in any case, the individual must ‘believe’ in either their own ability to recover or that the ‘message’ will cure them. Thus both the automatic thinking and the rational thinking must accept such an outcome.
Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.
Wikipedia - 2018The difficulty here is the difference between belief and conviction. One can be convinced that something is right or true, but also be prepared to look at new evidence. With a belief, the confirmation bias is profound even though you may not be able to articulate what it is that makes you believe. This belief is usually referred to as faith, since its most auspicious occurrences have been connected to religion. However, you can believe that the apple falls to the earth, because the evidence is clear and you can believe that people are out to get you even though no outside observer can confirm it. One downside of these propositions is that though confirmed by science, the ultimate science of physics has increasingly relied on faith [e.g., the Many Universe Theory].
The need for immediate conscious feedback provides the affirmation that something regarding improving either the body (including the brain) or the mind can be rationally believed. Other supports for such belief are expectancy and conditioning.
Proposition – III: Belief (faith) is something powerful that is trapped in the automaticity of intuition.
Jerome R. Gardner – 2018
Do you know what you believe? It is doubtful. Most people have convictions that they can articulate, but few can truly state their beliefs [although, they may contend to the outside world a belief, their inner world may deny it. A conviction is a rational, thought out position. Belief is in the gut – it is an automatic thought, not a rational, conscious one. Convictions may become beliefs through constant conditioning or through emotional stress. History tells about soldiers who found faith in combat – when given the prospect of death, they found faith in God. But few, even many of those thought of as pious really believed until put to the test.
Nonetheless, a belief provides the energy to implement the assets of the body.
Proposition – IV: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”
Albert Einstein – 1929
Imagination is a unique characteristic in which the brain is fooled – imagining oneself on the beach with its look, feel, smell, and etc. produces the same brain action as being on the beach. It therefore has profound psychological impact and can change emotional and chemical qualities in the individual so relocated. We can imaging past and/or future, changes in our lives and influence them to happen. Can we therefore implement changes in our body merely by imagining them? Science suggests that we can and cognitive behavior management techniques show how it is done.
The brain, it seems, cannot distinguish between imagining and being and scans the same in either case. Since you know the difference, it makes one wonder just who ‘You’ are. You, in this case, could be construed as the Mind, an organizing principle that manages the brain and body.
Imagining thus might be better thought of as cognitive replication or, better yet, cognitive modeling. We build models in our Minds to either remember or create. IF a bit of information makes a difference THEN we can IMAGINE (form images, ideas, and sensations in the Mind without any immediate input of the sensory apparatus) making knowledge applicable in solving problems and integrating experience into a learning process.
This may be the most powerful function of energy in the universe. If an enclosed elevator were falling through space everything in it (a person and a ball) would float in the form of zero gravitation. But THEN I accelerate the elevator and everything falls to the floor – thus acceleration equals gravity and a Theory of General Relativity is developed.
Proposition – V: A talk titled “Growing evidence for brain plasticity” outlines the basic findings of research, identifying two distinct periods of brain plasticity: The Infant Critical Period and the Period of Adult Plasticity. The Infant Critical Period is when a child’s brain establishes neural processes for the stimuli to which it is presented. The Adult Plasticity period is when the brain refines its neural processes as it masters a variety of tasks.
Michael M. Merzenich – 2004Norman Doidge, in his book The Brain that Changes Itself, gives a collection of case histories detailing the astonishing progress of people whose conditions had long been dismissed as hopeless. People with half a brain, one labeled retarded, the blind, stroke victims, etc., are demonstrated to change the neurological structure of their brains and therefore their lives. The key is the design of ways to use undamaged brain systems to pick up the slack. This is an extension of the cognitive behavioral management process that we have espoused for over twenty years.
In essence, science has demonstrated that merely thinking changes the structure of the brain. A thought requires a neural network. Having a thought only once would create a network that would quickly fade. By repeating the thought the network becomes more and more strengthened. This is how we habituate automatic thoughts. The downside is that the stronger the network, the more difficult it is to dissipate. We have already shown, however, the many ways in which this can be done. This is the Neural Network Theory that underpins all of the cognitive behavioral management methods. For damaged areas of the brain, it is a matter of coaxing the related brain systems to take over the functions that have been interrupted by the damage. I contend that this can only work if the person believes that the process will work, or has immediate conscious feedback and commits to the process.
Proposition VI: You are speaking to your genes with every thought you have. The fast growing field of epigenetics is showing that who you are is the product of (your interpretation of) the things that happen to you in your life, which change the way your genes operate. Genes are actually switched on or off depending on (your interpretation of) life experiences, and your genes and lifestyle form a feedback loop. Your life doesn’t alter the genes you were born with. What changes is your genetic activity, meaning the hundreds of proteins, enzymes, and other chemicals that regulate your cells. Your biology doesn’t spell your destiny, and you aren’t controlled by your genetic makeup. Instead, your genetic activity is largely determined by your thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions.
Debbie Hampton – 2015
It might be noted that neuroscientist tend to indicate that it is what we experience that changes the brain, but it is, in fact, what we think about the experience or activity that causes the changes. I have therefore added to the quote for clarification,
It’s been shown over and over again that just thinking about something can cause your brain to release neurotransmitters, chemical messengers that allow it to communicate with parts of itself and your nervous system. Neurotransmitters control virtually all of your body’s functions, from hormones to digestion to feeling happy, sad, or stressed. As indicated earlier, they access the ‘inner pharmacy’ that generates the placebo effect.
Epigenetics is showing that your perceptions and thoughts control your biology, which places you in the driver’s seat. By changing your thoughts, you can influence and shape your own genetic readout.
You have much more power than ever believed to influence your physical and mental realities. Your mindset is recognized by your body – right down to the genetic level.
It is, I suppose realistic to ask whether human beings differ from other animals in the ability to change their brains. After all, we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. Doidge asks and responds to this question by reporting neuroscientists, Robert Sapolsky’s statement that the human genome project was able to determine precisely which genes differed, and it turns out that one of them is a gene that determines how many neurons we will make.
It turns out that chimpanzee’s brains are plastic, but the sheer quantitative difference between theirs and ours leads to ‘an exponentially greater number of interactions between them’.
As Gerald Edelman points out, the human cortex alone has 30 billion neurons and is capable of making a million billion synaptic connections.
Edelman with his colleagues at the Neurosciences Institute at Rockefeller University created a biological theory of the mind, which he calls Neural Darwinism, or the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection [TNGS], which we have outlined on the site.
Doidge points out that plasticity creates a new way – beyond Darwinian genetic mutation and variation – of introducing new biological brain structures and through these, perhaps, changing the physicality of the entire structure.
What Does This Mean?
So now we have proposed that:
the body is a self-healing mechanism and has a pharmacy to provide the chemicals (medicine) to do the job,
that the contingent factor in implementing the pharmacy is that the individual believes or imagine the changes required,
that immediate conscious feedback can help to engender the changes,
that the Mind programs the brain changing both its structure and networks by what it thinks,
through employment of related neural systems even serious damage to the brain can be overcome by these strategies, and
That thinking can actually activate or deactivate genes.
If all of this is true, we seem to have re-entered the era of magic and can have the capacity to reduce our reliance on medications to make ourselves healthy. This, of course would not rule out accidental injury and the need for healers. So we might offer one more proposition.
Proposition – VII: Targeting your thoughts … ‘intention’ and ‘intentionality – appeared to produce an energy potent enough to change physical reality. The Intention Experiment rests on the outlandish premise: thought affects physical reality.
Lynne McTaggart 2007In her book, The Intention Experiment, McTaggert writes:
In the mid-1970s, a German physicist named Fritz-Albert Prop had stumbled on the fact that all living things, from the most basic of single celled plants to the most sophisticated of all organisms like human beings, emitted a constant tiny current of photons – tiny particles of light. He labeled them ‘biophoton emissions’ and believed that he had discovered the primary communication channel of a living organism – that it used light as a means of signaling to itself and to the outside world.
It’s been well documented that directed thoughts can affect a person’s own body in numerous ways. But did you know that thoughts have been shown to alter some biological processes in another person including gross motor movements, and those of the heart, eye, brain and respiratory system? Researchers have demonstrated that human intention can affect a variety of other living systems such as bacteria, mice, cats and dogs and even the direction in which fish swim.
Quantum physics has proven that living things are constant transmitters and receivers of measurable energy. Thoughts are bundles of electromagnetic energy, and new models of consciousness depict it as being able to move beyond physical boundaries like energy.
McTaggart goes on to explain how, through the same methods of belief and imagination, and through quantum radiation of biophotons, one can physically influence others.
What do you think?
If you merely read each proposition and ignore the given rationale, are any of these propositions accepted by you as true? How many do you accept and how many does it take to make you consider the power of your Mind and how to utilize your mind to resolve many of the psychological and physical health issues in your life? I assume you could reject one or two and still come to the conclusions that something important exists here. All of this probably conflicts with your rational logic, but remember, it is based on science: a rational process in itself.
If we assume that all of these propositions are true, one would expect some major changes in our culture. We would likely abandon psychiatry and large portions of our pharmaceutical industry. We would spend research funds to expand both the psychological [cognitive behavior management] and physical [bio and neurofeedback] aspects of the methodology. Neurolinguistic programming with its focus on emotion as an expanded cognitive intervention would seem to move to the forefront of our intentions.
But it is interesting that each of these methodologies have been abandoned by the power of government and big business. Psychiatry is the most powerful profession on earth and keeps a solid foot on cognitive behavior management technology [Heaven forbid, quacks like NLP], big pharmaceutical stomps on even psychoanalysis [a quackery in itself], and the National Institutes of Health abandoned biofeedback in its infancy. Do we notice a trend here? Our present culture drains individuals of the power of thought through medication and incarceration and never bothers with some potentially helpful possibilities.
Jerome R. Gardner – 2018
References
Baars, Bernard J., A Cognitive Theory Of Consciousness, NY: Cambridge University Press 1988.
Brody, Howard, The Placebo Response, Cliff Street Books, 2000
Doidge, Norman, The Brain That Changes Itself, Viking 2007
Hampton, Debbie, Contributor, How Your Thoughts Change Your Brain, Cells and Genes, 2015
https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/how-your-thoughts-change-your-brain-cells-and-genes/
Lynne, Taggart, The Intention Experiment, Free Press, 2007
SCIENCE WATCH; Heat From Meditation, The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/09/science/science-watch-heat-from-meditation.html
For further information see also:
Bandler, Richard & Grinder, John, The Structure of Magic, Science and Behavior Books, Inc. 1975
Bateson, Gregory, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Wildwood House Limited, 1979
Dietert, Rodney, The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life – Dutton, 2016
Edelman, Gerald, Bright Air Brilliant Fire, Basic, 1992
Gazzaniga, Michael S., The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the Mystery of how the Brain Makes the Mind, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 201